Jacob's Folly (5 page)

M
asha stared into the TV, her breathing shallow. The pillows had sunk beneath her back; without thinking, she turned to plump them. A pain, sharp, yet old, like a wound that had been poked at a thousand times, jabbed at her heart with each beat, echoing out through her chest, into her throat. She stopped as if caught red-handed, cursing herself for forgetting. Extremely slowly, like a sloth, she turned back to the TV and lay gingerly back on the pillow, waiting for her heart to slow down, the pain that bloomed inside her with each beat to subside. She took little sips of breath, her body rigid, and stared up at the screen. The only way to be free of the pain was to stay perfectly still. She couldn't lean back, she couldn't laugh, she couldn't cough. She had a quarter of an inch to move and that was it.

Masha had never watched so much television before. Through windows she had glimpsed images here and there, bright colors, flashes of expression on the actors' faces. Her mother had recently bought a portable DVD player for once-weekly use, but the only movie allowed on it so far was
The Lion King
. That was the one complete movie she had ever seen. But this night in the hospital Masha had gorged herself. She had watched
Top Gun, Mystic Pizza
, and several episodes of
Sex and the City
. Her eyes ached, yet she couldn't bring herself to switch
the thing off. She might never be able to watch this much again. Now, on the screen, an award ceremony: a girl Masha's age was smiling. A young man beside her was wearing a tuxedo. The girl had bare arms, loose red hair. Her skin seemed very smooth. A person off-screen put a microphone up to her face and asked her what designer she was wearing. She smiled and called out a name. She said she was proud to be there. She seemed so happy. Masha looked up at the girl. A longing was taking shape in her, a charged notion that had been gathering all night. Those girls, she thought. Those girls in the movies, in the shows. They were just people. They had all come from someplace. They hadn't been born inside those stories. And the thought of getting there, the amazing getting there, to the point where you were allowed to live inside those multiple worlds, that kaleidoscopic, endless story machine, tugged at her, prying her away from all the certainty she'd had only the day before. Masha had appeared in many all-female shows in school, and for charity events, which were performed for an audience of women only. She had been, all the women said, astonishingly good. She always got the lead. But her fame was confined to the women in her community; women were not allowed to perform in front of men. Masha had always accepted this prohibition as simply as she accepted the weather. Hashem did not want her to act or sing in front of men, so she could not. Disobeying Him was out of the question. Yet today, for the first time, an alternate future glimmered in the corner of her eye. It was absurd to her, this thinking—as if she had suddenly denied the fact of gravity and insisted that one day she could float in the air like a speck of dust. She wondered if it was her
yetzer hara
talking—everyone had an evil inclination, the self-serving part of you that tempted you to disobey the commandments, or to talk gossip, or be bad in general. She tried to squelch the thought. I heard her innocent cravings in my head as if they were my own. They interrupted my despair. Masha shut her eyes. Her eyelids were pale and pure as a baby's. For a moment she drifted into sleep. Then, woken by pain, she said her morning prayer of thanks at being returned to her
body:
Modah ani lifanecha, melech chai v'kayam sheh-hechezarta bi nishmati b'chemlah rabbah emunatecha
.

For a long moment Masha and I stayed perfectly still, she in her pain and I in mine. I wished I could give her what she wanted.

A knock at the door interrupted our contemplation. Reflexively, Masha reached for the remote to turn off the TV, and her heart sped up. The pain radiated through her chest with each heartbeat, like ripples of water after a rock plunks in. She lay still, waiting for the ripples to subside.

“Hello, Masha,” the doctor said. Masha turned off the television.

“Hi,” said Masha, strangling the end of even that short word.

“I am Dr. Heptulla. How's the chest?”

“Not so good,” she whispered. The doctor sat down. He had flawless dark terra-cotta skin, a thin nose with a little bulb at the end of it, and a smiling, generous mouth.

“We have the results of your EKG and X-ray now, Masha. I'll have to go over them with your parents. Do you have any idea when they might be here?”

“Could take them a long time,” she whispered. “They'll have to walk.” The doctor looked perplexed. “It's Shabbos,” she explained. “We're not allowed to take the train or drive or …” She shrugged, embarrassed.

“Where do you live?” asked the doctor.

“Far Rockaway,” she said huskily, closing up her hospital gown with a slow, old-lady motion.

“That's a long walk.”

“So what do I have?” asked Masha.

“The chest pain is being caused by pericarditis, which is an inflammation around the heart. Did you have a cold, a virus, recently?”

“A sore throat,” Masha said.

“Do you still have that?”

“No.” He took out a tongue depressor and stood up, walking toward her. She shrank back.

“Open your mouth, say aahh.” Reluctantly, she did so. He peered down her gullet.

“And you are twenty?” he said.

“Twenty-one,” she whispered.

“All the same, I'm going to have the nurses page me when your parents get here. In the meantime you should sleep.”

He pushed the red paging button and a fresh-faced nurse appeared. “Can you set Masha up so she can sleep?” asked Dr. Heptulla. There was a hint of irritation in his voice. He knew, Masha thought, that she'd been watching TV all night.

“Please don't tell my parents,” she murmured.

“What?” asked Dr. Heptulla.

“That I've been watching TV.”

“Don't worry, I won't,” he said, perplexed. “But now you really do need to sleep.” The young nurse had arranged the pillows high, and held Masha gently as she slowly rested her head on the cool pillowcase. She was so tired. Her pure eyelids closed. Within seconds, Masha was asleep.

I gaped at her sleeping there. I had run away from Jewish women for most of my adult life. Yet I couldn't stop the emotion that was building up in me. The girl was so touching: in pain, very sick, it seemed—yet with that ambition, planted in her that night, and growing, ineluctable as a healthy fetus, in the womb of her spirit. My love for her hurt; I felt it as a catch in my chest, a lump of feeling.

I marched back and forth along the metal window frame, feeling the morning sun on my wings, the steel gathering heat under my feet, a powdery smell of dust in my nostrils. Through the dirty glass I could see, far below, a man and a woman holding a small child by the hands. The living—how ignorant they were of the hoax that was being pulled on them! What indignities they had in store. I had never known such despair. Wrenched from a death that was after all not so bad, in that there was no consciousness involved, in order to become a lovesick fly, I felt hoodwinked and abused. After a lout's career of joyous disconnection
in affairs of the body, I had finally fallen in love, even if it was with a Jewess—and I was dead—worse than dead: I was an insect! I hated God, that prankster, and vowed to dedicate my fly's life to his debasement.
Oh, where are the dark angels?
I thought loftily,
that I might join ranks with them to overthrow the old despot!

I turned and looked over at Masha, who was sleeping now, having guzzled from the box of light and its world of temptations all night long. Her beauty was a torture. I noticed another fly, smaller than me, and, I intuited, a female, drinking from a droplet of orange juice on the rim of Masha's glass, just at the place where my girl's lips had left a perfect impression. I took off and alighted on the edge of the glass, just behind the female, a petite, glossy fly, recently hatched. Her smell was delicious—a cocktail of candy, orange juice, and excrement that filled me with straightforward lust. Never having done this before, I felt somewhat insecure, yet I needed above all to conquer something, someone, today of all days. Without thinking, I assertively leapt on the female. She took off. Terrified, I held on desperately, my forelegs clasping her face, as she looped through the air trying to shake me off. I was amazed to feel my penis emerge from within my body like a turtle's head and craftily enter her as she bucked and twirled beneath me, my little legs clamped around her hairy trunk. The wind whipping at my eyes, I stared at Masha's sleeping face. Masha woke now, as if stirred by my desire, and blinked slowly. She smiled, curious, mildly entertained at the sight of two copulating flies looping randomly through the air like a pricked balloon. The fact of my beloved girl watching me as I fucked was so erotic to me that pleasure infused me without warning and I ejaculated violently, my whole tiny body racked with what felt like a life-threatening explosion of sweetness inside me. The female, unlocked, buzzed off as I, barely able to beat my wings, landed heavily on the windowsill, dizzy and slightly nauseous. In all my years of sensual excess, I had never had an experience close to this. I felt a tightness in my abdomen and at the end of my back. For the first time since my arrival in the
sublunar world, I relieved my bowels, dropping a string of feculae along the window ledge, infinitesimal dots aligned like the three periods used to open up a sentence to a chasm of uncertainty …

Some time later, I was spitting on a crumb of Masha's toast, softening it for my long tongue to slurp up. My beloved was breathing softly through her nostrils. I felt calmer. The door opened. In walked Mordecai Edelman. I froze in confused amazement. He was dressed almost exactly as I once had been, in the eighteenth century. For a moment I thought I had stumbled on a wrinkle in the fabric of time. Surely this man did not belong to the present. I wondered if this was part of the mystical hoax being played on me.

Mordecai Edelman was a big, shaggy man with a gleaming beard and small, smiling eyes. A large fur hat was set upon his head like a crown. I recognized this as the Shabbos hat of the most pious. He wore his sidelocks short, however, and tucked them behind his ears. His coat was long and black. Behind him, his wife, Pearl, walked in. Pearl was small, with a voluptuous physique and a pleasant, smiling face. She wore a glossy auburn wig that came down to her shoulders, and she was dressed in a bright blue coat that ended below the knee to reveal a pair of thick beige stockings. I watched the family reunion warily, reminding myself that I was a fly, and could not be found out or judged by these devout people. The parents hugged their daughter, and she, not wishing to disappoint them, made an enormous effort to circle her shapely arms around their necks, her heart searing the flesh in her chest with every beat. Having greeted them both, the sweet girl fell back on the pillow, her face very pale and pinched with pain. Her eyes glittered like black jewels in her ashen face.

Dr. Heptulla came in soon after and arranged three chairs so they could all have a chat.

“You had quite a journey to get here today,” intoned the doctor with elegant, clipped English.

“Yes,” said Mordecai, wiping his brow under the fur hat with a cotton handkercheif. “Sixty-four stairs just to get to this floor!” Pearl laughed, but there were tears in her eyes. She sat beside her daughter, squeezing her hand.

“It took us an hour and a half, door to door,” she said. The doctor shook his head, smiling.

“Mr. and Mrs. Edelman, we have done an EKG, and a sonogram, and a chest X-ray,” the doctor intoned, one long-fingered hand in the air as if dispensing a benediction. “Masha has an acute case of pericarditis, an inflammation around the heart, which in a healthy young woman like her we treat with bed rest and Tylenol. These cases are generally triggered by a virus. I can find nothing organically wrong with the heart itself.” Pearl nodded, smiling, the tears in her eyes trembling. She had known for days that there was something wrong. Masha had said her chest hurt, she couldn't breathe properly. She should have brought her in sooner.

“If the pericarditis doesn't recede within a week, or if it recurs, there are other tests we can do,” said Dr. Heptulla. “Other medications. But for now I think we should go with a gentle approach.”

M
y wedding night was a disaster. Though fourteen, Hodel had the mentality of a small child; her submission to my clumsy fingers seemed obscenely forced by the unseen hands of our parents and tradition. She whimpered and shrank away from my caresses. Her newly shorn hair, cut after the wedding, as was our tradition, made her look even younger, and confused me terribly. I persevered, mumbling encouragements that it would soon be over. All I could think of was the examination our sheets would be submitted to by Mme Mendel in the morning. With no blood, the marriage would not be real and I would not be a man. As it turned out, I had to prick my own finger and wipe it on the sheet in the morning, having given up my entreaties by dawn. My bride had a week of relief after that first night; the blood of my finger was accepted as Hodel's, and so she was “unclean” for a week and we had to sleep in separate beds. But on the eighth day, my efforts continued. To be fair, Hodel wanted to become a woman and do her duty, but she was terrified. It took a full month to actually deflower her; her plump little body seemed to have no natural ingress. I felt I was trying to puncture a thigh, or a belly, so resiliently did her flesh resist my poor prick. Night after night I came to a crisis without actually entering my own wife, her rubbery body repelling me again and again. At
last I convinced her to straddle me, and I impaled her, though my sense of triumph was dulled by her whimpering as I finally burst the dam.

I fluctuated between guilt and despair in our first months together as I realized that I had been saddled with a hysteric. Hodel spent most of her time in my presence crying for her mother.

The terrible Mme Mendel lived upstairs from us (as per our marriage contract we had been allotted one large, drafty room previously occupied by the recently deceased paternal grandparents of my Hodel), but she insisted from the first day that we live on our own as husband and wife, not as her children. A good head taller than her husband and all but one of her six sons, Mme Mendel had black eyes and swarthy, wind-lashed skin. She had an intimidating, predatory slowness about her; she never rushed, yet she was prone to sudden surges of dislike and irritation, and lashed out at her endless progeny with a whip of a tongue in the fastest Yiddish I had ever heard. Having come from a tiny town in Poland when her first few children were young, she still had the mind of a provincial woman. Her superstitions were elaborate and terrifying: a pregnant woman stepping on fingernail clippings meant certain miscarriage; a hair in the milk meant a demon had been in the house. She never entered a room without kissing the mezuzah. She had even gone so far as to avoid giving her children grand names, so as not to make the demons jealous. She chose Hodel, Leib, Sheindl—no Esthers or Abrahams for this canny lady! She never paid anyone a compliment, for the same reason. If anyone complimented her, she spat on the floor to ward off the evil eye. When her children were babies, she made tiny tears in their garments. Demons were of a lower order than humans, and they were always jealous of us, she explained. No one should be too beautiful or too lucky. She sensed countless evil spirits and sprites swirling around her, just waiting for her to slip up. Still, I was grateful that she allowed us to eat our evening meal upstairs with her and the rest of the family, as Hodel seemed to be genuinely afraid of boiling water or hot liquid of any kind.

Every evening at six o'clock I would report upstairs to the family
apartment. My child-wife, having already been basking in her mother's indifference for several hours, always looked up at me from the dreaded bubbling stew she'd been forced to stir, standing as far away as possible from the pot, lest the liquid boil over and scald her—with a frightened, surprised smile, her shiny cheeks the purplish color of turnips, a few cropped ginger hairs peeking out of her matron's bonnet, as though she had forgotten all about me and our marriage and then, with my entrance, was compelled to remember.

Only eight people could sit at the Mendel table at a time, so there were three sittings a night. Mme Mendel stood until the last child was served, languorously scooping meat stew out of the enormous, dented, seemingly bottomless pot. Hodel and I were allowed to attend the first seating, because we were married. Also in attendance was Hodel's badgerlike father, Moishe, her idolized oldest brother, Leib, who, at sixteen, was the only one of the other Mendel children to be married, and his cunning wife, Leah. Leib had already impregnated his wife twice in two years. I could tell from the way the hugely pregnant Leah asked Mme Mendel, lisping, how old she was when each of her babies was born, that she planned on outdoing her. Mme Mendel, however, was not out of the running yet. Her fourteenth child was only two; she could easily drop another litter. She answered Leah's questions with deliberate vagueness, as if the age she was when she bore her eighth or twelfth child were a secret akin to Kabbalah. I was always seated next to the silent and shrunken mother of Mme Mendel, who had skin the texture of dried beef. She spent much of each meal glowering at me as I ate my stew, as if every mouthful I took were an affront to her finer manners.

Dinner inevitably began with Mme Mendel asking me in a sort of offhand way how much money I had made that day. I always told her, to the last sou. She then asked me exactly what I had sold. I had to describe each object in great detail: one painted enamel snuffbox, twenty sous; one pair of feather-lined men's kid gloves, four livres; one collapsible walking stick with an engraved tin handle, five livres; one
iron teapot, ten sous. After each description, Mme Mendel would squint her eyes, as if visualizing the object and matching it with the price. Then she would either nod, frowning appreciatively, her eyebrows up, or shake her head and smile derisively at my lack of business acumen. M. Mendel, with his two badger's streaks of white down the center of his reddish hair, and his long, pointy nose, would chuckle and then suddenly gasp for air. The first time Mme Mendel asked me for my inventory, I tried padding my list with a couple of items I had not actually sold. But at the end of the meal she demanded to see the money; I was humiliated and had to confess I had made a mistake. She looked at me and smiled, as if to say,
That's just what I expected
.

Mme Mendel's disdain for me was conjugated throughout the family: male, female, plural and singular, from the wizened grannie to the petulant toddler, they all thought of me as beneath them. Only Hodel, the irregular one, did not judge me in this way. My low status was due in part to my family of peddlers being far humbler than the Mendels, and in part because I had been duped into a marriage with Hodel, a child they all knew was not right in the head. The main reason I had no status in the family, though, was that Mme Mendel had decided I was a nudnik with no head for business. If she had fallen in love with me, I would have been a demigod. Her power in the clan was absolute.