The Dovekeepers: A Novel Read online

  NOW whenever I went to walk beside Sia she quickened her pace. The intimacy between us had been pierced to the bone. When we cooked together she didn’t speak. Sometimes she faltered when I was beside her. Once she became flustered and she burned her hand on the griddle set atop the fire. When we found a shallow pool at our next camp, I asked her to bathe with me. She declined, insisting she would bathe alone, but she never did. Instead she watched me reproachfully from behind the rocks, my young body an affront to her. I could hear her crying. I might have wept myself if I hadn’t lost the ability to do so, but I had decided long ago, in my father’s house in Jerusalem, I would never cry again. The goat soon became my only company. I found myself talking to her, until I recalled that was what witches were said to do. Then I only whispered, so no one would overhear.

  WHEN AT LAST we found a place where we might stay for a while, with clutches of mint and a few yellow onions managing to grow in a gorge nearby, I searched out a cave that was higher on the cliff in order to seclude myself when my time came with the moon. A woman who bled was unclean, what was called niddah, and must remove herself from others for seven days. Even a single drop of blood that fell forced a woman to retreat from the world of men, until she had cleansed herself in a mikvah, water that was pure, running directly from God.

  I went off by myself because it was our law, but there was another reason as well. I could no longer sleep in the same space as Sia. I had begun to imagine that she lay awake in the dark when her husband came to me, insistent now, as though claiming something he was owed. I wondered if she covered her ears, or worse, if she listened to us. I set myself apart to escape her prying eyes. In truth, I preferred my aloneness. I streaked my skin with mud to keep cool. I unplaited my hair. The stars were brighter on the ridge where I camped, they flecked the darkness to fill the night. I had seen women following the nomads, second and third wives who were banished to walk only with other women. They, too, covered themselves with mud. Though they should have walked in shame, they were even more beautiful than the first wives, for their skins had been turned white and yellow and red with mud, and their hair was loose, falling down their backs like water. They seemed oddly proud, for if there was nothing to quench the men’s thirst, then there was at least this available, their bodies, their souls.

  We celebrated Rosh Chodesh, the rising of the new moon that marked the start of the month of Tishri. Blessed is He who spoke and the world came into being. Every month began as a reflection of the first words of the Torah, with new life, marked by the reappearance of the moon. By then we had been wandering nearly fifty days, avoiding any sign of Roman troops. On the Day of Atonement I found myself guilt-ridden, appalled to think God knew what I did at night, aware that I had stolen something that didn’t belong to me, as though I were a common thief, as well as the murderess my father had claimed me to be. My father and I had little to do with each other, though we were often confined in a small space and took our meals together. We turned our backs to one another. He had little choice but to eat the food I managed to set before him, though I’m sure he considered it to be unclean. I had heard him recite a prayer over his bowl, as men may do to chase away demons.

  “Do you think I might kill you from the inside out?” I asked recklessly one noontime as he muttered over the greens I had prepared.

  He shot me a filthy look. He was hunched over, frail, suddenly an old man. For the first time I saw him for who he was despite his cloak of invisibility. I knew he was broken. I realized then it was the prayer for the dead he had been murmuring, the words one is to say when a passing occurs: Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe. Since the time of my birth he had been in mourning and he was mourning my mother still. All at once I was ashamed. He was my father, no matter how cruel, and I had not honored him.

  We celebrated the glory of God on the Feast of the Tabernacles. The men prayed, but we had no grapes on the vine, no red pomegranates to split open so that the juice rained down our mouths and arms and this day differed little from any other day. Soon enough, the weather began to change. At last there were birds again. I hadn’t realized how silent the world was in the months of great heat until the flocks returned as they journeyed above us. This was the route they took so they might spend the winter in the south, where the nights were not so black and chill. The entire sky swelled with flocks of larks and scarlet rosefinch. There were buntings, turtledoves, brilliant Abyssinian rollers, glossy ibis. There were whole colonies of glorious yellow and turquoise bee-eaters, who called to each other, even in the night. A huge expanse of color drifted above us, all moving south, searching for grasslands. Sometimes they were like clouds along the horizon and other times they became the entire sky. To see the vibrant waves of birds in shades of red and blue above the white desert was a miracle. I no longer counted off the days with regret but rather with joy.

  Even when I was unclean, when I had removed myself from the others, even though his wife might wake in the dark and find him gone, Ben Simon didn’t stay away. Men were supposed to avoid women during their time of the month, it was written in the Fourth Book of Moses, and so it was the law. But we broke every law it was possible to break in the desert, that was where cutting my leg had brought me, for it was the first rule I had ignored. I had no mother to call out cautions, but in truth, I would have disobeyed even if my mother had been alive to warn me. One broken law led to another. Ben Simon became unclean, covered with my blood the way he’d been covered with Roman blood when he struck his enemies in the courtyard of the Temple. He was used to committing crimes. His attitude was both tender and coarsely male. When he sank down beside me, his hand on the curve of my hip, his sex hard against me, I could see no guilt at all in his eyes. He said God could distinguish a sinner from a sin, and what we did was beyond judgment.

  Whenever I came down from the cave, I could tell Sia knew where her husband went each time he vanished from her side. I knew by the uncomplaining way she went about her work, by her frown. I couldn’t meet my friend’s eyes. Everything I might have been had disappeared. The girl who walked to the oasis on the night the Temple burned no longer left footprints. She, who had ashes in her long, red hair and wept for the loss of her city and her home, had been left behind where the citron tree had grown. The key that had opened the gate into the wilderness had opened Sia to my betrayal.

  I tasted grit between my teeth. I was a woman of the desert now, no longer the shy outsider, a city girl frightened of scorpions. I had become fierce, willing to do anything to get what I wanted. This was the way hunters were born. I felt that savagery inside of me, a dark glimmering of will that resolved to survive. If I wanted something, it became mine. I sneaked up on migrating birds and caught them in my scarf, sometimes in my bare hands. I was cunning, a lioness. I had watched how the black desert viper could hypnotize a bird, slowly wrapping itself around its prey before the final bite rendered it motionless.

  Our people believed every creature had a spark—nitzotz—that which was holy, and we were to show kindness and compassion to all beings, what we called baal chayyim. All animals praise God, as we do, with their songs and their voices. In midwinter, we dedicated a Sabbath to the birds, to offer our gratitude and acknowledge that it is their songs that have taught mankind how to chant and praise the glory of our Creator. We were even obliged to chase the hens away before we gathered their eggs so they would not see what happened to the unborn beings which might have been their offspring. When we needed meat, we were to make certain to sever the throat of an animal in a single perfect cut to allow its spirit to rise in a steady stream of light. We were not to eat blood in any manner, but to let it drip from the necks of our prey, returning to the earth from whence it came.

  But I had witnessed the way death came in the desert each time the viper who waited in the speckled shadows of the rocks partook of his meal. I had learned my lesson. I broke the birds’ necks, but I did so quickly, and I always said a prayer. I lay the bodies of these flightless cr
eatures across my knees and plucked their feathers and ignored the fact that I had taken the lives of such wondrous things. What was I not capable of? What bitter, brutal thing would I not be willing to do? In the cave I had grown teeth and claws, exactly what my father had said would come to us in the desert. Reckless, I no longer cared who might hear us at night. It didn’t matter if Sia’s eyes were swollen or if my father spat on the ground when he saw me, to protect himself, clearly convinced that I could manifest ill will and bring about curses. Let them believe they heard lions, come down from their lair in mountains to make such wild noise late at night. Sia was nothing to me. Her children were not mine. Who survived depended on sinew and muscle and a crude sort of will. I possessed all three. I stopped returning to the tent to sleep and remained in the cave.

  It was now Cheshvan, what some call the bitter month, the time of Noah, when rain flooded the world as my passion flooded my head. I allowed Ben Simon to observe my nakedness when I stood on the rocks atop the cave. I allowed him take me right there for the hawks above to view, for the Lord of all things to witness, for his wife to watch if she dared to look upon the cliffs that I favored. My beloved would approach only so far, making it clear I must be the one to sin. Every man is tempted by evil urges; he would not be a man if a swollen flicker of desire did not rise within him. But a woman who allows herself to swoon before such humiliations would be judged harshly, for she would be repeating the first sin of paradise as one of Eve’s daughters, betraying God’s laws for her own fulfillment. I accepted this. I was already a criminal, the murderer of my own mother; desire was nothing compared to evil such as that.

  When Ben Simon bade me to him I would run to him like a dog, but at least I was now a dog who chose my own master. I let him take me the way dogs take each other, and then the way lions do, face-to-face, entwined. When he insisted he was obliged to leave, I wouldn’t let him go. I satisfied his every urge, offering any favor to convince him to stay. I burned with him, hot and liquid in his grasp, our bodies a dark tangle, for we had become beasts for whom this was the only language. Salt tears stung my eyes, but they did not fall. Ours was a destroying sort of love. When he felt humiliated by his own needs, Ben Simon would heap insults upon me, then he would weep and take me again in his arms. I couldn’t get enough of him because I knew as soon he left me he would return to his family. He belonged to them. He never lied about that. I would watch his footprints when he went and mourn him before he was gone.

  IT WAS THE TIME when we remembered the reconsecration of the Temple after the Syrians were driven off, when Adonai allowed a single day’s oil to burn for eight nights to mark our faith and our triumph. But now the Temple was lost to us, and our oil burned with plumes of black smoke. The rocks were our ovens as flames leapt from the few twisted boughs we could find. A pale rain fell and spattered our fire so that even cooking was difficult. Our feast was a dove I had trapped in my scarf. The creature sang tirr tirr, a lovely song that sound like tor, our word for turtledove. I looked upon a bush of myrtle and saw the dove’s mate waiting there. Later in the season when the turtledoves would migrate south, I wondered if the one perched on the branch would leave alone, or if she would stay and mourn. I thought of Solomon’s words to his beloved, Behold thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes. I saw grief staining the dark eyes of the one perched in the bushes, and a tenderness I had never seen in humankind. I walked toward the lone dove, wondering if I should do away with its loneliness, but it flitted off to a higher branch, its pale feathers gleaming, too lovely a creature for me to destroy.

  A portion of water served as our wine that evening, for there were no grapes, and no time to try to ferment the figs we occasionally found growing wild. I had become accustomed to the way we lived and found solace in silence. I’d grown to love the scent of the desert at night, fragrant and harsh at the same time. We went from place to place, following the possibility of finding water, chasing after the tracks left by quail. I continued to live removed from the others so that Ben Simon could easily come to me while his wife and children slept. Once, when Ben Simon was off hunting, my father came up to me and asked if it was my desire to be a zonah. I felt that he had slapped me. He compared me to the prostitutes who lived at the edge of Jerusalem and were willing to pull off their cloaks for anyone who would pay them, even Roman soldiers.

  “If that’s who I am, then that’s who you made me,” I informed my father, the man who had murdered so many with his curved dagger, who had ignored me and used me as he would a dog, who hadn’t flinched when he brought me into the desert, where I could have no future other than the one that had already been written.

  I HAD STOPPED counting off days. I did not wish to be elsewhere, even though there was still no sign of my brother and the fortresses of the rebel Jews. The heat had lifted and the rains had begun in earnest. Soon there would be pools forming in the nechalim; the ravines between the cliffs would rush with iridescent waterfalls. I was like the leopard that roamed the desert, thinking only of survival and what I might need to get through each day. I saw prints in the sand, always a single cat, never two together. They were such solitary creatures that when they met their mates they would begin to scream, for they were drawn to each other, yet were enemies still. They were nothing like the lions, who were bound for life and rested in each other’s embrace.

  Once I had come upon a leopard, though such a sighting was extremely rare. I was silent beside some rocks where birds were nesting, waiting for one to find its way closer so that I might fall upon it. I glanced up, and there stood the leopard, dun-colored with black spots, large, surely powerful enough to kill me. My heart thudded. I was seized by the sheer desire to live. I stood upon a rock and lifted up my shawl and made myself fierce, my red hair blowing out behind me, my face snarling, my scream the scream of a leopard. The creature glanced at me, startled, then darted away. It disappeared between the rocks, then burst onto the flatland, where it glided over the earth. I was shivering, stunned by my own ferocity. That was who I was now. A creature who cared nothing for another’s hunger, who thought only of her own.

  I would have been happy to live this life forever. To wait for the dark and have Ben Simon when I could, but that was not the way it had been written. At the end of the month of Kislev, when clouds gathered and the nights grew cool, Sia’s sons fell ill. Bad fortune had been lurking every time we ate food that had not been blessed or when we drank from still pools. We had left a place where there were demons, and perhaps some had followed us through Zion’s gates. The children were sweet boys, always ready to tag along to search for figs in the fertile soil of the ravines, at least until their mother protested and would no longer allow them to accompany me. When I asked if I could help with their illness, Sia let me know there was nothing I could do. They weren’t my children, she told me. I saw grief stamped upon her, but I did not offer to share it for I had helped to cause her despair. Of course she wouldn’t want me near.

  Day after day the boys’ skins flamed hot, though the air grew cooler. Soon the children made rasping sounds when they tried to breathe. Faint red marks were scattered over their flesh. I could hear Sia weeping when they refused the soup of blanched vetch she offered them. She cried out to Adonai for Him to take her instead of her children. In my deepest heart I had wished for the very same thing. It was terrible, but it was true. I felt my disgrace, yet I wanted her gone from us. This was who I had become and what my craving had done to me. Now when I thought about who would be the first to die, I guessed it would be her.

  If you cannot be brutal in the desert, you will never survive. This is what I told myself and what I believed. I was not a donkey or an innocent girl or a worried mother or a boy with a high fever. I was a red-haired woman who had stared down a leopard. I spoke to a goat on a mountainside. I saw that Ben Simon sat watch over his children, the raw planes of his face transformed by worry. I went to him and bowed before him and begged to nurse his children. A curl of a smile formed on his mouth and he stro
ked my hair, but he said their lives were in God’s hands, not mine.

  Sia was watching, her face ashen.

  “Let me show you what I can do,” I insisted.

  In a single day I caught three wild hens and cooked them over a fire. I found water in a spring that fed an Egyptian sycamore and plucked the orange-colored fruit. I made a hearty soup for the boys, then cut the sycamore fruit into thin, cool slices to hold against their fevered lips.

  Sia could not reproach me. She had no choice but to nod blankly and accept my gifts. I plunged into survival. I made it my calling and my art, unlike my father, who spent his time idly gazing toward Jerusalem as the sky edged from white to blue. He, who had killed a dozen Romans, who was a rebel and a renegade, was being bested by Judea, by the wind and the hunger that had claimed him and how helpless he had become. Now that the children had fallen ill, he was terrified, chanting to the Almighty throughout the day. It wasn’t that he cared about the boys, it was his own flesh that concerned him. He insisted that demons could move from one person to another in a touch or a breath. I had contempt for him and turned away. When he asked me for water to wash his hands, I told him to find it himself, to paw through the sand as I had done.

  I cared about only one man, the one who had faced a lion. But I feared he was too tenderhearted and had been reclaimed by his wife and family. He had stopped coming to me at night. In my cave I shivered, alone. I suffered and watched from behind the rocks. He sat with the children beside a fire made of the twigs I’d collected, eating the soup I’d made, drinking water I had dug from beneath the sycamore. I was healing them for each other. Once I saw him take Sia’s hand in his own large hand and press her palm to his mouth. He had the right to do so, she was his wife, but I burned with a haze of jealousy. I couldn’t eat the soup I’d cooked. I didn’t drink the water I had found beneath the roots of the sycamore tree.