The Dovekeepers

by Alice Hoffman

  Before we left we gathered figs, along with a bundle of branches from the acacia trees. There was a storm rising, and the sea was filled with black lumps. They looked like stones set out to block our way. Our mother said not to worry. She swore that the water would heal and protect us; she had seen this as her own destiny. The boat rocked, and the man who rowed it uttered curses and fought with the sea. Still my mother was serene. Salt water splashed in our faces and threatened to blind us, but halfway across the sea turned calm, blue and then gray and then finally silver and still. The mountains of Judea were reflected in the water, floating before us. The vision made it appear that we had already reached our destination, though it was still a far journey. I caught the scent of fire and metal. My elements. My double life.

  When we reached the other side of the Salt Sea, the boatman left us. In the silence around us, I felt I could hear the beating heart of the world, lev ha-olam, the center of creation in the distance of Jerusalem. We camped where we had been left, exhausted from our travels. At night, after you and Adir had fallen asleep on the damp sand, our mother motioned for me to follow. We made a fire from the acacia wood we had gathered on the other shore, the last acacia I would ever see that had taken root in Moab. My mother released her pet doves. Once they had disappeared, she added their cage to the fire and let it burn in a blur of flame.

  Here in this emptiness, I could not stop thinking of the Iron Mountain and my life there, how I had imagined I was flying when I rode through the night with the troop of fearless raiders, how we had claimed everything we had come upon. I was fourteen, but I had killed several men. Afterward, I had burned the flowers of the acacia in tribute to each, as was the custom. Your father often brought back branches that were hung with hundreds of blooms for our mother. Although she thanked him, she wasn’t partial to those beautiful boughs. She didn’t appreciate the sweet nature of the flowers and how the bees were attracted to them. Those winged creatures understood the true essence of the acacia, the reason we burned it in honor of a soul. When acacia blooms are set aflame, they rise upward, in tribute to our God, who had made them.

  The only thing that grew on this side of the Salt Sea was the Jericho balsam, a tree people say arose from the underworld that contains a flame inside an inedible fruit. Our mother took three of these fruits and cast them into the fire, and the flame turned yellow, like gold. She then told me to remove all of my garments. Because I dared not disobey, I did as she said.

  I took off my leggings and tunic and then my cloak, along with the head scarf that was dyed the blue color of your father’s people. Our mother burned it all. The fabric sent inky sparks into the sky. She unplaited my hair and combed out the knots with her fingers. I didn’t complain, though it hurt. I said nothing and choked back tears. I had been told that at the beginning, when we first arrived, your father’s people had whispered that he had brought back a witch from Jerusalem and that our mother possessed the power to entrance him. It was best not to look her in the eye, the women of our camp said, or to go against her. Now I wondered if perhaps they’d been right. I feared my own mother on this night. I stood there naked on the salt, my feet burning as she chanted in a language I did not understand, mud from the Salt Sea covering her arms and throat and face so that she appeared to be a demon herself. I felt unmasked, my breasts unbound, my hair so long it reached past my waist in a black sheet.

  Our mother carried her small woven bag of belongings. When she reached inside, I dreaded what might be revealed. Perhaps a snake or a scorpion, or a knife meant to mark me a sacrifice, as Abraham had been commanded to bring up his only son, Isaac, before God. It took a moment for me to understand what she intended even after she revealed what she had brought with her from Moab. It was a skirt and a cloak made of silk that your father had given to her, a treasure from India, spun by butterflies. I dressed, slipping on the unfamiliar garments, along with a pair of fine leather sandals. It was dark that night, which was a good thing. I would not have been able to look at myself. I had become a stranger in my own skin. I still felt the wings above my shoulder blades, yet they seemed bound in a way they never had when there was a sheet of linen wound around me, concealing them.

  Our mother and I said prayers together, those that are recited when a child is born and a human soul has entered into our world. It was the night when I became a woman, though I kept my name. Aziza, the compassionate, the powerful. Aziza, the woman who knew what it was to be a man.

  In the morning a messenger arrived from Masada. He had been made aware of exactly where we would be waiting. He gave us fresh water and food, then told us he was meant to lead us to safety. He looked at me in a way no man had before.

  It was the first time in my life that I understood who I was to the rest of the world.

  I made certain to lower my eyes.

  EVEN NOW I am drawn to the ways of my old life. I spend as little time as possible inside the dovecotes. Doves do not interest me, no women’s work does. I cannot weave or sew without pricking my fingers. When I cook, I burn the flatbread. My stew is tasteless no matter what ingredients I might add to the pot. There is not enough salt or cumin in the world to make my attempts palatable. I am clumsy at tasks my sister could complete with ease when she was a mere eight years old.

  I often find myself beside the barracks, pulled there especially on the evenings that mark the new month, Rosh Chodesh, when the women gather to celebrate, for it is not with them I belong but here, alongside the warriors. When I find arrowheads, I hold them in the palm of my hand, talismans from my past. The blades fit perfectly in my grasp. Their cold, flat weight is what I yearn for. Metal alone can reach the center of who I am.

  I have been in this fortress for so long, but I still dreamed of that other time, though I told no one, not even Amram, to whom I have pledged myself, despite my mother’s warnings. Some things are meant to be kept secret, I learned that young, and I have kept our secret well. My mother may be flooded with doubts, but she has no proof that I have disobeyed. She’s piled salt outside our threshold, so that I might leave footprints, but I leap over, leaving no trace. She’s tied a strand of her hair across the doorway, but I merely crawl beneath it. I can outwit her at some things; all the same, I think of her prophecy every time I meet Amram. I am his, yet I know I have disgraced myself in keeping the truth from my own mother, the one who gave me life not once but three times.

  From the start my sister was my accomplice. We had been here for nearly a year, working beside our mother in the dovecotes, when Amram first arrived. We spent days devoted to toil. The three dovecotes were like a family of goats—the father, built as a tower, then came mother and child, square and squat, small and then smaller yet again. They were my world then, as I avoided our neighbors and kept away from other women, afraid they would somehow see through to the differences between us.

  When Amram arrived from Jerusalem at the beginning of the summer in the year the Temple fell, he was merely one more young man running from his enemies, convicted by his bloodline as well as by his actions, an assassin who could be seen as a murderer or a hero depending on who you were and where fate had placed you. I happened to be there, crossing the plaza. I was nearly sixteen, but still I kept to myself. I did not take note of any man until I saw Amram climb the serpent’s path. He did so easily, as though the rugged cliffs were little more than a field. What was steep and difficult for others was for Amram no different than air to the lark. It was clear he could conquer whatever came before him, man or beast, even the land itself.

  Watching him, I was almost ashamed of how handsome I found him. He was the warrior I wished I had become, fluid and lean, sure of himself. I envied him and wanted to possess him and all that he had. I remembered the way the dusk fell on the other side of the Salt Sea in waves of deep blue on the day my mother warned me of the prophecy that I should avoid love at all costs. But I was born to disobey her. I knew this when I found I could not look away from Amram. I tried and failed, though I was iron and s
tronger than most in such matters. Aziza, the powerful, was somehow undone. Was there some angel or demon who remembered what my name had once been and now called me Rebekah from the reaches of heaven? I stood there like any other woman at the Snake Gate alongside all the rest who gathered there, charmed and seduced by Amram even before he reached us.

  Perhaps the moment might have passed and I would have turned away and resumed my duties, if only he hadn’t seen me as well, if we hadn’t been transformed by a single glance that passed between us. I realized I had been caught from the moment I’d given in to my impulse to stand upon the wall to cheer him on. My intention was otherwise. Merely to view the sort of man I might have been in my second life. Instead, I became a woman in that instant. I gazed through the shimmering heat, watching his fate and mine twine together as he climbed the serpent path.

  I WAS CURIOUS, drawn to him. When the rains came, I stood beside the armory, dripping wet, hoping to catch a glimpse of this man at the barracks. I circled the wall, in search of signs marking where he had walked: an arrowhead, a footprint, a strand of hair. When the dust rose I thought of him, when I gazed into the sky I was reminded of him, when I fetched water, ate my dinner, worked among the doves, all of it, no matter how trivial, brought him to mind. I would not have pursued him, but one day he stood in my path as my sister and I hurried to the dovecote. I raised a hand to shield my eyes so I could take him in and so that I might hide the mark beneath my eye. In that instant I was claimed yet again. He grinned, convinced he knew me, and I grinned back, knowing he did not.

  Our mother was waiting for us. Had she been beside us, I would have been made to turn away. Perhaps everything that followed would have been different, but as fate would have it, she wasn’t there, and for that I was immensely thankful. Nahara threw me a look when I told her to go on, but she did as I asked.

  “You come this way every day,” Amram remarked once my sister had gone.

  “How would you know?” I spoke to him as I had once spoken to Nouri, as though I were an equal, not one who would bow before him.

  “Because I watch you.”

  I felt the way I had when I was in the mountains, myself once more.

  “Not as often as I watch you,” I said, my grin widening.

  Because I’d grown up among boys, I didn’t have the guile of a woman. Amram laughed, surprised by my honesty. I suppose when I first kissed him, holding nothing back, I did so as a man would, unwound by ardor. If he was surprised by that, he was not displeased.

  THE WOMEN in the fields gossiped about us. I heard their words, but such comments were nothing to me, wasp stings, grains of sand in my shoe. I let the sparks of their rude jealousy fall to the ground. None among them had the courage to seek out my mother and risk her anger with stories of my misbehavior.

  We began to meet in the dark, beside the fountain in the Western Plaza. Whenever I was with Amram, my sister vowed I was beside her. She was my shield, my key to freedom, the little dove who carried the words I wrote for her to say when she went to tell Amram the hour when we could safely meet. I had rescued my sister once, now she repaid me. She often crossed the plaza with me in the evenings. We held hands and whispered like children, but when we neared the fountain, there came a point when she masked her eyes and I went on alone. If she did not witness our meeting, she would not be forced to tell an outright lie when she assured our mother she had not spied me with any man.

  We found places to be alone, storerooms, gardens, the field late at night. Once again, as it had been when I gave my sister life, someone’s breath belonged to me and mine to them. Amram swore he would keep our secret from my mother, and he was a man of his word. There were those who vowed that in Jerusalem he had been the most daring of the assassins, able to transform himself. His father, that great and fearsome assassin Bar Elhanan, was said to possess the ability to vanish while in plain sight. Perhaps he had shared this trick of invisibility, for Amram was able to slink past my mother, his presence little more than a cloud. We grew so brave we dared to meet in the cellar below our chamber, for there was a set of secret stairs in the floor of the old kitchen, and yet another that entered the cellar from the plaza. We slipped off our cloaks beneath the floor my mother stood upon. Perhaps I did so to spite my mother, to claim my life for myself and disprove her prophecy that love would only bring me anguish.

  In our secret cellar, I tried my best to spy Amram in the dark scrim of shadows before he could see me. I could make out field mice in search of grain, and the drowsy forms of bats hanging from the ceiling, but Amram tricked me every time, grasping me before I knew he was there, sliding his hand over my mouth so I wouldn’t cry out. I could have eluded his grasp easily and raised a knife to his throat before he blinked, but I told myself this was the game we played, hiding our true natures. Though he did not see me for who I was, though I should have known better, I never denied him anything. And yet I was dissatisfied.

  He did not see through my veils, and I did not reveal my deepest self to him. Perhaps it was only to defy my mother, but by the time Revka arrived to work alongside us in the dovecotes, I had promised myself to him. Not long after his sister, Yael, came to work alongside us, I was his.

  PERHAPS SOME secrets are impossible to keep, for it seemed my sins were written upon me. I was unwed, yet I knew what brides knew, how men groaned with passion, how they sometimes wept with all they felt, how their desire could bind them as tightly as the clothes I wore in this life—shawls and veils and cloaks—tying me to who I had become. Men eyed me rudely at the market when I stood in line for our rations of wheat and millet. They watched as I carried baskets of dung into the field and made suggestions I ignored. I was not like a ewe, there to take on the burden of their desires. I shouted to them that they should run home to their wives or their mothers. The very idea that I would bow to any man who chose to speak to me in such a manner made me a warrior once more. I let the shawl slip from my hair and shoulders, allowing my arms to shine bare in the sunlight. That was when the other women first began to whisper that I was one of the sheydim, a creature no one could control. In that they were correct. I did as I pleased, even though my mother had forbidden me to do so, even though it was a sin.

  I began to wonder if there wasn’t some merit in the field women’s stories about me, if perhaps what set me apart from all others wasn’t the life I’d led before I’d come here but was instead cast from the truth of who my father might be. Though he was not an angel or an incubus but a man who wrote upon parchment, I puzzled over his identity more often as time went on. I thought it odd that the messenger had known precisely where to meet us on the shore of the Salt Sea and that he had bowed his head to my mother, as though she were the wife of an important man. I wondered why, of all the places we might have gone in this world, we had come to this fortress and not another.

  My mother would tell me nothing. She refused to divulge where she had sent the doves when she’d stood upon the Iron Mountain. She denied having ever received messages in return, though the words that had been sent to her had burned me and I still carried their scar. All she would say was that she had been a girl who had followed the path the Almighty had set out for her.

  “Would I ever be so coarse and full of myself as to ask God why He set me upon one path and not another?”

  When she said this, her face was young and innocent. For once she, who was always so fierce, appeared vulnerable. My mother had taught me much. Because of her I could read more languages than most learned men, yet I knew little about her or about myself. Ever since Moab, our secrets had resembled a spider’s web, one strand holding up the next. The words we did not say became the only things that mattered. We moved like spiders, circling one another, suspicious, waiting for whatever was to come next.

  “Do I not have a path as well?” I asked, emboldened when she told me she had not questioned the direction in which God had led her.

  She gazed at me thoughtfully. “One you must avoid at all costs.” That rema
rk alone was enough to convince me I must find my own way.

  AS OUR secrets forced us further apart, I kept to myself. Following my mother’s lead, I confided nothing. I stayed in our chamber when she went to assist women in their labor, or ministered to those afflicted by fevers, taking her pitcher and bowl and a soap made of fat and ashes, insisting that the ill wash their hands to purify themselves. I did not accompany her when she went at night to the synagogue, where she would dig in the dirt to bury amulets in holy places for the protection of those who came to her in need. When my mother asked me to venture beyond the gate with her, to gather rue and marjoram and the yellow apples of the mandrake used for pharmaka, I had little choice but to obey. But even when I tried to honor her wishes, I was of no use to her. My hands weren’t nimble. I tore at the leaves, and the fruit split apart in my hands. I hadn’t the touch for sorcery. I owned none of the skills a woman must possess.

  It was little wonder Yael took my place. My mother had chosen her to join us the moment she walked through the gate, as Yael followed behind her father, her head bowed, her red hair tangled with salt. Perhaps my mother was moved by her plight, which she divined as soon as she saw the sway in Yael’s walk and the manner in which she covered her middle so carefully with her shawl. My mother had also been alone while she carried her first child into this world.

  When Yael spoke her brother’s name in the dovecote, I’d felt my blood race, fearful that my hidden life could be read in my expression. Here was Yaya, the sister Amram had spoken of so often, his childhood protector and friend. I should have pulled her aside to beg for stories of his boyhood, but I remained distant. I had no reason to put any faith in her or to trust her with my secrets. When she spied me with Amram at our meeting place, I waited for her betrayal, expecting her to reveal the truth to my mother, with whom she shared so many confidences. But she never spoke of it. Instead she took me aside to whisper that her brother was a fine man. Who I loved was not her concern.