The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman [76]
I KNEW something was wrong when I smelled smoke. There were loaves in the oven. I checked them, but they weren’t yet burning. Why did he go on this day of all days? Why on this morning was he not single-minded when at all other times he saw nothing but his own bakery? The barley, the salt, the coriander, the cumin, these were the ingredients that made up his world. Until now the only difficulty that had plagued my husband was that rats slunk through the windows; like many bakers, he often had to lay down hemlock to turn them away from the flour bins. Now there was peril in every corner of our world. The demons had flung open the doors to our village. They had declared us to be victims as they stood on a dark ledge and rubbed their hands together gleefully. What you are given, they declared, we now take away.
As the hours passed, I began to pace back and forth in alarm. The baker had expected to return before the loaves in the slow-burning oven were brown. Does a man go off and disappear like that? He’d told me to remove the loaves when the sun was in the center of the sky if he hadn’t yet returned. I didn’t. What had he meant by that? Had he had some idea of the trouble to come? Noon came and went. I gazed out in alarm as I saw the shadows lengthening, the smoke drifting over courtyards and roofs.
I thought if I waited to remove the loaves, my husband would smell the bread and know it was burning and run back home. At worst he would be cross with me for not doing as I was instructed. But he still hadn’t returned when the sun had begun to drop down in the direction of evening. By now the loaves were charred, the crusts black with soot.
I had one thought, and that was to find my husband. I could be single-minded, too, perhaps that was what had bound us together for so many years. I opened the door, frantic to begin a search for the Baker, ready to dart into the street though it was now teeming with our neighbors, many of them stained with their own blood and with the blood of their fathers.
As I was readying myself to leave, I found my son-in-law, Yoav, in my doorway. He wasn’t a fighter then, not yet the warrior who would vow to never again cut his hair. Instead, he was a gentle man who longed to run from trouble. He had the panicked look of a scholar who is suddenly faced with the brutalities and the vile concerns of life. Like my husband, he had been dedicated to his work, concerned with his studies and with the will of Adonai. I had already wrapped my head scarf close to my skull, possessed with the intention to search for my husband, but my son-in-law stopped me. He warned I must prepare myself for what he had to say.
I raised my chin, ready to push past him, not willing to listen. What could stop me from going to my husband? What excuse could my son-in-law offer that might compel me to give up my search? My son-in-law, who was devout and would never touch a woman other than my daughter, his wife, placed his hand on my arm.
“There is a reason I tell you not to go out there,” he murmured. There could be only one reason. A world that had unraveled so completely that the man I’d spent a lifetime with had been lost. I could see the truth in my son-in-law’s eyes when he began to speak. He confessed he had seen the husk that had been my husband in the center of our town, cast upon the plaza with dozens of our neighbors, broken like a branch in the wind.