“It won’t, if you care.”

Every Sabbath eve, Moses, the boy, returned. When he did not have money, he brought a branch of jasmine he had picked from the neighbor’s garden, a slice of rice bread he had stolen from the kitchen, a strand of fake pearls his mother had left unattended. Rebekah welcomed him. Surrendered to him. Gave him refuge between her ample thighs.

He, in return, taught her to inhale and taste the many scents that inhabit the world, to give them the proper name and color, and to learn to smell the body and soul with all of their sweet and stinking hues.

“I miss your brand when I’m away,” Moses complained.

She licked his eyelids shut. “It brings bad luck.”

“You’re wrong,” he said. “It makes you different, loving and courageous.”

“Then let me give you one.” She went to her coffer and came back with her sewing box and the container that held her ointments and dyes. “Don’t look,” she whispered, holding a needle in the candle flame to decontaminate it. She sat him on the mattress and pressed her ear to his chest, listening to the beat of his heart.

Her needle traced a design above his left nipple, pricked the border of the figure and the insides, drawing blood. He sat motionless as she retrieved a satchel of henna from her box and smeared it on the pattern, mixing it with his blood.

She raised a mirror and displayed his tattoo. “There!” she said, blowing on his chest. “My gift to you. A permanent love brand to remember me by. Now you have two hearts to love with.”

“But hearts are not this color.”

“It’s the color of overexposed blood—like mine.”

One Sabbath eve, like every other, anticipating Moses, she locked her door, refusing all visitors. Late into the night, before she retired, she unlocked the door, certain he would come. He was one of eleven brothers. He helped support his family. He might have had to work late.

Moses never came.

Her body ached for his grateful gaze, kind hands, and bloody love tattoo, but she was not sad. He had transformed her into a different woman, a tutor of love, a benevolent matriarch to a large contingent of adolescent boys who would happily steal to pay her for secrets that would convert them into seasoned men.

“If the fire didn’t destroy your soul, Jacob,” she repeated every time she parted her thighs, “this will.” And the words turned into a tenacity that goaded her life.

6

Rebekah the Bundle Woman appeared in the Jewish Quarter with a sprig of mint stuck behind her ear to stave off the stink of the Devil. Her silver chador shimmering in the sunlight, her golden hair flying out of the fringes of her veil, she blew passionate kisses to those she liked and batted her eyelashes flirtatiously at those she did not. Clad in layers of lace, and emerging for the first time in daylight, Gold Dust perched on the saddle behind her.