Jerusalem Maiden (20 page)

Aba finished speaking and put his hand on Esther's head. He blessed her as if it were Friday night. “
May Hashem bless you like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah.
” His tone soft, he asked, “Are you ready to fulfill your duty as a Jerusalem maiden? As Queen Esther did? Don't disappoint me.”

Esther swallowed. “I won't.”

Minutes later, Shulamit led her to the
mikveh
, where Esther's women relatives gathered for her purification ceremony. Following the attendant's instructions, Esther held her breath and ducked in the water, submerging fully. A rough hand pressed her head down to ensure that all the roots in her hair had been cleansed of the mundane, all her past transgressions drowned.

Shulamit wrapped Esther in a towel and held her against her bulging stomach. Esther closed her eyes, wishing to be a child again. “With God's blessing, you'll build a home in Hashem's house,” Shulamit whispered, and fed her a hard-boiled egg, the round shape symbolizing a full cycle and good fortune. With the egg filling her mouth, Esther choked back a sob.

After she was dressed again, Shulamit led her to the rabbi's home. “When the
rebbetzin
asks you when your last monthly cycle was, say it was fourteen days ago,” she instructed.

“But it wasn't,” Esther said, perplexed.

“Trust me. She needs to approve that you can conceive tonight.”

They waited in the
rebbetzin
's parlor, a room filled with cushions, tablecloths and curtains. Shulamit leaned as far forward as her stomach would permit. “You'll make yourself pure again for your husband only after you've ascertained that your
nidah
days are over,” she said in a hushed tone. “Wrap a piece of white fabric around your finger and push it inside. Only the day the fabric comes out white are you permitted to your husband.”

This had nothing to do with her and Asher. Yet it was a chance to learn what had been concealed from her for so long—without being rendered impure by knowledge. “Where do I push my finger?” Esther asked, her face hot.

“Your husband will find the place first. Then you'll know,” Shulamit said softly. “It's like it says in the Song of Solomon.” She took a deep breath. “Now for my special gift. It's a secret you should never share with anyone—not the
rebbetzin
, not your closest friend, and certainly not your husband.” She held Esther's gaze. “Promise?”

Esther nodded.

Shulamit cupped a hand at the side of her mouth as she whispered, “After the cloth comes out clean, you will soak a cotton ball in olive oil and place it inside you.”

Esther stared at an embroidered rendition of the rabbi on the wall. His eyes were upon them as if he knew of her rebellious plans.

“Do so every evening for as long as you are too young to have a child,” Shulamit said.

T
he female relatives had chopped Esther's braid and plucked every hair on her body. Esther's skin was on fire, the humiliation a layer under the miasma of sadness that wrapped her. She pressed the severed braid to her chest until Shulamit gently forced her fingers to let go. The wigmaker would pay good money for it, weaving from it a wig for less pious women.

Shulamit dropped the veil over Esther's head. Blinded, Esther felt Tova clutching her other arm. No wonder Leban had been able to cheat Isaac, replacing the coveted Rachel with Leah. All Esther could see were the hem of the borrowed white dress and the tips of the brown shoes Mlle Thibaux had given her. There was something comforting in her teacher's proxy presence, as if she were at her side, not Tova in her double role as the groom's mother and a substitute for her dead sister. It was as if Mlle Thibaux were whispering, “This way you'll find freedom.”

“
Hineni.
Here I am,” Moses had said to God, fully giving himself.
Hineni,
here she was, standing before Him, about to follow His wishes, even if reluctantly, even if her heart wasn't wholly committed. This was her
Hineni
as much as she ever could. Had God wished to prevent this sham marriage, He would have intervened. Esther shut her eyes and envisioned Aba's contented expression merely a few steps away. God, too, must be pleased.

Hineni.
She kept her eyes closed as the groom lifted her veil for a verifying peek and let it drop again. Led by Tova and Shulamit, Esther entered the
chupah
and circled the groom for the Seven Benedictions. Minutes later, the ceremony concluded with the groom stamping on a glass in commemoration of the destruction of the Temple. Only then, when he lifted the veil fully, did Esther open her eyes.

And saw that she had married Nathan.

Motherhood

Happy the man whose children are boys,
and woe to him if they are girls.

—TALMUD, KIDDUSHIN

S
o, where are you going?” Gaytle, Nathan's oldest sister, sat on her front porch, shelling peas into a bowl held between her thighs. Her apron, askew on her chest, was dotted with stains bearing witness to her days of toil.

Shaping her lips into a smile, Esther kept up her pace. Three more steps and the date palm tree would hide her from Gaytle's view. Two more steps and she'd be at the yard gate. “To pray,” she called over her shoulder.

“At the beach again?”

Esther adjusted her
tichel
. No wig for her, a truly pious woman.
Tzni'ut
didn't mean fooling men with hair harvested from someone else's head. She swung open the waist-high gate, and the whiny hinges sang of freedom. From the pavement, she glanced back at her sister-in-law. Gaytle was wiping the perspiration from under her wig. On either side of her legs poked a pair of identical heads. The twins were the same age as Esther's two-year-old Eliyahu, but Gaytle had since produced yet another baby.

“I never have the time for a leisurely walk,” Gaytle called out, and her sigh could be heard down the street. “There's too much work.”

Esther didn't raise her eyes to the terraces above Gaytle's, where more sisters-in-law were surely watching the exchange. Her only friend in the family, Abigail, had a terrace at the back. She would get the report later, during the kitchen gossip from which Esther would be excluded.

“Got your prayer book with you?” Gaytle called after Esther, her tone mocking.

Without turning her back, Esther tapped her thigh, where the small Book of Psalms hid in the folds of her long, ample skirt. In the years she had managed Aba's home with no electricity or running water, Esther had suffered in Jerusalem for the salvation of the likes of Gaytle. Now He rewarded her by allowing these excursions to admire His creations.

“Don't drag back sand! We have enough of it without some Jerusalemite tracking more in thinking it's God-sent.”

N
ot even the Song of Solomon had exalted the beauty and virtues of the sea. Walking west from her home in Ne've Tzedek toward God's miracle, anticipation quickened Esther's steps as it had nine years earlier when she had first arrived in Jaffa. It took several minutes to reach the asphalt thoroughfare that ran northward, parallel to the beach, toward the nascent Tel Aviv just ahead. Esther crossed the road, plodded up the high dune, and there it was, stretching to the edge of the earth in all its magnificence. No wonder that God, on His first day of Creation, bestowed the sea and the earth with equal importance.

She took off her sandals to feel the fine sand between her toes; the soles of her feet had lost the leathery crust of her youth when she had walked barefoot on sun-sizzled jagged rocks. Her eyes feasted on the spectacle of colors. Years ago she had discovered “blue,” but since seeing the Mediterranean, she had observed the nuances of green and the blurred boundary between the two colors. Yesterday's aqua blue had turned a translucent, precious-emerald green that gleamed under the surface. Foam undulated on top like a lacy veil. And then there was the sound of the sea: a lapping, lulling
nigun
that changed with the weather. On summer nights, Esther kept the windows open, and the steady drone carried her to sleep.

Without being asked, the Arab boy flipped open the wooden frame of a canvas chair and set it a couple of meters from the water line. Esther gave him a
grush
, knowing he'd ask for two more. After they settled in the middle, she sat down and shielded her eyes from the afternoon sun. The elongated splash of orange reflected on the water, quivering from the far western horizon until it broke where the heads of brave swimmers bobbed. It never ceased to amaze her that people could enter the water and float. Nathan sometimes swam in the men's section wearing his wool knit trunks, and before they married, his younger sisters used to splash in the designated women's section wearing old cotton dresses; even they weren't immodest enough for the bathing garments worn by the secular women. Esther never went in deeper than her ankles. “Jerusalemites are mountain people,” she had told Nathan. “They don't know water and certainly don't trust their lives to it.” There were nights, though, when the air stood hot and motionless, and a yearning with neither subject nor name swelled in her so that she wished to strip naked, run up the dune and abandon herself to the embrace of the waves.

Esther's toes drew semicircles in the sand, digging beneath the warmed surface to find damp coolness. How could her sisters-in-law begrudge her this little pleasure? She removed her short cardigan and took a deep breath, then another. The tang of rotting seaweed and beached clams baked by the sun spiked the salty smell. She took her knitting needles out of her bag. The old ache for brushes and paints was somewhat assuaged when the yarn danced between her fingers. And unlike a painting, her knitting would be useful; she was working on a dress for her seven-year-old Dvora.

All was quiet except for the soft crash of the waves. As if she were two separate women, Esther's hands worked pink purls, while her mind savored the sights. Fishing boats dotted the horizon. One kilometer to the south, high on top of a cliff, the ancient fortress wall of Jaffa jutted above the sea. Just past it, at the entrance to the main port, tub-size boats latched to a bobbing freighter like suckling pups. Since the port was not deep enough for big ships, Nathan had explained, small boats had to haul the cargo to shore.

Esther's palms perspired from contact with the wool. She put away her knitting and started north along the water's edge, her toes marking their fleeting ownership of this long shoreline. Farther up, teams of camels and their drivers were forever clearing the dunes. Nine years ago, when Esther had first seen the sand hills, she thought it inconceivable that they could ever be flattened. Yet now, past the mosque with its minaret, a Tel Aviv neighborhood of two- to four-story buildings created a new skyline. Esther held the hem of her skirt just high enough to keep it from getting soaked and withdrew the Book of Psalms from her pocket.
All in vain I have kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence. For all day long I have been plagued, and am punished every morning.
She mouthed the words as she read. God was with her as she bore her sisters-in-law's taunting, and now, with every step on the watertight band of sand, with every passing minute, she was closer to Him.

From a hut-like café on the road came the curling, ululating half notes of Arabic music and the slamming of backgammon chips as Arab men played. A group of boys kicked a ball, whipping up puffs of sand. Esther kept to the waterline, anticipating the minute pleasant surprise when a wave licked her bare feet. She picked up a seashell and dipped it in the water. The wet surfaces brightened up in startling lines and hues.

A cloud of silver flickered at the water's edge. When the wave receded, it took with it most of the shoal of tiny fish. One struggled helplessly on the sand.

Esther bent and nudged it gently back into the water. “Thank you, Hashem, for placing me here to help Your most lowly creature,” she whispered. She shouldn't have worried that being cast off to Jaffa had posed a danger for her soul; living here had strengthened it, as God presented Himself to her in many new ways. Her sisters-in-law lived religion from the outside, never dwelling on the deeper meaning of God's hand in every detail of their surroundings. They followed selected decrees mindlessly, by rote. Though it mattered little to Esther whether a good deed or a prayer actually reached God—she had never figured out whether girls' prayers counted—she found either one was purifying in its own right.

Farther up the beach, dance music poured from the European cafés that had opened since the British had arrived seven years earlier with their “five o'clock” socializing. On a wide porch framed by climbing vines, British officers danced with shameless Jewish women. Esther turned her head away and walked on.

The fullness in her breasts had been increasing for a while. Her milk was right on schedule. Time to turn back.

Just then, on a high dune, a figure in front of an easel came into view. Esther stopped. Her fingers clenched at her sides with a sudden yearning.

She readjusted her kerchief to hide errant wisps of hair; Nathan didn't want her to shave her head, and sometimes, during their
yi'chud
in the dark of the night, he stroked her hair. Moving away from the water, she plodded deeper into the dune. Sand stuck to the sodden hem of her skirt, making the fabric coarse and scratchy against her ankles. Approaching the artist, she made out the figure of a uniformed British soldier wearing khaki knee pants and knee-high socks, his red knees exposed. He was propped on a three-legged folding stool, his body leaning forward as he worked on a book-size canvas.

She stopped seven meters behind him, where she could view his painting. Her lips tasted sea salt. She hadn't seen any pictures since leaving Jerusalem; although the bookstore carried a growing selection of art books brought by the new wave of Jewish intellectuals emigrating from Europe, the ache these books brought on stopped her from perusing them.

The breeze carried a whiff of linseed oil that made Esther's stomach clench with desire. As her eyes fixed on the hand that held a thin brush, naked, untamed envy rushed in her veins.

The officer—she now noticed the insignia on his epaulets—seemed oblivious to her presence. The visor of his flat-topped hat shadowed his face, and from her position she could only glimpse the set of a square jaw. Since defeating the Ottomans and taking over the mandate of the formerly nameless land they now called Palestine, but which the Jews still called
Eretz Yisrael
, the British had flooded the country. They all looked alike with their fair skin and starched uniforms. But this one's fingers moved with a gentleness that belied his military stiffness. Esther compared the sea she could see to its likeness appearing on his canvas. His selection of blues and greens was subdued—she saw more vivid hues—but they came together as a subtly moving surface. His fine brush was dotting the delicate foam.

Seagulls screeched above, swooped down to pick at beached oysters and soared again to survey the packed sand for more. The breeze chilled Esther's nipples. She looked down at the front of her shirt to find dark circles of wetness. Tearing herself away, she scrambled down the dune, her legs sinking in the deep sand. Her mouth was parched as she rushed back along the water's edge to collect her knitting and put on her cardigan.

The hem of her skirt dried fast, and the sand fell away as she trudged back to the road and caught her breath in the shade of a lone sycamore-fig. A coffin-sized kiosk of galvanized tin had recently been erected under the waxy leaves. Esther eyed the pitcher of lemonade on the counter and the floating slices of fruit.

“Plenty of sugar it has, my lemonade,” the woman behind the counter said. Esther estimated her to be her own age, twenty-four. A crying baby wrestled in a sling tied to the woman's front, and two children played in the sand. The woman's
tichel
-covered head gave Esther an instant sense of kinship.

Esther counted her coins and laid them down.

“How about a slice of almond cake?” the woman asked, ladling lemonade into a glass.

Whoever heard of paying for a cake? Either Esther baked her own or it was served to her at someone's home. And sitting at a café was immodest. “No, thanks.” She gulped down the whole glass.

The woman was already wiping a table, placing a plate on it, mindless of her baby's crying. “Ask anyone about Malka's cakes. The almonds, they're from Jericho. The fresh eggs and real butter, they are from our own farm.”

The farm must be one of the new agricultural Jewish villages sprouting where swamps had been drained. Nathan would have paid double in appreciation for this Jewish endeavor. Esther's breasts grew heavier with milk, but eating the cake must be done sitting down to show respect to God for bestowing this plenty upon her.

Sycamore fruit, like hard figs, had fallen to the ground, their purplish pulp emitting a sweet scent but also attracting flies. Malka kicked sand over the rotting fruit. “Sit. Sit. Eat.”

“With another glass of that delicious lemonade?” Esther placed more
grushim
on the table and sat down. She said her prayer, thanking God for sending the British to save the country from famine and for providing cake and lemonade as everyday treats. She ate and drank quickly, then rose to leave.

“You come tomorrow, I'll have a fresh cake again,” Malka said over her infant's wailing.

Tomorrow she could have two slices if she allowed herself to splurge. “Why's your baby crying?” Esther asked.

The woman shrugged, and her hand touched her protruding stomach. “My milk has dried up, with another one coming.”

At the words, Esther felt her own milk squirting. “Give him to me.” She extended her arms. “I have too much milk.”

Her eyes brimming with thanks, Malka handed her the baby. Esther stepped into the hot kiosk, faced the wall and unbuttoned her cardigan and shirt. Every person had a sacred mission for the day, and God had just presented her with hers. This trip to the beach wasn't an indulgence, but His plan for a good deed. Mumbling words of thanks, Esther kissed the baby's velvety head.

Yet, twenty minutes later, while the physical pressure had eased, an old yearning climbed up between her ribs. As she left the dune and walked toward the clock tower that marked the entrance to the old city of Jaffa, she kept turning her head toward the lone figure on the beach until the top of his easel disappeared behind the curve.

T
he tiny apartment smelled of lemony furniture polish. The Arab woman who did the laundry was in the kitchen, chopping parsley for the evening salad. In the children's room, five-year-old Gershon was having a loud dialogue with his imaginary fleet of British sailors. The sounds of domestic scrapings of families in the surrounding buildings came through the open windows with an occasional bump or clatter. Behind the wall, one of Nathan's nephews was practicing his violin, producing music as grating as the sawing of crickets. Yet Esther loved its sound. It still amazed her that she had never heard music until she had heard Asher play.