The Book of V.

by Anna Solomon

  Did she know that? Esther can’t decide. And she can’t see how it matters now. She presses her legs together more tightly, trying to squeeze the fingers into retreat, but it’s difficult to clamp down one part of your body with all your might while keeping other parts—in particular the face—appearing jovial and relaxed. It is, in fact, as Esther is neither the first nor last to discover, pretty much impossible. And the face must take precedence—the face either masks or gives away. As the minister’s fingers reach their intended goal, Esther shifts sideways but cannot escape.

  “But as you also know,” the minister continues, “one must not change direction. The queen had to be killed. The bird had to be killed. All this is clear. Less clear is how you brought the thing to life. Your people—” his breath in her nostrils, smelling of meat “—insist there is one God. They insist to the point of torture. To the point of death. It’s their one bravery, I suppose. And perhaps it’s why they stay. Perhaps they imagine from that quarter will come their relief.” The fingers go slack for a moment, before coming alive again at his next thought. “But that’s irrelevant to what I want to know, which is how you can be one of them, yet play God.”

  Esther struggles to speak. “I did no such thing.”

  “The bird,” breathes the minister. “You created the bird.”

  “The bird was already a bird.”

  “Is that right. I want to know how you do it.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “But Darius is growing larger.”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  “He’s walking. He might be sent to the training grounds. They’re far from here, you know. He’ll make a fine warrior. One day a warrior king.”

  “I’ll go with him.”

  The minister chuckles. “You’ll go nowhere. Teach me.”

  “It can’t be taught,” says Esther, her voice hoarse with the effort of trying to ignore his hand. Where is the beast? The beast would not have to endure this. “You have to be born into it.”

  “Ahhh. But that’s what everyone told me when I was a child. Stop your airs. You’re nothing but a butcher’s son. I was lower than the king, who was not high. But now look at me. I tell him what to do.” The fingers wriggle. “Look at me.”

  Esther vomits onto her plate.

  It is the only alternative to screaming. It is excused, her condition being what it is. It gets her out of the room. But it does not get her away from the minister more generally, neither his actual presence nearly everywhere she goes—pressing, rubbing, taunting—nor his questions, which torment her now as if he’s grafted them into her mind. Had she tried to act as God? But what else would make them go at this point? If not pillage and rape, if not a ban on spices? Somehow the ban scares her the most—it seems the kind of silent loss that could finally tip a people out of existence.

  She begins to walk the palace again, searching, though she does not know at first for what. She sees faces, Itz’s and Nadav’s and her aunt’s and her aunt’s washing partner’s and Marduk’s and faces of people whose names she never knew. But the faces are false, she knows. Even as they appear clearly in her mind she sees that they are facades of faces, molds, as if the real faces have been caught in sap. Who knows if these people are alive anymore? Even Marduk appears as an innocent, his long cheeks and hard eyes calling up a longing in her. She has been gone too long, she understands. The understanding makes her more frantic. She is looking, she realizes, for the bones room. She wants a fox, to replace the bird. If playing God is what she was doing, she will do it again. She has the energy for a fox. She is almost certain. She will teach the fox not scent but language, and the fox will dig until it hears her people talking up above, then it will deliver her message. At last. And then they’ll leave, before they’re all killed.

  If the idea is impractical, so be it. Through portal and passage Esther searches, Darius on her back or running beside her, her stomach preceding them like a moon. The midwives don’t stop her this time, maybe because she carried the first one well, or because he is the boy the king wanted; that need is sated. Or maybe they let her go because she moves so quickly, like a surging wave, that they are afraid of what she might do if they try to restrain her. This isn’t the same as their fearing her, she knows—if they feared her, she would have power over them, and she doesn’t. It’s her lack of power that scares them—they know she is fully trapped; their fear is that she will blow.

  A week after the dinner, her punishment arrives. Darius is taken from her rooms. He’ll be raised at the training grounds, she is told by one of the midwives as she measures Esther’s stomach. So matter-of-fact Esther almost misses it. Just right. Not much longer now. Your son …

  She is allowed one visit each week.

  When she sees him, she thinks she might bite into him. Take a doughy forearm into her mouth. Swallow an ear. When he is taken again, she cries until the midwives do something—she never knows—that makes her fall asleep, and when she wakes, and remembers, she begins again to cry. She would kill herself trying to get to him, if she did not have the other one inside her.

  So she begins to teach the minister. He will not succeed. She comforts herself with this. Even if a shred of magic were buried somewhere in him, he would not be able to access it; to access it, you had to be receptive; to be receptive, you had to be capable of admitting all you did not know. But she can’t let him fail outright, either. If he fails, he will blame her. He will take Darius to Persepolis the whole year round. She has to make the minister fail without realizing it; she must make him an eternal apprentice, so that he inches forward, or perceives himself inching forward, but never quite enough. This will be its own kind of sorcery. She will have to trick him into thinking he is learning until he dies.

  It will be a kind of circling, she thinks, endless movement without actually going anywhere. Like the camp used to do before the attacks started, when all they were hiding from was the sun.

  She teaches the minister. He does not touch her during their lessons, a pleasant fact she understands has nothing to do with humility; he is simply unexcited by the prospect of molesting her without the king present.

  Darius is returned to her. Though he is walking now, often away from her, she does not let him out of her sight.

  Her stomach begins, once or twice each day, to harden as if into rock. Her time to find the bones room is running out.

  She searches. But the minister is probably right. Why would they leave now if they haven’t already?

  She searches. But what if they are already gone? Maybe they walked off a year ago, into the desert. How would Esther know? The only information she gets comes from within the palace. Everyone could be lying. Even Baraz. Maybe especially Baraz.

  Baraz is nowhere to be found.

  People stop looking her in the eye.

  Only the midwives touch her. And Darius. Though he runs now, fast, laughing.

  A midwife tells her that Darius was well cared for, by a woman who claims she knew Esther in the night station, a woman with one eyebrow. And Esther thinks of the last time she saw Lara, and wonders if it’s too late, if Lara might yet be a friend, if she might help. Esther starts thinking she sees her, around corners and behind doors, but she can never move fast enough to reach her.

  The minister tells her she is losing her mind.

  She is the minister’s teacher.

  But the minister may be right.

  * * *

  She is dreaming when he wakes her, his voice a comfort she brings into the dream with her, a dream of childhood, a floor of papyrus reeds, yellow grass, Darius’s hair, Darius a friend, Esther only as tall as the grown-ups’ knees, Baraz’s voice: “Shhhh, wake up,” a tilting sky, a bowl of rice. It takes his hand on her shoulder to lift her out. At once, her blood begins to pound. Is the baby coming? Has Darius been taken? She rises onto her knees. Darius is there, his skin pink in the light thrown by Baraz’s torch. Her inside is calm.

  A whisper. “C
ome.”

  “Where have you been?” She hasn’t seen him in weeks.

  “I’ll show you.”

  “You didn’t tell me about the spices,” she says.

  “Shh.”

  “Why should I go with you?”

  “I didn’t know. I am only told what it is useful for me to know.”

  “You said you spoke—”

  “Never with them. I never said I spoke with them directly.”

  “The bird—”

  “I know.” Baraz swallows visibly, his Adam’s apple sliding in a way that reminds her that he is both a man and more than a man. “Please. I need you to come with me, without more words.”

  “I can’t leave Darius.”

  “He’ll cry.”

  “I won’t leave him.”

  Baraz suffocates the torch before opening the door to the passage. They walk in darkness, Esther carrying Darius until Baraz, sensing her struggle, takes the boy into his arms. Esther is barefoot as Baraz ordered her; their soles purr across the stones. They walk through portal and passage, far enough that Esther, losing track of the turns, takes up a fringe of Baraz’s robe between her fingers.

  When they stop, Esther touches the wall nearest to her. It’s smooth and solid—not a door. She feels Baraz at her feet, his hands working at something in the ground. She kneels and feels her son’s feet tickle her neck; he is cocooned, she realizes, in the space between Baraz’s legs and chest. Then a current of air rises and Baraz has her by the hand, leading her downward. Rungs in a wall. She has to lean back so that her stomach will clear them. Baraz is still above her, she can hear his almost soundless movements, his hands settling something back into place. She waits at the bottom, sand damp beneath her feet, her leg muscles quivering. The exertion has stirred up tears, and a fantasy: they are in the bones room. Baraz knew without her telling him what she wanted. Never mind that the bones room had not required a descent.

  The torch flares. They are in not the bones room but a low-ceilinged cellar, empty of furniture. Three other eunuchs stand waiting near an opening in the wall. A tunnel, Esther sees.

  Baraz says quietly, “It’s not for you.”

  Her chest starts to ache. “This is what you were doing,” she says, realizing. “When Darius was born.”

  Baraz nods. “This is where we’ve been anytime we weren’t somewhere else.”

  Esther is gripped by a sudden, wild fear. They have made some kind of deal for Darius. She can’t understand what; it makes no sense; when Baraz woke her, he didn’t want Darius to come at all. But that could have been an act, too. They are going to send him out this tunnel, her boy who has only just learned to walk.

  But when she reaches for him, Baraz lays the boy in her arms and smiles. Has she ever seen him smile? Then he gives his torch a shake, nudging the flame higher and illuminating more of the room, which is larger than it first appeared. As Baraz walks backward, it grows larger still, and for a few suspended moments Esther believes that it could prove infinite if only Baraz and his torch would keep pressing into its borders. All we have to do is walk, she thinks, until we’ve reached the camp.

  Baraz stops. In a far corner, there is a bed. A rug. A tall drawer. A chair. In the chair, there is a woman. She appears older than Esther, though by how much is hard to tell. Her features are youthful but her skin hangs slightly, as if living within the earth has shrunk her, and she sits with an ambiguous stiffness, as a young person might do in fear or an old person in pain. Her eyes rest dully on a middle distance. Darius squeezes Esther’s hand and Esther, squeezing back, wonders if the woman before them is dead. If her head is hanging from the ceiling by a rope Esther can’t yet see.

  “If it were only my life,” Baraz says, “I would have …”

  The woman turns. Her eyes fill with light. They are green eyes, set in a silt-brown face, surrounded by black hair that does not fall, like Esther’s, but rises, wild, its own crown. She is different. But she is also, Esther sees, the same. Beautiful in the way that Esther is beautiful, a way that cannot be changed. She is the queen.

  Part Three

  Reinvention

  BROOKLYN

  LILY

  Not a Good Influence

  At the reception after the memorial service, Lily and her brothers let people squeeze their hands. A few come at them with hard embraces, undeterred by whether or not Ruth’s children know who they are. There are many they don’t know, more than they expected. People from Gloucester none of them remember. Women from Cambridge. Lily knows some of the local friends, especially those who belong to Ruth’s synagogue on Garfield Place, where the event is held, but there are at least a dozen other Brooklynites she has never met. The social hall has been set up in a manner that surprises and moves her: not plastic sheets, as there were on the occasions when Ruth dragged her to something, but substantial white tablecloths; not supermarket platters but cheese and fruit plates put together by a group of women who, based on the dates and figs they’ve procured and the way they say her name, clearly knew and loved Ruth. There is decent wine, and two tall vases filled generously with flowers. When Ian gave his eulogy in the sanctuary across the street, Lily cried; she had declined giving one herself because she did not trust she would get through it. But here, there is not a lot of grief to be felt, rather, a low-grade numbness in hand after hand, words after words. Her friends talk in one corner—she hasn’t seen them in a while, but they came with strong hugs and an unmistakable tenderness. In her peripheral vision she watches Rosie and June play dodge-the-mourners with their cousins as Adam and Lionel’s wife work to corral them. Early this morning, as Adam was getting the girls dressed, Lily heard fighting and walked in to find June sobbing, You said she was here! and Rosie shouting back, I said her ghost was here! Adam waved his hand at Lily: Get out of here, I’ve got this. But how could she not wait to hear what came next? What’s a ghost? June screamed. It’s dead! What’s dead? Gone! June stopped trying to take off the shirt Adam had just put on her. Does she have a face? No. Does she have words? No. Does she show up? No. June burst into tears. But now she races gleefully among the dark-clad grown people, who must seem to her like a woods, and what Lily wants more than anything is to walk the three blocks home and lie down with June, as she and June lay with Ruth, and watch her nap with her nose up and her mouth open.

  An hour or so into the reception she and Lionel and Ian wind up in a corner, left to themselves. “An intermission,” Lionel observes. “For the inner mourners.” They stand silently for a while, drinking water handed to them by someone who somehow knows that this is the moment when inner mourners are struck by a terrible thirst. Their water is refilled and they drink more, and stand more, until Lionel says, “Oh god.”

  A few seconds pass. Then Ian says, “Oh my god. Is that?”

  “What?” Lily, ever the shortest, can’t see the room as they do.

  “It’s that woman,” Lionel says. “The governor’s wife.”

  “The senator,” says Ian.

  “She’s a senator?” Lily asks.

  “She was a senator’s wife. She did something to get thrown out, Mom would never say what. They were friends as kids. She came to live with us for a while. You were like three. Maybe four?” Ian brings a hand to his mouth.

  “What?” Lily asks. “What’s the big deal?”

  “She was Dad’s first affair,” Lionel announces.

  Lily looks to Ian, who nods. “I’m about ninety-five percent sure that’s what happened.”

  “That’s awful,” Lily says.

  “He hated her, though,” Lionel says.

  “That’s even worse. Why?”

  “He blamed her.”

  “For what?”

  “Everything!”

  Lionel’s voice has turned weirdly bright, and Lily sees that a nearby cluster of mourners has dispersed, making visible a petite, reddish-haired woman who stands more erectly than the other seventysomethings in the room. She wears a black collared dress, black tights, h
eeled boots in a navy suede. Lily is reminded of a photograph she once saw of Edna St. Vincent Millay. It’s not just that both women are small, with fluffs of red hair. There is a frankness in this woman’s expression as she scans the room, a quiet audacity as she spots Lily and her brothers and walks toward them, her boots clacking on the old parquet floor, her dress unbuttoned nearly to her breastbone so that her pale, narrow chest seems to glow.

  A hand, outstretched, shows her age.

  “I’m very sorry,” she says.

  Lionel offers his hand, then withdraws it as soon as they’ve touched. “Kent,” he declares awkwardly, as if by naming her he might dispel her.

  “Barr,” the woman corrects. “Vivian Barr.” Her voice is peculiar and somehow fitting, metallic yet also sonorous. “You knew me as Vee.”

  “We remember,” Lionel says.

  The woman nods. Lily sees that the skin on her chest—her décolletage, Lily thinks, this is a woman with a décolletage—is not milkily pure, as it appeared at a distance, but marred by moles and spots and fine vertical lines that meet between her almost nonexistent breasts and disappear into her dress. Lily’s brothers wait for the woman to leave—even Ian, who used to bring injured mice into the house, offers nothing more than a cool nod. But Lily is transfixed. She understands that there may be reasons why Vivian Barr’s name did not appear on Ruth’s invite list. Even so, she finds herself gathering the woman’s hands—they are small, and soft, the tiny bones and veins palpable under the skin—into her own. “Thank you for coming,” she says.