A half hour later a young man is at Vee’s door, in long shorts and a bright-yellow windbreaker. His neck is tattooed, his face bearded. He smiles, a big smile, his eyes sparkling as if he is glad to see her, and for a moment Vee feels as if they know each other. She smiles back. Then he and the package are gone, swallowed by the city, and Vee’s thumbs are rubbing at her fingers, feeling the creases the thick tape has left in them. Georgie pants behind her, waiting, and she says, “Yes. Let’s go for our nap.”
OUT FROM SUSA
VASHTI
Those Who Cannot Fly or Burrow Walk
By sunrise the city has disappeared. They keep walking. There is water, someone says, far but not too far—they can reach it by dark, if they don’t stop.
They are down to a few dozen, a diminishment that in the camp they could pretend against. They were not slaughtered in a way that could in a different millennium be tried in some kind of tribunal or court. A few boys who stole fruit off market-bound carts were hanged. A few girls were taken. Some men left. Mostly they died gradually, of hunger, thirst, heartache, heat. Exposed now, they see how minor they are. This and the salt whistling up off the sand urges them on.
Vashti watches the strangers who walk alongside her: the men with tents on their backs and the children hauling skins of water and the women slinging babies and pots and one woman, pitched forward as if against a wind, who is draped so heavily in necklaces strung with bones that she looks like a head atop a white mountain. Esther told her about this woman—the mother of Nadav.
The people are mostly silent, preserving their energy, even the small children on their fathers’ shoulders, the babies on their mothers’ breasts. Vashti carries all they will allow her to carry, a small skin and one blanket. She should protest, maybe. But her entombment has left her deficient in vitamins and muscle tone, and Baraz has sewn a small kingdom’s worth of gold into narrow channels in her robes, and she feels with every step on the verge of sinking to her knees.
She does not sink. As the sun slides across the sky she walks. They all do. They walk as they eat, walk as they drink. The men walk as they urinate. Only the women stop occasionally, squatting behind the pack. Vashti can’t bear the idea and so holds herself tightly until the bones woman walks up to her and says, “I can help,” by which she means she speaks Persian nearly as well as Vashti—her years of dealings with the palace have trained her well. “You’re the mother of Nadav,” Vashti says, and so learns the story: that Nadav married the second-in-line-after-Esther girl, the girl from the good family, and that when the girl gave birth to their first child she and the child died and Nadav left—he was one of the few who simply walked away and never returned. Vashti understands now why the woman leans forward as she does, why she appears to be perpetually scanning the far horizon. She asks the woman for her name so that she can call her something other than mother-of-Nadav, and the woman tells her Amira, and Vashti relieves herself behind the tower of bones that is Amira. They walk together. Later, Amira turns to her and asks what Esther’s child is called. And Vashti hesitates, because she knows the woman is thinking of her own grandchild. “Darius,” she says. And they are silent again, Amira thinking of her grandchild and Vashti of her own shock when Esther told her the boy’s name. Esther did not know, of course, that Darius had been the one who gave Vashti to Ahasuerus, that her son’s name was for the queen who had come before her. “I see,” Vashti said calmly, and Esther began talking of something else, but the boy had turned at his name—the boy looked at Vashti as if he saw through to her thoughts, saw everything.
By the second day, Vashti squats every chance she gets, whether or not she needs to relieve herself. To sweat is a shock. Her calves seize into knots. The skin on her hands and feet burns to the color of cinnabar. She cannot make words, cannot spend the energy to look toward Amira. She sees water where there is no water, clouds where there are no clouds, a cluster of tamarisk where there is only a dune. Her eyes feel singed. She closes them for long stretches, relying on the sand’s palpation to guide her forward. She staggers through passages in which she fears that none of this is real, that she will wake soon, in her hole, and others, when the sun flares especially hot, in which she finds herself longing to be in the ground again. She wants Baraz. Late in the afternoon, in a waking dream, she turns around. She approaches the palace gates and uncovers her head. Where is Ahasuerus? Will she be like Esther, going to their king unbidden? No. Esther waited on the floor and shook. Esther got only bones. Vashti is Vashti. She is her father’s daughter still. Isn’t she? Even without her crown? Here I am, she says. This is mine.
No one answers. She is herself and she is someone new. She is going out from Susa. Her sandals are full of sand.
MANHATTAN
VEE
In Only Her Diadem
Vee takes off her stockings and dress and slips into bed. But it takes her a while to fall asleep. She worries. She has seen the bike messengers, how they attach themselves by their shoes to the bike’s pedals and thread through the cars and trucks on the edge of death. Some ride with whistles in their mouths. Does hers have a whistle? At red lights, does he stop or does he shimmy back and forth, balancing in place? She pictures him in that precarious limbo, his neon-yellow sleeves puffing and deflating as he rocks, the muscles in his calves tensing. She wants to warn him against his refusal to obey gravity, the body, time. But soon, his rocking begins to soothe her, and she slips from worry to drowsiness. Georgie buries his nose in the crawl space beneath her knees, and Vee has the sensation that it is she who is riding the bicycle, she who is at the intersection on her pedals, not falling but rocking, shimmying, rising, as the noise and exhaust swell around her in a kind of salute. She returns the salute. Then the light changes, and she bursts forth, flying through the city like a myth.
SOMEWHERE NO LONGER NEAR SUSA
VASHTI
And All She’s Telling You May Be a Lie
Six days out it is decided they will rest. Some kind of water stretches out ahead, a wetly green brush, a scattering of trees. They have stopped before, of course—each time they come to water they drink and fill their skins. On a few occasions they’ve slept, curling for a few hours into a patch of shade or, at night, into the slope of a shallow canyon. But even in sleep they were preparing to walk again. Even on their Sabbath, after a debate, they walked.
Vashti is not the one who decides, of course. She does not rule here. She gets her news from Amira, the bones woman, who points, her necklaces rattling, and says, “See there? We’re making camp.”
And a while later: “Are you all right?”
Vashti nods. But Itz, up at the front, is looking back at her, straight at her, as he has not done since they left Susa, and in response her feet have begun to drag. She knows what he is thinking of—his words to her that first night, as they stood together watching the camp’s disassembly: “I don’t care who you are. When we’re gone from here, you’ll tell us everything.”
She was still dizzy then. But tonight, she knows, once the tents are made and a fire built, it will be time.
“You’ll have to translate for me,” she says, realizing. “Esther’s story.”