It was as though he no longer had children. We were only shadows on the wall, there to mock him and betray him.
ONE EVENING my father spied Aziza with my brother, secluded beside the fountain. Everyone knew she was the witch’s daughter. She was not the wife my father wanted for his son. He turned in her direction and spat on the ground. Shedah, he hissed, as though he’d spied a serpent. He called my brother to him, and they argued with such ferocity I covered my ears.
My brother announced that he planned to wed Aziza despite my father’s claims that he wouldn’t hear of this match. Amram threatened to denounce my father, and my father made threats of his own. If Aziza’s mother was to discover her daughter’s impurity, perhaps she would see to her punishment herself, bind her in a spell of silence or cover her with boils, cut off all her hair or cast her beyond the gate. I was in a corner spinning yarn on my spindle, doing my best not to interfere, but my heart was hitting against my chest as my brother and father raged against each other. The air in the chamber was hot, charged. The more my father railed, the paler my brother appeared, turning to ice. Pale light is dangerous, reckless and cold. Amram put his hand on his knife. Perhaps he had forgotten it was our father before him. I whispered his name, hoping to wake him from his dark dream. My brother glanced at the knife he had plucked from his belt as though he were indeed a dreamer. Quickly, he let it go.
“Don’t speak to me again,” he admonished my father before he departed. “If you see me, walk by me in silence, as I’ll walk by you.”
In that instant, what little family I had was dismantled. That night my father refused his meal. He took to his bed, face to the wall. He had become older than his years, a man who had thrown away all he might have had, ruined by his own bitterness.
I felt pity rise within me.
“He’ll be back,” I assured him.
My father shook his head.
“I’m sure of it,” I said, though the rift between them was deep. “Amram is your son and your student.”
I followed my brother to the garrison. There I found him splitting wood. He was in a fury, grunting as he worked, like a man rending an enemy in two. But his enemy had given him life and was his father. This enemy had taught him the secrets of invisibility and had crossed the desert to find him.
“He’s an old man,” I reminded Amram.
Perhaps my heart went out to our broken father because he had been my partner in our terrible crime. “Mourning our mother has caused a poison inside him.”
“When we go to Aziza’s mother to ask for her blessing, will you stand by me, Yaya?” he asked.
He spoke to me so even though we both knew the girl who had been Yaya was no more. I nodded, then found the courage to ask if he would also stand by me, no matter where fate might lead me.
The boy he had been was gone as well, the one who had proudly announced he would become an assassin as we stood together in Jerusalem. All the same, he was still my brother.
“I found you in the wilderness,” he reminded me. “Why would I abandon you now?”
SOON AFTER, I began to dream of my mother. All my life I had been dreaming of lions and of ghosts, but no more. I could feel my mother’s presence. I longed to see her, to have a list of her virtues, to know if we were anything alike.
I went to my father early in the morning, before I lost my nerve, having awoken from a dream of my mother’s voice, the one I’d heard as I entered this world. The assassin was outside the barracks, cleaning weapons, sitting on the stump of an old olive tree. Young men and boys who passed by had no idea he had been one of the fiercest men in Jerusalem, that he had possessed the ability to conceal himself and had murdered more men than there were leaves on the willow tree.
My father was hunched over, his hair white, the lines on his face deeply etched. I had never before asked a favor of him, but I wanted one now.
I asked him to tell me the color of my mother’s hair.
“You haven’t guessed why I can’t look at you? Every time I look at you I see her in your place.”
At last I understood why each time he gazed at me grief shone in his eyes. My mother’s hair had been the same color as mine. Like her I was a flame tree. Despite everything, I still burned.
THE RAINY SEASON ended early. The harsh trail of the future was evident in the white-hot sky above us, a fire waiting to be ignited. Each day barrels swollen with water were brought up from the pools below, tied to the backs of donkeys, until at last our cisterns were full enough to last through the harsh summer months. The air seemed enraged already, the wind blowing across from the far side of the Salt Sea, sparked with heat.