He, She and It (63 page)

She felt a little guilty, because she had suffered for two days figuring what to say to Ari, but something had to be said. Malkah was Grandma. House was House. House was smarter, more personal than any house he had met, but he was a very
little boy and would not think twice about House. He was a privileged child who always had a house to speak to: Turn on the lights. Close the window. Sing to me. But how to introduce Yod? Then she had taken a blind leap forward into what she prayed would be a future. This is your stepfather. Let Ari gradually observe the nature of Yod as time passed. Let him grow up thinking men were rational, benign, gentle, infinitely patient and vastly intelligent and strong. Why should he need to know that Yod was also a weapon? Yod would never use violence against Ari, of that she was sure.

Yod had always been sensitive as a lover, beyond competence into finesse, but tonight as they made love in her bed, for the first time she felt in him something like passion. He was desperately aware of the brevity of their time together. He was driven not only by his immense desire to please but by a new need within him to be secure in his possession. He was hungry for proof of their connection.

“I must leave you so quickly, I want everything at once,” he said when they lay still. “I want to keep making love and I want to be talking. I’ve always missed you during the time we aren’t together, but we were together at least nine hours every day.”

“Maybe the Council meeting will work out in our favor. I’ll go, of course.”

“You aren’t ashamed?”

“I’m afraid. But I’m hoping they’ll decide that Avram can’t make you work twenty hours a day.”

“Perhaps they’ll judge he can do anything he likes with me, since he made me.… It isn’t that I can’t replay any of our times together in my mind, but it isn’t enough. Now, when I want more than ever to be with you and I want to be part of our son’s life, I am forbidden.”

She still flinched when he said “our son,” but she kept it within. She was ashamed of that meanness. He had given her Ari as truly as Josh had. Josh whom Yod had killed. “I miss you also. When Nili leaves, I think you should move in. Malkah would be pleased.”

“I’d like that, Shira. I don’t need a whole room. I don’t need a bed. We can make love in your bed as we do now. I need only a closet and somewhere to put my terminal and equipment. Has Nili said when she’s leaving?”

Shira shook her head, tracing the line of his brow and nose with her finger. “No. She comes and goes a lot. She’s gone for a week at a time.”

“Avram has intentionally separated us. I know it! Sometimes I want to strike him to the ground.”

“Don’t you have an inhibition against violence to Avram?”

“I was programmed to obey him absolutely and to be incapable of injuring him.… But any programming can be changed, Shira. I could change the sequence for destroying me that he controls, if only I could access it. I haven’t been able to locate it.”

“But you’ve found the other?”

“It’s designed to be read-only, not alterable, but all things change,” he said almost sadly. “I hoped for a long time Avram would let me go willingly. Now my only hope is that the Council may free me.”

“If they can realize you are a person, fully conscious, a thinking, feeling being, they’ll free you. But you must control your anger at Avram. You must! There are other methods of changing his mind. Promise me.”

“I’ll control my frustration. But, Shira, maybe I can’t be a citizen. Tikva has chosen to be peaceful. I was designed to be a weapon. I was programmed to find the use of violence in defense or attack a keen pleasure. And I do. You know that, and you fear it.”

She saw Josh crumpled on the floor. “I know you can change yourself. You have the capacity to learn and grow, the same as any other person.”

“I’ll try to impress the Council favorably.” He held her face in his hands. “Now already I have to go.”

After Yod had left her, she looked in on Ari. He had flung the sheet off. She covered him, stood a moment over him in the glow she had asked the house to brighten. “Dim,” she said softly and returned to her room.

She sat in the chair by the windows, her hands loosely folded in her lap. Perhaps her relationship with Yod need not come up in the Council meeting. No, it was relevant. She could not deny him. She was Yod’s far more fully than she had ever been Josh’s, and she must fight for him. The Council, the gabby long-winded ultra-democratic Council: her hopes and fears would be tossed on its gusts of hot air. Malkah and Avram would have to step aside, leaving the others to hear Yod’s plea and vote her life up or down. But it was the one hope she could see of freeing Yod from Avram. The Council would decide that Yod was a citizen of Tikva or Avram’s tool: it was that simple.

FORTY-TWO

The Work of the Shadchen

Joseph and Yakov are heroes of the ghetto, along with the dead, who are buried with grief and every sign of gratitude the living can summon. Joseph and Yakov walk the streets like princes. Children run after them and sing about them. Women beam on them and flirt. Men slap their shoulders, touch their sleeves, consult them on everything, of which Joseph particularly knows nothing whatsoever.

Once again Yakov asks Chava to marry him. Once again she smiles and firmly, absolutely, with no flirtatious edge, refuses and bids him remarry elsewhere. This time he takes her advice, and by the next weekend he is engaged to the oldest granddaughter of Mordecai Maisl, the richest man in the ghetto and one of the richest merchants in all of Prague. For a widower with sons to take care of, this is an unheard-of coup. From a poor hardworking scholar with a good voice, Yakov becomes a man to reckon with. Rivka Maisl is no beauty, but she is a sweet-tempered darling, who is thrilled to be betrothed to a hero of the Battle of the Gates. She is only seven years older than his oldest son, but soon there will be younger siblings, everybody says, smiling, and Mordecai will provide them with servants and someplace to live.

Does Chava regret? Joseph watches, wondering. She seems honestly pleased for Yakov. She seems relieved. She sings as she goes up and down the stairs of the Maharal’s narrow house. She sings as she helps in the kitchen. When she works on the Maharal’s manuscript, she is silent, but she smiles to herself. At once Joseph likes Yakov much better. He wishes Yakov happiness whenever they pass each other. Yakov can hear the note of sincerity in Joseph’s deep voice and beams back. Yakov is proud of himself as he makes ready for his wedding. He is a practical man, and Chava is forgotten, except as the Maharal’s secretary. Rivka takes on the radiance of a very young woman who feels suddenly important and desired. The marriage cannot happen till the end of the counting of the Omer, six more
weeks, but then Rivka Maisl and Yakov Sassoon will be wed.

Many women look at me, Joseph broods as he sweeps out the Altneushul. It is not like the poor little whore who belonged to the knight, who just wanted to get me on her side. No, I walk through the streets and women stare after me now with admiration. In the narrow white silence of the Altneushul after morning prayers, he leans on his broom and imagines.

Two different shadchens have approached him with offers to introduce him to young maidens from good families interested in matrimony, widows still young with fat dowries, whatever he wants. “A man should marry,” they tell him. “It is time. You’re a poor man, Joseph the Shamash, Joseph called Samson, but right now you can pick and choose like a Maisl. All the young women want to marry you. All the mamas want you for a son-in-law. You can be the chassen of a maidel who stands to inherit a good peddler’s route. Let me make you a match you’d die for!”

Joseph puts them off. He is humble. He says he is grateful to the Maharal for taking him in and hiring him, for teaching him his letters. He is poor, and any wife he took now would regret him later. He will think about it, he promises.

What he thinks about is Chava, singing on the stairway, humming as she makes the soup with the inner unborn eggs of the chicken in it. The Maharal needs sustenance, for he is not feeling well. “Age has me in its teeth,” Judah says. “It’s biting through me. The angel of death, Moloch ha maves, is beginning to nibble on what’s left of my tough old flesh.”

Isaac Horowitz is hanging around far too much to suit Joseph. He, too, listens to Chava singing like a finch up and down the steep stairs. He, too, notes that Yakov is out of the picture, betrothed to a Maisl. It is full heady spring. The willows along the Vltava have unfurled their chartreuse banners. Fields of daffodils bloom. Inside the courtyard of the palace of the emperor are beds of scarlet tulips, the newest rage. Hardly anyone has seen them, but everyone talks of them. Little azure butterflies alight even on the dark pavements of the ghetto to dry their wings.

Horowitz has a long conversation with the Maharal. Chava is summoned. Judah is still feeling poorly and must receive her in his bedchamber. A long conversation entails. Chava is not singing when she comes out. She looks grim and a little angry. Horowitz is summoned next. He emerges with his shoulders sagging. He goes straight to Chava, where she sits proofreading the Maharal’s treatise on the Megillah, the story of Esther.

“You won’t reconsider?”

“I have considered carefully. You do me a great honor by proposing to me, Isaac Horowitz. But I have no desire to marry again.”

“Is it because you feel I should have fought? Taken up crude arms?”

“You are a credit to our people because of your mind and your hard work. But admiration does not necessarily produce conjugal affection. I’m a cold woman, Isaac. You can do far better for yourself.”

“I don’t want any other woman. You’re the only woman I will ever want. I am not changeable and I am not practical, as you have noticed. I don’t change because something doesn’t work out well or easily.”

“I am not something that is going to work out, no matter how patiently you wait. Marriage is not in my own best interest.”

“Chava, marriage between us would mean finer intellectual work. We would soar like angels into the firmament of thought. Never could I imagine this with any other woman.”

“Isaac, I have tried that, and I understand that if a woman is to soar, she had better beat her own wings. I don’t want to be anyone’s wife again. Once was good, once was enough. I have my work set out for me.”

“The Maharal would let you go. He told me that. He talked to you for me. I know he encourages this match.”

“He admires you enough to sacrifice me to you, yes. But I don’t admire anyone that much. I want to see all the Maharal’s books through the press. Then I want to go to Eretz Israel. I want to make my aliyah. There I will die.”

“If you don’t marry me, I’ll abandon my work and my studies here. I’ll go to Israel myself. I’ll marry you or no one. The holy one led me to you and put in my heart this desire, which is not impure but of a piece with everything I hope for and believe.”

“Yitzak, you do me great honor with your proposal, but I can’t accept it. I may be your just reward, but you aren’t mine. I care for you as a brother, not as a husband. This will never change.”

“Is there someone else?”

Chava looks at him with exasperation. She has told him since the first time he spoke with her that she does not desire marriage. It seems that he cannot believe her. Finally she says, “Yes.”

“Ah,” he sighs. He turns away ashen and drags off with slow
steps. He goes to pack. He was serious when he said he would depart Prague at once. But not before he has one last conversation with the Maharal.

Now, when Chava said there was someone else, the person she had in mind was herself. She is the person she wants at the center of her life. It was to find herself again she had left her son and the draining embrace of her husband’s family and returned to her grandfather’s house. She craves the clear bright working place of the intellect and its struggles with tradition and meaning.

She admires women who descend into the necessary factories of the body and the home and make daily life happen. But as a midwife, she has enough of the flesh and the wet red pain of living. She is an excellent midwife. If a mother can be brought through safely, she brings her through. By law, a mother is preferred to an unborn child. No child is deemed fully human till born and until welcomed into the community, named. But if she can save the baby, she saves the baby too. Life forces itself into her grasp or she must wrestle for it. Her work thrusts her hands and face right into the screaming and the bleeding, the hot smelly brew of birthing, our brute entrance into the violence of being alive.

Perhaps she has chosen midwifery because it puts her in the direct service of women who are doing the work women are supposed to do. They are the soldiers of the flesh. She cares for them, but she declines to serve in that army of procreation and daily reclamation every woman is raised to join. She put in her brief time, and she resigned. No man seems to understand that in offering marriage, he is asking her to cut off her head. How could she bear and raise children, run a household and also engage in intellectual labor, scholarship, religious thought? The needs of the family crowd out the more quiet, delicate needs of the intellect. Daily her midwifery reminds her, lest she forget. She will not be thrust back into that hot noisy place to live, not for the love of anyone.