Lilah (26 page)

At the Water Gate where, a few days earlier, we had formed a carpet of human flowers, the blood ran black, stinking of shame.

And we, the sons and daughters of Israel, stood on the walls, watching them move away. We stood there, terrified and incredulous.

We did not feel the pain yet. Only astonishment.

Would Yahweh be pleased, now that we had cast out the unclean?

Towards the evening of the second day, some boys and girls came running back along the Jericho road, towards Jerusalem, calling their fathers' names. Children of eight, ten or twelve. Some older. A hundred children, girls and boys. Running towards the gates of the city on a road white with dust.

Then, on the walls of Jerusalem, hands gathered stones. Hands lifted these stones and threw them.

Yes. I write the truth. They stoned the children until they fell or turned and ran. Until their mothers seized them and dragged them away, far from us.

Then I knew I could not stay.

It was all over for Lilah, sister of Ezra.

‘How can you order such horrors?' I asked my brother. ‘Don't you see the women and children on the roads? Don't you hear them?'

He replied that he had ordered nothing, it was Yahweh who decided everything. ‘It is Yahweh who wants this, my sister, not Ezra. It was not I who received His Law and His instructions. All I did was read and learn. Who knows that better than you, my sister? You, who urged me to cross the desert to Jerusalem when all I wanted was to pursue my studies. It was you who begged Parysatis. It was you who lay with the Persian so that he would deliver my request to Artaxerxes. It was you who said to Ezra, “Go! Your place is in Jerusalem, your destiny is in Jerusalem, that is the will of Yahweh. His hand is upon you.” Those were your words, Lilah.'

Yes.

Those were my words.

Yet Master Baruch had taught us the goodness of Yahweh. He had chanted Isaiah's words: ‘You will succour the oppressed, you will plead for the widow.'

Ezra laughed. ‘Isaiah said all kinds of things, sister. Was it not also Isaiah who said, “Put an end to mankind. It is a mere breath, of no importance”?'

The expression on my brother's face was terrible to behold.

I could not recognize him without his hair, his beard. A savage face, I thought, that reminded me of Parysatis' beasts. I was angry with myself for thinking such a thing, but that was what filled my heart.

I asked him, ‘Where is Yahweh's justice?'

‘Here, my sister,' he replied. ‘In Jerusalem. His justice will protect us if we follow every one of his Laws.'

‘I don't see any justice in forcing thousands of women and children out into open country, without fire, a roof or food. That isn't why we came to Jerusalem.'

He laughed. ‘But it is, Lilah, it is! We came so that the Law of Yahweh would live among our people. We are making it live. Only what is written on Moses' scroll. That and nothing else!'

‘I can't do it,' I said, to the man who had been my beloved brother. ‘I can't be with those who throw stones at women and children. I can't separate the clean and the unclean by separating a wife from her husband, and children from their father. That is beyond my strength. It is beyond my love for Ezra, beyond my respect for our God. If I must choose, then I shall leave with them – with the rejected women, the strangers. That is the only place for me. Did not Moses, our master, say, “Welcome the
stranger in your house as one of your own. Love him as yourself, for you, too, were strangers in the land of Egypt”?'

We looked at each other, our hearts closed, the light of our shattered love in our eyes.

‘If you leave this house, my sister,' Ezra replied at last, ‘if you leave Jerusalem, we shall never see each other again. I shall forget you. I will no longer have a sister. I will never have had a sister.'

I nodded, but said nothing.

I was sick of words. A stench hung about them, like the stench of the burnt offerings of rams and oxen that were spreading their funereal smoke once more over the roofs of Jerusalem the beautiful.

Sogdiam put his hand in mine. ‘Don't cry,' he said gently. ‘I won't leave you. I'm not from here either. I'm only from anywhere you go.'

I tried to dissuade him. Where I was going there would be no house, no comfort, little joy and much tragedy. And certainly no kitchen.

‘I'll build one. Wherever we are, we'll need a kitchen, or we'll die of starvation.' He was laughing already.

‘Will you come with me?' I asked Axatria.

She arched her back and lifted her chin. ‘I won't abandon Ezra!' she hissed, like a snake.

‘I'm not abandoning him, Axatria. Ezra is with his
God, his priests and his zealots. He hasn't been with me for a long time. How can I abandon a man who's already turned his back on me?'

‘Sometimes he needs you.'

‘Not any more. After the things he's ordered, he doesn't need his sister.'

‘You see? You don't love him! I've long suspected it. In the desert you didn't love him. When we arrived in Jerusalem, you didn't love him. The greater he's become, the more you've hated him.'

What was the point in protesting? ‘Do you want to abandon those women and children outside the walls, who have nowhere to find shelter except in their sorrow?'

‘Ezra has said it many times: it is the Law.'

‘But not your law, Axatria! You're a daughter of the Zagros mountains. You're as much a stranger as they are.'

‘Oh, you love to remind me of that, don't you? That just shows how much you despise me. You always have. The Law of Yahweh may not be my people's law, but Ezra is my law.'

‘You don't know what you're saying, Axatria. Can't you see that Ezra has never looked at you with affection, let alone love? That you're only his handmaid and will never be anything else? Don't you know that? Don't you understand that by
staying in Jerusalem with Ezra, you're trampling on your own life and dignity? You'll serve Ezra until he rejects you, because a time will come when he won't even allow strangers to be handmaids. Don't you understand that, if you stay in Jerusalem with Ezra, you'll never know love, never have a husband and children?'

She slapped me, then pushed me out of the house, screaming that I was only saying these things because I was jealous.

With the rage of someone in whom vengeance, sorrow and self-disgust have been brewing too long, she threw my few belongings out of the house that had been mine.

Now I am a rejected woman, like the others.

But I did not leave Jerusalem like the others.

While I was arguing with Axatria, Sogdiam had been telling everyone in the houses still friendly towards me that I was leaving.

With his limping gait he had run from one house to another.

‘Lilah is going to join the women and children outside, and I'm going with her.'

It was like oil waiting for a flame. The sadness and shame that had been simmering in people's hearts since the day of the stoning now boiled over.

In less time than it takes to say it, twenty wagons
were filled and mules harnessed to them. The former husbands gave tents, sheets, tent pegs . . . They wept as they gave, and if they could have, they would have offered their tears, too, as sweet wine.

The Jewish wives gave and gave.

The children gave their clothes and their toys to those who had been their playmates.

Two men gave even more: themselves. May their names be written here, and may Yahweh, if He so wishes, bless them. They were Yahezya and Jonathan.

When the wagons were lined up outside Jerusalem, it was quite obvious that I would find it hard to drive them with only Sogdiam to help me. ‘I'll go with you,' Yahezya said. ‘I couldn't stay in Jerusalem and work in my carpenter's shop, knowing that all you women were out there alone.'

‘My wife is out there, I don't know where,' Jonathan added, his eyes filled with tears. ‘She is three moons gone with child. I must see her and know if my child is a boy or a girl. I'm following you, Lilah.' He turned to the dozens of others who were like him, and cried, ‘You too, follow us!'

They lowered their heads and wept.

But during the days that followed, many went out into the countryside, taking food and kisses to their former wives and their children.

Then Ezra decreed that this was forbidden. No
clothes, no food, no wagons. Everything in Jerusalem was the fruit of the people of Yahweh, and this fruit could not be given to strangers.

First, we had to gather together the women and children, who were scattered throughout the land of Judaea. Some had already knocked at the doors of their fathers' and brothers' houses. Now they were weeping over their fate, cursing Jerusalem, themselves and their offspring: because they had married Jews, their own fathers considered them unclean.

Until the first rains of autumn came, we scoured the countryside in search of women hiding in bushes and holes, protecting their young like gazelles.

We travelled south, where Jonathan knew of some land that was vast and dry enough to set up camp. It took a lot of work: pitching tents, bandaging wounds, collecting herbs to cure the children's illnesses, tending women in labour, feeding the hungry . . . And already there were quarrels, jealousy and despair . . .

Then, one overcast day, Gershem's men came galloping towards us.

What a godsend for them! So many unprotected women!

They did not hold back. They took what they wanted. They forced open thighs, never mind if the girls were virgins.

They raped. They took it in turns to rape.

They killed those who resisted.

The old women who pulled at their hair while the men raped the girls were disembowelled.

The children who tried to defend their mothers had their throats cut.

So did Jonathan, who fought to protect his pregnant wife. His wife was disembowelled and her bloody offspring held up.

‘The rejected women of Jerusalem!' The men of Gershem laughed. ‘What a feast!'

They put the youngest and prettiest in chains, shackled them like a herd of she-camels and dragged them off to the desert where they lived.

It was bound to happen.

Not a day or a night had passed without our dreading it would happen. In Jerusalem, they had known it would happen. When they had expelled the women, they had known it.

And Yahweh, my God, had known too.

Last night, just before dawn, Sogdiam died.

They say his cart overturned and he was crushed beneath the wheels. They say he didn't suffer.

Sogdiam, my Sogdiam, is dead.

So are many others, of course.

They say Sogdiam was bringing back a wagon full of grain. He had been coming at night from
Jerusalem more and more frequently. Some men there still try to give us a little food – grain or vegetables – so that their former wives and children will not starve to death. But at night the Bethany road is dangerous, furrowed by the autumn rains. Or perhaps it wasn't the rain, but Gershem's men, or Toviyyah's. Neither miss an opportunity to strip us bare or murder us.

I did not think to ask if the grain had been stolen, which would have meant that Sogdiam had died for nothing.

My Sogdiam is dead!

I would like to weep but I can't. My hands are cold, my feet are icy. Perhaps my heart has frozen too.

I am gripping my stylus and writing.

I must seem confused to you now, Antinoes, my husband. I mix past and present. It is because of Sogdiam's death. But it is true, too, that everything is confused in my mind, my heart, my body.

Yesterday, towards evening, Sogdiam sat beside me for a long time. ‘You write and write!' he said reproachfully. ‘You spend your time writing like a scribe. Who will read your secrets?'

‘You,' I replied.

He looked at me as if we were dancing under the wedding sheet. I felt his warmth next to me. His misshapen body. I had only to look at him once a
day and I could breathe more easily. When he slept, his eyes smiled.

Oh, my Sogdiam, who fed me like a mother! A boy of barely sixteen. A child who'd become a man. A child I'd swept up in the whirlwind of my confusion when I'd urged Ezra to leave for Jerusalem.

Sogdiam, my beloved child!

It isn't true that I am writing this letter for Antinoes. I know that now, and it would be a lie to maintain otherwise. Antinoes, my husband, will never read it. Sogdiam, my handsome, crippled child, will never take him this papyrus scroll in a leather container hanging from his neck.

Antinoes is far away. He is no more than a thought that wrenches my heart every time I write his name.

He is far away, as far as the life I did not want, did not choose, did not accept. He has forgotten me. He is clasping a woman in his arms at this moment, as the ink slips from the stylus and enters the skin of the papyrus.

That is the truth.

I have no husband now. I have no Sogdiam.

That is the truth.

I write this letter as I wrote, one night a long time ago, in my bedchamber in Susa, to Yahweh: ‘O Yahweh, why must we stop being children?'

O Yahweh, why couldn't Sogdiam stay a child? Why did he have to die? Why must I become cold? Why must I be no more than a hand that writes so that you may hear another voice, different from those raised today in Jerusalem?

Why so many painful questions?

These words also are Isaiah's. They come often to my lips, though I don't know if they are good for us or not. They come to me like the angry clouds that race above our heads, chased by the whistling north wind.