The Dovekeepers

by Alice Hoffman

  I knew from the talk of women at the well in Jerusalem that it was possible to bind a man to you and keep him from straying. It was a blood act, they’d said, fearful of such things, but blood did not frighten me. I went off alone to a place where I had seen black adders, where there was a grove of yellow Sodom apples, whose long, fibrous seeds served as wicks when we had enough fat from a partridge to use for the Sabbath light. I crouched down on my haunches and drew the face of a lion in the dirt with a stick, then circled it with stones, which I streaked with my own menstrual blood. I wanted to keep my lion caged, and in this way I imagined I might do so. I had no mother to teach me the simplest cures, but my spell proved successful. Ben Simon came to me that night. He still wanted me. I tied up my hair with my blue scarf. I was careful, and silent, grateful beyond measure. Everything seemed breakable now. What was between us had grown until it was a flower, the red blossom of the flame tree, which stains your fingers when you pick it, twisted onto a vine that pricks your skin.

  “I shouldn’t be here,” he said.

  The same was true for me, and I should have said as much. Instead I went to him and we denied ourselves nothing. None of us was meant to be in this wilderness, but as it had been written that we should journey here, it had been written that he would come to me. All I wanted was his hands on me, his mouth on mine, his body and mine becoming one. That was when I was alive. I wondered if perhaps I’d set the spell upon myself and if it was a curse I’d have to pay for eventually. I should have allowed Ben Simon to care for his wife and children, but I didn’t let him go. A leopard knows who she is; she does not calculate her prey’s agony and fear, she runs because she is made to do so, she takes what she must.

  Perhaps it had been better when I was invisible, when men walked past me and looked away, when I stayed at home like a dog. I barely knew myself now. But I knew what I wanted. When I went walking among the rocks, barefoot, I left a trail. He always followed to find me. Even so, this was not his sin to carry, for when he came to me, I never once said no.

  THE NIGHTS grew cooler and the air was blue, sweeping in from the Great Sea, bringing rain in the banks of clouds. Yet the boys’ fevers still hadn’t broken. They had been sick for too long a time. Their lips were swollen and white. Their eyes rolled back, and they talked to spirits. We watched them, uneasy, fearing the worst. It had come to the point where they would not eat or drink. And then one day, when the branches of the tamarisk bloomed with pink flowers and there were clutches of sage rising between the rocks along the cliffs, Sia herself fell ill. She swore there was nothing wrong with her, but she shivered and refused to eat. In the evening she lay down beside her boys, and when the next morning came, she did not rise from the ground. When I brought her water, she accepted it, but the way she looked at me was terrible. Once she clasped my hand and I thought she was about to curse me. Instead, she gazed into my eyes with a fevered intensity. I don’t know if she found what she was searching for, but perhaps she did, for she asked then if I would take care of him should she die. I knew who she meant. I bowed my head and promised I would.

  “Yes, of course you will,” she murmured. She didn’t sound angry, rather she appeared to be a woman who had surrendered and no longer needed to bother with the details of those who would remain on earth, except to make certain that the husband she loved would be loved in return.

  After that I couldn’t look at her, my only friend who’d been so kind to me. I helped as best I could, crouching beside her with a dampened rag to cool her burning skin. I boiled a tea of nettles and mint, but she couldn’t drink. I made a broth from the bones and meat of a partridge, but she shook her head and turned me away. I had never nursed anyone, nor had I attended to the ill or the dying. She lay there uncomplaining, as did the children, who moaned softly. In Jerusalem the minim could be paid to come with their secret chants. They would pray for cures from the Infinite One, and as masters of pharmaka they had access to medicines that could cure blindness, headaches, fever. The root of the peony could be crushed and digested by those who had seizures; hot wax could stop bleeding. The minim wrote the Almighty’s name a thousand times, the scroll slipped inside a roll of leather, prayers with mysteries so private they could only be whispered to God alone. If I could have, I would have gone to one of the women in the alleyways such as the one I’d turned to for Amram’s amulet, for they often had access to darker spells and could bring back a life the Angel of Death seemed poised to snatch away.

  But we had no one to whom we might plead for a cure. We had nothing but dust. Time passed, but the fevers did not. Even I knew a body could contain such demons for only so long.

  One evening Ben Simon did not come to me. I went to the place where the tamarisk grew. The rocks I’d placed so carefully had been jumbled up, perhaps by wild camels or by jackals making a den for the night. Either way, the spell had been broken. I came back to camp and found him holding his children, weeping. Now I knew I had been wrong. A person could indeed cry in the desert, even one marked by the bite of a lion. At that moment I understood who I was to him. I did not come first, or second, or even third.

  It did not diminish the way I felt or who he was to me.

  But I knew.

  There was only one thing I could do to please him. When I told Ben Simon I would journey to search for a cure, he embraced me. I drank in his gratitude as though it were water. I wanted to set forth alone, but he not would allow it. A woman in the desert was like a bird in a snare, there for anyone to catch. He insisted my father go with me, and although my father thought little of me, he agreed to be my companion, perhaps only to flee from those who were so ill.

  Ben Simon gave me his knife, the one he had used to murder so many. There were rusty stains upon it, but the silver blade was so sharp that when I grazed my hand against it blood sprang from my thumb. I kept the knife in my tunic, wrapped inside a flat piece of wool, tied with a string made of my goat’s threaded hair. Ben Simon made certain I took my pet along, so that her milk would give us sustenance if we found nothing else. He gave me the flask in which he carried water and the last of the barley cakes. I took these things, though I was seized with the impulse to give it all back. As a gift marked a beginning, so, too, did it signify an ending. Something was happening as we said good-bye. He was giving me all he had, and yet a curtain had been drawn between us. I could feel my throat closing up, my heart hitting against my chest. I looked upon my beloved’s face, but he no longer saw inside me. I had become transparent, no more to him than air. It was as it had been on the day we left Jerusalem, before he spied me sifting through the mud for water, before he knew my name. I thought perhaps this was the way an assassin said farewell, fiercely and with dignity. I had no idea that he could already read what had been written.

  WE LEFT when the morning was dark and there were hawks spiraling across the sky.

  My father and I went without knowing how long it might take to find a cure or if there was indeed anything for us to find. Mistrust was everywhere, and for good reason. We were as likely to be murdered as we were to reach a settlement. Bands of robbers occupied caves all across Judea. There were escaped slaves, thieves, rebels with nothing more to lose. The wilderness was enormous. Every limestone cliff resembled ones we had already passed. We circled, lost, for several days to avoid soldiers from the Roman Legion, the goat that I led mawing to warn us of our mistake. There were those who wandered here for all eternity, who were never seen by civilized people again. I had heard stories from the women at the well in Jerusalem of a lost young girl who lived with the hyenas, who would run with them, and eat carrion, and sleep among them, and who, when she was found, had sharpened teeth, for she was no longer human.

  When we passed the same cliffs for the third time, I had no other choice; I took the scarf my brother had given to me and tore off strips of silk. I tied the flares of blue to the thorn trees to help guide our return.

  A few days into our journey, my father surprised me by speaking to me. I shou
ldn’t have wished for such a thing, for he had nothing good to say. He ranted, blaming me for entrapping Ben Simon, as though convinced that I was the lion who had devoured this man, taking him from his wife. I looked at my father, defiant, wondering what he would think if I walked away and left him to fend for himself. He went on to inform me that if Ben Simon’s two boys survived they would owe me their lives and would be my sons as much as they were Sia’s. His eyes blazed with anger. “Maybe then God will forgive you.”

  I didn’t defend myself. I often ran my hand over the cuts etched into my flesh that marked off our time in the desert, stopping when I reached the day Ben Simon first came to me. In truth I had walked into the wilderness to search for a cure as a way to bring him back to me. I had not thought of the boys or Sia until this moment. God wouldn’t forgive me for that.

  My father and I made camp as dusk fell. In this season the nights were cold, and I gathered twigs along the way to make a fire at night. When there was no other fuel, we burned our own excrement and that of the goat, and the smoke reeked foully. Surrounded by that dreadful blaze, I feared we had wandered out of God’s sight. At night we slept sitting up, back against back, our cloaks around us, the folds of the cloth burdened with grime. We heard creatures in the dark, wild dogs and jackals, once a bear lumbering toward its cave. This was a route not many walked, for we were without a glimpse of water. We had heard of the fate of Sodom, a place which had been burned to the ground by lightning. People said there were trees filled with beautiful fruit, but once plucked the fruit turned to smoke and ash in your hand. In the daylight hours our every breath burned. We dared not visit any oasis for fear the Romans would find us. The goat had not had water for so many days, she could no longer give milk. She huddled beside me. There were stones in her hooves which I did my best to pluck out. All the same, when I insisted we go on, I thought I heard her crying.

  We had come so far that a single small section of my scarf remained. Behind us a map of blue charted our way through the wilderness, back to Ben Simon. Our journey seemed hopeless, for we could see nothing more than the white cliffs before us. My father scowled, vowing he could have predicted as much, for I brought only bad fortune. But then we came to the top of a cliff and spied a sight in the distance that made our hearts lift. It was the Salt Sea, a horizon of vivid azure. The water was changeable; one moment it was blue and then green and then a flat slate color. When clouds approached, the surface turned black, so that the Romans called it Lake Asphaltitis, for it threw up black clusters of tarlike asphalt. But for us, it resembled heaven, so blue we had to blink back tears.

  The sea appeared to be so close I imagined I could reach out and touch it, but my father said it was a walk of several more days. He warned that distance was an illusion that had tricked many men, even great sages, into walking to their death. They were certain they were moments from the sea and started off beneath the brutal sun on a course that would bring them directly to Mal’ach ha-Mavet, the Angel of Death who was said to have a thousand eyes, never losing sight of a single one of his victims.

  Days slipped away under the burning sun as we remained on the ancient path that led toward the sea. We passed the ruins of a settlement where it was possible to see the moon doubled when it was reflected in the Salt Sea. The settlement had been destroyed by the Romans. It was intended to be paradise built by the Yahad, a group of believers from the Essene sect, Jews who practiced strict codes with fixed hours of prayer. It was said that our people had been cut into four quarters, each with their own philosophy, and then cut up four more times for good measure. Truly righteous, the Essenes had indeed cut themselves off from all others.

  The Yahad’s name for their oasis was Sechacha, our word for cover, for their houses were domed with the broad leaves of the date palm trees. They had come to the desert as true believers, forsaking their comfortable lives in Jerusalem. They had foreseen the fall of the Temple and had fled here to await the End of Days, so that they might spend their last hours in chanting, their scribes at work on rolls of parchment to assure that their truth would not be lost when this world ended. The Essenes forbade idols, as we did, but they were far stricter in their practices and would not even touch a coin with an imprint upon it. They believed no man should be king. Still they would not lift up arms or fight their oppressors. We were in the hands of Adonai, they insisted, therefore arrows and spears were meaningless. There were children of darkness and children of light and the true battle on earth was to remain in the light and praise the one who knows all, Elohim.

  We saw the crumbling ruins of their aqueduct, and the dam under a waterfall, which we drank from deeply, though the pool was cluttered with the remnants from the settlement the Romans had destroyed: oil lamps and broken glass vessels, clay inkpots, piles of ostraca—broken pottery shards used for writing upon. There were still tall oaks and laurel trees to offer dappled shade, but anything made by human hands had been crushed. Fallen wooden beams hewn from palm trees and the leaves used for roofs were in brown, crinkled heaps. I wandered through the scriptorium, a library whose shelves and columns littered the ground. Bits of torn scrolls on goatskin or papyrus lay in the dirt, rotting and falling into shreds. I went along the cobblestones to see the ritual baths lined with wide plaster steps. There were snakes in these baths now, nesting beside pools of fetid water.

  At last I came to piles of bones, the remains of the faithful. Though I was unworthy, I tore my ragged clothes in the act of keriah, as a sign of respect and mourning, and murmured a prayer for the dead. May His great name be honored. Blessed be He, forever and ever.

  I found my way back to the fire my father had lit. We spent the night at this oasis, knowing the Romans would avoid this place and the ghosts of those they’d murdered, but starving jackals would be called to us by the fear in our scent. Surely they had been here before, for the bones of the dead were scattered so widely we could not collect them and store them in a stone container as was their due. We looked at each other, my father and I, and perhaps we saw each other in a different light as the stars hung overhead and the bones glimmered before us. My father did not berate me on this night. Instead, he told me I should be the first to sleep, having decided he would stay awake to watch for any beasts who might come to surround us. It was the first kindness he had ever offered me.

  WE WENT FORWARD early the next day. Perhaps an angel led us on our journey. We found our way south, the direction of the springs. It was here the Essenes from Sechacha had come to haul water back to their settlement. We turned onto a path edged by brambles. The goat, now famished, chewed leaves that were prickly and brown. But as we ventured farther, there were green shoots among the rocks. The breeze rose up, carrying the fragrance of balsam and the soft, nearly undetectable scent of water. All at once I recognized the sound of bees. It had been so long since I had heard their honeyed song I nearly swooned. We had come to an oasis where a spring arose from the ground and huge date palms towered. The air was a cool balm, so sweet it seemed we had stepped inside a cloud filled with perfume, rich with the scents of myrrh and coriander. We had found a group of the Yahad people who had survived, settling here to wait for the End of Days.

  In the clearing their grapevines and gardens were brilliant against the white-hot sky. The beauty of the world burst forth in every growing thing. There was a field of wheat and flax, yellow and gold, ablaze with sun. We heard bells that were hanging from the trees on twists of black rope, ringing as they moved with the breeze. There were dozens of mulberry and olive trees circling a stone well, alongside a grove of pistachios that turned the haze green. A pen of forty goats was set up in the shade, another forty sheep dozed in the sun.

  Many among the Essenes had been priests, some lived without women in the limestone cliffs, their caves marked by mezuzoth, containers holding scrolls in which prayers to God were enclosed. These men were too pure for the entanglements of life in this world, but there were also men who had arrived with wives and daughters, their women dressed
in white linen, heads covered at all times. They resided in large tents with their families, some of them having fled from Sechacha, others having arrived only recently from Jerusalem after the fall of the Temple.

  People peered at us as we walked through the settlement. There were stone common houses, and ritual baths, and libraries where scholars set to completing documents, dividing themselves into groups of three, so that the men could work on scrolls written upon animal skins or papyrus throughout the day and the night. Perhaps my father and I looked like demons, made of sand rather than flesh. Our eyes peered out of our filthy faces. My hair was like blood twisted down my back, so long it reached past my waist. Some of the women blinked when they saw me, but no one jeered. The people of the Yahad sect practiced kindness in what they believed to be our last days in this world. What belonged to one man also belonged to his neighbor.

  The women came to greet us. The fabric they wove on their looms was so light their garments flowed around them. I yearned for sheets of linen to wrap around myself so no one would see me. Perhaps then I would be able to withstand the intensity of God’s bright light when He could not forgive me for all I’d done.

  Although these holy people had lost many of their own at the hands of the Romans, for they revealed that the settlement of Sechacha had been conquered and ruined even before the Temple fell, the Essenes weren’t willing to carry daggers, which they considered an affront to the greatness of God. Quickly my father made the decision not to tell them he was one of the Sicarii. These people considered the Sicarii to be on the side of darkness, snakes who defied Adonai. We merely announced that we were among those who had been expelled from Jerusalem, a poor father and daughter who had become wanderers. When we spoke of the mother and children traveling with us who had been stricken with fever, the Essene women had compassion and quickly resolved to help us. One among them, who identified herself as Tamar bat Aaron, escorted my father to a learned man, a priest whose followers called him Abba—father—a teacher of righteousness whose people did his bidding out of joy rather than duty.