The Story Sisters (41 page)

Mimi talked her mother into going with them to the park. “Maybe you’ll feel better once you get there,” she said reasonably. “You don’t have to go any farther if you don’t want to.” She was practical, the way Meg had been. Plus she had Lorry’s talent for talking you into nearly anything.

“Sure,” Elv said, catching up her daughter’s hand. “Will do.”

Pete was there with a taxi, which they took to the Bois; the driver went wickedly fast. Pete had second thoughts about Paris all over again.

When the taxi parked, they could see the lake and the island. Mimi was utterly enchanted. “It’s the fairyland you invented,” she said to her mother.

“Go on,” Elv said, sending her off with her ama. “I’ll watch from here. This is fine.”

Mimi was too smart. She came to her mother and gestured so that Elv would lean close and she could whisper. “Is it because they all hated Daddy?”

“Oh, no,” Elv said. “Everyone loved him. He told people stories and they just sat and listened and they didn’t want to be anywhere but right there with him. Believe me, I know.”

“Your mom doesn’t like crowds,” Pete said. He had come up behind them. Elv threw him a grateful look. “Like at the school dinners. She has a good view from here.”

Elv waved to Mimi when she got on the little boat and Mimi waved back. She had a sense of loss just seeing her daughter float away. The boat was indeed like a faerie boat, leaving water lilies in its wake. Once it had drawn up to the dock, everyone got off and was greeted by the Cohen family. Music drifted across the
water in bits and bursts. Every now and then Elv spied Mimi on the other side, exploring the island, and then she couldn’t see her anymore. Mimi caught sight of the bride standing by the reeds with a tall, handsome man. She ran right up to her gigi, and when Claire turned she knew Mimi immediately. She recognized the long black hair, the way she smiled. She was wearing the charm bracelet and she held up her arm for Claire to see. She shook it and there was the sound of bells. Mimi’s eighth birthday had just passed. She was exactly the same age Claire had been when she did the unpardonable, horrible thing for which she could never be forgiven.

She had gotten out of the car.

Claire glanced around and spied a woman on the other side of the lake. She asked Mimi if she would take care of her bouquet for her. It was made up of a hundred roses, all white. Each rose was small and perfect. Mimi nodded. She took her duties very seriously.

Claire could hear the birds in the linden trees; they always called when it was growing dark. The nature of love had totally escaped her until now. She had thought that if you lost it, you could never get it back, like a stone thrown down a well. But it was like the water at the bottom of the well, there when you can’t even see it, shifting in the dark. She remembered everything. The violets and the blood, the day when Elv hunkered down in the garden after refusing to cut her hair, the bird they had found with its tiny white bones, the charm Elv had strung together to protect them against evil. When they were in the garden looking up through the leaves, the whole world turned green. Elv thought she saw her sister walking toward the dock in her white dress. She had been waiting for her and she’d wait for her for as long as she was gone, and there she was, in the falling dark; she hadn’t gone anywhere at all.

Madame Cohen sat in an armchair that the waiters had carried out to place under one of the lindens. The air was still sultry. The last of the day’s light filtered through the shadows. It was lemon colored, exactly as Mimi had noted. Madame Cohen had been brought a kir
pêche
that reminded her of the peaches she and her sisters had once eaten on a picnic out in the countryside. Natalia pulled a chair next to her friend’s. She could see her great-granddaughter holding a bouquet of white roses, spinning in a circle on the dance floor that would later be crowded with couples. She and Madame Cohen had worked side by side in this world of grief. Today their grandchildren were happy. That was gratifying.

They could hear frogs splashing in the shallow water. There were white lights everywhere, as if the stars were falling down. It was twilight. The light would soon be turning to ink, another color for Mimi to write in her diary. Philippe shouted out and waved his arms, calling the two grandmothers over.

“They need us,” Natalia said.

“Let’s let them think so,” her friend suggested.

As they walked across the grass, Madame Cohen saw a small black shadow in the shape of a moth. It hovered above her glass of kir, drawn like the bees to the sugar and fruit, then it flitted away. She didn’t worry about it in the least. It was summer, and hot, and everything was just beginning.

The Assassin’s Daughter

W
e had been wandering for so long I forgot what it was like to live within walls or sleep through the night. In that time I lost all I might have possessed if Jerusalem had not fallen: a husband, a family, a future of my own. My girlhood disappeared in the desert. The person I’d once been vanished as I wrapped myself in white when the dust rose into clouds. We were nomads, leaving behind beds and belongings, rugs and brass pots. Now our house was the house of the desert, black at night, brutally white at noon.

They say the truest beauty is in the harshest land and that God can be found there by those with open eyes. But my eyes were closed against the shifting winds that can blind a person in an instant. Breathing itself was a miracle when the storms came whirling across the earth. The voice that arises out of the silence is something no one can imagine until it is heard. It roars when it speaks, it lies to you and convinces you, it steals from you and leaves you without a single word of comfort. Comfort cannot exist in such a place. What is brutal survives. What is cunning lives until morning.

My skin was sunburned, my hands raw. I gave in to the desert, bowing to its mighty voice. Everywhere I walked my fate walked with me, sewn to my feet with red thread. All that will ever be has already been written long before it happens. There is nothing we can do to stop it. I couldn’t run in the other direction. The roads from Jerusalem led to only three places: to Rome, or to the sea, or to the desert. My people had become wanderers, as they had been at the beginning of time, cast out yet again.

I followed my father out of the city because I had no choice.

None of us did, if the truth be told.

I DON’T KNOW
how it began, but I know how it ended. It occurred in the month of
Av
, the sign for which is
Arieh
, the lion. It is a month that signifies destruction for our people, a season when the stones in the desert are so hot you cannot touch them without burning your fingers, when fruit withers on the trees before it ripens and the seeds inside shake like a rattle, when the sky is white and rain will not fall. The first Temple had been destroyed in that month. Tools signified weapons and could not be used in constructing the holiest of holy places; therefore the great warrior king David had been prohibited from building the Temple because he had known the evils of war. Instead, the honor fell to his son King Solomon, who called upon the
shamir
, a worm who could cut through stone, thereby creating glory to God without the use of metal tools.

The Temple was built as God had decreed it should be, free from bloodshed and war. Its nine gates were covered with silver and gold. There, in the most holy of places, was the Ark that stored our people’s covenant with God, a chest made of the finest acacia wood, decorated with two golden cherubs. But despite its magnificence, the first Temple was destroyed, our people exiled to Babylonia. They had returned after seventy years to rebuild in the same place, where Abraham had been willing to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice to the Almighty, where the world had first been created.

The second Temple had stood for hundreds of years as the dwelling place of God’s word, the center of creation in the center of Jerusalem, though the Ark itself had disappeared, perhaps in Babylonia. But now times of bloodshed were upon us once more. The Romans wanted all that we had. They came to us as they swarmed upon so many lands with their immense legions, wanting not just to conquer but to humiliate, claiming not just our land and our gold but our humanity.

As for me, I expected disaster, nothing more. I had known its embrace before I had breath or sight. I was the second child, a year younger than my brother, Amram, but unlike him entirely, cursed by the burden of my first breath. My mother died before I was born. In that moment the map of my life arose upon my skin in a burst of red marks, speckles that, when followed, one to the other, have led me to my destiny.

I can remember the instant when I entered the world, the great calm that was suddenly broken, the heat of my own pulse beneath my skin. I was taken from my mother’s womb, cut out with a sharp knife. I am convinced I heard my father’s roar of grief, the only sound to break the terrible silence of one who is born from death. I myself did not cry or wail. People took note of that. The mid-wives whispered to one another, convinced I was either blessed or cursed. My silence was not my only unusual aspect, nor were the russet flecks that emerged upon my skin an hour after my birth. It was my hair, the deep bloodred color of it, a thick cap growing, as if I already knew this world and had been here before.

They said my eyes were open, the mark of one set apart. That was to be expected of a child born of a dead woman, for I was touched by
Mal’ach ha-Mavet
, the Angel of Death, before I was born in the month of
Av
, on the
Tisha B’Av
, the ninth day, under the sign of the lion. I always knew a lion would be waiting for me. I had dreamed of such creatures ever since I could remember. In my dreams I fed the lion from my hand. In return he took my whole hand into his mouth and ate me alive.

When I left childhood, I made certain to cover my head; even when I was in my father’s courtyard I kept to myself. On those rare occasions when I accompanied our cook to the market, I saw other young women enjoying themselves and I was jealous of even the plainest among them. Their lives were full, whereas I could think only of all I did not have. They chirped merrily about their futures as brides as they lingered at the well or gathered in the Street of the Bakers surrounded by their mothers and aunts. I wanted to snap at them but said nothing. How could I speak of my envy when there were things I wanted even more than a husband or a child or a home of my own?

I wished for a night without dreams, a world without lions, a year without
Av
, that bitter, red month.

WE LEFT
the city when the second Temple was set in ruins, venturing forth into the Valley of Thorns. For months the Romans had defiled the Temple, crucifying our people inside its sacred walls, stripping the gold from the entranceways and the porticoes. It was here that Jews from all over creation traveled to offer sacrifices before the holiest site, with thousands arriving at the time of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, all yearning to glimpse the gold walls of the dwelling place of God’s word.

When the Romans attacked the third wall, our people were forced to flee from that part of the Temple. The legion then brought down the second wall. Still it was not enough. The great Titus, military leader of all Judea, went on to construct four siege ramps. Our people destroyed these, with fire and stones, but the Romans’ assault of the Temple walls had weakened our defenses. Not long afterward a breach was accomplished. The soldiers entered the maze of walls that surrounded our holiest site, running like rats, their shields lifted high, their white tunics burning with blood. The holy Temple was being destroyed at their hands. Once this happened, the city would fall as well, it would be forced to follow, sinking to its knees like a common captive, for without the Temple there would be no
lev ha-olam
, no heart of the world, and nothing left to fight for.