The Book of V.: A Novel(5)

All this his wife must see. But she has been a mother to Esther. When he tells her about the pageant, she eyes him with disgust.

“No,” she says. “We made a promise.”

He nods, a little disappointed but mostly relieved; she has done it for him, taken away the choice.

But she finds him the next day. His arms are raised to the sky. He is stretching after a session of pit building with a neighbor and watching, while pretending not to watch, his niece, in the distance, rolling the children in a barrel. Esther’s cloth slips as she bends; her back is narrow and dark; the children’s squeals lift the camp into momentary peace. He doesn’t notice his wife approaching until she takes his beard in her hand and pulls him to look at her: purple under her eyes, the line that’s grown between them since Itz went into hiding. Her hands are nearly black from pitting and chopping figs. The ones they collect now take twice the work, to cut away the bruises and the rot.

“She’s a good girl,” she says, in the dry voice she uses when she has arrived at a decision. “She’ll be treated well.”

“Is that right?” Marduk swallows back bile.

“She won’t become queen, but she’ll be taken care of.”

Marduk waits, to be sure she’s sure.

“It’s good,” she says.

He perseverates for a week. His wife is talking about the night station, he knows, though she will not name it. Neither will he. The night station is the place the king’s concubines are said to occupy. The station is rumored by his friend Jebi to be a sordid place, a labyrinth of flaking tunnels where girls are rarely virgins by the time they meet the king. Esther may be raped if she is unwilling, or beaten even if she is. Marduk suppresses thoughts of the moods of a man who has lost his queen. He tells himself that the station may in fact be what most people in the camp assume it to be, a largely restful place of boredom and guitars, grapes and fans. Maybe, too, his wife is wrong—maybe there will be no station for Esther, but some better fate. Or maybe she will simply be returned, and Marduk will be the king’s fig man, and all will proceed as he has planned.

He sees his niece braiding the loaf of challah. This week’s bread is eggless—the camp’s chickens are hungry—and will be low, and hard, but Esther braids as if it will be perfect, her mouth open in concentration, her tongue tensed against her bottom lip, the muscles in her upper arms dancing.

He cannot send her away.

He sees his niece looking at Nadav. A fire rises in Marduk’s throat, a desire to rip them apart and smash their heads against the wall.

He has to send her away.



* * *



She resists. She won’t go. She’ll work for her keep—why won’t he let her work for her keep? Her uncle has lost his mind. What could a poor Jewish orphan possibly be to the king of Persia? He won’t pick her, and then what? So maybe he likes Marduk’s figs. He might sell Esther, or kill her. Her uncle laughs and says, Unlikely. What, then? Esther asks. What? But he won’t answer, and her aunt doesn’t meet her eyes. Please, she says, gesturing toward the tent’s open flaps, as if bickering in the camp is ever done in private. Itz lies meekly in one corner. He was down by the river earlier, hiding in the women’s washing, but then the Persians marched through, overturning buckets and barrels, and Itz was rolled home beneath a pile of bedclothes. His skin, which used to be brown, gives off a green pallor. Esther unties the flaps—made of bright, beautiful fabric her aunt’s mother’s mother wove—and lets them fall. The tent goes dark. “The night station,” she says, as it strikes her.

No one speaks.

She can’t believe at first what she’s hearing. She wants to shout, to tell them that her father was teaching her to read when he died, that her mother, when Esther was very small, tried to teach her a little magic. Her parents imagined that she would be like them—learned but modest, unconcerned with status or wealth. Better, in other words, than most people. But that will sound like boasting—it will only make her uncle happier to send her away. He doesn’t like her. How has she not realized this before? She feels ashamed, for herself and for her parents. She says, more quietly now, “This isn’t what they wanted.”

Still, no one answers.

Esther stamps her foot and her uncle slaps her.



* * *



A little while later, Esther and her aunt sit by the river as her aunt, humming, holds a wet rag to her niece’s cheek. It’s swollen already—Esther can feel the extra weight of fluid building under her skin. She scans the camp for Nadav. The sun has started to fall. Miles away, at the horizon, a red shimmer stands up off the sand. The last women doing washing today pack up their bundles and heft them back toward the camp. Her aunt stops humming to say, “I wish it were different.”

“Then make it different,” Esther says.

Her aunt resumes humming. She dips the rag again and wrings it, but this time, without warning, she pulls Esther’s head into her lap. Her hands are at once gentle, which is like her, and also firm, which is less like her, and Esther regrets her rudeness. Her aunt has been nothing but kind to her. She made space on her pallet for her, fed her, taught her to cook. When Esther began to bleed, a few months after she arrived, her aunt showed her what to do. She was simple but, unlike Marduk, she did not seem to resent that Esther was not. Esther understands this about her uncle now. Thinking of it heightens her shame. Water drips from her aunt’s rag into her mouth, and she swallows it helplessly, thinking of other people she may have misread. Maybe the other girls her age whisper behind her back: an orphan, unwanted. Maybe when Nadav kisses her he is mocking her, and she is too lustful to realize. Maybe he mocks her for her wanting, for the fact that she kisses him back without any official betrothal—maybe, when she tells him what her uncle is making her do, he won’t be surprised. Maybe the pride her parents instilled in her has made her blind.