by Shira Nayman
“About what?”
“The wedding, of course!”
Rachel let out a little laugh. “What a strange question!”
How could she have thought my question strange? Surely, it was the most natural question in the world to pose to a fourteen-year-old girl on the eve of her marriage!
“I told you, Boaz and I have been betrothed forever! A week hasn’t passed in all my life in which I haven’t seen him. Ever since I can remember, I was told that Boaz and I were to be married. Now, it’s happening!
“And I am excited about the return. To answer the question you asked—no, I don’t think I’ll miss—this place. We’re finally going home, after all these years. Can you imagine? Fifty years …”
There it was again—that look of absolute faith in Rachel’s face.
I suddenly remembered the expression on Talia’s face (my mother!), a face not filled with light, but hung with shadow, Talia standing on the pathway in Broken Hill, talking about how she’d never felt as if she’d belonged.
Something struck me like a bolt of desert sun. Perhaps this is what Talia, my mama as a teenager in Australia, had been longing for! Unshakable belief, a solid feeling of belonging. I wondered—had Mama ever found what she was looking for?
My mind’s eye suddenly filled with other images of my mother from the time of my earliest memory. Mama smiling, laughing, singing us songs, turning even the most mundane activity into play; Mama looking at Papa with love, even adoration—no trace of the achy longing I’d seen in Talia’s face at Broken Hill. Somehow, she’d made her peace with whatever was troubling her that day we flew over the Victorian landscape in Grandpa Jack’s plane, gazing down at the rocky outcroppings and scraggly savannah vegetation. Whatever my mother’s journey had been, I felt certain she’d found her own sense of home.
My own heart squeezed. Would I ever make it beyond—this? Would I find my true place in the world?
“Shoshana?” Rachel’s voice broke through my reverie. It was still there—that blindingly bright look in her face, her eyes like strange, beautiful jewels.
Deborah had draped some lengths of white cloth over a block of wood by the basin; now, we used these to dry ourselves.
“Don’t you see? Returning to Zion, to Jerusalem, will make us whole again.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, stepping back into my dress.
Rachel crossed to where a piece of colorful fabric was hung on a rod and pulled it aside to reveal an alcove, filled with clothing and other objects—blankets, pillows, and a wooden shelf full of trinkets. I made out a few little sculptures and what looked like necklaces and other jewelry hanging on a rack.
“Being in exile—it was like we were broken. A people torn apart.”
Rachel chose a pale blue robe from a pile of clothing arranged on a large pillow and returned to where I was sitting on the rug.
“But Rachel, everything I’ve seen—” I passed my arm before me in a wide arc, to indicate the magnificence of what I had encountered here, in Babylon: the splendor of her existence, the unearthly gardens reaching up into the sky, the glistening tower studded with gems. “How could all of this have anything to do with a broken people?”
Rachel pulled the robe over her head then sat beside me.
“I know you know the difference,” she said, “between visible beauty and invisible suffering.”
She swept her own arm about the room, though her movement was agitated, as if her intention was to wipe it all away.
“You were there with me, with Boaz.” She paused. Was she about to say and Nahum? And oh—there it was again! My own cheeks burning merely at the thought of his name!
“You went with me into that dreadful pit. You saw what this place is really about …”
When she spoke again, her voice was hard.
“You’re wrong. Whatever beauty there is here is ruined. Underneath everything is—well, the pit. Not the kind of beauty I could ever believe in. Or give my life over to.”
I knew exactly what Rachel meant, recalled again that moment—so far away, now—at the Belle Meade Mansion, surrounded by splendor, Mama muttering to Papa, built on the backs of slaves. And the haunting photograph in the gift shop, the expansive living room with its high windows and elaborate ceiling moldings, etched with the ghostly outlines of the superimposed image of the slave quarters. My mind’s eye trembled now with images from my journey, cycling one after the other: Talia, my mama as a girl, talking about her little friend who lived in the orphanage, taken from her family, stolen! The very idea of a child being stolen filled me with grief. And Joel, my grandmother’s beloved friend and protector, pointing to the color of his skin, the anguish in his eyes as he spoke of the reality facing his grandchildren who lay sleeping, curled up together on the packed-mud floor of his hut. And the glowing light of a thousand flames, devouring the village of Dusiat, the thunderbolt crack as the synagogue doors succumbed, the great burning timbers collapsing inward as the fire spewed outward. Fire leaping back through the centuries, down into the vile pit we’d just fled that was burning still. My whole body felt filled to the brim with grief, as if the hellish fires throughout history were blotting out all hope, all belief in the goodness of humankind.
And yet, Rachel’s eyes were glowing with something else: belief, faith, hope. There was something mesmerizing about the light that shone from her and seemed to lift to the heavens with a message, as if her entire being was what was meant by the word prayer.
“Don’t you see?” she said. “We’re meeting on the shores of the Ahava precisely because we’re ready—and, praise be to God, finally able—to throw off the chains of all this beauty and return to our true heart …”
I desperately wanted to feel what she was feeling, to join her in the bottomless reservoir that was her sense of home. But I felt shut out, as if there were a thick pane of glass separating us. Despair leapt to my throat like an ugly toad.
“But you’ve never been to Jerusalem! Nor have your parents—or your parents’ parents. Isn’t this your home? How do you know that going there won’t be—I don’t know, a new kind of exile?”
My exasperation only seemed to deepen Rachel’s calm and resolve.
“It’s hard for people to leave everything they know,” she said. “I understand that. That’s why so many refuse to leave. I can’t blame them. They’re comfortable here. They have a routine, everything they need. But if that’s all a person knows, if that’s all they care about or want—well, then it becomes dangerous. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. That if you forget where you’re from, if you forget your home, you are lost. No matter how comfortable your house is, how much food you have to eat”—she picked up one of the fruit cakes and threw it back into the basket with distaste—“captivity is captivity.”
Rachel fell silent. I found myself tuning in to sounds I hadn’t realized were in the background: delicate chirpings, tinkly and hesitant, as if an entire army of baby birds were opening their mouths for the first time.
How easy it was for Rachel to make light of other people’s connection to where they had lived the whole of their lives. What did she know of homeless wandering? Of being cast far away from everything and everyone you had ever known and loved? She talked of the terrible captivity—of her great-great-grandparents being flung out of their beloved Jerusalem, of being strangers in someone else’s land. But she’d been born here! She’d always lived in the impressive stone home her father had himself been born and raised in, with its colorful wall hangings and comfortable sleeping rugs and daily gatherings and feasts. What did Rachel really know of exile?
Rachel went back to the window and I followed. “Look, the roadway is full of workmen, returning to their homes.”
The roses, now, were drooping; a handful of petals had fallen to join the few Rachel had absentmindedly peeled from the buds. I stooped to retrieve the velvety scraps, bringing them to my nose before placing them on the windowsill. Through the open square in the wall
I could see men of all ages parading silently down the street, their heads half-turned toward the sky.
“Think about your home,” Rachel said, her voice soft and sweet. “The home you’ve known and loved all your life. Close your eyes. Go there in your mind.”
I felt a renewed surge of grief. That was the last thing I wanted to do; it was just too painful. And yet, I found my eyes suddenly heavy. I tried to keep them open, but they closed of their own accord, as if under the power of a hypnotist. Images flashed across my closed eyelids, fleeting, intense, and red-tinged: Billy on the swing in the playground, energetically pumping his legs, his face alive with pleasure; Mama standing over the stove, watching for the moment to turn the pancake, an attentive look on her face as she listened to my chatter; Papa embarking on one of his careful explanations, as we strolled arm in arm along a Brooklyn city street. The creamy yellow walls of our house—and motion, climbing the stairs, family photographs passing me on the walls, the creak of my bedroom door. Safe in my precious room: the smell of my pillow, lavender, from the drop of sleep oil Mama put on it at night, the porcelain angels hanging up near the ceiling, beneath the moon we bought at the Museum of Natural History. My art museum postcard wall, and stack of playbills from musicals and plays, and snapshots of friends—here, at the beach, there at a party, in the lunchroom at school.
What was Rachel thinking? Why was she doing this?
“I know what you see,” she said.
How could she possibly know what I was seeing? Rachel, who had never seen an electric light bulb! Or a car, or photograph, or computer! She didn’t even know that any of the things I saw in my mind’s eye—any of the things in my world—existed! I felt a surge of anger. What did she know about anything? Why should I listen to her?
“And whatever it is you are seeing—that is only the beginning. A kind of map that will point the way to the most beautiful home in the world. Your real home. The home where we truly—and for all eternity—belong.”
I wanted to rip away her ignorance. I wanted to close my eyes again and have her—and everything around me, this confusing, alarming Babylon, the vast Euphrates River, the markets and hanging gardens and the ghastly Temple of Moloch—just disappear. Slide away forever. And in its place—in its place … I could hardly bear the longing that overtook me, the longing for my mother and father and brother, for the familiar places, my home and neighborhood and school, all the people I knew and loved. I only wanted home. Not some abstract place of religious worship, drenched in historical longings and aches. Not that, no: I wanted my little place in the world. Real, solid as stone. What I wanted was my home.
I shook my head, pure misery coursing through my veins, and made no attempt to staunch my tears. In that moment, everything became strangely transparent. It was as if I could suddenly see the shape and texture of Rachel’s emotions shimmering through her skin. Her passionate understanding of a true home—a place she’d never actually seen, but had only heard of, through stories and lamentations and songs, in the words of sages and prophets and aged family members; her inspired vision about what was false in comfort; her commitment to history—to her history, her people, the past.
A vision took hold of me: I was looking directly at Rachel, but I was seeing an odd and yet beautiful home built of delicate colors, intangible as a rainbow. The home that she had built with her heart, her imagination, yearning, knowledge—and toward which she was finally, on behalf of her parents and their parents and their parents’ parents, preparing to journey.
Maybe I had been wrong about her. Maybe she did in fact know how I felt! Perhaps our journeys were not, in the end, so very different, despite the unimaginable chasm lying between her experience and mine. I clasped her hand and looked into her eyes.
“I am going home, too.” I was hardly aware of what I was saying.
“So then—you will come? You will meet us after the wedding tomorrow at the river Ahava?”
Her eyes were alive with so much: sadness and excitement and anguish and hope.
I found myself almost gasping with joy. My mother! She was there, right there, in Rachel’s expression! My mother of long ago, before she was ill. Rachel … Sarah … Darlene … Talia … Mama. And then I felt something equally wonderful and unexpected: a feeling that perhaps my own eyes were shining with that same expression: that all of them were not only in me, but just, simply … me.
Rachel cocked her head, seemed to be listening for something; she nodded and smiled, as if I’d said something she’d been expecting to hear, though I hadn’t said anything at all. Then, she leapt up, and ran to the door.
“All right, then. I must go! Deborah is calling for me to come and have my hair braided. They have honeysuckle to put in my hair, all the way from Egypt! I will see you later, before the feast? By the waters?”
With that, she was gone.
With the closing of the door, my own moment of joy also slammed shut. How completely Rachel had misunderstood me! What I had felt in my moment of euphoria was that I, too, would be going home—really home, back to Grandma, and then soon after that, back on a plane to New York, where Billy and I would be reunited with our parents. Had I been deluded in thinking that Rachel had miraculously understood this? That she had magically intuited the truth about who I was and where I came from?
Rachel had clearly understood nothing of the kind. She had taken my declaration to mean that I was coming with her and her revered leader, Zerubbabel, back to Jerusalem.
I couldn’t take any more of this! Yet another journey, this one by foot, across countless miles of desert sands to a place I had no desire to be. Even the thought of Nahum did not comfort me. It was true, I’d been hit by a small thunderbolt; what was surely meant by falling in love, though it was less of a fall than a plummet. But there was another truth. Nahum was a stranger to me, a stranger in a place in which I was hopelessly stranded.
I collapsed, devastated, on the rug.
The tears returned with a vengeance.
I don’t know how long I lay there, curled in a ball, pouring my tears into the woolen rug. Each second crawled. I felt condemned to remain there, on that spot on the rug, coiled and alone, forever.
I must have fallen asleep. When I awoke, the room was in darkness. The torch lamps on the wall had burned out, the oblong opening cut into the wall now showed a navy patch of sky, allowing in the sounds of a crowd. People calling to one another, children laughing and playing, their feet scuttling in the dirt, while clangs and other noises suggested the preparation and setting up of food. I pictured servants laying tables in the square below Rachel’s room, bringing platters of roasted lamb meat and bowls brimming with dried nuts and fruits—pomegranates, ripe figs, glossy purple grapes—and dense, crusty rounds of bread, steaming fresh from the wood-burning oven.
The basket of cakes was still sitting in the near-darkness of the room where Rachel had placed it on the shelf above me. I took a piece and bit into it. This one was rich and chewy, dense with something that tasted like carob, and absolutely delicious. I was so hungry, I polished off three of them, as well as several figs that were sticky and sweet as honey. I sat back with relief, the hollow in my belly for the moment sated.
I slipped on my sandals, grabbed the headscarf I’d worn earlier, and headed quietly down the stairs. I had every intention of joining the festivities, but once I got outside, I couldn’t bring myself to take the alleyway leading around the back of the house. Instead, I found myself gliding swiftly down the stepped roadway. My feet seemed to have a plan of their own and for some reason my mind shut down, simply refused to think, allowing my feet to determine my movements. It was an immense relief; I was sick of thinking, sick of feeling so lost and filled with grief. Go ahead, I said aloud—I was talking to my sandals! Take me wherever you think I should go.
I turned onto an unfamiliar road; my feet took me this way and that, through streets that grew more crowded as I went along. As before, the crowd was made up of such unusual people: a group o
f tall, thin men with regal bearing and handsome dark-skinned faces, dressed in white robes. And across the path, what looked like a large family of men, women, and children, arguing in a sing-song language that included bird-like trills. Farther along, foraging in a pile of garbage, were a dozen or more urchins, their bare feet covered in sores.
The air filled with a pungent odor that brought to mind wood rot and slime, and unwashed bodies; moments later, the street opened out to a very wide section of river, clearly a port. Ships of all shapes and sizes crowded the waters, which sloshed muddily around sterns and bows, giving up oily froth. One massive vessel stood out; its elaborately carved bow was in the form of a dragon, the stern taking the shape of the dragon’s tail. Dozens of enormous oars hung at angles from the sides like splayed limbs, empty of the slaves who would engineer the ship’s motion across the seas. The upper deck swarmed with men dressed in ceremonial military garb; swords and scabbards hung from their sides.
I hurried along the teeming banks, holding my scarf close to cover my face, hoping to attract no attention. Soon, I was running. I could hear the sound of my own labored breathing; my chest felt tight, like someone was pressing down on it, but I only pushed myself harder. All I wanted was motion, the faster the better. The air whooshing past me felt like the breath of freedom. The world raced by, no longer distinct: vague and shifting shapes and colors, fading before my eyes.
Something caught my attention and brought me to a halt. I looked slowly around as my eyes refocused. To my surprise, the city buildings and streets had disappeared. I was surrounded by scruffy desert vegetation, clumps of reedy grasses and bushes low to the ground. In the distance, the dunes shimmered, lying up against the horizon like the humps of sleeping camels. Beside me, tall grasses and spindly trees spiked the grayish soil of the riverbank. An enormous moon bore down on the scene with unnerving glare. A glance behind me confirmed my suspicion: the walls of the city were not all that far away, perhaps a mile or so. It all seemed flat and unreal, as if it existed only in my imagination.