Archive of Our Own

The scrap did not arrive with trumpets. It came the way news always came to them—small enough to fit in a pocket, carried in the crook of an elbow, pressed between a palm and a chest as if it might bruise. In the market that morning, the air had been full of ordinary things: the sweet rot of overripe fruit in a shallow basket, the sharpness of coffee beans being turned and turned in a pan, the warm animal scent that clung to hides. Voices rose and fell in bargaining rhythms that had nothing to do with presidents or inaugurations, only with salt, with cloth, with the day’s hunger and the day’s work.

Still, even there, people had noticed the stranger.

Not a stranger in the sense of a different skin or a different face—they had seen travelers before, men with tired eyes and dust in their hems, people from other villages whose speech carried a different tilt. This stranger was marked by what he brought: a bundle tied in twine, protected from wind and hands. He unwrapped it with the cautious ceremony of someone who knew its value lay in its fragility. Paper like that was not for wrapping lentils. Paper like that was for decrees and teaching—paper that belonged to schools and offices and the kinds of rooms most of them would never enter.

A few men gathered at a polite distance, pretending they were there for other reasons. Women continued sorting greens, their fingers never stopping, but their eyes flicked over. Children lingered where they were meant to be shooed away from, drawn by that strange pull of forbidden things.

The stranger laid the paper open on an upturned crate, smoothing it with the flat of his hand. The words, printed tight and black, were in a language none of the village boys could read, a forest of foreign shapes. There was a block of text, there were columns, there were small boxes of darker ink that might have been headings. But what caught them—what pulled the market’s attention like a hook—was the picture.

A face.

A woman’s face, framed by the crisp edges of the print, her expression caught in that peculiar way photographs had, neither moving nor fully still. Around her were more faces, blurred by the camera’s hunger for a single subject. Above and below her head, lines of words marched, incomprehensible but emphatic.

Someone sucked in a breath, as if the paper had spoken aloud.

“Who is it?” an older man asked, too loudly, then coughed as if to pretend it had been the dust.

The traveler’s mouth twitched. He liked having an audience. “A president,” he said, savoring the word. “A woman president.”

That made a few people click their tongues. A woman president was the kind of thing that belonged in stories told to children to make them laugh or behave. But the traveler tapped the paper again, firm. “Not a story. There. It is written.”

“Written where?” demanded a boy who could read a little scripture but not this. He leaned so close his breath fogged the print.

The traveler nudged him back with two fingers. “Not for your nose. For your eyes.”

A man with a narrow face and careful manners—one of the synagogue elders—stepped closer, keeping his hands behind his back as if touching the paper would be presumptuous. He was not easily impressed; that was part of his reputation. He had seen more seasons than most of the market put together. Still, his gaze went to the picture and held there longer than necessary.

“A Jewish president,” the traveler added, as if tossing a stone into still water to see how far the ripples would spread.

That did it. The market’s surface shifted. People who had been pretending disinterest suddenly found errands that brought them nearer. A woman paused mid-bargain, the coin still in her fingers. An old grandmother leaned forward on her stick, her lips parting around a toothless “Ah.”

“A Jewish president?” someone repeated, not quite believing. The phrase sat strangely on the tongue, familiar and unfamiliar all at once.

The elder’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know?”

The traveler shrugged, both smug and dismissive. “It says it. And they say she speaks Hebrew in that place. They say she swore her oath with her hand on… on—” He faltered, searching for a detail he had half-understood from other mouths. “On their holy book.”

“The Torah,” the elder supplied automatically, though he had no proof. It was not a question. It was an instinct.

The traveler nodded quickly, grateful to be helped. “Yes. That.”

The elder looked again at the picture, and a small muscle jumped in his jaw. He did not smile. If anything, his face became more cautious, as if he were handling something sharp. “Where did you get this?”

“In the town,” the traveler said. “From a man who sells papers, who gets them from other men, who gets them from—who knows. It travels. Like everything.” He wiped sweat from his brow, then—too casually—began to fold the newspaper.

The elder’s hand came out at last, swift but controlled. He did not grab. He placed his palm flat on the paper to stop it being folded away, the gesture both protective and firm. “I will buy it,” he said.

The traveler’s eyebrows lifted. “It is not cheap.”

The elder didn’t blink. “Name it.”

Coins changed hands without drama, but everyone noticed. When the elder lifted the folded paper, he did it as if he were lifting a bowl of water that could spill. He tucked it inside his cloak, close against his ribs. The traveler, paid and satisfied, moved on to show other wares that suddenly looked dull.

As the market’s noise returned, a new, thinner sound threaded through it—whispers, questions, quick rumors. Not loud enough to be called gossip, not quiet enough to be nothing.

“It is true?” a woman asked her neighbor while selecting onions. “A Jewish woman is president?”

Her neighbor shook her head as if trying to dislodge the thought. “Maybe it is another kind of Jew,” she muttered. “Maybe the word is used for politics there.”

“Hush,” the first woman scolded, eyes flicking to see if anyone had heard. “A Jew is a Jew.”

Across the way, a young man laughed, uneasy. “If women can be presidents, goats will soon learn to pray.”

“Goats already pray,” an old aunt snapped without looking up from her basket. “They pray for you to stop talking.”

There were jokes, there were warnings, there were little dismissals that attempted to make the strange thing smaller. But the newspaper, now hidden under cloth, had already done its work. The image existed. The claim existed. In a place where so much of the outside world remained a series of distant words—names spoken in prayer, places mentioned in scripture, far-off cities that might as well have been stars—an image was a kind of proof that bypassed all arguments.

By midday the folded scrap had reached the synagogue courtyard.

The elder did not make a show of it. He came the way he always came, at the same hour, his stride measured. He greeted people with the same nod. He passed the children who chased one another between the wall and the well. But his hand kept touching his cloak, checking, as if his own body had become the satchel for something too important to misplace.

Near the courtyard entrance, two women were rinsing grain. Their wrists flashed with water. When the elder passed, one of them lifted her chin slightly.

“Is it true?” she asked, her voice casual in the way it wasn’t.

The elder kept walking. “There are many things true,” he said, and that could have meant anything.

The other woman snorted softly. “That is not an answer.”

“It is an answer,” the elder replied without turning. “It is just not the one you want.”

Inside the synagogue, the air was cool and dim, the kind of cool that made the heat outside feel like a fever. The elder went straight to where Rabbi Abba Yishaq sat with a book open in his lap, his fingers moving along the lines as if the words were a path he could walk.

The rabbi looked up at once—not because the elder was loud, but because long years had sharpened his senses. He saw the elder’s posture, the way his shoulders held themselves, and knew something was being carried.

“You bring trouble,” Rabbi Abba Yishaq said mildly, as if greeting an old friend.

The elder’s mouth tightened. “I bring paper,” he corrected, and then—careful, reverent despite himself—he slid the folded newspaper from inside his cloak and placed it on the rabbi’s low table.

The rabbi did not reach for it immediately. His eyes went to it, then away, then back, as if measuring whether looking would change the room.

“What is it?” he asked, though his tone suggested he already knew the shape of the answer.

“A foreign paper,” the elder said. “From the town. It has a picture.”

“A picture of what?” the rabbi asked, and there was something precise in the question, something that refused to be rushed.

The elder hesitated. He was not a man who enjoyed sounding superstitious. “A woman,” he said finally. “They say she has become president in a great country.”

The rabbi’s eyebrows rose a fraction. Not surprise—interest. “And you believed a trader?”

“I believed my eyes,” the elder said, and then, quieter, “They say she is Jewish.”

That landed. The rabbi’s hand, which had been resting lightly on his book, stilled.

He let the silence stretch between them until the elder shifted, uncomfortable, as if silence was an accusation.

Outside, the synagogue courtyard made its usual sounds: footsteps, laughter, the faint call of someone scolding a child. The village was not holding its breath. Only the men at the table were.

After a long moment Rabbi Abba Yishaq reached for the newspaper, not with eagerness, but with the deliberation of someone opening a letter that might change the day. He unfolded it partway, enough to see the photograph.

The elder watched his face, searching for reaction the way people watched clouds for rain.

The rabbi’s expression did not change much. He did not smile. He did not gasp. His eyes only narrowed, focusing, taking in details. He looked as though he were reading the woman’s face as if it were a page of text.

“She is… very far,” the elder murmured, as if distance could be measured by ink.

“Yes,” the rabbi said softly. He folded the paper again before the elder could lean closer. “Very far.”

The elder’s impatience flickered. “Rabbi—”

“Not here,” Rabbi Abba Yishaq cut in, still gentle but final. He tapped the folded newspaper once. “Paper makes people foolish. It makes them hungry for things they cannot chew.”

The elder bristled. “It makes people proud.”

“It can do both,” the rabbi replied, and slipped the folded scrap beneath a cloth on the table as if hiding it from the room itself. “And it can make people careless with holiness.”

The elder sat back, chastened though not convinced. “The adults will ask,” he warned.

The rabbi nodded once, acknowledging the truth without surrendering to it. “Let them ask,” he said. “We are not desperate.”

It was a phrase that belonged to the grown world, the world of restraint. A phrase that meant: We will not beg for scraps of validation. We will not make ourselves small with hunger.

The elder exhaled through his nose, a sound like reluctant agreement. He stood, bowed his head, and left.

The synagogue returned to its quiet.

But the paper did not stay quiet inside the rabbi’s home.

News could be folded, but it could not be contained. The elder was a careful man, yet even careful men leaked stories. A muttered sentence here, a half-answered question there. A woman who overheard something while bringing bread. A boy sent on an errand who lingered too long outside the doorway. By the afternoon, the rumor moved like weather across the village—seen first as a small cloud at the edge of the sky, then felt in the air, then undeniable.

“There is a picture,” someone whispered at the well.

“A picture of what?”

“Of her.”

“Of who?”

“The woman. The president. The Jewish president.”

Adults absorbed it the way adults absorbed anything that might make them feel exposed: with measured interest, with eyes that did not widen, with voices carefully flat.

One man shrugged as if the matter were obvious. “What is a picture to us? We have our prayers.”

His wife rolled her eyes behind his back. “And yet your ears grow like donkey ears when you hear ‘president.’”

Another elder clicked his tongue. “It is a test,” he said, because men loved the idea that the world existed to test them. “A test of pride.”

“A test?” a young mother repeated, irritated. “Everything is a test with you. Perhaps it is simply… news.”

The adults did not gather in a crowd, did not go marching to the rabbi’s door. That was not their way. Their dignity mattered to them, sometimes more than their curiosity. They asked in ones and twos, in sideways conversations, leaving space for denial if needed. They pretended the answer did not matter.

The girls, of course, did not pretend.

They heard the rumor the way a match hears dry grass.

Tsedey caught it first from her aunt, who had been talking with another woman while grinding spices. The adults’ voices had been low, but the name had flashed bright as a knife: Phoebe. President. Photograph. Rabbi.

Tsedey’s head snapped up. “A photograph?” she repeated, too loud, sending a few grains of spice puffing into the air.

Her aunt hissed. “Lower your voice.”

Tsedey lowered nothing. “A photograph of Phoebe? Here?”

“Not here,” her aunt muttered, annoyed at having said anything. “In the rabbi’s home. And it is not for children.”

Tsedey’s grin was immediate and dangerous. “I am not a child.”

Her aunt gave her the look that said you are trouble in a skirt. “You are exactly a child,” she said. “And you will not go bothering Rabbi Abba Yishaq.”

Tsedey’s grin only widened. She turned away, already planning, already gathering.

By late afternoon she had found Aster, who pretended she was too busy helping her mother with laundry to care about anything else. She had found Rahel, who listened without reacting and then asked three questions that proved she cared very much. She had found Hanna, whose eyes lit up as if someone had opened a window inside her chest. She had found Mekdes, who frowned so deeply it looked like devotion.

And she found Saba, because Saba found everyone, slipping into conversations like water.

“It’s true?” Saba demanded, breathless. “A president is Jewish? A woman?”

“Not a president,” Aster corrected automatically, because correcting was half of her personality. “The president. The big one. The far-away one.”

“That’s what I said,” Saba insisted.

“It is not what you said,” Aster replied, and there might have been a smile in it.

Rahel glanced around, checking who was within earshot. “If the rabbi has the paper,” she said carefully, “it means he thinks it is… significant.”

“It means the elders bought it,” Tsedey said, already impatient with caution. “And if they bought it, why shouldn’t we see it?”

Mekdes’s voice was tight. “Because we are not entitled to every thing adults touch.”

Hanna looked from face to face, hardly breathing. “But it’s a Jew,” she said softly, as if afraid to say it too loudly in case it evaporated. “A Jew in a place we can’t imagine.”

Aster snorted. “We can imagine it. We just imagine it badly.”

Tsedey leaned in, eyes bright, lowering her voice at last—not out of obedience, but out of strategy. “He has it in his house,” she said. “Not in the synagogue. That means it is not being shown.”

“Or it means it is being kept safe,” Rahel said.

“Safe from us,” Tsedey shot back.

Saba tugged at Rahel’s sleeve. “Does she look like us?” she whispered, urgent, the question already shaping itself in her mind without words for the answer.

Rahel didn’t know, and her uncertainty made the question sharper. It had never occurred to any of them to imagine a Jewish president as anything other than… themselves, multiplied and transported into some grand, far-off room.

Tsedey straightened, decision settling over her like a cloak. “We are going,” she declared. “We will stand outside his door until he looks at us and realizes we are not goats.”

Mekdes opened her mouth to object, but Hanna spoke first, surprising them all with the steadiness of her voice.

“If we go,” Hanna said, “we go properly. We do not make noise. We do not drag the whole courtyard behind us. We go like… like students.”

Aster’s eyebrows lifted. “Listen to Hanna, suddenly wise.”

Hanna’s cheeks reddened, but she held her ground. “If you want something sacred, you don’t stomp toward it.”

Tsedey rolled her eyes, but she didn’t disagree. Rahel nodded slowly. Mekdes’s frown deepened, but it shifted shape—from refusal to vigilance.

Saba bounced on her toes. “When?” she demanded, as if “later” might kill her.

Tsedey looked toward the line of homes, toward the small, modest house that belonged to Rabbi Abba Yishaq, the place where adults went with lowered voices and came away with their shoulders eased. The sun was sliding down, turning the dust gold.

“By evening,” she said, and her grin came back, sharp as ever. “Before supper. Before the adults remember to lock the world.”

They scattered then, not to abandon the plan, but to feed it—each girl moving like a messenger carrying a secret. By the time the first cooking smoke thickened and the village began to gather itself for night, curiosity had already become a shape, a route, a shared look.

And somewhere, behind a quiet door, a folded piece of foreign paper waited in the rabbi’s home like contraband and blessing at once.

By late afternoon the courtyard began to thin the way it always did, not suddenly but in stages, as if the village exhaled in measured portions. The men who had stayed to talk after prayers drifted off toward fields and animals and errands that could not be delayed. The smallest children were herded away by older siblings, their laughter snagging briefly on the synagogue wall before being carried off into the lanes. Even the old women who liked to sit in the shade and discuss the price of flour moved homeward, tugging shawls tighter against shoulders that didn’t need the extra cloth so much as they needed the familiar habit of it.

The synagogue, emptied, took on its quieter voice—cool stone, stale incense, the faint lingering warmth of bodies that had been there and were now gone. Dust motes turned slow circles in the last slanting beams of sun. It was the hour when respectable things happened behind doorways and the public spaces belonged mostly to wind.

And yet, at the edge of the courtyard, Rabbi Abba Yishaq’s little home refused to become ordinary.

It sat close enough to the synagogue to be a continuation of it, as if holiness had spilled out and decided to settle there. The house was modest: mud walls, a roof that held back rain with stubbornness more than elegance, a low doorframe that made even the shortest visitor bow. A small patch of herbs grew by the wall, protected by stones and the rabbi’s attention, and in the late light the leaves looked almost silver.

That door—usually a door that opened only to quiet knocks and careful voices—had become, in the minds of half the village, the mouth of a secret.

Tsedey arrived first, because Tsedey liked to arrive first. She came as if she had no destination at all, as if her feet had simply wandered in that direction. She slowed when she neared the house, letting herself look bored, letting her arms hang loose, letting her eyes slide away from the door as if it held nothing of interest. Her performance was terrible, which was part of its charm.

Aster appeared a moment later, carrying a damp cloth as if she were on her way to wipe down something important. She stopped near Tsedey without greeting her, then leaned slightly, voice low enough that it might have been a sigh.

“You look like a hyena pretending to be a goat,” Aster murmured.

Tsedey’s lips twitched. “And you look like laundry pretending to be a person.”

Aster gave a small snort and kept her gaze forward. “We are both convincing.”

Rahel came next, measured, her posture too composed for what she was doing. She paused a few paces away and glanced up the lane in both directions—not because she expected danger, but because she expected eyes. When she joined them, she didn’t stand too close. She left a respectful gap, as if distance might disguise intent.

“Where’s Hanna?” Tsedey asked, unable to hold the question in.

Rahel lifted a brow. “You planned this like a raid and forgot the raiders?”

“She’ll come,” Aster said, and somehow made it sound like a sentence about weather.

Mekdes arrived with Hanna, and their pairing would have been funny if the stakes weren’t so strange. Mekdes walked as if she were accompanying Hanna to a lesson. Hanna walked as if she were accompanying Mekdes to a confession. Both of them looked as though they had told themselves sternly not to smile and had failed.

Saba came last, breathless from running, her braids swinging. She slowed at the edge of the group and tried to look casual, but her eyes went straight to the door like a thirsty animal to water.

“This is it?” she whispered.

“This is it,” Tsedey confirmed, and her voice sharpened with the pleasure of being right.

They made a scatter of themselves, as planned and not planned. Two of them stood near the herb patch, pretending deep interest in leaves they had never noticed before. One leaned against the courtyard wall, picking at a chip of plaster. Another crouched to adjust a sandal strap that did not need adjusting. They arranged their bodies into the shape of “just passing,” though anyone with half an eye could have seen they were a small flock gathered around a single point.

They watched.

They listened.

They pretended not to.

The door was shut. The house made no sound but the faint, ordinary creak of wood cooling as the day cooled. Somewhere inside, perhaps, the rabbi was reading. Perhaps he was eating. Perhaps he was sitting with the folded newspaper like a secret pressed between his palms. The girls, in their impatience, filled the silence with small movements: a toe drawing circles in dust, a shoulder rolling as if to shake off nervousness, fingers worrying a hem.

Hanna’s eyes kept lifting toward the door, then dropping again, as if she were afraid the house might notice being stared at. When she finally spoke, it was barely above a breath.

“What if he sends us away?” she asked.

Mekdes turned her head a fraction. “Then we go,” she said, firm, as if this were the obvious answer. “And we repent of being ridiculous.”

Tsedey’s chin lifted. “We’re not ridiculous,” she whispered back. “We’re curious.”

“Curiosity is not a commandment,” Mekdes replied.

Aster leaned in, voice sly. “It should be.”

Rahel’s eyes narrowed at Aster, but her mouth softened with the beginning of a smile. “Don’t encourage her,” she murmured. “She’s already a fire.”

On the far side of the lane, adult women began to drift into view, not marching, not gathering as a crowd—just appearing as if by coincidence. One carried a basket of greens she could have washed at home. Another paused near the well with an empty jar, though everyone knew water had already been drawn earlier. A third stood in her doorway and began shaking out a cloth so slowly it was almost theatrical.

They were older, and their performances were better.

None of them looked directly at the rabbi’s door. None of them looked directly at the girls, either, as if to acknowledge the girls’ presence would be to admit the game. They did chores with exaggerated focus, but their ears tilted. Their bodies angled subtly, catching any word that might fall.

Tsedey noticed them and rolled her eyes. “They’re listening,” she murmured.

“Of course they’re listening,” Aster said. “They’re adults. They invented listening from far away.”

Saba’s gaze darted from the women to the door and back, like a bird checking for predators. “Will they tell?” she whispered.

Rahel shook her head. “They want the answer too,” she said quietly. “They’re just pretending they don’t.”

That was the adult way: to hunger without showing teeth.

The girls were too young for that particular discipline. Even when they tried, their bodies betrayed them. Their brazen energy sat under their skin like a drumbeat, half prayer, half dare—an eagerness that wasn’t disrespectful so much as untrained. They had been raised to be reverent, yes, but they were also teenagers, and their blood ran toward forbidden doors the way water ran downhill.

Saba, unable to contain herself, crept closer to the door and then stopped, as if the threshold might bite her. She leaned forward, listening for anything—footsteps, page-turning, the clearing of a throat.

Aster reached out and tugged the back of Saba’s sleeve. “Don’t press your ear to it,” she warned. “He’ll open it and catch you like a thief.”

Saba’s eyes widened, scandalized. “I’m not a thief.”

“You’re a thief of paper,” Aster said, deadpan.

Tsedey’s gaze remained fixed on the door. “He knows we’re here,” she said with certainty.

Mekdes’s jaw tightened. “If he knows, why is he letting us stand like beggars?”

“We’re not beggars,” Hanna whispered, but the word had landed uncomfortably.

Rahel shifted her weight, dust whispering under her sandal. “Maybe he’s waiting,” she said, “to see how long we can be patient.”

Aster scoffed softly. “Then we’ll fail. Spectacularly.”

Tsedey ignored her, her mind already turning like a grinding stone. “We should knock,” she decided.

Mekdes’s eyes flashed. “Absolutely not.”

“Why not?” Tsedey demanded, voice low but fierce. “We came to ask, didn’t we? Are we going to stand here until night and then slink away like mice?”

Rahel stepped in before the argument could flare. “If we knock,” she said, calm, “we do it properly. Not like children pounding for sweets. We knock like students, as Hanna said.”

Hanna’s cheeks warmed, but she didn’t look away. “Yes,” she said. “We speak respectfully. We don’t demand.”

“And we don’t mention the photo first,” Mekdes added, quick as a blade. “We greet him. We ask after his health. We—”

Tsedey made a face. “We don’t have time to grow old in front of his door.”

Aster’s mouth tilted. “We might. If you keep arguing.”

Saba looked between them, the tension pulling at her like a rope. “What if,” she offered timidly, “we sing?”

They all stared at her.

“Saba,” Aster said slowly, “why would we sing?”

Saba shrugged, anxious but earnest. “If we sing, he has to open the door to tell us to stop.”

Despite herself, Hanna gave a sudden laugh, a small burst she smothered with her hand. Mekdes looked as if she might scold, then sighed, defeated by the sheer ridiculousness. Even Rahel’s eyes softened.

Tsedey’s grin returned, bright and dangerous. “That,” she whispered, “is almost brilliant.”

Mekdes snapped, “No.”

Saba wilted. “It was only an idea.”

“It’s a bad idea,” Mekdes corrected, gentler now. “But you’re not wrong that he’ll respond to noise.”

Aster leaned close to Tsedey’s ear. “If you start singing, I’ll pretend I don’t know you,” she murmured.

Tsedey whispered back, “You already pretend you don’t know me in public.”

Their whispers braided together, half conspiratorial, half affectionate, while the adults in the background continued their “accidental” chores with exaggerated concentration. One of the older women shook out her cloth again, slower, her head tilted just enough that it was clear she was listening to every word.

Rahel inhaled, then exhaled, the way she did when she was about to put her will into a room. “Enough,” she said, quiet but decisive. “We knock. Tsedey knocks because she has the courage. Mekdes speaks first because she has the manners. I will say why we came if he asks. Hanna will—” She paused, glancing at Hanna. “Hanna will keep us from becoming stupid.”

Aster made a face. “And what do I do?”

Rahel’s gaze flicked over her. “You keep us honest,” she said, and it was the closest thing to praise she ever gave.

Aster blinked, caught off guard, then recovered with a scoff. “I already do.”

Saba’s shoulders lifted with hope. “And me?”

Rahel hesitated, then said, “You… try not to blurt anything.”

Saba nodded solemnly, as if receiving a sacred assignment.

Tsedey stepped forward, suddenly aware of the weight of the moment. The door was only wood, only a threshold, but it might as well have been a gate to a different world. She lifted her hand.

Behind her, the adult women’s ears sharpened.

The courtyard held its breath in that very specific way a village could—no one openly watching, everyone somehow aware.

Tsedey knocked, not too loud, not too soft: three firm taps, a rhythm she had heard her mother use when asking for something important.

Then she stepped back, heart hammering as if she had just thrown a stone and now waited to see what it would strike.

Inside, for a moment, nothing.

Then—the faintest sound. A shift. The whisper of cloth.

And the girls, still pretending to be “just passing,” stood straighter without meaning to, their brazen teenage energy tightening into a single point of attention—half prayer, half dare—waiting for the door to answer.

The knock fell into the house and vanished, swallowed by walls that had learned long ago to hold secrets without leaking them back out. For a few heartbeats the girls stood perfectly still, as if the air itself might break if they moved. Tsedey’s hand remained lifted for an instant longer than it should have, fingers curled, then she let it drop to her side with deliberate casualness, as if she had only brushed dust from the wood.

Nothing happened.

Aster blinked slowly, exaggeratedly, like someone waiting for bread to rise. Rahel’s gaze stayed on the door as if she could coax it open by refusing to look away. Hanna’s lips parted, then closed again. Mekdes drew a breath that sounded too much like a prayer beginning and then stopped herself. Saba took one tiny step forward before remembering the assignment Rahel had given her and freezing with all her might, her face arranged into solemn patience.

From behind them came the faint swish of cloth being shaken out. The adult women, “busy” at their chores, had gone still in their own subtle way. You could feel their listening like a second shadow.

Inside the house, there was nothing but quiet.

Not the quiet of emptiness—no house in a village was truly empty—but the quiet of someone choosing silence. The kind that had intention tucked inside it like a knife.

Tsedey’s jaw tightened. She glanced sideways at Rahel without turning her head fully, asking with her eyes, Now what?

Rahel’s eyes answered without softness: We wait.

Waiting, it turned out, was its own kind of work.

A few moments stretched. The sun shifted lower, the light changing texture, warming the mud walls until they glowed. Somewhere a chicken fussed and then quieted. A child’s voice rose and fell in the distance and was pulled away by wind. The village continued to be a village; it didn’t pause for teenage impatience.

The door remained closed.

Saba’s hands began to twitch at her sides. She caught herself and clasped them, fingers interlaced so tightly her knuckles paled. Aster noticed and, without looking at her, murmured, “Relax. You’re going to strangle your own hands.”

Saba whispered back, scandalized, “He will hear you.”

“He can hear us breathing,” Aster muttered. “He has ears like an owl.”

Mekdes shot her a glance sharp enough to be felt. “Don’t joke.”

“I’m not joking,” Aster said, and though the words were light, her eyes were serious. “Owls are quiet. So is he.”

Tsedey’s foot scraped the dust. She stopped, lips pressing together hard. She lifted her chin, as if defiance could disguise discomfort.

Hanna’s gaze flicked over the group, taking stock the way she did when she sensed a moment might turn ugly. She leaned slightly toward Tsedey, voice low. “Don’t,” she warned, not specifying what, because she didn’t need to.

Tsedey leaned back, whispering through her teeth, “He’s doing it on purpose.”

Rahel answered without moving her mouth much, a ventriloquist of discipline. “Of course he is.”

Saba’s whisper came out like steam. “Maybe he isn’t home.”

Aster almost laughed. She stopped herself at the last second and turned the laugh into a cough. “He’s home,” she whispered. “If he wasn’t home, he’d be out walking, and then we’d be chasing him through the lane like goats chasing salt.”

Mekdes stiffened. “Do not compare the rabbi to salt.”

Aster’s brows lifted. “I didn’t. I compared us to goats.”

“That is accurate,” Tsedey murmured, and it slipped out before she could catch it. She instantly looked annoyed at herself for the admission.

The silence thickened again, not empty now but charged—like the moment before lightning, when the air feels heavier and every leaf holds still.

Then Rahel, who could not bear the slow unraveling of their composure, began policing the group in the only way she knew: precision.

“Stop shifting,” she whispered, not to anyone specific but to the entire circle of bodies. “He can see shadows under the door.”

“There is no gap under the door,” Aster whispered.

“There is always a gap,” Rahel hissed.

Saba’s eyes widened. She froze harder.

Hanna’s breath came out in a short puff. “Don’t look at each other like that,” she whispered, half amused, half pleading. “We look like—like chickens before slaughter.”

Mekdes’s head snapped. “Do not say slaughter.”

“It’s a saying,” Hanna whispered back, immediately contrite. “It’s not—”

“Quiet,” Rahel murmured, and somehow the word spread over them like a cloth thrown over a pot.

Tsedey’s nostrils flared. Her shoulders were still, but her impatience radiated. Every few seconds she glanced toward the lane, as if expecting the rabbi to appear from some other direction and catch them in their little performance. Her eyes kept darting to the herbs at the wall, to the stones around the plants, to anything she could pretend to be interested in.

Aster, in defiance of the tension, bent and plucked at a blade of grass. She rolled it between her fingers. She was trying to look bored, but the way her eyes kept snapping back to the door betrayed her.

Saba whispered, “Don’t fidget,” to herself, as if she were issuing a command to her own body.

Mekdes heard and—though she was the sternest among them—her mouth softened for a moment. She leaned in and whispered, “Don’t laugh either.”

Saba swallowed. “I wasn’t going to laugh.”

Mekdes’s eyes said, You will, if you’re nervous.

Hanna heard them and whispered, “Don’t look hungry.”

Tsedey shot her a glare. “I don’t look hungry.”

“You do,” Aster whispered, not unkindly. “You look like you’re waiting for a festival tray.”

Tsedey’s teeth flashed in a silent snarl. “If you keep talking, I’ll bite you.”

Aster’s eyes widened theatrically. “See? Hungry.”

Rahel, exasperated, whispered, “Stop. All of you. Stop saying what not to do. Just—stand.”

They stood.

They stood so hard it became ridiculous.

Time slid.

The discomfort grew in layers. First it was the simple awkwardness of waiting outside an elder’s door. Then it became something sharper: the awareness of being watched by the adult women behind them, the awareness of their own bodies making a small spectacle of themselves. Then it became the kind of discomfort that feels like a test, the kind that makes a person want to escape simply to prove they can.

Tsedey’s throat worked. She wanted to knock again. She wanted to shout. She wanted to walk away in a storm of dignity, as if leaving was her choice, not his.

Rahel could read her like a book. Without looking at her, she murmured, “If you knock again, you’ll lose.”

Tsedey whispered back, furious, “Lose what?”

Rahel’s reply was immediate. “Respect.”

That landed, heavy.

Tsedey swallowed her impatience like bitter medicine.

Hanna’s gaze flicked again toward the adult women. One of them—an aunt of someone in their circle—was scrubbing a pot with slow, exaggerated strokes. She did not look over. But her ears were practically pointed at them. Hanna felt her cheeks warm with embarrassment that had nothing to do with the rabbi and everything to do with being fifteen and suddenly aware of the whole village’s attention.

Saba shifted minutely, then froze, then whispered to herself, “Don’t fidget.” Her voice trembled.

Aster’s expression sobered. She leaned slightly toward Saba. “You’re doing fine,” she whispered, so softly it barely existed.

Saba stared at her, surprised by kindness, then nodded quickly as if kindness itself might be suspicious.

The house remained quiet.

Then, from within, a sound: the faint scrape of something being moved. A stool, perhaps. Cloth rustling. Not footsteps yet. But life.

Every girl’s spine straightened at once, involuntary as a flock responding to a hawk’s shadow. Their faces rearranged themselves—innocence, respect, composure—each trying to look like the version of herself who belonged at a rabbi’s door.

They waited another long moment, and the moment felt like it was being measured.

At last the latch clicked.

The door opened slowly, not flung wide, but eased outward as if the person behind it had no need to hurry for anyone. The dim of the house spilled into the courtyard in a cool rectangle, carrying the scent of old paper and dried herbs and whatever the rabbi had been cooking.

Rabbi Abba Yishaq stepped out.

He did not look startled to find them there. He did not blink as if surprised by their little cluster. His face held the mild irritation of a man interrupted mid-thought, the expression adults wore when they wanted to remind you they had important inner lives you were not invited into. But beneath it, there was the calm of someone who had already listened to the knock, already interpreted the silence, already anticipated the outcome.

His beard was neat, his robe plain, his hands empty. He stood in the doorway as if he were the doorway itself—solid, unimpressed, quietly amused in a way he would never admit.

He let his gaze pass over them: Tsedey’s defiance masquerading as respect; Rahel’s careful stillness; Hanna’s restless brightness barely contained; Mekdes’s pious tension; Aster’s performative boredom; Saba’s wide-eyed effort not to breathe too loudly.

Then he spoke, his tone mild enough to be polite and sharp enough to sting if you weren’t careful.

“Well,” he said. “Either you are all lost, or you have decided my doorstep is the new place for afternoon prayers.”

No one answered immediately, because all their rehearsed sentences evaporated under the weight of his composure.

Tsedey’s mouth opened. She shut it again. Her cheeks burned.

Mekdes recovered first, because manners were her armor. She stepped forward a fraction and dipped her head. “Rabbi,” she began, voice steady, “may your evening be peaceful.”

Rabbi Abba Yishaq’s eyes flickered—approval, not praise.

“And may yours,” he replied, as if he were giving her exactly what she’d asked for and nothing more.

Aster, unable to resist, whispered out of the corner of her mouth, “See? He’s an owl.”

Mekdes shot her a look that could have peeled paint.

The rabbi’s gaze shifted, landing on Aster as if he’d heard the whisper anyway. His eyebrows lifted a fraction.

Aster’s face went blank with innocence so quickly it was almost impressive.

Rabbi Abba Yishaq sighed, the sound quiet but theatrical enough to communicate that he had been a teenager once and had survived it.

“Now,” he said, folding his hands behind his back, “tell me what you want—before the sun sets and you begin to claim you were only passing by for three hours.”

They had expected, in the secret chambers of their imagination, a rebuke sharp enough to cut. They had expected him to tell them to go home, to wash their hands, to stop chasing the world like a loose chicken. They had expected the familiar adult reflex—children should not want so much—delivered with the weight of authority.

Instead, Rabbi Abba Yishaq looked at them as if he were looking at seedlings that had chosen to grow in a crack of stone. Not angry. Not indulgent. Simply… attentive.

He stepped fully out onto the threshold, letting the door rest ajar behind him. The shadow inside his home made a dark frame around his shoulders. In the late light his face was calm, his eyes alert, the faint irritation still present but softened now into something closer to curiosity.

Mekdes had offered her polite greeting; the rabbi had returned it and then waited, the silence inviting someone else to speak. No one moved. They could feel the adult women behind them—pots, jars, cloths—holding their breath in unison.

Rabbi Abba Yishaq did not fill the silence for them. He simply tilted his head, the way a teacher does when a student has raised a hand and then forgotten what they meant to ask.

At last Tsedey, unable to stand inside her own restraint any longer, took a half-step forward. Her heart hammered so hard she felt it in her throat. She swallowed and spoke, and the words came out too quickly, tripping over themselves.

“We heard—Rabbi, we heard you have the paper,” she blurted, and then, because her mouth was already running downhill, “with the picture, and—she’s president, and she’s Jewish, and we just—” She made a helpless gesture, as if her hands could shape longing into sense. “We want to see her. We want to know what she looks like.”

Aster, who had spent the last two minutes pretending she didn’t care, immediately tried to rescue Tsedey from her own enthusiasm.

“She means,” Aster said, sliding in with a crooked grin, “we want to make sure presidents don’t have two heads. We’ve never met one.”

A ripple of suppressed sound moved through the circle—not laughter exactly, but the instinct toward it. Saba’s mouth twitched; Hanna pressed her lips together hard. Mekdes looked as if she might actually bite Aster.

Rabbi Abba Yishaq lifted a hand.

It wasn’t an angry gesture. He didn’t snap his fingers. He didn’t glare. The hand rose, palm angled slightly outward, a simple, final motion that made the air go still. The way a priest might stop a congregation from answering too loudly. The way a father might halt a child from running into a road.

The half-laughter died before it could be born.

Aster’s grin froze, then softened into something more respectful, as if she were suddenly aware of how thin the line was between wit and disrespect.

The rabbi looked at Tsedey again, not unkindly. He spoke in the same calm tone, almost gentle, as if they were already seated in a lesson rather than standing like culprits at his door.

“Why her?” he asked.

The simplicity of the question struck them harder than any scolding would have.

Not why the paper, not why now, not why are you bothering me. Just: why her.

Why this woman whose face they had never seen, whose voice they had never heard, whose country was only a word pressed into a foreign alphabet. Why did a photograph of her matter enough to pull them from their chores and bring them to a rabbi’s threshold like petitioners?

Tsedey blinked, caught. She had rehearsed a speech about fairness, about curiosity, about the right to see what the elders had seen. She had not rehearsed this. Her mind grabbed for something and came up with messy truth.

“Because—” she started, then rushed, “because she’s famous, and because she’s a woman, and because they say she’s Jewish and I want to see if it’s real—if she looks real—if she looks like… like—” She stumbled, suddenly aware of how dangerous it sounded to say like us, and how foolish it sounded to think she should.

Aster tried again, quieter this time. “Because it’s exciting,” she offered, as if excitement were a respectable reason if said calmly.

Mekdes inhaled sharply, scandalized. Rahel’s eyes narrowed, warning Aster without words: Not that either.

Rabbi Abba Yishaq waited. He did not interrupt. He let Tsedey’s eager, tangled answer finish itself and fall into the dust between them.

Then he spoke, and his voice remained steady—neither harsh nor indulgent.

“Not that,” he said.

Two words. Soft, but absolute.

Tsedey’s cheeks flamed. She clenched her fists at her sides, angry at herself, angry at the way her own mouth had betrayed her with hunger.

The rabbi’s gaze moved over the group again, slow and measured. He wasn’t punishing them. He was giving them another chance. That was, in its own way, more demanding than punishment.

He lifted his hand once more, not as a stop this time, but as a small invitation, palm turning slightly upward.

“Try again,” he said.

The circle tightened without anyone stepping. You could feel the girls draw inward, a flock huddling against wind. They looked at one another—quick glances, urgent, searching—because now they understood the question wasn’t about getting what they wanted. It was about whether they deserved to want it at all.

The air between them held Tsedey’s embarrassment like heat trapped under a pot lid. She stared at the dust by the rabbi’s sandal as if it had offended her personally, then lifted her eyes again with that stubborn, bright defiance that always made adults either sigh or smile. Aster’s face had gone carefully blank, her humor retreating into the corner like a dog told to lie down. Rahel’s mouth tightened, already rearranging their scattered impulses into something that might pass for sense. Hanna’s gaze kept flicking between the rabbi’s expression and the door behind him, as if the photograph might somehow be listening from inside. Saba stood very still, as if she were trying to become invisible by force of will.

Only Mekdes looked as though she had swallowed a stone.

Rabbi Abba Yishaq didn’t step aside. He didn’t move to block them either. He stayed in the threshold, neither gate nor invitation, and the calmness of it made the moment heavier than any scolding. His eyes rested on them the way a hand rests on a book before opening it—measured, unhurried, aware of weight.

“You want to see,” he said at last, not as accusation, simply repeating the shape of their desire so they could hear it properly. His voice softened slightly, but only slightly, as if he were giving them something to hold onto. “Tell me: what is an image?”

It was not the question they expected, and it struck them oddly, like being asked what water was while you were thirsty.

Tsedey blinked, thrown. “It’s—” she began, then faltered, because the obvious answer suddenly felt too thin. “It’s a picture.”

“A picture,” the rabbi repeated, as if tasting the word. “And what is it for?”

No one spoke immediately. The adult women behind them—pots and jars and cloths—made small, purposeful sounds again, pretending the conversation was none of their business. The girls could feel those ears, those careful, adult ears, gathering every syllable. It made Tsedey want to answer fast just to prove she could. It made Rahel want to answer correctly. It made Hanna want to answer honestly. It made Mekdes want to answer in a way that would keep the world from tilting.

Aster, unable to resist filling silence, tried the first thing that came to mind. “It’s for showing,” she said, then added quickly, “So people stop arguing about what something looks like.”

Rabbi Abba Yishaq’s gaze slid to her without sharpness. “So,” he said, “it settles arguments.”

Aster’s shoulders lifted in a small shrug. “Sometimes.”

“And other times?” the rabbi asked, mild.

Aster’s mouth opened, closed. She looked annoyed at herself for starting a line she couldn’t finish. “Other times it starts them,” she admitted, grudging.

The rabbi nodded as if that mattered. He turned his eyes back to the whole group. “What else?”

Rahel spoke cautiously, as if stepping onto a stone she wasn’t sure would hold. “Memory,” she said. “So something doesn’t disappear.”

“Memory,” the rabbi echoed. “Yes.” His voice didn’t praise her, but it didn’t dismiss her either. It simply placed the word on the ground between them like a tool. “What kind of memory?”

Rahel hesitated. Her eyes flicked briefly to the adult women, then to her friends, then back to the rabbi. “A memory for those who weren’t there,” she said. “So they can believe an event happened.”

“Believe,” Rabbi Abba Yishaq repeated, and the word sharpened. “So it is proof.”

Saba’s eyes widened. Proof was a powerful concept in a world where so much was carried by telling. She whispered, without meaning to, “Proof,” as if the word itself might keep the photograph from vanishing into rumor.

Hanna leaned forward, forgetting for a moment to be cautious. “Teaching,” she blurted. Her cheeks warmed as she realized she’d spoken out of turn. She tried to recover by making her voice quieter, steadier. “Like when we learn from books. When we see a drawing of a place we’ve never been. It makes the idea… less like smoke.”

Rabbi Abba Yishaq looked at her for a long moment, and Hanna fought the urge to look away. She held his gaze the way she held a pot steady over a fire—careful, tense, determined not to spill.

“Teaching,” the rabbi said, and now the word softened the air again. “Yes.”

He let that sit, and the girls felt a strange shift inside themselves, subtle as a hand turning a bowl. He wasn’t asking to trap them. He was asking them to take their own desire apart and look at its pieces.

“And what else?” he asked, as if there were more in the pile.

Mekdes’s throat tightened. She knew what else. She could hear it under his questions like the low, constant note of a drum: Be careful. Her fingers curled into the edge of her shawl, gripping cloth hard enough to keep her anchored.

Aster, perhaps trying to show she could be serious, said, “Comfort,” and then, realizing how that sounded, hurried on. “If someone is gone. If you miss them. You keep their face.”

The rabbi inclined his head. “Comfort,” he allowed. “Yes.”

Tsedey’s impatience, finding no obvious place to go, transformed into something fiercer: a need to prove that her wanting wasn’t childish. “It’s also for celebration,” she said quickly, forcing steadiness into her voice. “When something good happens. When you want to… mark it.”

“Mark it,” the rabbi repeated, as if the word pleased him more than she expected. He held it up in the air with the gentlest touch, like a thread, and then he tugged.

“And what happens,” he asked, “when you mark a person?”

The question came so calmly it took a second to feel its bite.

Tsedey’s mouth went dry. Aster’s brows knit. Rahel’s eyes lowered, thinking hard. Hanna’s breath hitched. Saba looked frightened, as if she had suddenly glimpsed a cliff edge.

Mekdes flinched. It was small—only a tightening of her shoulders, a quick flicker across her face—but it was unmistakable. She heard the warning underneath his mild tone as clearly as if he had spoken it aloud: Don’t turn a person into an idol. Don’t carry a face like a charm. Don’t let awe turn into worship.

Her lips parted, and for an instant it looked like she might speak without being asked. Then she stopped, swallowing the words back, because she could sense he wanted them to arrive at the danger themselves.

Rabbi Abba Yishaq continued as if he were still building a list, still simply curious. “Memory,” he said, counting on invisible fingers. “Teaching. Proof. Comfort. Celebration.” His gaze moved from girl to girl, not searching for the right answer so much as watching who would be brave enough to name the wrong one. “And?”

The silence that followed was different from the earlier silence. Earlier it had been awkward, the silence of waiting. Now it was weighted, the silence of being handed responsibility.

Aster, surprisingly, was the one who spoke. Her voice had lost its playfulness; it came out low and direct. “Temptation,” she said.

Tsedey turned her head sharply, a quick look that meant why would you say that? Saba stared as if the word might bite. Hanna’s eyes widened with reluctant agreement. Rahel’s lips pressed together, because she knew it was true and hated that it was true.

The rabbi’s eyebrows lifted a fraction, not in shock, but in recognition. “Temptation,” he repeated, and the word landed cleanly. “Temptation to what?”

Aster’s jaw tightened. She glanced down at her hands, suddenly aware of how unprepared she was to say difficult things in front of elders. Then she forced herself to look up again. “To make it into a… thing,” she said, searching. “To carry it around. To show it. To… brag.”

“To use it,” Rahel added quietly, picking up the thread. “To say, ‘Look what I have seen,’ instead of asking, ‘What does it mean?’”

The rabbi nodded once, slow. “Yes.” His voice was still gentle, but the gentleness was the kind that demanded more from you, not less. “And?”

Mekdes finally spoke, because she could not bear for the danger to remain unnamed. Her voice trembled only slightly, the tremble of someone walking a narrow ridge. “To worship,” she said.

The word came out and made the courtyard feel colder.

One of the adult women behind them let a pot lid clink too loudly, as if her hands had betrayed her attention. She covered the mistake with a cough. The other women continued their chores with even more determination, as if scrubbing could erase the fact that they were listening.

Rabbi Abba Yishaq did not look shocked that Mekdes had said it. He did not reprimand her for bluntness. He only held her gaze a moment longer than he’d held the others, as if acknowledging her courage in naming the thing everyone feared.

“To worship,” he repeated softly. “To take what is meant for memory and turn it into a shrine. To take what is meant for teaching and make it into a spell.”

Mekdes’s fingers tightened on her shawl until the cloth creased. She wanted to insist she would never—they would never—yet she knew that was not the point. The point was not their intentions in the moment. The point was what a hungry human heart could do with an image if it wanted to.

Tsedey swallowed hard, and her defiance rearranged itself into seriousness, not because she was scared of punishment, but because she suddenly saw what the rabbi was doing. He wasn’t withholding to be cruel. He was measuring whether they could hold something powerful without dropping it, without clutching it too tight, without turning it into a toy.

Hanna’s voice came quieter now, as if she were speaking inside a synagogue even though they stood in open air. “We don’t want to worship her,” she said, and it wasn’t a plea so much as a statement of fact that felt fragile. “We don’t even know her.”

“That,” Rabbi Abba Yishaq said, gently, “is exactly why I ask.”

Rahel’s eyes lifted. “Because it’s easier to make a story of someone you’ve never met,” she murmured, understanding blooming in her face like dawn.

“Because distance invites imagination,” the rabbi agreed.

Aster shifted, the dirt whispering under her sandal. “So what do we do?” she asked, and for once the question held no challenge, only a cautious sincerity. “If an image can be all those things—memory and proof and also temptation—how do you… hold it?”

Rabbi Abba Yishaq’s expression softened almost imperceptibly. The irritation that had greeted them at the door was gone now, replaced by something steadier. “You decide what you are,” he said, “before you take it into your hands. That is how you hold anything that can burn.”

The girls fell silent again, but now their silence was not awkward. It was a quiet that made room for thought.

In that pause, the late-afternoon light seemed to change. The courtyard, the house, the herbs by the wall, even the adult women with their “accidental” chores—everything felt less like a stage for teenage boldness and more like a small courtroom where their own intentions were being weighed.

They had come hungry and half-laughing, buoyed by the thrill of a secret. Now, standing in the shadow of the rabbi’s doorway, they could feel trust hovering near them like a bird that would only land if they stopped lunging.

Suddenly this wasn’t about gossip, or novelty, or even the thrilling strangeness of a faraway president.

It was about whether they could be trusted with awe.

For a moment no one moved. The rabbi’s words—decide what you are before you take it into your hands—sat in the air as if they were made of smoke you could still taste. The girls stood there in a line that wasn’t quite a line, each of them suddenly aware of her own breathing, her own face, the way her desire had brought her to this doorstep and now had to justify itself like a traveler at a border.

Rabbi Abba Yishaq did not rush them. He did not offer them another question, did not soften the task by pointing them toward an answer. He simply looked at them with that calm, expectant patience that meant the lesson was theirs to make, or to fail.

Behind them, one of the adult women scrubbed at a pot so hard the sound became almost comical. Another adjusted her scarf, as if it had suddenly become urgent to perfect the fold. The village pretended not to watch, but the girls could feel the attention pressing from all sides.

Rahel inhaled, the smallest signal, and then—without speaking—tilted her head toward the side of the courtyard where the herb patch met the wall. It wasn’t a grand gesture, just a subtle pull, the way water finds a lower place. The others understood and drifted with her, pretending, for a heartbeat, that they were only stepping aside to let someone pass.

They didn’t separate far. They couldn’t. Their shared nerves clung together like wet cloth. They bunched into a tight huddle, shoulders touching, skirts brushing, their heads leaning inward until their braids and shawls made a small roof of privacy over their whispering.

“What do we say?” Tsedey hissed, and her voice, usually so confident, cracked at the edges with urgency.

Rahel held up one finger. Not a scold—an organizing signal. “We answer what he asked,” she whispered. “Not what we want to hear ourselves saying.”

Aster muttered, “That sounds like the same thing.”

“It’s not,” Mekdes whispered sharply, eyes darting toward the rabbi as if he might hear thought itself.

Hanna leaned in, her eyes bright with something that was half fear and half exhilaration. “We have to show him we understand the danger,” she said. “The worship danger.”

Saba nodded so hard it looked like her neck might give up. “The worship danger,” she repeated, like someone writing it down in her mind.

Tsedey’s teeth clicked together. “Fine. We’re not worshipping. We already said that.”

“And he said it wasn’t enough,” Rahel replied, quick as a stitch. “We have to tell him why it isn’t worship. We have to… place it.”

“Place it where?” Aster whispered.

“In the right box,” Rahel said, impatient. “In the right… meaning.”

Mekdes’s fingers were still fisted in her shawl. “If we mention beauty,” she whispered, “we will sound foolish.”

“We did mention beauty,” Saba whispered in alarm. “I said she was like wax.”

Aster’s mouth twitched. “That was—”

Rahel cut her off with a glance. “Not now.”

Saba pressed her palms to her cheeks as if to hold her face in place. “I won’t say wax,” she promised quickly. “I won’t say milk. I won’t say candle. I won’t say—”

“Stop listing,” Mekdes whispered, and despite herself she sounded almost fond, like a scolding older sister.

Hanna’s gaze flicked from one face to the next. “We’re not only defending ourselves,” she said, quieter now. “We’re defending… our faith. If we sound like we just want a poster on the wall, he’ll—he’ll think we’re shallow.”

Aster’s brows lifted. “We are shallow. We’re fifteen.”

Tsedey elbowed her lightly. “Shut up.”

Aster rubbed her side, affronted. “I’m helping.”

Rahel ignored the bickering, because she always had to, or nothing would ever get done. “We need two parts,” she whispered, counting on her fingers. “One: we explain why we want to see. Two: we explain how we will hold it without turning it into—into a thing.”

“A charm,” Mekdes whispered, echoing the rabbi’s language.

“A shrine,” Hanna added, eyes widening as she spoke the word like it was hot.

“A trophy,” Aster said, surprisingly serious now.

“A spell,” Saba whispered, and then looked startled, as if she hadn’t meant to say it but the word had found her anyway.

Rahel nodded, satisfied. “Yes. Those.” She leaned closer, voice low and precise. “We say: we want to witness, but we don’t want to reduce holiness to ink.”

Tsedey made a face. “That sounds like something an elder would say.”

“That’s good,” Rahel hissed back. “We are trying to sound like people who can be trusted.”

Tsedey bristled, then swallowed it. Her hunger was still there, burning, but now it was accompanied by something else—an awareness that if she didn’t learn to carry it properly, it would shame her.

Hanna, who had been quiet, suddenly leaned forward as if a thought had kicked open a door in her mind. “We should use a story,” she whispered.

Rahel’s eyes narrowed. “Which story?”

Hanna’s voice came fast, fervent. “A story where someone is close to power and doesn’t let it make them forget who they are. Someone who could have stayed comfortable and didn’t.”

Aster’s gaze sharpened. “Moses.”

Mekdes inhaled as if the name itself had weight. “Yes,” she whispered. “That’s… safe. That’s ours.”

Tsedey’s eyes flicked toward the rabbi, then back. “But Moses is a man,” she whispered. “He asked why her.”

Hanna’s expression didn’t falter. “Moses isn’t the point,” she said. “The point is refusing the easy life. The point is choosing covenant when power offers you comfort.”

Rahel’s face lit with understanding, the way it always did when the right structure clicked into place. “We connect it,” she whispered. “We say: Moses could have remained in the palace. He didn’t. He chose the people. He chose the command.”

“And she,” Saba breathed, practicing immediately, “she could have—could have hidden.”

Aster glanced at Saba. “Hidden what?”

Saba’s eyes went wide, and she whispered with the earnestness of someone reciting scripture, “Hidden that she is Jewish.”

Mekdes nodded sharply. “Yes. That. She could have made herself small, made her faith private.”

Tsedey’s mouth tightened in agreement. “And she didn’t.”

Rahel’s fingers fluttered, organizing again. “We say it like this,” she whispered. “We say: we’re not seeking an idol. We’re seeking a witness. We want to see a sister who did not fold herself away.”

Aster grimaced. “Sister sounds like we’re… praying to her.”

“It doesn’t,” Hanna whispered, quick. “It’s kinship. It’s covenant.”

Mekdes’s eyes flashed. “It’s true,” she said. “We call strangers ‘brother’ in prayer. It is not worship. It is belonging.”

Tsedey leaned in, voice urgent. “But he’ll ask why seeing matters. We can’t just say ‘because she exists.’”

Rahel nodded. “We say: because hearing is one thing, and seeing is another. Seeing makes the story less like smoke.”

Hanna’s cheeks flushed; her own earlier words came back to her. “Yes,” she whispered, almost surprised at herself.

Saba repeated, softer, “Less like smoke,” as if tasting the phrase to see if it fit.

Aster’s mouth tilted. “Saba, stop rehearsing.”

“I’m practicing,” Saba whispered back indignantly. “For a speech I’m not allowed to give.”

That made Hanna’s shoulders shake with a silent laugh. Even Mekdes’s mouth twitched before she caught it.

Tsedey pressed her palm against her own thigh, grounding herself. “Okay,” she whispered, forced calm. “We say Moses. We say power. We say fidelity. We say—” she searched, almost angry at herself for needing words, “—we say celebration, not worship.”

Rahel nodded, approving the list. “And we mention Hebrew,” she added quickly. “They say she speaks it. That matters. It means she’s not only… Jewish in name.”

Mekdes’s eyes softened with something like pride. “Unapologetic,” she murmured, and the word sounded strange in her mouth but right.

Aster raised a brow. “Do we know that for sure?”

Rahel shot her a look. “We know what the rumor says. We say ‘they say.’ We’re not lying.”

Aster nodded, conceding. “Fine.”

Hanna leaned in again, and when she spoke her voice was quieter, steadier, surprising even herself. “We should say,” she whispered, “that our hunger is not for her face as decoration. Our hunger is for what it means. For proof that we are not only… on the edge.”

The words landed like a stone dropped into water. For an instant all of them felt it—the ache under their curiosity, the longing to be seen by the wider world, the loneliness of being scattered not just in scripture but in geography, in circumstance, in history.

Rahel’s throat bobbed. She nodded once, slow. “Yes,” she whispered. “But we don’t say it like begging.”

Tsedey’s chin lifted. “We don’t beg.”

Mekdes whispered, fierce now, “We don’t reduce our faith to paper.”

Saba whispered, solemn, “Not a poster on the wall.”

Aster snorted quietly. “If my mother hangs a poster of the president in our house, I’ll pretend I’ve never met any of you.”

Hanna gave her a look. “Aster.”

Aster raised both hands in surrender, but her eyes were warm. “Fine. No posters.”

Rahel took another breath, then spoke like someone tying knots. “We answer together,” she whispered. “Not all at once. We choose who says what.”

Tsedey opened her mouth, ready to volunteer herself for everything, but Rahel’s look stopped her.

“Mekdes,” Rahel whispered, “you start. You say it is not worship. You say the covenant is not written in skin.”

Mekdes blinked. “I didn’t say that.”

“You did,” Aster whispered, grinning faintly. “You just didn’t know you said it.”

Mekdes scowled, but there was a flicker of pride too, unwilling and real.

“Then,” Rahel continued, “I speak. I bring Moses. I say why power matters. Hanna—” She glanced at Hanna. “You say the line about smoke. And you say sister. Because you can say it without making it sound foolish.”

Hanna swallowed, startled to be assigned something so central. “Me?”

“You,” Rahel confirmed.

“And me?” Saba whispered, desperate.

Rahel hesitated, then softened. “You… you can say Hebrew,” she decided. “You can say she speaks it. That she keeps it.”

Saba’s eyes shone, as if she’d been handed a treasure.

Aster made a face. “And I’m what, the goat?”

Rahel’s gaze slid to her. “You—” she began, then allowed the smallest hint of humor into her voice, “you keep us from turning it into poetry. You say it plain if it starts to float away.”

Aster looked mildly offended, then nodded anyway. “I can do plain.”

Tsedey’s shoulders tightened. “And I—?”

Rahel met her eyes. “You,” she whispered, “hold your hunger without letting it talk first. That is the bravest job.”

Tsedey stared at her, caught between irritation and something like respect. Then she gave a small, sharp nod, as if accepting a dare.

They stayed huddled another heartbeat, shoulders pressed, whispering last adjustments—little repetitions, little corrections.

“Don’t mention wax,” Mekdes murmured.

“I won’t,” Saba promised, then added, “Maybe.”

Aster’s mouth twitched. “No ‘maybe.’”

Hanna exhaled slowly, gathering courage. “We’re ready,” she whispered, though her voice trembled.

Rahel lifted her head first. She straightened, and the others straightened with her, as if her spine had pulled theirs upward on a string.

They turned back toward the rabbi.

From the doorway, Rabbi Abba Yishaq watched them with the same calm attention he’d given the paper, as if he had been waiting not for an answer, but for the moment their strategy became something deeper—when their teenage boldness and their reverence finally found the same language.

They approached as a group, but now they moved differently: not like a gaggle pressing for a secret, but like students stepping forward to recite, to explain, to be judged.

Their hunger was still there, bright and real.

So was their resolve: not to let that hunger make them careless with what they loved.

They came out of their huddle as if they’d stepped from one world into another. Their shoulders unpressed, their whispers packed away, their faces rearranged into the kind of seriousness adults respected. Even Saba managed to stop vibrating with anticipation. Aster’s hands hung still at her sides. Hanna’s eyes were bright but fixed. Mekdes’s jaw had set into that calm, devotional stubbornness she wore like armor. And Tsedey—Tsedey looked almost fierce enough to frighten her own hunger into behaving.

Rabbi Abba Yishaq hadn’t moved. He remained in the doorway, the house’s dimness behind him, the courtyard’s warmth in front. His hands were folded loosely at his back, his posture neither welcoming nor forbidding, simply… present. His face held a mild patience that felt like a challenge.

Rahel stepped forward. She didn’t step close enough to be presumptuous, and she didn’t hang back either. She found the exact distance that suggested respect without cowardice. Her chin lifted; her shoulders settled. When she spoke, her voice was steady in the way a person’s voice becomes steady when she has decided to be brave.

“Rabbi,” she began, and dipped her head. “We have thought.”

The rabbi’s gaze rested on her without change. “I see,” he said. It was neither praise nor mockery, simply an acknowledgment that time had passed and something had been done with it.

Rahel drew a breath. Behind her, the others held theirs.

“We want to see the photograph,” she said, and didn’t flinch as she named it, “not because we want a charm or a shrine. Not because we want to carry her face like a talisman. We want to see it because—because it matters that someone who shares our covenant has risen to such a place without hiding what she is.”

The words came out clean, built like a small wall. Rahel’s gaze stayed on the rabbi’s eyes, not sliding away, not pleading. “We are not asking to worship her,” she continued, more quietly. “We are asking to celebrate. To mark it properly inside ourselves. We hear many stories of Jews far away, but this—this is a witness. It makes the world less… vague.”

From behind them came the faintest scrape of a pot being set down too carefully. The adult women were still pretending not to listen, but even their pretending had grown tense, as if they were holding their own hunger in check.

Rabbi Abba Yishaq’s expression didn’t shift. His eyes narrowed slightly, thoughtful rather than disapproving. “Go on,” he said.

Rahel nodded once, as if accepting the invitation and not being swallowed by it. “If we see her face,” she added, choosing each word like a stone placed in a path, “we will remember that the covenant is not only in books, not only in our walls. It reaches farther than our hills. It can stand in places we cannot even imagine.”

She stopped. She did not ramble. She did not decorate the meaning. She let the sentence land, then stepped half a pace back, making space as planned.

Tsedey stepped forward at once, as if her body had been wound tight and Rahel’s pause released the spring. Her eyes were bright, her chin set. When she spoke, her voice had a fierce heat in it—less polished than Rahel’s, but stronger in its raw conviction.

“And Moses,” Tsedey said, the name ringing with certainty, “Moses could have stayed. He could have remained in Pharaoh’s house and eaten the best food and worn fine cloth and never worried about being hungry or chased. He could have had comfort and power and—” She swallowed, her own words catching on her own emotion. “—and he didn’t. He chose obedience. He chose our people. He chose to belong, even when belonging was dangerous.”

Her hands clenched and unclenched at her sides. She was no longer performing; she was telling the truth as she understood it, and her truth had teeth.

“If a woman far away has power now,” Tsedey went on, her voice rising slightly before she forced it down again, “and she still stands as a Jew, if she doesn’t fold her faith away like it’s shameful, then that is not just politics. That is the same kind of refusal. The same kind of—” She searched, then found it with a fierce satisfaction. “Fidelity.”

Aster’s eyes flicked sideways, surprised, as if she hadn’t expected Tsedey to find a word like that. Hanna’s mouth softened. Saba stared at Tsedey with something like admiration. Even Mekdes’s expression eased, the piety in her face approving of the shape Tsedey had given their argument.

Rabbi Abba Yishaq watched Tsedey without interrupting, without softening her edges. When she finished, he did not respond right away. He let the heat of her conviction cool slightly in the air.

Then Mekdes stepped forward.

She didn’t move quickly. She didn’t move like a spark. She moved like a person approaching a prayer—deliberate, careful, aware of weight. When she spoke, her voice was quieter than the others’, but it carried in a different way, as if her words were anchored deep and didn’t need volume to stand.

“Rabbi,” she said, and her tone held a kind of earnest respect that made it feel wrong to interrupt. “An image will not replace prayer.”

Her eyes held his, unwavering. “We know the danger,” she continued, and her fingers tightened once, briefly, at the edge of her shawl. “We know that a face can become a temptation. That people can turn paper into a charm and call it faith. We don’t want that. We don’t want to hang her on a wall like a decoration and think it means something by itself.”

She drew a breath, and the breath sounded like a vow.

“If we see the photograph,” Mekdes said, “it will sharpen our prayers, not dull them. It will remind us that the faith we keep here—by habit, by hunger, by discipline—can also stand upright in the center of the world. That covenant can be carried into rooms we will never enter. That being Jewish can be spoken out loud in places where power is gathered.”

Her voice trembled slightly now, not from fear but from the intensity of what she was allowing herself to imagine. “It will be proof,” she finished, choosing the word deliberately, “that faith does not only survive in hidden corners. It can stand in full light.”

For a moment no one spoke. Not the girls. Not the adult women behind them. Even the courtyard seemed to pause, the wind caught in the leaves as if listening too.

Rabbi Abba Yishaq held their faces in his gaze—Rahel’s steadiness, Tsedey’s fierce refusal, Mekdes’s disciplined sincerity—and something in his expression shifted, very subtly. Not a smile. Not praise. But the smallest easing around the eyes, the look of a man who had been given a reason that could bear weight.

He nodded once, slow and measured, as if setting a seal on their words.

“And you,” he said, his gaze moving briefly to the others—the watchers, the silent ones, the girls who had not spoken but had chosen to stand behind the speakers and be part of the same argument—“will hold it that way?”

Aster opened her mouth, ready to say something sharp, then closed it. Hanna’s lips parted, then she caught herself. Saba clutched her own hands tighter, desperate not to blurt.

Rahel answered, calm and sure. “We will try,” she said. “And we will be corrected if we fail.”

The rabbi’s head dipped a fraction, as if that was the only honest promise anyone could make.

“Good,” he said quietly. Then, with no ceremony at all, as if he were simply inviting them to sit for a lesson, he shifted his weight and stepped back a pace into the doorway.

“Come,” Rabbi Abba Yishaq said. “Inside.”

Rabbi Abba Yishaq did not soften into the kind of adult they were secretly hoping for—the kind who would clap them on the shoulder, call them clever girls, let warmth spill out in approving noise. He stayed where he was, half in shadow, half in sun, as if he belonged to both and needed neither. The doorway framed him like a line drawn on the world: this side, the courtyard; that side, the quiet of his home.

For a long moment he said nothing at all.

The silence was not empty now. It was full of what they had just offered him—Rahel’s careful steadiness, Tsedey’s fierce insistence, Mekdes’s sober vow. It was full of the risk he had named without naming: the risk of turning awe into foolishness, of turning a face into a charm. It was full of the village’s listening, because behind the girls the adult women had gone so still that even their “accidental” chores had become a performance of restraint. A pot sat in someone’s hands without being scrubbed. A jar was held without being lifted. A cloth hung mid-fold, forgotten.

The rabbi’s eyes moved over the girls slowly, one by one, and the feeling of it was strange—like being measured for a garment you didn’t know you were meant to wear.

He looked first at Rahel, and his gaze lingered, assessing not her words but the discipline behind them. Rahel held her posture steady, chin level, hands quiet at her sides, as if she had decided her body would not betray her excitement. But the rabbi could still see it in the smallest places: the tightness at the corners of her mouth, the careful way she swallowed, the faint rise and fall of her breath as she kept it controlled.

He shifted his gaze to Tsedey. Her eyes were bright as coals; her whole stance dared the world to argue with her. She had the look of someone who could turn joy into shouting without meaning to, who could make celebration so loud it became indistinguishable from hunger. Under his gaze, Tsedey’s shoulders tightened, and then—deliberately—she let them drop a fraction, as if she were forcing herself to remember the lesson: carry it without spilling.

Then Mekdes. The rabbi’s expression did not change, but there was a slight narrowing, a focus that made Mekdes feel exposed. She was always the one who feared carelessness most, the one who felt holiness like a fragile bowl. She met his eyes and did not flinch, though her fingers curled once at the edge of her shawl, gathering cloth like a reminder.

Hanna, restless as wind, tried to stand like stone. Under the rabbi’s gaze her eagerness flickered in her eyes despite everything. She looked like someone who wanted to step forward into a wider world and was trying not to reveal it. She pressed her lips together, then softened them again, making herself breathe like a person who belonged in the presence of elders.

Aster watched the rabbi watch her, and for once her expression wasn’t set in a shield of wit. Her mouth was closed. Her eyes were open, direct. It cost her something not to turn the moment into a joke, and the rabbi seemed to register that cost without acknowledging it.

Saba stood very still, nearly holding her breath, as if stillness could earn her a place at the grown table. Her gaze kept flicking, like a bird’s, and then snapping back to the rabbi’s face. She looked like she wanted to speak and was terrified of herself.

The rabbi did not praise any of this. He did not smile at their effort or soften the lesson with affection. He simply kept looking, and in that looking there was something both stern and strangely protective—an insistence that joy could be holy only if it was held with care.

Behind them, one of the adult women made a small sound, almost involuntary—a throat clearing, a breath caught and released—then immediately began scrubbing a pot again as if she had never stopped. The other women pretended harder, their bodies angled away, their ears tilted.

Rabbi Abba Yishaq’s gaze returned to the center of the group, and the girls felt, all at once, how young they were and how much they wanted to be taken seriously.

He let the silence stretch just long enough that Tsedey’s impatience stirred and then was swallowed. Just long enough that Saba’s knees threatened to tremble and she willed them still. Just long enough that Rahel’s careful control began to feel like a weight.

Then, finally, the rabbi moved—not forward, not backward, but inward, as if shifting a thought into place.

He gave the smallest nod.

It was not the nod of a man impressed. It was not the nod of a man amused. It was the nod of someone who had been given something he could accept without shame: a reason that did not cheapen what it reached for. That nod, so restrained, felt heavier than praise would have. It landed in the girls’ chests like a stone placed there deliberately—steady, undeniable.

Tsedey’s throat tightened. Hanna’s eyes stung unexpectedly. Mekdes’s shoulders eased by a hair, as if she had been holding herself braced against rebuke and the ground had shifted to something firmer. Aster felt, to her own irritation, a flicker of pride. Saba clutched her hands together so she wouldn’t do something foolish like clap.

Rabbi Abba Yishaq’s voice, when he spoke, was ordinary—almost maddeningly so. The tone belonged to lessons and chores and the daily ordering of things, not to secrets and miracles.

“Come inside,” he said.

He said it the way a teacher might invite students into a room for study, not the way a man might unveil contraband. There was no drama in it. No flourish. Only a calm opening, as if what waited beyond the doorway was not a treasure to be snatched, but a responsibility to be carried.

The rabbi stepped back into the doorway and held it for them without ceremony, and the girls filed forward as if pulled by a single invisible thread. The moment their bodies crossed the line between courtyard sun and the cooler rectangle of his home, the whole world seemed to dampen.

Outside, there had been wind and distance and the faint, constant hum of village life. Inside, sound fell softer, as if it landed on cloth instead of stone. The air had its own texture. It smelled of old paper—dry and slightly sweet, the way forgotten pages held on to time. There was oil too, faint but steady, the practical scent of lamps and rubbed wood. Under it lingered woodsmoke, not sharp like a fresh fire, but settled deep into walls that had been warmed by many evenings. The house felt lived in, but in a way that didn’t beg for attention; it was the life of a man who made his days out of repetition and thought.

Books occupied the space like quiet elders. They were stacked and shelved where they could fit, wrapped in cloth in places, their spines softened by use, their pages faintly warped by seasons and hands. Even if the girls couldn’t read every mark inside them, they understood what books meant here: memory made physical. Words that could outlast the bodies that carried them. The hush of them pressed gently against the girls’ skin.

They stopped being brazen the instant the doorframe swallowed them.

It happened almost comically, like a flock of birds dropping sound all at once. Tsedey, who had been all sharp edges and daring outside, suddenly became painfully aware of the dust on her skirt hem, the dried mud on her sandals, the faint smell of sweat that no amount of pride could disguise. Aster’s shoulders, which had held themselves like she was unimpressed, drew in a fraction, as if the room might take offense at her posture. Rahel’s careful calm deepened into something like reverence, not performed now but reflexive. Hanna’s eyes went wide in a different way—less hungry, more awed—as if she’d walked into the inside of a thought. Mekdes, for once, looked relieved to be somewhere where stillness was the rule. Saba’s hands floated awkwardly in the air, unsure where to put themselves, until she clasped them against her stomach like a child trying to behave at a wedding.

The change in them was so sudden that it almost made it obvious how young they were.

A figure near the back of the room straightened from where he’d been crouched beside a low shelf, as if he’d been putting something away or pretending to. Fikru had the limber posture of someone older than the girls but not yet fully an adult, his movements quick and quiet, his eyes bright with the kind of mischief that survived even in holy spaces. He had been trying, very hard, to look indifferent—as if teenage girls flooding the rabbi’s home was normal and boring.

He failed the moment he saw their faces.

His mouth twitched, then betrayed him entirely. A grin spread across it like sunrise.

Aster spotted it instantly and shot him a look that could have shaved bark from a tree. “Don’t,” she mouthed, soundless.

Fikru bit his lip. The grin only trembled, refusing to vanish. He bowed his head slightly, as if he were suddenly fascinated by the floor, but the amusement stayed in his eyes.

Tsedey, mortified by the awareness of her own muddy feet, tried to regain some dignity by lifting her chin as if she belonged there. She whispered, too loud in the quiet, “Is he laughing at us?”

“He is laughing at the way you walked in like you were going to steal a goat,” Fikru whispered back before he could stop himself.

Mekdes turned her head sharply. “Fikru,” she hissed, scandalized by the casualness.

Fikru’s grin faltered into something more respectful. “Sorry,” he murmured, though the apology didn’t fully reach his eyes.

Rabbi Abba Yishaq closed the door behind the last of them with measured care. The latch clicked softly, and that small sound seemed to settle the room even further, as if it had been the final stitch in a seam. He didn’t usher them toward chairs or offer them cushions; his home was not a guesthouse. He simply moved past them with the calm of someone who knew exactly where everything belonged.

“Shoes,” he said quietly, not looking at them as he spoke, as if the instruction were as obvious as breathing.

They blinked. Of course. Of course. They’d been so focused on the photograph, on the door, on their own courage, that they’d forgotten they were dragging the courtyard in with them.

There was an awkward flurry, suddenly silent and frantic. Sandals were slipped off and set aside too carefully. Someone’s foot caught on a strap and she wobbled. Saba made a tiny squeak of alarm and then clamped her lips together. Aster steadied her without comment, a hand briefly at Saba’s elbow. Tsedey’s sandals made a small thud as she dropped them, and she froze as if she’d slammed a drum.

Rahel whispered sharply, “Gentle,” even though no one had asked, and her voice sounded absurdly adult in the small room.

Hanna, kneeling to set her sandals neatly beside the others, murmured, “I feel like I’ve brought the whole field in with me.”

“You did,” Aster whispered back. “It’s on your hem.”

Hanna glanced down and winced. “Don’t say it.”

Fikru, watching them line up their sandals like penitents, couldn’t help himself. “You’re fine,” he whispered, and there was unexpected kindness under the humor. “If the rabbi banned mud, half the village would be excommunicated.”

Mekdes glared at him again, but her glare had softened at the edges.

Rabbi Abba Yishaq moved to a low table near the wall. It was scarred with use, the surface worn smooth where hands had rested over years. He didn’t sit. He stood for a moment, looking down at the table as if he were remembering something not written there. Then he turned to a small wooden chest of drawers tucked beneath a shelf. The wood was darkened by age and oil, the kind of furniture that had survived because people repaired it instead of replacing it.

The girls watched him as if he were performing a ritual.

He reached for the lowest drawer, fingers steady. The drawer resisted for a heartbeat—wood swelling and shrinking with seasons—then slid open with a soft groan. The sound was intimate, like a throat clearing in a quiet room. Rabbi Abba Yishaq did not rummage. He did not paw through the contents. He moved with the deliberate care of a man retrieving something fragile, something that could tear or crumble if handled with impatience.

Even though it was only newsprint, even though none of them had touched it yet, the way he reached into the drawer made it feel suddenly precious in a different way—not because the paper itself was holy, but because the meaning it carried needed to be protected from their own careless hands.

Tsedey swallowed, her earlier fierceness reduced now to a tight, vibrating anticipation. Saba’s eyes were round and shining, her hands clasped so tightly her fingers had gone white. Aster’s humor had disappeared entirely; she looked almost solemn. Rahel stood with her shoulders squared, as if reminding herself that this was not a treasure hunt but a lesson. Mekdes’s lips moved soundlessly for a moment—perhaps a prayer, perhaps simply the habit of reverence rising on its own.

Fikru leaned slightly against the wall, still trying not to grin, and failing less now because the room had claimed him too. His expression held that half-amused, half-awed look of someone watching younger girls meet something that will change them, however small it seems.

Rabbi Abba Yishaq’s hand closed around something thin inside the drawer. He paused for the briefest moment, as if weighing not the object but the moment itself.

Then, with the same careful restraint, he began to lift the folded paper out.

The folded paper came out of the drawer as lightly as if it might bruise. Rabbi Abba Yishaq held it in one hand for a moment, not presenting it, not dangling it like bait, simply letting its weight exist in the room. The girls watched that hand with the intensity usually reserved for fire—because paper could burn, because meaning could burn, because their own minds felt flammable right now.

He carried it to the low table and laid it down with care, as though the table were an altar even if it wasn’t. Then he adjusted the oil lamp beside it, turning the wick a fraction so the flame steadied and gave more light without flaring. The smell of warm oil rose faintly. Shadows shifted on the mud wall. The room drew in closer around them.

Rabbi Abba Yishaq’s fingers rested on the folded edges for a breath, holding the pause. The girls stood in a loose arc around the table, not daring to crowd too close. Their bare feet on the packed earth made them feel suddenly vulnerable, stripped of the protection of their sandals and of their earlier bravado.

Fikru leaned forward slightly, eyes bright, then caught himself and leaned back again, lips pressed together as if he were trying to keep from commenting.

The rabbi began to unfold the newspaper.

It opened with soft crackling sounds, brittle and intimate—paper that had been folded and unfolded by strangers before it reached his hands, paper that had traveled through town and market and cloak folds, absorbing sweat and dust, carrying its ink like a secret. He smoothed one crease with the pad of his thumb, patient, unhurried. He adjusted the angle so the lamp light fell across it, flattening the shadows that tried to swallow the print.

The foreign letters came first: dark lines marching in tight columns, shapes that looked to the girls like little fences or hooks or insects frozen mid-step. The letters bordered the empty space where the image would be, hemming it in with language none of them could read. There were bold lines at the top—headings, surely, proclamations—then more dense blocks of text beneath. It looked official, mechanical, confident in its own authority.

Then the photograph appeared.

It was smaller than they had imagined—smaller than the space it had occupied in their minds all afternoon. It sat in the middle of the page like a window cut into a wall, a rectangle of grainy darkness and light. The edges were creased where it had been folded, a faint scar that ran through the picture without destroying it. The ink was slightly faded in places, the print imperfect, and the whole thing felt strangely fragile, as if a hard wind could tear it away.

But the face inside it struck them like a bell.

It was not the kind of face you imagined when someone told a story. It was not an icon painted with perfect lines, not a drawing softened by reverence. It was a real face, captured mid-breath, with the blunt honesty of a machine that did not flatter. There was posture—shoulders set, head held in a certain angle that suggested both composure and weight. There was expression—not smiling, not stern exactly, but present, the look of someone standing in a moment that mattered and refusing to be made small by it.

The background, blurred by the camera’s hunger for its subject, hinted at a crowd, at movement, at hands and suits and the stiff formality of an event. But the photograph’s center held steady: the woman.

For an instant, everything in the room went utterly still.

No one spoke.

Not because they were instructed not to. Not because they feared being corrected. Because awe had done what no rabbi’s hand signal could do—it had pressed their voices flat.

Tsedey’s mouth was slightly open before she remembered to close it. Rahel’s eyes widened, then narrowed, not in suspicion but in concentration, as if she were trying to memorize every line before the page could be folded again. Hanna’s breath caught, and she held it, chest tight. Mekdes’s hand rose halfway toward her throat, then stopped, fingers hovering as if touching herself might anchor her. Aster’s usual readiness to comment vanished; her face went blank with shock, then softened into something she didn’t know how to name. Saba stared so hard it looked like she might cry, not from sadness but from the sheer force of her own feeling.

It was the same for all of them, in different ways: the sudden, violent specificity of it.

This was not rumor. Not an elder’s careful tale. Not a traveling man’s exaggeration. Not a story you could massage into the shape you wanted.

This was proof—ink and grain, a crease, a face caught by a machine they would never touch, printed in a language they could not read, carried across distances they could not imagine. A moment from a faraway world pressed onto paper and placed in front of their bare feet.

The photograph made the outside world, which had always been a kind of vague horizon in their minds, become sharp. It had edges. It had light. It had a person.

And in that sharpness there was no hierarchy of who was clever, who was pious, who was brave. The picture didn’t care who had spoken best at the doorway. It didn’t reward the right argument. It simply existed, equalizing them with its blunt reality.

For a second—maybe two—the only sound was the tiny, steady hiss of the oil lamp.

Then, somewhere in the back of the room, Fikru let out a breath he’d been holding and made a soft noise that might have been a suppressed laugh, might have been wonder. He pressed his knuckles to his mouth as if to swallow it back.

The girls didn’t look at him.

They couldn’t.

Their eyes were pinned to the page, to the small, creased photograph that had just made their world wider—and, somehow, more intimate all at once.

For a few heartbeats the photograph held them in perfect silence, like a hand pressed gently but firmly over their mouths. The room had become a small universe of lamp light and paper, of bare feet and breathing. The outside world—the courtyard, the women with their pots, the late sun—might as well have been on the other side of a sea. There was only this: the rectangle of ink and grain, the face caught there, the startling intimacy of seeing someone who had lived, had stood, had been witnessed by a machine.

Saba broke first, because Saba was always the first crack in any dam.

“She’s so pretty,” she whispered.

The words fell into the hush like a pebble dropped into deep water—small, almost nothing, and yet loud in the quiet. The moment the syllables left her mouth, Saba’s face changed. Her eyes widened in panic, her cheeks flushing, as if she had just blasphemed. She clapped a hand over her own lips, staring at the rabbi’s still hands and the newspaper as if the paper might recoil.

“I—” she tried, muffled behind her palm, then stopped, mortified.

Tsedey’s head turned sharply, ready to scold her for making them sound foolish after all their careful reasoning. Mekdes’s brow furrowed, the devotional line between her eyebrows deepening as if the word pretty had dragged something sacred down into shallow water. Even Aster, who would usually have pounced on Saba’s embarrassment with teasing, stayed silent, caught in the same strange tenderness that had pinned them all.

Hanna, however, didn’t flinch. She didn’t laugh. She didn’t shush Saba either. Her gaze remained on the photograph, and when she spoke her voice was gentle, almost reverent in its calm.

“Pretty isn’t childish,” Hanna said softly.

She said it like a correction given with care, the way an older sister might correct a younger without making her feel small. The sentence widened the room again, letting breath back in.

Saba’s shoulders dropped. Her hand slid down from her mouth, and she let out the smallest exhale, half relief, half gratitude, as if Hanna had handed her permission to be human.

Aster released a breath too, though she hadn’t realized she’d been holding it. She stared at the photograph with the hard, critical gaze she used for everything—trying to find the joke, trying to find the angle—and found instead that her eyes were stinging. That startled her so much she blinked hard, once, then again, as if she could blink the wetness away by sheer defiance.

“What?” she muttered under her breath, not to anyone, irritated at her own body. But her voice was thin, and she didn’t look away from the paper.

Rahel said nothing. Her face was composed, but her eyes had softened, the careful strategist inside her momentarily quiet. She was watching not just the woman in the photograph, but the way the other girls were reacting, as if she were trying to understand what this meant for all of them—what this meant for the shape of their world.

Mekdes leaned a fraction closer, as if the photograph were scripture and she needed to read it properly. Her gaze moved slowly over the image with the same deliberate attention she gave a verse when she didn’t want to miss the hidden weight. She wasn’t looking for jewelry. She wasn’t looking for symbols that could be bought or worn. She wasn’t looking for ceremony, for the obvious display of an inauguration that the foreign letters and blurred background implied.

She was looking for something else entirely.

Steadiness.

The set of the shoulders. The way the chin held itself. The expression that refused to fold. Mekdes studied the photograph as if she could see, in the grain, whether this woman carried her faith like a burden or like a spine. She searched the face for shame, for apology, for the subtle shrinkage of someone trying to disappear inside power.

She found none.

Or perhaps she found what she needed to find: a look of someone standing upright in full light, neither performing piety nor hiding it, simply existing as herself where the world could see.

Mekdes’s lips parted slightly. The word she might have spoken—unashamed—stayed inside her mouth, because speaking felt too loud.

Beside her, Hanna’s eyes traveled over the dark fall of hair in the photograph, over the way it framed the face, and she felt that restless ache again—the sense of the outside world becoming specific, almost reachable. She didn’t say it. She just watched, her expression open in a way she rarely allowed.

Tsedey had been rigid at first, holding herself back the way Rahel had instructed, trying not to spill her hunger all over the rabbi’s table. But the longer she stared at the photograph, the more her fierceness shifted shape. It turned from defiance into recognition—sharp, sudden, almost painful.

Her throat tightened. Her voice, when it finally came, sounded thicker, as if emotion had crowded her words and made them heavy.

“She looks like she belongs,” Tsedey said.

It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t dramatic. It was quiet, almost rough, the kind of sentence that slipped out from under all their careful arguments and went straight to the center. The statement held everything they had been circling: the kinship, the pride, the strange relief of seeing a Jew in a faraway room and realizing she didn’t look like a visitor there. She looked placed.

Rahel’s chest rose with a slow breath. Aster’s blinked eyes stilled. Saba’s mouth softened, her earlier embarrassment forgotten. Even Mekdes, still studying the photograph like a verse, let her gaze pause at the woman’s face and allow the simple truth of Tsedey’s words to settle.

Belonging.

It was a word that did not require them to understand politics or geography. It didn’t require them to know the language printed around the photograph. It didn’t demand they imagine the halls or crowds beyond the blurred edge of the picture. It only demanded they recognize what their own hearts recognized: the posture of someone who was not trying to disappear.

Hanna’s voice, still gentle, added something like a whisper of agreement. “Like she’s not asking permission,” she murmured.

Aster swallowed, her throat working. She made a small, embarrassed sound that might have been a laugh in another moment, then shook her head once as if to clear it. “Well,” she said, attempting dryness, “if that’s what presidents look like, maybe goats can learn to pray.”

Mekdes shot her a look, but it lacked venom now. It was the look of someone too moved to truly scold.

Saba, emboldened again, leaned forward the tiniest bit and traced the air above the photograph without touching it, as if her finger might disturb the ink. “She’s real,” she whispered, and the sentence sounded almost like a prayer.

The room held their reactions without judgment. The lamp hissed softly. The paper lay open, creased and ordinary, carrying an extraordinary specificity. And in that little rectangle of grainy ink, the girls found—alongside beauty and shock and curiosity—a strange, quiet tenderness that none of them had expected to feel for a person they had never met.

Rabbi Abba Yishaq did not interrupt their softness. He let it exist, unhurried. The newspaper lay open on the low table, lamp light pooling over the grainy rectangle, and the girls leaned in and held themselves back in turns, as if their bodies couldn’t decide whether to approach or to bow.

Time passed in a way it rarely did for them—quietly, without being chopped into chores. The rabbi said nothing at all. He stood near the table with his hands folded, not guarding the page so much as guarding the moment. Fikru shifted his weight against the wall and watched the girls watch, his grin fading into something more thoughtful. Every so often his eyes flicked to the rabbi, as if checking how long this miracle of patience would last.

The photograph kept giving them new details the longer they looked. Not facts they could name, not information, but the small truths a face carried: the set of the mouth, the steadiness that Mekdes had noticed, the particular way someone held her head when she wasn’t asking permission to exist. Even the creases that cut through the print began to feel like part of the story, a reminder that something could travel far and still arrive intact enough to matter.

Saba leaned forward, then caught herself and rocked back on her heels, as if the impulse to touch was a sin she could feel in her fingertips. She whispered, barely audible, “It’s strange. It’s so small.”

“And it’s still too big for your mouth,” Aster murmured, though there was no sharpness in it, only wonder disguised as teasing.

Saba glanced at her, offended on principle. “My mouth can be very big.”

“Your mouth is big and your head is full of birds,” Aster said softly. Then, surprising even herself, she added, “That’s not an insult.”

Rahel’s gaze moved over the foreign letters framing the photograph, the bold heading that meant nothing to her, the tight columns of ink that might have been the whole story. “We can’t read any of it,” she said quietly.

Hanna’s eyes stayed fixed on the face. “We can read this,” she replied, and her voice sounded almost like a prayer.

Mekdes didn’t speak. Her attention was so intent it was almost fierce, as if she were trying to commit the expression to memory the way she committed verses—so that later, when doubt came or loneliness came or the world narrowed again to their own hills, she could summon the image in her mind and remember: faith can stand upright.

Tsedey was the one who finally became too full and had to release it, not in noise but in a small, forced breath. “So,” she murmured, and shook her head once, as if shaking could rearrange her thoughts into something more orderly. “So it’s real.”

“Yes,” Rabbi Abba Yishaq said, and the single word dropped into the room like a stone into water. Not a dramatic confirmation—simply a fact.

The girls startled, as if they’d forgotten he could speak. They looked up at him, and for the first time since the paper opened they saw his face not as a gatekeeper but as a witness. His expression was calm, neither amused nor indulgent, but there was a quiet watchfulness there, as if he were paying attention to how they held themselves in the presence of wonder.

He let them look longer still.

The lamp hissed softly. Somewhere outside, a muffled voice called a child’s name, and a goat answered with a complaint. Those sounds felt distant, filtered through mud walls and the girls’ absorption. Inside the room, the only movement was the shifting of their breathing, the minute adjustments of feet, the occasional swallow.

Then Rabbi Abba Yishaq’s hand moved.

It was not sudden, not snatching. It was the same deliberate motion he had used to retrieve the paper from the drawer. He reached down and placed his fingers at the edge of the newspaper, and the girls’ eyes followed as if compelled. Saba’s hand rose an inch, then stopped, hovering, helpless.

The rabbi began to fold the paper again.

The crackle sounded louder now, because their attention had made everything sharper. He folded along the existing crease first, guiding the worn line with the pad of his thumb so it wouldn’t tear. He smoothed it once, gently. Then another fold, neat, contained, as if he were tucking away a flame before it could scorch the room.

Aster’s mouth opened as if to protest—wait—and she swallowed the word in time. Her own earlier joke about trophies flashed in her mind, and she felt a hot embarrassment at how close she’d been to being exactly what the rabbi was warning them against.

The paper ended up once again a modest square in the rabbi’s hands, ordinary-looking, almost disappointing in its smallness. Yet the girls could feel the weight of what had just been folded away, as if the image had moved from ink into their bodies.

Rabbi Abba Yishaq set the folded newspaper on the table, not hiding it yet, simply placing it down as one places down a teaching. He looked at them, one by one, and his gaze carried the quiet authority of someone who understood how quickly young hearts could turn awe into hunger and hunger into foolishness.

“You have seen,” he said.

They nodded, some of them too quickly.

“You are allowed to carry what it means,” he continued, and the phrasing mattered—allowed, not entitled. Meaning, not object. “You are allowed to remember that a sister of the covenant stands in a far place without shame. You are allowed to let it strengthen you.”

Tsedey lifted her chin, hungry for that permission, as if it were bread.

The rabbi’s gaze settled on her a fraction longer. “But you are not allowed,” he said, “to treat a piece of paper like a charm.”

Saba’s eyes widened. “We wouldn’t,” she whispered instantly, defensive and sincere.

Rabbi Abba Yishaq didn’t argue with her. He simply let the statement hang there like smoke, because he didn’t need to accuse them of bad intentions; he needed them to be aware of their own human softness.

“A charm,” he repeated, patient. “Something you think will protect you just because you hold it. Something you show to make yourself feel important. Something you clutch when you are afraid instead of praying.”

Mekdes nodded so sharply it was almost painful. “Yes,” she murmured, as if grateful he had named it plainly.

Rahel, careful as ever, asked the question that lived underneath. “Then what do we do with what we feel?”

The rabbi’s mouth softened at the corners, not into a smile, but into something like recognition. “You do what you always do with fire,” he said. “You put it to work.”

Fikru shifted, interest sharpening. The girls leaned in without meaning to.

Rabbi Abba Yishaq reached to the shelf beside him and pulled down a small worn volume wrapped in cloth. He set it on the table near the folded newspaper and tapped it lightly, as if reminding them that their faith already had weight and shape without any foreign proof.

“You wanted the world to become specific,” he said. “You wanted proof. Very well. I will give you something that does not live in a drawer.”

He looked directly at Rahel first, as if assigning responsibility to the one who had spoken for them. “You will recite,” he said, “the Shema each morning this week with attention, not like a habit you throw from your mouth while your mind wanders.”

Rahel’s eyes widened slightly, then she nodded, solemn. “Yes, Rabbi.”

“And not alone,” the rabbi added. His gaze moved across the group. “You will recite it together. After prayers. Here. In the courtyard. Loud enough that the younger ones hear that you mean it.”

Aster blinked. “Loud enough?” she repeated before she could stop herself, surprised.

Rabbi Abba Yishaq’s eyebrows lifted. “Yes,” he said mildly. “You are capable of loud. I have heard you be loud about goats.”

Aster’s mouth twitched despite herself. “That was an important goat.”

Mekdes shot her a look out of habit, but even she couldn’t completely flatten the small spark of amusement.

The rabbi ignored the joke with the skill of a man who had spent decades ignoring jokes. “And,” he continued, “you will teach the little ones a song.”

Saba’s eyes lit up immediately, because songs were where her heart liked to live. “A song?” she whispered, thrilled.

“A simple one,” Rabbi Abba Yishaq said, already anticipating their tendency to make everything elaborate. “A song they can remember when they are walking, when they are carrying water, when they are frightened in the night.”

He paused, as if selecting something from his memory the way he had selected the newspaper from the drawer. Then he began to hum a short melody—plain, steady, built for repetition. It wasn’t ornate. It was the kind of tune that could sit in the bones and not leave.

He sang softly, and the girls listened as if the sound itself were instruction.

“Chazak v’ematz,” he sang, the Hebrew syllables simple and firm. “Chazak v’ematz.”

Be strong and courageous.

He repeated it, and the line felt like a hand placed on the shoulder. He added a second phrase, a call that could be answered:

“Al tira—do not fear.”

The cadence was gentle but insistent, like footsteps on a path.

Fikru’s grin returned, smaller now, not mocking—warm. He mouthed the words, as if he’d known them his whole life and was pleased to see the girls being handed something solid.

Saba leaned forward, lips moving soundlessly as she tried to catch every syllable. Hanna’s eyes shone. Mekdes’s face softened into something like relief; this was holy ground she understood—prayer, song, continuity. Rahel’s mind was already organizing who would teach which line, who would keep the little ones from turning it into a joke. Even Tsedey, who had come craving a photograph, felt the assignment land inside her like a spear of purpose. A song was something you carried without paper. A song could travel.

“Again,” Saba whispered before she could stop herself.

Rabbi Abba Yishaq looked at her, and for a heartbeat she thought she’d overstepped. Then he hummed it again and sang, slower this time, letting the words settle.

“Chazak v’ematz,” he repeated. “Al tira.”

When he finished, he said, “You will teach it to the youngest class. Tomorrow. After the lesson. And you will not teach it like entertainment.”

Aster’s eyebrows lifted. “How else would we teach it?”

“Like a rope,” the rabbi replied, matter-of-fact. “Something to hold. Something that does not break when hands are small.”

Hanna swallowed. “Yes,” she said, and her voice carried that surprising steadiness again, the one that made Rahel glance at her with approval.

Rabbi Abba Yishaq’s gaze shifted to Tsedey. “And you,” he said.

Tsedey straightened, bracing for a scolding or a warning.

He gave her neither. “You will make sure they come,” he said simply, indicating the group. “You will make sure this becomes a week of attention, not a day of excitement.”

Tsedey blinked, thrown by the trust hidden inside the instruction. “I can do that,” she said quickly, then steadied herself. “Yes, Rabbi. I will.”

“And Mekdes,” he added, turning to her, “you will correct them if they begin to turn it into noise.”

Mekdes nodded, fervent. “Gladly.”

Aster coughed, half laughter. “We’re doomed.”

Mekdes’s eyes flashed. “Behave.”

Rabbi Abba Yishaq let the small exchange pass as if it were weather. “That is all,” he said, and then—only then—did he pick up the folded newspaper again.

Saba’s gaze followed it like a puppy watching bread.

The rabbi held it in his palm and looked at them once more, not sternly, not warmly, but with that steady measuring look. “Carry the meaning,” he said again, quieter now, as if giving them something delicate. “Not the paper.”

Then he slid the newspaper back into the drawer and closed it with care. The wooden front met the frame with a soft click, final but not forbidding.

The girls stood for a heartbeat longer, as if reluctant to break the spell of the room. Their bodies remembered reverence now; it clung to them like smoke. Even Aster didn’t immediately reach for a joke. Even Tsedey didn’t immediately demand more. They had gotten what they came for, and something else besides—something they hadn’t known to ask.

Rabbi Abba Yishaq’s tone shifted subtly, returning them to the world. “Go,” he said, not unkindly. “Before your mothers come looking and decide you’ve been kidnapped by books.”

That released them. A ripple of suppressed giggling moved through the group, quick and bright, the way laughter always bubbled up when fear or awe loosened its grip. Saba covered her mouth again, but this time it was to keep from bursting. Hanna’s shoulders shook silently. Aster’s eyes crinkled. Even Mekdes’s mouth twitched, caught between solemnity and the undeniable fact that they were, after all, teenage girls in a rabbi’s house trying not to squeal.

They fumbled for their sandals at the doorway, suddenly remembering their mud and their youth in a different way—less shame, more fondness. Their feet slid back into worn straps. Someone stepped on someone else’s heel and hissed an apology. Saba nearly tripped and caught herself, cheeks flaming. Fikru moved aside, still grinning, and whispered as they passed, “Don’t forget the words.”

“We won’t,” Rahel whispered back, and her voice had a quiet firmness that surprised even her.

Outside, the courtyard’s light hit them like a warm slap. The air felt louder, the world broader. The adult women who had been “accidentally” doing chores suddenly found reasons to look elsewhere, as if they’d never been listening at all. A pot was lifted with exaggerated nonchalance. A jar was carried away at a measured pace. A cloth was shaken one last time, slow and dignified.

Tsedey stepped out first, chin high, but her eyes were bright in a different way now—not just hungry, but purposeful. Rahel followed, already murmuring the first words of the Shema under her breath as if testing the weight of them in the open air. Mekdes walked with her shoulders straighter, as if the assignment had given her spine as much as the photograph had. Hanna blinked up at the sky as if it had changed size. Aster bumped Saba’s shoulder gently, and Saba giggled, then immediately sobered, clutching the new song in her mind like a treasure she was allowed to carry.

They moved away from the rabbi’s house together, their voices rising and falling—still giggling, still teasing, still themselves—but threaded through it now was something steadier, something that pulled their laughter into a cleaner shape.

They walked back into the village a little taller than they had arrived, as if the world beyond their hills had not only expanded, but reached a hand back through the distance and touched their shoulders with a quiet, unignorable weight.

They made it three steps into the courtyard before the world remembered to be the world again.

The late-afternoon sun hit their faces, warm and blunt, and with it came noise: the scrape of feet on stone, the faint clatter of a pot, the call of someone’s name from a lane. The air smelled of dust and cooking fires and the sharp green of herbs crushed underfoot. It should have snapped the moment in half, should have reduced what had happened inside the rabbi’s home to a private secret sealed behind a door.

But the village was too small for secrets to stay private, and too polite to admit it wanted them.

The women who had “just happened to be nearby” were still there, still positioned with suspicious convenience. One stood with a pot in her hands as if she had been scrubbing for an hour and planned to scrub for an hour more. Another had finally filled her jar but continued to stand by the well, adjusting her scarf and studying the water as if she had never seen water before. A third had moved her sweeping to a patch of ground that was already clean. Their bodies were angled away—respectfully, modestly—yet their eyes flicked over with the speed of birds.

As soon as the girls stepped fully into the open, the adults’ performances sharpened.

Aunties and mothers looked past them instead of at them, the way people look past a storm cloud to insist the sky is clear. Someone clicked her tongue at nothing. Someone hummed as if her mind had been entirely occupied by her own chores. Someone said, too loudly, to no one in particular, “These children walk like they’re late to their own wedding.”

Then a voice, too casual to be truly casual, called out.

“So?”

It came from a woman with her hands deep in grain, as if she had no time for foolishness, as if she could not care less about foreign newspapers and presidents. Her mouth did not curve into a smile, but her eyes did, bright with curiosity she would deny if accused.

“So?” she repeated, and the word carried everything: Did you see? Was it real? Was she wearing something strange? Did she look proud? Did she look like us? Did the rabbi scold you? Did he let you?

The girls stopped as if a rope had tightened around their waists.

They looked at one another, quick, silent glances passing between them. It wasn’t a conscious decision, not fully. It was a reflex born in the last few minutes, in the hush of books and the crackle of folding paper: the sudden understanding that what they’d been given was not meant to be thrown back into the courtyard like scraps.

They were protectors now.

Of meaning. Of the fragile, sharp spark they had been allowed to witness.

Tsedey’s mouth opened, ready to answer with the bluntness she usually offered the world. Rahel’s look stopped her—just a fraction of a second, but enough. Hanna’s lips pressed together, holding back a smile. Mekdes’s expression tightened into something righteous. Aster’s eyes gleamed, delighted by the chance to be maddening.

Saba, who could never keep anything inside her for long, clasped her hands in front of her as if praying for strength.

Aster spoke first, because of course she did.

“It was… educational,” she said, with a seriousness so exaggerated it bordered on mockery.

The woman with the grain snorted softly. “Educational,” she repeated, unimpressed.

“It made us better people,” Hanna added, deadpan, and then immediately bit the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing.

Mekdes, trying to be truthful without being revealing, said, “The rabbi gave us an assignment.”

That sentence was both true and infuriatingly vague. It was a gift and an insult at once.

An older woman by the well turned her head slightly, pretending she was only stretching her neck. “An assignment?” she echoed. “Since when do you go to Rabbi Abba Yishaq for assignments you weren’t avoiding?”

“We weren’t avoiding,” Rahel said quickly, then realized the mistake. She softened her tone. “We mean… he wants us to recite with attention.”

“With attention,” Aster repeated, solemn. “It’s very difficult for us. We are very… energetic.”

The women’s eyes narrowed, their patience thinning in the face of nonsense.

Tsedey, who hated feeling cornered, lifted her chin with defiant sweetness. “She looked… like a person,” she said.

“A person,” the grain-woman repeated, eyebrows rising. “Thank you. We were worried she might be a donkey.”

Saba made a small sound that could have been laughter or a choke. She clamped her lips shut and stared at the ground as if the dust had become suddenly interesting.

The woman sweeping—whose broom was barely touching the earth—cleared her throat. “Was she wearing a crown?” she asked, too casually. “Sometimes foreign leaders wear strange things.”

“No crown,” Aster said. “Just a face.”

“Just a face,” Hanna echoed, the corners of her mouth twitching.

The adults began to murmur among themselves, annoyed and amused in equal measure. The girls’ vagueness was infuriating, but it was also familiar. Adults knew that teenagers hid important things behind nonsense the way cats hid stolen meat under a bed.

One of the women folded her arms and fixed the girls with a look sharpened by years of mothering. “Was she proud?” she asked, quieter now. The question, stripped of gossip, revealed the real hunger beneath it. “Did she look… unashamed?”

The girls’ teasing faltered for the briefest moment. The courtyard seemed to tighten.

Rahel met the woman’s eyes, and her voice became careful, gentle. “Yes,” she said simply. “Unashamed.”

That was all. No details. No description of hair or skin or posture. Just the one truth that mattered.

The woman’s face softened, almost despite herself. She glanced away quickly, as if softness were embarrassing. “Hm,” she said, and returned to her grain with sudden intensity.

Aster, sensing the moment had grown too real, slid a grin back into place like a curtain. “And now,” she declared, “we have to teach the little ones a song, so if you want to know more you can ask a child, because children tell everything.”

Mekdes snapped, “Aster.”

Aster’s grin only widened. “It’s true.”

That did it. The tension broke into laughter, rippling across the courtyard from adults to girls and back again. It wasn’t mocking laughter. It was the laughter of a village recognizing itself: the small dance between curiosity and dignity, between wanting and pretending not to want.

“Go on,” an aunt waved them away, pretending she had been annoyed the whole time while her eyes still chased them. “Before you start reciting with attention in my ears.”

“And wash your feet,” another called, because no adult could resist a practical instruction.

The girls scattered then, not far, not truly leaving—just moving away with the loose, bright energy of teenagers released from a tight room. They bumped shoulders, whispered and giggled, traded looks that held whole sentences. The song Rabbi Abba Yishaq had taught them hummed under their breath already, small and stubborn, weaving itself into their steps.

Saba leaned close to Hanna as they walked. “We didn’t tell them she was pretty,” she whispered, half proud, half scandalized.

Hanna’s smile was soft. “We didn’t tell them anything,” she murmured back.

Tsedey glanced over her shoulder at the rabbi’s door one last time. The earlier hunger was still there, but it had changed. It felt less like grabbing and more like carrying.

Aster nudged her. “Don’t look like you’re about to cry,” she whispered. “It will ruin your reputation.”

Tsedey made a face. “I’m not crying.”

Aster smirked. “Good. Because I would tell everyone.”

Tsedey elbowed her back, and their laughter returned, quick and bright, threaded with that new seriousness they didn’t know how to name.

Inside the rabbi’s house, the door closed again on the courtyard’s noise, and the quiet returned to its rightful place.

Rabbi Abba Yishaq stood for a moment where he had left them, listening—not to the girls now, but to the way the village resumed itself. He could hear the women’s laughter fade into murmurs, the scraping of brooms, the clink of pots. He could hear the girls’ footsteps moving away, their voices rising and dipping like birds.

He waited until the sounds were distant enough to become background rather than presence.

Then he crossed to the table where the newspaper lay folded.

He did not unfold it again. He did not linger over it like a man clinging to a novelty. He placed two fingers on the paper—briefly, lightly, not sentimental. A touch of acknowledgment, as one might touch a book before returning it to its shelf. The gesture held no possessiveness, only recognition: This has weight. This has traveled. This has ignited something.

He withdrew his hand, as if refusing to be ruled by it.

The drawer opened with a soft, familiar groan. The rabbi slid the folded paper inside and smoothed it once, not to worship it, not to hide it in fear, but to store it properly—as you store a match in a dry place, as you store a spark for later when the night is long and the fire needs feeding.

The drawer closed with a quiet click.

Rabbi Abba Yishaq stood for a moment longer, hands folding behind his back again, his face calm and unreadable. Then he turned away from the drawer and went back to his book, as if nothing extraordinary had happened at all—only a lesson delivered, only a small flame set to work in the right hands.

They didn’t scatter the way they usually did after being allowed somewhere important.

They drifted out of Rabbi Abba Yishaq’s home in a knot—half-pressed together by excitement, half-held by the strange hush that had fallen over them when the paper unfolded. Even outside, where the courtyard light widened into air and distance and the familiar dusty path, it felt as if the photograph was still inside their eyes.

The sun was lowering, the long shadows of the acacia stretching like fingers across the hard-packed earth. Smoke from cooking fires lifted in thin blue threads from the cluster of homes beyond the synagogue, the scent of injera and lentils already making the evening feel inevitable. Somewhere a goat bleated, offended at being tethered. A baby cried and was soothed. The world, in other words, returned to itself.

But the girls didn’t.

They walked a little way—past the synagogue wall, past the patch of ground where the smallest children liked to draw shapes in dust with sticks, past the place where the water jar line usually formed—until they reached the edge of the fields where the land fell away into a shallow terrace. It wasn’t private, not truly; nothing was private in a village that held itself like a palm holds water. But it was the nearest thing to “away” they had, a spot where the wind came cleaner and the adults were occupied with their evening tasks.

They sat in a loose circle without deciding to. Their knees nearly touched. Their sandals scuffed at the earth. They made themselves into a council simply by remaining.

For a while they didn’t speak. They looked at one another, as if checking: Did you see what I saw? Did it land on you the way it landed on me?

Saba was the first to break, because Saba always broke first.

“She was—” Saba started, then stopped and put both hands on her mouth as if words were a bird she might accidentally let fly away. Her eyes were enormous. “She was like… like a candle. But not the flame. The wax.”

Aster let out a short laugh that wasn’t mocking, just startled. “A candle,” she repeated. “Saba, we have never seen a candle that looks like that.”

“We have seen candles,” Saba insisted fiercely, as if the argument mattered. “At the synagogue. For the prayers. The wax is—” She pinched her own forearm, darker than the soil when it’s wet. “Not like this.”

Hanna hugged her knees to her chest and stared down at her own hands, turning them over. The backs, the palms, the lines of her life. Then she said, softly, as if confessing something private, “I thought… I thought everyone in the world was like us.”

Silence again, but this time it was the kind that admits agreement.

They had never been withdrawn from the world in spirit. They weren’t timid girls who feared a stranger’s shadow. They sang loudly when they worked. They argued with their brothers. They climbed trees and ran races. They were curious in the way dry ground is curious about rain.

But the world—the world—had always been an idea that arrived through scraps: a trader’s story that grew wild in retelling, a traveler’s passing phrase, a rare visitor who stayed only long enough to drink and continue walking. Beyond the hills lay other villages. Beyond those lay towns. Beyond those lay places with names that sounded like foreign prayers.

And beyond even that?

Beyond even that had always been an emptiness filled with imagination.

Rahel, who rarely admitted confusion out loud, said it plainly now. “When we were little, and the teacher spoke of lands far away, I thought it meant there were more mountains, more rivers, more sun. But the people… the people were always the same in my mind.”

Mekdes’s voice was quiet. “The psalms say we are scattered, but scattered does not mean… changed.”

Tsedey leaned forward, elbows on her knees, the way she did when she was about to challenge a boy twice her size. “She hasn’t changed,” she said, stubborn and protective in the same breath. “She is Jewish. She is our sister. That’s what matters.”

“It matters,” Aster agreed, but her eyebrows lifted. “And also: her skin.”

Tsedey shot her a look. “Aster.”

Aster held up both hands, palms out in surrender, but her mouth twisted, half amused and half earnest. “Don’t ‘Aster’ me like I’m insulting her. I am stating what we all saw.”

Saba nodded so hard her braids bounced. “Her skin was like milk.”

“Milk is not that pale,” Hanna said, almost absent-mindedly. “Milk still has—” She searched for the word. “It has a body. Hers was… like flour when it’s first ground. Like the inside of a peeled root.”

Mekdes frowned. “Don’t compare her to food.”

“It’s how we understand,” Hanna said, and her voice sharpened with a kind of shame—shame at not already having the right language for what she’d seen.

Rahel tapped her fingers against her knee, thinking. “Maybe,” she offered cautiously, “maybe in her land the sun is different.”

Tsedey scoffed. “How can the sun be different? It is the same sun God hung over the earth.”

“Is it?” Aster asked, not to provoke but because she genuinely wanted to know. “We have never walked far enough to see if it behaves the same everywhere. We know what our mothers tell us. We know what we have seen.”

That was the heart of it: the difference between what you are told and what you have witnessed.

Hanna’s eyes lifted, and there was that restless light in them—the part of her that always looked beyond the ridge line, beyond the next season, beyond the rules. “If there are lands where the sun is softer,” she murmured, “I want to know them.”

Mekdes glanced at her sharply, as if Hanna had spoken aloud a dangerous thought. “Wanting isn’t knowledge,” she said. “And knowledge isn’t a path. Don’t let a picture make you foolish.”

But Mekdes didn’t sound angry. She sounded afraid—of foolishness, yes, but also of how quickly a person’s mind could become a door.

Tsedey reached out and flicked Mekdes’s braid gently, an affectionate reprimand. “We are not worshipping her,” she said, echoing their own careful argument to the rabbi. “We are not carving her face into the wood. We are talking.”

“Talking changes people,” Mekdes replied. “Talking is how the serpent begins.”

Aster snorted. “Now Phoebe is a serpent?”

Mekdes’s cheeks flushed, and she pressed her lips together in annoyance. “Don’t twist my words. I mean… when something is new, the tongue runs ahead of the soul.”

Rahel, who was always the bridge between sharp edges, said, “The rabbi let us see. That means this is not forbidden.” Then, after a beat, she added, “But it also means he expects us to hold it properly.”

That brought them back to the rabbi without them meaning to. The way he had watched them. The way he had nodded as if their reasoning was a vessel he approved of—strong enough not to leak.

Saba rubbed her arms as if she had gooseflesh. “Did you see her hair?” she asked. “It was so… straight.”

“Like a rope that hasn’t been twisted,” Hanna said.

“Like water falling,” Saba insisted, eyes bright with the urgency of metaphor. “Like when rain runs off the roof and it doesn’t stop to curl. It just goes.”

They’d all grown up surrounded by hair like theirs: dense curls that held the dust and the sun, braids that told stories, coils that could be threaded with beads and cloth. Hair that was worked with fingers and patience, hair that was loved into shape.

Phoebe’s hair in the photograph was dark—dark as a pot left near the fire—but it fell in long, smooth lines that seemed almost unreal to them, as if it belonged to a doll rather than a living woman.

Tsedey, who prided herself on not being easily impressed, had been unable to stop staring at it. “It looked heavy,” she admitted now, grudgingly. “Like it would make your neck tired.”

Aster’s grin returned. “Imagine trying to braid it.”

Saba’s eyes widened. “Maybe she doesn’t braid. Maybe she just—” Saba mimed running her fingers down an invisible curtain. “Maybe she just lets it be.”

Mekdes pursed her lips. “Hair is not the point.”

But her gaze drifted, despite herself, to Hanna’s long braids and the faint envy that flashed there. Not envy of the president, exactly—envy of the ease of something they had never known could be easy.

Rahel exhaled slowly. “When I was very small,” she said, “I thought the stories of our people meant we were the only Jews. Just us. Like we were a secret.”

“That is not a child’s thought,” Mekdes said, almost tenderly. “That is a lonely thought.”

Rahel shrugged, embarrassed at being seen. “Then I learned the prayers speak of Jerusalem. Of return. Of being scattered. I understood there were others. But I still… when I imagined them, I imagined them like us. Dark. Braided. Speaking like our elders. I thought the difference was only distance.”

“And now?” Hanna asked, too quickly.

Rahel hesitated. “Now I understand ‘others’ means truly other. Not only far away.”

Saba said, with the bluntness of the young, “Her face was… different.”

Aster snapped her fingers softly, delighted. “Yes. Not only the skin. The shape. The nose. The eyes.”

Tsedey’s shoulders tensed. She hated the feeling of measuring someone like livestock, and she hated that the photograph had made it unavoidable.

Mekdes reached for the only handhold she trusted. “We were made in the image of God,” she said, and there was relief in the familiar sentence, like stepping onto a stone you know won’t shift. “That means the image of God can look like… like all of this.”

“Like wax,” Saba whispered, stubbornly loyal to her metaphor.

Aster’s laughter this time was soft, almost fond. “Yes, Saba. Like wax.”

They sat with that. The wind combed through the acacia leaves above them, making a dry, whispering applause.

Hanna leaned forward, elbows on knees, voice low. “Do you think,” she asked, “that there are people as pale as her who have never seen someone like us? Who think everyone is like them?”

The question hung, and for a moment it felt like the earth had tilted.

Tsedey blinked. The idea that they could be the unimaginable person in someone else’s story was so strange it almost made her angry.

“They must know,” she said finally, more forceful than sure. “The world is big. They must have traders, like we do.”

Aster tilted her head. “Maybe they have traders who only trade with people who look like them. Maybe their mountains are bigger than our mountains.”

Rahel spoke carefully, as if sorting stones. “Or maybe they know with their heads but not with their eyes. Knowing is different when it is not a story.”

Mekdes watched them, that faint line between her eyebrows deepening. “Is this making your faith stronger,” she asked, “or weaker?”

No one answered immediately, because the truth was complicated.

Tsedey opened her mouth, then shut it. She had been ready to say stronger, because that was the correct answer. The answer the rabbi had approved. But in her chest there was also a strange ache—something like longing, something like vertigo. It didn’t feel like weakness, but it did feel like a door.

Hanna saved her, unexpectedly, by answering in a way that was not neat.

“Both,” Hanna said.

Mekdes’s eyes narrowed.

Hanna didn’t flinch. “Stronger because she exists. Because she is real. Because a woman can stand at the center of a far country and say, ‘I am Jewish,’ and not fold herself smaller.” Her voice shook slightly with the intensity of it. “And weaker because… because now my mind is full of places. Full of questions. Full of things I cannot touch. That makes me feel… restless.”

Aster nodded, once, as if Hanna had admitted something Aster couldn’t admit herself.

Rahel said, “Restless is not the same as unfaithful.”

Mekdes drew her knees closer. Her jaw worked as if she were chewing a hard piece of bread. “Restless can become ungrateful.”

Tsedey finally found her footing. “Or restless can become brave,” she said. “Moses was restless. He could have stayed. He didn’t.”

Mekdes’s gaze went sharp. “Don’t use Moses to excuse your hunger.”

Tsedey held her stare. “Don’t use fear to pretend hunger is sin.”

They might have snapped at one another harder, but Saba interrupted with the innocent cruelty of another observation.

“Do you think she is sick?” Saba asked.

They all turned to her.

Saba’s face was earnest, worried. “Because… because she is so pale. When a person is sick, they lose color.”

Aster’s mouth opened. Then she closed it, because the thought was not stupid. It was logical inside their world, where paleness belonged to fever and exhaustion.

Rahel answered gently, “No, Saba. I don’t think she is sick. In the photograph she was standing. Her eyes were bright.”

“And she had cheeks,” Hanna added. “Not hollow. Not like someone who has been without food.”

Saba nodded, relieved, but still perplexed. “Then why?”

Rahel looked at their surroundings—the relentless sun, the way it pressed itself onto everything until even stone seemed warm from within. “Maybe,” she said, “some people are made for different light.”

Tsedey snorted softly. “God made the light.”

“And God made the people,” Rahel replied. “So perhaps God made many kinds.”

Mekdes murmured, almost to herself, “The covenant is not written in skin.”

Aster glanced at her. “Say that again.”

Mekdes looked up, startled at being requested rather than challenged. “The covenant is not written in skin,” she repeated, firmer. “It is written in what you keep. What you carry. What you refuse to abandon.”

Tsedey’s shoulders loosened a fraction, as if that sentence had untied a knot she hadn’t known she had. “That’s what we said,” she murmured. “That’s what the rabbi heard.”

Hanna’s voice went dreamy again. “But it is strange,” she confessed, “to see it. To see a Jew and not recognize her at first with your eyes.”

Aster poked at the earth with a stick, drawing a circle, then another inside it. “Maybe that is why the picture matters,” she said. “Because now if a traveler ever comes, pale like her, we will not say, ‘You can’t be one of us.’ We will remember. We will say, ‘Show us your faith, not your face.’”

Rahel gave a small, approving nod, as if Aster had finally built something solid out of her sarcasm.

Saba, still grappling, said, “But she looked… soft.”

They all knew what she meant. Not weak. Not foolish. Soft the way pale things in their world were soft: the inside of bread, the underside of leaves, a baby’s palm. Softness belonged to what was protected.

Tsedey frowned. “She is president. Presidents are not soft.”

Hanna smiled, a little rueful. “Maybe you can be soft and still be strong.”

Mekdes looked at Hanna as if she didn’t like how true that sounded.

Aster leaned back on her hands and stared at the sky, which was slowly cooling from blazing blue into something deeper. “Imagine,” she said, “being her, walking into a room full of people who look like her, and still feeling like an outsider because of what you keep.”

Rahel’s eyes narrowed in thought. “Or walking into a room full of people who do not look like her,” she said, and her gaze flicked to their own circle, “and still being claimed because of what you keep.”

The wind shifted. A fire cracked somewhere in the village. The evening call of birds began.

They were quiet again, but this time it wasn’t because they didn’t have words. It was because the words were rearranging them inside.

Tsedey picked at a dried leaf between her fingers until it crumbled. “Do you think she knows about us?” she asked finally, and the question came out smaller than her usual voice.

It was a dangerous question, not because it was disrespectful, but because it held a longing that could make a person reckless. To be seen. To not be only a rumor on the edge of someone else’s world.

Hanna answered first, too quickly. “She must. She is Jewish. She will care about all Jews.”

Mekdes shook her head slowly. “Caring is not the same as knowing.”

Rahel said, measured, “Perhaps she knows there are communities in places she will never see. Perhaps she says our names in prayer, like we say the names of places we will never touch.”

Aster’s voice softened. “And perhaps,” she added, “she has her own circle of girls somewhere, arguing over what we look like.”

That made Saba squeak a laugh. “They would say we are dark like the pot,” she said, delighted.

Tsedey chuckled despite herself. “They would think we are made of night.”

Hanna smiled, then her smile faded into something thoughtful. “If they saw my hair,” she said, touching her braid, “they would think it is a rope.”

“Not a rope,” Saba protested, loyal to beauty. “A river.”

“A river that refuses to lie flat,” Aster said, and there was pride in her tone now, pride that didn’t need to compete with anyone else’s difference.

Mekdes watched their faces, and something in her eased. Not all the way—she would always be the one guarding the door of reverence—but enough to let her speak gently.

“The rabbi,” she said, “did not give us the paper to keep.”

Tsedey’s mouth tightened. “He didn’t trust us?”

“He trusted us with what matters,” Mekdes corrected. “He trusted us to take it into ourselves and not into our pockets.”

Rahel nodded. “If we carried the paper around, it would become a trophy. It would become a thing to show. A thing to boast about.”

Aster made a face. “And it would get torn. Or soaked. Or stolen by someone’s little brother.”

Saba gasped as if the thought were a tragedy. “My brother would eat it.”

They all laughed then—properly laughed—and the laughter broke the tightness in their chests like a pot finally releasing steam.

Hanna wiped at her eyes, still smiling. “So we keep it here,” she said, tapping her sternum. “We keep the fact that she exists. That she is real. That the world is wider than the hills.”

“And we keep the covenant,” Mekdes said, and for once it wasn’t a warning. It was a joining.

Tsedey looked toward the village, where the first stars were beginning to appear in the darkening sky. “I want to see it again,” she admitted, stubborn and honest. “Not because of her skin. Not because of her hair. Because I want to remember the feeling.”

“The feeling of what?” Rahel asked, though she already knew.

Tsedey swallowed. “Of not being only a small place,” she said. “Of being connected.”

Aster nodded slowly. “That’s the dangerous thing,” she said, half joking, half serious. “One picture, and suddenly your whole life becomes… connected.”

Hanna’s eyes shone. “Let it be dangerous,” she whispered.

Mekdes opened her mouth, then closed it again. Then, quietly, she said the words that made them all look at her.

“We should pray for her.”

Tsedey blinked. “We… already do. For leaders.”

“Yes,” Mekdes said. “But now we know a face. It will make the prayer less like mist.”

Rahel’s expression softened. “That,” she said, “is a proper use of seeing.”

So they sat there a little longer, as the sky deepened and the village called them home in smells and sounds. They talked themselves in circles—sun and distance, hair and cloth, stories and proof—until the questions settled into something they could carry without dropping.

When they finally rose, brushing dust from their skirts, their bodies were the same as they had been that morning. Their feet still knew every stone on the path. Their homes were still where they had always been.

But the world inside their minds had expanded.

And each of them, in her own way—bold Tsedey, careful Rahel, devout Mekdes, restless Hanna, sharp Aster, breathless Saba—walked back toward the firelight with the peculiar, steady warmth of kinship: the knowledge that somewhere, impossibly far, a woman shared their faith and stood unhidden in her own fierce light.