by Dara Horn
First the women healers came, then the sages, then the market magicians whom her father so disdained, then even a Roman doctor who spoke to them in stilted Greek. Each brought pouches of herbs, rubbed powders into the child’s skin, forced liquids down his throat. Zakkai brought sacrifice after sacrifice to the Temple. But Rachel knew nothing would help.
One day her mother understood. “Go, my daughter,” she said. “Go. You need to see something beyond the walls of this house.” Did her mother know? Surely she did. Rachel didn’t object. She grabbed a blank scroll from her mother’s cart and ran to the Temple, dropping her signal into the hands of a young priest and telling him to bring it to Elazar, before returning to the tunnel. She no longer cared what anyone thought.
It had been over two years since she had spoken to Elazar. He knew about Yochanan; the priests had heard of Azaria’s heir, had seen Zakkai bringing offerings of thanksgiving. And Elazar had seen her and the baby: she still delivered her father’s scrolls to the Temple, now with the child on her back. Many times Elazar had lain in wait for her, watching her; she had seen him in the corners of the outer court. A few times she had even delivered scrolls into his hands, feeling the trace of his fingers on her palm. Once he even dared to compliment the child’s beauty, and asked the child’s name. But never had she been back to the tunnel, until now.
She waited for a long time under the ancient carving, one hundred cubits below the surface of the earth. The light that approached brought her no comfort. Elazar took her in his arms eagerly, covering her face with kisses. She sobbed aloud, and he stopped.
“He’s dying, Elazar.”
“What? Who?”
“Yochanan. He’s ill. We’ve tried everything. Offerings, poultices, every remedy in the world. Elazar, he’s dying.” She gagged. “And you know why,” she wailed. “It happened to King David a thousand years ago. The child he had with his lover died, and everyone knew why.” She pulled herself away from him.
Elazar looked at her. “He won’t die, Rachel,” he said softly. “He’ll recover. I promise you he will.”
“Don’t insult me, Elazar. What are you, a witch?”
“No. But I’m the son of the high priest. And there is a way.” His voice made her feel like a child, as though someone were holding her hand. “We’ll make vows,” he said. “More than vows. We’ll become Nazirites.”
Why hadn’t she thought of it? The Nazirite vow was for just such a situation, for repentant sinners. To become a Nazirite, one only had to declare one’s vow and then abstain from cutting one’s hair, drinking wine, and touching the dead. After thirty days, one went to the Temple, cut off one’s hair, and offered it on the altar along with many sacrifices, including one for one’s sins. Everyone knew that God forgave Nazirites. Rachel listened to the rushing waters and felt protected, immersed in a priestly blessing. But nothing was simple anymore.
“Zakkai will know that I’m a Nazirite. He’ll suspect.” Suspect what, exactly? she wondered. It hardly mattered. Her entire life had become a maze of lies.
Elazar laughed, and reached under her veil. She thought to stop him, but couldn’t. He tugged at her bound braid and wound her long black hair around his hand, pulling her breath from her lungs. “People notice when men become Nazirites, not women. No one will notice if you drink only water. If no one in your family dies in the next thirty days, you won’t touch a corpse either. And no one will notice if you don’t cut your beautiful hair, at least until the end when they shave your head at the Temple. If he notices then, what of it? You were trying to save his boy.” Elazar’s smile was painful to endure.
Rachel remembered the sages in her house, debating whether such vows were acceptable. “But at the end of the vow we would each have to bring a lamb, a ewe, and a ram, and then unleavened bread, and grain, and on and on,” she said. “Zakkai is already making too many sacrifices for us to afford. How could I sacrifice all of that? We aren’t rich.”
“Fortunately, you have a rich and priestly friend.” Elazar took her hand as she shuddered. “It will work, Rachel. The power of the Temple is to make people die without dying,” he said softly. “Without the Temple we would have to wait until death to be judged or forgiven by God. But we don’t have to wait until death. We can speak to God now. We don’t even need more witnesses. We can make the vow right here.”
To her surprise, the urgency had left Elazar’s body. He spoke calmly, without passion. He knew what she needed. She looked up at the carved stone, thinking of the ancient kings who dug their way through a mountain. “Speak the vow with me,” Elazar said. “ ‘Let me be a Nazirite.’ ”
“Let me be a Nazirite,” she repeated.
He smiled at her, and she was overwhelmed with relief. “Now go home and care for the boy. And meet me in thirty days on the Temple steps. The boy will get better.”
THE BOY DID NOT get better.
Each day his complexion changed slightly in color, becoming first pale, then yellowish, then finally darkening, as though his body were bruised. Sores opened on his skin. By the second week of her vow he could barely even cry; by the third, he struggled to keep down food. On the thirtieth day, she told her mother she had to leave, that she would be back before nightfall. “Don’t go now, Rachel. Your child needs you.”
“I have to.”
Her mother was too weak to stop her. Yochanan lay in her mother’s arms, his breaths swelling like a mist.
She went to the ritual bath first, stripping and immersing herself as quickly as possible before dressing again and ascending the Temple steps. One of the priests’ wives met her at the gate, took her to a corner of the women’s court, and removed her veil. Rachel had not expected to feel so embarrassed. The woman took a razor and hacked off her hair in thick long clumps, until Rachel felt a cool breeze against the skin of her scalp. The men in the courtyard stared. In another corner of the immense plaza, she saw Elazar kneeling before another priest, bowing his shaven head.
The woman bundled the hair into a thick rope and placed it in Rachel’s hands. Then she signaled a different priest, a man even younger than Elazar, who came leading the three animals by leather cords. Behind him, a boy priest carried the meal and grain and water offerings. Rachel followed the two across the women’s court and up the fifteen stone steps to the threshold of an open gate she had never approached before, the entrance to the inner court.
The smell overwhelmed her. She breathed in and gagged, tasting burning incense and roasting animal flesh. The odors made her vision blur, but she still saw the altar with its perpetually burning fire, the penned rows of calves and rams and goats, the golden bowls and other implements for tending to ash and blood, the intricately fitted multicolored stone tiles that covered the floor. Towering before her was the colossal edifice of the sanctuary itself, the shrine containing the Holy of Holies, its walls gleaming with plates of silver and gold, its massive bronze and cedar doors closed tight. Her eyes had barely focused before a man came around the altar and stood before her, a man in a tall cloth hat like a crown, wearing a golden breastplate adorned with twelve glowing jewels. Hanania, the high priest, Elazar’s father. She knelt on stone.
Hanania signaled the young priests, who brought the animals to the altar. They dispatched them quickly, efficiently, and the animals barely moaned. Soon their burning flesh mingled with the other smells, the unleavened bread offerings and the meal offerings and the water offerings, blood and water draining into golden bowls and through channels in the floor as smoke rose in columns toward the bright blue sky. Rachel could hear the smell of the smoke rising up like thin lyre music, impossibly high-pitched, like a newborn’s wail. She felt weak, and pressed her face to the floor. When she heard the young priests’ footsteps hurrying away, she opened her eyes and cautiously rose to her feet, wondering if she was finished. But she was still holding her hair in her hands, and now Hanania moved.
Hanania’s breastplate was thick, raised from his chest like a golden box. He opened it as she watched
, and took out what appeared to be two circles made of slices of bone. He threw them on the floor before her, where they rattled and spun and dropped. One fell down blank, a circle of solid white. The other fell with a word carved on it: Urim. She heard Zakkai’s voice in her head: Is it a light, or is it a curse?
“You are here for a child,” Hanania said.
She looked at him, uncertain of whether to answer. “Yes,” she said at last.
Hanania looked at the bones on the ground. “Your Nazirite vow has failed.”
Rachel stared at him, speechless. If she were a man, a sage, practiced in the art of arguing, she might have challenged him: How can it have failed? I offered a sin offering! You haven’t even burnt my hair! Isn’t God all-merciful, abounding in lovingkindness? Isn’t the Temple where one can die without dying? Save my child! But she was a woman, and young, and gutted. She held out her hair. The smoke piqued her eyes, bringing forth hot tears.
“Vows fail when something more is required of us,” the priest said. Rachel shuddered, feeling accused. But Hanania’s voice was gentle. “We are living in perilous times. Everything here is in danger.” Rachel glanced up at the massive façade of the sanctuary, God’s eternal home on earth. What danger? “If all this is destroyed, it will take uncommon wisdom to find a path to holiness beyond it,” Hanania said. “Not every child has that capacity for wisdom.”
Rachel listened, confused. Was he talking about her baby?
“There remains one possibility for you,” he said slowly. “A new vow.”
“The same vow, again?” she finally asked, when he remained silent too long. She did not meet his eyes. She had heard of people renewing Nazirite vows, or failing to keep them and trying again. But the high priest’s face seemed far too grave.
“No. Something else, a new vow, an eternal bond between you and God. You may reject it, but if you do, your child will die.”
Now she raised her face to look at Hanania. The high priest himself: was he even human? He was: a thickset man with a graying beard and grizzled bags beneath his eyes. His eyes were black, but his eyebrows arched upward like his son’s. She had the sickening thought that she was staring not at divine redemption but rather at her own future, at her lover grown old. She winced and looked away. “What eternal bond?”
“Not a temporary vow like the one you made.”
“A lifelong vow?” she asked. Now she was frightened. She had heard of lifelong Nazirites, forbidden forever from touching the dead. Did that mean she couldn’t bury her parents?
“A lifelong vow is also temporary,” he said. “I am speaking of an eternal vow. This vow will make you die without dying. If you make this vow, your son will live, but so will you.”
Rachel stared at him. “I don’t understand.”
“Your child will live through this illness, but there is a price.”
“You mean a sacrifice.” She steeled her nerves. Would Elazar give her more animals? He would give her anything. But she hated asking.
“Yes, but not one you can touch. The sacrifice must come from you.”
She drew in her breath. “What do you mean?”
He looked at the bones on the ground. “The price is your death.”
She followed his gaze to the bones, then looked back at Hanania’s face. A wave of strength rushed through her, inhaled with the stench of entrails and blood. The words she erased from her father’s scroll rose within her mind. “I would gladly die for my son,” she said, with an unfamiliar pride.
Hanania touched the red stone on the breastplate on his chest. “No. You will live for him.”
Rachel almost smiled. “I’m already living for him. All mothers live for their children.”
Hanania spoke slowly, as if struggling to form the words. “To make this vow, you must live for all your children, forever,” he said. “You must sacrifice your own death for him to live.” He breathed, thick audible breaths, still staring at the bones. “You need to understand what this means, my daughter.” My daughter. Did he know? She raised her face again and looked into the deep black of his eyes. He knew. “It means that your child will live, but you will never die.”
Rachel remembered the verses about the first people ever created, the ones who had eaten the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge: And God said, Now that man has become like us, knowing good and evil, what if he stretches out his hand and also takes from the fruit of the Tree of Life, and lives forever? “That’s impossible,” Rachel said. “The Tree of Life is protected by a revolving sword.”
Hanania smiled at her. “Your father taught you well.” To him, she was still Daughter of Azaria. “The Torah is our contract with God, and it is also the Tree of Life. The Master of the World has planted it in our midst. But this vow would be a new contract with God, undertaken only by you. You and the child’s father.”
He did not say you and your husband. Rachel inhaled the stench of burning animal flesh. “Are there people who have upheld this—this contract?”
Hanania touched a finger to his beard. “I know of no others who have made this vow. It has been offered, but no one has ever accepted. Not once in a thousand years.”
“Why not?”
Hanania sighed, a long deep sigh. “Someone as young as you could never understand that,” he said. “You are young, my daughter. Don’t do something you will regret. You will have more children.”
Rachel glanced over her shoulder, as though she could see Yochanan behind her. The Yochanan she saw in her mind was not the one whose body was covered with sores, who was too weak to speak or move. She saw instead the little boy reciting verses, ensnared in the final words. I set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse, her tiny, healthy, black-eyed Yochanan sang, perfectly imitating his grandfather’s lilt. Choose life, so you and your children may live, may live, may live, may live.
“I only want this child.”
Hanania looked at the bones. “Then you must make him matter,” he said. “Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“Then bow.”
She knelt on the stone floor. Hanania lowered himself alongside her and whispered in her ear, telling her what to say. He rose, placed her cut-off braid in her open hands, and placed his empty hand on her head.
She spoke, surprised by how loud her voice sounded against the stone walls. “I give up my own death in exchange for the life of my son, Yochanan son of—”
She hesitated. For centuries upon centuries, she would remember that pause: the silence in the court, the smoke and smells blowing in and out of her body with each breath, the weight of the hand of Yochanan’s grandfather against her bared head.
“Elazar,” the high priest whispered.
“Yochanan son of Elazar,” she spoke aloud. The name rose from her lips, riding a crest of incense. “For this child’s life, I give up my own death. This I swear, I swear, I swear, by the holy name.”
She pronounced the name of God and felt the warmth of hot stone against her knees as her hair burnt before her, a smell she would inhale again and again in the years to come, every time she burned herself alive.
CHAPTER
6
COIN COLLECTION
. . .
When he was six years old, Rocky began collecting coins. He started with pennies, looking for Indian heads and then trying to find at least one specimen from every year. Soon he moved on to more obscure coins, saving money from walking neighbors’ dogs and shoveling snow and then “borrowing” more from his mother so that he could order them from catalogues that came in the mail. This baffled Rachel.
“Why would you spend real money to buy fake money?” she once asked.
“These aren’t fake money,” he told her in his ten-year-old soprano voice. “They’re investments.”
Everything with Rocky was an investment: a weird, illogical, eternal faith in the future—for which only Rachel, his prime investor, seemed obliged to pay. She was still paying. More than anyone else, he reminded her of Yochanan.
Rocky had been small as a boy but was large as a man, a hulking six foot three, with a broad chest and, even in middle age, a full head of hair—lustrous black hair whose refusal to recede had made her nervous as he grew older, since any sign of her children not aging induced in her an existential panic. Over the past ten years she had noticed him graying a bit at his temples, which brought her immense relief. He would die after all. But not yet, apparently. Now he was fifty-six years old and still collecting coins. This time he was doing it in her basement. That was familiar too.
One late afternoon, not long after his wife had kicked him out and Rachel had taken him in, Rachel cornered him there. He sat crouched over a laptop on her husband’s old desk, which was now buried under a snowdrift of Rocky’s insurance records, legal notices and bills. It was incongruous with the rest of the windowless room, which was filled with several generations of toys to occupy great-grandchildren. Rocky had only been living with her for two months and already his mess had followed him, overdue papers and unfulfilled obligations swirling around him like a visible manifestation of his harried soul. He hunched over the keyboard in his dead father’s rumpled pajamas with his unshaven jaw hanging open before the screen, several feet away from three large bins of wooden blocks and Legos. Rachel approached him slowly, watching the thick ropes of veins twitching on his dark-haired hands as his fingers rattled the keys. She always felt unsettled when she caught her grown children engrossed in something: it evoked the eternally disturbing sensation that this creature who once lived with her, once lived within her, was in fact a stranger.
“What are you doing down here all this time?” she asked the side of Rocky’s head.