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Both of his wives outlived Achashverosh. I took Esther’s soul in the long twilight of a high-summer day. I was running early that evening and I had a few minutes to spare before my next engagement, so I let her finish saying the bedtime shema before I stepped in. Then: the bluest of blues. A color with that kind of clarity is hard to come by.
***A POINT OF CLARIFICATION***
I remember every soul I have ever taken and what color it evoked in the end.
I try not to count them, because it reminds me of how long I’ve been doing this.
That makes me feel tired.
No one does their best work when they are feeling tired.
That is as true for me as it is for you.
I took Esther’s father shortly after she was conceived, and her mother Yasmin didn’t make it through childbirth. Yasmin could see on the midwife’s face that she was dying. She wasn’t worried for herself, but she prayed for the baby to survive. They didn’t always, especially in those days before humans knew anything about sterilization or germ theory. I didn’t answer her prayer, because that’s not the business I’m in. But I was glad that I was only there to collect the one soul. It was nice to see Yasmin get her wish as I carried her away.
Mordechai taught Hadassah to read as soon as she could reliably recognize letter shapes. Most people in Shushan couldn’t read, but Hadassah could.
Hadassah loved to read and to make up stories in her head. She had elaborate fantasies of being a princess in a castle, rather than an orphan whose uncle could rarely afford meat. She thought of those fantasies from time to time once her life took its unexpected turn into the palace, and wondered whether she had wished this new reality into being. (She had not.)
Like Abraham, Hadassah changed her name at a pivotal moment in her life. Though unlike Abraham, she got her new name from her uncle, not from God. Mordechai said Hadassah sounded too Jewish. “Esther” was an assimilated name, close enough to “Ishtar” that no one would think twice. Esther also implies nistar , “hidden,” which is precisely what her Jewishness became once she went into the palace.
Most of the girls in the competition were rude to Hegai. His gender confused them, or they thought anyone who served was low-status and not worth their time. Or they were just priggish and stuck-up. Children from noble families have always had a greater than average chance of being like that.
Esther came from one of the poorest households in the city, and most of the people she’d known growing up were either servants or scholars in threadbare garb. It never would have occurred to her to be unkind to Hegai, or to anyone. She thought Hegai looked splendid in his wide-legged black trousers and red kamarband, and told him so the moment they met.
Because she was kind, Hegai took her under his wing. He instructed one of the younger boys who was practiced with a needle to pierce her ears, after numbing them with ice. There was always ice in the palace icehouse, even in summertime, brought at great expense from the mountains. On the night when she first went before the king, Hegai himself applied the kohl around her eyes and the red stain to her lips. Although she had not told him her original name, he chose myrtle oil as her scent and dabbed it at her pulse points. He said it would help her remember to keep her head high.
On Saturday nights after the sun went down, when she could see three stars in the sky, Esther would ask Hegai for a drop of myrtle on one wrist. She couldn’t light a braided candle but she could silently sip her wine, and the scent of myrtle kept her spirits aloft as the extra soul of Shabbat departed.
The extra soul granted to believers on Shabbat is not the same as the soul I take with me when your lives are done. It comes and goes without my intervention. But when I claim a Jewish soul on Shabbat, its color is deeper.
At the moment when Esther died, everything was deepest sapphire blue. Blue like the sea, blue like the sky, blue like the sea that reflects the sky.
