Jerusalem Maiden (21 page)

Nathan was seated at the dining table in the parlor, perusing a stack of documents. The crown of his soft brown hair was covered by the velvet skullcap he had asked Esther to embroider during their first year of marriage, the word
Jerusalem
on one side of the circle in gold, the image of the Western Wall on the other in silver.

The wriggling of the two flounder she had bought at the fishermen's dock grew faint in Esther's string bag. She dropped the bag on the floor and peeked under the table, where Eliyahu sorted building blocks. When he saw his mother, he toddled toward her, his head almost hitting the apron of the table's edge. She pulled him out and settled on the sofa. In a swift, practiced movement, she turned from Nathan's view, threw a napkin over Eliyahu's head, and opened her shirt.

“Tel Aviv has great food stores.” Nathan gestured toward the string bag. “You shouldn't go alone into the Arab market just to save half a
lira
.”

“It was dangerous in Jerusalem, too, but I'm still alive,” she replied in Yiddish over the sound of Eliyahu's sucking. In this city, where Hebrew was the spoken language, Yiddish had become her mark of piousness, whereas in Jerusalem, speaking Hebrew had marked her defiance. “I got fish for Shabbat.”

“On Wednesday?”

“Tomorrow it will be more expensive.”

Nathan sighed. “My Queen Esther, you take away my pleasure of shopping.”

“The merchants see you approach and their hearts fill with glee. That cabbage you bought at noon? The worms had already escaped to a better one.”

He smiled. “It's my obligation to put food on our table.”

“Your Arab neighbors do the marketing because they don't trust their women with money,” she said. “I
save
you money.”

Eliyahu wiggled, trying to extricate himself. Esther brushed her lips against his long curls, put him down and gave him a wooden block. Picking up the string bag, she turned to the corridor just as Dvora emerged from the kitchen, munching on a peeled cucumber. Without acknowledging her mother, the girl went to sit beside her father, where her book lay open.

“Shalom,” Esther said. “What are you reading?”

Her daughter sunk her head in her hands, her eyes fixed on the page.

“Answer your Ima,” Nathan told the girl. His eyes apologized to Esther on her behalf.

Dvora raised her head, but the pupils in her raisin-dark eyes didn't dilate. Her pinched face and low, fuzz-covered forehead made her look somber.

Esther withdrew from her knitting bag the yet unshaped pink piece hanging from the needles. “Look at the dress I'm making for you.” She heard the pleading in her own voice.

“Pink is stupid,” Dvora said.

“It will match the pink cape Aba brought you—” Esther stopped. “Never mind.” Hiding her disappointment, she passed her hand over the corner of the black-lacquered buffet. It left a mark in the dust that had accumulated in the few hours since she had last wiped it. She stepped to the washroom, her skin vibrating as she heard Dvora's eager, chirping voice drawing her Aba with questions. Why couldn't her daughter adore her half as much as she did Nathan?

Esther perched on the edge of the shower basin to rinse her feet. Dvora was a never-ending disappointment. Esther had conceived when Shulamit's trick of cotton-in-oil had failed, and Dvora had grown inside Esther like an inflamed appendix. Dvora had been a serious infant, not given to easy giggling. She refused the breast but sucked hungrily on cucumbers, later munching on them with her toothless gums. Soon after her teeth came in, they rotted into black dots like ants. Esther had had to hold her while the dentist pulled out the teeth, and the screaming Dvora, who spoke in sentences at ten months, blamed her for the pain.

Yet, Esther was the adult. The mother. What was she doing wrong? Had her own mother reached from the grave through her namesake to punish her?

The sand washed off Esther's feet into a tin bucket so the water could be reused. Eventually, the sand would be carried back to the sea; God saw to it that nothing was lost.

Esther dropped the fish in the bucket. Distrustful of their salvation, they remained still for a moment, then broke into sluggish swimming. Accustomed to seawater, they would survive just long enough for her to prepare them for Friday's festive dinner.

Gershon came running down the corridor, a bedsheet flapping from his outstretched arms. His flying blond sidelocks failed to hide his big ears. “I'm a man-o'-war!” he shouted, swooping by like an exotic bird.

“Come here,” Esther called, following him to the parlor. “Show me your splinter from yesterday—”

But he disappeared out the front door, leaving behind a whiff of muddy sweat and the sound of his feet pounding down the stairwell. He shouted for his many cousins who lived in the building. Gershon had little need for her affection; his world had already closed to her, while Esther's worry increased as he approached the age of her little brother's death.

“I must soak the splinter or it might get infected,” she told Nathan.

“It's hard for him, being cooped up in the yeshiva all day. At his age, I hated it.”

“But now you're glad you did it,” she retorted, bracing herself for an argument. She hadn't foreseen that God's settling her in this city as an example to adhere to His mitzvahs would land her in a battle with Nathan. Her victory in sending Gershon to a full-day yeshiva at age three remained precarious. “Your Torah and the Talmud have enriched your life immensely since.”

“This land needs our boys to study more than just religion. The secular school teaches math, geography, biology and English—”

She cut him off. “He's safe at the yeshiva until late afternoon. Should he run around in the street and get run over by a cart?”

“He needs sports. The British have even introduced badminton.”

“Whatever that is.”

“It's a game where you throw a ball with feathers,” Dvora piped in. “The other person hits it with a racket and—”

“Maybe you should try it yourself instead of reading all the time,” Esther said.

“It's a game for boys,” Dvora replied, her eyes back on her book. “You made me a girl.”

“Hashem created you in whatever image He wanted you to be.”

“Then He made me want to read.”

Esther's jaws tightened. Dvora had been reading before the age of three. Often, her darting remarks left Esther preferring her silence. She picked up Nathan's fedora from a chair and brushed its rim.

“There's a letter for you from your sister,” Nathan said, as if to break her discomfort.

“Miriam?” Her youngest sister wrote occasionally with news of the family. Aba still suffered from crippling back pain. Moishe's lame wife had died at nineteen upon giving birth to her sixth child, leaving the care of her orphans to Shulamit, who had already borne Aba five children. And Hanna, who had failed to produce even one baby, at night turned the front room into a bedroom for herself and her yeshiva
boocher
husband, while Naftali, who had regained his speech but not his studious focus, had built a hut on top of the house for his own growing family.

“The letter is from Hanna,” Nathan said.

“You're sure?” Esther hung the fedora on the coatrack. Flaunting her elevated status in the family, Hanna had never even acknowledged Nathan's shipments of food during the last years of the Ottoman rule when Jerusalem starved, nor his yearly stipend. After all, support was due her husband, who studied Torah on behalf of all Jews. By the time the Great War in Europe had ended, Hanna's silence had hardened into an insurmountable cliff.

“I'll bring the letter!” Dvora bounced up and down. “I'll open it!”

“You may bring it, but it's for me to open,” Esther replied, a spear of jealousy cutting through her at her daughter's excitement. Last summer Nathan had taken Dvora to Jerusalem on a business trip and left her in her grandfather's house for a month. For weeks after her return, Dvora chattered about the house and its inhabitants—and Hanna. Apparently, in a household overrun by more than a dozen children, the childless Hanna had singled out Dvora.

Esther held the envelope, weighing it, rereading her name on its face. She had forgotten Hanna's prudent handwriting. A sudden longing for her childhood in Jerusalem, for the beauty of the city and its mountains, flooded her chest.

Dvora looked up at her, and her eyes sparkled under the dark brows connecting over the bridge of her nose. “Open it!
Nu?
”

Nine years and never a word from Hanna. Even Avram sent a short congratulatory note every Rosh Hashanah. The old pain tasted sour in Esther's mouth. She tucked the envelope in her pocket. “Whatever Hanna wants can wait.” She walked to the kitchen.

“Ee-ma! Let me read it!”

“Want to help me decorate the dinner cake?” Esther asked, but Dvora refused.

Esther busied herself churning cream into butter, stealing time, drowning her apprehensions in the thickening fluff. She heard Nathan open the bedroom door and then stop. She knew what he had noticed: the two beds had been pulled apart, a nightstand inserted between them. Her
nidah
days had started again. She put down the bowl and went out to him.

His brow was clouded. Two years after baby Eliyahu, she had again failed to conceive. But she was taking no more chances. Breast-feeding reduced the risk of pregnancy, and nursing Malka's baby would help now that hers was close to weaning. To further lower the odds of pregnancy, Esther also used the rubber douche bag the midwife had sold her, which she hid from Nathan in the storage space above the shower.

“I'm sorry.” Nathan's voice cracked with sadness as if it were her disappointment, too. “Hashem willing, it will happen next month.”

Their blurry silhouettes reflected through the lace-covered mirror above the vanity table. Nathan had purchased the set of furniture before he learned that she considered a vanity table an improper indulgence. Esther had covered the mirror with her own handiwork, but she now peeked at the indistinct images as if viewing strangers through a window. A picture of the British officer and his painting flashed through her head and with it the old ache, as familiar as the sore tooth she avoided when chewing. She lowered her gaze.

The date palm outside swayed in the evening breeze. “Will you eat before or after the synagogue?” she asked Nathan. In addition to his hour of morning prayers before work, he studied Talmud for two hours most evenings. This reaffirmation of his faith in the sea of Jaffa's secularism comforted her. It was the most she could have expected from a modern Jew.

“Later.”

“What Talmudic passage are you studying tonight?”

He didn't seem to hear her. He cleared his throat. “My sisters want us over on Fridays. They asked to rotate every week, so we'll all eat together as a large family.”

Her annoyance over Nathan's ignoring her question about his studies—not for the first time—was eclipsed by the news. “This ‘large family' already shares the Shabbat midday meal,” Esther said, making no effort to conceal her sarcasm. “Did they show up at your shop as a committee? Or was it Gaytle who made the request on their behalf?”

Skipping ahead a few lines in a stale argument, Nathan protested, “She—They don't hate you.”

“All but Abigail mock my Haredi ways, nudge me to wear jewelry, never stop ridiculing Jerusalemites as filthy—”

“They feel that you're in judgment of
them
. No one is religious enough for you.”

“Someone around here must show genuine reverence of Hashem.” On her wedding night, when Esther had realized that God had sent her a kind and gentle groom, she figured that her exile to Jaffa had been His special mission for her, rather than a punishment. Nathan's sisters had been shocked that he had imported a Haredi bride from Jerusalem—and one who spent hours admiring the sea. They thought of the sea as a depository of the city's garbage and sewage. Only a Jerusalemite would view it as God's miracle.

What none of them had grasped was how much she had relaxed her Haredi ways: these past few years she enjoyed idleness, indulged in comfort and savored beauty.

Nathan sighed and looked at the ceiling as though the solution to the conflict were etched upon it. “My sisters admire your sewing. The Purim costumes you made for all their children are still the talk of the neighborhood. And they approve your being prudent with my money. Let it be enough.”

“I wouldn't give up my beautiful Friday-night table.” Esther loved setting it with her own colorful embroidered tablecloth and napkins, with Nathan's gifts of crystal, silver and china. She loved listening to him offering
Dvar Torah
. Now her ire climbed a notch. “You know what an oasis the Shabbat is for me. But what did you say? You've agreed to whatever your sisters asked.”

“Soon, I'll finalize the plans for our new house.” He walked to the open window. “When I joined the group purchase of land, I committed to building it.”

“You're changing the subject.”

“I'm not.” He faced her again. “Esther, we'll all be more comfortable in a larger house.”

“How is moving to the dunes of Tel Aviv more comfortable?”

“Walking twice a day to and from the store would be easier if I lived near the new commercial center—”

“And what about me? It's bad enough that I'm choked by your sisters. Must I also live among immigrants whose idea of being a good Jew is to eat
traife
in
Eretz Yisrael
rather than in Germany or Poland?”

Nathan pointed to the electric wire that snaked from the pole outside through the corner of the window and dangled above the floor to the lamp on the nightstand. His voice remained patient. “Esther, we can build a house with wires and pipes
inside
the walls. An inside toilet, too. Hashem bless the British, we can have comfort. The streets in Tel Aviv will be paved. There will even be electric torches to light sidewalks at night. You'll see.”