The Book of V.

by Anna Solomon

  What she doesn’t understand is keeping a thing that you know wants to escape. Keeping it, dressing it, feeding it, praising it, and all the while, you know it doesn’t want you. It seems to her it would be a great humiliation. Yet no one appears humiliated except for her.

  The child has made it better, and much worse. He came in the middle of the night, waking her like the river was inside her, needing to get out, and the midwives arrived instantly, though it was, oddly, Baraz she turned out to want. She called out for him, she cried for him. When someone told her they had looked but could not find him, the weight that howled into her back in that moment, a hot, massive fist that contained her mother and Lara and Itz and her aunt and Nadav and her father and Mother Mona and Esther’s own birth, made her want to die. But she had no choice; the child’s seizing was hers. And then he was born, a boy, his little wand swollen and waving, and she gave up a cry.

  He looks unlike anyone she has known. Even the king admits this; he wonders aloud if his child is of another world, a god; his mistrust of Esther deepens. Once upon a time, she has learned, the king served as a steward in Vashti’s father’s palace; whichever girl in the night station said he himself was not of noble blood was correct. So even as he reigns he is displaced, and his son’s entrance has displaced him further. The child is four months old now, with yellow hair the color of a grass that grew in the city where Esther was raised, along the washing creeks. His eyes are darker than brown. His name is Darius. The king’s choice. Esther is grateful for it, though her gratitude stings: Darius is not a Hebrew—or won’t have to live as one, at least. And he is, as the midwife knew, not a girl. He is the king’s first son. He is in line to reign. Esther is glad for all these things, though her father would mourn the child not knowing the stories and prayers. Maybe she will tell him someday; or maybe, she sometimes thinks, he will discover them on his own, like Moses. She is glad for Darius’s warmth, when he isn’t being taken away to be nursed or put to sleep. But she is also aware that he has sealed her fate, because even if she were released now, she would never be able to leave.

  She knows from Baraz that the attacks on the camp have grown more violent. He goes as close as he can, he tells her, he looks and listens. This must be what he was doing when Darius was born, Esther decides. He is sorry—his sorrow is visible—that he can’t do more. He tells her everything he learns. He tells her children have died. He tells her women are raped.

  But what do they gain now? Esther asks. If the camp is already in pieces, why do the Persians keep smashing it?

  There are many poor among the Persians, too, says Baraz. It’s a solace for them. Not to be the lowest.

  Oh.

  A bird lands on the palace wall, choosing the last bit of sun. It’s the same type of bird Esther saw from her pallet in the night station one afternoon, black with yellow wings, and she slows her feet, not wanting to scare it off. Don’t go, she thinks at the bird, even as she waits for it to lift. Don’t fall any further, she thinks at the sun, though she looks forward to night, when Darius is brought to her. She stands, her back to the guards, waiting for the instant when the sun will abandon the bird to shadow and the bird will fly, and when it comes, and the bird wings away, Esther’s blood beats with what she takes at first to be longing until she recognizes it for what it is: a new plan.

  * * *

  Late that night, from a chest in the corner of her chamber, she unearths the bird skeleton she took from the king’s bones room. It’s still intact, held together by the king’s handiwork of guts and wire, as light as a reed in her cupped palm. Esther studies it, then turns it over into her other hand and studies it more. She has dismissed the boy with the fan to go stand outside with the guards. She is alone, except for Darius, asleep in his basket—she has an hour, maybe, before his cries will wake the nurse, who sleeps as lightly as a cat behind the closet door.

  She stands the bird upon the chest, marveling at its silver feet. If this one works, she thinks, she won’t have to sneak or cajole or seduce her way back to the bones room. She hasn’t been allowed there since her first visit, when she broke the feet off the fox, and the minister has warned her that if she attempts to visit the king again without official invitation, he will have her locked in her chambers from one moon to the next. He traps her in corners. He pretends to whisper in her ear, then licks. Once, under the table at a banquet, he drew the king’s golden scepter—a thing she had never seen the king so much as touch—up under her robes until its tip arrived at her entry point. After that he decided that anytime she was brought before the king, the king had to point the scepter at her before she could approach. And the king now does this. He appears even smaller since Darius was born, as if his son’s strange beauty has diminished him further. He does whatever the minister suggests.

  Esther touches a finger to the bird’s beak. It looks oddly long, without eyes or feathers to accompany it. You will talk, she thinks, and almost instantly, she believes she can do it. Enough time has passed. Her magic must be accumulating again. You will.

  * * *

  She works each night, while Darius sleeps. She has no one to guide her now or provide instruction. She must make it up. She must be patient beyond her capacity for patience. She knows the beak must come last so starts with the feet, and one night, a few weeks in, the silver toes begin to quiver. She jumps, forgetting Darius, settles him before the nurse can hear—he likes his stomach patted—then mazes in her mind back to where she began, reconstructing the order of breath and mind that led to the quivering. She tries again. Nothing. But the next night, her energies renewed, the feet again quiver. The next, they turn from silver to bone. The next, a layer of skin grows upon them. In this way, she works her way up the bird. Each time she achieves a new turn, she panics—she will never be able to do it again. There is no formula, no incantation or trick. Only faith and focus. But every night—except when she is kept late at a banquet, or called to the king—she sits with the bird and brings another part of it closer to life.

  The wings are not easy. The yellow doesn’t want to come in. She almost gives up. Does it matter if they are yellow? Maybe this is a different kind of bird. But she’s certain it’s not. She keeps going. She must press the point of herself into the bird’s wings with great force yet slowly; she can’t leave a hole. She thinks of her mother whittling one of her needles, working until the tip was so fine she could push it through cloth and watch the cloth close up again behind it. Esther’s task is similar now to the needle’s: she has to enter and disrupt, while leaving the bird intact. She hums, to steady herself. She goes so slowly she isn’t sure she’s moving, and every time she is interrupted by Darius crying—forcing her to dive, eyes closed, onto her bed, the bird hidden inside her robe, readying herself for the nurse’s entrance—she must begin all over again. Sometimes she is too tired. Sometimes she brings Darius into her bed, deciding that this bird business is a kind of madness, vowing to stop. She has this boy. It could be enough. But the next night, always, she begins again. And eventually, at a moment that does not announce itself as any different from the moments that have come before, the yellow blooms.

  But the wings are not as difficult as life. She knows the bird contains it. She is more confident about the bird containing life than she was about its wings containing yellow. But how to make it breathe? She presses herself in, but that doesn’t work, then she tries it as a kind of transformation, but that doesn’t work, either. She puts her mouth to the beak and offers her own breath to the bird, but her breath comes back at her, smelling sour. It’s only when she gives up one night, and in giving up loosens her hands around the bird, and in loosening her hands around the bird accidentally spurs it to open, that the bird exhales the breath it’s been holding since it died so that it can receive another. It shivers. Then, without apparent shock or grogginess, it begins to fly. Esther cries out before she can stop herself, prompting the closet door to open so that she must call in her mind to the bird, Stop come now at once. And it ob
eys! I am its master, she thinks, lying with it beneath her cover linen, her heart pounding with the bird’s as the nurse pads across the chamber to find Darius sound asleep.

  Life, though, is not as difficult as the voice. And the voice is not as difficult as the words. Can a bird utter human words? It takes Esther two months to figure out a method. By the time she does, by the time she has filled the bird with sounds and pulled them out as forms—Esther says, Go—she knows she is carrying another child, but she is so elated by and focused on her work, she barely notices. If she has trained it correctly, the bird will fly directly to Nadav’s mother, because she is the one it already knows and because Esther has deemed her, after Itz—who may be inaccessible, hiding in the tent—the one most likely to listen to a talking bird. Esther fine-tunes the bird’s Hebrew until it cannot be misheard. Esther says, Go. Esther says, Far. All that’s left is for her to teach it the smells that will lead it to the camp.

  GLOUCESTER, MA

  VEE

  Other People’s Husbands

  Every afternoon for twenty-nine afternoons, Vee walks up the hill and sleeps with the man in the woods. He is not a lumberjack or quarryman, as his clothing and truck first suggested, but an architecture student at Harvard taking time off to “investigate” himself. His name is Benjamin, and Vee has fallen in love with his house. She loves the plain wood of the walls and the silence of the sunlight that falls through the large windows. She loves that they are new windows, not divided into panes like all the windows Vee has ever lived behind but plain faced and unfussy, and she loves that not everything here is new. Benjamin’s family has owned the land for centuries; they claimed it when Dogtown was still an active settlement, after the Indians were pushed out and before the place was abandoned to witches and feral animals. There is history here and there are modern windows and all of it makes Vee feel as if she is at once regaining something from her own past while also wriggling loose from its hold. For the first time in her life she has experienced pangs of actual desire to make house, and because she and Benjamin are alone, unwatched, with no one to see or remark or expect, this desire does not seem suspect; it does not seem perhaps to be someone else’s desire. With Alex, anything she did was not merely something she did but something she did to confirm or dispel an idea of herself. In Benjamin’s house, she moves freely between activities without self-consciousness, chopping onions, or poring over his plans for a vegetable garden with genuine interest, or making love, or reading on the window seat or in his bed. Benjamin does not interrupt her, as Alex did, as if her reading were merely a placeholder as she awaited his next communication, and after she closes a book, Benjamin asks her to tell him about it. About herself, he asks little. Vee has told him only that she is recently divorced, which she considers a lie only in a technical sense, and living with a friend nearby. And Benjamin is fine with this; Benjamin calls himself a “counterstructural.” God is he glad, he says, not to be in Cambridge now. Vee agrees. She went with Rosemary to the Jewish consciousness raising group in Cambridge and is glad not to be there now. She might be done with cities altogether, she sometimes thinks. Which is yet another reason to love Benjamin’s house in the woods.

  On the thirtieth day, Vee spends the night, and on the thirty-first, she does not go back to Rosemary’s. Instead, she drives Benjamin’s truck into town and returns with bread; cheese; two bottles of wine; a bone for Georgina, Benjamin’s dog; and a palpitation beneath her sternum. She plans to stay the night again and, tomorrow, to ask Benjamin if she can move in with him.

  The next afternoon, after a shower, together in their underwear—for Benjamin has overfed the woodstove—they set the kitchen table and sit down before their second picnic. A moment spreads out in which Vee cannot quite believe that this is real. To have lived that life on Dumbarton Street with her vanity and Senator Kent and now to be here, wearing almost nothing, her stomach folded in the open, across from this lanky, weathered-faced, pale-chested man who always waits for her to speak, in a house without a single window covering, is almost too great a transformation to bear. She is happy, however unknown the future might be. The palpitation begins again. She has dithered over the phrasing—for a time? or for a while? She knows she must not frame her question as a need, though it is in fact the case that she needs a place to live. The room she has been sleeping in is slated to become a nursery to Rosemary’s new baby, and though Rosemary is too polite to say that she would like Vee out in advance of her due date, she has begun putting up wallpaper samples on the wall behind Vee’s bed. Living in Benjamin’s house would mean being close enough to Rosemary but not in her way, and away from Philip who, since the day in the kitchen when she stood with her robe a little too loose, has stopped hectoring Vee to leave but now regularly stares at her breasts. Rosemary, Vee believes, must see this. She is not stupid. But does she also see how Vee waits a beat, lets him get his look, before turning away? And if she does, does she trust that Vee does it not proudly but out of desperation, a desire not to be kicked out again? If Benjamin would take her, all this could end.

  Vee waits until they have emptied their first glasses. She reaches across the table to wipe a bit of brie from his lip, then, catching his smile at being babied, she dives in. “I’ve been thinking … maybe I could move in?”

  For a time, she tells herself. Don’t scare him. But she can’t add the words. Benjamin is looking at her with a new expression, his eyes tense at their corners, his mouth pitched at a hard angle.

  She has prepared for him to hesitate, of course. He has come here to live alone, away from bricks and crits and people. And he won’t want to ruin the charge between them, which relies at least in part on their strangeness to each other—they have yet to exchange even their last names. But Vee has an answer for both of these problems. For the first, she planned to inform him that even Thoreau depended on his mother and sister to do things like his laundry, and for the second to argue that they can have it both ways, that she, at least, does not need to know anything more about him. All she wants is to live forever in a new house on old land with a man named Benjamin and a dog named Georgina as a woman named Vee without any titles or papers marking them.

  But this look he is giving her is not about living alone, or about sex.

  “I’m married,” he says quietly. “Back in Cambridge.”

  It takes Vee a full minute before she can talk. By then she is scavenging around the bed for her clothes as Benjamin follows and dodges her at once, apologizing and trying to convince her not to go.

  “Get away,” she says. “Please get away from me.”

  “I’m taking some time off,” he says. “But I can’t stay here forever. I have a son.”

  Vee would cover her ears if she could but she must pull on her dress, her coat, her hat. She stuffs her stockings into her bag and her bare feet into her boots. “Nothing has to change,” Benjamin says, and she remembers him musing just yesterday about how this land wasn’t his family’s to claim, how it belonged to the Indians and how someday there would be proper reparations made, remembers how even as he said this he rested back in his bed, clearly unprepared to go anywhere or give anything up. She runs, for the second and last time, away from the beautiful house.

  * * *

  An hour or so later, Vee opens Rosemary’s front door as silently as possible. She would prefer to stay outside forever, walk the miles to the nearest coffee shop, walk until she reaches another planet, but she is without scarf or gloves, both of which she left at Benjamin’s in her rush to flee, and her bare feet feel close to frostbite inside her boots. She doesn’t want to see Rosemary, not yet. She has told her about a man named Benjamin up in the woods, told her enough to make Rosemary smile, and though Rosemary has not asked for more—Rosemary has been distracted, Rosemary has seemed more and more often not quite herself—she knows enough that Vee cannot now tell her that Benjamin has a wife and child. Vee is not a woman who sleeps with married men.

  Yet she is, apparently.


  She hears the children playing outside, on the other side of the house.

  She will slip upstairs, lie down, pull herself together.

  “Vivian.”

  It’s Philip calling her, as no one calls her.

  “Just a minute,” she calls, her voice shaking. She bends to untie her boots, a process mercifully slowed by her numb fingers, so that by the time she is following Philip’s voice into the living room she has managed to take a deep breath. Her chest vibrates painfully, and she realizes, as she enters the room to find Philip lying on the couch with one forearm flung across his eyes, that what she is, more than angry, is hurt. She and Benjamin joked a few times about both being on the lam, but now it turns out he really is, of his own choosing—Vee is alone in having been sent away.

  “Are you okay?” It’s almost comical, hearing herself ask these words even as her body longs for a private place in which to cry. She tries not to look at him, in his wrinkled shirt, no tie, and gold-toe socks. She has never seen him without shoes on. Alarm sings in her ears, telling her there is danger here and her hurt must wait, though of course the danger is not unrelated to the hurt, the danger is the married man laid out before Vee, Vee who did not intend harm but harmed nevertheless. “You have to leave,” Philip says, his eyes still covered by his arm.

  “Where’s Rosemary?”

  “Not here.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “This is my living room.”

  “Yes?”

  “So why must I be talking to you right now? Why must you be here? You’re not a good influence.”

  “I …” Vee flounders, bewildered. “Do you mean the cigarettes? She hasn’t been smoking anymore. Hasn’t been drinking, either.”