The Book of V.: A Novel(6)

Esther seizes when her aunt begins to stroke her forehead. It doesn’t seem right to allow herself this when tomorrow she will have to go. But her aunt’s fingers feel good, almost embarrassingly good, and she lets herself stay for a moment, curled on her side on the bank, and then, because she is so tired, she stays for another moment, and then another. Soon, she is sinking. She is swimming in a river, not this river but the river of her childhood, in the city; she is underwater but breathing, as easily as a fish, and seeing, through the sunlight that falls into the water, a pair of feet, illuminated, her father’s perhaps, or her mother’s. She is swimming fast for them when her aunt’s voice cuts in, silky and, for the first time, false. “Don’t worry. You are beautiful. Anything is possible.”



* * *



Of course, this is not true. Earth cannot turn into water. The sun cannot be caught. (Not yet.) Dust cannot be banished from the desert, only blown and swept into a different order.

She doesn’t sleep. Tomorrow, her uncle told her, he’ll take her to the palace gate. She should be ready, he said, in her aunt’s best cloth. She should comb her hair. He didn’t look at her. Then he looked. A feeling of some kind washed through his eyes: doubt, or maybe fear. Then he walked away, calling back, Comb your hair!

Esther twists on her pallet. She pulls her sheet down, then up. On either side of her, the girls breathe. Across the tent, the boys lie like cats, curled around each other, except for Itz. Itz is still lying in the corner by the flaps. Esther watches the long, still rope of him. Itz has always been her favorite. He reminds her of her father, his way of wandering, occupied by some idea, how little he cared what others did or thought. She has assumed a quiet greatness in Itz, something that will reveal itself as he grows older. Above him, on a clothesline, is her aunt’s muslin cloth, and draped next to that a linen belt. In Esther’s hand—gifted to her before bed—her aunt’s good comb, cut from a turtle’s shell. Please, her aunt said. And then her uncle was back, crowding without touching, his very breath like a rope. Hadassah, he said, using her Hebrew name. You don’t have to say what people you’re from.

She snorted. Any duty she’d owed him she did not owe anymore. What will I say?

They may not ask. If they don’t ask, don’t tell.

Esther closes her eyes. She rocks her head against her pallet. As a little girl she did this to help herself fall asleep and her mother would scold her, warning of tangles, but now she does it for the tangles, to snarl her hair so irretrievably that it won’t be salvageable with the comb.

She reaches back to check the damage and decides it’s not enough. On tiptoe, she finds the basket where her aunt keeps her tools: her knives, her thread and needle, her saw, her scissors. Esther holds a fistful of hair away from her head, spreads the scissors slowly to prevent the blades’ high-pitched rasp, and cuts. She cuts until her feet are buried in hair and the hair left on her head is jagged and short. She touches her bare ears, her neck. Then she decides, again: it’s not enough.

She stays as close to the tents as possible, sliding her feet where the sand is loose enough to allow it. The night’s fullest dark is already fraying, pale threads splitting the sky’s edges. She hears a shifting, then a light clang, and drops to the ground. It’s the night-duty guards, her own people, but not wholly, of course. They’re men. Every one of them would drag her by the ear back to her tent. Or maybe worse—how can she know, given how little she has turned out to know?—maybe they would drag her somewhere else, push hands up her nightshirt, take advantage of her need to stay quiet. She changes direction, swallowing back tears. They’ve blocked the path she planned to take, past Nadav’s tent. She went to see him before the sun went down, but before she could call his name his mother appeared at the flap; he’s not here, out of camp, a neighbor’s sheep, and so on. Esther didn’t believe her. She doesn’t believe her now. But she can’t risk being caught, and she doesn’t believe she could wake Nadav without waking his mother, and another part of her, the vain part, doesn’t want him to see her with her hair like this. She crawls to the palace wall and, staying close beside it, begins to make her slow way forward until the camp begins to thin. Here, at its far northern boundary—the boundary this week, anyway—is a small subcamp, only five tents large, where the magicians hold their own society. Even in the city, with everyone crushed up together, the magicians stayed apart, in their own dead-end side street. Her mother said it was to protect their powers, to keep their children among their children so when they were old enough to mate, they chose their own kind. Esther’s mother knew because her own mother had been one of them before she defied her family and married out, and then Esther’s mother had defied her own mother, who by the time she was a mother saw that magic might do more for a girl than love, and married Esther’s father, and by the time Esther came along, her magic was likely a trickle, at best. Esther remembers holding her breath when her mother spoke of this, feeling as though she was being told that she might have a tail, or a secret name, or a fate none of them could imagine. She absorbed all the details—the names of the purest, most formidable families, the Tolous and Ibrahims; the mix of respect and bemusement in her mother’s voice—yet in her alarm forgot the actual lessons her mother gave her. She retains only an image of a knot being tied without her mother having moved her fingers. But what help is that? She feels angry now, regarding the magicians’ tents, thinking of how calmly her mother accepted her loss of power, and her work as a seamstress, how unworried she seemed to be about Esther’s future. Her mother would cup the back of Esther’s head in her hand, look at a pile of garments waiting to be hemmed, and say, Go on then. As if Esther’s returning were a given, as if her mother’s being there, when Esther did return, were guaranteed. Even before her mother got sick Esther had a sense of foreboding. She was the only only child she knew—maybe that was part of it. She would grab her mother’s hand sometimes, forcing her mother to dislodge her. She would dig her nails into her mother’s skin. She feels a nausea thinking of it now: her mother’s large hands unknotting her small ones. Her mother’s hands were larger than Esther’s father’s hands, a fact her parents joked about, over Esther’s head. As the sky lightens over the circle of tents, she wishes that she had at least inherited those hands, if not the magic. Her own are petite and stubbornly soft—no matter how hard she works, they don’t callus. Nadav has commented on their softness. He has called them beautiful. Twice, he has taken one of her fingers and bitten down on it. This shocked and pleased her. But thinking of it now, she is afraid for what it revealed: a certain force she exerts, whether she intends it or not. Her hands are beautiful and won’t help her.