The Book of Longings(22)

When finally Mother returned, she looked flushed and excited. She sent Lavi to the storeroom lugging a basket of vegetables, then swept past me into her quarters.

I caught up with Lavi in the courtyard. “Mother is out of sorts.”

He studied the ground, his hands, the crescents of dirt beneath his nails.

“Lavi?”

“We came upon the girl who visits you.”

“Tabitha? What about her?”

“Please do not make me speak of it. Not to you. Please.” He took several steps backward, gauging my response, then fled.

I hurried to Mother’s room, fearing she would turn me away, but she allowed me in. She was white-faced.

“Lavi said you saw Tabitha. Has something happened?”

She strode to her storage chest, the one into which Tabitha and I had pried, and for one irrational moment I wondered if Mother had simply discovered our interloping.

She said, “I can’t see how to avoid telling you. You will learn of it anyway. The city is already brimming with talk. Her poor father—”

“Please. Just tell me.”

“I came upon Tabitha on the street near the synagogue. She was making a terrible commotion, wailing and tearing at her hair, crying out that one of Herod’s soldiers had forced her to lie with him.”

I tried to comprehend. Forced her to lie . . .

“Tabitha was raped?” came a voice from behind us, and I turned to see Yaltha standing in the open doorway.

“Must you use the vulgar term?” Mother said. She looked implacable standing there, arms crossed, morning shadows blossoming around her shoulders. Was this what mattered to her? The indelicacy of the word?

A pressure started in my chest. I opened my mouth and heard a strange howl fill the room. My aunt came and placed her arms about me and no one uttered a sound. Even Mother thought better than to reprimand me.

“I don’t understand why—”

Mother interrupted. “Who can say why she stood on the street like that and cried out news of her defilement to every passerby? And she did so using the same crude word as your aunt. She bellowed the soldier’s name and spit and swore curses in the vilest language.”

She’d misunderstood me—I wasn’t wondering why Tabitha shouted her outrage on the street. I was glad she accused her rapist. What I didn’t understand was why such horrors happened at all. Why did men inflict these atrocities? I wiped my face with my sleeve. Through my shock, I pictured Tabitha on the first day of her renewed visits when I’d been rude to her. My father says my mind is weak, and my tongue, weaker, she’d told me then. It seemed now her tongue was not weak, but the fiercest part of her.

Mother, however, was not done rebuking her. “It wasn’t enough that she made a show of cursing the soldier; she cursed her father for trying to seal her lips. She cursed those who passed by and closed their ears to her. She was distraught, and I’m sorry for her, but she shamed herself. She brought dishonor to her father and to her betrothed, who will surely divorce her now.”

The air crackled around Yaltha’s head. “You are blind and stupid, Hadar.”

Mother, unused to being spoken to in that manner, narrowed her eyes and jutted out her chin.

“The shame is not Tabitha’s!” Yaltha practically roared. “It belongs to the one who raped her.”

Mother hissed back, “A man is what he is. His lust can be greater than himself.”

“Then he should cut off his seed sacs and become a eunuch!” Yaltha said.

“Leave my quarters,” Mother ordered, but Yaltha didn’t budge.

“Where is Tabitha now?” I asked. “I’ll go to her.”

“You most certainly will not,” Mother said. “Her father came and dragged her home. I forbid you to see her.”



* * *



? ? ?

THE REST OF THE DAY unfolded with unbearable ordinariness. Mother kept me sequestered in her room while she and Shipra paraded out bolts of cloth, threads, and a ridiculous array of baubles for my dowry and talked with endless banality about preparations for the betrothal ceremony. I could scarcely hear them for the screaming in my head.

That night in my room, I lay atop the coverings on my bed and drew my knees up, fashioning myself into a little ball.

Everything I knew about rape I’d learned from the Scriptures. There was an unnamed concubine raped and murdered and her body cut into pieces. There was Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, who was raped by Shechem. Tamar, the daughter of King David, raped by her half brother. These women were among the ones I meant to write about one day, and now there was Tabitha, not a forgotten figure in a text, but a girl who sang while she plaited my hair. Who would avenge her?

No one had avenged the unnamed concubine. Jacob did not seek vengeance on Shechem. King David did not punish his son.

Fury welled in me until I could no longer keep myself small.

I left my bed and crept to Yaltha’s room. I lay down on the floor next to her sleeping mat. I didn’t know if she was awake. I whispered, “Aunt?”

She rolled on her side to face me. In the dark her eyes gleamed bluish white. I said, “When morning comes, we must go and find Tabitha.”





xviii.


A servant, an old man with a deformed arm, met Yaltha, Lavi, and me at the gate. “My aunt and I have come to pay respects to Tabitha,” I told him.