The Book of V.: A Novel(58)

The minister tells her she is losing her mind.

She is the minister’s teacher.

But the minister may be right.



* * *



She is dreaming when he wakes her, his voice a comfort she brings into the dream with her, a dream of childhood, a floor of papyrus reeds, yellow grass, Darius’s hair, Darius a friend, Esther only as tall as the grown-ups’ knees, Baraz’s voice: “Shhhh, wake up,” a tilting sky, a bowl of rice. It takes his hand on her shoulder to lift her out. At once, her blood begins to pound. Is the baby coming? Has Darius been taken? She rises onto her knees. Darius is there, his skin pink in the light thrown by Baraz’s torch. Her inside is calm.

A whisper. “Come.”

“Where have you been?” She hasn’t seen him in weeks.

“I’ll show you.”

“You didn’t tell me about the spices,” she says.

“Shh.”

“Why should I go with you?”

“I didn’t know. I am only told what it is useful for me to know.”

“You said you spoke—”

“Never with them. I never said I spoke with them directly.”

“The bird—”

“I know.” Baraz swallows visibly, his Adam’s apple sliding in a way that reminds her that he is both a man and more than a man. “Please. I need you to come with me, without more words.”

“I can’t leave Darius.”

“He’ll cry.”

“I won’t leave him.”

Baraz suffocates the torch before opening the door to the passage. They walk in darkness, Esther carrying Darius until Baraz, sensing her struggle, takes the boy into his arms. Esther is barefoot as Baraz ordered her; their soles purr across the stones. They walk through portal and passage, far enough that Esther, losing track of the turns, takes up a fringe of Baraz’s robe between her fingers.

When they stop, Esther touches the wall nearest to her. It’s smooth and solid—not a door. She feels Baraz at her feet, his hands working at something in the ground. She kneels and feels her son’s feet tickle her neck; he is cocooned, she realizes, in the space between Baraz’s legs and chest. Then a current of air rises and Baraz has her by the hand, leading her downward. Rungs in a wall. She has to lean back so that her stomach will clear them. Baraz is still above her, she can hear his almost soundless movements, his hands settling something back into place. She waits at the bottom, sand damp beneath her feet, her leg muscles quivering. The exertion has stirred up tears, and a fantasy: they are in the bones room. Baraz knew without her telling him what she wanted. Never mind that the bones room had not required a descent.

The torch flares. They are in not the bones room but a low-ceilinged cellar, empty of furniture. Three other eunuchs stand waiting near an opening in the wall. A tunnel, Esther sees.

Baraz says quietly, “It’s not for you.”

Her chest starts to ache. “This is what you were doing,” she says, realizing. “When Darius was born.”

Baraz nods. “This is where we’ve been anytime we weren’t somewhere else.”

Esther is gripped by a sudden, wild fear. They have made some kind of deal for Darius. She can’t understand what; it makes no sense; when Baraz woke her, he didn’t want Darius to come at all. But that could have been an act, too. They are going to send him out this tunnel, her boy who has only just learned to walk.

But when she reaches for him, Baraz lays the boy in her arms and smiles. Has she ever seen him smile? Then he gives his torch a shake, nudging the flame higher and illuminating more of the room, which is larger than it first appeared. As Baraz walks backward, it grows larger still, and for a few suspended moments Esther believes that it could prove infinite if only Baraz and his torch would keep pressing into its borders. All we have to do is walk, she thinks, until we’ve reached the camp.

Baraz stops. In a far corner, there is a bed. A rug. A tall drawer. A chair. In the chair, there is a woman. She appears older than Esther, though by how much is hard to tell. Her features are youthful but her skin hangs slightly, as if living within the earth has shrunk her, and she sits with an ambiguous stiffness, as a young person might do in fear or an old person in pain. Her eyes rest dully on a middle distance. Darius squeezes Esther’s hand and Esther, squeezing back, wonders if the woman before them is dead. If her head is hanging from the ceiling by a rope Esther can’t yet see.

“If it were only my life,” Baraz says, “I would have?…”

The woman turns. Her eyes fill with light. They are green eyes, set in a silt-brown face, surrounded by black hair that does not fall, like Esther’s, but rises, wild, its own crown. She is different. But she is also, Esther sees, the same. Beautiful in the way that Esther is beautiful, a way that cannot be changed. She is the queen.





Part Three



Reinvention





BROOKLYN


LILY


Not a Good Influence



At the reception after the memorial service, Lily and her brothers let people squeeze their hands. A few come at them with hard embraces, undeterred by whether or not Ruth’s children know who they are. There are many they don’t know, more than they expected. People from Gloucester none of them remember. Women from Cambridge. Lily knows some of the local friends, especially those who belong to Ruth’s synagogue on Garfield Place, where the event is held, but there are at least a dozen other Brooklynites she has never met. The social hall has been set up in a manner that surprises and moves her: not plastic sheets, as there were on the occasions when Ruth dragged her to something, but substantial white tablecloths; not supermarket platters but cheese and fruit plates put together by a group of women who, based on the dates and figs they’ve procured and the way they say her name, clearly knew and loved Ruth. There is decent wine, and two tall vases filled generously with flowers. When Ian gave his eulogy in the sanctuary across the street, Lily cried; she had declined giving one herself because she did not trust she would get through it. But here, there is not a lot of grief to be felt, rather, a low-grade numbness in hand after hand, words after words. Her friends talk in one corner—she hasn’t seen them in a while, but they came with strong hugs and an unmistakable tenderness. In her peripheral vision she watches Rosie and June play dodge-the-mourners with their cousins as Adam and Lionel’s wife work to corral them. Early this morning, as Adam was getting the girls dressed, Lily heard fighting and walked in to find June sobbing, You said she was here! and Rosie shouting back, I said her ghost was here! Adam waved his hand at Lily: Get out of here, I’ve got this. But how could she not wait to hear what came next? What’s a ghost? June screamed. It’s dead! What’s dead? Gone! June stopped trying to take off the shirt Adam had just put on her. Does she have a face? No. Does she have words? No. Does she show up? No. June burst into tears. But now she races gleefully among the dark-clad grown people, who must seem to her like a woods, and what Lily wants more than anything is to walk the three blocks home and lie down with June, as she and June lay with Ruth, and watch her nap with her nose up and her mouth open.