The Dovekeepers

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 creatures 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.