Lilah (20 page)

She fell silent, her eyes still closed. Antinoes did not dare move – he hardly dared to breathe. He had no doubt about Lilah's decision. But his hands shook as if he expected something different to emerge as if by a miracle from her beloved mouth.

‘I went to the lower town,' Lilah resumed, softly. ‘He greeted me more tenderly than he has for a long time. “Antinoes told me,” he said. “He told me you went to see Queen Parysatis for me.”'

Lilah's voice broke. She bit her lip, and tears formed beneath her closed eyelids.

‘He said, “I know it was Antinoes, your lover, who wrote the letter in my name seeking an audience with Artaxerxes. I've been unfair and harsh towards him. I can speak well of Antinoes now. But that changes nothing. You must understand that all I'm doing is following the Law of Yahweh. I have no other choice. How could my sister live her whole life with a man who's not a child of Israel? At the foot of the mountain of the Commandments, Yahweh said to Moses and Aaron, ‘How dare you let the women who have lain with Midianites live? They are unclean. The bitter water of my curse will flow over them.'”

Antinoes had seized Lilah's hand. She clung to him, holding him so tightly that she seemed suspended in the air. ‘He keeps saying he needs his sister,' she said. ‘And it's true. I know it. I've always known it. Just as I know that what he's doing is great.'

‘I know it, too,' Antinoes replied at last. ‘And so does Parysatis. There's no miracle. You must go with Ezra to Jerusalem.'

Lilah opened her eyes, and her tears flowed. She gazed into Antinoes' face. ‘I could hide. Only go as far as Babylon. Wait there until Parysatis forgets me. We can meet again in a year – yes, in a year Parysatis will have forgotten me. She might even be dead.'

‘Parysatis will never forget you. Wherever you
are, if you're with me, her cruelty will reach you. And don't count on her death. Demons live on for a long time. In any case, Ezra will never leave you in Babylon either.'

Lilah raised Antinoes' hand to her lips. ‘Will you forget me, then?'

‘No. I'll carry you within me all the days of my life.'

Gently, he made her stand, then took off her tunic. He held a candle in each hand, the better to see her naked body, and walked round her.

‘Every inch of you will be stamped on my eyes,' he promised. ‘I will see your face, kiss your breasts and your belly in my dreams. I will be inside you, night after night, and in the morning I will have the scent of your kisses on my lips. In the morning, my penis will grow hard at the memory of your hips.'

Lilah realized that Antinoes was weeping too. She smiled. ‘You came back to Susa to make me your wife . . .' she said softly.

‘There are too many people who don't want our marriage.'

‘I made a promise, I must keep it.' She took the sheet from their bed and held it above her, like a canopy. Then she began to move round Antinoes, with a light, dancing step. ‘I am Lilah, daughter of Serayah,' she whispered. ‘I choose my husband according to my heart and before the Everlasting,
Yahweh, my God.' A radiant smile lit her face, while she danced the wedding dance and her arms moved the sheet so that it was over her lover's head. ‘I choose Antinoes, he who chose me on the first day of love.'

Antinoes started to laugh and raised his arms to hold up the sheet. They both turned and turned, looking into each other's eyes, hips swaying.

‘I am Lilah, daughter of Serayah. As long as Yahweh gives me breath, I will have no other husband.'

‘I am Antinoes, lord of the Citadel of Susa. May Ahura Mazda and Anahita protect my love for Lilah.'

They laughed, tears glistening on their cheeks, their joy as intense as their despair.

‘I am Lilah, daughter of Serayah, and before the Everlasting I keep my promise. I am Lilah, wife of Antinoes. That is written in the Book of Days to the end of time.'

‘I am Antinoes, husband of Lilah. May Ahura Mazda bring me Lilah's kisses to the end of time.'

ANTINOES, MY HUSBAND,

Almost a year has passed since we turned beneath the wedding canopy. A year since your lips last touched mine, and your hands last caressed my breasts and hips.

A year that has been so long, I no longer have any yardstick by which to measure it.

Not a day or night has passed that I have not whispered your name, that the desire to hear your voice and feel your breath on the back of my neck has not wrenched my heart and crushed the few joys that are left to me.

Yet I have been patient.

On our wedding night, I promised that one day we would meet again, in Susa or in Babylon, perhaps in Jerusalem, perhaps somewhere else in the
world. I promised that Yahweh would not keep us apart for the rest of our lives. I promised that a day will come when Lilah, your wife, will be at your side, will bear your children and watch them grow. Antinoes and Lilah will be a real husband and wife, not just ghosts and memories.

Today, however, I fear I cannot keep that promise.

It is not of my own free will that I say this. Not at all!

But something so terrible has happened that I no longer know what tomorrow will bring. I no longer know what I can and cannot do.

I am writing to you because I am afraid, because I no longer know what is just and what is unjust.

It is like being swept away by a swollen river, struggling in the current while the banks recede.

And yet, as I write, I tell myself it is madness to blacken this papyrus with words. For I know nothing about your present life. I know nothing about you, my beloved husband. In truth, I am not even sure you are still alive. But I cannot think about your death. That is impossible, Antinoes, my love.

Have you been in many hard battles? Have you sustained wounds, known victory?

Sometimes, during the hours of despair, when solitude becomes as cold and clinging as winter mud, when the colour has gone from the trees and the
sky, and the beating of my own heart frightens me, I think that another woman may have taken the place I left empty and become your wife.

Then I reproach myself. I punish myself by dreaming about the things I chose to reject: going away with you, far from Parysatis, far from Ezra, far from Susa; being at your side, seeing your eyes and mouth, watching your nostrils quiver with each dawn, each twilight.

I know that a man as handsome and strong as Antinoes my husband cannot remain alone. How could he live with only memories of a woman's love and caresses – memories that by now may be no more than smoke scattered on the wind?

For that is our truth, my husband. We are no more to each other now than the ghosts of memory.

These thoughts torture me endlessly.

But they torture me less if I talk to you like this, putting words down on the yellow fibres of the papyrus.

I am writing this letter to you, but I have nowhere to send it. No country, no city, no camp, no house. This is just my madness, my dream of keeping you alive and by my side.

Antinoes, my beloved, my husband before the Everlasting, the only man who has placed his lips on me.

To make you understand – if that is possible – the madness around me today, I must begin with our departure from Susa.

The order that separated us came the day after our wedding night. That very day, you had to leave Susa for Karkemish in the Upper Euphrates. Parysatis had done her work: she was separating us with an expert hand.

You and I were both paying the price for the letter with the seal of Artaxerxes, which guards from the Citadel placed in Ezra's hands.

Zachariah climbed onto a strong basket that Sogdiam brought him, and read the scroll aloud so that even those in the street outside the house could hear.

Since then, I have heard them repeated so often that today I can write them without thinking.

Everyone listened, open-mouthed, their hearts warmed in spite of the cold.

When the letter had been read in its entirety, there was no explosion of joy such as there had been after Ezra's audience in the Apadana. There was no singing or dancing. The faces around me were solemn.

Artaxerxes' letter was not only an order, not only an expression of power: it bore witness that the hand of God was now upon Ezra. I had known it for months, and so had Master Baruch, but now everyone knew.

It took several days to prepare for our departure. Now that it was certain, volunteers arrived in their hundreds and thousands. Many came from the villages around Susa. Soon, the lower town was overrun, and the inhabitants started complaining. Zachariah was granted permission to use an area of wasteground on the banks of the Shaour, near the lower town, and pitched his tents there.

But in spite of the large number of people who
had chosen to follow him, Ezra was not content. ‘Yahweh demanded the return of all our people to Jerusalem,' he stormed, ‘not just a few!'

He sent enthusiastic young men to every Jewish house. In response, my uncle Mordechai and others came to visit him. They explained that not every family could leave Susa and abandon the work of a lifetime: the factories, the workshops, even the posts in the Citadel which had often been obtained in the first years of exile.

‘The exile is over,' Ezra replied, without listening to their complaints. ‘You have no good reason to remain among the Persians, except for your gold and your comfortable cushions.'

And so, for five days and five nights, the Jewish houses of Susa were full of as much weeping as joy. There were some who were leaving and others who were staying. Fathers sent their sons, sons refused to follow their fathers. Lovers, wives, sisters were separated, or torn as I was.

Contrary to what I had feared, Aunt Sarah did not beg me to stay. She locked herself in her bedchamber, her eyes red with tears, indifferent for the first time in her life to what was happening in the workshop.

In truth, it was those who were staying behind who had to bear all the sadness. The sadness of separation and the sadness of shame, for Ezra's harsh words had struck home.

To assuage his anger – perhaps Yahweh's, too – those who chose to remain offered all the wealth they could. We were given wagons, food, clothes, carpets and tents, livestock of all kinds and hundreds of mules. Some even offered slaves and servants.

Those were strange days.

And the way I lived through them was even stranger.

To tell the truth, I felt no joy, and reproached myself for it. Hadn't I wanted what was happening more than anything? But, however much I reproached myself, nothing brought me peace or satisfaction.

I had already started to miss you, Antinoes. I had imagined that I had hugged you in my arms tightly enough to keep the imprint on me of what I had lost, but the burden was heavier to bear than I had imagined it would be. I began to doubt that I was equal to it. I was no longer the confident woman who had mustered the courage to confront Parysatis.

I was only a young woman of twenty-two and a wife of a few days. I was terrified. My whole life stretched before me, a life I could not even imagine.

Fortunately, Ezra guessed nothing of my doubts, for I did not see him before the departure, or even during our journey to Babylon. Zachariah and his family were always around him now, as well as a
band of young zealots who had come from all parts of the Susa region. They drank in his words and his rages like morning milk.

It was not that anything disagreeable had occurred. No one had spoken a harsh word or made an unpleasant gesture. But it soon became clear to me that I was no longer welcome near my brother while serious decisions were being made concerning our departure. They were men's decisions, things only men knew about!

I was not hurt by this. I had my own preparations to make, and many tears to wipe away. Axatria was as nervous as a she-cat who has lost her kittens. She lived in dread of not being able to come with us, because of the rumours that were circulating: Ezra's young zealots were saying that my brother wanted only Jews with him. Only the children of Israel could take to the road and return to Jerusalem, they claimed. The servants, and even Gentile wives and husbands, could not join the travellers.

Eventually this rumour died down. Instead, it was announced that Ezra had ordered a two-day fast on the banks of the Shaour before our departure.

Oh, Antinoes, my beloved, if only I could lay my head on your shoulder! I had to interrupt this letter to bury a child. At the moment, that is the most terrible of my tasks, though not the least frequent. It
is difficult for me to take up my stylus again without my hands shaking.

I am sure you can imagine our departure from Susa, so I will not waste words on it. Uncle Mordechai had made a chariot for Axatria and me, and Aunt Sarah had decorated the seats with the most beautiful rugs from her workshop. Beautiful and strong: I still sit on them, although the chariot itself has been pressed into other uses.

There were at least ten thousand of us. In the evening, when the front of the column reached the place where we were to make camp, the rear was still far out of sight. Ezra was at the head, of course, followed by Zachariah and his family, and the young zealots. There were no women at the head of the column. Then came the families, in order of tribe, according to the lists Moses and Aaron had drawn up beneath the mountain of the Commandments.