The Dovekeepers

by Alice Hoffman

My girlhood disappeared in the desert.

They say the truest beauty is in the harshest land

The desire for Jerusalem was a fire that could not be quenched.

Teeth and claws, I heard him say, that is what our future will bring.

“Let us not speak of this,” she said then. “Sometimes it’s better not to know what men must do.”

Ours was a destroying sort of love.

If a man sees his brother tied with ropes and dragged down the cobblestone road, does he ever see anything else?

Every betrayer knows his fate is to have the misery he once doled out to others returned to him in kind,

Perhaps that in itself was witchery, to make someone yearn to reveal herself.

PERHAPS it is possible to discover more in silence than in speech.

Soon the land would burn and I would burn with it.

This was what it meant to be human, to know that time moved and all things changed.

the wind engulfs us and claims us, making it clear we are nothing more than a moment in time.

He had the panicked look of a scholar who is suddenly faced with the brutalities and the vile concerns of life.

Every loaf of bread feeds you in the way you need to be fed.

Perhaps that was the sin I committed. I forgot that even the worst of lives is a treasure.

Be a pauper, a wanderer, a secret in the darkness of night. Once you possess something others do not, you are a target for the wicked.

You know that no man can understand what a woman may be driven to do.

As for me, sleep was a country I no longer visited,

I realized that he looked like the madmen we sometimes spied in the desert, warriors, hermits, prophets, priests; men who saw only their own path and no one else’s.

for Shirah the future was not a distant place.

“The air you breathe, the water you drink, waking each day to see the sun. There must be something you still want from this world.”

Our rest is formed by our waking life and our waking life is formed by our sorrows.

Every man in this region was said to be born with a knife in his hand, a horse already chosen for him, and a prayer to offer to his God.

I have placed the eternal always before me

In the silence around us, I felt I could hear the beating heart of the world,

The words we did not say became the only things that mattered.

for some secrets bring you closer in their sharing, just as others break you apart.

We were nothing against the relentless power of the Roman Empire.

“You don’t fight for peace, sister,” Nahara told me. “You embrace it.”

Whoever gives his true self away does so with words.

He wanted pain, I saw that in him, and what a man wants he will often manage to find.

I now understood it was our duty as human beings to see behind the veil to the inside of the world, to the heart of things.

At twilight, the hour between worlds when one’s eyes can play tricks and it is easy to see what you wish to view rather than what is before you,

We yearned for our portion of the sky.

Disgrace smolders, it burns when you least expect it to ignite.

Still I listened, for this woman and I had been tied together as the night is tied to the day, never knowing each other yet never eluding one another.

some days were meant to make us remember that the past was with us still.

They knew that flesh was not lasting in this world.

“We were born to die,

They lifted into the blackened sky all at once, flecking the darkness with their radiance, delivering the message that there was a time to die and a time to rise up.

Love made you give yourself away, it bound you to this world, and to another’s fate.

Cousin, you were wrong. We were born to live.

I am the woman who was saved by doves,

I can only say that she was ruined by love and delivered by it and that she left something glorious to the world, a child who loves to stand in the rain.