The Changing Room 5

 

turning it over to the professionals, and he mourned like no man before him upon the death of a lesser wife.

The wife who told me these things in the marketplace slipped a honey cake into my basket and stroked Ilona's head. As she went away her shoulders were squared, her step lightened, and I knew it was not because of the death of the other.

For his artifact, Ezra had often brought a feather, an odd twig, sometimes a scrap of cloth which I supposed he got from one of his wives. The piece he finally made was a bird nest. His beard had grown from black to gray, and finally to white. When he brought the nest to show me he wept, sighing deep sighs, and I supposed that he put it in the rafters at home in the hope that birds would actually nest there.

My students never knew that in my body I was less than a woman. They believed I was more, and so did everyone who learned of the work. It came to be said that I was a sorceress, even a goddess. All these sayings were tributes to Grandfather.

Practical people admired my strength, and most presumed I was lonely, without a husband, without children, without kin.

Philip was the youngest of Ezra's sons. His eyes bore the marks of a troubled childhood, for in the early years Ezra was a tyrant in his house. Philip said that he had seen such changes in his father he wanted the same freedom to be himself.

"Do you wish to become like your father?" I asked.

"No," he said, "I think I could never be like him because I was not like him before."

I asked, "What is it you wish to become?"

He replied, "I wish to learn what I could have been without my father, and what I can still be, with or without him."

His answer was wise and I told him so.

Philip would come once a fortnight, at the fullness of the moon and at its darkness. He first entered the changing room with the scent of the rose about him.

I put a trained dove in a basket, gave it to Philip to hold, and I snuffed the lamps.