I awoke at the same instant Mordecai did that morning, for it was still dark and our door sounded like it was being pounded off its hinges. A high, shrill voice wailed from the other side. It sounded vaguely familiar, but it was forming a sound somewhere between a hyena’s laughter and a widow’s funeral cry.
Mordecai bounded from his room. By the time he reached the front door I was peering around my bedroom door, my heart pounding in alarm and fear.
“Rachel?” he cried.
“Yes!” came the hysterical voice from the other side.
I gasped when Mordecai threw open the door and we were greeted by the sight of Rachel as neither of us had ever seen her. Her hair was tangled and askew, her eyes wild and red with tears, her back bent over as though she were misshapen. She appeared to have aged a decade in just a few hours. She shuffled in and resumed her weeping the instant she was inside.
“It’s Jesse! It’s Jesse!”
My blood ran cold as I heard this. Mordecai had come home late, bearing news from the royal barracks, news of a new kind of conscript that had made my heart sink even before this dire lament.
“What happened?” he asked, almost shouting at her for coherence.
“I don’t know! He’s gone! He’s been missing since the afternoon. His father and mother searched the streets. We only heard rumor of an army patrol taking away groups of boys—”
Mordecai reared back with a deep, loud breath. I recognized the gesture; it was his reaction to very bad news—such as when I had told him about my excursion into town dressed as a boy.
He sat down slowly, his face growing paler by the second, his breathing like that of a man trying to make himself remain alive. At the sight of his reaction, Rachel fell to her knees and began to shake. “What is it? What is it, Master Mordecai?”
He only shook his head, his gaze an eternity away. Finally it came to rest on poor Rachel. He lowered his hands slowly onto her shoulders and took another deep breath.
“Rachel. I don’t know. I’m so sorry—I can’t guarantee this is what happened, but someone has to tell you—”
“Oh, my G-d! Oh, YHWH!” she began to pray and wail in anticipation, her eyes still fixed on Mordecai.
“I heard a strong rumor today at the Palace that five hundred handsome young boys had been captured and taken to the citadel to be turned into eunuchs.”
At that, Rachel’s eyes fluttered to the top of her eyelids, her head threw back and she fell heavily onto the floor.
When Jesse came to his senses it was still dark. The room was lit only by a pair of candles somewhere above him. It was cold, and he was naked. He was lying on a flat, hard surface. Wood. A table. His head felt numb; his senses swam wildly. Dimly, as though through a layer of mud, he started to realize something. I feel drunk. Several years before he had sneaked several long pulls of the Shabbot wine and faintly remembered the sensation of it. He was sure someone had slipped him a foreign substance.
And then, the most startling sensation of this whole event—large male fingers grasping his private parts. He heard the clicking of metal and the sound of a blade being sharpened.
Then came a male voice from somewhere in the gloom, low and menacing, speaking to no one in particular.
“Look at this: another Jew. They think they’re so different, even down there they have to do things their own way.”
And another voice, from the opposite side. “They think it makes them special. Just get it over with.”
Then Jesse felt a sensation between his legs which, had he been conscious in the moment that followed, would have made him pray for death.
I was on the street before I knew it, before I even realized what I was doing. My legs were doing their own thinking, churning beneath me as fast as they could, my arms clawing the air, my bare feet flying above the ground without a care for whatever roughness lay beneath them. My lungs heaved, but not from the exertion; they were trying to stay inflated through sobs that threatened to tear every breath from my body. I felt like my mind was a passenger barely hanging on to some overheated stampede, for my limbs now had a will of their own.
And I knew where my headlong run was taking me: northward, uphill, toward the Palace portico. He would be there, as young and innocent as he had been just a short while before, riding the gryphon. He just had to be.
As the distance fell away before me, I inwardly began to shout at G-d, the vague Hebrew entity whom I had never fully trusted.
So, is this your idea of caring for your own? Is this your gift for me upon reaching womanhood? For the supposed Creator of the Universe, you certainly have a strange way of showing your power. In fact, if this is your idea of sovereign watchcare, then opt me out! I’d rather be a Persian and worship their god!
I was just beginning to feel the burning in my joints and legs when abruptly, sooner than I had expected, the portico square lurched into my sight.
The plaza I had seen crowded so thick that its ground was invisible now stood empty. A patch of dirt, surprisingly small. A great silence now reigned where the clamor of people had once roared almost unbearably. The sun was just beginning to rise, and a wedge of yellow sunlight was starting to chase purple shadows down the Palace wall. The square’s only occupants were the Palace guards at the far end. I could feel them following me closely with their eyes.
I raced up to the gryphon statue and circled it with desperate speed. Beneath it was a pile of donkey droppings. I started to run up the incline we’d taken for our jump. But clearly the space above was empty.
Taking advantage of my pause from the exertion, fear and rage now began to well up inside of me to the point that I felt I would burst. My chest still heaved, not from a lack of air but from the effort of holding in my emotions. And then I held them in no longer: I threw back my head, took a deep breath and screamed at the top of my lungs.
“Nooooooooooo!”
How could they take a flawless young man, as new and perfect as nature could make him, and maim him like that? I’d barely had time to form a coherent picture of what made him distinctly male, and now that had been cut away and thrown aside like a bit of trash. His manhood, part of his deepest core, now shorn and discarded—the sheer callousness of it was beyond belief. Beyond my ability to fathom. The uncaring power of the Empire now seemed to loom over me with an almost physical sense of ruthlessness.
I fell to my knees and bowed my head. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that the guards had lowered their lances a notch and now stared at me openly. It had been a stupid, indulgent thing to do; I realized that at once. Yet even today, looking back from the calmer viewpoint of an older woman, I cannot say those feelings could have been restrained. My childhood cloud of foreboding had returned. Doom and tragedy seemed to have reasserted their control over my destiny. For someone that age, it was almost too much to bear.
With as much slowness and reluctance as I could possibly convey, I stood. I turned toward the road home and let the downhill pull of gravity, more than my own effort, move me forward. I walked into full sunlight and felt warmed a bit, inwardly and outwardly. Doors were now starting to open and sleep-swollen faces beginning to peep outside. I passed an old woman tossing out her evening’s slop bucket from the safety of her doorway and swerved to avoid the splash. Another matron pulled out a canvas awning to shield her home’s window from the early sun. A man whose unclad belly hung down over his waist gazed up into the sky, assessing the weather.
How can they act normally on a morning like this? I thought despairingly as I passed. Don’t they know? Do they not have a son, a nephew, a cousin taken in yesterday’s roundup? Mordecai had told me that five hundred young men had been herded through the Palace gates. Surely the city should be filled with wailing and every person’s countenance downcast and grieving at the dawn of a day like this.
I was beginning to approach the turn onto our street when I saw Mordecai in his night-robe, running up the empty lane waving his arms wildly, shouting. I could barely tell who it was. I could not make out his words, but I stopped in my tracks. Then, struck by his hysterical appearance, I started toward him and home.
“What is the matter?” I shouted back.
He waved even more wildly and shouted more forcefully, but the louder his voice became, the less I could understand him. So I crossed a few long steps into our street to hear better.
And that is when I heard what Mordecai was shouting about.
From behind me, uphill from him, came the sound of marching feet. I turned, and only then did I hear Mordecai’s shout clearly for the first time. It sounded eerily like the cry that had just ripped from my chest a few moments before.
“Nooooooooo!”
I backed away from the center of the street, away from the oncoming column, still not understanding the cause of Mordecai’s extreme reaction. After all, army patrols happened all the time—it was certainly an occasion for prudence in choosing one’s path but hardly cause for that sort of anguished cry.
I flattened my back against the wall, wanting to make sure I obstructed nothing of the soldiers’ progress.
But the column veered and came straight toward me.
Before I could take another breath I was surrounded by soldiers. I could feel a dozen pairs of eyes travel up and down my body and even though I was clad in nightclothes, I wished immediately that I could have yanked on a heavy cloak.
One of the men, not a soldier, stepped forward from the rest and eyed me slowly from head to foot. I began to feel embarrassed at the disheveled state of my appearance, as I had bolted straight from my bed when this adventure had started. The man turned to a soldier behind him.
“A little unkempt, but still, she is beautiful, no?”
The other nodded, his eyes glued to the upper part of my body. “You’re right, sir. She is stunning. A great face, a most appealing figure. She must be the beauty they told us about.”
The civilian nodded his agreement with a smirk that sent a cold chill through my veins.
Just then the sound of tumult came up the street; Mordecai had finally reached the scene and was shouting, out of breath, nearly incoherent with panic.
“Please! Do not take her! She is exempt! She is exempt!”
The man frowned and turned Mordecai’s way. The soldiers parted quickly to clear the path between the two men.
“Why is she exempt?” the soldier barked.
“Well, for one thing,” Mordecai answered, pausing to try and recover his wind, “she is a member of a foreign people. . . .”
“Which one?”
“Well . . .” Mordecai gritted his teeth in his effort to decide whether to answer.
“Which one?” came the question again, this time more impatient.
Mordecai shook his head no. “Forget it. It was a lie—I take it back.” Then he fixed me with a tear-stained look. “My dear, don’t mention anything on that subject. Don’t say anything, no matter what you do, about, you know . . .”
I numbly nodded my assent. Only Mordecai would have thought about the stigma of my Jewishness at a time like this.
“Look, it doesn’t matter. This is a royal edict,” the man interrupted, his voice growing more clipped with every passing second, “and to royal edicts there are no exemptions. The only question for you is, is she a virgin?”
Mordecai stopped still, his eyes darting from side to side in search of an answer. Finally he began to shake his head.
“She is not. She was—she was raped by bandits a few years ago.”
Unfortunately, the man turned to me with a reappraising glance just as I grimaced at Mordecai’s lie.
“What?” I began to protest. “But I am . . .” Again, the imprudence of youth and inexperience.
The soldier turned back to my uncle. “You’re lying. I have a mind to have you run in.”
“I am a royal scribe,” Mordecai babbled, pleading now. “I’ll give you anything. I’ll pay you any price.”
“Yes, I recognize you. From the King’s Gate. And I am the King’s agent in Susa, charged with finding virgins for his bed. We heard a rumor that one of the most beautiful young women in the kingdom lived in hiding somewhere around this neighborhood. How long has she resided here?”
Mordecai’s jaw flexed grimly. It was then that I remembered the times Mordecai had escorted me beyond our home with his hand gripping my elbow to steer me forward—my eyes downcast as he’d instructed, our gait swift and hurried. He had been trying to protect me from prying and lascivious eyes. I glanced his way with the briefest look of gratitude, then back at the agent whose swaggering figure filled my sight.
“Sir, if you were not a Palace aide,” the man sneered, “I would have you run through with a sword already. Now answer me. How long has she lived here?”
“Her whole life,” Mordecai replied after a long pause.
And that is when I truly began to understand the soldiers’ intent. They were going to take me into the Palace, just like Jesse. I would not be mutilated, but probably—my mind spun with the conclusions—I would become one of those girls on the benches, one of the gilded statues, one of the disposable women, a mere Palace decoration. . . .
Worse still, Mordecai had often described these women’s solitude to me. They lived as virtual prisoners—something I had once considered myself—yet without friends or family to comfort them.
As the realization began to sear its way through my body, an attitude that had begun as mere bemusement swiftly turned to terror. I shrank back into the wall, wishing with all my heart that I could melt into the bricks and disappear.
The agent stepped toward me and brought his face within inches of mine. I could feel his gaze upon me like a physical blow. Then his fingers found their way into my hair; I recoiled only to have my shoulders pinned against the wall. Rough hands groped at places no one had ever touched before.
“Careful,” said a voice behind us. “If she’s that beautiful, she may end up as your queen before it’s all over.”
The man in my face snickered and backed away a little. Suddenly I was looking at his back.
“All right, men,” he said loudly, “return two days from now and take her. We’ll give the man some time to clean her up and dress her decently.”
The King’s agent leaned into Mordecai’s face. His eyes went cold. “A favor,” he said, almost in a low growl. “From one royal staffer to another. If she’s not out on this street two days from this minute, ready to go, it’ll be your neck and hers. You understand?”
Mordecai nodded numbly.
And prepare we did. Mordecai stayed home from work the next two days, claiming sickness—and “sick” was actually close to the truth in describing his overall state during that period. In fact, many moments during that span found me afraid that he might succumb in some manner to the extreme distress my predicament had plunged him into. Perhaps concern for him proved a welcome distraction for me, for I often thought he was taking the news worse than I was. After a determined consideration of the options, we came to the dismal conclusion it was death or cooperation. There was nothing else.
When he was able to keep his emotions in check, Mordecai maintained a running commentary on the protocols of Palace life and the best strategies for maintaining my purity and faith as a follower of YHWH. He refused to sleep or allow me slumber; instead my poppa rocked from side to side like some mystic reciting an endless creed, his eyes focused on nothing in particular, intoning his ceaseless instructions without pause. On and on it went—admonitions on keeping a godly diet, on following the commandments, on dealing with the eunuchs and other officials, on conducting myself with the other candidates. The longer he continued, the more I realized that he was not just trying to prepare me for a rushed departure but actually seeking to compensate for a whole lifetime of social deprivation.
“Tell no one of your Jewishness,” he muttered over and over again. “It will become an issue. It could actually mean your life.”
By the time he began to speak of how to approach my time with the King, Mordecai’s themes had begun to flow together in a seamless verbal torrent. “I know you are frightened by what your capture implies, but my dear, you must realize that there are greater things to fear than the unknown regions of sexual intimacy. Much more than the King’s bed partner is at stake. Hidden powers are jockeying for position here. Just stay as observant a Jew as you can. Privately, G-d will understand the things you are compelled to do upon pain of death. And you will be forced to break some commandments. But try your very best not to. Remember who you are, even if you keep it silent. Keep up your prayers to the Lord. Do not follow the others—the common sentiment—but remember what I taught you about the Word of G-d.”
I suppose Mordecai’s alarming behavior helped shield me from the full shock of my impending fate. I spent the two days in a sort of daze, trying my best to absorb the best of what he was attempting to impart and at the same time distinguish his true nuggets of wisdom from product of mere panic. In the end I slipped into a sort of numb state of my own, a mindset that I can barely remember to this day. Thank G-d, the time passed all too swiftly.
The fateful dawn arrived. I stood just inside our door arrayed in a fine tunic that Rachel had purchased for me at the King’s Gate bazaar. Rachel had come early, and I was bathed, perfumed and beautified to the best of her experience. I now recall with some amusement that I actually believed myself to be as clean and fragrant as a girl could possibly be, that any further beauty treatments before it came to be my night with Xerxes would just be futile excess. How little I knew! And how naïve! I was able to form the phrase “my night with Xerxes” not understanding even a small portion of what that meant.
Finally, just as we stood to face the door and all the fearfulness awaiting outside, he turned to me with tears in his eyes.
“Hadassah, my dear,” he said in a broken voice, “I think it is best if you leave your star necklace with me.”
I gasped in shock and dismay. For some reason, surrendering the one relic from my dead family seemed like the cruelest loss of all—more grievous somehow than losing my freedom, my innocence or even my future.
Yet I knew from the crushed look upon Mordecai’s face that he had my highest good at heart; it was no easier for him to ask it than for me to relinquish it. So I numbly felt my fingers reach to my neck, unclasp the medallion and hand it to him. Then I turned back for the door, opened it and stepped outside into a chill morning and the sun’s bright rays emerging over the tops of nearby buildings.
Right on schedule, the synchronized slapping of boots on cobblestone was heard approaching our place. Rachel began to sob; Mordecai merely draped an arm over my shoulder, squeezed hard and stared at the opposite side of the street. The only motion in his face was that of his lower lip, which now quivered, I must admit, like that of a baby.
And then they were beside us. Today’s column was far more military and precise than the one that had found me two days before. After their captain had barked out his order to stop, the men stared straight ahead. The only sign of their humanity was the faint wisps of air pluming from their mouths in the night-cooled air.
I almost fainted, for my breath was now rasping in my chest, shallow and halting. I tried to speak but my spastic throat would not form a word. My knees gave way, and I would have fallen but for the three pairs of male hands that immediately grasped my arms and held me up.
Through my tears and the lurching sway of my sight I could see Mordecai back away, his hands held pleadingly in front of his face. He was no longer in control of his faculties.
“No! No!” came all the pathetic plea he could muster.
The men pulled me farther into their midst, their grip so strong that keeping my feet was no longer necessary. They started to carry me uphill.
“The East Gate!” Mordecai began to shout, tearing at his hair, his eyes wild with grief. “Meet me at the East Gate when you can—I’ll be there!”
I wanted to acknowledge his instruction, but all I could manage was a single word.
“Mordecai!” I screamed.
“Keep the commandments!” he shouted after me, his voice beginning to dim. “Remember! Keep the commandments!”
The same houses I had passed on my quiet return home now flowed past like mournful reminders. The early risers I had seen a few days before were now staring wide-eyed at the commotion.
“Come on, girl, it’s not so bad,” the King’s agent said from my left. “You’re not going to be executed. You’re going to spend the best twelve months of your life, get bedded by the King and even stand a decent chance of becoming Queen of Persia. There are girls lining up all over the kingdom to be considered for this.”
And that, believe it or not, is the first time I heard a clear statement of my future.