The Dovekeepers

When Revka, always sour and ready to place blame, noticed a bird missing the following morning, I declared that I’d seen a hawk earlier that day. Such things happened often enough; a dove would arise through the narrow opening in the roof and be struck in midair. Then there would be feathers floating down, and if you narrowed your eyes, a thin rain of blood.

WHEN I WENT to the wall to look out at the far reaches beyond our settlement, I was often stunned by how set apart we were from the rest of the world. The wilderness appeared endless, the earth so distant it seemed impossible we might ever walk upon it again. If this was what it was to be an angel, to be Raphael or Michael or one of the sheydim who peered down upon mankind, then it was a lonely and terrible place to be. We were a city and a world unto ourselves, with more people arriving all the time. The desperate, the devout, the beaten, the lost. That was why there was so much gossip; it was difficult to keep secrets in such a crowded, unforgiving world. Families shared their lives, with only thin walls of rough fabric made of goat hair strung from ropes to separate us.

We heard what should have been private, lovemaking and arguments alike. We knew whose children wouldn’t behave and were scolded and whose wife muttered curses as soon her husband left their chamber. The baths were always teeming, with talk as well as with bodies. Shops were filled with those desiring flour and oil. So many had traveled here from Jerusalem there was not enough for all; we were forced to share everything, to wait in lines for food and provisions doled out carefully from the dwindling storehouses, to toil far into the evening hours. I understood why the men went out raiding. I was only a woman, not privy to the knowledge of men at the synagogue or in the barracks, but even I understood what awaited if God failed to favor us. Although the fields were green now, it was impossible to know what storms might come, whether there would be clouds of locusts, how we might go hungry in the month of Av, when the world was burning once more.

For the time being, we were in the mild season. We could pick wild radishes and greens that grew between the rocks on the other side of the Snake Gate, appearing in places where it seemed impossible that anything could ever grow. Still, we knew that times of plenty didn’t last. That was why Herod had stocked his storeroom with enough provisions to last a hundred years, a time we had entered and passed. The jars of oil and wine were emptying. We tapped on the sides, and when the clay echoed we knew there was nothing inside.

There were now so many of us that wood was rationed for our fires. I wondered what would happen if our crops failed and we were left with our wits and nothing more. One night when I went to fetch some kindling kept at our door, it was gone. My father said goats had eaten it, but the goats were locked in their pen. He said I was a fool who couldn’t even count sticks. But I knew that one of our neighbors had stolen from us. That was what happened in lean times. The truth about people surfaced just as surely as tiny silver fish arose from the sand in the desert when there was flooding, miraculously appearing in the ravines amid the sudden rushing streams. It was said such fish could bury themselves in the sand for seven years, their flesh so dry it would seem to be nothing but dust. At the first hint of rain they would show their true selves, exactly as people did whenever they were given time enough and cause.

MY FATHER was happy to have nothing to do with me. He let me clean and cook for him but ignored me at all other times. I heard him offer his opinion to some men who asked after me, eyeing my red hair. “She’s nothing,” he said. “Only trouble.”

My father sat outside our chamber on a bench he had built as the dark sifted down, his cloak draped around his shoulders. In the half-light he disappeared, quickly becoming the wall, the darkness, the night itself, as he had done when he lurked outside the Temple, practicing invisibility. I wondered if I alone could see him there against the stones, facing toward Jerusalem, yearning, as I did, for a life that had past. I had compassion for this man, despite all he had done. I alone was his partner in crime.

My father was not too proud to partake of the meals I prepared despite his contempt for me, slowly devouring a stew of lentils, beans, and barley. In the hours when he left our chamber I had the freedom to shut myself away. I could hear other women gathered in the plaza singing as they worked on the looms; their voices sounded sweet, much like the songs of birds. I had taught myself to spin and to weave, but I never joined in. Had I gone, someone might have questioned me and then known me for who I was, nothing but trouble, exactly as my father had declared, a ruined woman whose time was growing near. Soon, I would no longer be able to hide the truth.

No one came to call; even my brother was absent, taking what little time he had away from the garrison to slink off with Aziza. My single visitor was the ghost in my dreams. She alone came to me faithfully. In time I came to know her better than anyone. I slept with her each night, and in my dreams she wept. I did not believe in tears, my own or others’, I thought they were shameful, a sign of weakness, but I had no choice but to lie silently beside her and listen as she cried. I was chained to her the way the slave from the north country was chained to the dovecote’s stone wall.