Incantation by Alice Hoffman Read Free Book Online Page A

grandmother.
    For the first time in my life, I wasn’t afraid of her.

    L ATE THAT NIGHT , my mother woke me. She shook me, then signaled for me to follow. The moon had risen, and everything looked white. I pulled my cloak on over my nightclothes and stepped into my shoes.
    I felt I must be dreaming, but the road we were walking on was very real. We didn’t speak as we made our way through town. Still, I knew my grandmother and my mother had talked about me. Now it seemed they had decided they would trust me with their knowledge. My mother reminded me I could tell no one where she was taking me.
    Not for any reason on this earth. You can never tell,
my mother told me.
    I swore I would not.
    I did not tell her that when she woke me, I had been standing in a garden in my dreams. Someone had called me
Esther.
    Esther,
the voice had said in my dream.
Those you love will not drown or burn. They will fly away.
    My mother was so at home in the woods she didn’t notice when her skirts caught on thorns; little blue flags were left behind. I had to struggle to keep up with her. My breathing was so hard my sides hurt; still we went on. There were stones, but we went around them. There were low branches, but we ducked beneath them. There was a small stream, but we found our way over by stepping on some flat rocks.
    We passed hidden graves on the way, all with blue stone markers, each engraved with a star. We didn’t stop until we came to a far place, one that was even more distant than the spot where my father was buried. We walked through a grove of plum trees, then crawled through a tall hedge covered by white blooming flowers. In the clearing on the other side of the hedge there was a pool made from cedar wood planks. My mother said the pool was very old and had to be repaired and filled with clean rainwater once a year by the men of our church. My mother told me the word for this wooden rainwater holder was called a
mikva,
a bath. It was only for women, to purify us and make us stronger. All of the women in our church shared our secret; all journeyed here when they came of age.
    My mother pinned up her long hair and took off her clothes. She was so beautiful, I was stunned. I felt like nothing compared to her, a child; but when she told me to undress and enter the bath with her, I did.
    We floated in the dark water. Above us the sky was so filled with stars, it seemed more white than black. I thought of salt and flour on my grandmother’s tabletop. I thought of pearls in the sea. All this way from town we could still breathe in the odor of the lime flowers from the burnt trees in the Plaza. Some things were strong; they stayed with you. The place where you grew up, the scent of lime flowers, the dreams you had. When I stared into the bathwater, I thought of the bowl of water my mother had me gaze into so many times, and I thought,
It is all here.
The beginning and the end.
    Later, when I dressed, I could feel the burden of who we were. All the same, I felt like my truest self walking under the stars, so clean I shivered, so much who I was and always had been, whether or not they’d told me.
    It was a long way back to town, and I had one more question to ask.
    Why didn’t our great-great-grandparents leave this place instead of living false lives?
    The court took the children when they cast out the Jews. They wouldn’t give them back until the people of your great-great-grandparents’ time converted.
    They should have run away after that.
    We’ve always lived here,
my mother said.
Five hundred years of bones are in this earth.
    My mother knew how hard it was to leave the dead. But didn’t we carry them with us? Wasn’t my father with us as long as we thought of him?
    We walked the rest of the way in silence. It was nearly sunrise when we sneaked into our own yard, our own house. We stopped in the yard and took off our shoes so we wouldn’t wake my grandfather. The chickens were still asleep, but there was the hawk above