“Let me come,” Esther says to Marduk, balancing the baby on her right hip as she chops figs. Esther’s left-handedness is her one ugliness, but even that Marduk wants to eat.
“I can help pick,” she says, and it’s clear that she offers freely. Her black eyes are flecked yellow, like a night sky. He would swim into them, if he could. He would hide there, safe from her body.
One day, the answers to Marduk’s many problems seem to come all at once, in the form of a command sent out from the palace: A pageant! Bring the most beautiful virgins from across the kingdom! The king will choose one for a new queen!
What happened to the old queen—who was herself newish—Vashti? No one knows—certainly no one in the camp. The command is not meant for them. But they are not deaf. We are not deaf! Marduk shouts silently. His ire fists, then coalesces into a thought. It’s like a ball of mud suddenly turning to clear water.
Esther will be the queen of Persia.
Ha!
He knows it’s impossible. She is a Jew; she is a no one. She’d go up against girls from as far away as Greece. If he spoke the idea outside his tent, the people would howl.
And yet. Maybe it doesn’t matter that she doesn’t have a chance. Maybe the idea is smaller, and more practical: Marduk sends her with his figs—his most succulent, sweet enough to make a man moan—and the king, though he cannot choose her, chooses Marduk as his new fig vendor. He cancels his existing contract and takes on Marduk and then, at the right moment, Marduk tells the king about his son. (For the purposes of optimism, Marduk ignores the question of whether the king’s fig man would have access to the king’s ear.) He is honest. He confesses to his son’s mistake with the coin. Then he tells about the marauders. The king, understanding—or at least fig-loving—orders them to stop. Itz will be a boy again. In a year, Marduk will have made enough from his figs to marry Esther off to Nadav, the boy she says she loves.
With fewer words, he consults his wife. Complaints he has only grumbled about he lays out with force. Esther costs the family too much. The girl’s ideas of herself are outsized. What orphan decides to want a boy from a family so wealthy, albeit in the past, that they demand a true dowry even in a camp, so full of their own worth the mother calls herself a créative and then—the gumption—manages to sell to the palace what she creates? (Nadav’s mother is the one who makes the bone necklaces. She already has what Marduk wants.) The family has given Marduk and Chura one year to come up with the dowry—after that, they say, it will be another girl’s turn. There is another girl already picked out, they say. It’s a betrothal, as far as they’re concerned.
All this his wife must see. But she has been a mother to Esther. When he tells her about the pageant, she eyes him with disgust.
“No,” she says. “We made a promise.”
He nods, a little disappointed but mostly relieved; she has done it for him, taken away the choice.
But she finds him the next day. His arms are raised to the sky. He is stretching after a session of pit building with a neighbor and watching, while pretending not to watch, his niece, in the distance, rolling the children in a barrel. Esther’s cloth slips as she bends; her back is narrow and dark; the children’s squeals lift the camp into momentary peace. He doesn’t notice his wife approaching until she takes his beard in her hand and pulls him to look at her: purple under her eyes, the line that’s grown between them since Itz went into hiding. Her hands are nearly black from pitting and chopping figs. The ones they collect now take twice the work, to cut away the bruises and the rot.
“She’s a good girl,” she says, in the dry voice she uses when she has arrived at a decision. “She’ll be treated well.”
“Is that right?” Marduk swallows back bile.
“She won’t become queen, but she’ll be taken care of.”
Marduk waits, to be sure she’s sure.
“It’s good,” she says.
He perseverates for a week. His wife is talking about the night station, he knows, though she will not name it. Neither will he. The night station is the place the king’s concubines are said to occupy. The station is rumored by his friend Jebi to be a sordid place, a labyrinth of flaking tunnels where girls are rarely virgins by the time they meet the king. Esther may be raped if she is unwilling, or beaten even if she is. Marduk suppresses thoughts of the moods of a man who has lost his queen. He tells himself that the station may in fact be what most people in the camp assume it to be, a largely restful place of boredom and guitars, grapes and fans. Maybe, too, his wife is wrong—maybe there will be no station for Esther, but some better fate. Or maybe she will simply be returned, and Marduk will be the king’s fig man, and all will proceed as he has planned.
He sees his niece braiding the loaf of challah. This week’s bread is eggless—the camp’s chickens are hungry—and will be low, and hard, but Esther braids as if it will be perfect, her mouth open in concentration, her tongue tensed against her bottom lip, the muscles in her upper arms dancing.
He cannot send her away.
He sees his niece looking at
