The Dovekeepers

We heard rumors of Roman scouts who had set up a camp not far from our fortress. Our warriors went to confront them, but there were too many of the enemy, and in the end our men had to slink away and wait for the Romans to break camp. Our enemies left little behind but the bones of pigs and piles of their own waste. But they also had left behind a tower of rocks. Those rocks were terrifying, for they marked the place as one to which they intended to return.

Still I was determined that, for the sake of my grandsons, our lives should continue without event for as long as possible. I was resolved that we should keep to ourselves. No friends, no enemies, only the three of us. I did my best to prevent any disruptions. Then one night there was a knock at our door. I felt a lump in my throat. I had known all along that at any moment the world might barge in upon us. No door could prevent every intrusion. No barrier was strong enough to keep out the movement of time. The chaff beaten from the wheat rises into the air and is carried by the wind to another place, whether to a green field or a stretch of barren land was dependent on God’s will.

I prayed for the rapping to stop, but there it was again. My grandsons were stirring. Their hearing was so attuned they had heard the knocking the moment it fell upon the door. I held a finger to my lips as I went forward.

I feared what was to come and stood there shivering, like a tame bird who shies from the opened door of the cage. I wanted our small, quiet existence to remain constant, for every day to shine as a mirror image of the one before. I reached for my knife. Our chamber had once been used as a storehouse. Mice often came here, searching for grain. Now they scurried off, dodging my footsteps as I ventured to see who might visit at such a late hour. I peered through a hole between the stones.

Yael was there in the dark. No soldiers, no beasts, just a woman with long red hair. She had a basket of belongings with her, so little she might have owned nothing.

I considered sending her away, that was my inclination, but I could see she was desperate. I relented and let her come in. She sat on the pallet where I slept. I didn’t ask what was wrong; I didn’t have to. Her face was ashen, except for a dark blue ribbon of a bruise on her cheek where someone had recently struck her. I had compassion for the silence she carried and found myself drawn to her, as the doves were.

She was uncomplaining, only murmuring that she was sorry to disturb me. She and her father had argued. I’d seen him in the plaza, and he seemed a cold and selfish man, one who thought himself superior to those around him. I’d seen such men look down upon my husband because he was a baker, the same ones who thought Yoav was too good to live under our roof. I set a place for Yael to sleep, gathering a blanket I had woven and died hyssop blue in memory of my daughter, who had loved the color of that flower. Yael had come here in search of shelter though I had been cold to her, remote since the day she arrived in the dovecote. She was my daughter’s age. She was alive when Zara was not, and I had held that against her, pecking at her, resentful. I winced to think of what I’d done. Still, she had seen something in me that had brought her here. She knew that I understood the language of silence. I would no more ask Yael to surrender her past than I would offer to tell her what I myself had done.

IN THE MORNING, we walked to the dovecotes together as though our days had always begun this way. The bruise on her face where her father had lashed out had already begun to fade under the balm I used to treat it, a poultice made of honey and figs. We did not discuss her father’s cruelty, or the fact that the child within her would soon arrive, a reality she could not hide despite the shawls she wore to cover herself. Instead we spoke of the heat and of the failure of the almond crop. The pink blossoms had burned this season in the last days of Tammuz, as if someone had set them on fire, singeing the edges of the petals with a powdery, black film. Much of the fruit of the trees had never formed, puckering instead into ruined bunches that exploded into ash when plucked. There was gloom everywhere, and worry. The initial mantle of freedom we’d experienced on arriving at the fortress diminished as crops began to fail. We were so isolated from the rest of mankind I could not help but think of the angels, how removed they were from us; so far away that, even when they attempted to catch us as we faltered, they were too distant to truly understand our sorrow.

“I always dreaded Av,” Yael said of the month we were about to enter. “But not this year.”

She sounded fierce, ready to fight the blaze of the season. Av was the month when her child would enter the world. I’d assumed she would be weakened now that she’d been cast out of her father’s house, but that was not the case. Her strength seemed renewed. She stared down those who gazed at her with curiosity, exactly as I’d done when people whispered about my grandsons’ inability to speak. In that we were alike, branded by what we had done but prideful when it came to our children, even when God had deserted us.