The Dovekeepers

MY FIRST SIGHT of the fortress took my breath away. A mirage emerged from the stone, a miracle appearing beneath the midday sun. We paused in the valley, spellbound. It was the season of the winds, the time when the Ruach Kadim, the hot and furious wind that arose from Edom, brought us clouds of dust. My grandsons were wrapped in capes, staying close to each other for comfort. Perhaps they spoke to each other through their dreams, for they seemed to communicate and could clearly understand each other without the use of language. They refused to be separated and slept beneath the same blanket, just as they ate from the one plate and drank from a single cup. I thought the sheer cliffs leading to Masada would frighten them and they would hesitate. I expected that their father would have to tie ropes around their waists to help them navigate the cliffs, but the younger one, Levi, was the first to start up the spiraling snake path, scrambling like a goat, and Noah applauded his brother’s sure-footed bravery and was quick to follow.

I then had the vision that the boys would never have a father again, and that this perilous climb would be the last time we would be with the Yoav we had known before this other man, the one who would not be separated from his ax, took his place completely. The sun struck against the earth as it had when the beasts in the oasis had fallen upon us, emboldened, without mercy. My grandsons were climbing up, the clouds of dust rising behind them, carried by the wind in little whirls that disappeared before our eyes. I placed my hand on my son-in-law’s arm before he began his ascent. Yoav turned to me, but his eyes were hooded. He was like the hawk, seeing only what he must to survive. All he wanted was revenge, but I gave him more. I told him I had bent to take Zara’s last breath. Neshamah, our word for soul, means breath, and so she was with us still.

A sob escaped from my son-in-law when he heard this. He shook his head and turned from me. “I can never hear her name again,” he insisted. “Don’t speak it in my presence.”

I had come to realize the depth of his love for her. Everything else about him had changed, but in this he was constant. He was the only one who could understand what it meant to lose Zara. Because of our mourning, we were bound together despite the silence and the wind and the man he had become. I signaled for him to lean down, and he did so. I then did the second most terrible thing a mother could do, in some ways worse than burying her beneath the stones. I breathed my daughter’s last breath into his mouth. I gave her to him so that her spirit would belong to him and he could carry her with him, so that he could still be a man with a soul, even though he had lost everything else.

MY ONLY CONCERN was for my grandchildren. They were my world, my present and my future. I vowed to pay attention to our daily life, nothing more. Once we came to this fortress, we moved into our small chamber, built in to the king’s wall, a mere curtain dividing our residence from that of another family. At night we could hear our neighbors, the children laughing, the parents arguing or making love. In our room, there was only silence. That was the way our life was now. We no longer needed language; there weren’t words for what we had witnessed. The boys watched me with their dark, night-flecked eyes. I insisted we were safe and made every attempt to show them this was so. I put a thread across the threshold so no one could pass without my knowledge. I slept with a knife beneath my pallet. I turned each day into a ritual of sameness hoping the children would be comforted by the small tasks and duties of everyday life. In their presence I was calm and patient, the practical grandmother they could depend upon at all times and in all things, but my smile went slack whenever I was alone. Each morning I went to the dovecotes. Each evening I returned to cook dinner. But each night I wept.

*

MONTHS PASSED this way. We became accustomed to the dry air of the mountain and the scent of salt carried from the sea below. We began to know other people in the settlement, all of whom had come to this fortress when there was nowhere else for them in Zion. We were all in God’s hands, and in that way we were brothers and sisters, no matter where we had come from. There were warriors and assassins, rebels who had committed crimes and those who insisted crimes were committed upon them. There were learned men and tanners, potters and goatherds, simple men and those who could read Aramaic and Hebrew, as well as Latin and Greek. There were those who had been cast out of Jerusalem and those who’d run from the burning of Jericho, as well as refugees from small villages like my own.

Many of the women wanted to befriend me and asked me to join in the group that met at the looms in the evenings to discuss the day’s events. They meant well, but I kept my distance. I could not tolerate their chirping good humor any more than I could abide their faith. Though I pretended otherwise, the past had not melted away. It was all I had, and I clung to it and savored it, for my daughter was in that land of grief. My sorrow filled me, leaving little room for anything else. I was squinting out at the world from behind the barricade I’d placed between myself and all others just as surely as there was a curtain draping down to separate our chamber from our neighbors’ home. I understood that fate could not be eluded forever; it came on leathery wings, swooping through the darkness like the bats in the orchards.