In a single day I caught three wild hens and cooked them over a fire. I found water in a spring that fed an Egyptian sycamore and plucked the orange-colored fruit. I made a hearty soup for the boys, then cut the sycamore fruit into thin, cool slices to hold against their fevered lips.
Sia could not reproach me. She had no choice but to nod blankly and accept my gifts. I plunged into survival. I made it my calling and my art, unlike my father, who spent his time idly gazing toward Jerusalem as the sky edged from white to blue. He, who had killed a dozen Romans, who was a rebel and a renegade, was being bested by Judea, by the wind and the hunger that had claimed him and how helpless he had become. Now that the children had fallen ill, he was terrified, chanting to the Almighty throughout the day. It wasn’t that he cared about the boys, it was his own flesh that concerned him. He insisted that demons could move from one person to another in a touch or a breath. I had contempt for him and turned away. When he asked me for water to wash his hands, I told him to find it himself, to paw through the sand as I had done.
I cared about only one man, the one who had faced a lion. But I feared he was too tenderhearted and had been reclaimed by his wife and family. He had stopped coming to me at night. In my cave I shivered, alone. I suffered and watched from behind the rocks. He sat with the children beside a fire made of the twigs I’d collected, eating the soup I’d made, drinking water I had dug from beneath the sycamore. I was healing them for each other. Once I saw him take Sia’s hand in his own large hand and press her palm to his mouth. He had the right to do so, she was his wife, but I burned with a haze of jealousy. I couldn’t eat the soup I’d cooked. I didn’t drink the water I had found beneath the roots of the sycamore tree.
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.