The rabbi sat cross-legged on the floor, his chest wheezing.

She raised her hands in a gesture of complete submission. “I’ll leave and never look back if you tell me what happened to the contents of this jar.”

The rabbi fluttered his hands on the crown of his head. “Now you want to steal the Lord’s miracle from me?”

Rebekah brought the jar closer to his good eye. “Where are the contents?”

“What contents? The Lord placed this in the ark. I hosed it down in the backyard.” He grabbed the jar. “It’s a gift from Him—a receptacle for the boreh ismeh besamim—the prayer of herbs and scent.”

Rebekah wrestled the jar away from him and ran into the backyard. She plowed the dirt with her fingernails, shook every thorny bush, every blade of dried grass. With bare feet, she padded through the slosh at the bottom of a grimy pool, then came down on all fours and searched with her hands.

The eunuch would never go entire to the afterworld.

Rebekah took the Alley of Beggars toward the butcher’s shop and left with a sweetbread still warm inside the wrapping. For the first time since Jacob’s death, she ignited the kiln in her bedroom. She set a stool next to the kiln and sat counting the minutes. Fiendish tongues licked the soot-blackened walls. Her nipples shrank against the heat. Smoke and cinder burned her throat. The translucent skin on her fingers glowed. Bloody and veined, the sweetbread glistened in her palm.

Would the day come when she could look at a fire without evoking the Devil, without wondering why Gold Dust’s bones had started singing? Weeping. Crying out for help. She could still hear the first melody of her daughter’s body: the moan of harps, the trill of nightingales. She had examined her daughter’s mouth and had found no trace of liquid iron, or had seen it and not recognized the poison. Had the Ancient Zoroastrian’s concoction saved her?

Had she been absent when her daughter had needed her most?

The sweetbread dried up and shrank. Like her hand. Now it was the right size and consistency. She dropped it in the jar of sand, went to the corner of her room, and searched through the many parcels. She pulled out old veils, faded pants, crumpled skirts. Each piece revived memories: the day she buried Jacob; the day she became a bundle woman; the day she initiated her sweet Moses into manhood. But none carried the importance of the dress she wore on the two most significant occasions of her life: the day she seduced Narcissus, so he would allow her daughter into the harem, and the day she reappeared in the Jewish Quarter with Gold Dust on a journey to visit Rouh’Allah to offer her daughter to his son. His rejection had caused a shame greater than she had ever experienced, greater than the shame of spreading her legs to Jacob and barking like a dog. But that incident had sparked such a monumental dream; its success had become as essential as breathing.