Jephte's Daughter (17 page)

His action seemed to wake her from her stupor. “Isaac, please, please. Be careful with it, it’s a delicate instrument.” How to get his destructive hands off it? Pry it away? How, how? “I wasn’t doing anything wrong,” she pleaded. “Just taking some pictures. Pretty pictures of the hills.” She instinctively spoke to him in soothing, simple language, the way one speaks to a very small child or a maniac. “There aren’t even any people in them. It took me such a long time to focus right and get the perfect lighting. How can you even…?” His attack was so sudden and vicious. She had had no training in self-defense, except for a few moves Elizabeth had once shown her for fun. Her parents, her beauty, her money, had always protected her before. She felt entirely vulnerable and helpless. She had never even really disliked anyone before, but here she was faced with deliberate cruelty and narrow-minded suspicion. It was like being punched or slapped in the face. If Elizabeth were here, she thought suddenly, she would say; “Up yours, Isaac Meyer.” The thought calmed her, and she felt a hysterical giggle begin. She would kick him in the behind and tell him to leave her alone with all this bull. People don’t belong to people, Isaac. Wives don’t belong to husbands. This is a partnership, she would say. And give me back my camera before I kill you.

But she wasn’t Elizabeth. She wasn’t in America, she realized almost for the first time. She was in a totally different society with a radically different set of rules. Women did not call their husband obscenities. They did not openly defy them or their wishes. His hands were big and powerful. She rubbed her wrists, which were still red and hot from his grip. She suddenly realized that for the first time in her life she was afraid of being physically hurt. She stood up with dignity and it took all her courage to say calmly: “Please give me back my camera, Isaac. I promise to tell you the next time I go. I’ll put my wig back on, only it’s so hot and heavy. I’ll try harder…” She was ready to promise anything to get the camera back, to put her books away, out of harm’s way. “I’m just not used to all these rules. We learned different things in school from the rabbis in America. They’re more lenient there. I’ll try harder to be a good wife…please give me back the camera, Isaac.” She reached out for it.

He pulled it out of her grasp. Torture was a new experience for Isaac Meyer. So long dominated by his parents and teachers, by the million dos and don’ts of his belief, he felt acute pleasure in watching another human being squirm helplessly under his total control. He toyed with the overweening power of his male strength and authority. They were all alone, after all. Who was to see or know what happened here? Deep in his soul, he was fearless, laughing at the idea that any unseen power could judge him, laughing at God. He thought of her soft body turned away from him in revulsion, remembered the stiffening of her limbs, contracting away from him.

“I told you graven images were a sin, didn’t I?”

“But, Isaac, I told you, it’s only trees, hills…”

He flipped open the camera and ripped out the film, exposing the roll. A red and blinding light lit up behind her eyes. She imagined jumping on him, scratching his face with her nails. But she could do nothing. She was immobilized with a shaking hatred. Her tears seemed to please him. Rather than soften him, it spurred him on. The small bully in him, so long repressed, sprang up whole. “Now you will hand over the books. Come on. I’ll take them eventually, so don’t be foolish. Don’t make me hurt you.”

“But, Isaac, what do you need them for? Can’t we talk about this?” But all the while she spoke, she watched him methodically pick up the scattered volumes and place them in the carton.

“No!” But with one quick and brutal movement, he snatched the books out of her hands and added them to the pile. He carried them to the bathtub. She saw him empty bottles of toilet water on them, then set them on fire. The smoke rose and billowed and crashed on the ceiling, then flattened and spread out, polluting the house. Grabbing her camera and her purse, she ran out into the street, blinded by grief and smoke and the stench of something so foul and cruel—not just Isaac, but the way he twisted all the things she held sacred to fashion a prison for her. It broke her heart. She hailed a taxi and took it to the main post office, the only place one could place a foreign call.

“Aba,” she whispered, choking.

“Who is this? Batsheva. Oh, yes.”

“Oh, yes”? No “My dear child, what is the matter?” Doesn’t he hear that I’m crying? “Aba. I want to come home,” she managed to get out before her sobs shook her body and made the words incoherent. There was silence. “Aba, please. I’m so unhappy. Isaac is a cruel man. He has…”

“Batsheva, listen and listen carefully.” The voice was that of a stern stranger. “Isaac called me a little while ago. You must stop this nonsense immediately. How dare you parade around Jerusalem in pants and without head covering, all alone in the middle of the day? If only half what he says is true…Is it true?”

“I just wore some culottes and I took some pictures,” she protested sickly, hopelessly. She tried to conjure the image of her young father to be her companion in that booth: his work-roughened hands digging deep into his pockets for candy, caressing her hair out of her eyes, smoothing the pain from cuts and bruises. But she could not find him. He had disappeared, and all that remained was this righteous stranger, granite hard and cold.

“So it’s true, then. I can’t believe my ears. That my daughter should prove such a disgrace to me and to the two-hundred-year-old name of Ha-Levi. Hitler tried to destroy our family. But you, you, Batsheva, are worse than he. Because you will finally complete his work. You will destroy everything I have worked and prayed for.”

“Aba, sweet Aba, please listen to me. It’s not true. He is so mean to me. He took away my camera, burned my books. He said they were filthy…” She sounded so foolish, she realized. Childishly foolish. But there, exhausted and heartbroken, totally alone, she needed her father’s comfort and she had no words to earn it. She had been taught never to speak ill of anyone, to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. Even if it were true, it was
richilus
, slander, one of the greatest sins. How could she say he was a monster who reveled in humiliation and petty bullying? How could she describe how the revulsion crept up her skin like insects when he touched her? She did not know these things, although she felt them. She had not yet the consciousness to separate and define her feelings and trace their history. She wept bitterly into the black, impersonal phone.

“My dear child. I know how hard it is for you.” His voice had softened, becoming lovingly familiar. “A new country, newly married. There are so many things to get used to. You must look to your husband for guidance. He is a scholar, I know, and probably busy with his books. But his scholarship must have given him some understanding. He will teach you what you need to know. You are acting out of ignorance. Jerusalem is not California. It’s a privilege for you to be there. Only the holiest people have such a
zchus
. Try to be worthy of it, of your husband.”

“But, Papa, he’s…”

“Please, nothing bad about Isaac. I will not listen, it’s
loshon hara
. I am going to hang up now. Write to me and try to make me proud.”

“Papa, don’t!” But the phone had gone dead and outside the door, the blond tourist in the Harvard T-shirt looked in curiously. He had a kind face, she thought. Like Elizabeth. If only she could call her! She would understand. But Elizabeth was at Cambridge and had not written so far.

Isaac had called him. She imagined him watching her run out the door, his sick smile on his lips, knowing that she would call her father, knowing what would happen. At that moment her dislike and fear and humiliation suddenly converged and metamorphosed into an emotion she had not known before: hatred.

She wandered aimlessly around the city, her mind a blank. With sunset the weather in Jerusalem turned cold. A light drizzle began to fall. She shivered, hugging herself, and did not return the stares of passersby, well-dressed in heavy sweaters and carrying umbrellas. She had rushed out of the house with nothing but a few cents in her purse, change from a soda she had bought. The rest she had already used to pay the cab-driver. Her stomach ached from hunger, and her mouth was caked and dry. She was so tired, tired. She sat down by the bus stop and watched bus after bus come and go. Her feet grew wet and soggy from the pelting rain. I have no place to go, but to him. No one at all that I know, but him. Slowly, the hunger and cold chipped away at her pride and fear until only the most basic, primal needs of her body were left. In the distance she could already hear the faraway drone of the bus, bearing down, waiting to stop in front of her and bear her away to him, to Isaac. In her heart a weary resignation began to take hold.

Suddenly, the sound of footsteps made her lift her head. It was a young girl running to catch the bus. She wore a pantsuit with a zipper down the front that hugged the curves of her pretty body. Her light, agile feet danced along the wet street, carefree and reckless. She was laughing out loud, breathless, and her long dark hair, all sparkly from raindrops, streamed out behind her, bouncing joyously with each step. Batsheva felt her heart stop. No, whatever happened, she would not do that. Go back to Isaac Harshen in that smoke-filled house. She felt her lips press together with resolve. She took her purse over to a lamp post and rummaged through it in the waning light. So little money! But then she found a zippered compartment she had forgotten about. She looked inside it and there, still shiny and valid, was an American Express Gold Card, Visa, and MasterCard, and her American passport.

The bed at the King David Hotel was very large and comfortable. It was an old, elegant hotel, finely maintained, she decided, and the food, delivered hot and tempting on a tray, was wonderful. She was not sure how much she ate, or even what. But it was by turns warm and sweet and savory and filling. The aroma of steaming coffee filled the room, mingling with the heady scent of a fantastic concoction they called a Sabra—a rum-soaked cake with a baseball-sized scoop of whipped cream. She leaned back into the fluffy pillows, licking the cream daintily off her fingertips like a perfectly contented child, and snuggled beneath the blankets, toasty warm. Her wet clothes lay drying all over the room. Later, she thought, I will go down into the lobby and buy some new clothes. She went to the vanity and unpinned her hair, letting it tumble down her shoulders and back. She danced around the room and let it whip around her face and felt a joy, a youthful exuberance, bubble through her body the way it had not in many months. She didn’t look too closely at her face in the mirror, afraid that it might somehow have changed, that she might look visibly older. Somehow she had expected that. She allowed herself only one quick glance in which she could find nothing different about the face or body, except that she loved it less now, respected it less. But then she smiled, and the face smiled back: sweet, sweet, pretty thing! She hugged herself.

She formulated no plans but was satisfied to drift. Later she wandered into a boutique in the lobby and flipped idly through the racks of clothes until she came to a bright-red pantsuit with a zipper down the whole front. Her fingers closed around it impulsively. “Would you like to try it on, dear?” the saleslady murmured.

She began to back away hesitantly, then stopped. “Yes,” she said firmly, surprising herself. “I would like that very much.”

The fit, as the saleslady gushed, was magnificent. Tastefully tight and perfect, emphasizing her generous bust and tiny waist and long, long legs. She looked at herself in the mirror, fascinated. She turned around and let her long hair swing like a cape around her shoulders. The image she saw could have been that of a movie star, or a singer, a model or an actress. What a desirable woman I am, she thought, shocked, the thought coming to her as a newly observed fact, the way one suddenly discovers one’s hair is streaked with blond or red from having spent long days out in the sun. The idea made her self-conscious and shy.

She became almost painfully aware of the faces in the lobby and in the shop that had turned to peer at her as she studied herself in the mirror, and she hurried behind the curtain to take the outfit off. A certain part of her was pleased with the attention and urged her to buy it, to walk proudly out of the store wearing it, hips swinging. She had a certain urge to overdo it, to compromise even her own standards of modesty to show her utter comtempt for Isaac’s. The way a put-upon teenager will say: Okay, if that’s what they think of me, that’s what I’ll be. But even though she was just a teenager and very put-upon at the moment, she had a very strong sense of herself, a stubbornness born of years of resisting teachers, friends, parents, and the world outside her golden ghetto. She pressed her lips together. Why should I let him do this to me, make me into something I’m not? She didn’t recognize herself in the mirror as herself, but as the embodiment, the confirmation, of Isaac’s falsest accusations. She took it off and gave it back to the saleswoman apologetically: “It just isn’t me.” The dress she chose was very soft and clingy, with sleeves well above the elbows and a modest but open V neck. She looked very girlish and vulnerable in it. She put nothing on her head to cover her hair. It was a compromise she could live with. Charge it, she told the saleswoman, waving the card like a battle flag. Charge it.

Later that day, she went out and bought bright dresses and leather sandals for long, lovely walks, and high-heeled patent-leather shoes for dancing and a lovely lavender bathing suit, because its color pleased her eye. But if someone were to have asked her seriously at this time where and when and how, precisely, she would do this walking, dancing, and bathing, she would have looked up a little surprised and chagrined perhaps and given the matter some thought. But as it was, no one did and she gave the subject no thought. Like a small child stuffing herself on sweets, she could not satiate her hunger. The buying finally became wearisome to her. She wandered listlessly through the lobby, looking into the shop windows. She stopped in front of the glittering display in Stern’s Jewelers, her eyes fascinated by the diamonds and rubies and emeralds heaped up like a king’s ransom. She pressed her lips together as if to keep from laughing out loud.

“May I help you?”

Help me. Yes. She thought of her father’s harsh voice. “How dare you do this…” “Yes. I am buying myself a present. Something very expensive.” She bought an enormous pearl-and-diamond ring, large and gaudy. Not her style at all, like the necklace in the bank vault. She would never wear it. Waiting for the credit card to clear, she went into the gift shop and bought ten new novels: Vonnegut, Tyler, Shaw, Eco. Charge it, charge it, she told the salespeople. Then she went back and pocketed the small box with the ring she didn’t want, thinking with pleasure of the justice of her father paying the bills, and her hunger began to abate. There was now only one more thing left to buy. She went out of the hotel with firm, purposeful steps and crossed the street, not allowing herself to hesitate for a second, knowing that if she did, her courage, which was not quite real, but rather forged in a dreamlike vacuum, could vanish at any moment.

“Yes, miss?” The travel agent’s hair was black and thick, she noted, and his eyes appreciative. Israeli men. So many had those large, handsome heads and that dark, romantic coloring. She felt an absurd blush creep up her cheek.

“I…I,” This was no time for weakening, she kicked herself mentally. Play the part, damn it! She straightened up and lifted her head, looking him full in the face with a mysterious smile (at least that’s what she was attempting. She had no way of knowing if it
was
mysterious or simply, as she suspected, foolish and gawking, like a teenager sneaking into an adults-only bar). “I want you to please arrange some tours for me around the country.”

“Of course, miss. Where would you like to go?”

“Everywhere,” she said before she could stop herself.

He laughed. “How long do you have, miss?”

“Why, as long as it takes, I suppose,” she said, getting a little hot, thinking this must be the stupidest conversation the man had ever had. Suspicious too. Maybe he’d call the police or medics. But he just looked at her seriously and politely, and began leafing through some books.

“A five-day tour of the country leaves tomorrow. The Galilee, Tel Aviv, Haifa, then three days in Eilat—a little sun, wonderful this time of year. How is that?”

“Fine,” she said with what she hoped was adult dignity and decision. Then she took out the credit cards and held them out toward him like candy bars, defeated by the smile on his face as she let him choose.

The next day she waited in the lobby early, surrounded by tourists. She didn’t check out of the hotel. A hundred dollars a day didn’t seem worth bothering about, and anyway she needed someplace to leave all her new things. She took only her camera, bathing suit, a dress, and a few changes of underwear. She wore her new dress and walking sandals.

“Where’s your father and mother?”

“Excuse me?” She looked over the woman who had spoken. Teased blond hair, gray at the roots, wearing an unmercifully revealing print dress that showed much more than anyone needed to see of her wrinkled flesh.

“A
maidel
like you by herself.” The woman shook her head doubtfully, with a stare that began at Batsheva’s toes and ended much later at the top of her head. She sighed. “
Nisht geferlich
. So I’ll watch you.” She patted Batsheva’s arm and held on to it relentlessly. Batsheva looked around at the other members of the group and the light bounced off balding heads and little Kodak cameras. There didn’t seem to be anyone under fifty-five.

“Excuse me, I…think I’ve forgotten something.” She backed away politely, pulling her arm free.

“You’ll miss the bus, darling,” the woman called after her, disappointed.

“It’s…brain tumor. Forgot. Just have to have it removed this afternoon. Terribly sorry. Don’t wait.” Batsheva babbled incoherently, practically fleeing.

She made her way to the Jerusalem Central bus station and sat down, as anxious as a little girl on her first school outing, as delighted as a runaway with her foot firmly on the steps of a Greyhound bus bound for faraway places, drunk with the heady sense of freedom.

“I hear Eilat’s great this time of year.”

“Yeah, windsurfing’s great, and the scuba diving…”

Voices filtered out of the bustling crowd. Young, blond tourists having the time of their lives. Young soldiers, handsome and rested, returning from weekend passes; bearded old men; pretty, dark-eyed girls lining the platform waiting impatiently for buses to take them to clear destinations in Tel Aviv, Haifa, Ashdod, and Ashkelon. A bus would pull up and they would shift along the metal railings that kept the lines straight, moving quickly, purposefully, toward some goal: a job, family, a boyfriend or girlfriend. But where was she going to? What was she going to do?

“Eilat,” the young man ahead of her in the ticket line said. He wore a Rolling Stones T-shirt and was tall and muscular with a deep tan. When her turn came to buy her ticket it seemed as good a place to start as any.

“Eilat, one way,” she said. When she turned, he was standing there, waiting for her.

“I’ve never had any luck before now,” he said with a boyish grin. “You’ve only bought one ticket, you’re going my way, and you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen,” he said with frank admiration.

She didn’t know what to do. So she looked at him, blushing, confused, with shy pleasure. She had never dated, never flirted. She was filled with joy at this confirmation of her desirability, but her sense of propriety made her stiffen and move away, carrying his face and words with her like a secret gift, to unwrap and savor in private.

The bus lurched forward in sudden stops and spurts, throwing the passengers “around like cattle,” the elderly man she chose to sit next to groaned, shaking his head and opening his paper. The bus barged around corners and pulled up short at lights. It raced with something of the reckless verve of a motorcyclist on a clean stretch of road, inching into crowded spaces, calling up a symphony of angry beeps and honks all along the road.

“Now I’ll tell you a story,” her seat mate said, folding his paper with resignation. “A famous rabbi goes to heaven to meet his Maker. He sits in the waiting room hour after hour, waiting for his sins to be weighed against his good deeds. The line moves very slowly. All of a sudden, he sees a new fellow come in, go straight to the head of the line, get weighed and sent straight to Eden. Now the rabbi, who has been very patient, gets up, dusts himself off, and goes to complain. ‘Who was that fellow that he got such treatment, while I have been sitting here for hours?’ ‘Why, he’s an Israeli bus driver.’ ‘What!’ the rabbi says. ‘How could it be that a man like that waltzes right in, immediately gets weighed and sent right through the Pearly Gates while I, a famous rabbi, the leader of a large congregation, am kept waiting for hours in doubt?’ ‘Well,’ the angels tell him, ‘it’s really quite simple. When you get up to make a speech, you cause hundreds of people to fall asleep. But when an Israeli bus driver sits down to drive his bus, he causes forty people to pray.”’

Laughter erupted all around them, the sound mingling with the muted hum of the engine. Batsheva looked out of the window at the long flat fields, the gentle hills. How lovely it all was. The admiring glances of a strange young man. The amusing tales of strangers. Batsheva closed her eyes, savoring the small, unexpected pleasures of being alive.

Then the scenery changed, the green erased as if by magic, swallowed up by the desert as the bus moved down toward the lowest point on earth: the Dead Sea. The mountains, white and stark against the brilliant blue Mediterranean sky, stretched as far as the eye could see with no sign of life. It was like being on another planet. Bedouin tents dotted the landscape, the only sign of human habitation. On the road was a Bedouin woman, dressed in long black robes that covered her from head to toe, balancing a load of firewood on her head. She walked with a slow, accepting gait behind her husband, who sat on a donkey and sauntered through the burning sands at a leisurely pace. Batsheva stared at her, almost feeling the heavy press of the wood on her own head, the heat of the sand, the rough gravel on her own feet. I know you, she thought, without surprise. She watched with almost morbid fascination as the woman moved, like a dark cloud in the billowing black dress, stately and sure, pride struggling with acceptance, as she followed her husband through the strange, deathlike setting, leading flocks of goats to almost nonexistent pastures.

And then they were gone, and mile after mile passed with no living thing. Miles of huge white-and-gray cliffs. After a while, the boredom that settled over her began to change into something else. It was as if the absolute blankness of her surroundings had entered her mind and heart, washing them clean of all pain, all worry. It made her feel pure and clean and strangely happy, full of awe and patience. The desert was uncompromising. It would not be rushed, and she began to take it at its own pace, to accept it on its own terms in all its strange beauty.

Hours later, she sat on the shores of the Red Sea in Eilat, her flesh cool and fragrant after bathing in its waters. She leaned back and let the fresh wind whip her hair around her face. The country was so small, yet the contrast enormous! After the desert this dreamlike sea surrounded by mountains that turned red in the sunshine. The young man in the Rolling Stones T-shirt sat down next to her. His name was Bobby, he said. He was such a good-natured, natural flirt. Sometimes the things he said made her want to laugh, and other times she fought the redness that crept into her cheeks. So this was dating, she thought. You sit with an attentive young man who owes you nothing but to be pleasant and agreeable. You give him the pleasure of your company. You get to admire his fine white teeth, his laugh, without committing yourself, knowing that around the corner may be another young man with whiter teeth and funnier jokes. She felt a sense of irretrievable loss as well as discovery at what she had missed. He rubbed her back casually and she gave a startled jump at the unexpected pleasantness and promise of his fingers. “I have to go now,” she said. “I’ll be honest with you. I’m married. I’m religious. You’re barking up the wrong tree.”