Neither Kreindel nor Lev was ever fully comfortable during these Sabbath recitations. For Kreindel, to be so close to her father—to smell the soap on his skin, and see the hairs on the back of his hand as he turned the pages—felt overfamiliar, impolite. For Lev’s part, reading the Tsene-rene was a weekly exercise in patience. He found the language mundane, the teachings dull and vaguely depressing, focused as they were on tales of womanly forbearance and resignation. But Lev recalled how his own father, who’d been known to debate any point of law no matter how fine, had always kept a respectful silence while his mother read from the Tsene-rene. From that silence Lev had taken the lesson that women’s knowledge was different from men’s, the one serving as foundation and support for the other—for without women to focus on worldly needs, men would be unable to devote themselves to the divine.
And so Kreindel learned the story of Eve’s fashioning from Adam’s rib, and its accompanying lesson: Thus a woman is strong by nature, for she was created from a bone, while a man, created from earth, is weak, and quickly dissolves. She learned of Sarah’s modesty, and the love between Rachel and Jacob, and the heedlessness of Dinah that led to her ravishment by Shechem. She absorbed the bits of lore and legend that Lev suspected were there to keep the attention of the young: the shamir, the magical substance with which King Solomon had cut the stones that built his Temple; and the Ziz, the enormous bird that liked to stand with its feet in the ocean and its head in the heavens, singing for the pleasure of the Almighty. She wished she could enjoy the Tsene-rene, since it was the only book she was allowed—but she was too observant not to notice her father’s subtle impatience with it, his relief when he put it aside. It was clear to her that there was other, better knowledge to be had.
Alone in his synagogue office, Rabbi Altschul sat at his desk and stared blindly down at his half-finished sermon. He’d begun it that morning: a denunciation of the Tsar and his lackeys, and all those who’d joined in the pogrom’s violence. They were the words of a powerless man, a man helpless to do anything but shout.
But you are not powerless, a voice inside him whispered.
He picked up the pen, put it down again, closed his eyes and saw the parade banners passing before him, each the herald of a different ideology, a different argument. Send arms to the most vulnerable. Settle in the Holy Land. Educate the workers, start a revolution. All of them were doomed to failure. Evil could not be cured by the flawed plans of misguided men; it required the strength and presence of the Almighty. And Lev could no longer deny that he, and he alone, held the true solution.
That night, after Kreindel fell asleep, Lev washed quietly, prayed at length, and at last drew the old wooden suitcase from beneath his bed.
5.
It was a warm spring morning in the desert west of the Cursed City.
A group of young jinn flew together, stealing each other’s winds in teasing play. Among them, hanging slightly back from her fellows, was the jinniyeh who feared no iron. Ever since the incident with the farmer’s scythe, she’d been careful to cultivate the appearance of timidity, never exploring on her own or flying out ahead—for what would happen if she led them too close to iron without realizing it?
—Look, one of them called. Humans.
Three travelers had appeared on the road leading east: one man and two women, all on horseback, with a pack-laden donkey following behind. Two wore head-coverings meant to keep away the sun. The third, one of the women, went surprisingly bare-headed. She was younger than the others, and pale-skinned, with sparrow-brown hair that she wore woven about her head, fastened here and there with points of metal that glinted in the sunlight. The woman’s companions rode ahead of her, as though on guard—and indeed, even as the jinn watched, another group of humans rode into view from the north. These were black-robed Bedu, a scouting party come to decide whether the travelers were worth raiding.
—Let’s see what happens, one of the jinn said.
They flew toward the converging groups of humans, the jinniyeh maintaining her cautious distance as the trio on the road wheeled about to face the oncoming Bedu. The man placed a hand near the rifle at his side. The fair-haired woman pulled one of the dark scarves she wore from around her neck and draped it over her head. The jinniyeh saw that she was trembling, and thought it was out of fear—but then the woman called out, “Blessings upon you, O Sheikh!”
The leader of the Bedu party reined in his horse, and the others followed; he was smiling, an expression more amused than glad. “Miss Williams!” he called back. “I had wondered if we’d see your family this spring.”
“May we beg your hospitality for the night?” The woman spoke slowly, as though still learning the dialect. Her companions sat easier now; the man had moved his hand away from the rifle.
“You will be my honored guests,” the sheikh replied—and the trio turned north, and joined host.
The group
