The Book of V. Read online

  * * *

  So it begins. The man gathers other men and they move on the camp like a wind. They kick over pots, stamp out fires, pull up stakes. They do not touch the people. They don’t even look at them. They sweep through as if the people are not there at all.

  The Hebrews move. They know how to move. After the men have left—they come frequently now, once or twice a week, though never at the same time—they make their camp again, farther along the wall. This is like chasing the shade but different: they do not go far, but their work is hard. They must remake their tents and pallets and pits. They have little time to form their bowls and beads, or pit their dates, or wash their sheep’s guts. Some want to go west, or east, but others want to wait—the Persians will lose interest, they argue. They take turns hiding the boy who made the mistake with the coins. A few believe he should be sacrificed, laid out before the Persians, to save the camp. They are ignored. The boy, called Itz, is wrapped in rugs, or buried in sand, or hidden at the river behind rocks and sheets the women pretend to wash again and again.

  The boy’s father, Marduk, who was already angry at the boy generally, for his softness, is now angrier because the boy is useless to him. Itz is his oldest child—the others are one and two and four and five and six and eight—yet he can no longer be sent to carry water or taken on the journey to work the family’s fig trees. And Marduk cannot go as often as he should, because he is needed to help remake the camp. When he does go, he finds fruit rotting on the ground. His anger swells. He can’t afford to pay a boy from a neighboring tent to help, and he can’t bear to beg for help, and he can’t even bring the one person who would help him along to help, not because she can’t do the work—she can, far better than a nine-year-old boy—but because he cannot allow himself to be alone with her. She is seventeen. She is Marduk’s niece, left in his care when his brother died, and she is the source of Marduk’s holiest anger, the frustration that heats his blood until it hurts. Her name is Esther.

  Esther will not be beautiful always. In some other time, her tall nose and brown lips and ferning eyebrows that touch between her eyes will not be considered the pinnacle of beauty, but now, in the early summer of 462 BCE—and now is all Marduk has, unable as he is to go back to when his brother was alive or forward to when the girl will be old enough to marry respectably among the Jews, let alone far enough back or forward to reach an entirely different pinprick of civilization—now her face contains nobility (a lank, tall angle to the nose and jaw) and sex (a pink shimmer to the eyelids, glimpsed at each blink) and mystery (even Marduk, who knows perfectly well the tribes from which she descends, looks at her and wonders, What is she?).

  And only seventeen. And a late bloomer, which is why it’s taken so long for her to smoke up Marduk’s tent, swell his brain and nether parts, obscure his wife, who is or at least was beautiful, too. Only Marduk’s children are innocent to Esther’s menace: to them she is a second mother, more patient and less tired than their own.

  Marduk thinks of selling her into slavery. He thinks of killing her. He loves his niece, he hates her. He loved his brother, he hated his brother. Harun. Favorite from the age of three, barely up to Marduk’s waist and already sitting with their father in shul. This was when they lived in the city still, within four walls. While Marduk rolled marbles, Harun taught himself to read; by four he spoke three languages; by five he recited Torah, though he couldn’t look you in the eye. Later he was celebrated in Bashan for opposing the old synagogue’s opulent renovations and starting his own services in a former stable. He stayed a dreamer even after his wife died; he was carrying an armload of books during the Four Day Raid when he turned down the wrong street. Marduk cannot kill his brother’s daughter, and he cannot sell her into slavery. He can’t even climb on top of her, though he knows most other men would. He is a good man, Marduk. This is what his wife says to his children when they run from his flexed palm. And he is. How could a man who was not good grow such sweet, perfectly formed fruit?

  “Let me come,” Esther says to Marduk, balancing the baby on her right hip as she chops figs. Esther’s left-handedness is her one ugliness, but even that Marduk wants to eat.

  “I can help pick,” she says, and it’s clear that she offers freely. Her black eyes are flecked yellow, like a night sky. He would swim into them, if he could. He would hide there, safe from her body.

  * * *

  One day, the answers to Marduk’s many problems seem to come all at once, in the form of a command sent out from the palace: A pageant! Bring the most beautiful virgins from across the kingdom! The king will choose one for a new queen!

  What happened to the old queen—who was herself newish—Vashti? No one knows—certainly no one in the camp. The command is not meant for them. But they are not deaf. We are not deaf! Marduk shouts silently. His ire fists, then coalesces into a thought. It’s like a ball of mud suddenly turning to clear water.

  Esther will be the queen of Persia.

  Ha!

  He knows it’s impossible. She is a Jew; she is a no one. She’d go up against girls from as far away as Greece. If he spoke the idea outside his tent, the people would howl.

  And yet. Maybe it doesn’t matter that she doesn’t have a chance. Maybe the idea is smaller, and more practical: Marduk sends her with his figs—his most succulent, sweet enough to make a man moan—and the king, though he cannot choose her, chooses Marduk as his new fig vendor. He cancels his existing contract and takes on Marduk and then, at the right moment, Marduk tells the king about his son. (For the purposes of optimism, Marduk ignores the question of whether the king’s fig man would have access to the king’s ear.) He is honest. He confesses to his son’s mistake with the coin. Then he tells about the marauders. The king, understanding—or at least fig-loving—orders them to stop. Itz will be a boy again. In a year, Marduk will have made enough from his figs to marry Esther off to Nadav, the boy she says she loves.

  With fewer words, he consults his wife. Complaints he has only grumbled about he lays out with force. Esther costs the family too much. The girl’s ideas of herself are outsized. What orphan decides to want a boy from a family so wealthy, albeit in the past, that they demand a true dowry even in a camp, so full of their own worth the mother calls herself a créative and then—the gumption—manages to sell to the palace what she creates? (Nadav’s mother is the one who makes the bone necklaces. She already has what Marduk wants.) The family has given Marduk and Chura one year to come up with the dowry—after that, they say, it will be another girl’s turn. There is another girl already picked out, they say. It’s a betrothal, as far as they’re concerned.

  All this his wife must see. But she has been a mother to Esther. When he tells her about the pageant, she eyes him with disgust.

  “No,” she says. “We made a promise.”

  He nods, a little disappointed but mostly relieved; she has done it for him, taken away the choice.

  But she finds him the next day. His arms are raised to the sky. He is stretching after a session of pit building with a neighbor and watching, while pretending not to watch, his niece, in the distance, rolling the children in a barrel. Esther’s cloth slips as she bends; her back is narrow and dark; the children’s squeals lift the camp into momentary peace. He doesn’t notice his wife approaching until she takes his beard in her hand and pulls him to look at her: purple under her eyes, the line that’s grown between them since Itz went into hiding. Her hands are nearly black from pitting and chopping figs. The ones they collect now take twice the work, to cut away the bruises and the rot.

  “She’s a good girl,” she says, in the dry voice she uses when she has arrived at a decision. “She’ll be treated well.”

  “Is that right?” Marduk swallows back bile.

  “She won’t become queen, but she’ll be taken care of.”

  Marduk waits, to be sure she’s sure.

  “It’s good,” she says.

  He perseverates for a week. His wife is talking about the night
station, he knows, though she will not name it. Neither will he. The night station is the place the king’s concubines are said to occupy. The station is rumored by his friend Jebi to be a sordid place, a labyrinth of flaking tunnels where girls are rarely virgins by the time they meet the king. Esther may be raped if she is unwilling, or beaten even if she is. Marduk suppresses thoughts of the moods of a man who has lost his queen. He tells himself that the station may in fact be what most people in the camp assume it to be, a largely restful place of boredom and guitars, grapes and fans. Maybe, too, his wife is wrong—maybe there will be no station for Esther, but some better fate. Or maybe she will simply be returned, and Marduk will be the king’s fig man, and all will proceed as he has planned.

  He sees his niece braiding the loaf of challah. This week’s bread is eggless—the camp’s chickens are hungry—and will be low, and hard, but Esther braids as if it will be perfect, her mouth open in concentration, her tongue tensed against her bottom lip, the muscles in her upper arms dancing.

  He cannot send her away.

  He sees his niece looking at Nadav. A fire rises in Marduk’s throat, a desire to rip them apart and smash their heads against the wall.

  He has to send her away.

  * * *

  She resists. She won’t go. She’ll work for her keep—why won’t he let her work for her keep? Her uncle has lost his mind. What could a poor Jewish orphan possibly be to the king of Persia? He won’t pick her, and then what? So maybe he likes Marduk’s figs. He might sell Esther, or kill her. Her uncle laughs and says, Unlikely. What, then? Esther asks. What? But he won’t answer, and her aunt doesn’t meet her eyes. Please, she says, gesturing toward the tent’s open flaps, as if bickering in the camp is ever done in private. Itz lies meekly in one corner. He was down by the river earlier, hiding in the women’s washing, but then the Persians marched through, overturning buckets and barrels, and Itz was rolled home beneath a pile of bedclothes. His skin, which used to be brown, gives off a green pallor. Esther unties the flaps—made of bright, beautiful fabric her aunt’s mother’s mother wove—and lets them fall. The tent goes dark. “The night station,” she says, as it strikes her.

  No one speaks.

  She can’t believe at first what she’s hearing. She wants to shout, to tell them that her father was teaching her to read when he died, that her mother, when Esther was very small, tried to teach her a little magic. Her parents imagined that she would be like them—learned but modest, unconcerned with status or wealth. Better, in other words, than most people. But that will sound like boasting—it will only make her uncle happier to send her away. He doesn’t like her. How has she not realized this before? She feels ashamed, for herself and for her parents. She says, more quietly now, “This isn’t what they wanted.”

  Still, no one answers.

  Esther stamps her foot and her uncle slaps her.

  * * *

  A little while later, Esther and her aunt sit by the river as her aunt, humming, holds a wet rag to her niece’s cheek. It’s swollen already—Esther can feel the extra weight of fluid building under her skin. She scans the camp for Nadav. The sun has started to fall. Miles away, at the horizon, a red shimmer stands up off the sand. The last women doing washing today pack up their bundles and heft them back toward the camp. Her aunt stops humming to say, “I wish it were different.”

  “Then make it different,” Esther says.

  Her aunt resumes humming. She dips the rag again and wrings it, but this time, without warning, she pulls Esther’s head into her lap. Her hands are at once gentle, which is like her, and also firm, which is less like her, and Esther regrets her rudeness. Her aunt has been nothing but kind to her. She made space on her pallet for her, fed her, taught her to cook. When Esther began to bleed, a few months after she arrived, her aunt showed her what to do. She was simple but, unlike Marduk, she did not seem to resent that Esther was not. Esther understands this about her uncle now. Thinking of it heightens her shame. Water drips from her aunt’s rag into her mouth, and she swallows it helplessly, thinking of other people she may have misread. Maybe the other girls her age whisper behind her back: an orphan, unwanted. Maybe when Nadav kisses her he is mocking her, and she is too lustful to realize. Maybe he mocks her for her wanting, for the fact that she kisses him back without any official betrothal—maybe, when she tells him what her uncle is making her do, he won’t be surprised. Maybe the pride her parents instilled in her has made her blind.

  Esther seizes when her aunt begins to stroke her forehead. It doesn’t seem right to allow herself this when tomorrow she will have to go. But her aunt’s fingers feel good, almost embarrassingly good, and she lets herself stay for a moment, curled on her side on the bank, and then, because she is so tired, she stays for another moment, and then another. Soon, she is sinking. She is swimming in a river, not this river but the river of her childhood, in the city; she is underwater but breathing, as easily as a fish, and seeing, through the sunlight that falls into the water, a pair of feet, illuminated, her father’s perhaps, or her mother’s. She is swimming fast for them when her aunt’s voice cuts in, silky and, for the first time, false. “Don’t worry. You are beautiful. Anything is possible.”

  * * *

  Of course, this is not true. Earth cannot turn into water. The sun cannot be caught. (Not yet.) Dust cannot be banished from the desert, only blown and swept into a different order.

  She doesn’t sleep. Tomorrow, her uncle told her, he’ll take her to the palace gate. She should be ready, he said, in her aunt’s best cloth. She should comb her hair. He didn’t look at her. Then he looked. A feeling of some kind washed through his eyes: doubt, or maybe fear. Then he walked away, calling back, Comb your hair!

  Esther twists on her pallet. She pulls her sheet down, then up. On either side of her, the girls breathe. Across the tent, the boys lie like cats, curled around each other, except for Itz. Itz is still lying in the corner by the flaps. Esther watches the long, still rope of him. Itz has always been her favorite. He reminds her of her father, his way of wandering, occupied by some idea, how little he cared what others did or thought. She has assumed a quiet greatness in Itz, something that will reveal itself as he grows older. Above him, on a clothesline, is her aunt’s muslin cloth, and draped next to that a linen belt. In Esther’s hand—gifted to her before bed—her aunt’s good comb, cut from a turtle’s shell. Please, her aunt said. And then her uncle was back, crowding without touching, his very breath like a rope. Hadassah, he said, using her Hebrew name. You don’t have to say what people you’re from.

  She snorted. Any duty she’d owed him she did not owe anymore. What will I say?

  They may not ask. If they don’t ask, don’t tell.

  Esther closes her eyes. She rocks her head against her pallet. As a little girl she did this to help herself fall asleep and her mother would scold her, warning of tangles, but now she does it for the tangles, to snarl her hair so irretrievably that it won’t be salvageable with the comb.

  She reaches back to check the damage and decides it’s not enough. On tiptoe, she finds the basket where her aunt keeps her tools: her knives, her thread and needle, her saw, her scissors. Esther holds a fistful of hair away from her head, spreads the scissors slowly to prevent the blades’ high-pitched rasp, and cuts. She cuts until her feet are buried in hair and the hair left on her head is jagged and short. She touches her bare ears, her neck. Then she decides, again: it’s not enough.

  She stays as close to the tents as possible, sliding her feet where the sand is loose enough to allow it. The night’s fullest dark is already fraying, pale threads splitting the sky’s edges. She hears a shifting, then a light clang, and drops to the ground. It’s the night-duty guards, her own people, but not wholly, of course. They’re men. Every one of them would drag her by the ear back to her tent. Or maybe worse—how can she know, given how little she has turned out to know?—maybe they would drag her somewhere else, push hands up her nightshirt, take advantage of her need
to stay quiet. She changes direction, swallowing back tears. They’ve blocked the path she planned to take, past Nadav’s tent. She went to see him before the sun went down, but before she could call his name his mother appeared at the flap; he’s not here, out of camp, a neighbor’s sheep, and so on. Esther didn’t believe her. She doesn’t believe her now. But she can’t risk being caught, and she doesn’t believe she could wake Nadav without waking his mother, and another part of her, the vain part, doesn’t want him to see her with her hair like this. She crawls to the palace wall and, staying close beside it, begins to make her slow way forward until the camp begins to thin. Here, at its far northern boundary—the boundary this week, anyway—is a small subcamp, only five tents large, where the magicians hold their own society. Even in the city, with everyone crushed up together, the magicians stayed apart, in their own dead-end side street. Her mother said it was to protect their powers, to keep their children among their children so when they were old enough to mate, they chose their own kind. Esther’s mother knew because her own mother had been one of them before she defied her family and married out, and then Esther’s mother had defied her own mother, who by the time she was a mother saw that magic might do more for a girl than love, and married Esther’s father, and by the time Esther came along, her magic was likely a trickle, at best. Esther remembers holding her breath when her mother spoke of this, feeling as though she was being told that she might have a tail, or a secret name, or a fate none of them could imagine. She absorbed all the details—the names of the purest, most formidable families, the Tolous and Ibrahims; the mix of respect and bemusement in her mother’s voice—yet in her alarm forgot the actual lessons her mother gave her. She retains only an image of a knot being tied without her mother having moved her fingers. But what help is that? She feels angry now, regarding the magicians’ tents, thinking of how calmly her mother accepted her loss of power, and her work as a seamstress, how unworried she seemed to be about Esther’s future. Her mother would cup the back of Esther’s head in her hand, look at a pile of garments waiting to be hemmed, and say, Go on then. As if Esther’s returning were a given, as if her mother’s being there, when Esther did return, were guaranteed. Even before her mother got sick Esther had a sense of foreboding. She was the only only child she knew—maybe that was part of it. She would grab her mother’s hand sometimes, forcing her mother to dislodge her. She would dig her nails into her mother’s skin. She feels a nausea thinking of it now: her mother’s large hands unknotting her small ones. Her mother’s hands were larger than Esther’s father’s hands, a fact her parents joked about, over Esther’s head. As the sky lightens over the circle of tents, she wishes that she had at least inherited those hands, if not the magic. Her own are petite and stubbornly soft—no matter how hard she works, they don’t callus. Nadav has commented on their softness. He has called them beautiful. Twice, he has taken one of her fingers and bitten down on it. This shocked and pleased her. But thinking of it now, she is afraid for what it revealed: a certain force she exerts, whether she intends it or not. Her hands are beautiful and won’t help her.