by Tommy Tenney
I could feel the heat across my back and the hem of my nightrobe beginning to sear my skin. The flames were now a storm in my ears. I dared not look back, for I had seen them speeding across the fabric for me. Like prey, I was like a small, innocent animal being stalked for death by an uncaring and implacable foe.
Now, at long last, I screamed. Not in grief, as I could have, but in frustration and terror.
Twisting my torso with the strain, I willed my legs to move. And they did. Still not nearly as fast as I wanted them to, but they shuffled forward. Cubit by cubit, the door grew closer—but by now it, too, was sheathed in a glowing inferno.
I heard a loud crack that was not fire and glanced up to see from the corner of my eye a ceiling beam crash down behind me and land heavily on the floor. Agony lanced through my brain, my shoulders, and as the pain began to scream down my back, I realized the timber itself had been aflame.
I looked again at the burning doorway, and in a judgment not borne of experience or sophistication—merely a raw, innate knowledge that however dangerous the door was, it stood only a handsbreadth away from the outside, from open, free, cooler air—I started to run. I do not remember realizing that my legs were now capable of flight. I only recall that they did run, and while I tripped over burning wreckage I knew with a wild exhilaration that nothing would knock me off my feet now. I passed through a brief assault of heat, then fell into the flickering night and rolled upon the ground.
All I remember next is the sound of shouts. Less than a second later I felt hands upon me, wrapping clothing around my body, pulling me, rolling me farther into the dirt.
Through the tumult I heard one voice that I recognized. It was the deep yell of my cousin Mordecai, my uncle’s eldest son. He had not been in the home because, as we all knew, Mordecai was a highly spirited young bachelor who often stayed out late with his friends. A knot of onlookers had been holding him back from the fire, into which he might well have plunged himself in suicidal grief. It was clear from the sight of the inferno that no one would survive that blaze.
Mordecai was screaming to be released when I stumbled from the doorway, still covered in my mother’s blood, flames rising from my garments. He gave a great cry and launched himself on me, the first to reach my side. Still crying out at the top of his lungs, Mordecai threw off his robe and proceeded to quench the fire.
I do not remember much after that.
In fact, I have only a few specific memories of the next few years. Only numbed impressions. I do know, because he told me, that Mordecai immediately carried me to the home of a physician, who bathed me in aloe and a poultice of other Oriental herbs. I believe that is why, to this day, I bear no scars or marks from the ordeal. It can only be miraculous that my body escaped unscathed. The scars from that night I carried in my soul.
And that is how the next chapter of my life was born.
8
SUSA—CIRCA 493 BC
It has taken me a lifetime to remember the events I just related to you. I spent nearly as long trying to forget them. In fact, even writing them here has taken a surprisingly exhausting amount of effort, calling up grief I did not know I still harbored this many years later.
I know from his stories that Mordecai took me in as the sole survivor of his family and adopted me as his own. Almost as if he, too, had jumped through a doorway of no return, there was no hint of the careless, reckless youth he had been. We left Babylon shortly after the massacre, after the feeble attempts and ultimate failure of the Persian authorities to hunt down and punish those responsible.
He tells me the story of purchasing our passage on a Bedouin convoy along the royal road to my hometown of Susa. I was still so deep in shock that he reports having been forced many days to hold me in the saddle, slumped against him. The effort must have been extremely tiring, but he never made any inference of having resented it, not ever.
The only tokens I had of my family were the birthday pendant I had been wearing on that fateful night and the warmth of my parents’ words as they gave it to me.
This memory of my family would indeed become one of the last to fade, thanks to Mordecai’s admonition and my gradual attachment to the necklace. He kept it hidden away, but he would bring it out on occasions such as my birthday, then carefully return it to its hiding place. It came to mean more and more to me as I grew older, and I yearned for the day it would be mine to keep. That had been my parents’ final admonition to me—that I should wait until I was a woman to wear it. It was my one tangible link to my past, and it retained that significance long after my parents’ faces had disappeared from my memory.
We could live in my family’s old house, Mordecai says he told me. He had remarked that it was the only place left for us, but I think he also knew how much I would appreciate sleeping in my own bed, with familiar sights on every side. But I don’t think dear Mordecai considered how painful it would be to see these places without the beloved family who had once inhabited them with me.
No, instead Mordecai, ever trying to cheer me up, reminded me that we were in the capital of the Persian Empire and therefore relatively safe. Not actually safe, that is, but less imperiled.
How wrong he was. But I will tell you that story in its proper order.
According to our family lore, upon our arrival in Susa we contacted a childhood friend of Mordecai’s father, a fellow Jew named Elias. Soon this friend helped Mordecai secure an apprenticeship at the Palace scriptorium. And so it is here, in the home of my birth, surrounded by the ghosts of my dead family, that I passed the long, sequestered years of my childhood.
Several images shimmer into focus from that time of slow awakening. The towering green canopy of the palm tree in the center of our garden. An impossibly high span of outer wall, smelling of old plaster, which blocked out the winter sun. The frozen eyes of my cherished clay doll, Tirzuh. The broad, wizened smile of Rachel, our housekeeper and my closest childhood confidant. Mordecai’s face gazing down at me, his eyes brimming with tears of affection, his smile tremulous but full of caring and love for me. I do not myself clearly remember Mordecai’s demeanor before the killings, only what I had heard adults saying about him. But somehow, as I grew to know him, I became convinced that he was now far more serious and burdened than he had once been. A freer, more whimsical version of him surely lay hidden behind the solemn and caring man I now saw every day. In my childish self-absorption, I forgot that Mordecai, too, had his enormous griefs and losses. As well, he had inherited the traditional Jewish burden of carrying on our family name, of passing on its heritage.
In those days, my adopted father—and eventually I began to think of Mordecai and address him as Poppa—was a thick, soft man whom no one would mistake for a common laborer. Rachel always said that in Israel his build would have revealed him as a priest, especially had he belonged to the tribe of Levi. He wore an admirably full beard that turned gray with surprising quickness during those first few years. He kept it trimmed square and long, though in the curled Persian style rather than the Jewish. Most remarkable about him were his eyes, which were brown and large and always darting alertly about to assess his current surroundings or the character of someone nearby. He radiated an air of warmth, competence and intelligence, yet also a wariness that never rested.
Mordecai did not marry. At the time he was content for me to believe it was out of devotion for me, and I’m sure that played a part. But now I also think he remained a bachelor because he was so concerned about betraying his Jewishness. He could not bear the thought of either marrying a known Jewess as the Torah mandated or, worse yet, marrying a Gentile woman and having his secret revealed upon their wedding night. Either scenario would have filled him with dread, for if I remember anything about my beloved guardian, it is the incredible care he took to disguise his Jewish origins. Besides his Persian name, he dressed as a Persian, talked like one, and only a handful knew he was not.
This care even reached deep into our home, where he required Rachel and
me to converse in Persian—although when he was telling stories from our Hebrew history, he slipped into the familiar language of my early years with my parents.
I especially loved the stories of Sarah and Abraham, Rebekah and Isaac, and the bittersweet love story of Jacob’s Rachel and her sister Leah.
So I grew up knowing both languages well. Now, you may hear me speak of Mordecai’s pains to appear Gentile and conclude that he was less than a brave or dedicated Jew. And that would be completely false, as you will soon learn, although I see the paradox. No, Mordecai was a secret and yet a dedicated, observant Jew—with but one notable exception: neither of us attended services at the local synagogue.
The Jews of Susa, as I would soon find out from Rachel, were actually a sizable and privileged minority. They were the merchants and money-changers, and, based on the Code of Hamarabi our Persian rulers had concluded that at least tolerance toward their strange ways and strange god was the wisest political course. They administered their own house of worship and lived under the civil authority of their prophet, though owing ultimate fealty to the King. But to identify publicly with this community would have posed too great a risk for Mordecai. The memories of our family’s holocaust were too vivid to feel at ease, even among our own people. We considered ourselves fugitives of a sort, survivors of a massacre whose perpetrators remained at large. Toward that end, he maintained a respectable standoff with the high priest, who came over several times to plead the case of ending our seclusion.
The prophet-priest, a thin, swaying man with the burning eyes of someone who had once survived near starvation, stood in our home and argued convincingly that our ultimate safety lay in identifying with his numerous and influential flock. And Mordecai, without once losing an attitude of profound deference, repeated the facts of our narrow escape and the sense of danger that still haunted us both. Finally the man would toss up his arms in mild resignation and leave, both appeased and exasperated at Mordecai’s respectful manner and his assurances that we kept all the observances. Indeed, Mordecai was rearing me in the knowledge of G-d’s ways.
Actually, Mordecai kept his heritage hidden only out of concern for me. Had he been alone in the world, I believe he would have cast all cares to the wind. For that matter, I am sure he would have cast himself into the flames of his family’s home that fateful night and willingly perished. Only the strong arms of his neighbors kept him from it. And then the sight of me stumbling through the doorway, wreathed in flame and coated in my mother’s blood.
In fact, I have never known nor imagined a man more committed to his religion. Within the confines of our home he faithfully observed, and taught me, every Hebrew ceremony and tradition imaginable. During the early years he did so without great enthusiasm, for his faith was battered and wounded in those days. (When I think about it, his disillusionment with G-d may have played a bigger role in his arm’s-length stance with the temple than he would care to admit.) Nevertheless, he maintained his outward faithfulness through it all.
Eventually the faces of my parents and brother receded from my memory and blurred into a melancholy haze. They were rarely spoken of directly, except when the occasional Jewish ritual required us to refer to our fathers and mothers. As a result, I actually grew to picture my home with Mordecai as overhung by a dark cloud. It hovered just below the ceiling, its shadow gray with all the memories and losses we dared not discuss. I actually had frightening dreams about it. The cloud would hang over my every waking hour, always present, ever looming at the back of my vision, and fill me with a dread and foreboding far more terrible than its mere appearance would suggest.
I did not blame Mordecai for this oppressive silence, at least not until many years later. But my lack of guile did not keep me from recognizing an underlying unhealthiness in our lives.
If anything, though, the unspoken grief we shared translated itself into an intense kindness between us. I suppose that is partly because Mordecai and I were all the relations left to each other in the world. Another reason may be the secretiveness of our Judaism, which bound us together in another layer of silence. But I have to say it is also because Mordecai was basically a kind and highly principled human being, qualities that soon began to distinguish him in the capital and earned him a respected place as court scribe.
How much more would I have worried had I known that the band of murderers still roamed my native Persia, still seeking my blood and that of all my people? That even as I walked through the years of my childhood, an ancient conspiracy to wipe the children of Israel and their memory from the earth was even now gathering strength—coming together like an evil growth joining its errant shoots? That rather than a safe place, the capital of Susa would soon become the most dangerous place imaginable?
I am not sure I would have survived even the thought of it. Had I even contemplated such a possibility, I’m certain I would have scurried under my bed, curled up like a small cat and melted into the comforting darkness, never to emerge again. Had you found me there and pulled me from my hiding place, my mind would have been gone, departed forever to a place of safety and peace.
But somehow, in my naïve state I did not consider such a possibility. My immediate surroundings felt safe, so I did not think about an attack ever happening again. Nor about the men who would not rest until I was dead if they even suspected that I could identify them and their horrendous deed.
That is not to say that the secretiveness did not affect me deeply. From the youngest age I recall thinking that I was different, yet forbidden to speak of why. In fact, since I saw virtually no one beyond Mordecai and Rachel, I wonder how I came to even have a basis for comparison.
The greatest reason for feeling different lay in the fact that I was a virtual prisoner in my home. I grew up to be a shy and socially maladjusted girl, of that I am sure. Strangers—the few who came by the house for this or that purpose, or the Jewish children Rachel would sometimes bring into the home to play—frightened me. Many days I would back into my favorite corner of the wall and cower, my head lowered. Strangers had killed my family. I had not seen the murderers’ faces. How was I to know this wasn’t the stranger who had done it? Or at least someone who would betray me to them?
Mordecai tried hard, when I was young, to put a good face on it. Being Jewish was a gift, he would tell me, and then he’d recount tales of this faraway place called the Land of Promise that was supposed to be our homeland.
And it worked, for a while. Even though it rarely became more than a background story, in those days it gave me comfort. Actually, I never witnessed hostility toward Jews until years later, when I left the four walls of my home and encountered humanity at large. Essentially I grew up as the sheltered only daughter of a Palace functionary in the capital of the world. At least, that is how I saw it. In those early years, I was content—for a while.
The truth is, I grew up sequestered both by physical isolation and by emotional devastation—I realize that now. But not knowing anything different, I did not consider it an aberration. I was only grateful for the embrace of a comfortable and expansive home. I played alone under Rachel’s watchcare and listened to her stories of Israel and its kings. And I grew.
I only suppose that if I possess any depth of person at all—and I use this term only because others have used it on my behalf—it must be due to the equal depths of grief and inwardness that my childhood traumas had carved out in my soul. I grew up a quiet child, I’ve already pointed out. In fact, Mordecai informs me that I hardly spoke for nearly a year after the murders. I must believe him, for of that period I remember absolutely nothing. The fog obscures everything. And I must admit that although I would not wish my losses on anyone, I do believe that long periods of silence and introspection do a great deal to enrich a person’s spiritual and emotional dimensions.
I still would trade these qualities in a heartbeat to have spared my father, mother and brother their horrible encounters with death.
THE ROYAL ROAD, NEAR SUSA—LATER
THAT YEAR
Haman the Agagite stopped his horse at the top of the very last bend in the great Persian highway, raised his hand to shade his eyes and peered longingly ahead. Below him, shimmering from heat waves and distance, lay the capital of Susa, its broad scattering of white rooftops nestled against the hilltop jumble of the Palace itself.
He grinned fiercely, exposing his teeth to the hot desert wind in the process. He reined back his shying, impatient mount. Finally here he was. Ever since he’d heard of the Persian Empire for the first time, he had coveted this arrival, this city. Not only was it the seat of staggering power, the repository of untold riches, but he’d been told that the place was stinking with Jews. He had heard a drunken soldier mutter once that there were more Jews in Susa than in Jerusalem itself.
Just think of the fun to be had, he told himself. Wealth to plunder. A king to overthrow. And Jews to kill by the score.
Paradise on earth.
And he, already a satrap, was one of the King’s key governors, the Princes of the Faces. He was already positioned. The generals knew him from the raids they had conducted together, along with several reprisal attacks against Egypt and Babylon. A lifetime of pillage had turned him into their anointed expert on low-level raiding—a painless alternative to costly, full-scale war. Soon he would call for his family and the rest of his private army, summon the men back from their current raids against the Greeks and show this city who was boss.
Haman laughed out loud, kicked his horse in the side and galloped off toward his blissful future.
9
Sometime after I came to live with Mordecai and he adopted me as his daughter, he sat me down on our home’s rooftop and made several revelations to me. I remember that it was a spring day, a rare cool day in Susa, and a recent rainstorm had given the air a briskness and pleasant fragrance. Yet despite the milder temperature, Mordecai’s face was stiff and his voice was rough with the strain of his disclosures. He looked me in the eye only when he was through speaking.
