The Dovekeepers

by Alice Hoffman

What is brutal survives. What is cunning lives until morning.

The Romans wanted all that we had. They came to us as they swarmed upon so many lands with their immense legions, wanting not just to conquer but to humiliate, claiming not just our land and our gold but our humanity.

The desire for Jerusalem was a fire that could not be quenched. There was a spark inside that holiest of holy places that made people want to possess it, and what men yearn for they often destroy.

Victims often attack one another, they become chickens in a pen, bickering, frenzied. We did the same. Not only were our people besieged by the Romans but they were at war with each other.

I’d had to restrain myself from cutting myself to shreds, for the knife against me made me feel I was being taken by Ben Simon, and I longed for that blood-brimmed connection.

It was as though he no longer had children. We were only shadows on the wall, there to mock him and betray him.

I forgot that even the worst of lives is a treasure.

Know a man’s name and he belonged to you. In return, no matter how you might deny it, you were his as well.

Whoever gives his true self away does so with words.