Jerusalem Maiden (10 page)

“All the material you'll need to get the job done in the next two years.” Aba smiled.

“She'd better quit that school that teaches her fancy languages and makes her impertinent,” Tova called out.

“Esther is a good daughter,” Aba told Tova. “With Bible and Talmud studies, she'll be a better mother to boys.”

Was that the reason he'd been insisting on schooling her all these years? A mother to boys. A shofar blared in Esther's head, blasting to heaven, No trousseau! No marriage, not ever!

Someone passed the kiddush wine bottle, and everyone raised tiny silver cups. Esther kept her eyes downcast, or the expression on her face would betray her. She didn't want to seem ungrateful; she loved that her mitzvah age had been remembered—and the expensive surprise gift. But she detested what the gift meant. She sipped the wine, gulping too much. The sweetness, usually soothing, burned her insides.

“What happened to your famous tongue?” Tova asked her.

“Leave her alone,” Asher said, a bit wildly, and Esther glanced at him with surprise. “Don't you see she is shy?” he added and blinked.

It was hard to believe this boy's soul was so close to being stolen. Esther was glad Aba would save him.

“Thank you, Ima, thank you, Aba.” Her voice barely went forth. Where was God in all this? With a pang of an unfastened shutter she realized that He must be siding with her parents, according to His Fifth Commandment,
Honor thy father and mother.

She had just dropped down into her seat when Ima came bearing a plate.

“A special dish for you, my daughter. So you'll fly the coop soon.”

Esther stared at the boiled chicken wings, their skins succulent and fatty. She had plucked the fowls that morning and could see some feathers still hanging on. All around the room voices joined in a chorus, “From your mouth to Hashem's ears. May you be betrothed soon.” But the sounds came to Esther as though cotton balls were stuffed in her head.

Hanna reached over and grabbed a chicken wing. “For my good luck, too,” she declared, and Esther's tears broke the dam. With a sob, she pushed herself away from the table and fled the room, the house and the courtyard. She wanted to be anywhere, any place, as long as it was devoid of people—or of God's order.

E
sther stood on a stool over the boiling cauldron in the communal laundry shed. Ruthi was at the next stove. Between the galvanized tin roof absorbing the fiery sun's rays, the fire in the paraffin stoves, and the steam from the boiling water, the heat was unbearable. Esther churned the laundry with a stick as thick as her arm. “We're being cooked slowly like
cholent
. The Sons of Israel in Egypt didn't slave in such hell.”

Ruthi's eyes looked feverish, and her brow was pale as though she were about to faint. “It prepares us to become Women of Valor.”

“Even in the bible there isn't one true Woman of Valor,” Esther muttered. She finally had the solution to Ruthi's wanting to become one. It waited in her skirt pocket. Wiping the perspiration and steam off her face, she said, “Let's go to the Hezekiah's water duct.”

“And leave the laundry?”

“We'll be back.” Esther snuffed the flames, removed a candle from the shelf and stepped out.

Giggling, Ruthi threw her apron aside and joined her.

Even being outside under the scorching sun proved a reprieve. Twenty minutes later, the two of them held up the hems of their skirts and scrambled down the rocky hillside into the Kidron Valley. Esther ran barefoot, envying Ruthi the luxury of her sandals. After trudging along a mules' path, they reached the cave-like opening of the eighth-century tunnel, where a wave of coolness greeted them. Esther gulped the damp, chilled air and the musty odor of wet rocks. Two Arab boys milked goats up on a nearby knoll, chicken clucked by a row of cacti, and from the Arab village of Silwan came the sounds of wheat being pounded and tin being hammered. Esther tucked her skirt above her knees, and Ruthi followed suit, giggling at their immodesty.

“No one can see us,” Esther said, to assure herself as much as Ruthi. “Except Hashem, of course, but He won't mind.”

Ruthi tied her sandals together by their laces and threw them over her shoulder, while Esther rubbed the toughened soles of her feet in the mud. She lit a candle and, pulling Ruthi, waded into the tunnel water. The uneven stones under her feet were slippery from years of gentle flow. The water cooled and soothed her ankles. In winter, it would have reached her hips. “Pretend we're the biblical diggers cutting this tunnel to smuggle the waters of the Gihon Spring to Jerusalem before the Assyrians put the city under siege.”

“I'm scared,” Ruthi whispered.

“You can't be. Hashem's with us.” Esther raised her candle over her head and cupped her mouth with her other hand. “Wooooo—ooooo.” Her voice bounced off the rock as had the voices of the two ancient teams that had hacked and chiseled from both ends toward each other, carving this secret passage. “Wooooo—”

Ruthi giggled. A moment later, in the dark, a splash assaulted Esther. “I got you!” Ruthi shrieked.

Refreshing rivulets of water dripped down Esther's face and neck, and her laughter echoed as she splashed back. This was Ruthi's first prank since her engagement. “We're listening to the sounds of the other team to stay on course. Wooooo—ooooo—” Esther forged forward. For centuries, in reverse route, Jerusalemites under siege had escaped the city through this tunnel. Where would she have gone? Not to a cave in the Judean desert. Perhaps to Jaffa, where ships sailed away. Or Paris?

Twenty minutes later, the sky suddenly gaped at her, and its brightness hurt her eyes. Esther squinted, reluctant to leave the water's coolness, the comfort of Ruthi's companionship, and the surety of the ancestral world of heroes. Ahead of her, Ruthi scrambled up the rock. Blinding light framed her willowy silhouette as in a charcoal drawing.

Esther hauled herself to the opening, and stayed in the shade of the tunnel as the familiar street sounds rushed toward her: braying of donkeys, shouts of Arab
falachs
announcing their farm produce, rusty squeaking of hand pushcarts and chanting of Moroccan Jewish women searching for a day's work. The moment felt like a new start. “Let me show you something important,” Esther said. She withdrew the folded paper from her pocket and spread it on the top of a stone. She had drawn Yossel taunting a little girl, his fanned-out teeth exposed in a grin.

“What's that? Idols?” Ruthi asked.

“It's your groom. It's Yossel and his sister—”

Ruthi threw the paper on the ground and squashed it. “I forgave you your jealousy. No more! I thought you were my friend!”

“I
am
! Forever—”

“Everyone says you're contaminated by an Arab. You're evil!”

“Yossel is unkind—I'm trying to save you from him—”

“You're not Queen Esther, but Queen Jezebel!” Ruthi broke into a run toward the bustle of the street.

No! Reaching for Ruthi, Esther grabbed air. Her friend was swallowed by passersby. “I'm not Jezebel!” Esther called. That queen had been so cruel that after her gruesome death the dogs ate her flesh. No! Esther stepped into the harsh, unforgiving sun. Heat clutched her in its powerful arms and her clothes clung to her body with fresh perspiration. What now?

H
ot winds blasted desert sand on unprotected faces. Esther pulled her cotton scarf down to shield her eyes or she'd be blinded by trachoma, a grain-like eye disease that claimed the sight of both poor and rich. Since noon, Jerusalem had sunk into a sleep. Merchants closed their shops, and doves halted their cooing in the cracks of the walls. Even stray dogs, their tongues lolling, curled in any patch of shade, too thirsty to sprint for heat-stricken birds that dropped from trees. The Arabs draped themselves in thick cloth from head to toe. Jews suffered.

In the kitchen yard, Esther shook the dust off her clothes and entered the house. In this weather, no one would come to Aba on bank business. She latched shut the shutters so the thick walls would keep out the heat, rolled up the Persian rug, sprayed water on the stone floor and then went down on all fours to spread it with burlap to cool the house.

Ima shuffled to the sofa. Except for the surge of energy she'd had for Avram's bar-mitzvah, she hadn't regained her strength since Gershon's death four months earlier. Now, while she and the two girls lay down to wait for the temperature to cool, Esther shouldered most of the work. Her body ached from the incessant lifting, bending, chopping, scrubbing and stirring. Moishe helped by catching mice and killing flies and cockroaches.

Esther's stomach grumbled from hunger. Instead of painting at Mlle Thibaux's, she was peeling the three beets Aba brought home—their only fresh food. Feeding the crowd at Avram's bar-mitzvah had depleted their last cache of potatoes, beans, rice, oil, sugar and flour. “If we had carrots, I'd grate some just for Ima,” she called to Aba from the kitchen.

“There're none to be bought in all Jerusalem.” He sighed. “First, we're afflicted with drought, and then whatever grows in Arab fields is confiscated by the sultan—”

“May his liver come out of his nostrils piece by piece,” Ima interjected.

“—to feed his army,” Aba finished his sentence. “The Turks are losing the war, and so we Jews starve. I should travel to America to raise money in the Jewish communities to feed our
klal
.”

Esther poked her head into the front room. “Miss Landau says we should stop living off charity and start working. She says that the Haredi are beggars,
schnorrers
.”

“Your smart Miss Landau has fine ideas for everything except how to put food on our tables,” Ima replied. “The Jews abroad have their souls saved by our men who devote themselves to holy studies. Who, then, is not doing the important work?”

“Maybe I should become a seamstress,” Esther said.

“Only married women work,” Ima said. “To support their husbands' Torah studies.”

“Rich matrons give seamstresses a meal on sewing days at their homes.” Esther imagined herself seated at a table laden with food, maybe even being given leftovers to take home to her family.

“With Hashem's blessings, I'll see you married before you stoop to paid employment,” Aba told her as he shuffled his stack of promissory notes that had gone unpaid.

Esther wondered whether he'd had a word with Asher. She hadn't seen her cousin in the two months since Avram's bar-mitzvah, and once she had unloaded his problem onto Aba, it paled in the mosaic of her day-to-day labor.

“Have you started sewing your trousseau? No seamstress has ever precipitated the arrival of the Messiah, but many brides have,” Ima said, and Esther recalled the seamstresses who had burned to death in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. God had been displeased with their choices. Ima went on, “Shlomo, ‘a peeled egg doesn't leap into the mouth by itself.' You'd better finalize Esther's betrothal soon or more birds will enter her head—” Ima suddenly stopped speaking as a groan escaped her lips.

Aba and Esther looked at her. “She's not eating,” Esther told him. “She gives it all to you and the boys.” She dared not ask if Ima was with child again. Anyway, how would he know?

Hugging herself, Ima pressed her face against the back of the sofa. “It's nothing.”

A few days later, Ima lay on her stomach while the midwife heated down-facing glass cups with the flame of a candle and placed each on Ima's back. As the air in the cups cooled, it sucked the skin into round red welts like clay coins.

“It will chase the impurity from her body. Much better than leeches,” the midwife told Esther. “So, did you get your monthly flow yet?”

When Esther shook her head, the woman tsk-tsked in pity. “Eat yeast.”

“We save our yeast for bread,” Esther replied. In case they ever get flour again.

Ima struggled to raise her head. “Esther, eat yeast. It's more important that you marry.”

Esther went to her cache of weeds and swallowed some. The stomach cramps that would ensue were a small price to pay to stave off her womanhood, but some hazy, undefined dread spread in her nonetheless. Ruthi was lost to her, and Ima was sick.

A
n ailing sun broke through a colander of dust, spreading a tiger-eye-colored film over everything. The cobblestones reached oven temperature, and Esther's bare feet danced over them as she hurried to Mlle Thibaux's for a rare visit.

Upstairs, the heat receded from the cool, high-vaulted room. Unencumbered by chores, people and edicts, Esther surrendered to the tranquility while she sipped from the kosher glass of sweetened water in which floated lemon slices.

She picked up her notebook and was about to select colored pencils when Mlle Thibaux handed her a pen and a jar of black ink. “Graphic art recognizes only the dark and light; it only employs the line and the field. Painting lives the experience of colors, and sculpting occupies itself with shapes and tangible space.”

Sculpting, forever a reminder of the Sons of Israel's sin of creating the Golden Calf after Moses had gone up the Sinai mountain to bring God's words to them, was far more pagan than painting. Saying nothing, Esther busied herself testing the texture and various widths of the black lines the new pen could create.

Mlle Thibaux pointed at a shelf on which a row of clay sculptures was displayed. “Did you see the little animals Pierre has made? He presented them to Bezalel Academy and was accepted.”

Esther didn't lift her gaze, but the sharp point of her pen pierced the paper. She had been avoiding the washroom, where Pierre's shaving brush was drying. And when she looked through Mlle Thibaux's art book, she no longer sat on the sofa where he slept for fear of becoming infused with something intangible, yet as palpable as his absence from the room.

Sketching the section of the Tower of David visible from her spot, she was unprepared for Pierre's arrival. Again. Her breath caught at the same moment that resentment rose in her at his intrusion. His unbounded eagerness and his lively chatter caused that funny sensation at the bottom of her stomach, and tainted her stolen time with something she didn't know how to define.

“
Une automobile!
” Pierre pulled his mother to her feet. “Come see!” His blue eyes flicked a glance in Esther's direction as he ran to the terrace. “You, too! Don't miss this sight.”

Esther craned her neck, but didn't follow. When the first horseless cart had arrived from Boston four years earlier to tour the land under the auspices of the American embassy, the rabbis forbade the Jews to look at it. It was certain to corrupt the mind with earthly distractions—if it weren't a pagan idol incarnate. Sure enough, less than two years later, Halley's Comet had appeared in the night skies, and the rabbis declared that this huge tail of light hanging over their heads for months was a warning that a Sodom-and-Gomorrah-like doom was imminent.

On the terrace, Pierre chattered, and his mother laughed. He came to the door once, asking, “Esther?” but Mlle Thibaux pulled him away. Esther was curious, but looking at the automobile was one transgression she could do without. Even the quickening of her heart was an offense to her modesty. No wonder her brothers' friends were never allowed at the Kaminskys', where virgins were present.

She rose from her chair and, without saying good-bye, walked out, leaving the courtyard through a back gate to avoid seeing the abomination chugging in the street. This was no time to try God's patience with her.