7

BABYLON—CIRCA 492 BC

My second memory took a long time to form. It is a composite, really, a sadly familiar slice of the years following the murders. The memory is one of awakening ever so gradually from a cold, thick fog, a choking mist that dissolves from around my vision as slowly as eternity itself.

Oh yes, and the fog is pain. I know that. Even as a child, I realized it. I look back and I am walking, one slow step at a time, out of an endless cloud of anguish.

Did I tell you? Of course I didn’t. I hardly ever tell myself.

I was the only member of my immediate family left alive.

As it was, the murderers were not content to slaughter my mother, father, brother, uncle, aunt and three cousins. Or, as I would later discover, leading citizens of Babylon and all but a few dozen of its Jewish citizens. The Empire had stayed true to its plan—arranging for the conquered city’s homeguard to be deployed on “maneuvers,” all Imperial sentries mysteriously called away from their posts. Then it had ensured that the Ishtar Gate stood open and unwatched for the first time in centuries. The way for their cowardly massacre had been smooth indeed. The tweaking of mighty Babylon’s nose was complete.

And as they swaggered out, one of the murderers found the time to throw a torch into the middle of the room. It is a wonder it was not extinguished by the deep puddle of blood that had collected there. But instead, it sprouted vigorously into flame and began to consume the remains of my family with an almost willful aggression.

I remember the first sound of the fire’s eruption as a respite from the awful silence that had immediately settled as the last attacker departed. I had lain there, wishing time to stop, desperate to postpone the moment when I would have to open my eyes and deal with the cause of the awful stillness in the room, absorb the grisly verdict of my fingertips. But then I heard a great soft thump followed by the crackling of fire and realized that the last man had made one last act of violence. I was lying in the farthest corner from the door and truly at great risk of burning alive. Outside, the whinnying and galloping of horses had subsided. The murderers were gone.

So I shakily stood in the sudden glare, not looking around me but keeping my eyes fixed on the door and the freedom framed there. I wanted to run, but here’s something I remember vividly: standing suddenly after so many minutes with every muscle clenched had caused my legs to go numb. I can clearly recall trying to coax my feet forward, even pawing at the floor with my tingling yet utterly unresponsive instep. Panic began to chase my heartbeat and inflame my gestures. It struck me as almost ironic—though I would not have known the word—for my entire lower extremities to be frozen at a moment like this, but the fire was roaring toward me, and I could honestly picture myself becoming a human torch, unable to move in time. I began to gasp. Slowly, through a million pinpricks, my feet started to respond. I took a step with the slowness and exaggerated effort of a ninety-year-old.

And then, possibly prompted by the recalcitrance of my limbs, I became instantly paralyzed with a limb-numbing kind of fear, the likes of which I had never felt before and seldom since.

I simply could not move an inch, even to save my own life. I could not have been more immobilized had someone tied me with a rope. I watched the flames approach, felt the heat grow unbearable, but found myself as fixed as a statue.

In the next moment, the image of myself as the last victim of this attack burst whole into my mind, vivid and realistic. Somehow it seemed, for the briefest of seconds, utterly reasonable and proper that I should soon die. It was in the order of things. It made sense.

And then, just as quickly, it did not. Now it made no sense whatsoever; in fact, in the blink of an eye its reasoning became offensive to me. I felt pain and looked back. The fire had raced around the ceiling’s corner and had now swallowed a linen curtain tucked above a windowsill, only five cubits away. I sensed an actual rage in the flames, a vast and powerful hatred of my body in its intact state. Suddenly the thought of myself as its victim struck me as repugnant. The very notion of remaining frozen and accepting of this fate now made me feel like a cowardly accomplice to my own horror.

So I began to fight again. Not willing to accept the excruciating slowness of my steps, I actually hopped, as though jumping would liberate me from the rebellion of my legs. I hopped again, farther this time.

I could feel the heat across my back and the hem of my nightrobe beginning to sear my skin. The flames were now a storm in my ears. I dared not look back, for I had seen them speeding across the fabric for me. Like prey, I was like a small, innocent animal being stalked for death by an uncaring and implacable foe.

Now, at long last, I screamed. Not in grief, as I could have, but in frustration and terror.

Twisting my torso with the strain, I willed my legs to move. And they did. Still not nearly as fast as I wanted them to, but they shuffled forward. Cubit by cubit, the door grew closer—but by now it, too, was sheathed in a glowing inferno.

I heard a loud crack that was not fire and glanced up to see from the corner of my eye a ceiling beam crash down behind me and land heavily on the floor. Agony lanced through my brain, my shoulders, and as the pain began to scream down my back, I realized the timber itself had been aflame.

I looked again at the burning doorway, and in a judgment not borne of experience or sophistication—merely a raw, innate knowledge that however dangerous the door was, it stood only a handsbreadth away from the outside, from open, free, cooler air—I started to run. I do not remember realizing that my legs were now capable of flight. I only recall that they did run, and while I tripped over burning wreckage I knew with a wild exhilaration that nothing would knock me off my feet now. I passed through a brief assault of heat, then fell into the flickering night and rolled upon the ground.

All I remember next is the sound of shouts. Less than a second later I felt hands upon me, wrapping clothing around my body, pulling me, rolling me farther into the dirt.

Through the tumult I heard one voice that I recognized. It was the deep yell of my cousin Mordecai, my uncle’s eldest son. He had not been in the home because, as we all knew, Mordecai was a highly spirited young bachelor who often stayed out late with his friends. A knot of onlookers had been holding him back from the fire, into which he might well have plunged himself in suicidal grief. It was clear from the sight of the inferno that no one would survive that blaze.

Mordecai was screaming to be released when I stumbled from the doorway, still covered in my mother’s blood, flames rising from my garments. He gave a great cry and launched himself on me, the first to reach my side. Still crying out at the top of his lungs, Mordecai threw off his robe and proceeded to quench the fire.

I do not remember much after that.

In fact, I have only a few specific memories of the next few years. Only numbed impressions. I do know, because he told me, that Mordecai immediately carried me to the home of a physician, who bathed me in aloe and a poultice of other Oriental herbs. I believe that is why, to this day, I bear no scars or marks from the ordeal. It can only be miraculous that my body escaped unscathed. The scars from that night I carried in my soul.

And that is how the next chapter of my life was born.