Return to Me Page 5

  “It must have taken a long time to walk here,” Zechariah said after a moment.

  “Yes, but we had no choice. The soldiers forced us to keep going no matter how tired we were—for miles and miles, across mountains and deserts. . . . Many people died along the way, especially the old ones and the little children who were already weak from starvation. People had to carry their loved ones’ bodies until nightfall because the soldiers wouldn’t let them stop to bury them, and we couldn’t leave them for scavengers to feed on. So we buried them at night, with nothing to mark their graves and no chance to grieve or to pray before falling asleep and waking at dawn to march another day.” He stopped again as his voice choked with emotion.

  Zechariah was sorry for making his grandfather sad. He searched for something to say to cheer him but couldn’t think of anything. At last Saba cleared his throat. “And now, if it pleases God, we will go back the way we came,” he said. “The Almighty One will provide a new exodus from slavery and we’ll return home, just as He promised through His prophets.”

  Zaki thought of how Abba had called the prophets a bunch of dreamers. He and Saba couldn’t both be right.

  When Zechariah heard voices in the street below, he stood to peer over the parapet. Yael was entering her courtyard with a Babylonian woman, draped in golden jewelry. He wanted to wave, but Yael didn’t look up and he didn’t dare call out to her. Saba stood and came to peer over the wall beside him. “What is that woman of wickedness doing in our neighborhood? And on the Sabbath, no less!”

  “Yael’s mother is sick, and she’s the woman who’s been reading her future in the stars. Yael says the stars and planets control our destiny and that—”

  “Nonsense! The Almighty One created the heavenly bodies so we could keep track of the times and seasons. Why would He allow something as distant and impersonal as a star to decide our fate? Yael’s father knows that pagan sorcery is forbidden. The Torah says a woman of wickedness like her should be stoned to death.”

  Zechariah couldn’t imagine such a horrible death, pummeled with rocks and stones until you died.

  “Promise me you won’t go near that woman,” Saba said.

  “I promise.”

  “Come, let’s begin.” Saba turned his back on Yael’s house, and they sat down in a patch of sunshine to study together.

  “Will you help me practice my Torah portion, Saba? I want to read it perfectly on the day of my bar mitzvah. I want you to be proud of me.”

  “I already am proud of you.”

  They worked until it was time to eat, and Zechariah made good progress in studying the passage of Hebrew Scripture. When the meal was ready and they left the rooftop, Zechariah lagged behind so he could dash over to Yael’s house and see if she wanted to go exploring after the meal.

  He halted before reaching Yael’s gate. The Babylonian woman stood with her back to him while Yael knelt beside the threshold. They were digging a hole—something that was forbidden on the Sabbath. Zechariah remembered his grandfather’s story of how they had buried their dead loved ones along the road into exile and wondered if Yael’s mother was going to die.

  When Yael looked up and saw him, she motioned to him. He shook his head, remembering his promise. She hurried over, brushing dirt off her hands. “Come on, Zaki. Want to help us?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “The seer brought a clay demon and we’re burying it under our threshold to keep the evil spirits away until Mama gets better. The stars say she will recover if nothing interferes.”

  “Do you really believe all that stuff? I mean, it seems . . . stupid.”

  Yael planted her hands on her hips, challenging him. “What if your mother was sick? What would you do?” For all her bravery, tears shone in her eyes.

  “I don’t know. I guess I’d try anything.” He didn’t want to imagine losing his mother, even though Safta Dinah and his aunts would take care of him. Yael had no one. He thought again of how Saba had lost his entire family. Why did the Holy One let things like that happen?

  “Want to see the demon before we bury it?” Yael asked.

  “I can’t. I promised Saba that I wouldn’t go near . . . her.” He tilted his head toward the Babylonian woman.

  “Parthia? Why not? . . . Hey, you know what Parthia said? She said I have the gift of divination. She’s teaching me to tell the future like she does.”

  “The future?” He took a small step backwards. Saba said Parthia should be stoned to death.

  “She says I can earn money telling fortunes and help pay for Mama’s potions and things. It costs a lot of money for seers, you know. Here—give me your hand, and I’ll tell you what I learned so far.” She grabbed Zechariah’s hand before he could stop her and turned it palm-side up. “This is your lifeline. . . . Hey, yours is really long! And this is your love line. See all these little lines branching off of it? You’re going to have a harem full of wives.”

  “I am not,” he said, snatching back his hand. Yael laughed at him. But she had such a happy, carefree laugh that he couldn’t help smiling.

  Then her laughter died away and she said, “I’m afraid to look at Mama’s lifeline.”

  Zechariah felt sorry for her. They had lived side by side since they were born, yet Yael’s life was so much harder than his was. He couldn’t imagine his friend telling fortunes like the Babylonians, working to earn a few pennies, even though everyone Zechariah knew longed to see the future.

  “Come back, Yael,” the woman called, beckoning to her. “The hole is big enough. We must finish this.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to see the demon before we bury it?” Yael asked.

  “No thanks. I have to eat. You want to go down to the canal with me afterward?”

  “Sure. See you later, Zaki.”

  He hurried inside and quickly washed his hands before sitting down with his family. As he listened to his grandfather recite the blessings and break the bread and pour the wine, he wondered why his father didn’t believe in tying on phylacteries every morning or resting on the Sabbath like Saba did. Were Saba’s beliefs as useless as Babylonian sorcery? How was Zechariah supposed to tell the difference between superstition and faith? He felt pulled in opposite directions again, as if he sat in an oxcart with an animal tied to each end. The direction Saba pulled seemed right—but so did Abba’s way. Zechariah loved both men, but how was he supposed to choose?

  He remembered what Rebbe Daniel the Righteous One had said in the house of assembly and suddenly decided that if the Holy One made a way for them to return to Jerusalem, it would be a sign that the stories in the Torah were all true. If not, then Abba must be right, and the prophets were all dreamers. But it would break his grandfather’s heart if Rebbe Daniel was wrong.

  Chapter

  4

  Yael knelt beside her mother’s pallet and gently shook her shoulder. “Mama . . . Mama, please wake up.” She felt bones beneath her mother’s pale skin where flesh and muscle should be. Mama hadn’t eaten in days. All she did was sleep. A tremor of fear shivered through Yael as she shook her again. “Please wake up and eat something, Mama. You can’t get well if you don’t eat.”

  At last Mama stirred and opened her eyes. They looked huge and dark in her thin face. “Yael . . . ?”

  “I brought you some food. You need to eat so you’ll get well.” Mama couldn’t die, she couldn’t! The clay demon Parthia had buried last week was supposed to chase the evil spirit of sickness far away. Parthia had promised it would work. But Mama gazed up at Yael as if too weak to move.

  “Where’s your father?”

  “At work.” Yael lifted the bowl of food and held it near her mother’s face so she could smell it. “Zaki’s grandmother brought us some food. You should eat it while it’s still warm.”

  “Dinah? . . . Is Dinah here?”

  “No, she didn’t want to wake you. Shall I help you sit up?”

  “Go get Dinah. Ask her to come here.”

  “Why
? I can help you.”

  “I know . . . just go get her, please.”

  Yael set the bowl of food on the floor and hurried next door, wishing she didn’t feel so afraid. She found Dinah sitting outside in the courtyard with her family, enjoying the sunshine. “Mama is asking for you,” she told her. “Can you come right away?”

  “Of course.” Dinah stood and passed the baby she’d been rocking to his mother. “How is your mother feeling today?”

  “I—I don’t know.” Yael saw her friend Zechariah sitting with the others and said, “You come, too, Zaki.” He made Yael feel brave when she went exploring with him, and she needed courage right now. She didn’t want anyone to know how scared she really was.

  She led the way home and then into her mother’s room and saw Dinah’s shock as she knelt beside the pallet. “Oh, Miriam . . . I’m here now,” she said, taking Mama’s hand. “What do you need, dear one? I want to help you.”

  Mama’s voice sounded whisper soft, as if she was breathing out each word. “Dinah . . . promise me you’ll take care of my Yael when I’m gone . . . treat her as if she’s your very own daughter. . . .”

  Yael collapsed to her knees beside her. “Mama, no! Don’t talk that way!” Was she getting ready to die?

  Mama didn’t seem to hear her as she gripped Dinah’s hand, gazing up at her. “I should be teaching Yael things . . . but I can’t. . . . Promise me you’ll teach her, Dinah.”

  “Of course, Miriam. But . . . but you’ll be able to take care of Yael yourself when you’re better.”

  Mama shook her head. “Help her find a worthy husband. . . . Promise you’ll do that for me.”

  “Of course. But you must get well, dear one.”

  “Take Yael home with you. She’ll be your daughter from now on.”

  “Mama, no! You won’t die! The stars all say you’ll be healed.”

  Mama released Dinah’s hand and groped for Yael’s. “They’re wrong. I don’t want to leave you, my sweet Yael, but I’m just so tired. I can’t fight this sickness any longer.”

  Yael buried her head on the bed, weeping as she clung to her mother.

  “Shh . . . shh . . . I’m not afraid,” Mama soothed, stroking her hair. Her touch felt as soft as a breeze. “Dying is as easy as closing my eyes and falling asleep.”

  “Please don’t leave me, Mama! Please!”

  “I would stay if I could . . . but I can’t hang on any longer, Yael. I’m sorry . . .”

  “Zaki, go home and get your father,” Yael heard Dinah saying behind her. “Tell him to find Mattaniah and bring him here right away.”

  The next several hours were like something from a nightmare. Abba arrived home and everyone gathered around Mama’s bed, sitting with her and weeping as they said good-bye. Night fell and Mama slept, but even though Yael was exhausted, she couldn’t rest. She lay curled beside her mother, listening as she drew one ragged breath after another. Eventually her breathing slowed. Then stopped.

  “Mama!” Yael screamed.

  “She’s gone,” Mattaniah said. “She’s gone.”

  Yael flung herself into her father’s arms, weeping angry tears. “Why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you save her? You let her die!”

  “I tried everything, Yael, every omen and potion and ritual I could find. There was nothing more I could do. I’m grieving as much as you are.” She had never seen Abba cry, but he was weeping now as he held her tightly.

  “What are we going to do without her?” she asked, her voice muffled against his chest.

  “I don’t know . . . I don’t know . . .”

  “How could she go away and leave us?”

  “She didn’t want to, Yael. She would have stayed if she could.”

  Mama was dead. Gone forever. Yael sat in a daze for the next few hours as the house filled with people who came to mourn with them. Dinah and her cousin Shoshanna washed Mama and anointed her with spices. The potent scent filled the room and clawed at Yael’s throat. She looked at her mother’s beautiful face one last time before they wrapped her in a clean shroud.

  Yael clung to Abba’s arm, unable to watch as they buried Mama, unable to think of her mother’s soft, warm body lying in the ground the way they had buried the clay demon. She wanted to dig up the clay figurine and smash it to pieces. It hadn’t done any good. Nothing had done any good.

  As they walked home from the graveyard, the mourners’ wailing cries seemed to echo in Yael’s ears even though they walked in silence now. She realized that the cries were coming from a place deep in her heart. People tried to comfort her, but their words made her feel worse. “She suffered for so long,” everyone kept saying. “You didn’t want her to keep suffering, did you?” As if wanting her mother to live made her a terrible person.

  The women brought food, but Yael couldn’t eat. She stood in her family’s courtyard, wishing everyone would go away and leave her alone. As she stared out through the open gate at a group of departing visitors, there stood Parthia, looking all around at the mourners in surprise. Rage boiled inside Yael, spilling out as she ran toward the seer. “This is all your fault!” she cried, shoving Parthia backwards. “You said Mama would get better, but she died! She died!” Yael was angry enough to claw out the seer’s eyes, but Zechariah’s grandfather raced up behind her and caught Yael before she could strike Parthia again. He gripped Yael so tightly she couldn’t break free as he pulled her back inside the courtyard.

  “Go away!” Iddo shouted at Parthia. “Go away and don’t ever come back! You don’t belong here!” He lifted Yael in his arms and carried her the last few yards to the house. “I know . . . I know,” he soothed. “I know how you’re suffering.”

  It was true. Zaki said his grandfather had lost both of his parents when he was Yael’s age. She let Iddo hold her until the flames of her anger and grief had cooled, then wiggled out of his arms and went inside the house to hide.

  The day seemed one hundred years long, but at last all the mourners left. Yael went outside again and stood with her arms wrapped around her father’s waist as he said good-bye to Zaki’s family, who were the last ones to leave.

  “I’m so sorry, my friend,” Iddo said, resting his hand on Abba’s shoulder. “I understand your grief. But soon you’ll leave all these sorrows and memories behind when we go home to Jerusalem.”

  “Why should I go there?” Abba asked. Yael heard the bitterness in his voice and knew he shared her anger. “I don’t believe any of that stuff. Religion didn’t do my wife any good.”

  “You mean those spells and Babylonian superstitions? That isn’t true religion, Mattaniah.”

  “What’s the difference? Aren’t they all just myths and tales? The Red Sea parting? Miracles? Bah! Why would God take my wife? My child’s mother?”

  “I don’t know, Mattaniah. I’m sorry. There’s no easy answer, so I won’t insult you by offering one.”

  Yael slid out of her father’s arms. How could anyone expect them to leave their home? Mama was buried here in Babylon. They couldn’t leave her here all alone. Yael hurried across the courtyard and ran out through her gate, not sure where she was going. She heard Zaki calling behind her, “Yael, wait! Where are you going?”

  She ignored him and kept running, but he quickly caught up with her. “Stop following me!” she said, shoving him with her elbow. When he stayed right beside her, she halted suddenly, turning on him. “What do you want, Zechariah?”

  “I want to come with you.”

  “Why?”

  “So you won’t be all alone.”

  “But I want to be alone. I don’t want to talk to you or anyone else.”

  “That’s fine,” he said with a shrug. “We don’t have to talk.”

  He kept pace with her as they started walking again, heading toward the canal. Yael didn’t say so out loud, but the farther they walked, the more relieved she was that Zechariah had come along. She would have been afraid by herself, especially when she saw a gang of Babylonian boys fish
ing along the canal. Zaki steered her to a clump of palm trees and scrub bushes farther upstream, and they sat down together in the shade. Birds wheeled overhead, calling to each other as barges and single-mast vessels floated down the canal. How could the world keep going the same as before, as if nothing had happened? It didn’t seem fair.

  “What happens to people after they die?” Yael asked after a while.

  “The Torah says their body stays here in the ground but their spirit keeps on living in a different place.”

  “Where? Where does it go?”

  “No one knows for sure. The Torah doesn’t tell us about the afterlife because we’re supposed to pay attention to how we live now, so that we’ll be ready for eternal life.”

  “Do you believe that? About our spirits not dying?”

  “My grandfather explained it this way: the Holy One told Adam and Eve that if they ate from the forbidden tree they would die. Well, they ate anyway, but they didn’t drop dead as if the fruit was poison. They kept on living but in a different place, not in Gan Eden. This teaches us that death isn’t the end. Our spirit keeps on living, but in a different place.”

  “So I’ll see Mama again?”

  He nodded. “And she won’t be sick anymore.”

  Yael began to cry, and Zechariah wrapped his arms around her, letting her lean on him. They sat side by side for a long time until the warm sunshine and gently lapping water made Yael feel sleepy. She stood, leaning on her friend’s shoulder as she struggled to her feet. “Let’s go home,” she said.

  They were nearly there when Parthia suddenly stepped out of the shadows and into Yael’s path. “I’m so sorry about your mother, little one. She was a very brave woman.”

  “You were wrong!” Yael lunged at her, fists tightened as she tried to strike her. “You said Mama would get better, and she didn’t!”