you. How pleasing you are in my sight. There was only silence.
It was while I busied myself putting away my writing tools that the second commandment appeared in my mind as if God had spoken after all, but it was not what I wished to hear. Thou shalt not make a graven image of anything living in heaven, or on the earth, or in the sea. It was said God himself had written the words on a stone tablet and given them to Moses. I couldn’t imagine he’d really intended us to go to such an extreme, but the commandment had taken on a strict interpretation as a way to keep Israel pure and separate from Rome. It had become a measuring rod of loyalty.
I grew still. A coldness passed through me. People have been stoned to death for creating images cruder than the one I’ve drawn. Sinking to the floor, I braced my back against the sturdiness of my cedar chest. Last evening when my aunt instructed me to place my likeness in the bowl, the admonition against graven images had tormented me for several moments, but I’d dismissed it, blinded by her self-assurance. Now my disregard for the consequences left me weak.
I wasn’t concerned about being stoned—matters could never go so far as that. Stonings took place in Galilee, even in Sepphoris, but not here in my father’s Greek-loving household, where what mattered was not keeping Judaic laws, but the appearance of keeping them. No, what I felt was fear that if my image were discovered, my bowl would be destroyed. I feared the precious contents of my chest would be taken away, that my father would finally heed my mother and forbid me to write. That he would unleash his wrath upon Yaltha, perhaps even send her away.
I pressed my hands against my breast as if to compel myself back to the person I’d been the night before. Where was the self who composed a prayer girls dare not pray? Where was the self who entered the mikvah? Who lit the lamps? Who believed?
I’d recorded the stories my aunt had told me of the girls and women in Alexandria, afraid those, too, would be lost, and I dug now through my scrolls until I found them. I smoothed them out and read. They emboldened me.
I searched for a piece of flax among my wiping rags. Draping it over my bowl, I disguised it as a waste pot, then slipped it beneath my bed. Mother would never come near it. It was her spy, Shipra, I must worry about.
iv.
My mother’s name, Hadar, means splendor, a name she did her best to uphold. She stepped into the room wearing a robe the color of emeralds and her finest carnelian necklace, trailed by Shipra, who was laden with a stack of luxuriant clothes and an array of purses containing jewelry, combs, and eye paint. Balanced on top of her pile was a pair of honey-colored sandals with tiny bells sewn to the straps. Even Shipra, a servant, wore her best coat and a carved bone bracelet.
“We will leave soon for the market,” Mother announced. “And you will accompany us.”
If she hadn’t arrived with such a pressing mission, she might have noticed me glancing at the bowl beneath the bed and wondered at the object of my fascination. But her curiosity wasn’t aroused, and in my relief I didn’t at first question the irrationality of attending the market in such finery.
Shipra removed my robe and replaced it with a white linen tunic heavily embroidered with silver thread. She wrapped an indigo girdle about my hips, slid the musical sandals onto my feet, and admonished me to stand still as she lightened my brown face with chalk and barley flour. Her breath smelled of lentils and leeks, and when I twisted away, she pinched the lobe of my ear. I stamped my foot, unleashing a gust of bell ringing.
“Stand still; we can’t be late,” Mother said, handing Shipra a stick of kohl and watching as she lined my eyes, then rubbed oil into my hands.
I could hold my tongue no longer. “Must we dress so lavishly to attend the market?”
The two women exchanged a look. A patch of red bloomed beneath Mother’s chin