Rebekah held her mother’s hand as she led her past the stalls in the bazaar toward her husband’s house. The ground was thick with chicken feathers, horse manure, and decayed melon rinds. The cries of the vendors of ice water, hookah pipes, and hot tea filled the air. Lopsided poles held white canvases that sheltered vendors from the fierce sunshine. Goods were exhibited at the entrances—strings of figs suspended overhead, roasted nuts and dried beans overflowing canvas sacks, cones of sugar perched on sloping counters. The greengrocer in his skirted robe, belted at the waist with a multicolored shawl, lifted his cone-shaped hat and scratched his shaved head. He wet his henna-tinged forefinger in his mouth, then smeared his saliva on Rebekah’s cheeks to scare away the evil eye. From an assortment of persimmons, pomegranates, and yellow melons open to the flies and street dust, he chose a pomegranate, quartered it, and offered her a slice. “For the violet-eyed beauty.”

She bit into the bloody fruit, sucked on the seeds, and tasted the familiar tang of powdered nutmeg and ice flowers. She dropped the rest in her pocket to save for her husband.

They reached the end of the Alley of Ezekiel the Cobbler. “This is your home,” her mother whispered. “Your husband is thirty-four years old. He’ll take care of you.”

Her home was the color of mud. From behind an iron fence that protected the house, she saw jasmine bushes, a walnut tree, and a patch of arid land.

“Rebekah,” her mother said. “Look! Enough space for you to plant geranium and flowering almond and myrtle like your garden back home.”

“Water our garden, Madar. Don’t let it dry like this.”

At her mother’s touch, the gate groaned open. Rebekah stepped into the smell of hot coals. She pressed her nose to her mother’s chador to inhale her scent of caramelized sugar and licorice.

Her mother squeezed her to her breasts. “You’ll never be alone. I’ll always be looking over you,” she said, releasing her and walking out the door.

Rebekah ran to the window and peered out through the curtains, past the rusting iron gate. Clutching her doll in one hand and the parchment in another, she watched her mother’s wide hips disappear around the turn of the alley. A bird fluttered against the window. The breeze ruffled the leaves of the ancient walnut tree. She turned around to look for the stranger, her husband with the lullaby voice of a storyteller.

Heavy, gold-colored drapes darkened the room. Silver masks, features frozen in laughter, stared down at her from a mantelpiece above a massive kiln in the center. Her stomach churned at the glitter. She averted her gaze from the flames in the hearth, from the poker; mesh glove and tongs suspended from hooks hammered into the cracks in the baked mud walls around the furnace.

“I am Jacob the Fatherless.” A fat man with crossed eyes that quivered under heavy brows faced her.