“I… I shall get you a soothing drink.”

Without opening his eyes, the man nods.

Eliyahu sprints across the grass toward his cave. He sets water boiling on his cooking fire just outside and then, ducking his head, he enters the cave. Toward the back is a rocky ledge, and it is this space that he designated as a cooking area. Lined up in small, earthenware jars are the dried herbs and plants he scavenges from the surrounding hills and woods.

Ground olive bark. He drinks it all winter for its  medicinal properties, wondering if its very bitterness is a segulah against ailments. Will the stranger tolerate it? Maybe just a pinch. With some rosemary for the pain, and yarrow for healing any wounds. Mint will help relax his muscles, and chamomile will calm him.

He gathers them all in his cupped hands and empties them into the cooking pot outside. Now. Food. A handful of barley, water. Eliyahu peers into the mushroom jar. Not many left. He hesitates, then castigates himself: hachnassat orchim.

Although, this man is not a guest. He is simply a wayfarer, seeking assistance. He will be on his way before midday; certainly, before sunset.

He need not even know that Eliyahu lives here, only that he has set up camp for a few days.

No one knows where he lives.

At the start of it all, when he was weary from wandering and sleeping under hedges and on stony ground, when he could no longer take the wind and the rain grew stronger and the cold crept under his skin, he searched for a place that no one would find. And when he finally discovered it, he made a trip back to his old home to collect all the things that could not be found in the wild —a knife, cooking pots, his heavy fleece blanket.

He went just before the dawn, the hours when even the tzaddikim who stay up all night lamenting the Churban close their eyes to the world for a few minutes. He had eased open the door with his fingertips, afraid of what he might find. But there were no stray cats or dogs, no child run away from home, only layers of dust, and air heavy with memories that had not yet retreated to the past, but seemed to brush his eyelashes and swirl around his chest.

He had placed things into a large leather sack and then pressed both palms on the stone walls. They were cold to the touch, but solid. Witnesses. Once, he had sat down in this very room, at the end of a long day of work and study and prayer. He had chewed on bread and tasted a spoon of lamb stew and looked up to see his wife’s dark brown eyes, watching him steadily, waiting for his murmur of appreciation.

He would meet her eyes and they would smile and then it would come, that jolt that she was there, with him, and he would have to suddenly swallow and look down and hope she didn’t notice the sudden brightness of his eyes. He would take a breath, steady himself, look around the room: a wooden stool and white-stained shutters, protecting them from the wind; the off-key hum of his wife as she ladled more stew onto his plate and it was a miracle, all of it, a miracle, and it had happened to him.

Sorrow rises through him and makes his body heavy and his jaw slack. He closes his eyes. The pot. He strains the contents, pouring the liquid carefully into a cup. Eliyahu treads carefully across the boulders, and up the hill to where the man lies.

The man looks pale and tired, but he allows Eliyahu to prop him up. He swallows and his eyes fly open.

“What are you trying to do, finish me off?”

“Kevod Harav…”

“Don’t want to be bothered with me, eh? A nuisance, am I? So you give me this… this noxious stuff. Well, I won’t drink it.”

A smile hovers around his lips. Eliyahu settles onto the grass beside him. He is a tall man, and now his legs seem to go on forever, and his feet feel too large, as if suddenly he doesn’t fit his world.

“This is filled with goodness.”

“Well, and do you have no honey, then, to sweeten it?”

“No, I—”

He props himself up. “No honey?”

Eliyahu slowly shakes his head. “There is no honey here. I have nothing sweet at all.”

“Rabotai,” Leonora calls out from the window. “Rabotai.”

The crowd, which before was only eight men, has swelled. Little children have gathered, scratching at the soil, tugging their fathers’ hands, impatient to understand. A woman walks past, slows almost to a halt, then continues on.

“Please, listen to me.”

Three men stop, ask about their protest. The ringleader launches into an explanation.

She raises her voice. “Listen to me!”

The crowd quiets. “You accuse me of lending money to the church. But know that everything I do is with the permission of the rabbis.”

They do not listen. Instead, they begin a chant: “Traitor, traitor, traitor.”

A child picks up one of her good cooking pots, smeared with dirt. He lifts it above his head, ready to hurl it onto the ground.

“Hear me! Hear me now!”

They glance up. “I have a scroll here. A teshuvah from a rav.” Where is it? It should be in one of the wooden trunks that they have brought from Alexandria, from Naples, from who knows where. “Far be it from me to flout the rules of the Almighty.”

But the crowd just ignores her, and the chanting gets worse. Her hands shake. She would call her manservants upon them, but does not want to cause a ruckus.

There is a crack, and one of the pots is hurled. It shatters.

For a moment, the crowd is silenced.

In the silence, her son Yishai appears.  “Shame on you,” he bellows, face turning red. “Is this your hakarat hatov? My mother comes with her soft woman’s heart and has mercy on your children and this is what you do?”

He looks around and the crowd shrinks back.

“You want to uphold the halachah, but you break it! Lo Tonu, you shalt not afflict your nation. You shall not oppress a widow!  Friends, my mother is a poor almanah who cared for your children. Shame on you! Who is the traitor? You are traitors to the word of Hashem in Heaven!”

Leonora watches as the men shrivel in on themselves and start to slip away.

“Send an emissary from your rabbis, if you are worried about a halachic infraction. But my mother does not step foot left nor right from the holy Torah’s laws.”

All day, Bilhah has been asking, cajoling, and eavesdropping on different workers, trying to find out what type of work she should request. But the women are occupied with Istanbul gossip. Something about a beggar who gets no handouts, though he sits outside the hamam where men come and go all day long, with the clink of coins in the pocket, too. And then he comes across an old friend, a man in whom he can place his trust and… she has still not pieced together the end.

Now, with the evening meal almost over, an older woman trails to the front and claps her hands.

“All new odalisques remain.”

Bilhah, sitting next to Katerina, turns and meets her eyes. Katerina shrugs: who knows what the woman wants? The last few days have been filled with instructions, including a lecture on the rudimentary principles of Islam: a haze of words, and when Bilhah’s eyes had fluttered closed she had thought she heard the low tone of a cane flute. It was only the man’s voice.

The room slowly empties.

“Come close,” the woman orders.

As they move over, Bilhah whispers to Katerina. “And?”

“And what?”

“The beggar.”

Why is it so important for her to know?

Katerina smiles and continues walking toward their group, which gathers near the main doors of the hall. “Ah. So the friend pretends to be dead. And the beggar cries out, Ay, ay, ay, my friend’s spirit has passed on and I have no money to bury him.”

Together, they lower themselves to the rugs, that cover the white and gray threaded marble.

“And?” Bilhah whispers.

The older woman — who introduces herself as Aziza — clutches her hands together as if she must make some kind of pious gesture. “Said the prophet: The believer dies with sweat on his brow. And since then, we believe in good work, hard work, work that benefits others, and that benefits oneself.”

Her words sound harsh, but the woman’s voice is soft and gentle.

“To explain, I shall tell you the tale of a girl like you. Fifteen years ago, a girl arrived from Ruthenia.  She was tired and confused, perhaps like you, unsure of the transaction that had her join a caravan and travel many farsah. Her name was Roxelana.”

Whispers rush through the girls.

“It was the name of the woman now called Hurrem Sultan. In the history of the empire, no one has risen as high as she.”

No one has seen Hurrem Sultan, and no one expects to. She occupies the innermost, most sumptuous and private chambers.

“I tell you this because this is a place where, through hard work and talent, you may rise. Hurrem Sultan learned, as you will learn, to pray and sew and sing. Now she lies on a bed studded with emeralds and sleeps on satin as fine as a wisp of cloud on a summer’s day.”

But it is not all that she learned, Bilhah thinks. She learned who to talk to, and how. She thinks of the beggar turning his friend into a corpse so he can gain a few coins. This is a sly city, a clever city, a city where a girl can live on her wits.

They are told to stand and form six lines.

Each girl steps forward, Bilhah sees, and is asked some questions. The women write down the answers, as if it is nothing for a woman to write. Head by head, they move forward until Bilhah herself is standing in front of one of the women. She does not look unkind, but Bilhah feels cold creep up her skin.

“Welcome…”

Bilhah dips her head.

“Name?”

“Bilhah.”

The woman notes it on her page. “Your name is acceptable.”

She has heard that girls must change their names. One girl has already been called Qaswa, the name of the Prophet’s donkey. Qaswa has vowed never to use it and so the girls bray when they see her, which makes her tug the hair of whomever is closest, until they squeal.

“We are here this morning to determine your areas of study in the madrassa.”

“You come from?”

“Salonika.”

“Jew or New Christian?”

Bilhah hesitates. Which answer would be safer in the eyes of a Muslim? “Jew.”

The woman peers up at her and smiles. “Hurrem Sultan herself became a servant of Allah when she joined the palace. As will all of you who were not born into the true faith. We cannot have a dhimmi serving the Sultan. It would not be honorable.”

So, she is to become a Muslim.

“By all accounts, Jews are intelligent folk.” She looks down her scrolls. “Perhaps you can have a place with our doctors. I believe one of them was a Jew. You will learn anatomy, diagnostics, and to administer medicines.”

Bilhah’s mind works rapidly. A doctor.

The smell of herbs and gangrene. Injuries, stomach complaints. A limp, a blind eye. Death.

Fail as a doctor, and bring death upon yourself, as surely as that beggar, now he has been caught.

Bilhah hesitates. But then, work in the kitchen or laundry and you are easily dismissed.

“I do not have healer’s hands.”

“Do you sing or play? Many Jews play the kenan or the tanbur, do they not?”

“Not the girls. It is considered immodest.”

The woman thinks for a minute and then dips her pen in ink. “I shall put you with the embroiderers. The work of their hands is intricate and valuable.”

The embroiderers. Sitting hour after hour with a rounded back, coaxing fingers to hold needle, direct, pierce, tug, eyes misty from staring at the same spot. Tangle, wrong stitch, lost thread, broken needle, spoiled silk, aching neck.

And all the while, legs and feet crackling with the need to stretch, walk, run, run free.

She looks up at the woman’s dark eyes, ringed with kohl, perfect eyebrows. “Is there not a need for cosmeticians?”

The woman shakes her head. “We only take cosmeticians from Egypt. It is in their blood.”

“I can… write.”

The woman’s eyebrows raise. “Yes?”

“And I am proficient in many languages.”

“Including Arabic? Here we use the Ottoman tongue but we do not use the Latin alphabet, only the Arabic one.”

She does not know Arabic. But really, how hard could it be to learn? “I have not written in Arabic for a while, but with practice it will come back to me. And I speak Spanish and Italian, which would be helpful for dispatches to foreign lands.”

Every morning, before the streets are filled with turbaned men running to morning payers, the diplomats send their dispatches. So that by the morrow, Henry VIII, king of England, and the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, will all know that Hurrem Sultan has been given a new monkey and she slipped a golden bell around its neck and feeds it sugared almonds, and it struts after her through the Imperial gardens.

They want to know everything. For knowledge used — to charm or to press a point, to gift or to wrangle, and even to blackmail.

The woman studies her carefully. Bilhah looks up and holds her gaze. She is, as the woman said, a girl of intelligence. And letters — of all kinds — are in her blood. How long would it take her to master Arabic? She will find a girl here and cajole or bribe or somehow bend her into teaching her the letters.

“You want to join the scribes, then?” She bends over and scribbles onto her parchment. “Yes, that can be arranged.”

Bilhah dips her head in thanks and feels the air fill her chest once more. Perhaps this is what the beggar’s friend felt, when he scrambled to his feet after a long day as a corpse.

to be continued…

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 793)