The Dovekeepers

“Do you have anyone here with you?” They wanted to know more about me, so that we might be friends. I shrugged coldly, with only a gleam of response.

A lion, a ghost, a goat who is an angel, a hundred birds with broken necks.

“I was brought here by my brother. Amram, son of Yosef bar Elhanan.”

To my surprise, their curiosity faded, and my words dropped like stones. I heard the echo of my brother’s name. The silence that came back to me was something I understood, the realm of secrets best left untold.

Nahara was called to her mother. She seemed grateful to have an excuse to run out to the smallest of the dovecotes, even though the dovekeepers usually recoiled from working there, for the building was so compact only one person could stand within its walls. Beside me, Aziza quickly returned to her work, chasing the doves away, collecting their eggs. I could see through the mirror of her languid, gray eyes. She didn’t have to say any more for me to understand how my brother’s name had blazed for her. Once spoken, it refused to disappear.

IN THE DAYS that followed, I kept to myself during my hours at the dovecotes, attending to whatever tasks I was given. I was pleasant enough, but I spoke only when others spoke to me. I was their servant, nothing more. I wasn’t one of them and didn’t pretend to be. I had had a friend once, and I had betrayed her. I didn’t need another.

The other women took their meal together at noon. I ate alone. I went into the orchard in the midday sun, taking along some dry cheese and flatbread. I neared the wall and peered out, gazing north, the direction we had come from, where we had left the bones. One day some of the women who worked in the fields came to sit beside me. They had tied up their hair and covered their heads with scarves to shade their complexions. Their hands, however, were brown from their work in a small pistachio grove, slick with nut oil. They had come here from Jerusalem, following their husbands, or fathers, or brothers. Now they acted like those fortunate ones who had found their way to the Garden of Paradise. I’d heard them singing as they worked. A few carried babies in woven slings tied to their backs or hips. The unmarried women asked me to meet them at the baths. I shook my head and said I was unable to do so. I wanted no one to notice my rounded form when I took off my cloak. As my excuse, I said I must remain at the dovecotes, for I had just begun there and wanted to please Shirah. When they heard this, the women grew suspicious.

“Fine,” one said, rebuffed. “It’s your choice if you prefer the Witch of Moab.”

The field women who gathered around cautioned me, murmuring that Shirah had come across the desert from the far side of the Salt Sea. The salt had lifted her up, allowing her and her children to cross without drowning. Shirah, they assured me, could call the clouds to her the way she called the doves in the dovecote. After her arrival there had been downpours for weeks. Torrents fell until the world was green and people were weeping with joy. This was why their leader, Ben Ya’ir, had sent for her. Shirah was his kinswoman and cousin, but there was more to her arrival. Even a great man may sometimes call for a witch.

I found these women to be self-absorbed fools. What sort of witch would work in a dovecote, eat lentils for her meal, shovel out excrement, collect speckled eggs in a basket? She was a woman like any other. Still, when I went back to the dovecote, I noticed there was a curious intensity about Shirah; what was silent to others rang out clearly for her. Sometimes, at the end of the day, when she was locking the door, she would turn to gaze at me. In that instant I felt she knew everything about me. Even stranger, I had no desire to hide myself from her. I wanted to speak of the night when I cut myself for the twenty-first time, and the morning when I left to set out in search of a cure, and the evening when I returned to find that Ben Simon had already entered the World-to-Come. Perhaps that in itself was witchery, to make someone yearn to reveal herself.

*

ONE EVENING a young woman was waiting beside the largest dovecote. She was a servant, brought here from Jerusalem by her master’s family, living alongside them as their cook and housemaid. I had seen her in the fields. Now she gestured to Shirah from the shadows, urging her to come away. Shirah spoke with her daughters, sending them home to see to their younger brother and begin the evening meal.

When Shirah left with the housemaid, I followed, curious. I removed my sandals and went barefoot, as I had when I’d stalked birds. I felt something wicked in my actions, yet continued on. Shirah and the housemaid did not stop until they reached the far end of the wall. There they slipped into a dark corner. We were not far from the place where large looms had been set up for women to work on in the evenings, after their daily chores had been completed. I paused behind a column where green-tinged shadows spread along the stones. I felt as I had when I had crouched in the wilderness, waiting for my prey. There was a beating of my pulse in my throat.