The Dovekeepers: A Novel

by Alice Hoffman

  THERE WERE MANY who were leaving cities and villages when we fled. They were mostly good people, but there were also those who veered to the left of the road, the side of the wicked. Before the Baker slid the last loaves in the oven on the huge wooden breadboard he always used, before I knew he wasn’t coming back, before black feathers fell onto the road, it had already been written that we would meet those who were evil and that they would come upon us late in the day, when the sky flared blue and the air was scented with jasmine.

  They came for the donkeys, which they spied from the cliff. They came for the cool water that glittered in their eyes. But they stayed when they saw Zara tending to the fire. They saw her brightness, so beautiful it appeared that morning was breaking before them, and their intent changed. They forgot the donkeys and the pool of water and the Tenth Legion, the Roman regiment they had deserted, fearing punishment from their superiors, the canes of the generals broken upon their backs in exchange for misdeeds and grudges.

  They were already beyond the line that divides us from the creatures of darkness. They crossed the worn path left by the pack of hyenas who had been stalking us, crying in the night, trying to gain our favor with their sorrowful yelps, hoping for scraps before they came to devour us. Four Roman soldiers who had lived without water or food or hope ventured down the hillside, their chain-mail armor weighing upon their frames, men once but no more. It was easy for them to become beasts; one step and their humanity was an illusion. Beneath the armor there was only teeth and claws, hunger and thirst. It was the Sabbath, and Yoav was gone into the desert to pray, his prayer shawl thrown over his shoulders. The wind was rising, so he didn’t hear any of what happened to us. He was committed to God and to the sound of his own voice. Ever since Yom Kippur he had been absent all day and into the evening, praying for our deliverance. When the first star appeared in the sky, we would light the Sabbath lamp with the last of our olive oil, and he would return to us. That was the sorrow of it. He saw the light but never expected the darkness.

  I spied the soldiers as you might spy a demon, a shadow in the corner, melting across the ground. I didn’t wait to think further. I sent the boys running. It was as though a key had unlocked the future and for one brief instant I saw through to the other side.

  “Go quickly and don’t venture forth,” I told my grandsons. “Not until I come for you. Even if the night falls, even if the sun is eaten by the moon, no matter what you hear, even if someone calls you by name. Don’t answer. Don’t talk.” I looked into their eyes as I instructed them. “Above all else: Stay hidden.”

  I sent them to the ledge behind the waterfall where they sometimes played. The children were small enough to slip inside a crevice that had been formed where the rocks met. The water was a curtain as it rushed past. I thought if anything went wrong the boys wouldn’t be able to see through the water and God would protect them.

  But water is clear, like an open window, and their eyes were open as well.

  THE MEN fell upon Zara at the fire. I heard her voice the way you hear a bell, it rings and sounds above all other noises. I ran to her, and one of the intruders threw me to the side, for to him I was no more than a dried locust, good for nothing other than a raven’s dinner. I could taste blood brimming in my mouth. I charged at them, screaming, but they were four, and brutally strong, and I was a woman and unused to fighting. While two of them held Zara, tearing at her garments, the other two made quick business of me. The world grew dark when they took a rock to my head. I could feel the heat of my own blood washing across my forehead. Everything was black as night inside of me. To my shame I didn’t see what my grandsons saw, I only understood when I saw the broken shell Zara had become. But the boys observed it all: how the soldiers took turns with their mother, how she tried to fend them off, how when they were finished they tortured her with fire and with burning rocks and sharp sticks for no reason other than the sake of their own wickedness.

  When I came out of the darkness and awoke again to this world, it was too late. The beasts were going through the meager possessions that were stored in our tent. I went to Zara even though I knew that we had entered the realm of demons and that each demon who walks the earth has the strength of a thousand men and that I was only a woman, made old in these few hours, an ancient, worthless thing. I dragged myself through the sand.

  One moment we had all the time in the world stretching out in front of us, and in the next instant my beloved daughter was dying in my arms. She was whispering for me to finish it and let her go to the World-to-Come. She pleaded with me as her blood washed over us, the blood I had labored to bring forth into this world. It was not enough for them to use her for their pleasure and then leave us be. It was not enough for them to take all that we owned—the donkeys, the water, the tent, the provisions—and abandon us to the hyenas who were already circling. They were the angels of destruction, I saw that clearly, though they appeared to be Roman soldiers. They had come to us from the dark side of the world, where no light can penetrate. Zara’s skin was blackened where they had held burning sticks and rocks against her. They had put the rocks inside her just to hear her scream. I snatched those rocks away, but it did no good. She was already speaking to those in the World-to-Come, already broken. Now I saw that she had been split in two with an ax, and all that was contained inside her body had spilled into the earth.

  In that moment, as I crouched beside her, I turned into something that was not a woman.

  The beasts had tossed their weapons and armor and brass helmets onto the ground. I took up a knife they’d cast aside, slick with blood. I did as Zara asked, though it was a crime against God and against our laws. I whispered in her ear that she would be free now and that she should close her eyes. Then I did what no mother should ever have to do. I took the knife and cut her throat. I did it the way a sacrifice is made, for even a beast of burden is sent from life in this way, with compassion, in a single swift slash, completed without pain. As I did so, I leaned over and placed my mouth on my daughter’s bruised lips. Her last breath entered me, and I held her spirit inside me as I had before she was born.

  The evil ones took what they wanted. They laughed when they saw me lying beside Zara. When I went after them, roaring, wielding the knife, one of the soldiers grabbed it from me and held it to my throat. I was grateful when he did so. This was what I wanted. I asked him to kill me. “Go ahead,” I said. “My death will be your gift to me.”

  If he couldn’t completely understand my language, he most surely knew the meaning of the words. I could no longer endure the agonies of this earth we walked upon. But the one who was their leader told his cohort to wait. The soldiers were hungry from their wickedness. Like animals, they wanted more. They commanded me to cook for them over the fire where they had killed my daughter. The smoke carried the scent of the perfume she wore, a mixture of cinnamon and ginger oil, a cloud of fragrance arising from the ashes.

  An idea began to form inside me.

  “Will you deny us?” the leader said. He had a smile on his treacherous face, as though asking a favor from a neighbor. “Surely you can cook.”

  I was no longer a woman, but I was still a baker’s wife. I thought of what my husband had said to me in my dream. At last I understand his meaning. I told the beasts I could do more than simply cook a meal. I could bake bread, enough for them to carry into the desert to make certain their hunger would be satisfied for many days to come. I would feed them in the way they deserved to be fed.

  “You had better not be lying,” the one who wanted to kill me remarked.

  I took out the griddle and my husband’s wooden spoons. I tied his white apron around my waist.

  “What do I look like?” I said to them. “This is my life’s calling.”

  I must have looked like a beaten-down old woman, but one who knew the mysteries of bread, for they urged me to continue with their meal. They dozed in the sun. The scorched scent of death didn’t bother them, as it never bothered the hyenas,
who stalked their prey from the hills, or the jackals, who lived in ruins, feeding off the bones of the slain. While the beasts were subdued, their drowsy eyes closed, I baked beetles into the loaves and filled them with curses. I found the coriander dashed onto the ground as they had pawed through our belongings and took some for seasoning so they would not suspect that what they ate was anything more than bread. At last I spied the vial of the ingredient the angel in my kitchen had bid me to take. Not a grain had spilled. I mixed it with the water and the last of the flour, added a portion of yeast from the cool earthenware jar, then set the mixture under a swath of fabric to help the dough rise in the dark.

  Before the loaves were ready, the beasts awoke. They had more damage to do in the world. They were running from service to their Emperor, anxious to flee, but I was slow, tending to my portion of vengeance and despair.

  “We can’t wait,” they told me. “Hurry,” they shouted.

  I had no choice but to cook the bread directly over the fire before it was finished rising. I expected it to be thick and flat, like crackers, the way griddle bread is, or be dusted black, as ash bread becomes, but it rose into perfect loaves. I knew then that the angel that had been beside me in my kitchen was beside me still, helping to form the dough.

  The dark pulse of grief was in my throat. I was thankful I wasn’t asked to speak, only to serve. I could hear the ravens above us. I thought of the feathers on the road and of the many signs the angel had given me and how I had failed to pay attention. That would never happen again. I cut the loaves with the bloody knife, burning my fingers as I then tore the bread into pieces, and I served it to the beasts who looked like men. They were wearing the insignia of the legion, though they were traitors to their own kind, and were therefore still decorated with the sign of the wild boar. I thought how fitting that pigs should eat this bread. I smiled as though I were a woman who hadn’t witnessed all I had seen on this day, a mother whose daughter’s body hadn’t been kicked into a ravine where the jasmine grew.

  I was the other thing now, the thing I’d become.

  They wolfed down what I had baked, eating more bread than any men I’d seen before. Their violence and the days of stalking others had caused them great hunger. I served them again and again, as if they were my masters. In their eyes I appeared to be a woman and their servant, nothing more. Then, stomachs full, they went to fill their flasks as well as two large barrels from the pool so that they might take enough water for their journey. They stood so near the waterfall I grew dizzy, fearing they might spy my hidden grandsons and murder them for sport should the children dare to call out. I did not know that the angel had permitted me one last favor. He had taken the boys’ voices so they couldn’t give themselves away. When they opened their mouths to scream and sob, not a sound came out.

  By then the beasts were crouched by the pool, their faces in the water like dogs, suddenly possessed by an unquenchable thirst. I breathed in my grim success, knowing this was a sign that the poison had claimed them. They could not stop their desire for water even though they clutched at their bellies, which were overly full, nearly ready to burst. I watched cold-eyed as they drank themselves to death. That was what happened to the rats in my husband’s bakery. We often found them drowned in a bucket after they took the bait, dying from the terrible thirst the hemlock brought on.

  One of the men came to me on all fours, begging for mercy. He choked out that he had a wife and children waiting for him. He claimed to be a good man in the life he’d led before, but his words, like all things in the desert, were carried away by the rising wind. In truth, I was someone who no longer listened to such entreaties. I had no pity inside me, only my daughter’s last breath.

  BY THE TIME night fell and my son-in-law returned from his prayers, I had slain all four beasts, slitting their throats for good measure, not out of mercy but to make certain I had accomplished the deed. I had washed my daughter’s body with clean water and wound her in the white linen shawl she had worn at her wedding. She’d brought the shawl with her on our journey, the single treasure she’d taken from home, whereas I had reached for poison. The choice you make about such matters reveals who you are deep inside. She was a good wife, while I was a creature who would do anything to protect what was mine. I gathered stones to place over her body so the jackals would not come for what was left of her. If the stones were heavy, I failed to notice. They were red and chalky and stained my hands. Perhaps that is how I became marked for the rest of my life and why, if anyone looked too closely, my hands would doubtless give my true nature away.

  I must have appeared to be a demon myself. As soon as my son-in-law saw me, he sank to his knees. When he took in all that had come to pass in his absence, he beat on the earth; he wept and cursed and tore at his cloak. I wondered if he would run into the desert like a madman, forsaking us. This could not happen, even if he wished for a crude release from his agony. I refused to allow my daughter’s death to be the death of her children. I needed my son-in-law to help us get away. I took hold of his prayer shawl, though I should not have touched even the hem. This time I was the one to tell him what to do. I said to be quick about it, for time had shifted to become sand beneath our feet. I knew we must leave this place before anyone searched for the beasts at the pool.

  While Yoav packed all that we had left onto the donkeys, I went to the waterfall, for that was where my treasure was stored. The boys stared at me with their dark, gleaming eyes, but they would not come out. I clapped my hands and called to them, but there was no response.

  The sound of the falling water was deafening. I crept behind the waterfall, my feet slipping on the cool, wet stones. I was too large to fit into the crevice where they huddled against the damp rocks silvered with mica. They were only six and eight years old, and yet they had seen what no grown man on earth should see. I held out my hand and begged them to come to me. I told them that I carried their mother’s spirit inside me, and that we would take her with us wherever we went. We had to make haste. Their mother would want us to do so. After a while the boys grasped for me and followed me out from behind the water. They did not speak a word as we left that terrible place, or later when we made a hurried camp under the stars far from that waterfall. They have not spoken since.

  WE HAD ENTERED the territory of silence, slipping inside of it the way shadows fold across the earth with the lengthening day. The wind was the only thing we heard unless we met travelers on the road who told stories of Herod’s palace and of the men from Jerusalem who followed the way of the curved knife, Zealots who now ruled the king’s fortress. Yoav listened to these stories of rebels, absorbed, his grave profile turned away from us. We made circles in the wilderness to keep our distance from the Roman garrison. With no destination, and no knowledge of the wilderness, we stumbled upon the road to the Salt Sea. As we journeyed, my son-in-law changed before my eyes. The world began to slip away from him, and it seemed that he already walked beside the angel Gabriel. That which we saw to be the earth below our feet, he saw as fire. At night he went off into the thornbushes, and I could hear him sobbing and my heart broke in two alongside his. But in daylight he was hardened, his eyes narrowed, his skin burned by the sun. He consumed only green herbs, and if none were to be had, he ate nothing at all. When we came to a nomads’ settlement, he traded the silver chalice he used for the wine blessing.

  The old man in the settlement of goat-hair tents and unclothed children could not believe the good fortune of his trade. He was only too ready to give up his ax in return for pure silver. It was a heavy weapon, made for a woodsman rather than a warrior, much stronger than the one that had split my dear Zara in two. As we went on, I could hear Yoav practicing with it in the early-morning hours, when the sky was still black, turning to the ax as he had once turned to his prayers and his scrolls. He slept beside it, as he had once slept beside his wife.

  My premonition that Yoav would run into the wilderness and forsake us in his grief had been correct, only not in th
e manner I had envisioned. He was with us, yet he had been summoned to another place entirely, the kingdom of vengeance. This was when his hair turned white overnight and grew long and tangled. His body became lean and strong. We heard little from him, except when he practiced the art of destruction, throwing his ax with such force that he grunted and groaned, like a man in his death throes. His own children, those sweet silent boys, shied from him. I realized that he looked like the madmen we sometimes spied in the desert, warriors, hermits, prophets, priests; men who saw only their own path and no one else’s.

  MY FIRST SIGHT of the fortress took my breath away. A mirage emerged from the stone, a miracle appearing beneath the midday sun. We paused in the valley, spellbound. It was the season of the winds, the time when the Ruach Kadim, the hot and furious wind that arose from Edom, brought us clouds of dust. My grandsons were wrapped in capes, staying close to each other for comfort. Perhaps they spoke to each other through their dreams, for they seemed to communicate and could clearly understand each other without the use of language. They refused to be separated and slept beneath the same blanket, just as they ate from the one plate and drank from a single cup. I thought the sheer cliffs leading to Masada would frighten them and they would hesitate. I expected that their father would have to tie ropes around their waists to help them navigate the cliffs, but the younger one, Levi, was the first to start up the spiraling snake path, scrambling like a goat, and Noah applauded his brother’s sure-footed bravery and was quick to follow.