She Woke Alone in a Burial Cave at Midnight

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The Dream She Took To a Beam

She had fasted for it, so she could not tell herself afterward that it was the meat.

The sages held that a person is shown at night only the business of his own heart, which is why most dreams can be waved off by breakfast. They also held that a sixtieth of prophecy is mixed in, and that a dream follows the mouth that reads it. A woman in another town brought a bad dream to Rabbi Eliezer, and he said she would bear a son, and she bore a son. When his students tried it without him and found the dark reading, the dark reading is what arrived.

So there were three men in any town who could have taken hers and turned it, and the daughter of Rabbi Meir went to none of them.

The dream had given her a number. Twenty-one years, in three portions: seven of slavery, seven in a brothel, seven of unpaid work in a synagogue and a house of study. She was the daughter of the greatest sage of the generation and the wife of the head of the academy, and no arrangement of those years left either of those men standing. She did not argue with it or ask anyone to. She got a rope and went up on a beam.

Midnight in the Cave

Her husband cut her down and carried her out to the cemetery, and it was Friday afternoon.

Nobody digs into the Sabbath. So they laid her in a burial cave to wait until the day passed, rolled the stone across, and went home to light lamps, and the sun went down on a woman who was not actually dead.

At midnight she came back. Her cheek was on stone. The air had the shut, cold smell of a room that has never had a fire in it, there was cloth over her face, and her hands, when she got them up, found rock a foot above her chest. She lay still a while in the dark, working out where she was, until she understood that the rope had not worked and the twenty-one years had not started until now. Then she began to cry and could not stop.

She cried through the last of the night. A little after dawn a duke rode past close enough to hear a woman weeping inside a hillside, and he had his men break the cave open and pull her out, and he took her home and gave her to his wife as a slave.

The first seven began that morning.

The Bird Over the Pearls

Word came that the duke was riding home from a long absence, so the household turned itself inside out getting ready.

His wife wanted her pearls restrung before he arrived. She put the loose pearls and the thread in the slave woman's hands and went off to the bath, and the woman sat in the open with the string half filled, and a bird came down and took it out of her fingers and flew off with it.

She told the truth, which was the whole of her defense, and it sounded exactly like what a thief would say. Her mistress heard the account and gave it the dark reading, since a bird is a convenient bird, and there is no third party to a woman alone in a courtyard with a fortune in her lap. She was sold into a brothel that day, and the second seven years began there.

Fourteen years of her sentence had now been spent, and both halves had been handed to her by someone who preferred the worse account of what she said.

The Tree in the King's Garden

The king of that country decided to build a palace, and his builders wanted one long timber for a beam, and the tree they picked was the big one in the garden.

It came down. High in the wreck of the top branches the workmen found a nest, and worked into the twigs, the way a bird works in anything that shines, was the string of pearls a great house in that city had been missing for seven years.

The duke's household remembered. They sent for the woman they had sold, stood in front of her and asked her pardon, and signed her free. She did not go back to her father's town. She walked until she came to a place with a synagogue and a study house, and took the work nobody was paid for: sweeping the floor, filling the lamps, locking the doors at night.

Seven years of that were owed. She paid them a day at a time and did not tell anyone whose daughter she was.

The Man Who Would Not Sleep In a Bed

A great scholar was coming through, and he turned down every bed the town offered him. Not the inn. Not the houses of the rich men. He would sleep in the synagogue or outside it, so they put a mat between the benches and told the caretaker to see to him.

In the middle of the night she heard him crying, and he cried until it was light.

She pressed him about it in the morning, the way a servant can press a guest who has kept her awake. He said his wife had hanged herself years ago and he had laid her in a burial cave with his own hands, and when they came back the next evening the cave was empty. He had never found her and had never remarried. He said he still went from town to town half looking, and he said it without once raising his eyes to see who was standing over him.

She sat down beside him on the floor of the synagogue and told him he was talking to his wife.

He would not have it, so she gave him the signs. The private things between a husband and a wife, one after another, in order, until he stopped shaking his head and started shaking. The twenty-one years were finished to the day. They walked out of the synagogue together in the morning and went home, and this time nobody had to break anything open to get her out.