“I'm afraid so, my love,” he said, the last words nearly unintelligible over his sobs. At length he gained control of himself and cuffed me lightly behind the neck.
“Do you remember the things I told you?” he asked, looking directly into my eyes.
“Of course. Of course I do.”
“Please. Swear to me you'll follow them as though your life depended on it. Because you know it does.”
“All right. Yes, I will,” I said with penitence in my voice. Suddenly the things I had once rebelled against at home had become precious icons of all I stood to lose. “I swear, Mordecai. I swear it to you. In fact, I have already done one thing.” I lowered my voice and looked quickly around. “When they asked for my name, I realized that Hadassah is Jewish, and so I gave another one. For some reason all I could think of was my medallion necklace. I told them my name is Star. If you need to find me for some reason, that is how I am known. Star of Susa.”
He nodded wistfully. “A wise decision, my dear. I should have thought of that myself.” Then he, too, looked about him anxiously. “Go, my precious one. And when you can, meet me in the courtyard across from your building. Early morning is the best, and I can go from there to my work. If I am kept from the actual Palace grounds for some reason, look for me here in the evening.”
I nodded through a fresh flow of tears and leaned through the bars to kiss him on the cheek. As he walked out of sight, weeping, I pushed my arm through the bars and called after him like the wife of a condemned man. I shouted his name through sobs until finally, just at the edge of my vision, he turned around, his face as shiny as a rain-slick stone, and lifted his hand in blessing.
My return trip, undertaken through a cascade of tears, seemed to take but a fraction as long as the earlier trek. This time I circled as far as possible around the male compound and kept to the thickest bushes. In but a few minutes I was walking back to the courtyard pool as though I had just stepped away for a moment of solitude. A familiar male voice sounded behind me.
“Star, right? From what I hear, an ill-timed walk is what landed you here in the first place.”
I turned to the sight of Hegai, resplendent in a white silk tunic that seemed to magnify the setting sun. “I am told I ought to be grateful to have landed here, as you say,” I answered.
“And well you should. This is the beginning of a wonderful life for you, or it can be if you let it. Women all over Persia dream of living in the royal harem. No annoying husbands, no burdensome children or families to feed and clothe and clean up after every hour of the day. Instead, a life of leisure and luxury unimagined. Every once in a while, a night of passion with the most powerful man in the world. Who would not be grateful?”
I looked at him and tried to give him the best answer I could without surrendering my dignity. “You are indeed persuasive, noble Hegai. I shudder to think what this harem would consist of without your convincing oratory.”
He smiled knowingly. “You have a point, young Star. I do my best to lighten morale. As I always say-puffy eyes and tear tracks never did anything to enhance a woman's beauty. But somehow-” and at that he paused and gave me a deeply piercing look-“I don't think that will be a problem for you. You are a very beautiful and poised young woman, my dear-oh, and now, what is your real name?”
His question seemed to quiver between us in the morning air like some sort of raindrop suspended in mid-flight. I made a decision-probably not the wisest of my life, but in the long run, one of the most fortuitous.
“I would rather not say, sir.”
“It will remain a secret between us. I promise. And my dear, if you have not guessed yet, no one in the world knows more about keeping secrets than a royal eunuch.”
“All right. It is Hadassah. It means `myrtle.”'
“Hadassah.” He said the word and looked up into the sky, searching his memory. Then he nodded and fixed me with a satisfied grin. “Jewish. You are a child of Israel.”
“Please tell no one, sir. I simply cannot allow my origins to become a matter of common knowledge.”
“Why? Jews are well respected, even revered, throughout the kingdom.”
“By His Majesty's government, yes. But we have enemies everywhere, sir. My own family was murdered by a group of marauders. I have lived in fear and seclusion most of my life. Please, sir. I would like to present myself as a modern Persian woman. Nothing more.”
He pursed his lips in thought and nodded toward the ground. “All right, Star. Your real name and race are forgotten.”
“Oh, except for one thing, I'm sorry to ask.”
“What is that?”
“My diet. My adoptive father has begged me to remain true to our dietary laws. I wonder if you might speak to the kitchen staff about making one or two small additions to your menu that I may obey his wishes. Nothing radical, sir. Just a few dishes that will actually improve the health of anyone who shares them.”
“Your request is granted, my dear. My dear young `Persian' woman,” he agreed with a slight emphasis on my assumed nationality.
nd this, my dear Queen candidate, brings me to one of my strongest instructions for you. If my story has struck the least chord of sympathy within you, then I urge you to heed this advice.
If you want to gain the King's favor, listen to the Chamberlain.
You will be given a gatekeeper, a person who knows intimately the King and whose favor will do much toward gaining that of His Majesty. Listen to this person, for he speaks in the King's stead. He knows every one of the King's preferences and tastes. Heed his admonitions as well as you heed mine-or better. Seek his counsel, then follow it as if your life depended on it for it may indeed be so.
It was in my case.
You may say that's fairly elementary advice. But of hundreds of girls who came to Xerxes' harem when I did, I was the only one who lived by this axiom. Nearly every other candidate allowed the luxury and stature of living at the King's Palace to go to her head. For many of them, the intoxication of incredible luxury eventually overcame the fear and anger at being taken. For others, having defeated high odds and already been recognized as the most beautiful in their districts made them think of themselves as having arrived exalted and exempt from the normal rules and dynamics of human courtesy. Among other things, many began to treat Hegai as some sort of personal footservant. Some of them were daughters of nobility, whose sense of superiority and privilege now raged unchecked. Their families' hopes of royal accession rested on their shoulders, so these girls knew no bounds of ambition and treachery in the pursuit of their goals. What all these young women from various backgrounds and levels of social standing had in common was inexperience-we all were virgins.
And Hegai, ever the wise one, did not bridle or openly protest this uncalled-for treatment-although in the Palace hierarchy he was far more influential than any of us. He merely dropped the girl who acted this way from his list of favorites. And just as quickly, her chance of becoming queen effectively ended. The girls had no idea, of course. They were too wrapped up in their own elation to even notice they had fallen from any sort of standing. They simply went about their indulgences and chased after the esteem of the other girls-the last group from whom a prudent person would ever seek approval.
Even though Hegai was not a follower of YHWH, I found him over the months to be a wise and principled man. Every morning for weeks, a group of girls newly arrived from some far-flung province would meet their first dawn as Queen candidates in the harem. He would gather them by the pool and give them the same speech I had heard on my first morning.
He would stand by the water, adopt a nurturing, grandfatherly expression and say, “Young women, if I do not stray badly from the truth, I would say that each of you is experiencing a wide, even conflicting set of feelings right now. Exhilaration. Fear. Alienation. Homesickness. Anticipation. Loneliness. Joy. And probably a dozen other possibilities I have not named. If I can, let me heighten the joyful emotions among those. You have just become pa
rt of a highly select group, the most beautiful virginal young women in the entire Persian Empire. And if the Greek women I have seen are any indication, you are the most beautiful young women in the entire world.”
Invariably, a modest patriotic cheer would go up at those words. Nothing, in those days of war, could stoke the fires of a dutiful young Persian like some slighting reference to the Greeks.
Soon, his comforting, reasonable tone and his words would quietly begin to dry teary eyes and settle anxious hearts. “And because of your youth and beauty, and maybe some other qualities that we will discover in the weeks and months ahead, you have a chance to be selected as the new queen of this whole empire.” He would smile and say, “You may think I've been nice to you because it's my dutyactually, I'm being nice because one of you will be my queen someday, and I'd like to keep my head right here on my shoulders.”
This time laughter, albeit somewhat nervous.
“Remember that you are not concubines, at least yet, and no one is allowed to treat you as such. You are Queen candidates, every one of you. Now, here is what your next twelve months will consist of. You will be immersed in the most complete regimen of luxury and indulgence any woman has enjoyed in the history of the human race. You will be fed the finest, richest foods Persia can offer. In a few moments you will be given a large supply of rare cosmetics from India, Lebanon and Egypt. For six moon cycles, you will be pampered with treatments of myrrh, the King's favorite essence. When you have been so thoroughly soaked in myrrh that you secrete its fragrance through your very pores, then will come six additional months of treatment with a wide assortment of spices from around the world. How does that sound?”
And then, invariably, would come the loudest, most sincere cheer of the day.
“At the end of that year, we will begin the process of selecting each of you for a night spent in the King's bed. That night, you can choose any garment, any amount of jewelry you wish to wear in with you. The decisions will be entirely your own. At the end of the night, whatever the King's ultimate choice may be, the jewelry and the clothes you wear are yours to keep. And should you not be chosen, you will take them with you to the concubines' harem, across the Palace courtyards. There I will help you adapt to the life of a Palace concubine-one of the most envied and luxurious lifestyles in Persia today. Should you be chosen as Queen, the royal brideand I presume one of you will-then, well ... there is no limit to the power you will wield-except the King's.”
More clapping and cheering, after which the group would break up for a breakfast of rich baked goods and roasted sweetbreads. I routinely stayed away from such breakfasts, opting instead for a small pitcher of water and a few oranges from the orchards.
It turned out to be no difficult task keeping the dietary laws; I simply followed the habits Rachel had instilled in me most of my life. With the noon meal and dinner, the girls were served a sweet wine made from honey. The concoction obviously earned their rapid allegiance, but since I knew such a drink would never find its place in Mordecai's household, I avoided it. At first I had anticipated facing some scorn from my fellow candidates, but as it turned out no one ever noticed what color liquid was in my goblet or the fact that I had not approached the wine table.
And besides the satisfaction of obeying my race's religious laws, I enjoyed another unexpected benefit: While every other girl swiftly gained a visible fat layer around her hips and thighs, I remained slender. None of the other girls could explain how I did it-I of course said nothing about the dietary laws or their source, although I gave plenty of general advice about staying away from the rich and fatty foods.
I hope it does not sound like I held these young women in contempt. Far from it. In fact, though I was not the oldest of the girls, many of them began to seek my company for counsel. Perhaps they sensed the regard Hegai already had expressed for me. Or maybe they discerned that something in my upbringing had imbued me with a certain reserve upon gaining the Palace, rather than the hedonistic abandon that the others had embraced.
Eventually, I did make some friends among the other girls. But the emotional rigors of the competition ahead seemed to limit our closeness. The sense of loneliness never really went away, a feeling I had been familiar with my whole life.
And Jesse-I simply would not let my mind stray his direction too long. My thoughts and images of him had acquired the same sense of palpable horror as those of my family's murder. Something else I struggled to forget.
In fact, during those early days the only thing that would occasionally jolt me from my isolation would be the fleeting sight of that twisted cross trotting by on the side of a warhorse in the distance or briefly seen on the tunic of some figure in a crowd. I never failed to shudder and weaken at the briefest glimpse. For a time I harbored the mistaken conclusion that those two lines, crossed like the first letter of Xerxes' name and then twisted to the right at the ends, was the King's royal emblem. Thank G-d I soon learned better and the origin of the symbol soon faded into mystery-for I never could have given myself, no matter the consequences, to a man who bore that hateful sign as his own.
pon returning to my room that very first night after the emotional reunion with Mordecai, I began to feel an actual physical ache in my chest, the pain of a heart breaking. One fact made itself immediately clear to me-that the heart in question was not my own. I searched my feelings to try and place the strange emotion. No, the heart I could feel breaking was not Mordecai's, either.
Then I heard the voice of old Jacob again as he spoke in our home, as clearly as if he had stood there with me in the room.
“I felt like a child so overcome with joy at His return that all I could do was leap as high into His presence as I could.”
And then I realized what I was feeling. It was the same presence Mordecai and I had both experienced so vividly upon Jacob's departure.
The presence of G-d himself
The grief of a great Father's heart, as deep and warm as that of ten thousand earthly fathers and more, all at once poured itself into mine. And a question poured in along with it. It came not as a voice but an unspoken lament....
Why could you not weep for my presence, and rejoice at finding it, the way you weep for Mordecai 's? Like a child rejoining its parent?
The power of this question struck me so forcefully that I felt my knees buckle under me. My eyes, which had dried only a few minutes before since my parting with Mordecai, started to pour tears uncontrollably. Long buried, like my own tears for my parents, my tears for G-d shredded from me like old skin. I could hardly catch my breath; the grief was so fresh that it actually ripped the air from my lungs. I bent over my bed and tried to mask the sobs, not wishing to be mistaken for some homesick girl.
What was this sudden strange attraction for G-d, the same G-d I had avoided, even rejected? Why did I now feel a pull that had eluded me for so long?
Stop. Stop, I pleaded. The broken heart felt as if it was beating wildly inside my own chest. I could feel its power, its agelessness. Yet because it was divine, its sorrow was so much deeper-it coursed through my body like the throb of a bowstring across a violin.
But it was more than emotion-it was a person. The sensation of His nearness and His love for me brought back, for the first time in years, the tangible feel of my mother's love. Sensations returned full force. The proximity of her cheek. The warmth and softness of her breast against my face. The distinctive smell of her. The velvet cooing of her voice.
I wept for them both, my mother and my Creator. So intense was the grief that it left my chest feeling hollowed into some inner crater-sapping my last ounce of strength yet leaving me to weep on.
But if you're real, I found myself crying silently to Him, then why? Why did you let these bad things happen to me? Why all the death and loss?
This time the answer came to me.
When those horrible things took place, my heart broke with you. I wept for you as strongly as you weep now.
In the depths of my being, I
gradually came to the realization that I had forgiven Him. I understood. The breach of those last few years was gone. But not my tears-I now wept because I knew for certain I had caused the sadness I had felt. My rejection and resentment had broken G-d's heart as badly as all the tragedies that had ever scarred my life. I resolved there and then to try and atone for the pain I had caused Him with every minute left to me on earth. I was a Jew in spirit now, not just by lineage.
And from that fateful morning on, I found that I could feel His presence more in that pagan, foreign environment than I ever had in the familiar confines of Mordecai's home. It truly seemed He was flanking my steps, a silent yet wise companion, His Spirit whispering into my innermost being words of instruction and exhortation.
G-d spoke to me about my challenges ahead. The first words of wisdom that came to me had to do with my upcoming night with the King.
One Night With the King: A Special Movie Edition of the Bestselling Novel, Hadassah by Tommy Tenney;Mark Andrew Olsen Page 13
