Alice Hoffman - The Dovekeepers

I would not move when my father shouted at me, or when he raised his hand to me. In the end my father had to bury them. It was a woman’s place to ready bodies for the Angel of Death and chant lamentations, then to set herself aside until the specter of death was no longer with her, but I refused. Welts rose across my back and shoulders when my father beat me, but I would not be his dog on this day. My father shouted out that I was a coward, afraid to see to the needs of the dead, but he was wrong. I wasn’t afraid to be unclean any more than I was frightened of the dead. I only feared that if I held Ben Simon for too long, I wouldn’t be able to let him go.

My father carried the bodies to the highest cliff and set rocks atop them so hawks and vultures and jackals couldn’t get near. He said prayers of lamentations, having folded Ben Simon’s prayer shawl around his own shoulders to honor him. For seven days after this ritual, my father had to sit in the sun to cleanse himself because he had been so close to death and was considered tamé, impure. He sang the lamentations that a woman was meant to sing because I would not allow those words into my mouth. I would not recognize Ben Simon’s death or see him walk into the World-to-Come. When I closed my eyes I could envision the natural grace of his strong body, the sharp planes of his face, his deep glance of appraisal which cut right through me. I did not want to let him go, yet I could hear my father’s laments and prayers even when I covered my ears with my hands. His chanting sounded like the wind, and like the wind it wrapped around me until I heard nothing but a single song.

I wondered if in his illness Ben Simon had been like the lion who had fought so hard against nine warriors, only to lay down his head and die before the tenth. I wondered if he had lasted until the day when it rained, when we were so close, only moments away, and if that rain had been made of his tears, for he had not been ashamed to weep.

I remembered the words I’d overheard before we left the Essenes when Abba had sent his messenger to my father. Even for the righteous, it is only up to Adonai to punish. Perhaps this holy man had known who we were all along. Now the assassins’ punishment had fallen upon us. If one of the Sicarii carried all the men he had murdered on his back wherever he went, did the dead not wish to eventually take their revenge? Perhaps their spirits had followed Ben Simon, and when he was weakened by grief, when he sank down, eyes shining wet before the still forms of his children, they had burned through his flesh and overtaken him.

I buried the Essenes’ cure, for it was worthless now, as they said things of this world always were. As I dug in the hard, white earth, I wondered if perhaps I was the one being punished, if I was now meant to suffer as I had made my friend suffer when I stole what belonged to her.

During the seven days my father was away to cleanse himself from his nearness to the dead, I did not eat or drink. I tied the goat to a low bush and didn’t listen when she called to me. On the dawn of every day I cut a mark of my sorrow into my leg, each more deeply than the last, for I now used Ben Simon’s sharp knife. Every wound was like a kiss to me, a dark slash of passion. The scent of blood emanated from my skin, a film that covered me. A leopard came one night and sat on the other side of the fire pit, watching me. I did not rise to chase it away. Come and devour me. See if I care. My eyes met with his, and I saw the yellow glimmer of violence in his glance. But in the end he must have deemed me worthless, for he slunk away.

When my father returned from his days of purification, he was shocked to see my condition. I could barely rise from the ground, as ashen as the dust I would someday become. I had nothing in my life but to wait my turn for the World-to-Come. What was this earth to me now? A prison cell, a lash of rope. My father had always told me I was nothing, and that was what I had become. Later he admitted that, when he saw me before him, he thought of my mother at the hour of my birth, already gone from this world. On the day he found me wasting away, he thought of what she would have done had she been there with her only daughter. She would have wished to save me. That was why he convinced me at last to take a sip of water.

On the eighth day after Jachim ben Simon was buried under stones, I broke my fast and drank from the leather goatskin that had belonged to him. I did so not for myself but for my beloved, for he was not yet gone from me. Though the Angel of Death had snatched him, a flicker of his spirit remained.

By then I knew I would not bleed again.

* * *

SOON AFTER, my father had a powerful vision. He awoke with tears running down his face and his faith renewed. He had dreamed that my brother was waiting for us in a tower. The dream was so real he could hear my brother speak to him. Look, and I will come to you, Amram had said. My father vowed that when the clouds lifted he would see his son.

Believing this to be so, the assassin took a staff so that he might climb the highest of the crags, where he believed it would be possible to witness on earth what he had viewed in his dreams. I did not argue with him, but I was skeptical. My father might have faith, but I had none. I saw us as we had become: a man too old and frail to be a worthy assassin, his ruined daughter who was unable to weep or bleed. I thought perhaps someone had put a hate curse on me, perhaps it was Sia before she died, perhaps it was all I deserved in this world.

The rains came now with great force. The air was blue and wet with heavy downpours. My father and I sat for days in the cave to escape the flash floods in the nachal, the goat our only company. This fetid cave was the last place that Ben Simon had been in this world; he had breathed in the damp, chalky scent of the limestone and had breathed out his soul inside the cobwebbed confines of this cavern. I thought I might feel closer to him here, but it was Sia’s spirit that hovered close by. I felt her pinch me as she tried to get my attention. She pursued me in my dreams. Did you think it would be any other way? Did you think you would get what you wanted? When I awoke, panting for air, I sometimes believed I could hear a burst of her laughter, as if we’d had a battle and she had been the one to win and was now pleased with the results.

The months of winter were upon us. I wanted to run away, but the rains that had fallen in sheets made for a world I couldn’t flee. All at once the desert was a sea. Where there had been only the rattle of the wind, now all we heard was the rushing water in the nachal . What we had longed for we now had in abundance. There were pools everywhere; at the bottom of every ravine the floodwaters ran so fast that any goat or deer making a misstep could easily be carried away. Flying insects rose up in swarms, borne from the water in funnel clouds. Ibex came to drink and were refreshed. My little goat tugged on her rope; she’d always followed at my heels, but now she seemed maddened by the scent of rain. She kicked and raced in a circle, and her milk was fresh and tasted like grass. I wept to think that life went on even when so much had been lost, that rain still fell and myrtle grew between the rocks.

I found a clear pool that had gathered in a gulley. I realized I hadn’t been cleansed since I’d gone to the ritual bath of the Essene women. I took off my garments and saw that I was bruised and thin. I barely recognized my own flesh. And yet my belly appeared thickened, bulging, so that I looked like a woman who had satisfied myself with too much water. I saw how deeply I had gashed my leg, scars that would never fully heal. I’d had to restrain myself from cutting myself to shreds, for the knife against me made me feel I was being taken by Ben Simon, and I longed for that blood-brimmed connection.