The Book of V.: A Novel(73)

By the second day, Vashti squats every chance she gets, whether or not she needs to relieve herself. To sweat is a shock. Her calves seize into knots. The skin on her hands and feet burns to the color of cinnabar. She cannot make words, cannot spend the energy to look toward Amira. She sees water where there is no water, clouds where there are no clouds, a cluster of tamarisk where there is only a dune. Her eyes feel singed. She closes them for long stretches, relying on the sand’s palpation to guide her forward. She staggers through passages in which she fears that none of this is real, that she will wake soon, in her hole, and others, when the sun flares especially hot, in which she finds herself longing to be in the ground again. She wants Baraz. Late in the afternoon, in a waking dream, she turns around. She approaches the palace gates and uncovers her head. Where is Ahasuerus? Will she be like Esther, going to their king unbidden? No. Esther waited on the floor and shook. Esther got only bones. Vashti is Vashti. She is her father’s daughter still. Isn’t she? Even without her crown? Here I am, she says. This is mine.

No one answers. She is herself and she is someone new. She is going out from Susa. Her sandals are full of sand.





MANHATTAN


VEE


In Only Her Diadem



Vee takes off her stockings and dress and slips into bed. But it takes her a while to fall asleep. She worries. She has seen the bike messengers, how they attach themselves by their shoes to the bike’s pedals and thread through the cars and trucks on the edge of death. Some ride with whistles in their mouths. Does hers have a whistle? At red lights, does he stop or does he shimmy back and forth, balancing in place? She pictures him in that precarious limbo, his neon-yellow sleeves puffing and deflating as he rocks, the muscles in his calves tensing. She wants to warn him against his refusal to obey gravity, the body, time. But soon, his rocking begins to soothe her, and she slips from worry to drowsiness. Georgie buries his nose in the crawl space beneath her knees, and Vee has the sensation that it is she who is riding the bicycle, she who is at the intersection on her pedals, not falling but rocking, shimmying, rising, as the noise and exhaust swell around her in a kind of salute. She returns the salute. Then the light changes, and she bursts forth, flying through the city like a myth.





SOMEWHERE NO LONGER NEAR SUSA


VASHTI


And All She’s Telling You May Be a Lie



Six days out it is decided they will rest. Some kind of water stretches out ahead, a wetly green brush, a scattering of trees. They have stopped before, of course—each time they come to water they drink and fill their skins. On a few occasions they’ve slept, curling for a few hours into a patch of shade or, at night, into the slope of a shallow canyon. But even in sleep they were preparing to walk again. Even on their Sabbath, after a debate, they walked.

Vashti is not the one who decides, of course. She does not rule here. She gets her news from Amira, the bones woman, who points, her necklaces rattling, and says, “See there? We’re making camp.”

And a while later: “Are you all right?”

Vashti nods. But Itz, up at the front, is looking back at her, straight at her, as he has not done since they left Susa, and in response her feet have begun to drag. She knows what he is thinking of—his words to her that first night, as they stood together watching the camp’s disassembly: “I don’t care who you are. When we’re gone from here, you’ll tell us everything.”

She was still dizzy then. But tonight, she knows, once the tents are made and a fire built, it will be time.

“You’ll have to translate for me,” she says, realizing. “Esther’s story.”

“Come,” answers Amira.

But Vashti is thinking. She thought of the story incessantly the first couple days of their march—what she would tell, what she would leave out. But then she stopped, maybe because she stopped believing that they would ever rest. Who was to say when a people was gone from the place they had been? It seemed to her that they might walk forever. So now she must work to recall what she decided. And now, too, she has walked farther with them. She must consider what she has come to know.

She begins to walk again but slowly; soon the people around her slow, too, adjusting to match her pace. They do so without looking at her, as they’ve done the whole way, ever attentive to her without admitting their attentiveness, shifting as she shifts, making sure she is never left on the flanks or behind. Whether they think they’re protecting her or protecting themselves, she can’t decide, or rather she comes to different conclusions on different days. They don’t trust her fully, that’s clear. And why should they? But now that they’re close to a destination she senses in them a new impatience with her, something that borders perhaps on contempt and makes her feel more acutely the demands of her task ahead. They left for her. Or this is what they tell themselves—as little fealty or fear as they should seem to owe her, this is what they need to believe. What will she give them in return?

It’s not her story they want, of course. She is only the queen who was banished so their part could begin. She warrants a mention, maybe two. Make way for Esther! They will think they want to know everything. So Vashti will have to make them think she is telling them everything. Esther the maiden in the night station. It will have to be a bowdlerized night station, bawdy but not dark, not depraved. Only as they imagine. Esther the one girl (Lara will be excised; Lara is too complicated) who will not paint her face or tower her hair, whose natural beauty is such that the king is instantly besotted. The king means well but does not have his own thoughts; the king wants above all to be king, to possess and declare; the king is a dupe. They will like this. He is not one of them. But Esther. She will have to do something very brave. Esther had in fact done something very brave, but it was not the thing they would want her to have done—never mind that she became the beast for them as much as for her. In the story, she has to do something that is entirely and explicitly for them, something that emphasizes her virtue (excise Baraz in the linen room, excise the minister’s advances, excise anything she may have wanted for herself) and above all proves her loyalty and her good luck. It will be the kind of outrageously good luck that can masquerade as wisdom, the kind of luck that results in triumphs a people can then believe they deserve.