The Book of V.: A Novel(60)

SUSA


THE QUEEN


Her Earlier Reentry



Once more, it’s as you imagine. The exodus begins in the middle of the night. A heavy dark, the air sweet with the shybrush that grows along the creek.

So there must be a breeze. It might be strong enough to lift the cloth that covers her hair. She might faint. The air, the cloth, her skin, all of it fluttering, touching, touched.

She works to concentrate, to attend to what is happening: I am out, I am here, I must find the camp and take them far away by sunrise. She is dead, according to the public record. And she has to stay dead, to make her exodus before she is found alive. If she’s found alive, she will be truly dead.

She looks to Baraz. Behind him, like another country, the palace looms, still innocent of their flight. Ahead, she sees a herd of broad, humped animals, and a vertigo rises through her. Where is she? What has happened to the outside world? Then Baraz nods and begins to walk, and she sees: the animals are the tents. The camp is ahead.

Yet as they walk, the tents appear to shift and sigh, to behave as the animals she first saw. This will happen often in her first days out: she will see a vision of a thing before the thing itself, and the vision will be hard to shake. A towering flame before a distant tree. A silver belt girdling the sand before a creek. She will recover; she will orient to the disorientation. For now she is in shock. Her eyes twitch at the vastness, strain to go everywhere. It’s a physical effort to make them focus and look for what she’s supposed to be looking for: the tent Esther described to her, with its asymmetrical roof, the odd angle to the back wall, the beautiful, bright fabric hung as a door—

You thought she was Esther?

You wanted her to be Esther.

Oh. But that’s not possible. The queen and her child—soon to be children—can’t leave the palace. Only in a fantasy, a farce, could they be allowed another fate: return heroic, save the people, destroy the villain, etc. Happy coincidence, vengeance, reversal, rejoicing. There will be a story like that, but this isn’t the one.

She is Vashti. Thirty paces from the camp, Baraz stops, slips off his sandals, then kneels to remove hers. He hooks the straps onto one of his thick forefingers, lowers himself into a crouch, and begins to slide so silently toward the camp that if Vashti were to close her eyes she would not know he is there. She closes her eyes. She is overwhelmed again by the space around her, the sky, the air prickling her skin. You can’t know when you’re kept from night and day and fresh air for so long that when you finally get it, what you’ve been craving, it will be terrifying, almost painful. She can’t hear Baraz. She startles. But there he is, looking back for her. And here she is, beginning again to follow him, to try to mimic his crablike dance. Do this, she tells herself. Only this. Tomorrow, or maybe by now it’s today, later, there will be time?…?But she is distracted. A new sensation. It would not shock another—Esther, for instance. It’s only sand, scraping the sides and bottoms of her feet. But not once in her twenty-eight years—it’s easy to forget how young she is, this former queen—has Vashti walked barefoot, and the agitation brings her back to the baths of her youth. Eucalyptus branches, lashing and scratching. By the end of the old women’s beating she would be pink and tingling and raw, and yet always, she wanted more. The Babylonian baths were training, in this way, for the erotic. But Ahasuerus did away with them anyway, just as he did away with any other of her people’s customs that he could in his opinion easily replace with his own. Vashti was enraged at first. Who was he, a former steward, to make the rules? Later, after she grew inexplicably tender toward him, she forgave him. He was not a natural king, like her father and grandfather, with a face that never gave way. He was suggestible, and very short, and worshipped her so fully that she not infrequently saw a bit of drool fall from his mouth as she disrobed. She had the power, and he knew it, and so she let him choose his trappings the way he wanted them. But the baths she never stopped missing. The harshness against her skin now as she slides after Baraz.

Just slide, she tells herself. Focus. She has had nearly three years in a hole in the earth. You might think by now she would have used up all her thoughts, traveled to every splinter of her past ten million times. But you would not be accounting for madness. Early on, when she was first trapped, it was true that she thought nonstop. Her thoughts made a frantic loop of regret and fury as she flailed and scratched at the walls: should have done what he wanted; should have spit in his face; should have killed herself; should have turned the guards on Ahasuerus; should have done what he wanted?… She knocked her head against her walls. Her thoughts would have destroyed her if she had not shut them down. She shut them down. Went numb. So what is happening now as she follows Baraz across the sand is not just shock but a coming alive, a rebirth that is not entirely within her control, and her mind as if to make up for its time of hibernation begins to move as fast as a splitting star. Her feet trying to mimic Baraz’s remind her of her father criticizing her flat arches, which did not belong, he said, with her narrow heels and long toes; they were the arches of a peasant, they exposed something base in her; and the timbre of her father’s voice calls to mind his death, midspeech, on his throne, when an improperly affixed candelabrum fell from the ceiling above him, splitting open his skull. How many ways she felt then, at fifteen, horrified and in awe and curious, so curious to see the contents of her father’s head?…?but then she was swept up by her king’s chief minister and pushed toward Ahasuerus, who was standing, as always, at the ready. Her father would have murdered this minister if he’d seen what the gesture was allowed to grow into, but Ahasuerus was teachable, at least, he was malleable. Vashti did not mind that, she thinks as she slides, remembering the first time they made the spring journey from Susa to Persepolis, how readily Ahasuerus tossed his chin away when they passed the Saka camps along the way, though his own family had been nomads not so many hundreds of years ago, and Baraz’s back now, in front of her, the broad animal bulk of it, is so precisely the shadow to Ahasuerus’s slight one that she is reminded of yet another reason she could not do as he asked: not because she had drunk less wine—she had drunk plenty—but because she was and had always been a queen and he was and had always been a steward in a king’s robes. So she understood, when she was asked to appear before him and his men in only her crown, that he would regret it. She also understood that this did not mean that he did not think he wanted it. For a short while she had worked to decide which was more important, what he thought he wanted now or what he would want later, until she realized, or was it that she remembered, that she did not have a choice; she could not do it; she had been trained from birth to be a queen, the same training that makes it a struggle for her to squat now and copy Baraz’s crab walk, for she was raised up with sticks and strings, like a wall plant, taught to walk with her clavicle to the sky and to keep her robes closed except in the baths, and except for her husband, and she had done all of this, and she had opened them for him, too; she had gotten over what would have been her father’s disapproval and let him please her, and she had pleased him; he knew what he’d been given, so much so that even when she could not bear him a child he kept her and refused the children of his other wives as his heirs, and refused the shock in the court, and refused to believe it would not happen with her eventually, that her body that had been swaddled and shrouded and shod and finally crowned could possibly be a body that failed, and though she felt certain he was wrong she was grateful for his faith. So there was a certain rightness between them, until that night.