by Lynn Austin
Could that be true? Were Amina’s sister and older brothers and even her father imperfect in some way? It seemed unlikely. Amina held out her palms to show Hodaya how they’d been scraped, too. Hodaya poured more water onto the cloth. “Maybe you can’t run as fast as the other children,” she said as she wiped the dirt off Amina’s hands, “but God created you to do something special that they can’t do.”
“He did? What?”
Hodaya laughed. “I don’t know, but I’m certain you’ll figure it out by the time you’re my age. My husband was a shepherd. His flock grazed in the fields outside town. I learned to spin and weave the wool from his sheep and make cloth to sell.”
Amina climbed off the stool after Hodaya finished and looked around at the colorful skeins of wool and piles of cloth. Hodaya had been unpacking her goods in her stall when Amina had tripped and fallen, and she continued laying out her samples now. “These colors are really pretty,” Amina said, trailing her fingers over the soft fabric.
“Thank you, dear. I dye the wool myself. I love trying different ingredients and creating new colors.”
Amina’s father said Jews were thieves and liars, and she should stay far away from them. If her sister came back and saw her talking to one, Amina would get into trouble. But she didn’t care. She liked this kind, gentle woman.
“Your hair is such a beautiful color,” Hodaya said, resting her hand on Amina’s head for a moment. Amina only flinched a little this time. “I would love to find a way to dye my cloth this gorgeous, coppery-brown.”
“Sayfah says my hair is ugly. Hers is black like Mama’s.”
“Don’t listen to her. It’s lovely and—” Hodaya halted in surprise as a man hurried into the booth. Amina could tell by the little cap he wore and the tassels on his robe that he was Jewish. “Jacob! What are you doing here?” Hodaya asked.
“Pack everything up, Mama. We have to go home right away.”
“What are you talking about? I just got here. I haven’t sold anything yet.” The man began stuffing cloth back into sacks as if he hadn’t heard her. “Jacob, stop. What are you doing?”
“Something’s happened, Mama—”
“To one of the children? To your brothers?” she asked in alarm.
“No, we’re all fine.” He noticed Amina for the first time and asked, “Who’s the Edomite girl? Why is she here?” He glared at Amina as if she were his enemy.
“This is my new friend, Amina. She fell and skinned her knees. Amina, this is my very rude son, Jacob.” He didn’t respond as he continued to fold up Hodaya’s cloth and take down her display, his movements hurried and jerky. Hodaya made him stop, pulling a bolt of fabric from his hands. “Jacob, I’m not packing up or going anywhere until you tell me why.”
He let out his breath in a rush, the way a horse snorts when it’s impatient to run. “Three elders from Jerusalem came to the house of assembly this morning with bad news. The Persian emperor has issued a decree that’s . . . well, it’s like something from a nightmare. We’re holding a meeting right away to discuss what to do. I came to take you home.”
Amina watched Hodaya’s face. If her son’s news upset her, the older woman didn’t let it show. She rested her hand on Amina’s head again, as if blessing her. “It was so nice to meet you, Amina. I hope we see each other again.”
“Me too.”
Just then, Amina heard her sister calling her. “Amina . . . Amina, where are you?”
“Bye,” she said with a little wave. “Thanks for helping me.” She ducked out of the booth and limped up the street toward Sayfah, taking her time so she wouldn’t trip again.
“Where have you been?” Sayfah asked. She looked as angry and impatient as their father as she stood with her arms folded, glaring as if Amina was at fault instead of Sayfah and the others for running off. “Come on, slowpoke. Mama is finished shopping. We’re going home.”
Mama stood waiting at the narrow entrance to Bethlehem, holding the produce she’d purchased. Amina tried to help, carrying a melon as she limped home, but her weak leg made it hard to keep up. She tried to show Mama her scraped knees when they arrived back in their village. “Look what happened when I fell. A nice woman in the marketplace helped me—”
But her mother wasn’t interested. “Maybe you’ll watch where you’re going next time.”
Amina helped prepare the meal, then waited out of sight while Abba and her two older brothers ate. They were the three most important people in her household and entitled to the first and best of everything. They peppered her with slaps and kicks and curses whenever she didn’t move quickly enough, especially when they were tired from working in the fields all day.
She was still thinking about the Jewish weaver’s kindness as she lay in bed that night. Hodaya had called Amina’s hair a lovely color. She’d said there was something special that Amina could do that her sister couldn’t—and she would find out what it was someday. Hodaya said she liked being different, even though her foot was even more crooked than Amina’s.
Amina fell asleep thinking of her words. But sometime in the middle of the night, loud voices and cheering woke her up. She sat up, listening in the dark to sounds of laughter and celebration. It sounded like the festival her village held after the olives were harvested, but they weren’t even ripe yet. When another great cheer went up, Amina climbed out of bed and peeked outside her door. Everyone in the village had gathered in the street, celebrating with torches blazing and open jars of wine. Amina’s mother and some of the other women passed through the crowd with pitchers, refilling everyone’s cups. Abba stood on the back of a wagon, swaying slightly as if the wagon was rolling down the road. “What a day this is!” he said, lifting his cup. “We’ll be rid of those filthy Jews at last! Now they’ll all die!” The crowd cheered in response.
Amina’s Uncle Abdel, who had come to visit from a distant village, jumped onto the wagon beside him, draping his arm over Abba’s shoulder. “Friends, we’ll take our pick of the Jews’ houses and property,” he said. “We can have their olive groves and vineyards, harvest fields that we didn’t have to plant—”
“And sheep!” someone yelled from the crowd. “They have huge flocks of sheep!”
“That’s right!” Abba said. “We’ll not only reap the benefits of the Jews’ labor and prosperity, but we’ll be rid of them for good.” His words were met with joyful laughter.
“Listen . . . listen!” The oldest man in the village shuffled toward the wagon with his arms raised, signaling that he had something to say. The laughter quieted. “I was just a boy when the Jews arrived here from Babylon with their stinking caravans. They invaded like a locust swarm, building on our land and claiming our fields and vineyards as their own. Thousands of them! That was nearly seventy years ago, and I’ve thought of little else all these years, except getting rid of them. At last we’ll have our chance!” The people gave another roaring cheer.
Amina was wide awake now. She slipped through the door and limped barefoot across her family’s small courtyard to stand by the gate. She was too frightened by the shouting and rowdiness to venture into the street, and besides, she was in her nightclothes.
“We need a plan,” Abba said, “so we can take advantage of this opportunity. Everyone needs to stake his claim and determine whose plunder he wants and which Jews he intends to kill. And we’ll need swords and other weapons.”
“It might be better if we rounded up all the Jews first,” the old man said. “We could kill them all in one place.”
“Do you think they’ll fight back?” Amina’s uncle asked.
“They can’t!” Abba replied. “That’s the beauty of it! This decree comes from King Xerxes himself. Every Jew in the empire—every man, woman, and child—must be executed.”
Amina didn’t understand. The woman who’d helped her today was Jewish. Why would the king kill someone as kind and gentle as Hodaya?
She watched her father drain his cup of wine, then scan the crowd as if se
arching for a refill. “Hey! What are you doing out here?” he shouted when he saw Amina. She backed away, careful not to trip and make him angrier. “Get back inside! Now!”
Mama hurried over and slapped Amina’s face before yanking her into the house. “You heard your father. Stay inside where you belong.”
“But . . . why is Abba going to kill—”
“This doesn’t concern you. This is grown-up business.” Mama pushed Amina down onto her pallet saying, “Go to sleep and forget what you heard.”
“But the nice lady who helped me today was Jewish and—”
“What are you doing talking to Jews? You know better.” Amina ducked as Mama lifted her hand to slap her again, her face still burning from the first slap. “Never trust a Jew. They do sneaky things to deceive people and disguise what they’re really like. They all deserve to die.” Mama left the room, closing the door behind her.
Amina was no stranger to killing and bloodshed. She’d seen Abba and the other men slaughter sheep and pigs for festivals and special occasions. She’d watched as the blood gushed onto the ground after Abba cut their throats, his hands and arms turning red and slick. The animals had squealed and squirmed one moment, then lay limp and lifeless the next. Would Abba kill the Jews the same way, slashing their throats and letting their blood soak his hands and pour into the dirt? Amina knew that people sometimes died—two children from her village had died of the same fever that had crippled her leg. But everyone was supposed to be sad when people died, wailing and mourning for them. They weren’t supposed to cheer and rejoice in the streets. Amina shivered in bed as she listened to the noise outside. It took her a long time to fall asleep.
Chapter
5
BABYLON
Time passed with a swiftness that left Ezra breathless, the days and weeks trampling each other in a wild stampede. Ever since they’d heard the king’s decree a month ago, Ezra had spent each day here in his study, searching for answers, finding none. Now, as spring began to blossom and their death sentence loomed closer, he felt a desperation that bordered on panic. Studying and teaching the Scriptures had fulfilled him in the past, but it had been an intellectual pursuit, not a matter of life and death. And he hadn’t worried about time eroding, hour by hour, like a riverbank in a rainstorm.
His people had less than nine more months to live, less time than it took for a child to form in its mother’s womb. He had cancelled all his classes and suspended work with his fellow scholars to study in solitude, praying and confessing, fasting and weeping and then studying some more. But Ezra was no closer to discovering the mind of God or a way to save his people. Instead, he’d discovered the vast difference between talking about God all day and talking to Him; between knowing about God and His laws, and knowing God. The more he learned, the less he understood—and the more unqualified he felt to lead his people as Jude still urged him to do.
He looked down at the scroll of Isaiah lying open in front of him. The prophet’s words had blurred on the page a moment ago as he’d read them through his tears: “O Lord, you are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand. Do not be angry beyond measure, O Lord.” He had thought of his own father, a master potter, pictured his muscled hands, skilled at shaping a formless lump of clay into a useful vessel. Abba had been proud of Ezra, his firstborn son, blessed by the Almighty One to be a Torah scholar instead of a potter, and the youngest member of the Great Assembly. Abba had continually reminded his three sons of their heritage as priests, tracing their lineage back to Moses’ brother Aaron, and to Zadok, the high priest in King Solomon’s temple. If they hadn’t been exiled here in Babylon, Ezra might be serving as the high priest of the temple in Jerusalem, the spiritual leader of his people. But his learning and his pedigree did him no good, now. He may as well make pots like his younger brothers.
He stood and rolled up the scroll to put it away. He needed to get out of his stifling study. The sackcloth beneath his tunic burned his irritated skin like fire, but he refused to remove it, a reminder to pray each time it chafed. As he walked through the quiet, meandering lanes of Babylon’s Jewish community, hearing the familiar sounds of goats bleating and babies crying, only two things were clear to him—and they were contradictory. The Almighty One had made a covenant with Abraham and his descendants, an everlasting covenant that would never change; and the Persian king had decreed his people’s annihilation, a decree that also could never be changed.
Ezra’s steps took him to the grove near the canal where his brothers continued their father’s pottery business, the towering palm trees above the clay pit motionless in the still air. He wove his way around the shimmering heat of the kiln and through the obstacle course of pottery in various stages of completion to where Jude sat at his potter’s wheel, shaping a vessel on the upper wheel while spinning the lower wheel with his foot. Jude glanced up and acknowledged Ezra with a nod before returning to his work, dipping his fingers in water to keep the clay supple. The knee-high vessel he was making would be glazed and fired, then used to store grain or olive oil.
Ezra watched the clay expand and grow beneath Jude’s experienced hands like a living thing, obeying the pressure of his fingers, the pull of his hands. He thought of Isaiah’s words: “We are the clay, you are the potter . . .”
Ezra had apprenticed with his father in his younger years and knew that a pot couldn’t be shaped without pressure. He also knew the importance of centering the lump of clay precisely in the middle of the wheel before beginning. If it wasn’t centered, the emerging vessel would become deformed or even fly off the wheel as it spun. Ezra had never mastered the centering process, and his pots had inevitably become misshapen beneath the pressure of his fingers. Was that where his people had gone wrong? Had they failed to center their lives on God’s law before being shaped by Him? Maybe if Ezra could teach the Law to his people more diligently, centering them and—
“What brings you here?” Jude asked, pulling Ezra from his thoughts. The wheel had stopped spinning, the pot finished.
“I needed to get out for a while. Get some perspective.” Or was he avoiding God’s echoing silence? His brother cut the pot free with a thin cord, then climbed from behind the wheel, stretching his arms and shoulders.
“Did you find a reason for the king’s decree?”
“Not yet.”
Jude sloshed his hands in a bucket of water to clean them off. In the pit in front of them, an apprentice treaded the oozing slime, mixing water into the clay with his feet. Two more apprentices knelt beside a wooden board, wedging the clay to force the air out before forming the clay into a pot. Ezra had never mastered the skill of wedging, either. But the Torah? He could recite large portions of all five books by memory. Jude crouched beside the boards to inspect the wedged clay, poking it to feel the texture. He shook his head. “Work it some more.”
Their youngest brother, Asher, worked beside the kiln, dressed in a turban and loincloth. His lean body glistened with sweat in the intense heat. Married for less than a year, Asher had been ecstatic as he’d shared the news that his wife was expecting. Ezra remembered how he had bounced from one foot to the other as he’d announced the news. Now Asher’s joy had turned to despair. He seemed to shrivel a little more each day, like a branch hanging too close to the flames, knowing he couldn’t protect his wife and unborn infant. Why would God doom his child—all their children—to such a short life?
Asher left his work to talk with his brothers, unwinding his turban as he walked closer, using the end of it to wipe the sweat from his face. “I told Jude that it’s a waste of time to keep making pots all day,” he said. “Why not stop and enjoy the few months we have left?”
“And I told him that we still need to earn money to feed our families,” Jude said.
Asher responded with a huff. “Right. Let’s fatten everyone up like calves in the stall, even though we’ve been sentenced to death. In fact, maybe we should hold a banquet!”
&n
bsp; “Would you rather we all starved to death before our enemies have a chance to kill us?” Jude asked. “Because starvation is an agonizing way to die, you know.”
“And being slaughtered isn’t agonizing?”
“Stop . . . please . . .” Ezra held up his hands.
“Is there any hope at all?” Asher asked. “That’s what I want to know.”
“As the psalmist wrote, our hope is in the Almighty One’s unfailing love,” Ezra said. But did he really believe that, or were they mere words?
“I hope you’ve made up your mind to lead us,” Jude said. “We need a strong leader more than ever.”
Ezra spread his hands. “How can I lead if I don’t have any answers?”
“Then find answers! Give us hope or understanding or something,” Jude said. “You’re the expert on God, the great theologian. We don’t care about your doubts, just tell us what God is doing to us!”
“Have you heard about Rebbe Nathan?” Asher asked before Ezra could reply.
“No . . . what about him?”
“He resigned as head of the house of assembly. He’s suffered such severe pains in his chest that he’s bedridden.”
“We were discussing his replacement this morning,” Jude said, “and the other men requested I ask you.”
Ezra groaned. “You’re the natural-born leader in this family, Jude. Not me.”
Jude rubbed his forehead, leaving behind a smear of clay. When he spoke, Ezra heard the emotion in his voice, the unshed tears that threatened to choke him. “I can’t lead. It takes all my energy to be strong for Devorah and the girls. I can’t do more than that. I can’t be strong for our people, too. You need to help us, Ezra. You don’t have a family like the rest of us do.”
As difficult as it was to face his own death, Ezra knew this ordeal was even worse for men like Jude and Asher with wives and children. Ezra wouldn’t have to spend the final months of his life struggling to console the people he loved. He could stay awake day and night as he had been doing, falling asleep at his study table with his scrolls and sputtering oil lamp in front of him. And he could mourn and weep alone instead of pretending to be strong for someone else. Yet Ezra envied his brothers now more than ever before. What would it be like to find comfort in a loving wife’s arms? Who would he hold in his final moments of life?