plight—you, a privileged girl who has never known a hard day of work or a pang of hunger! Are you your father’s daughter after all?”
His words were no less crushing than the slab of stone. I remained immobile and shamed as he lifted it off the man and bound his wound with a strip of cloth torn from his own tunic.
Returning to me, he said, “Give me your bracelet.”
“What?”
“Give me your bracelet.”
It was a band of pure gold carved with a twisting grapevine. I drew back my arm.
He leaned close to my face. “This man”—he broke off, gesturing at the entire ragged collection of sweat-slick laborers who had stopped to stare—“all of these men deserve your mercy. They know nothing but taxes and debt. If they cannot pay, Herod Antipas takes their land and they have no way to live other than this. If this man cannot work, he will end up a beggar.”
I slid the band from my wrist, and watched as Judas placed it in the injured man’s hand.
It was later that same night that Judas and Father had clashed while Mother, Yaltha, and I listened from the balcony above the reception hall, pressed into the shadows.
“I regret that a follower of Simon ben Gioras spit on you, Father,” Judas said. “But you cannot condemn him. These men alone fight for the poor and dispossessed.”
“I do condemn them!” Father shouted. “I condemn them for their banditry and rabble-rousing. As for the poor and dispossessed, they have reaped what they sowed.”
His pronouncement on the poor, rendered with such ease, such malice, incensed Judas, who bellowed back, “The poor have reaped only the brutality of Antipas! How are they to pay his taxes on top of Rome’s tributes, and their mandatory tithes to the Temple? They are being broken, and you and Antipas are the pestle.”
For moments there was not a sound. Then Father’s voice, barely a hiss: “Get out. Leave my house.”
Mother sucked in her breath. As uncaring as Father had been to Judas over the years, he’d never gone so far as this. Would Judas have lashed out if I hadn’t provoked his disgust earlier that day with my own words of malice? I felt sickened.
My brother’s footsteps echoed in the flickering light below, then died away.
I turned to look at Mother. Her eyes were shining with abhorrence. For as long as I’d had memory, she’d despised my father. He’d refused to allow Judas into the narrow precincts of his heart, and Mother’s revenge had been methodical and spectacular—she pretended to be barren. Meanwhile, she swallowed wormwood, wild rue, even chasteberries, known to be rare and of great price. I’d found the preventatives in the herb box Shipra kept hidden in the storeroom below the courtyard. With my own ears I’d heard the two of them discuss the wool Mother soaked in linseed oil and placed inside herself before Father visited her and of the resins with which she swabbed herself afterward.
It was said women were made for two things: beauty and procreation. Having granted Father beauty, Mother saw to it he was denied procreation, refusing him children besides me. All these years, and he’d never caught on to her deception.
At times it had crossed my thoughts that my mother might not be driven solely by vengeance, but also by her own female peculiarity—not an unbounded ambition like mine, but an aversion to children. Perhaps she feared the pain and risk of death that came with birthing them, or she abhorred the way they ravaged a woman’s body, or she resented the exhausting efforts required to care for them. Perhaps she simply didn’t like them. I couldn’t blame her for any of that. But if she feigned an inability to give birth for such reasons, why, then, did she birth me? Why was I here at all? Had her chasteberries failed to work?
The question vexed me until I reached thirteen and heard the rabbi speak of a rule that allowed a man to divorce his wife if she had not given birth in ten years, and it was as if the heavens parted and the reason for my existence toppled from God’s throne and