Jerusalem Maiden (3 page)

Her eyes stung, and she couldn't open them. She was blinded like Zedekiah, the last king of Jerusalem! She tugged the ripped hem of her skirt to cover her legs. Pushing herself up to her knees, Esther was surprised that her arms obeyed, but another kick sent her down again, and a red-hot pick seared her rib cage. She could barely breathe. “Ima, Aba, Hashem,” she wept. These men would kill her. No one would even know she had been here. “Ima, Aba, Hashem—”

T
his plaid uniform? This is a Jewish girl from Evelina de Rothschild.” The Yiddish words broke through the din and brought Esther back from a fainting spell. Or had she imagined Yiddish being spoken? Lying in the gutter, blinded, she pictured the slow-moving clumps of sewage flowing next to her head. Mucus trickled from her nose down the side of her cheek. If only she could escape the humiliation of her body.

She tried to push herself up again, when a man crouched next to her. “Me and my son, we'll take you home,” he whispered in Yiddish, and covered her legs with something that smelled of donkey.

“To Me'ah She'arim,” she mumbled. Pain bound her rib cage like a barrel hoop. Her lungs couldn't expand to take in air. She clutched the man's ankle while he haggled in Arabic with a crowd of merchants.

Finally, he bent toward her. “Now we go.”

“My eyes,” she cried. She pressed her knuckles into her eyeballs. “I'll never see again.”

“Blindness should be your gravest problem,” he murmured, and added for God's ears, “The Ten Plagues should strike all our enemies.” He lifted Esther onto a handcart. Through her whimpering, she felt him and his son push the cart uphill, then downhill, then uphill again. The bouncing of the wooden wheels on the cobblestones clattered her teeth and sent shards of pain through her side.

By the time the men delivered Esther to her family, she had managed to open her eyes to slits. Dozens of neighbors came into view through a fog. Esther winced. Everyone would witness her shame.

Ima rushed out, her hands flying to her chest as she keened, “
Oy, gevalt! Oy vey iz mir!
”

“What happened?” Aba cried from the kitchen door.

“Your daughter jumped on an Arab merchant in the Cardo and bit him,” the man said, scratching his head.

“She bit him?”

“Jumped on him? She has the
dybbuk
,” Ima growled. She waved her hand at the onlookers as if to chase away cats and pushed Esther inside. “Always running around. Don't you know that
‘A king's daughter's honor is all indoors'
?”

“I think that he—well, he—he did something despicable first.” The man followed in.

“What?” Aba whispered in horror. His long red beard trembled. “What did he do?”

“Why were you in the souk?” Ima demanded of Esther.

“My eyes!” Dazed, rubbing her eyes and holding her painful side, Esther stumbled to the sofa. At least she wasn't totally blind. She needed her sight for God's gift. But why would He put her in such peril? She could barely breathe, let alone think.

Ima covered her with a shawl. “Answer me. Who'd ever marry a girl who's been touched by an Arab?” As no enemy could be mentioned without a curse, she added, “May he have pharaoh's plagues decorated with Job's boils.”

Moishe headed to the door. “I'm going to kill the
mamzer
!”

“You're not going to kill anyone.” Aba grabbed him by his barrel chest. “All we need is to start a fight with the Arabs.”

“There are five times as many of us! The Arabs should be the ones afraid!”

“Stop acting like a
goyishe
vandal,” Ima ordered, dripping cold tea into Esther's eyes. “Better?”

Esther moaned and clutched her rib cage. More details of the room came into view. Hanna, the sister who people said looked like Esther's twin, stood frozen against the wall, shock in her raisin-dark eyes.

“Shlomo, you go to the police!” Ima called to Aba.

Moishe stopped his struggles, and Aba let go. “And become another problem to the Turks? They have their own
tzuris
fighting the Italians in Libya and holding their pants in the Balkans.” Aba's voice quivered. “For four hundred years the sultan protected us. Now his governor, this Amalek, forgets his Jews—”

“He should lose all his teeth but one, for a toothache,” Ima interrupted. “How can you let them dishonor your daughter?”

Aba shook his head with regret. “Hashem will seek justice for us.”

“Hanna, go fetch the midwife.” Ima helped Esther into the bedroom, where she dabbed Esther's face and neck with a damp rag. “
A shandeh un a charpeh.
Shame and disgrace you've brought upon us. Whoever heard of a girl biting a man's flesh?”

Avram, a year older than Esther, crouched next to her cot. According to the decree not to dress like the
goyim
, he wore his yeshiva clothes—a black coat and black pants tucked inside knee-high white socks. Avram had been her playmate when they were younger, both shunning Moishe, who took pleasure in pulling off insects' legs.

Now Avram studied her face, and she noticed the new reddish fuzz on his upper lip. “How are you?” he asked.

“Not good.” Her voice was hoarse. The leech-like lips of the spice merchant still sucked her neck. Looking into Avram's large gray eyes, so like their father's, she willed him to know that she could still feel the beast's lips. She scratched her neck.

“Avram, go study for your bar-mitzvah,” Ima said, her voice brightening. “The day that will make up for all the troubles I must suffer.”

“Study for my mitzvah age, too,” Esther croaked, and Avram laughed. Come spring, his thirteenth birthday and her twelfth would fall on the same weekly Torah portion. Yet, his rite of passage would be celebrated, while hers would be marked only by an oblivious half moon.

“At your mitzvah age, you'll finally be responsible for your own sins, thank Hashem.” Ima's lips tightened over a crooked front tooth. Although she was only thirty-three, double lines on her forehead had settled in like Bedouin squatters. “But seeing you under the
chupah
will still be my job, even if you've ruined your prospects.
A king's daughter's honor is all indoors.
Where shall I bury my shame?”

In spite of Ima's grumbling, she propped a pillow behind Esther's back to ease the pressure on her rib cage and coaxed her to drink warm milk spiked with honey.

Soreness knitted Esther's limbs. She felt dirty. Filthy. If only there were enough water for her to soak in a bath and scrub herself with a loofah, but street water distribution had long ceased. She kept scratching her arms and thighs to remove the handprints that burrowed like maggots under her skin.

“Did you catch fleas from that cholera? May his bones be broken.” Ima examined Esther's skin.

Little Gershon crept over and placed on Esther's pillow his Chanukah top, his most precious toy. She couldn't help but smile. As God had done for Avram, He had painted Gershon with a feather dipped in gold and blown heavenly breath into his heart to bless it with kindness. But she couldn't touch Gershon now. Not when she was so unclean.

The midwife arrived, carrying her leather bag. She tapped Esther's forehead with a spoon, sprinkled salt around the bed and mumbled magic words. She wound a torn strip of sheet around Esther's chest. Then she spread Esther's legs. Mortified, Esther could muster no strength to fight the probing fingers that checked whether her virginity had been defiled.

Esther pulled the covers over her head as the woman called Aba into the room. “She's still marriageable.”

“Thank Hashem.”

“She's not only ruined her reputation,” Ima muttered at the door, “but also poor Hanna's prospects.
A shandeh un a charpeh.
”

“She's broken a rib. It will heal before her wedding day,” the midwife added. “But she has a rotten molar that better come out.”

“Take it out,” Ima ordered. “You're here already.”

“Now?” Esther whined. She passed her tongue over the doomed tooth. “It will hurt so much—”

“We won't have to pay her twice.”

A mouse scurried against the wall and disappeared into a hole as the midwife withdrew a pair of pliers out of her bag.

Esther sent Ima a beseeching look, but her mother moved to stand next to her head. Esther closed her eyes, willing everything away. Ima pried Esther's mouth open and dripped wine on her gums. She then pressed Esther's forehead down with all her might. Esther heard the clanking of metal against her teeth. The pliers moved back and forth as if uprooting a giant turnip from the stubborn earth.

A sharp pain shot into her temple, then black mushroomed over everything.

D
arkness pressed on the window when Esther woke to the throb in her jaw, to the knife-like pain in her ribs, and to Ima's grumbling while killing flies with a swat of caned wood then folding bedding into the crib; unclaimed by a baby, the crib had long turned into storage space. “It all started with Shlomo's desecrating the holy language by speaking it at home like a heretic Zionist,” Ima told an invisible audience, referring to Aba's following the linguist Ben-Yehuda, who had revived the biblical Hebrew. She pointedly spoke only Yiddish. “No wonder Hashem is punishing us. Now our daughters are dishonored, and there is neither judge nor justice in this land.” Without breaking her pace, Ima brought over a bowl of chicken soup and placed it in front of Esther. “Say your prayer and eat, or sickness and afflictions will enter your belly.”

Esther took a spoonful of soup and retched.

Ima tied a garlic bulb around Esther's neck. “Feeling better? Eat.”

There was a fuss at the front door, then a grave voice, and Aba entered the bedroom. “The rabbi's here to pray for your recovery.”

So great was the honor of the rabbi's visit that Esther tried to sit up. This distinguished scholar, so slight that he wore a pillow under his coat to give him an important paunch, spoke only to men unless a barren woman, a starving widow, or a beaten wife appealed for his intervention. “Thank you, rabbi.” Esther took his hand to kiss.

Ima dragged in Aba's upholstered chair from the front room. The rabbi sat on it and caressed his chest-length white beard. Everyone left the small room, but Avram stayed at the door as it was forbidden for a man—even a rabbi—to be alone with a girl of marriageable age.

“
We put our trust in You to guide us through the valley of the shadows in these taxing times,
” the rabbi prayed. “Daughter, let this calamity be a lesson to you. I will tell you a tale.” He looked at Esther from under a hooded gaze. “In a boat full of people, a man drilled a hole through the bottom. When the others objected, he said that the hole was only under his own seat. His fellow travelers replied that although he was literally correct, they could all drown.”

Esther's ears grew hot with shame. She glanced toward Avram. Not to waste time, he was counting the fringes in the four corners of his
tzitzi'yot
undergarment, each individual string representing one of God's 613 commandments.

“A Jew is inseparable from the
klal
, the community,” the rabbi continued. “It is the
klal
which stands to suffer from any selfish action taken by one member. An unfortunate event such as the one you caused can escalate to Arab riots.”

The throbbing in Esther's jaw flared like fire by a gust of wind, but this pain was her deserved punishment. The souk had been forbidden to her for a good reason. By breaking the dictate of
tzni'ut
she had dishonored her family and endangered her blameless
klal
.

She started weeping. “Rabbi, I'll never go to the souk again.”

“Good. ‘Create respect for one Jew, and you create respect for a hundred Jews.' ” His tone turned softer. “You have a very important destiny.”

Esther felt hope rise. Not venturing ever again into the Arab market didn't have to imply deserting her art sessions with Mlle Thibaux; those posed no bodily danger to Jews. There had been a reason God had spared her eyesight.

“I think—uh—” Esther sniffled into the corner of her blanket. “I think that Hashem has destined me for something special. He wants me to devote my life to His will, but not through building a home—”

The rabbi jumped to his feet and looked down at her. “Only Christian women—pagans all of them—have such blasphemous notions.” His white tufts of brows knotted. “Has a missionary gotten to you? Have you been reading forbidden books?”

Esther's fists squeezed her blanket onto her eyes, hiding her face. She couldn't lie about Chekhov, nor admit it.

“Our
klal
, of all Jews in the universe, is a righteous elite with a special mission to bring the Messiah, and you have been honored with ensuring our people's survival after generations of persecution and strife.”

“I'm only a girl, rabbi. This honor is too much responsibility—”

“That's why you were entrusted with the gift of purity of heart as befitting a Jerusalem maiden.”

Something dislodged in Esther. The rabbi hadn't been assigned to permit her—of all girls in Me'ah She'arim—a new destiny; he was unaware of God's gift to her. The pain in her jaw and chest burst like an over-ripe pomegranate, hurling all its 613 pieces through her head and body. She turned her face to the wall, but couldn't prevent the wail that slipped out.

Mistaking her crying for regret, the rabbi said, “Hashem-blessed-be-He forgives an errant child for the mindlessness that led you to cast indignity and danger upon us all.”

Her hand on her jaw, Esther halted her bawling. “He forgives?”

“You have failed His test once. I'm sure that from now onward you'll tremble before Him. You'll walk the path He chose for you long ago. And do you know why I say ‘long ago'? To emphasize our traditions. The weight of not just our future, but of our history is on your shoulders—”