He can not imagine doing this. He has not spoken to anyone but Yannai for two years. But he is concerned for the man, worried for his wife, neither of them young.

Yannai shakes his head. “My wife is a strong woman — the homecoming must be my own.”

He bends his head and his lips begin to move; some form of prayer, surely. Yannai combs his fingers through his beard and dusts down his robe, straightening his back, dismissing weakness and weariness. Eliyahu steps back as Yanni knocks, presses the handle, and passes through the door into the dim light of the stone house.

A screech, the chatter of voices, a wail, the bang of a pot, a peal of laughter.

Eliyahu buries his face in his hands.

A cacophony of welcome. The man’s wife, his children, grandchildren. Soon the news will pass from courtyard to courtyard, and friends and neighbors will gather to make a brachah on the sight of the old man, whom they feared lost from the world.

Even as the noise continues, Eliyahu slips away. Tomorrow, he will return to his flock. But for tonight, at least, he will return to his old home.

Although all that will greet him is silence.

***

The room empties as the girls are summoned to prayer, and the scrape of chairs and hum of conversation fades into silence. Bilhah lingers in the room of words. She has a scrap of discarded parchment and she is playing around with words. She does not want to go to the prayer hall and hear the buzz of Arabic, nor does she want to unfurl a prayer mat and prostrate herself. After all, how would she have arrived here if she had not kept her back straight and her head tall?

She looks down at the words she has written.

When you laugh, birds fly out of your mouth.

She crosses it out.

When you laugh

She frowns.

Maybe better, your laughter

What about her laughter?

What happens when Hurrem Sultan — or perhaps Suleiman — laughs? She does not even know for whom she is writing this. She bites her tongue between her teeth and thinks. A laugh. Something unexpected. A revelation. A moment of happiness. Maybe that is the most unexpected thing of all.

Your laughter is a bird.

Not just a bird. A white dove — purity and peace and loyalty.

She writes: A dove carries the bell-like tinkle on the wind and my heart gladdens when it reaches me.

A bell-like tinkle.

She pauses. If the laugh was not a sound but a smell, what would it be? The faintest whiff of rose? No. Rose is too sweet, almost cloying. What smell would be a surprise, carrying you off to a different place?

The smell of pebbles that have been washed by spring rain? The scent of rosemary, cracked off a bush and rubbed between her fingers? What else? She chews on the tip of her finger and looks around. Everyone else is busy, no doubt, with their duties, their shoulders rounded as they bend over their desks.

She feels Yasemin’s presence before she sees her. Her heart sinks. Will the woman castigate her about the missed prayers? But she is a Jew, and she has made as if she is on Bilhah’s side, though Bilhah still watches and waits.

“How goes it?”

Bilhah moves her hand to cover the lines she was composing.

“I learn the workings of the queens of the world.”

Yasemin smiles. “Of course. Catherine de Medici is quite a correspondent. As is Margaret Tudor, sister of Henry VIII. But those letters arrive in Latin, so they go to someone else.”

“But she is not proficient in Turkish, so she translates them from Latin to Italian and then they get passed on to me.”

Yasemin frowns. “They do? I see.”

Has she just cast aspersions on someone’s abilities? Bilhah hopes not.

Yasemin draws a chair next to Bilhah’s desk and sits down.

“Of course, it is not these queens and princesses who write, you do know that.”

Bilhah nods. “Surely they have servants just like us, who place words in the mouths of their mistresses.”

A sudden smile plays on Yasemin’s lips. “Two servants who pretend to be queens write messages that will be read by other servants,” Yasemin says. Her dark eyes crinkle with merriment. “If fortune or goodwill or curiosity overtakes them, then one or two words of goodwill shall be conveyed to the monarch or matriarch or princess. Usually, however, unless the letter is attached to an unusually clear emerald or perhaps an amber-eyed panther in a gilded cage — nothing will be read at all. Simply, two servants across the seas read the letters, file them, and compose a response.”

Feeling suddenly reckless, Bilhah adds to Yasemin’s words, “And in this way the servants pass another day, half-amused, half-bored, aiming at most to please their superiors with their diligence and perhaps earn a silver coin for their efforts. At least, they will be happy simply to eat a meal that fills their stomachs, perhaps hear a tune played on the tanbur, and sleep in a place that is warm and safe.”

Yasemin laughs and Bilhah is suddenly glad. It is a relief to show herself, to speak and not only nod and agree and answer and calculate, always calculate how her words will be received.

Yasemin touches her lightly on the shoulder. “How is your instruction in the madrasah?”

Does she mean the prayers that they are learning each day with the imam, who is determined to change them all into pious Moslems? Or the other subjects?

Bilhah hesitates. She looks around, but the place is empty. Everyone else is at prayer. “They took us to see the walls of Istanbul.”

Yasemin inclines her head and her veil flutters onto Bilhah’s desk. “I am glad you saw it. It is quite a sight.”

Bilhah looks down. She feels hot, suddenly, although the thick stone walls protect them from the summer heat. “Aziza spoke about rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem.”

Yasemin’s eyes begin to glow. “I have heard of this myself. It is the latest rumor to be spreading through the Imperial Palace. Would that not be a harbinger of good tidings?”

“How so?” She knows what the woman hints of, but will force her to name it, say it, examine it.

“Would it not signify the Final Redemption? That after the sorrow and tremors of the past few years, the Almighty is finally smiling down at us, waiting to gather His scattered remnants from around the world?”

Bilhah stands suddenly. She walks over to the window.

Something in her curls up and pulses with fear. The Final Redemption.

Yasemin’s dark eyes are surrounded by fine lines, no doubt formed by years of prayer and tears, of closing her eyes to shut out the Imperial palace and enter instead a world of fire and light, of burnished gold and glowing torches.

A woman with lines like this around her eyes — surely, she can trust her? Surely, she can tell her what is on her heart?

Though she is unsure of how to begin. What to say. She shivers.

That night, in that place just before sleep, where terror has dominion, she half-dreams, half-remembers.

They would put lemon juice in her hair and make her sit in the sun so that it would be blonde. Then they would sit her in front of a bank of candles, and the heat would burn into her neck, but from the front, they told her, it looked as if a glow surrounded her blondish hair.

It started when she was perhaps six years old. She woke up in the morning and told her nurse: “I dreamed of Mama.”

“May the Almighty bless her memory,” Nurse had said piously, and had pulled the bedspread tight. It was only later that morning that curiosity overcame her and she asked Bilhah, “What did she look like?”

“I could not see for the light that came from her face. But there was a smell.”

Nurse’s eyes grew wide. “What kind of smell?”

She tried to think. “Maybe it was the smell of baking bread and flowers in the field and the spices we use for Havdalah.”

Nurse had given a shiver and all of a sudden, Bilhah had regretted telling her.

A week later, Papa had approached her when she was playing between the roots of the peach tree outside their home. He said, “I want you to do it again.”

She looked up at him, puzzled. His face did not seem angry, so perhaps he was not going to hit her. But then again, you never knew. She wrapped her arms around herself and shrank behind the tree. He took a step forward.

She looked around. If anyone passed by, she was safe, for Papa would not hit her too hard in front of others. Not since he had been seen by old Sarah and then called in to the Talmud Torah HaGadol, in front of the great sage Rav Shmuel de Medina, and come home muttering about a father being a father, the chacham might be a great rav but he was not given this girl as a daughter. She had not understood this, but for two nights had offered up tefillot that the rav would take her as a daughter instead of Papa.

Heaven had remained silent.

Perhaps she should move closer to the road, the better to protect herself. “Do what?”

She had been scratching a hole in the earth between the roots of the apple tree in the garden.

“When you fall asleep tonight,” he told her, “I want you to go back to Heaven and find out about Old Maria’s mother. Find out where she sits, who sits beside her.”

She had nodded. In her head, she counted through the alef-beit. When she got to mem, he lumbered away.

That night, she tossed and turned, worried that if she went up to Heaven to find Old Maria’s mother, she wouldn’t come back. Her father’s face in the morning was so close that she could smell the goat cheese on his breath.

“I do not know,” she had protested. “I could not find her.”

“Then you go back to sleep until you find out.” He had yanked the shutters closed and locked her into the room.

She had hidden under the blanket, barely breathing, the air growing warm from her used breath. Tears leaked from her eyes, but she didn’t dare to make a noise, lest her father was listening from the outside and waiting to hear her snore. If he heard her cry, she didn’t know what he would do. But she couldn’t fall asleep.

At lunchtime, Nurse came with a hunk of bread and a jug of water. She had sat down beside Bilhah and stroked her hair.

“How about you think of a story in your head?” Nurse had told her. “You are good at that, are you not?”

A story. Old Maria. Her mother — that toothless woman who kept a large brown cow that gave no milk.

She closed her eyes.

“Tell Papa that I am ready.”

She was allowed out of the room, and her father sat her on a chair. Behind her, he lit six large candles. They warmed the back of her neck and made her afraid to move, lest her hair catch fire. Old Maria came in.

Bilhah closed her eyes. “I saw your mother.”

“How did you know her?”

“She smelled of honey.”

The women kept bees.

“And lavender.”

There is lavender everywhere in the neighborhood.

“And she was shaking her head and then she reached down to her leg and picked up a…”

Bilhah hesitates. A story, a story. Her voice grows firm. “A snake.”

The woman gasps.

“But it was not alive, the snake. It was black and it looked as if it were made of smoke.”

“And then?”

She does not know. She thinks and thinks and tries to go there in her mind, as if trying hard enough will make it come, the vision, she will step into Heaven itself and learn its byways and compartments and the higher places and the lower.

“And then…”

The sun is in her eyes and the candles behind her are burning and although Ines brought in food and water, she did not yet eat or drink. She feels her head growing heavy and when she tries to lift up her hand to push her hair away from her face, for her forehead is growing sticky and wet with sweat and the hair is pulling against her eyes, her arm is a great weight and her fingers shake.

She closes her eyes, sways, and falls to the floor.

That evening, Old Maria was sweeping her yard as the shadows fell and she saw a black snake. Or at least, she thought she did. And then, just like that, the entire town of Salonica knows that Gedalyah the printer’s daughter, Bilhah, is not just a motherless child who hides in dark corners, watching and waiting and only coming out when no one is present. Bilhah is one of those children — not unknown, but still unusual — with the gift of ruach hakodesh.

to be continued…

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 804)