“So, Thursday?” Jace is saying. “We’ll meet you outside class?” and all Lily can do is nod. Why is she thinking about her mother again? Why is she thinking of Hal? She is supposed to be where she is, be good and gracious. But in the next room, the music has been turned off and the children are starting to disassemble, turning into rags and beasts. The windows have gone dark. Kyla calls out to her, “So you’ll come back next week! Same time?” and Lily takes out her phone to check her calendar but Kyla has turned away, busy gathering people’s coats, and Lily drops her phone back into her bag and soon she’s stumbling with the other mothers and children down the stairs to the street, the mood jovial and warm as everyone calls good-bye and the family units scatter, each toward its own shelter. Lily, trying to outpace the sadness that laps at her heels, points out to the girls how beautiful the sycamores look on Third Street, lit by the streetlights. But they’re already focused on what comes next, whether they will have their dresses soon, and whether they can have screens at home or just a book, and if it’s a book it must be Esther, and Lily, after making a halfhearted plug for The Paper Bag Princess or Ferdinand, her favorite—how utterly the bull embraced his anti-ambition!—says, “Fine, okay, alright,” and walks the rest of the way listening to the girls talk and thinking of Adam, wondering what she will cook for him, and of her underwear drawers, wondering what she has to wear.
SUSAESTHER
The Original Pageant
She is in the bath when the girls are called. A procession, she’s told, a parade before the king, and instantly the number of days she has painstakingly stored is yanked from her mind like a thread. One hundred twenty- … what? It doesn’t matter now, she tells herself, as she is wrapped and shoved toward the oiling room. Tonight, she will fail to become queen, and tomorrow she will be released. Her grip on Baraz is advanced now, what he has seen of her near replete. A heat is rising in him, like a fever. Esther is confident he’ll do what she asks if she offers him more—which is to say, everything.
Is she willing? She is. She is both certain of and disgusted by her willingness. But Nadav won’t have to know. The trick for that is so simple it can barely be called a trick.
Esther has seen more, too. Like a plant growing new roots, the night station gains hallways. Esther walks in a direction she has walked before only to find a new tunnel to a new place. Her recent discoveries include one distant room outfitted with eye hooks and ropes where certain girls go to be stretched and whipped, and another outfitted with cages in which girls—often the same certain girls—are locked and prodded. Both rooms are equipped with viewing windows, holes cut into the wall so that a passerby in the hall can stop and watch. Esther stops and watches. It is something to see. It is—be honest—fascinating. Sometimes a eunuch enters a cage with a girl. Other times he stays outside and watches as she puts on a show. Esther—still only kissed—is surprised by the apparent dignity of the proceedings. The girls come to these rooms of their own volition as far as she can tell: unshackled, chins high. Perhaps they are rewarded, or imagine that they will be, in the future, or maybe they’re simply bored. They step into the cages as gracefully as birds. They flit and shake and sometimes shimmy like fish, and sometimes they turn without warning into tigers, clawing at the bars, growling. Esther feels heat in her legs but not revulsion, not the shame she would have expected. She remembers her mother picking up speed as they passed the women who stood around behind the market, dragging Esther by the hand with sudden force. Esther remembers thinking that those women were a different species from people like her and her mother, made of a different substance, more like jackals or vultures, but now she thinks the line between them is more porous than she imagined, if it exists at all. In the linen room with Baraz, Esther feels an astonishing ease, an almost out-of-body calm, as she squeezes her breasts and rubs between her legs. She is outside herself, looking on. She waits for the eunuch’s moan as if waiting for water to boil, and in this way, like a kettle, he becomes a kind of object for her, domesticated and possessed. He obeys and doesn’t touch, though recently he brought her gifts: a square of silk, a fan of peacock feathers, a bone necklace. The necklace nearly destroyed her, a garland of tiny vertebrae sanded to the smoothest white, so clearly the work of Nadav’s mother that Esther had to grip her thighs to stop her hands from reaching for it.
In the end, she touched none of Baraz’s gifts.
But she did tell him where she’s from, and began squeezing him for information. He has told her that the raids on the camp continue, now with an official title: the king’s cleanse. He says more men, and more violent men, have been recruited. More fire pits have been destroyed, even as other fires are lit, burning tents and tools. The clay vessels her people make to sell are smashed.
Are they leaving yet? Esther always asks, when
