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we preferred vegetables and fresh green things.
    They name their children after those in the Old Testament.
    We did that, but they were only our pet names that meant nothing to anyone but each other. The name of love my grandfather called my grandmother that sounded like knives—Sarah. The name my mother used to call me when I was small as she rocked me to sleep that was also the name my grandmother called me when she gave me the strand of pearls.
    Esther.
    Turn one in, and you share all he owns, halved with the court.
    People were looking at each other with their eyes cast down, only daring to sneak looks at one another; with a single decree the world was viewed differently, filled with dangerous possibilities. I felt as I had on that first burning day when there were cinders in my hair. Standing there, surrounded by my neighbors, in a village where my family had lived for five hundred years, I could think of only one thing:
    We did that.

    I NSTEAD OF going home, I went into the hills where my mother and I so often went to search for herbs. I walked fast so I couldn’t think. I wanted it that way. Otherwise I would think about Catalina and her mother rummaging through the Arriases’ house. I would wonder if my name were really Esther.
    I went deep into the woods, where there were pine trees and a carpet of soft needles that made everything quiet. But I didn’t want quiet. I didn’t want to know any secrets. Why we went to the same church as the Arrias family. Why we had special names. I wanted to be who I’d always been. Was that too much to ask?
    I started to run. I ran until my ears were pounding. Until I couldn’t take another breath. I thought I’d been running aimlessly, without a thought in my head. But I had been following a map I didn’t know I kept inside my heart. Soon enough, I found myself in the grove where my father was buried. I had remembered.
    I hadn’t been here in a very long time. Not since I was a little girl. But I must have recalled there were pine trees. I must have remembered the way deep inside.
    There was a flat blue stone to mark his grave, and on that stone, engraved too deeply ever to disappear, was a star. I thought of my name. Estrella. My father’s dark star. I thought about all the secrets in my house. I thought about the way we loved each other. When I was a little girl and came here with my mother, we had left two small stones on my father’s gravestone to mark our remembrance. I did that now.
    It took me a long time to return to the hill overlooking our town. When I got there and looked down, there was nothing I felt I wanted from that place. Usually I felt I was gazing at my home; now it was only a cluster of houses, tile roofs, fields and meadows, and trees. It might have been anyplace, somewhere I’d never been before.

 

    Love

    I n the outskirts, the Muslim quarter was quiet, but the closer I got to the center of the village, the noisier it became. There were riots in the Plaza, neighbor turned against neighbor. Bloody betrayal on every step. Shops had their locks and doors ripped away. People were carrying stolen goods on their backs: rugs and kettles and bolts of cloth. It might have seemed like a carnival except for the screaming, and the rising smoke, and the bitterness in the air. The lime trees in the Plaza had been set on fire. Lime trees when they burn smell black and evil, like honey when it’s scalded, like rotten fruit. People said those trees had always been there and that our town would continue as long as they flowered and grew.
    Andres had been waiting for me at the edge of our neighborhood. He’d seen me run off and had been worried.
    This is no time to be wandering around,
he said.
    I have the feeling I don’t even know who I am.
    It was the time when anything could happen. It was the time when a single word could turn your world upside down.
    Don’t worry. I know who you are in your heart,
Andres said.
That’s all that matters.
    And that was it.