Jerusalem Maiden (14 page)

Aba shifted his position, and the fluttering of his eyelids eased. Esther turned the page, and her glance stopped on a headline: T
WENTY-FIVE
T
HOUSAND
W
OMEN
M
ARCH
I
N
M
ANHATTAN
T
O
D
EMAND
T
HE
R
IGHT
T
O
V
OTE
. Vote for what? The women wanted a say in how the country was run, she read. Like men? Like a Sanhedrin, the supreme court of ancient Jerusalem? In the photograph, ordinary women in long white dresses and elaborate hats, their arms covered modestly, held placards and flags while marching toward the camera. In spite of the grainy faces, there was resolve in the collective posture.

Esther stared at Aba, willing him to wake up and talk to her. A moment later, he passed a hand over his face and rubbed his eyes. She smiled until his gaze fell upon her, then she showed him the photograph. “These women think they're as important as men.”

“The
goyim
's
meshigas
. Even Deborah, with God's hand guiding her to battle, was unable to do it without appointing a male general.” Aba pulled the newspaper away from Esther and waved his finger. “Be vigilant not to be impertinent to Hashem. He has ordained that we should set the example to the world.
We
are the light for the
goyim
, not the other way around.”

“If we're the light to the world, then we have a problem explaining Jephthah's daughter's story.” Esther's hand traced the embossed gold lettering on the Bible's cover. “The Bible doesn't consider the moral dilemma from her point of view. Why didn't she resist her fate?”

Aba chuckled and cited the proverb, “One innocent can ask questions to which a thousand sages have no answers.” He stroked his beard. “She shared her father's faith in Hashem. The Bible assumes that a daughter's obedience is absolute.”

Had Esther painted Jephthah's daughter, she would have shown the anguish and rebellion on her face. “If a woman's testimony in court weighs only half that of a man's, does it also mean that her wishes count only half as much?”

“One is the court of man, the other is the court of Hashem. He listens to everything.”

“Hashem objected to human sacrifice. Why would He accept it from Jephthah?”

“A promise to Him must be kept.”

God had accepted her own sacrifice, Esther thought. But He hadn't spared Ima's life, either. Suddenly, she understood: God had to stop her from sinning once she had entered her mitzvah age. In her obtuseness, she had continued to misinterpret His intentions.

She rose and patted down the part in her hair. “I'm going to help Ruthi with her wedding preparations.”

“Here's my gift to her: I wish for her to become a great Jewish woman.”

“She's already a devoted Jewish maiden.”

Aba laughed, but then his glance caught the smudges on the floor. There was no water for washing. “You should ask me, ‘What's a great Jewish woman?' I'll tell you: You put a fish tail in her hand and, magically, out pops a head. She adds some roots, pepper and parsley, and, bless Hashem, there appears a whole Shabbat dinner.”

Esther let out a thin smile. “Unless she's a ‘burnt offering' first.”

T
he Shabbat was being desecrated by the mere shabbiness of the garbage-strewn streets, Esther thought as she made her way toward Ruthi's neighborhood of Nachlat Shiv'ah. A blanket of human stench hung over the alleys and clusters of gnats hovered about, like a raiding army. The large public rectangle originally created by the four perpendicular rows of attached houses was crisscrossed by newly constructed dwellings. Dozens more families had moved into the neighborhood, driven by poverty and death. The new outhouses that supplemented the overused old ones were insufficient. Some residents sheltered dogs to eat the trash, and the hateful animals sneaked into kitchen yards to feast from pots still hot on stoves, growled at passersby and chased alley cats that were multiplying along with the rat, mouse and cockroach populations.

Past the Russian Compound, instead of entering Ruthi's neighborhood, Esther turned toward the Hospice Saint Vincent de Paul. She looked up at the colonnaded balconies, turrets and arched windows, hesitated a moment, then climbed the stairs to the second floor. It had been more than two years, but her former teacher was the only person Esther could think of to consult about Asher's proposal. At the door, she knocked, then listened for the sound of clicking heels, but heard only children playing in the street and pots clanging in the smaller houses abutting the fence. She knocked again, harder.

“Who do you want?” came a shrill call behind her.

Esther turned to see a
tichel
-clad woman in the tiny kitchen terrace of an adjacent house. “Mlle Thibaux, the French teacher—”

“The whore? After her bastard son showed up, the school fired her. The neighbors didn't want her
mamzer
boy here either, let alone a man visiting. The
shiksa
had followed her ambassador lover here from Paris. What did she think, that he'd make her an honest woman?”

“Do you know where she lives now?”

“What does a good Jewish girl like you want with a whore?”

“I am—uh, I am—a seamstress—”

“She took her
mamzer
son and her degenerate dresses and went back to Paris.”

Esther knocked on the door of the apartment to the left, where, she remembered, a French family had lived. The woman on the kitchen terrace watched her. “What else do you need?”

“Her address in Paris.”

The woman waved a finger at Esther. “You keep away from the likes of her.”

No one answered her knock. Esther looked at the dry weeds in a planter where once a yellow rosebush had bloomed. As long as Mlle Thibaux had been living in Jerusalem, Esther's heart had entertained the possibility—as implausible as her head told her it was—that Hashem would lead her back to canvas and oils.

Leaving the courtyard, Esther plucked at a sprig of rosemary so hard it came out by the roots. She shut the gate behind her with a rusty bang, then shook the dirt off the rosemary so Ruthi could stuff it in her trousseau.

R
uthi's sobs drilled right into Esther's heart. It was all her fault. Now that even the strictest tradition allowed Ruthi and Yossel to see each other once shortly before the ceremony, Esther had suggested that the meeting take place when Ruthi still had her hair; after the beautiful honey-colored braid was shaved, it would never again present a temptation to men. “For the rest of your life together he'll remember what you really looked like,” Esther had said.

An argument about
tzni'ut
ensued among the women squeezed into the tiny bedroom to assist the bride with her preparations. When Ruthi's mother, aunts and the women on Yossel's side failed to agree, they sent word to the rabbi. He had approved the groom's glimpsing Ruthi's virgin hair as long as the meeting was chaperoned.

Yossel had just left, and Ruthi now sobbed.

Her mother brandished the sewing scissors borrowed from the tailor. “We must hurry now,” she said, uncoiling Ruthi's braid.

“Did you see him?” Ruthi cried out. “Hashem will be with me, but did you see his face? Full of pus!”

“It's a known fact that the skin heals once a man marries,” Yossel's mother retorted.

“The mitzvah is good for many male ailments.” Ruthi's married cousin giggled behind a hand to discount the boldness of her statement. “And you'll be healing someone's skin before winter, may Hashem help,” she told Esther.

“He's as ugly as the night!” Ruthi railed at her future mother-in-law. “Is that the
metzi'ah
, the great find, I'm getting?”

“You're an ungrateful witch!” the woman yelled back.

“Shhhhhh,” said Ruthi's mother to her daughter. “You don't know what you're saying.”

Esther needed air. She unlatched the window, but one of the women leaned past her and slammed the wooden shutters closed. “Are you crazy? A ghost is roaming the street to possess a bride!”

“It's just normal virginal trepidations.” Ruthi's aunt patted Yossel's mother's arm. “Pay no attention. We're all happy about the
shiddach
.”

“Not me! I am not!” Ruthi shouted.

Esther had never seen her friend lose her poise like this. “Maybe you should all leave the room,” she said.

“We don't have time,” Yossel's mother said.

Yossel's skin was the least of his unattractiveness, Esther thought. Didn't his mother know of his cruelty to her younger daughter? “Please. Let Ruthi calm down or the preparations will take longer.”

As soon as the women stepped out, Ruthi cried, “Why didn't you force me to take an
ankuken
?”

“How many times did I suggest it? I warned you! I even drew a picture for you—”

“You didn't try hard enough. What am I going to do now?”

Esther bit her lip to stop its trembling. “Cancel the wedding.”

“Are you crazy? Am I supposed to return my shoes and go barefoot again?”

Tears clouding her vision, Esther opened the window and unlatched the shutters. She'd invite the ghost in to carry them both away.

Ruthi's voice came out muffled from behind the fist stuck in her mouth. “Cancel? After my mother instructed me in a woman's ways?”

Esther looked at her. The hair from the undone braid framed Ruthi's blotchy face. The bride now knew how to reach holiness through the
yi'chud
, the private commune of a man and a woman. That knowledge tainted her unless she married.

Ruthi's sobs were the only sounds in the room. A thought of Asher's convictions flitted through Esther's mind. “Whose life is it, yours or theirs?”

“Theirs.” Ruthi collapsed onto the floor, her willowy back rounded like a cloth puppet's.

Her throat tight, Esther crouched next to Ruthi and put an arm around her friend's heaving shoulders. Gently, she lifted the curtain of Ruthi's hair. “I beg you. Don't go along with the ceremony when you feel this way. You mustn't—”

“I'll be a pariah. No family would ever agree to a betrothal with me if I cancel on the day of the wedding.”

“Could it get any worse? You're only fourteen. Your parents can search again.”

“They'll beat me if I call it off.”

“Ruthi, please. Let's escape through the window and go talk to Miss Landau.” Ruthi had dropped out of school just the day before, as married girls weren't permitted to attend. “She'll arrange for you to look after a rich family's kids—”

A wail broke out of Ruthi's chest. “I am obligated—to my family, to Yossel's rabbi and to Hashem.”

R
uthi's weeping continued as the scissors her Ima brandished hacked at her hair, making the grating, snapping sounds of a dropping guillotine. Nor did it stop when the women shaved her scalp and tied a white
tichel
around it, or when the intertwined threads stretched between one woman's fingers and teeth and plucked every hair off Ruthi's legs and underarms. Esther clutched Ruthi's hand throughout the threading, but when the women held Ruthi down and spread her legs to tweak out the hair between her legs, Esther faced the wall. Ruthi's screams were less from pain than humiliation.

Ruthi's favorite aunt bent toward her. “Suffering in Jerusalem is good. You know that,” she said in a soothing tone. “It brings the Messiah closer. Soon you'll feel the divine mission. By creating a family, you'll reach holiness.”

Esther swallowed hard. Ruthi continued to bawl.

“A daughter's wedding day is the happiest in a mother's life,” her Ima told her, “and you're ruining it for me with all this ruckus.”

Breaking Ruthi's will had been the real ceremony, Esther realized a short while later when, exhausted from crying, Ruthi was coaxed to stand up and step into a white dress. Her mother threw a veil over her head, an embroidered silk that completely blinded the bride. Her whimpering grew to a wail again as, supported by the two mothers, she dragged her feet like a sacrificial lamb as they guided her out to the kitchen yard. The
chupah
had been set there to get the benefit of the unobstructed sky above—and of God.

Clad in somber long coats and hard black hats, their knee-high socks gleaming white against the black pants tucked into them, Ruthi's brothers and uncles held the four posts of the
chupah
. Ruthi, blinded, staggered and both mothers propped her up like bookends. All three circled Yossel seven times for the Seven Benedictions. Ruthi's loud hiccups broke into the rabbi's incantation of the ancient words, until he ordered someone to give the bride red wine to calm her nerves.

Esther leaned against the wall so she wouldn't collapse. She was the only one who didn't chant
mazal tov
when the newlyweds retired for their
yi'chud
. All around her hundreds of second and third cousins dropped in to wish the family many offspring. Someone thrust the circulating cup of kiddush wine into Esther's fist. She stared into its ruby-red depth, contemplating the reflection of the candles in the rich liquid. Maybe now that they were allowed to speak, Yossel would cajole Ruthi to stop crying and eat the hard-boiled egg, symbolizing fertility. Or, would he hold it over her head, taunting?

Esther hadn't noticed how long she had been staring into the wine cup until someone said, “There're no Pharaoh's frogs in there. Drink, drink.” But when she brought the cup to her lips, the sweetness she usually liked felt like a betrayal of her friend.

She slipped away. Outside, two emaciated olive trees threw thin shadows on the broken pavement. Tomorrow was Yom Kippur Eve. Who was to atone for today's sacrifice of a Jerusalem maiden? Esther walked the streets under the rising pockmarked, silent moon, searching for a place to hide, finding none.