1913
Mountains surrounding Balaklava Valley, Crimea
“Asherah. Never forget. She calls me. We must go now,” my baba yells as my feet stumble among things of the unknown covered by this darkness.
Duty. Honor. Obedience. These three words are why I am here in this damp, dreadfully cold cavern—in honor of and obedience to my ailing baba, my mother’s mother. These three words called for me before anyone else in the house awoke. She came rushing to my bed, calling out the name that had haunted her for all of my short thirteen years on this earth.
As we now stumble in the dark, only a lantern illuminating the possible, plausible, pockmarked pathway along the sandstone-lined passage ahead, my baba says to me what might be her last words: “I must find her. Asherah. She calls.”
Who is Asherah? Who but a hermit lives in the darkest, dankest reaches of a Crimean cave?
Duty. Honor. Obedience. Three words that enslave us. As my ana, my mother, drilled into me—duty, honor, obedience. To your family, your parents, their parents. And one day, if I am to follow my duty, to my children. So, here I wander into the unknown.
A tug on my arm, and my baba, my grandmother, will not let me wait for an answer to my pessimistic pondering. She says, “My Oksana, I fear I have not had the time to teach you as your father teaches your brother.”
Then my baba insists, “You must teach your granddaughter as much as you learn today. For we all must seek the blue light. We all must help her return to the blue light. We must bring the one whom she needs to return here.”
If I had been born my father’s magnificent son instead of a meager daughter, he would be teaching me the ancient oral legend he insists my younger brother, Asan, repeat every day. Something about a bright, shining star at the tail end of a bird-shaped constellation, malicious marauding monstrous giants, and some mysterious ancient black object. One that will save mankind. Not womankind. Mankind. I learned this cold, hard lesson through a wall. My ear pressed to the cold plaster of the living room wall while my father’s voice rose and fell on the other side, patient in a way it never was with me.
Instead, my gender folds me over in this dark, damp den fit for bears or worse, holding my lower belly, for those cramps finally came into my life last evening. I hope this pad my mother gave me spares my off-white, many-times-mended, hand-me-down shift from red stains, as I wonder what compelled my baba to choose this particular cavern passage to descend. The voices of the armed men who are chasing us grow ever louder, saying this must be the cavern the tsarina’s priest foretold, where they would find what would save the tsar and Mother Russia.
Our little lantern’s light begins to flicker—its life nearing its end, as is my baba’s, whose each step now grows more labored. She awoke me before sunrise, saying, Death comes for me, so we have little time. Hurry!
I wrap her arm around my shoulders, and she feebly holds on—to her flickering lantern and her flickering breath. That energy, that essence that drove her this far, is finally fading.
Crunch. Crunch. Crunch, go my boots. What on earth could those be? My heart jumps as the little lantern in my hand faintly outlines bones beneath our feet. Many of them of all sorts, all lengthy. With a long exhale, I ponder the legend told by my father, which said something about fleeing the giants.
As my baba crumbles for a moment, I brace both of us with a hand against the uneven, rocky cavern wall. A carving lies half my height above me. Lantern illuminates a bullhead carving.
But my curiosity is not to be sated, as the deep voices behind us have gotten closer. What do they want here? My virginity, I am sure, as such men violently took from my older sister, Kamila.
More groping of my hand along the walls guides us deeper and deeper into what are no longer cavernous rocks, but smooth sandstone blocks. It is warm here, not like the frigid snow we came from. The air. It is like spring. It is like a crisp ocean breeze after a storm. It is as if we passed through a boundary into somewhere ancient but fresh.
In the distance, I spy the faint glimmer of something blue. Is this the light my baba spoke of? Closer and closer we hobble until I can discern the source. A tiny blue glowing stone embedded in the wall, slightly higher than my head. It anchors a cluster of starlike engravings in the shape of a bird. The tail of the bird star, as my father’s legend had stated. Maybe he should have taught his daughter and not his son, for I am here where none of them ever imagined.
“You’ve arrived,” a voice says. A woman’s voice. But I cannot see who she is. As if the fresh air has breathed new life into my baba, her limp body takes firmer form as she responds, “I have come as you have asked. And I have brought my Oksana for you.”
My breath stops. My brain stops on one thought. Those fairy tales about villagers and wicked witches or sorcerers…am I the virgin sacrifice to be made at some ancient temple? Maybe those hunters back there are actually my friends in this situation. I remain petrified. Stiff and frozen as the ancient oaks outside the cavern opening.
From the darkness in front of us, a distant glow of blue backlights an emerging form. A long beige robe covers her body, neck to ankles, her head covered by a brilliant white headscarf. Flawlessly pure—not only what she is wearing. My baba kneels, pulling me down, and the woman reveals a peek at her face—one of the ages. Not so much of wrinkles. But of one who has seen time pass over and over again. That gaze says everything. An elder woman. Elder not by age, but by the wisdom implied by her eyes. Piercing through your soul as if you could hide nothing.
Her hand touches my baba’s forehead, from which a blue aura emanates. “You’ve suffered so much, Alime,” the elder woman says.
How did she know my baba’s first name? I only learned her given name, used only on formal occasions, at my dede’s—her husband’s—shiva. Who is this elder woman? Does she know my name?
Her head bowed, my baba replies, “I have completed what you have asked. My daughter is of purity and married the type of man needed to produce my granddaughter, in front of you.” She glances at me. “I know she is years too young to come in front of you. But Oksana came of age yesterday; I am near death and had no choice but to bring her now in your service. She is wise for her age, honor driven, duty bound, and obedient to her faith and her family.”
Her lips lift. A sparkle forms in her eye as she glances down at me. Of all the things I had imagined for this moment—reverence, fear, sacrifice—a smile was not among them.
What does that mean, to be of service? Am I to be a housekeeper in this temple? I suppose that is better than being sacrificed at the altar. Well, that is still to be determined, my pessimistic mind ponders.
Turning her body slightly sideways, the elder woman points down the sandstone corridor towards the faint, shimmering blue glow. “Rise, Alime. Your husband awaits you.”
My baba slowly rises. Her face reflects an azure glow from the increasing intensity of the blue luminous streaks radiating from the beyond, down the corridor. I must be dreaming. Or I am delusional because baba’s destiny woke me up so early this morning. Her face appears as youthful as it did in the painting of her wedding.
She pulls me up and hugs me. “My Oksana. Please tell your mother I love her so and wished I could say goodbye this morning. But to her confusion last night, I bid her farewell, which she took only as the babbling of a dying woman.” She kisses my forehead. “Listen to Asherah. Follow her words as you have done mine.”
My tears wet her headscarf. My throat coated as the tears within my sinuses drip down. I hug her tighter. Her frail body now firm like that of a robust young woman. “Baba, it is too soon for you to leave me. To leave Ana. I need you to finish teaching me all that you taught my sister. I need you to guide me to become the woman you say I am meant to be. Please, stay longer.”
She disengages from my hug. Her hands pull back on my chestnut cotton shawl that forms my headscarf, exposing my long, wavy, silky brown hair as she says, “All you need always has been back here. It will guide you to your destiny.” Her fingers move to the back of my skull. To the juncture of the head and the neck, where that annoying, odd nape bump haunts me. My dead sister, Kamila, had one; my brother, Asan, has one, which he brags about. I had always wondered how I would hide it from the man whom my mother would one day choose for my destiny. How hideous is a woman with a misplaced bump?
My meandering musings cost me my last moments with my baba as she kisses my forehead one last time before she heads down the blue-lit corridor. To the unknown. To the beyond. To where my duty and obedience stop me from following. I am not Kamila, who had the courage to go where none of us had gone before. Into the beyond. And look where that got her. The loss of her honor. And life.
Kamila was the chosen one in our family. The daughter who would carry on the traditions and legends of my baba. The one who was to be first married into another family of prestige and means. The one who killed herself out of shame after her fiancé’s family called off the marriage.
I still reach for her in sleep sometimes. My arms cross the cold half of the floor bedding we had shared.
In the distance echoes my baba’s voice. “Illyana, I am here. I tried to bring your brother, Orzu. I am sorry I failed.”
As I tremble indecisively about what to do now, the elder hand touches my forehead. And the blue aura thing happens to me. “Oksana, my child. Your destiny is yet to come. Your grandmother’s, Alime’s, was to raise your mother and you so someday you’d arrive here.”
Does one ask questions of those of greatness, of the ages? Trembling, I timidly broach the matter. “When in doubt, my ana, my mother, has taught me to say I am but a simple, humble, Krymchak girl. As such, I do not understand what you mean by ‘destiny.’”
Wow. My ana’s advice works like a charm. For a warm smile winds around her face as she enlightens. “In your world, you’re trained to think in linear terms. From point A to B. From your age at thirteen years old to eighteen years old, when something most life-altering will happen. That’s what your world calls destiny. A destination you’re supposed to go to. If you’re ever to meet my mother, if you’re that woman who’s destined to do so, then you’ll learn a much broader sense of destiny.”
Well, that is certainly a different destiny from the one my father had been saving that dowry for. That is, unless some man awaits me down this hallway whom my parents would find acceptable to take ownership of me. Oh my.
Man? Men? What happened to those who were chasing? Sharply twisting my head away from her touch back towards the cavern entrance, I yell, “There are men with guns coming to hurt us! They want my virginity like they did my sister’s. I must flee. Quickly!”
With that hand thing again, she lightly taps my forehead, and my anxiety whisks away like fine feathers floating on the wind. “Young one. Here, within, is a sanctuary, a safe place, for women of purity. We’re protected here from unwanted men. Do you hear them anymore?”
Come to think of it, no. “Those skeletons,” I yelp. “Did those men die like those giants did?”
Another tap on my head and the blue aura arises. “No, my child. Do you want them to die?”
Shaking my head side to side, vibrating like a hummingbird, I ask, “But where are they?”
“No worries, my child. If you wish them to live, then they’ll be waiting for you outside. But they’ll be terrified of something horrifying with no memory of the where, how, and why of their current situation.”
“But why are only women allowed to be here? What do they need sanctuary from?” I ask.
Her fingers now reach to that accursed bump, from which a soothing warmth arises. “Because women like you are among the most special of all. Women of great faith. Of great destiny.”
Finally, her eyes close as she rubs that bump. Her smile flattens. She must have seen through my soul. Everyone becomes disappointed as they get to know me better.
“You’re not who your grandmother had hoped she would bring to me,” she says as her eyes slowly reopen.
No, I am not. Kamila was the chosen one in our family. I was only the left-over daughter who comforted her ana, her mother, after the chosen one took her own life. Death and dishonor. How are they so tightly linked?
Her fingers come to the edges of my down-turned lips. “Smile, Oksana. Your beauty will emerge as you smile. Your heart will emerge as you smile. And the world will come to understand the depth of your soul.”
As one anxious thought subsides with her touch, another one jumps into its place. “Who did you hope I was?”
Her fingers lift the edges of my lips, as her lips lift. “One day, my daughter will return. Her soul is lost to time. Your baba thought she was within you.”
Like when our rabbi says something of great mystical, even supernatural, profoundness, I try to emote the face of one who understands. But I am failing again.
“No worries, my little Oksana,” she reassures as if she can peer into my mind. “Your destiny is still to come.”
“My mother says my ‘destiny’ is to raise children as she did. To have boys who will find girls like me. To have girls who have a bump like mine, who will marry boys like my father. That is my duty to my family’s honor, which I must remain obedient to.”
“That, my child, is important. If you don’t reach your family’s endgame, then you must raise children who will, as did your baba,” she responds, lightly touching my bump again. “I must ask something of you. Something that will take not bravery and courage, but your trueness to your heart, to your faith. Are you that girl Alime thought could rise to the occasion?”
My ears fix on her words. My eyes into hers. Her eyes pierce through my soul again. Something in her question stifles my inner voice. Is this the moment? The kind my ata had me read about in books that my teachers said were beyond my years? The heroes in those books were boys like Asan. Not Krymchak girls with hand-me-down dresses who have no right to go to the beyond.
And the beyond should stay in the beyond as I reply, “I am so sorry, ma’am. I am but a humble, Krymchak girl. Once my father finds out that I have become a woman, he will start the search for a husband who will bring to the family the resources that will help him and my brother to solve their destinies.” I rub my nose. “I can only hope my mother picks the best of who is willing to have me.”
A smile that only a mother could have beams from this elder woman’s face. She pats me on the top of my head. “Someday, you’ll have a daughter, as did your baba, as did your mother. And you’ll comprehend what destiny you want your daughter to have.” Her eyes no longer pierce my soul but stare into the distance down towards the caverns. “My daughter sought her destiny eons ago. Your world needs to return to the natural and equal balance between the genders. She’s still trying to find her way back here. Someday, your children’s children may finally help her return.”
My mouth opens. Good thing there are no flies in here to zip into my throat. She did not simplify her words this time when I said I am but a simple, humble, Krymchak girl.
“No worries, my child,” she says, as if my thoughts were transparent. “Your baba had spent most of her wisdom training your sister. Have you come to understand why it’s you who stands here and not your sister? Why was her death destined?”
I glance down at my light-tan coat, my long dark red-and-blue school dress underneath, my cotton shift under it. Everything I have is a hand-me-down from my sister. Is she saying my destiny here is but another hand-me-down? Am I but a shallow substitute for the great destined one whose self-inflicted death changed our family? Drove my mother’s darkness, her depressions? Changed my father’s focus to my eventual marriage?
“Are you saying my sister died so I would be the one my baba took here to meet you?”
“Destiny works in ways the human mind struggles to comprehend,” she replies. “No worries, for time will be your friend. With time, you’ll come to understand your place in the destiny of your world. You must find within your heart your acceptance that fear will always be a constant. But the hero inside you will find fear is but another distracting voice. That only one voice will matter.”
One voice? For my family, my temple, that means the one voice in the Oral Torah. For my baba, that meant another name. “Are you Asherah?” I ask.
That smile, those eyes, all emoting peace and security. “My child, if this name brings you comfort, helps you find your path, then you can call me Asherah. I’m known by many names. But most importantly, I’m a daughter like you. Like my daughter, I’ve lost my way from my mother. Like you have now.”
She is right again. I am lost. I have no idea how I will find my way home without my baba. A long breath in, eyes closed, I say, “I am but a simple, Krymchak girl. Much of what you have said is beyond my humble upbringing. But as my baba was obedient to your word, duty-bound to bring me here, and in honor of what you have taught, so will I be. What is it you want me to do, in simple-Krymchak-girl language?”
A stifled laugh. The flawlessly perfect do have a sense of humor.
She taps my forehead once again, with a blue halo forming. “My dear Oksana, keep being the simple woman of purity, of honor, you’ve strived to be. Your destiny will bring into your life those who empower you. Inside your heart, you need to find the courage to listen to the one voice that will lead you north. Follow the tail of the bird star as far north as your people know. Into this beyond, you and only you will understand how to find my mother. She awaits you.”
Tail of the bird star. What did my brother say as he rambled through what my father wanted him to recite word-for-word exactly as his own grandfather had taught? When the giants come, flee from the direction of the tail of the bird star. Oh my!
“But the giants come from that direction. How can a little girl like me fight giants?” I plead.
Her hand-thing again atop my head quells and qualms my fraught and fright of all things taller than me. “What did I say? Think with your heart, not from all those conflicting words in your head. Your heart will conquer even giants.”
As something settles deep within my chest, my hand reflexively touches that bump behind my neck. Well, that idea was simple enough, I think. “What do I say to your mother? What do you want to tell her?”
Her hands, warm, soothing, uplifting, surround my temples. “In you is my message. At the time you meet her, she’ll understand. Above all, tell no one about our meeting. Even your family. Even your mother.”
No fear. No anxiety. Her one voice. It is true.
Well, one anxiety, as I ask, “I will not fail you or your mother. But how do I find my mother? I have no idea which way is home.”
Her hands still around my temples, She says, “Trust yourself. Trust your heart. Trust the voice within. If you do, the way will present itself, as it did for your baba to find your way here.”
I finally fully exhale, slow and long, as if the mountain above had released its weight from my body. She kisses my forehead, lifting my shawl headscarf back around my head. She turns and seemingly floats back towards the dimming glimmering blue light down the stone-block hallway. Should I follow Her? Should I turn around? Is it true that those men are not behind me to enslave me, or worse?
Trust that voice. Trust my heart. I repeat these words over and over as I put my hand against the wall. I slowly feel my way back down the cavern path. Crunch, crunch, crunch. I pass the giant bones and the bullhead engraving. Those men who chased us are not here, dead. Maybe She is telling the truth. About everything I never knew.
At the cavern’s hidden mouth, my feet stop. The frozen winds find me once again. Cold enough to sting the inside of my nose—cold enough to remind me I am only thirteen and alone after my baba walked into the blue light and never came back.
All I can discern is white. The snowfall had intensified since the moment we had fled into this cavern. No sign of our footsteps. I have no idea how to get back to our cart and horse.
Trust that voice or freeze trying. I take the first brave, heroic step forward into the beyond.
And then muffled, miserable voices arise. Behind a cluster of ancient oaks, they huddle. Mumbling something. Should I go to them? Or should I run from them? Then they spy me and yell, “No, no! Do not hurt us!”
These two burly men, dressed in sheepskin overcoats and Russian tsarist hats, are no more than little boys who have been terrified of a night monster hiding in their bedroom closet. No unbridled lust. No hate. No anger. Just babblings of fear.
In death’s frozen, forgotten embrace, my destiny awaits.
Oh Asherah. Have you forsaken me already?
