Jephte's Daughter (22 page)

“I don’t have…much…” She seemed to be searching for words. “Time. Yes, time.”

Elizabeth looked at her carefully, but decided not to pursue it. “I’m climbing up to the top of the minaret. Anyone game? Come on, Graham!”

“You go on up, youngster, and leave the old and pregnant to their well-deserved rest,” he called out to her. She waved and was gone.

They were alone on the darkening hill.

“You know, that letter you sent really worried Liz. She cares a great deal about you, my dear. Actually, we were both surprised to find you so well. All your marital problems on the mend then, eh?”

“Yes. Yes. On the mend then,” she said absently, picking up strands of grass and tearing them into tiny bits.

“He’s beating you, isn’t he?” Graham said very quietly.

She turned her head and got up, walking away from him. He walked after her and caught her arm. She struggled briefly against him, then finally laid her head on his chest and wept. He stroked the length of her back, in long comforting strokes, from shoulder to waist. Soft, long strokes. “Can’t you tell me? Eh?” He led her to a soft mound of grass.

“It’s only happened once or twice,” she lied. “I’m probably just as much to blame.” She shook her head helplessly from side to side.

He lifted her chin on his finger and looked deeply into her eyes. “You hate him, don’t you, my dear. You despise him.”

She let out a long-held breath and looked away, ashamed.

“Then why don’t you leave him? The Hebrews have always been a lot more liberal than we Catholics about divorce. Is it the baby?”

She shook her head, unable to speak. No one had spoken to her about this, and she felt in another moment she would burst, the long-held scream, the primal, awful in-held scream would rip her apart.

“Please, tell me. I won’t tell Elizabeth unless you want me to.”

“Have you ever read the Bible, Graham?”

“Well, yes, as literature.”

“And do you know the story of Jephte?”

“Let me see, from the Book of Judges, yes? It inspired an oratorio by Carissimi:
Plorate, filii Israel, plorate virginitatem meam, et Jephte filiam unigenitam in carmine doloris lamentamini
,” he sang. “Lament and weep, ye children of Israel, for a hapless maiden, yea, weep for Jephte’s unhappy daughter with wailing notes of sadness.”

“O my father, thou hast opened thy mouth to the Lord and hast returned to thy house in peace, therefore offer me for a burnt offering before the Lord,” she said to his surprise, continuing the lovely chorus, her voice breaking. “Well, I am Jephte’s daughter, sacrificed to God.” She laughed bitterly.

“I don’t understand.” He shook his head. “Please, can’t you…?”

“My, my, don’t the two of you look cozy! I swear, if it was anybody else but you, Batsie, I’d wonder,” Elizabeth laughed. Batsheva jumped up, a confused smile spread across her face.

Graham cleared his throat.

Elizabeth looked at them, puzzled. “What did I interrupt?”

“Nothing my dear. Just a Bible lesson. Book of Judges, what, Batsheva?” He reached out and patted her arm. “I promise to look it up.” Batsheva returned his meaningful glance gratefully.

The sky moved from the dark red fire of sunset to the pale silver radiance of the rising moon. Realizing this, Batsheva started to walk toward the taxi, frightened. “I must get home. My husband, Isaac…” She gnawed her lips nervously.

“Of course, we’ll take you home.”

“No! I mean, you’d better not trouble. You can just let me off on your way to the hotel.”

Elizabeth put her arms around the shivering young girl. She was sure now that her first impression had been right. Something was terribly wrong. She was shivering from fright, terrified.

“What is it, kid? Can’t you tell your big sister Liz?”

Batsheva rested her head against her friend’s shoulder to still her trembling. But it was slender and delicate. She could not lean on it.

“You can’t help me, Liz. No one can.” She reached up and kissed her friend’s soft cheek. “I’ve had such a wonderful day. Thank you so much, so very much.”

“Must you get back now? We have to leave early tomorrow. When will I see you again? I have to talk to you. Something is wrong, isn’t it?” Elizabeth pressed.

“No, please, please, Lizzie. Everything is fine. It’s the way it must be. I must get home before Isaac sees I’m gone.”

“Can’t you just explain to him that you forgot the time and had some dinner with old friends?”

“No, please. I have to go home before he gets there.”

“Likes his supper hot and on the table, eh? My kind of guy,” Graham broke in suddenly, taking charge, wanting to see things finally settled. “Well, the cab is waiting for us. Let’s just get in and go.”

Elizabeth turned to him angrily. “Graham, I want to get to the bottom…”

“Yes, you do. Of course you do. You can talk in the car.” He hustled them both in and gave the driver directions. He had hesitated for a moment, but had made his decision swiftly to leave Batsheva Harshen to her fate. She was young and beautiful and, perhaps, just his type. But she was also very pregnant with an insane husband and a rich, influential father. Things were complicated enough without private detectives and policemen staking out one’s life. It was true that he had wavered for a moment, but he was old enough to know that taking in stray dogs and cats gave a momentary satisfaction in exchange for a long, drawn-out mess, inconvenience, and expense.

As long as he could help it, Elizabeth wouldn’t have to find out about the black-and-blue marks, about the passage in the Book of Judges (whatever that meant anyway). When they reached Batsheva’s address, they all got out.

Graham took Batsheva’s cold hands in his and kissed them. “Good-bye, my dear.”

“Good-bye, Graham, and thank you.” He had given her words of kindness at a time when they were rarer than diamonds in her life, and she would always be grateful.

He held the door open for Elizabeth to get back in.

“You get in, Graham. I’ll be there in a minute.” She grabbed Batsheva’s arm and walked off with her.

“Tell me what it is.”

“I can’t.” She caught herself. “I mean, there isn’t anything to tell.”

“Now, you listen to me carefully. I know you, and this person I see in front of me, this shivering, frightened kid, isn’t you. What has he done to you? Won’t your parents help you?”

Batsheva shook her head helplessly. “I can’t tell you, please. It doesn’t matter. Soon I’ll have the baby. My own sweet baby. I’ll be all right. I’ll be fine.”

“Batsheva, please.”

Batsheva’s eyes glittered with undropped tears. She hugged her friend for a long time, tightly. She thought of the open cab door, and the rush and lift of an airplane soaring up into the sky. But in the middle there was her father’s face, white on the hospital pillow, his unforgettable words. “Jephte’s daughter,” she whispered and shook her head, releasing Elizabeth from her embrace.

“What?”

“Nothing. I have a present for you. Wait here.” She returned, breathless, moments later, with a bulky package tied with a red bow.

“What is it, Sheva?” But the girl just shook her head.

“Don’t open it until you’re on the plane, promise me?”

There was something strange in Batsheva’s face that Elizabeth didn’t like, a tightness, almost a martyrdom that didn’t sit well. But there was no time. The cabbie had begun to honk, and Batsheva was already backing away, saying Isaac would be in any minute. The prospect of meeting Isaac Harshen frightened Elizabeth more than she was even willing to admit to herself.

“I will promise, but you’ve got to promise me something.” She grabbed Batsheva’s hand tightly. “Promise me if you change your mind, if you want to talk to me, you’ll call me, write me, or just come. You’re not alone. You have me, for better or for worse. Friends. Remember? You were the one who made me promise.” They were quiet, looking at each other, warmed by the memory of that fragrant spring day when they sat weaving plans into a beautiful fabric to cover their lives. So many hopes, so many plans…

“She wouldn’t promise. She just shook her head and kissed me,” Elizabeth told Graham, who was already deep into his second drink and was motioning the stewardess for a third. She began to unwrap the gift, then sat looking at it unbelieving, as the tears flowed unheeded down her cheeks.

Graham gasped and sat up straight: “A Leica. Whew. Have you any idea how much one of these costs? Now, that’s what I call a good friend.”

“Don’t touch it, Graham! Don’t you dare touch it!” And suddenly her soft, unfocused sadness became sick with real fear. She wiped away her tears. “I’m just going to save it for her. She’ll ask for it back one day. I have to believe that.”

There was a certain rhythm to the pains. Like music, they began gently, then rose to an unbearable crescendo. She thought she would die. And then, suddenly, they melted away again. Pianissimo, pianissimo. The midwife dabbed her forehead. Batsheva had decided to do without heavy anesthetics, as was the custom among the women of Meah Shearim—and Israeli women in general—out of zealous regard for their babies’ well-being. Instead, she whispered psalms: “
Achas shaalti may ace Adonai, oto avakash
…” This thing I ask of the Lord, that I might dwell in His house all the days of my life…Over and over she whispered the words silently, terrified of the next crescendo.

“
Yehiyeh tov, maideleh. Od me at, od me at
,” the woman told Batsheva. She had a kind, soothing voice. It will be all right, just a bit longer, Batsheva’s mind translated the Hebrew words.

It was all right now. Restful. Then again the pains started and all at once they gripped her with horrible force from which there was no escape. She screamed, a loud animal noise that frightened her.

Can this be me? Can it? She flailed her arms and legs, trying to escape from the torture. “I can’t, I can’t do it,” she sobbed.

“Yes, you can. Of course you can,” the midwife’s gentle, encouraging voice soothed her. “Just a little bit more, and it will be out. See, already I see the head. Come, sit up and push.”

“Really, the head.” She had forgotten about the baby. It had been erased by all the never-ending, wrenching pain. She had thought of death, of any kind of escape, but she had forgotten the baby altogether. Remembering made her smile. She pulled herself up and began to push, straining with each contraction and surprisingly, it did not hurt anymore. It was work, hard work, yes, the pushing. Animal work. But it was satisfying, not painful. She held her breath and pushed and pushed and pushed.

It moved.

“Yes, beautiful, dear. Yes, here it is, yessss,” the midwife cheered. Spectator at a football game.

A terrible weight suddenly pressed down on her. She screamed. Incredible pain. And then, miraculously the tiny cry.

“A boy, a beautiful, perfect son.” The midwife laid the warm, moist infant on her breast. Part of her body, yet not part. The pain was over and there was her child, her baby son. An indescribable relief and happiness swept over her that had no precedent either in her experience or her imagination.

“I have a son,” she wept with unknown joy and it was as if the pain had never existed. “A baby son.” She touched his long, thick black hair and knew she would die for this creature, to protect every silky hair on its head. For him who a few moments before had not existed, she would unhesitatingly give her life now. She wondered at the strange fierceness of her love. And in her heart she thanked God for His gift.

They had all come for the circumcision ceremony. Her father and mother, all the Hassidim. She dressed the child with cold, shaking hands. She had been to so many Brit Milas in her life. They were joyous occasions, like weddings and Bar Mitzvahs. But now it was her own child and she thought about how they would clamp his foreskin and cut it off with a knife. Her little baby! He would bleed and cry. Yet, this must be done. God had decreed it and they must obey.

The women were given a separate room and then Isaac came in with her father and all the Hassidim. A flood of black and white. Isaac put his hands out and she had no choice, no choice at all, with her father there and all the men at his back. She gave the child to her weeping mother, and her mother gave the child to her father, who was beaming with triumph; her father gave the child to Isaac, who took it with cold ceremony and bore it away into the next room. The laughing, joyous voices of the men drifted back to the women, who stood silently, their faces puckered with anxiety. The men’s loud prayers reverberated like a clap of thunder, but the women’s lips moved silently. Amen, they whispered with resignation. Then there was silence as the mohel did his work and then the heartbreaking cry of the infant. Batsheva’s heart contracted. She felt her mother’s hand patting her own. They could hear the songs of the men rise up, loudly, in happiness as they danced with the crying infant, welcoming him into the covenant. The women smiled with relief. The men had finished. When the mohel brought him back to her, the baby was quiet, sucking on a piece of wine-dipped cotton. His eyes were tightly shut. She winced at the bloody diaper. But the wound was very clean. The mohel, a pious man more expert at his craft than any doctor or surgeon, for he did hundreds of such circumcisions a month, had been carefully trained. He smiled kindly at the young, worried mother, understanding her ache of helplessness as she examined her tiny son. Dear little boy, precious child. She counted his tiny toes, kissing each one and then the arch of his soft, plump foot. Sweet, so sweet. They were not going to hurt him anymore, she vowed, deep in her soul, deeper than she had ever thought possible. Her lips pressed together, drawing upon reserves of strength she did not know she still had. Never again, she thought, her anger irrational, her bitterness misplaced. She would not stand by idly, helplessly. Let them try, she thought, feeling her insides harden like a stone.

“My dear Batsheva,” her father came up behind her, his face radiating such incredible happiness that for a moment its reflection caught hold of her own face, imparting a vicarious glow. “I am the happiest man on earth! My cup runneth over! Here, darling. Take this. It can never bring you a hundredth part of the joy you have given me. But take it, with my love. A little token.”

She didn’t like to look at her father’s face. It was so painful to see his deliberate blindness, his willed ignorance. So she opened the box. The diamonds and emeralds glittered against the background of green velvet like drops of water caught forever under the sun. A magnificent necklace.

“I bought it from Shershon, in Tel Aviv. They designed it for you especially. But if you don’t like it, they will happily exchange it…”

“Thank you, Aba,” she said, not looking at him. “It is very beautiful.” No hug, no dancing feet, he mourned, wanting to cry for the little girl he had lost. He searched her face but saw only the love and overwhelming joy of a mother for her first child. The other things—the sadness in the corners of her mouth, the dull luster in her once bright eyes, he could not and would not see.

Like many bad marriages, Batsheva and Isaac’s settled into a period of resignation, a modus vivendi of shared unhappiness. The baby gave Batsheva a new willingness to look for good in the man who was her husband, her baby’s father. She tried so hard to find something to focus on. He was, after all, a brilliant scholar. He taught the Torah, the Talmud, to younger students, leading them on to a good life, she told herself. He was very clean. He dressed immaculately, groomed impeccably, and was still, despite his gaining weight, a handsome, imposing man.

In the bedroom, he made few demands and in return gave little. She knew it was because she had radiated her dislike so clearly, her repugnance at his touch. She felt guilty about that. Maybe I should have tried harder. She prayed to God so often, asking him to help her, to forgive her. To help her be a better wife, a good mother, and she felt that He heard her prayers. Since the baby’s birth, Isaac had stopped hitting her. Perhaps, she thought, I gave him reason to before. Perhaps all men did that to their wives when they passed over that invisible line. She knew she was not the kind of wife he had wanted. She hated to cook and clean the way his mother did and could not bear to spend the hours in the kitchen needed to bone and grind fish for gefilte fish, or roll out thin strudel dough. She made macaroni and cheese, pizza, guacamole, and Isaac grimaced and went to his mother’s for dinner. She tried to dress the way he seemed to want, suppressing her distaste, avoiding the mirror. She kept her wig on day and night and tried not to care that, underneath, her own hair was growing dull and matted for lack of sunshine and fresh air. Outside, when the sky over the white city was particularly brilliant with white radiant clouds and blades of sunlight filtering through like an artist’s conception of holy light, she tried not to frame in her mind the wonderful photograph it would make. She tried to forget the person she had been, becoming quiet and without needs or desires. She tried to be what was expected of her.

Isaac saw the subdued obedience in his wife with satisfaction. Yet he regretted, too, how quickly she had been subdued. Her meekness took away his pleasure in seeing her bend to his will, but it was valuable, too. It was necessary, with the baby to care for, to keep her well, to keep peace between them. The child was important. He had been chosen as successor, but the child was the blood of the Ha-Levis, the undisputed heir. Already he had heard rumblings among the Ha-Levi Hassidim questioning some of his judgments. The woman he had advised to have another child against the doctor’s order had died. Marriages he had approved of had failed. Operations he had advised against had turned out to be critically, irreparably, necessary. And so it was now more important than ever to have his wife firmly by his side, their child paraded through the streets each day.

In the past, Isaac had not approved of her visiting other women. “It leads to the sin of gossip and slander,” he told her. But Gita Kessel was Rabbi Magnes’s daughter and the wife of Rabbi Gershon, already respected as his father-in-law’s successor. Isaac had introduced them himself. Batsheva had been reluctant at first. She had made acquaintances among the women of Isaac’s students and fellow teachers—young, pretty women who cared about their clothes and their hair. She learned that most young women had to work full- or part-time to support their husbands in the yeshivah. They gave their babies over to daycare centers, older women, or mothers with small children at home. Only women with the wealthiest fathers could afford to stay home and care for their own children while their husbands studied.

Most of the women she met were good people, teachers of small children, secretaries, seamstresses. It was a great source of pride and status to them that their husbands spent all day bent over a Talmud in a yeshivah. As young brides they sacrificed gladly to keep their husbands learning. But after the first child was born, the hardships and constant tension over money made them careworn and dull. They never read, never went to the movies, had never been anywhere farther than Safad or Bnei Brak. If they learned, they learned only the little books of Bible stories with moralistic messages at the end. The fate of the young women was reflected in the lives of the older families. For with the years, the families grew. Ten, fifteen, even twenty children were not unheard of, for birth control was considered wrong, even though it was permissible according to the strict letter of the law. And no matter how large or poor the family, the children were immaculately dressed: the little boys copies of their fathers all in black and white, the little girls in pretty, old-fashioned, home-sewn dresses, with long braids and bows in their hair. How hard these women must work to keep their children like this despite their poverty, Batsheva thought with admiration. Still, she could not bring herself to befriend these serious, sacrificing women who had no room for anything frivolous or extraneous in their difficult lives. They seemed so much older than she. Perhaps if she had been poor, if she had been able, like them, to feel the accomplishment of achieving some noble goal through her suffering and self-negation. But she had everything, and was left with the boring housework, the cooking. She wanted to have some fun and these women didn’t know what the word meant.

But Gita was different. Tall, slim, and aristocratic looking, she navigated with confidence through the narrow streets of Meah Shearim, her impeccable lineage and social position surrounding her with an almost impenetrable shield of approval. If Gita wore red, well, then, it must be all right to wear red. If Gita wore stylish hats with feathers that covered almost all of her hair, well then, the women took heart, it must be all right to cover almost all of your hair. If Gita went to symphony concerts in the evening by herself, well then, the social buzz rang out clear with approval, well then, it must be all right then.

Batsheva, swept into Gita’s company, found herself joyously released from the prisonlike structure Isaac and his mother had built for her. Putting their babies in backpacks, she and Gita would travel to museums and art exhibits, shop for fashionable clothes, and try on hats, giggling like school-girls.

With Gita as her guide, she also opened her eyes and was amazed at the sheer variety of ways Hassidic women chose to observe the same law. There was so much room for individual taste and style. Some wore ugly scarves pulled tight over hat forms; some wore stylish kerchiefs and let their bangs hang out; some wore scarves that reached almost to their eyebrows, covering every strand. And some wore pretty colored scarves that matched their clothes. Some wore only long, black kerchiefs over shaved scalps. And those who wore scarves considered themselves more pious and chaste than those who wore wigs, because if the intent of the law was to make a married woman unattractive to other men, the wigs sometimes did the opposite. She thought of her mother-in-law’s straw hairdo. There were women who would not consider her devout enough!

Among those who wore wigs there were also many variations: some wore expensive human-hair wigs done up in the latest style at the beauty parlor, and some wore strawlike acrylic. And some even went so far as to wear scarves or hats over their wigs to obviate any and all criticism!

On their legs, the same variety persisted: The Daughters of Jerusalem, with their black scarves and dresses, wore thick black stockings; others wore thick flesh-colored hose with seams, to make it clear that their legs were indeed covered. And some, perhaps most, wore regular pantyhose in different, fashionable shades.

And some wore beautiful designer clothes in bright colors, modestly, but not severely, covering their slim bodies, clothes Isaac would not let her wear. And some were fat and wore only wrist-length sleeves and mid-calf skirts.