The Dovekeepers

I was the only one to witness the occasion of your birth, and if the truth be told I, too, wished to run into the daylight, afraid less of witchery than of blood. There were pools of it, and the gushing heat of it terrified me. This liquid was alive, pulsing with the power of creation. I was too young, too innocent to be of help. But our mother cried out Save her, her words like stars, brilliant and stinging.

I did what I could. I unwound the cord. But that was not enough, so I breathed into your mouth and drew out the liquid that was drowning you. I tasted blood and salt, everything life is made of, and spat it upon the ground. It is a miracle when you know what you must do without any instruction, and that is what happened to me at the hour of your birth. This mysterious knowledge was granted to me by God in the time of my desperation, and for that I will always be grateful. I took your death and your life into myself. In that moment we became one being, sisters claimed by the same force. Because of this I will always look after you. Even if you try to break away, you will find you cannot leave me.

These days you turn from me in the fields where the almonds will soon flower. You insist you belong elsewhere, but I will not abandon you. I see you dressed in white linen, in the rocky field, tending to six black goats, your head bowed, your feet bare, and I weep to see you taken from me in your fervor and your desire for a man who can never know you as I do. Perhaps you do not wish for him to know you. You keep your back to me and will not speak, not even when I knock on the rough wooden door of the goat shed where you live beside the people you’ve chosen as your own. They are paupers whose only desire is to praise the Almighty with prayers for peace, even though outside the confines of our fortress the world snarls with war. You will not sit at our table, for our practices are not as strict as those you now revere, and our ways are unclean in your eyes.

I sent a dove to you, one that was pure white, a favorite of our mother’s, thinking this creature would fill you with remorse and you would follow him, but the bird returned to the dovecote with my message unread. Inside the tube I had attached to the bird’s leg I wrote your name and mine intertwined, as our fate intertwined at the moment of your birth. I cannot imagine whom I could ever love more in this world we walk through.

When I see you at the wall, at prayer with the Essene women at the hour when day becomes night, you don’t glance at me, though my breath is inside you and yours is a part of me. No matter how you refuse me, our spirits combine to form a single thread. Even if you never speak to me, or raise your eyes to me, even if you are ashamed of me and of our past.

You are mine and mine alone.

YOUR FATHER was a wealthy man, and he knew what he wanted. Had this not been so, had he not traveled to Jerusalem from the far shore of the Salt Sea, our mother and I would have perished, cast out on the day I was born. I had no sister to comfort me as you did on the day of your arrival in this world, only the taste of my own blood in my mouth.

The man who was to be your father had come such a great distance to trade the riches he had amassed, piles of black myrrh and balsam, spices in heaps of ocher and red, baskets of frankincense grown from the white star flower of Edom, salt from the sea, limestone from the cliffs. Perhaps an angel stopped him on the street and whispered in his ear, suggesting that he turn his head. He wore a long scarf and the blue robes of his people, which were dyed with the root of the ginger plant. Although he was far from young, his eyesight was sharper than a falcon’s and he took note of my mother’s great beauty. Among the men he rode with, he was known for seeing what others could not. That may be why he spied us in a cart meant for sheep brought to the butcher as we were driven into the wilderness. The Angel of Death was waiting for us—Mal’ach ha-Mavet, who has a thousand glinting eyes—but he was defeated when your father followed us.

Your father gave the driver a handful of coins that he himself deemed worthless. He was a man who believed what mattered came from the earth, not from the treasuries of a temple or the workshops of men. He took us with him that very day, destined for the east, the ancient land across the Salt Sea, where the mountain is made of iron and mounds of black asphalt float along the shore, setting themselves on fire when the heat rises. Your father’s people collected nets full of asphalt to sell at a high price to the legion so that the soldiers might forge paved roads in Alexandria and Rome.

Our mother confided that when she saw the black sea she didn’t know if we’d been rescued or forsaken by this fierce, silent man whose arms were ringed with blue tattoos and who marked his own face with scars he had cut with a thin knife to commemorate his many battles. She feared he was bringing her to Gehennom, the valley of hell. In fact we journeyed from Judea to Moab, a kingdom that had been ruined and deserted more than once but that was now in full flower. Many of the tribesmen of this land refused to stay in one place but instead called every corner of their country home. This was the land Ruth had come from when she followed Naomi into Judea, though her people had cursed ours. From her line our great King David was born, a gift to his people and to the world. The land here was green, the earth rain-spattered even when other countries were aflame with heat, the vistas lush with fields of grass. There were acacias in bloom, the tree God asked be made into the Ark of the Covenant so that its strong and fragrant wood might house His word to mankind. Myrtle bushes grew tall in Moab, and there were spills of wild cassis. The bursts of yellow iris made it appear as though sunlight had spilled across the land as a blessing.