by Anna Solomon
“I know. I didn’t know, but then I found out.”
“She didn’t sew after she was Ruth?”
“No.”
Vivian Barr nods. Her smile has disappeared.
“Did you ever think to reach out to her?” Lily asks. “Once enough time had passed?”
“I didn’t think it was my place.”
“You both lived alone.”
“And?”
“And in New York—”
“Do I look like I need company?”
Lily flushes. Something has flared in Vivian Barr; Lily has offended her; it is time to go. She begins to push back her chair. But suddenly Vivian Barr has propped her elbows on the table—a move as surprising coming from her as a fart might be from someone else—and she is looking at Lily, really looking into her eyes, in a way that reminds her, yes, of Ruth. “When I lived at your house,” she says, “you and your brothers were always racing around. Inside, outside, up the stairs, down the stairs. Sometimes it seemed … well. I was very fragile right then, very absorbed. I’ve said that, I realize. My mind is sound. But sometimes it seemed to me … With your brothers, I might have been a tree. But with you, there were these moments when I would see you looking at me, really looking, like you saw something. Something I didn’t yet know about. This sounds ridiculous, I realize, because I was grown and you were a little girl. But I felt, always, a little afraid of you.”
Lily thinks of her kitchen memory—Lily on one side of the glass, Vivian Barr on the other. Does Vivian Barr have the same one? Is she trying to apologize in some way? Lily cannot ask this. She cannot say to this woman, I remember you in a robe, there is something desperate about you, in the robe, you are in a robe in my kitchen, maybe with my father … They have already discussed Lily’s father. That is done. If there is anything else to the story, if Lily is not the only one here who has grappled with another woman’s husband in a kitchen, Vivian Barr is not telling. So Lily says—and it is true, and it was true last night when she said good-night to the girls, her blood still firing from her trespass: “I feel that way with my older daughter sometimes. Rosie. She looks at me, and I think she can see not just something but everything. It’s very unnerving.”
Vivian Barr looks at Lily for a long moment. Then she sits back from the table with a sigh. One of her hands drifts downward. Within a second, the dog is there, fitting himself to her fingers. “Girls are always unnerving,” she says.
SUSA
VASHTI
Is Her Mind Sound?
For an instant, engulfed by the tent’s blackness, Vashti fears she is in the earth again. The sky, the breeze, the sand, must all have been a hallucination. Fevered answers to questions she’d thought she’d stopped asking. Sour air fills her nostrils. A keen forms in her throat. I am entombed again.
Then a torch flares. An arm shimmies into view, a chest, a man—or not quite a man. A man-sized boy whose bones have stretched faster than they’ve been fed. He wears only a cloth at his hips; in one hand he holds the torch, in the other a knife. Vashti knows at once that he is Itz. The boy who lost his mother’s spoon and accidentally stole another, the boy who started the war on the camp. He would be the first to wake. His head lifts the tent’s ceiling; his jaw has the overshot squareness particular to pubescent boys; an Adam’s apple slides in its slot. Vashti takes it all in. She will relay what she sees to Baraz—each hair, every angle, the kinds of details he will miss on his own—and instruct him to bring all of it back to Esther. Not the small number of tents remaining, nor the empty-stomach smell, but the beauty of her cousin as he brandishes that tiny blade. This will be Vashti’s token of thanks, however small, for the hours Esther spent in her cave, telling Vashti what she needed to know.
“We won’t hurt you,” Baraz says. He lifts a hand, his gesture for peace, a gesture he used so often on Vashti in her first days in the hole that she began to think—because it worked on her—that he possessed hypnotic powers. But it doesn’t work on Itz, who continues wagging his knife at them, and whose eyes, dark in their hollows, are impossible to read.
Vashti is sorry, to come upon them like this.
The others are stirring now, a collective rumbling like a caravan. They are more than one family—they are, she will learn, four families and assorted abandoneds—and Baraz, trying to preempt attack, says loudly: “Esther sent us.” He says it again, making sure they hear the name, for though Esther insisted they speak basic Persian, and though Baraz loves Esther, he has the same view of her tribe as most, Vashti included, that they are an insular and stubborn people.
He says it a third time, and as their faces rise into the torchlight now, creased with sleep, blinking, they are silent, with the exception of one man who leaps up and says, “How can you prove it?”
This is Marduk, of course. Vashti recognizes him right away. A bit like the king, Esther said, and this is true: the uncle puffs his chest and steps in front of Itz. He looks from Vashti to Baraz and back with a practiced violence in his eyes, though it’s easy to see, in his stooped form—his son, behind him, stands a full head taller—that his gaze is more forceful than any harm he can actually inflict.
She thinks of all the proof she can offer. All Esther told her to help her ingratiate herself with them. Vashti knows about the goblin. She knows about the rugs that rolled Itz back and forth from the river, and she knows how Marduk and his wife laughed, like vultures, before he slapped his niece. She knows more still: that Marduk was forever jealous of his brother Harun; that he lives in fear that he’s a fool. A blowhard, Esther called him, perhaps not with that word but with another that meant the same in that time and place.
But not everything Esther told her will be of help. Much of it—most of it, probably—they do not want to hear. And some of it would only stretch their disbelief further. The malformed tips of Esther’s ears, for instance, or the bird she brought to life. Even if her exertions might demonstrate her devotion to the people in this tent, they will not go down smoothly, for they are not tales of mere goblins or simple sorcery but—Esther’s term—perversion. She had sat on Vashti’s bed as she said this, her hands absentmindedly catching her son’s hair as he toddled by to explore some other corner of the cave. Vashti watched the boy as he went, digging in the floor and poking his fingers into the walls as his mother told her story. She watched one thing and listened to another. The beast Esther had become. The nails the minister had dug into her face as Ahasuerus watched. (Poor man, Vashti thought, before thinking, Poor girl. He had never chosen before. He had only been chosen, and in a desperate moment.) The skeleton she had stolen from the bones room. The breath she had drawn from the bird as the boy slept.
What she had done was to pervert nature itself. I didn’t see it that way, she said. But the minister made me see it. I played God. Vashti didn’t understand at first. She didn’t think Esther, or anyone, ought to listen to the minister. But you said you had a lesson, she said, with a sorceress in the camp; you said your own mother came from a family with sorcery running through it. Not the same, Esther said. What they did and what she had done. They turned grass into rope, lit fires out of rock. They did not turn a living being into another being or bring a dead thing to life. So even if Marduk and Itz and the others believed it, Vashti knows that they would not want to know. Neither would they want to know about the bare, almost vacant tone with which Esther had laid out her story before Vashti, like a servant laying a table of words. Vashti did not believe that Esther was in fact unharrowed by all that had happened—whenever she turned back from watching Darius, Vashti caught something, a twitch in her jaw, a darkness in her eyes—but she understood that Esther needed to pretend to be. And she knows that Marduk and Itz will need for her to have been that, too. Blasphemy, and suffering, will have to be excised. They need—look at them—something, one thing, that is not tragic.
“Your figs,” Vashti says. “I know, Esther told me, that you have a secret method of splicing their seeds, and that this is what mak
es them the most delicious in Persia.”
Marduk looks at her. There is pride in his eyes, wound with sorrow (his fig trees are no longer his) and warning (the secret still is), and Vashti nods, her promise not to tell.
“She sent us here to tell you. Tomorrow, there will be a massacre.”
She lets the lie sink in. They’ll all be dead within a year, that much she can see. She feels no regret, only a growing ease in her role. She is not in a hole and she is not in a palace; she is in a tent. A middle place, a moveable place. She will convince them.
“Esther says you have to go.”
The man and boy stare at her. Marduk lifts his chin. “She could not come herself?”
“No. She could not come herself.”
“She won’t help us?”
Vashti can’t speak for a moment. She nearly laughs, not because she finds him funny but because his query, his angry hope that has somehow survived these years, strikes her as impossibly sad. What did he imagine his niece was waiting for? What kind of queen did he think he had created, that she might have the power to save them and also the cruelty to bide her time? “No,” she says at last. “I wish I could tell you how she tried.”
Itz steps out from his father’s shadow. He has lowered the knife but his face contains its own sharpness. “What have they done to her?” he asks, and though his cracking voice betrays his youth, it is the only youthful thing about him. If there is a problem, Vashti thinks, it will be Itz. He and Vashti are not entirely unlike. They both know what it is to be hidden, trapped, for the sake of your own life. He sees through Vashti’s hedging. He understands that she could tell them how Esther tried and that she chooses not to. Even if he does not know the details, how she went to the king unbidden, brought to life a bird, offered her sex, he knows: Esther was never in a position to save them. He does not believe, as Vashti counted on everyone believing, that a queen is a queen is a queen.
“She is treated well,” Vashti announces, avoiding Itz’s eyes. “She has one child, a boy, and another soon to be born. She sleeps on a bed of silks …” As Vashti describes Esther’s days, the shaded courtyards she walks in, the robes she is wrapped in, the banquets she attends, she includes every sumptuous detail she can think of, colors and textures and scents, scenes that are somehow both factually true in that Vashti can attest to them—she once lived them—and also fantasy, a tripling and quadrupling of the facts, an eruption of desires fulfilled. The more she talks, the more she herself begins to believe. She feels the tent nod and shares in their gladness, absorbs it for herself: Esther, she is convinced, will do more than survive. The child is beautiful, she adds—Esther sleeps with him in her bed. And she has Baraz, too, the most trustworthy eunuch in all of Persia. Vashti pauses, making sure the eyes take him in: his height, his palpable goodness. She has him, that is—and here is Vashti’s pivot, here is where she must go gently, as if innocent of her own intention—Esther will have Baraz if he gets back to her before daybreak. She will have him only if they leave in time.
“He can go now,” says Itz.
“He’s here to help.”
“We don’t need his help.”
Vashti wishes she could stuff Itz in a rug again, just for a while, until they are out. He’s here to help me, she thinks at him. I was first, I am still first, I will be first until I am gone. There is no way to change this.
Itz narrows his eyes. He hears her, maybe. Or he is just a precocious boy, expert in skepticism. “Who are you?” he asks.
Vashti perceives in the upturned faces around her a breath withheld—Itz has planted doubt in them, too. She looks to Baraz. She is a loyal maidservant to Esther; this is the answer she is supposed to give. But in Baraz’s raised eyebrows she can see that he agrees with her: Itz will never believe that story. Itz has the power to turn the camp against them.
Vashti looks into the shadows of Itz’s eyes and says, “I am Queen Vashti.”
The people shift as one. Their awe makes a heat that she can feel, a heat she knows well, so well that for a moment the scene is familiar to her, and her feet press into the earth, lifting her body away, so that she feels herself at a distance. She is pleased, for they want to believe her and she depends upon their believing her, and also ashamed, at how susceptible they are, even these people who are not supposed to worship other people.
But there is no time for shame. And she is not in a position not to take full advantage of them. She says: “If I am not gone by sunrise, if I am found, they’ll kill me.”
A murmur rises. Marduk reaches for his son’s hand and pries his knife from his fingers. But Itz stands unmoved as a statue. “You’re Vashti,” he says. “Prove it.”
Again she looks to Baraz. It’s the first time she has known him to look afraid, and her blood grows heavy. She isn’t sure what he fears more: her failure to convince Itz or what she will do to convince him. They are both thinking of the same thing, she knows, though it makes only an illusory kind of sense, and though Baraz has spent his career protecting her from such humiliations. But without Itz, they lose the people, and she and Baraz will have to go out into the desert alone, as almost no one does, certainly not a tree-tall eunuch and a woman. They will be caught and killed, the gold sewn into Vashti’s robes sliced out and stolen—or she will be recognized, and hauled back, and both will be killed where they began. And in the process Esther will have lost Baraz, as they promised her would not happen.
A shift occurs in the color of the tent’s walls, an upturn of hue so slight it might only be perceptible by someone whose life depends on darkness. Vashti, who has not seen the sun in thirty-four months, experiences it as a pulse of fire. She turns her back to Itz and lets her robes fall off her shoulders until she is exposed from nape to waist. A gasp goes up in the tent, followed by silence as they take in what she is showing them: the wings spanning her shoulders, the beak pointing in tandem with her spine toward the sky, the two black eyes that look out from the top of the head.
She begged Baraz for the bird when she still imagined that she might escape aboveground. She had seen high priestesses turn their skin into parchment, had seen dancers in the night station do it, too, ink flowers they had never seen onto their buttocks or breasts. Baraz had balked, then given in—of course he had given in. He must have been relieved that she was no longer raging and pacing, as she had in the early days of her banishment, when she swung between planning ways to kill herself and planning a coup to topple Ahasuerus. I could do it, she would declare, I would win, to which Baraz would nod—of course. He nodded because he loved her and he nodded because it was true: if she called for it, she would have the loyalty of the guards. Most of them had worked for her father; they saw Ahasuerus as a benign but inferior intruder; they would turn for her if she commanded them to. She went so far as to order Baraz to gather arms.
Then, as suddenly as if she’d run into one of her walls, she was done. A calm fell over her, she lost her appetite for blood; she saw clearly that to wage war on Ahasuerus would be to destroy the kingdom. Her father had raised her too well for that. She knew that her banishment itself, understood by most to be her death, would be enough to confuse the people for thousands of years, and that to reverse it would be far worse, that the course had to be kept. She would have to flee, instead. And so the bird began to take shape in her mind, and soon she wanted it not only in her mind but on her body; she wanted to become it.
Baraz brought substances, some for her to drink, some for her to smoke, as he worked with his needles and ink. The needles were longer than any she had seen, made from antelope horn, he said, and she played with the ones he wasn’t using, rubbing their silky lengths against her lips, jabbing their points into her fingertips until she bled. She was high, she was hibernating in highness—and all the while, the heavy air never moved. Then Baraz came with news. His favorite virgin, the one who did not want to be queen, had been chosen. She had turned herself into a beast—no, not metaphorically. She had tried to escape her fate, and failed
, and now the palace was thicker with guards than he’d ever seen it; some were new, loyal to Ahaseurus, others brought in from Persepolis, men who’d known Vashti since she was born. Her idea that she would sneak out in costume was unlikely to succeed.
This time, she did not scratch or slam the walls. She thought. If Ahasuerus learned she was alive, he would break. Any equilibrium he’d found—which the new queen was testing, evidently—would be spun into chaos.
And so the fox. Vashti did not know that Esther was above somewhere, in the bones room, working out the same problems, devising parallel solutions. Though she must have known. Esther, too. They must have moved, in moments, as one. Or, it was simply obvious, universal: anyone would think first to fly, above the earth, and, when that didn’t work, to go through.
She turns now, baring the fox that crawls across her stomach. One front claw wraps around her waist; the other cups her left breast. Baraz’s lines are simple but bold, so that the fox’s tail, skirting her ribs, appears to quiver. Itz’s mouth is open. Agony sings in Vashti’s ears. Who is this whore, she thinks. This whore has swallowed the woman who was called a whore for her virtue. It does not follow. But of course it does. Of course Ahasuerus hadn’t wanted her to be virtuous at that particular moment, because it made her look frigid, and if she was frigid, it was about him, whereas a whore—or a leper, or whatever other conclusions they came to—well, that was about her. She was a woman like that. By the time his drink wore off, she knew, it was too late. She was gone, dead—and he could not change his mind. He could not be seen as weak.
So now, again, whore. Her robes open. Itz is aroused—it would be false to pretend that she can’t see his arousal. He does not know that ink is not reserved for the queen. None of them know this. They have never seen anyone’s body adorned in such a way, and it is easy to believe, in their stunned state, that only a queen is given these markings. (This is one way people come to think they know things, which they then tell to other people, who tell them to other people, who write them down, and so the thing stands as truth in a book and later on a pixelated screen: “A queen in ancient Persia was marked by animal tattoos.”)
