The Dovekeepers

by Alice Hoffman

  I then had the vision that the boys would never have a father again, and that this perilous climb would be the last time we would be with the Yoav we had known before this other man, the one who would not be separated from his ax, took his place completely. The sun struck against the earth as it had when the beasts in the oasis had fallen upon us, emboldened, without mercy. My grandsons were climbing up, the clouds of dust rising behind them, carried by the wind in little whirls that disappeared before our eyes. I placed my hand on my son-in-law’s arm before he began his ascent. Yoav turned to me, but his eyes were hooded. He was like the hawk, seeing only what he must to survive. All he wanted was revenge, but I gave him more. I told him I had bent to take Zara’s last breath. Neshamah, our word for soul, means breath, and so she was with us still.

  A sob escaped from my son-in-law when he heard this. He shook his head and turned from me. “I can never hear her name again,” he insisted. “Don’t speak it in my presence.”

  I had come to realize the depth of his love for her. Everything else about him had changed, but in this he was constant. He was the only one who could understand what it meant to lose Zara. Because of our mourning, we were bound together despite the silence and the wind and the man he had become. I signaled for him to lean down, and he did so. I then did the second most terrible thing a mother could do, in some ways worse than burying her beneath the stones. I breathed my daughter’s last breath into his mouth. I gave her to him so that her spirit would belong to him and he could carry her with him, so that he could still be a man with a soul, even though he had lost everything else.

  MY ONLY CONCERN was for my grandchildren. They were my world, my present and my future. I vowed to pay attention to our daily life, nothing more. Once we came to this fortress, we moved into our small chamber, built in to the king’s wall, a mere curtain dividing our residence from that of another family. At night we could hear our neighbors, the children laughing, the parents arguing or making love. In our room, there was only silence. That was the way our life was now. We no longer needed language; there weren’t words for what we had witnessed. The boys watched me with their dark, night-flecked eyes. I insisted we were safe and made every attempt to show them this was so. I put a thread across the threshold so no one could pass without my knowledge. I slept with a knife beneath my pallet. I turned each day into a ritual of sameness hoping the children would be comforted by the small tasks and duties of everyday life. In their presence I was calm and patient, the practical grandmother they could depend upon at all times and in all things, but my smile went slack whenever I was alone. Each morning I went to the dovecotes. Each evening I returned to cook dinner. But each night I wept.

  *

  MONTHS PASSED this way. We became accustomed to the dry air of the mountain and the scent of salt carried from the sea below. We began to know other people in the settlement, all of whom had come to this fortress when there was nowhere else for them in Zion. We were all in God’s hands, and in that way we were brothers and sisters, no matter where we had come from. There were warriors and assassins, rebels who had committed crimes and those who insisted crimes were committed upon them. There were learned men and tanners, potters and goatherds, simple men and those who could read Aramaic and Hebrew, as well as Latin and Greek. There were those who had been cast out of Jerusalem and those who’d run from the burning of Jericho, as well as refugees from small villages like my own.

  Many of the women wanted to befriend me and asked me to join in the group that met at the looms in the evenings to discuss the day’s events. They meant well, but I kept my distance. I could not tolerate their chirping good humor any more than I could abide their faith. Though I pretended otherwise, the past had not melted away. It was all I had, and I clung to it and savored it, for my daughter was in that land of grief. My sorrow filled me, leaving little room for anything else. I was squinting out at the world from behind the barricade I’d placed between myself and all others just as surely as there was a curtain draping down to separate our chamber from our neighbors’ home. I understood that fate could not be eluded forever; it came on leathery wings, swooping through the darkness like the bats in the orchards.

  We heard rumors of Roman scouts who had set up a camp not far from our fortress. Our warriors went to confront them, but there were too many of the enemy, and in the end our men had to slink away and wait for the Romans to break camp. Our enemies left little behind but the bones of pigs and piles of their own waste. But they also had left behind a tower of rocks. Those rocks were terrifying, for they marked the place as one to which they intended to return.

  Still I was determined that, for the sake of my grandsons, our lives should continue without event for as long as possible. I was resolved that we should keep to ourselves. No friends, no enemies, only the three of us. I did my best to prevent any disruptions. Then one night there was a knock at our door. I felt a lump in my throat. I had known all along that at any moment the world might barge in upon us. No door could prevent every intrusion. No barrier was strong enough to keep out the movement of time. The chaff beaten from the wheat rises into the air and is carried by the wind to another place, whether to a green field or a stretch of barren land was dependent on God’s will.

  I prayed for the rapping to stop, but there it was again. My grandsons were stirring. Their hearing was so attuned they had heard the knocking the moment it fell upon the door. I held a finger to my lips as I went forward.

  I feared what was to come and stood there shivering, like a tame bird who shies from the opened door of the cage. I wanted our small, quiet existence to remain constant, for every day to shine as a mirror image of the one before. I reached for my knife. Our chamber had once been used as a storehouse. Mice often came here, searching for grain. Now they scurried off, dodging my footsteps as I ventured to see who might visit at such a late hour. I peered through a hole between the stones.

  Yael was there in the dark. No soldiers, no beasts, just a woman with long red hair. She had a basket of belongings with her, so little she might have owned nothing.

  I considered sending her away, that was my inclination, but I could see she was desperate. I relented and let her come in. She sat on the pallet where I slept. I didn’t ask what was wrong; I didn’t have to. Her face was ashen, except for a dark blue ribbon of a bruise on her cheek where someone had recently struck her. I had compassion for the silence she carried and found myself drawn to her, as the doves were.

  She was uncomplaining, only murmuring that she was sorry to disturb me. She and her father had argued. I’d seen him in the plaza, and he seemed a cold and selfish man, one who thought himself superior to those around him. I’d seen such men look down upon my husband because he was a baker, the same ones who thought Yoav was too good to live under our roof. I set a place for Yael to sleep, gathering a blanket I had woven and died hyssop blue in memory of my daughter, who had loved the color of that flower. Yael had come here in search of shelter though I had been cold to her, remote since the day she arrived in the dovecote. She was my daughter’s age. She was alive when Zara was not, and I had held that against her, pecking at her, resentful. I winced to think of what I’d done. Still, she had seen something in me that had brought her here. She knew that I understood the language of silence. I would no more ask Yael to surrender her past than I would offer to tell her what I myself had done.

  IN THE MORNING, we walked to the dovecotes together as though our days had always begun this way. The bruise on her face where her father had lashed out had already begun to fade under the balm I used to treat it, a poultice made of honey and figs. We did not discuss her father’s cruelty, or the fact that the child within her would soon arrive, a reality she could not hide despite the shawls she wore to cover herself. Instead we spoke of the heat and of the failure of the almond crop. The pink blossoms had burned this season in the last days of Tammuz, as if someone had set them on fire, singeing the edges of the petals with a powdery, black film. Much of the fruit
of the trees had never formed, puckering instead into ruined bunches that exploded into ash when plucked. There was gloom everywhere, and worry. The initial mantle of freedom we’d experienced on arriving at the fortress diminished as crops began to fail. We were so isolated from the rest of mankind I could not help but think of the angels, how removed they were from us; so far away that, even when they attempted to catch us as we faltered, they were too distant to truly understand our sorrow.

  “I always dreaded Av,” Yael said of the month we were about to enter. “But not this year.”

  She sounded fierce, ready to fight the blaze of the season. Av was the month when her child would enter the world. I’d assumed she would be weakened now that she’d been cast out of her father’s house, but that was not the case. Her strength seemed renewed. She stared down those who gazed at her with curiosity, exactly as I’d done when people whispered about my grandsons’ inability to speak. In that we were alike, branded by what we had done but prideful when it came to our children, even when God had deserted us.

  Usually I was the first to arrive to care for the doves, but on this day we had tarried while I introduced Yael to my grandchildren. Shirah and her daughters were already at work; they stared when we entered together, as puzzled by our new alliance as they were by the mark on Yael’s face. I had done nothing but complain about Yael since her arrival, true enough. But a woman can change her mind.

  “I needed help with my grandsons,” I said, indicating that our being together was a simple matter, despite the bruise which clearly signified more had transpired. “I’m too old to play games.”

  That was that, no need for further explanation. A good thing, since none would be forthcoming. Women were hurt every day and kept the cause to themselves. Yael threw me a grateful look and quickly set to work. I took note of the slave’s expression when he spied the injury upon her face. Had he owned his freedom, I imagined he might have been seized with the need to go in search of whoever had harmed her. I signaled for him to pay attention to his duties. He did so, but all the rest of the day he was attentive to Yael’s every move. It was odd to see him behaving as though his loyalty tied him to a woman who carried another man’s child.

  “Leave her be,” I told him when no one would overhear. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her. “She has troubles enough, she doesn’t need yours.”

  “What makes you think I have troubles?” he asked in the hesitant way he spoke our language.

  I paused and took him in as he worked with the rake he had invented to gather dung, a warrior the doves no longer feared. I had thought of him as an oddity because of his fair coloring and his great height, which forced him to crouch down in the dovecote. Now I saw that he was indeed handsome, broad-shouldered, with appealing features and huge, rough hands that were surprisingly tender when he cared for the doves.

  “You’re not a man?” I said, implying that every man in this world had troubles of his own.

  “I was,” he said. “Once.”

  I wasn’t so old that I didn’t understand his meaning. Despite the bonds of slavery, he would become so again.

  EACH DAY we could hear our warriors preparing for raids. Our storerooms were low on supplies, our stomachs empty. Summer was always a time when our lives were lean, but this year was worse than others. At the evening meal I ate half of what was on my plate—a few chickpeas, some pressed dates—to ensure that the boys and Yael could have more. We had each been given one of the ostraca, a bit of stone with our name or initial carved upon it, and that mark would grant us only so much food and water and firewood each week. It was a troubling time for everyone. The heat of the summer was fully upon us, the billowing air so dry that we wore scarves over our mouths to cool our breath. The water in the cisterns had already reached a low mark, and we were just entering the month of fire.

  Yael and I did not speak of our arrangement, but she continued to stay in our small chamber. My grandsons were shy with her at first, but one day she called them to her. Although the boys were hesitant, they gathered near when Yael pointed out a scorpion in a shadowy corner. When she was a little girl, she told them, she would watch such creatures in the hall where she slept but was always careful not to touch them. She warned Levi and Noah, they, too, must never disturb a scorpion, staying a respectful distance away, appreciating not only the deadly sting of such a creature but its cunning silence.

  My dark-eyed grandsons watched, mesmerized, visibly delighted as Yael caught the fearsome intruder in a jar. She nimbly pinched him up between her fingers. I wondered what else she had done that had called for such bravery, or if, like mine, her courage sprang from sorrow. The less you had to lose, the easier it was to pick up the knife, the sword, the scorpion. When she carried the deadly creature out to the terraced gardens nearby, the boys followed at her heels, thrilled by her daring. Seeing them so lighthearted and filled with interest made my throat tighten, and I felt I might lose my voice as well. Marked by grins and deep concentration, the boys appeared no different than any other children; no one would have taken them for two boys who had lost the power of speech in the web of a demon. They were fascinated, crouching on their knees in a patch of Syrian radishes to watch openmouthed as Yael allowed the scorpion to go free in a shady nook among a cluster of onions.

  “The world is many things to many creatures,” she told the children as we all surveyed the walled garden, what was surely a forest for a small creature that had been torn from its home. The scorpion had scuttled out of sight. “We are considered giants by some and ants to be stepped upon by others.”

  PEOPLE were whispering about Yael, wondering who the father of her child might be and speculating about the night the assassin Bar Elhanan had cast out his own daughter. My grandsons, however, had already grown to adore her. Although I kept my distance, I became accustomed to her as well. If people spoke poorly of her in my presence, I glared at them, and that was the end of it. Though I preferred to keep to myself, there was a way in which I was comforted to have Yael in my home, to hear her breathe easily in her sleep, as my own daughter might have done had she still been with us.

  Admittedly, I was grateful for help with the household chores. Even in her state, so big with the child that was to come, Yael was far from lazy. She cooked our meals, crouching over the fire pit to fry our food on a grill which fitted over the ring of stones. She went to the storehouses to collect our daily allotment of beans and grains, and made certain there was firewood, all to repay me for taking her in. But the stories she told were the only repayment we needed. The boys’ eyes brightened when they listened to her at bedtime, mesmerized. In all of the scorpion’s exploits, silence was an asset and a gift, not a flaw but a virtue. The scorpion could do what others could not: he could see in the dark, hear a fly buzzing on the far side of the mountain, sense danger while the rest of the world slept.

  “Did your mother tell you these stories?” I asked one evening when Yael and I went to the plaza. We had taken to working at the looms on a regular basis. We kept ourselves removed from the other women, but it was a pleasure to weave and our garments were tattered; we had need of shawls and cloaks. When we busied ourselves in this manner, it was possible to forget the dust that rose in clouds all around us and to distance ourselves from our hunger. If we had nothing else, then at least we had the sheep’s wool and the work of spinning and weaving.

  “I had no mother.” Yael kept her eyes downcast.

  We reached the looms, where we settled, bringing forth our lengths of carded, dyed wool. Yael was working on a pattern everyone praised. Even those gossips who whispered about her were impressed. There were intricate threads of color forming a line of continuous blocks of multihued squares. I noticed it was the same pattern as the cloth the slave wore.

  “Every human has a mother,” I insisted as we worked.

  “Are you sure I’m human?” Yael said, her chin tilted, teasing me.

  I had never seen a woman with hair so red, or one with so little fea
r that she was willing to grasp a scorpion between her fingers. Others might whisper she was possessed by a demon and swear she was unlike other daughters and wives. But I had seen her on the night when her father cast her out, when she huddled in a corner like any other beaten woman. And I had taken note of the expression on her face when she stood beside the Man from the North.

  She was human.

  WHEN THEY thought they were alone, I heard what I should not have pass between them. Yael was fortunate that I was accustomed to silence, and therefore held my tongue. A gossip would have been unforgiving, making quick use of the intimate encounter I’d stumbled upon. A hawk had been circling the largest dovecote for several days, intent on taking our doves for his dinner. We set out sticks tied together with rope that looked like a child’s toy; when the breeze stirred, the sticks whirled and frightened the hawks away. But one hawk was fearless; he wouldn’t be chased off. He looked underfed and seemed intent on having his supper. Hunger struck everyone in the desert at the same time.

  When the hawk lit on the window ledge, Yael found some grain and reached out to him. I was stunned to see the creature eat from her hand, as if he were a dove himself. I was not the only one to take notice. The Man from the North had come up beside her. I overheard him say that in his country hunters trained hawks to strike down prey and bring back partridges and doves. Their sharp yellow beaks were wound with strands of leather, clamped halfway closed so they couldn’t devour their kills; they had to learn to wait patiently when they brought back their prey, hungering until the hunter tossed them a bit of meat.

  It usually took months to gain a hawk’s trust. The slave was astounded by how easily Yael had called this one to her. He said she must possess magic. He sank to his knees and bowed his head, only half in jest, declaring she had bewitched him as well. Yael laughed at his remarks—I remembered because I had not heard her do so before. It was a lovely, surprising sound. She said that women with red hair had the ability to tame wild creatures. Since the slave had come from a country where many of the women looked so, he should have known this to be true. He got to his feet, though he had to shift his tall body just to be near her.