If she, Bilhah, had been a mother, she would never have succumbed to illness and left a little one alone

Leonora, imprisoned in Jerusalem, tells Bilhah the story of her time in Lisbon, and how she gave away her daughter.

For a long moment, Bilhah stares at Leonora. The walls of the prison press in on her. In her throat is trapped a strange, inchoate cry, as if she is some wild, ensnared creature. I gave her away because I did not want her. I did not want my daughter. The words Leonora just said echo, over and over, filling her until there’s room for nothing else.

“You see that I am evil.” Leonora speaks quietly.

It is on Bilhah’s lips to say, yes, evil, evil, evil.

But something stops her.

She lifts the lamp, holds it up, so she can see Leonora’s face. She has the mark of nobility. Her silk cloak is grimy and her long skirts are hemmed with mud, but she is still a tall woman with flashing eyes and contempt for the world.

Or maybe she is not. Maybe she is another abandoned daughter.

Fourteen years old. Watching her parents sail away. A baby in her arms.

A baby. A mother.

She thinks, suddenly, of her own mother.

A vague scent of lavender, fingertips that were slightly dry and would gently scratch Bilhah’s cheeks.

This anger. This anger. It’s making her heart thump so hard that her body aches, and her face burns.

Why did her mother not fight for her life? For her child? She imagines her mother laid out on her bed, spirit of life ebbing away. Was it sorrow that ended it all?

Did she succumb to escape Papa?

Possibly.

So it again returns to Papa, and he is here, standing in a cell just a few steps away, behind iron bars and stone walls.

But then, the beit olam in Salonika was filled with women — dead in childbed, mostly, but also of bee stings or winter colds that went to their chests, or plague that arrived each summer. Every time a woman entered childbirth, the midwife would send a message to old widow Mazaltov, day or night.

And she would go to the beit olam, to the section where the women in childbirth lay, and say, “Rise up and implore the Almighty for the sake of your sister and for the sake of her unborn baby.”

If she, Bilhah, had been a mother, she would never have succumbed to illness and left a little one alone.