No one said a word, but their eyes never faltered. I pushed my platter away, leaning back on one elbow. I’d heard the story only once, when I was ten years old or so. My mother hadn’t told me, but I’d been playing behind the table where she sat talking softly with a friend. I remembered her words.

“Masada—it was strong. Stuffed full of Jewish rebels, of food and water. It held out a long time, sieged by Roman legions. The Romans couldn’t starve them out, so they built a great ramp up to the gates, and a siege tower. They used Jewish slaves to do it, so the rebels couldn’t throw down pitch and stones to kill them.”

Simon’s niece rose abruptly, picking up the little boy on her couch and putting him over one hip, beckoning to the other children. They trailed out and I paused for a moment. She returned and sank back down onto the couch. “Mirah,” her mother began. “This isn’t fit for your ears either—” But the girl darted her fierce eyes around the couches and looked back to me. I found my voice again. It came out very flat and tight.

“The Romans were celebrating below. They’d take the city in the morning, and they’d burn it, and they’d take all the rebels back to Rome in chains. To be sold for slaves.”

The black-bearded nephew spat.

“Inside Masada, the Jews met. All of them, men and women. My mother wasn’t there; she was only six years old. But she figured it out later, from what happened. Her father came home, and he talked for a long time with her mother in the bedroom. He came out, looking very white. There was a body behind him on the floor—”

My grandmother. I’d never thought of that before, somehow.

“He was crying. He told my mother and her sister to come to him like good girls, and my mother saw the knife in his hand and ran. Not before she saw her sister go to him—he couldn’t do it, so her sister took the knife and stabbed herself. She was fourteen.”

She’d have been my aunt, if she’d lived. Across the couches, the girl named Mirah put a hand to her mouth. She was surely only a few years older than that dead girl had been.