The Book of V.: A Novel(51)

She works each night, while Darius sleeps. She has no one to guide her now or provide instruction. She must make it up. She must be patient beyond her capacity for patience. She knows the beak must come last so starts with the feet, and one night, a few weeks in, the silver toes begin to quiver. She jumps, forgetting Darius, settles him before the nurse can hear—he likes his stom ach patted—then mazes in her mind back to where she began, reconstructing the order of breath and mind that led to the quivering. She tries again. Nothing. But the next night, her energies renewed, the feet again quiver. The next, they turn from silver to bone. The next, a layer of skin grows upon them. In this way, she works her way up the bird. Each time she achieves a new turn, she panics—she will never be able to do it again. There is no formula, no incantation or trick. Only faith and focus. But every night—except when she is kept late at a banquet, or called to the king—she sits with the bird and brings another part of it closer to life.

The wings are not easy. The yellow doesn’t want to come in. She almost gives up. Does it matter if they are yellow? Maybe this is a different kind of bird. But she’s certain it’s not. She keeps going. She must press the point of herself into the bird’s wings with great force yet slowly; she can’t leave a hole. She thinks of her mother whittling one of her needles, working until the tip was so fine she could push it through cloth and watch the cloth close up again behind it. Esther’s task is similar now to the needle’s: she has to enter and disrupt, while leaving the bird intact. She hums, to steady herself. She goes so slowly she isn’t sure she’s moving, and every time she is interrupted by Darius crying—forcing her to dive, eyes closed, onto her bed, the bird hidden inside her robe, readying herself for the nurse’s entrance—she must begin all over again. Sometimes she is too tired. Sometimes she brings Darius into her bed, deciding that this bird business is a kind of madness, vowing to stop. She has this boy. It could be enough. But the next night, always, she begins again. And eventually, at a moment that does not announce itself as any different from the moments that have come before, the yellow blooms.

But the wings are not as difficult as life. She knows the bird contains it. She is more confident about the bird containing life than she was about its wings containing yellow. But how to make it breathe? She presses herself in, but that doesn’t work, then she tries it as a kind of transformation, but that doesn’t work, either. She puts her mouth to the beak and offers her own breath to the bird, but her breath comes back at her, smelling sour. It’s only when she gives up one night, and in giving up loosens her hands around the bird, and in loosening her hands around the bird accidentally spurs it to open, that the bird exhales the breath it’s been holding since it died so that it can receive another. It shivers. Then, without apparent shock or grogginess, it begins to fly. Esther cries out before she can stop herself, prompting the closet door to open so that she must call in her mind to the bird, Stop come now at once. And it obeys! I am its master, she thinks, lying with it beneath her cover linen, her heart pounding with the bird’s as the nurse pads across the chamber to find Darius sound asleep.

Life, though, is not as difficult as the voice. And the voice is not as difficult as the words. Can a bird utter human words? It takes Esther two months to figure out a method. By the time she does, by the time she has filled the bird with sounds and pulled them out as forms—Esther says, Go—she knows she is carrying another child, but she is so elated by and focused on her work, she barely notices. If she has trained it correctly, the bird will fly directly to Nadav’s mother, because she is the one it already knows and because Esther has deemed her, after Itz—who may be inaccessible, hiding in the tent—the one most likely to listen to a talking bird. Esther fine-tunes the bird’s Hebrew until it cannot be misheard. Esther says, Go. Esther says, Far. All that’s left is for her to teach it the smells that will lead it to the camp.





GLOUCESTER, MA


VEE


Other People’s Husbands



Every afternoon for twenty-nine afternoons, Vee walks up the hill and sleeps with the man in the woods. He is not a lumberjack or quarryman, as his clothing and truck first suggested, but an architecture student at Harvard taking time off to “investigate” himself. His name is Benjamin, and Vee has fallen in love with his house. She loves the plain wood of the walls and the silence of the sunlight that falls through the large windows. She loves that they are new windows, not divided into panes like all the windows Vee has ever lived behind but plain faced and unfussy, and she loves that not everything here is new. Benjamin’s family has owned the land for centuries; they claimed it when Dogtown was still an active settlement, after the Indians were pushed out and before the place was abandoned to witches and feral animals. There is history here and there are modern windows and all of it makes Vee feel as if she is at once regaining something from her own past while also wriggling loose from its hold. For the first time in her life she has experienced pangs of actual desire to make house, and because she and Benjamin are alone, unwatched, with no one to see or remark or expect, this desire does not seem suspect; it does not seem perhaps to be someone else’s desire. With Alex, anything she did was not merely something she did but something she did to confirm or dispel an idea of herself. In Benjamin’s house, she moves freely between activities without self-consciousness, chopping onions, or poring over his plans for a vegetable garden with genuine interest, or making love, or reading on the window seat or in his bed. Benjamin does not interrupt her, as Alex did, as if her reading were merely a placeholder as she awaited his next communication, and after she closes a book, Benjamin asks her to tell him about it. About herself, he asks little. Vee has told him only that she is recently divorced, which she considers a lie only in a technical sense, and living with a friend nearby. And Benjamin is fine with this; Benjamin calls himself a “counterstructural.” God is he glad, he says, not to be in Cambridge now. Vee agrees. She went with Rosemary to the Jewish consciousness raising group in Cambridge and is glad not to be there now. She might be done with cities altogether, she sometimes thinks. Which is yet another reason to love Benjamin’s house in the woods.