I nod mutely.
“You must have converted then, haven’t you? You aren’t wed.” Her gaze skims me up and down, like a merchant examining a porcelain vase for its cracks. “You look older than I am. If you want to be wed—”
“Jozefa.” Batya’s voice cuts between us. “The rabbi is going to start.”
Jozefa’s lips go taut, and she faces back toward the lectern. My cheeks are hot, but it’s a small flustering. There’s no shame pooling in my belly. I’ve long since learned to tell which questions are meant only to probe and which are meant to wound. Jozefa’s are dull, toothless—Katalin would have scoffed at such mundane impudence. I imagine she might have asked them of any Yehuli girl who was unwed at five and twenty, and the thought fills me with a tight, blooming hope, something like a coin clutched in a closed fist.
I expect the rabbi to be someone like the érsek, but he is younger, with a dense beard that coils profusely, black as wet bramble. There are two candles on the lectern, and when he traces something into their stands, the wicks both blossom into flame. It makes my breath catch, the same as when Zsigmond did it.
He begins to speak, and I am deeply relieved to hear Régyar and not Yehuli. My skin prickles with the memory of Count Reményi’s words, how easily he imagined the Yehuli could give up their homes and their histories in Régország, how I had even briefly entertained the same fantasy. Now it seems impossible to imagine: Régyar words spill from the rabbi’s mouth as easily as water from a mountain spring. The story he tells is familiar, names and places lighting up in my mind like signal fires. There is the orphaned Yehuli girl, Esther, who was wed to a king. The king didn’t know that his new wife was Yehuli, and neither did his wicked minister, who plotted to kill all the Yehuli in the kingdom. When Zsigmond told me the story, decades ago, he gave the minister a pinched voice that made me laugh and laugh. Now, every time the rabbi starts to speak the minister’s name, the temple fills with shouting and crowing, sounds that blot the minister from the tale like a thumb smudging ink. I think of Zsigmond obscuring the first letter of emet, turning truth into death.
“Esther knew that she had been made queen so that she could help her people, but approaching the king about such things was against the law, and would lead to her death,” the rabbi says. “So for three days Esther prayed and fasted and sharpened her mind, and then she went to the king anyway.”
I already know that the story ends with Esther triumphant, the Yehuli safe, and the wicked minister killed. I know, too, that there is a lesson in it, like all of Virág’s dire tales, but I can’t tell what it is. Was Esther brave, or was she shrewd? Was the king cruel, or was he only stupid? I think Virág would say that Esther was a coward for marrying the king at all, or for not first slitting his throat while he slept soundly in their marriage bed.
A bit of grief leaches into me, like rainwater through roots. All around me the Yehuli sit with their families, shoulders brushing, hands linked together, and then there is Zsigmond and me, our thighs barely touching. Yehuli words float through the air in whispers, thin and pale as dust motes, still mostly foreign to me. I can sit in their temple and wear their clothes and even try to garble their tongue, but I am still not really one of them.
And then, extraordinarily, Zsigmond lays his hand over mine. I feel the quiver of hesitation run through his palm, and then he threads his fingers with my own. Warmth envelops me. Jozefa reaches across her mother’s lap and smooths one of the pleats of my dress, of her dress, almost absently, like she has noticed one of her own hairs out of place. Zsigmond is still staring straight ahead, watching the rabbi, but when his eye flickers to me briefly, I see in it a look of exquisite peace.
After the reading, bodies flood from the temple into the street. Feast tables are laid with huge platters of triangular-shaped dumplings, thin pancakes rolled with sweet cheese and topped with the last blackberries of summer, carafes of wine, and the same hard biscuits that Batya brought my father in his gift basket, thumbprints of sour-cherry jam at their centers. Zsigmond told me this was a minor holiday, but it looks as big as any feast we have ever had in Keszi. Farther down the road, there is a man performing a bawdy shadow-puppet play, telling the story of Esther with some embellishments not fit for children’s ears. The children are not listening anyway: they run through their mothers’ skirts, mouths stained purple with berry juice. The girls wear paper crowns, imagining themselves Queen Esther. The dusky evening sky is banded with orange and gold.