SUSA—CIRCA 480 BC
The heart of my story, the part that you perhaps have heard of, begins one stifling hot summer day in my nineteenth year. I was used to the heat having known nothing else. I had heard that the King and his court would occasionally escape to Ecbatana for a reprieve from summer temperatures. I was sitting at the table pounding out Rachel’s unleavened bread when Mordecai came through the door, breathing heavily. He usually didn’t return before sundown.
He fumbled with his outer tunic, the purple velvet piece he’d saved up months to buy and usually folded carefully. Today he briskly tossed it over the sill of an open window, his cheeks flushed the color of a ripe apple.
“I’ve been invited to a banquet with the King!”
I stopped as though struck by a witch’s spell, my fingers frozen white with flour. I had been daydreaming about life in the Palace all afternoon. My face must have asked the question.
“The King’s chancellor has just given a general invitation for everyone in Susa to attend a royal banquet lasting for seven whole days. It’s the tail end of a military convocation that has been going on for six months. King Xerxes has been whipping his generals into a frenzy over going back to war against Greece. Now he wants to demonstrate the people’s affection for him. There’ll be food and wine from all over the Empire, and dancers. None of which I have any use for, of course.” He chuckled and looked over at Rachel, whose expression had already grown disdainful.
I felt my lips form the words, then heard them as though they’d floated out of another person’s mouth. My head became light and dizzy, filled with a sort of filmy gauze, when my ears actually heard the statement meet the open air.
“I want to go.”
A year before he would have dismissed the words without even glancing at me. After all, I did not leave the grounds. But something about my new stature and the tone of my voice made him stop quite abruptly and meet my eyes with a dark, appraising look.
“What did you say?” he asked, no doubt for time to collect his thoughts.
“You said ‘everyone in Susa.’ Well, I am someone in Susa, and I want to go. I want to see the Palace.”
“It’ll be a drunken brawl. It’s the last place I would take you outside of this house.”
“Then why,” asked Rachel, already cocked sideways in her defiant posture, “is a good, observant Jew like yourself going?”
“Because I have to. I’m a Palace scribe. I have to be there. Be seen in attendance by the court. It’s—oh, you wouldn’t understand.”
Rachel threw down the small rag from her shoulder with an exasperated sound.
“Mordecai, you need to go almost as little as Hadassah does.”
“Besides,” he argued, “the whole celebration will last seven days. I won’t be able to come home for a whole week.”
“Then let me meet you for the final night,” I said.
“The final night is the worst,” he answered with a shrug. “Everyone has been drinking for a solid week. It’s not safe for a woman of purity.”
“Wait a minute!” I cried out. “I have hardly ever been outside these walls in my life! I hardly know what other people look like—in my imaginary world everybody is middle-aged and Jewish, because I don’t know any better! And to make things worse, I’m getting older—”
“You’re older,” he repeated with a dubious look.
“Yes. Older,” I spat out, still riding the steam of my agitation.
But Mordecai began to shake his head like the sage of the centuries. “No. No, my dear. You have no idea what questions I would raise coming in with a beauty like you. ‘Oh, the bachelor Mordecai has found himself a winsome young concubine. Look at that luscious maiden!’ And then if I explained that you were my daughter, I would have to answer even more questions, as I’ve told everyone I was never married. Even if I were to lie and say that we were neither lovers nor relatives, I would then open the door to countless questionable, even obscene, proposals and physical danger. The King himself might take a fancy to you and keep you as his concubine. And then I would never see you again. It is just too complicated and dangerous.”
“All right, then. I’ll go as a boy.”
His eyes grew wide.
“I’ve done it before, Poppa.”
His eyes doubled in size.
He sat heavily on his stool, his eyes glazed over with the look of a man in furious thought. A man whose view of things has just been twisted upside down.
“You’ve left here without my permission?”
“Yes.” The word gave me a perverse thrill even as I said it.
“You’ve gone to the Palace?”
“The portico plaza—once.”
“In a disguise.”
“Well!” He looked up at Rachel, questioning with his eyes whether she’d been an accomplice to this calamity. He turned away with the weariness of an old man. Of course, she would have to be an accomplice to some degree, no matter what. She was charged with always knowing my whereabouts. He sighed as though the fate of the world rested in his hands.
“I’ll follow along behind you and not say a word,” I continued. Then, as I saw he was beginning to actually contemplate my idea, I turned conciliatory. “Please? You know it will be the most exciting day of my life. To go from being a shut-in to a guest in the Royal Palace?”
When he began to chuckle grudgingly, I knew my case was won.