We had blood upon us from readying the pheasants. The birds would be hung on a line so that the rest of their blood would be drained from their bodies before they were salted and cooked. Our people never consumed blood. It was one of God’s strictest laws. Still our hands were stained with the pheasants’ lifeblood. I took my sister’s hand in mine. She had betrayed me to our mother; nevertheless, I could not abandon her.
“What do these people offer you?”
“Everything.” Nahara withdrew her hand from mine, shaking her head, disappointed in me. “They offer a world of peace, Aziza.”
She gazed toward the barracks and the stock of weapons stored there. Children had been set to work fashioning stones into round rocks that could be dropped upon our enemy with great force should they be foolhardy enough to attack us. Nahara turned back to me, her eyes damp. She had always been softhearted in times of killing. She would close her eyes when we came upon a rabbit in a snare. Our people did not eat rabbits, they were considered unclean, but Nahara’s father’s people had no such laws. You do it, she would say to me as the poor creature shivered in its trap. I would take the rabbit and sever its throat, quickly, so that she didn’t have to see. I would do whatever she asked.
“You can’t think that’s the answer,” she said of the mounds of weaponry.
“What would your people have you do if we are attacked?” I wanted to know.
“Trust in Abba.” Her hands were folded upon her lap. She looked calm and beautiful, older than her years. I thought she meant the leader of her people, then I realized she meant God. She, like the other Essenes, claimed a personal relationship with the Almighty. She spoke of Him as if she were indeed His child.
“And if that means we are to die? What then? Lie down and let Rome trample us?”
Nahara gazed at me with compassion, as though I were the younger sister, too simple to understand. “Then we rise again.”
“Your father was a man of courage. Peace was something he fought to keep.”
She smiled gently at my remark. I saw within her some of the girl she’d been before she left us.
“You don’t fight for peace, sister,” Nahara told me. “You embrace it.”
“Not in the world of your father,” I reminded her.
Nahara laughed outright, for this was undeniably true. “That was long ago. You were another person then. As was I.”
“You cried for him when we left. We thought he’d hear you in Petra, that was how loudly you called to him.”
“I was a child.” Nahara shrugged her narrow shoulders. “My father was the only man I knew. Now”—she nodded to the long trestle table, where Malachi was at work on a text—“I belong to him.” I had heard it said that Malachi wrote so beautifully the angels came to watch, for words were the first thing God created out of the silence and were still the most beautiful of all His creations.
“Then I will be happy for you,” I said.
I walked away, leaving the pheasants with my sister, unable to tell her the truth. No matter what she did or whom she loved, I was the one who had given her life in this world, a world she was so eager and ready to leave, one in which there were acacia trees that called the bees to their blossoms, where there were endless fields of grass and cassis.
No matter what she said, she still belonged to me.
I WAS WALKING at night, as I had come to do so that I might relish my freedom as a boy, when I came upon the Essenes digging near the synagogue. The earth was rocky, white as the stars above. The hour was late, and there were clouds of bats in the sky, in search of the last of the sycamore fruit in the arid ravines below. The center of the hottest time would soon be upon us, and the air grew heavy with heat, thick as a curtain.
I crept closer, hiding behind a citron tree that no longer bore the etrog fruit. Though the tree was stunted and leafless, the bark still sent out a peculiar fragrance, sharp and sweet at the same time.
I saw that the men had hold of a large urn, formed of simple dun-colored ceramic, the kind in which they stored their scrolls. They buried it carefully, softly chanting, then were quick to replace the sanctified ground. Their chants brought them to a place of ecstasy, and they rocked back and forth, raising the strands of their knotted prayer shawls to the sky so that God might hear them take joy in their prayers.
I thought about the Essenes’ strange deeds for the rest of the evening. The next night I went back to sift through the shadows. Again they were at work, secretly burying yet another urn.
In the morning I asked my mother what it might mean for pious men to disturb holy ground in such a secret and heedless manner. My mother had been ailing for days, listless and pale, leaving the business of the dovecote to me and Yael and Revka, able to eat little but soup and water. She’d made a tea of bitter vetch and cucumber, green in color, very strong, which she sipped through the day. She could not bear the rising heat and poured water over her head, braiding her wet hair so that it stayed damp against her scalp.