Jerusalem Maiden (6 page)

“Pierre,” his mother said, her tone warning.

“I'm not supposed to speak with her, but can't I just give this to her?”

“Pierre!”

“
D'accord, d'accord,
fine,” he grumbled. He poured himself tea from the thermos and retreated with his bread, a piece of cheese and a hard-boiled egg. Mlle Thibaux handed Esther the package, but taking it, Esther felt it had been scorched by Pierre's touch. This was all a mistake. She shouldn't have come out here with him tagging along. Mlle Thibaux was a gentile from Paris. How could she grasp the strict discipline God expected from the chosen among all His Chosen People?

Mlle Thibaux presented her with a small bottle of wine. “I emptied the kosher wine, washed the bottle and put in drinking water instead,” she told Esther.

“Oh.” Such kindness! How different her life might be had Ima been as kind and patient as Mlle Thibaux. Banishing the ungrateful thought, Esther mumbled a prayer to “
Who brings forth bread from the earth
” and took a bite of a roll. It must have cost a fortune, since flour was scarce. And Pierre had made the trip to a kosher store just for her.

Gingerly, Mlle Thibaux bit into her sandwich, her pinky stretched out in a gesture Esther decided to emulate. Esther peeled her hard-boiled egg and, her pinky sticking out, sprinkled the egg with Dead Sea salt.

“Here,
mon chou
, try a fig,” Mlle Thibaux told Pierre and handed him one of Esther's fruits. He tasted it, and a minute later was up among the branches, picking more figs, laughingly pelting his mother with them.

“Leave something for the poor shepherds,” his mother said. “It's food, not toys.”

Pierre was quiet for a moment, his head hidden among the leaves. “Can you hear the music?”

Having given each bite the full attention God's handiwork deserved, Esther hadn't paid attention until now to the flute's song. Melodious and clear, it drifted from the other side of the monastery ruins. “It's the Arab shepherd,” she told Mlle Thibaux.

“
Ce n'est pas la musique arabe. C'est Mozart!
” Pierre called down. He hopped down from a tree branch so high that Esther flinched, expecting a broken leg. But Pierre merely landed on his feet with a small jangle of stones and started walking. “
On y va,
” he said. “Let's go see who's making the music of the angels.”

His mother followed. Esther checked the position of the sun. The days were short, the unusually mild temperature would drop soon, and she must get the hues right so she could continue working on this painting back at Mlle Thibaux's. Yet, too timid to object, she trailed behind, memorizing the swishing flounce of her teacher's skirt. She would use rusty red for the folds, maybe yellow.

When they reached the other side of the monastery, Esther stopped short.

The shepherd boy they had encountered earlier crouched on his haunches, his finger in his nose. Several feet away, playing the flute, a scrawny yeshiva
boocher
sat propped against a rock, his long sidelocks twisted and tucked behind his ears and his black skullcap pushed back. Asher! The only son of Ima's sister—who claimed he was a biblical genius, an
eeluy
—he had cut classes to sin in full daylight. Well, not sin really, but music was an affront to the
klal
—

Unable to turn around and flee, Esther made herself small behind Mlle Thibaux, hiding from Asher's view. Resentment rose in her. Her fifteen-year-old cousin's presence shattered her illusion of freedom. If he saw her, her secret would be revealed. And Asher was so attached to his mother's apron that he would surely tell Aunt Tova, who would be delighted to stick a dagger into Ima's pride in her children.

“He's fantastic,” Mlle Thibaux whispered over her shoulder to Esther. Pierre stepped forward, his head cocked as if bewitched.

Because of the mourning over the destruction of the Second Temple nineteen hundred years before, music was banned. But even in the occasional exception the rabbis had made for the mitzvah of rejoicing with a bride and a groom at their wedding, Asher never played. Yet here he was, the notes of some strange, beautifully haunting melody cascading around him like precious gems.

The song ended, and Asher sent Pierre a shy look. His eyes blinked. Once, twice, three times. Without the music, he seemed deflated, as frail as a girl in pants. It was hard to believe he was the same age as Pierre.

“
Bravo!
” Mlle Thibaux clapped her hands. “
Bravo!
” She shifted her weight, moving from in front of Esther.

Asher jumped to his feet. “Esther—” A blush flared all over his neck and face.

She felt herself redden, too. “What are you doing here?” she asked him in Yiddish. “You'll be in big trouble for skipping yeshiva.”

“I'll be in bigger trouble for playing
goyishe
music,” he replied, his tone humble, and Esther was astonished to see his eyes glistening. Even though his voice hadn't yet changed, he was old enough to be a groom. Men never cried, except, of course, when praying over the destruction of the Temple. “I give him my lunch,” Asher said, nodding his head toward the Arab boy, “and he lets me play his flute.”

“How come he can speak with her and I can't?” Esther heard Pierre ask his mother.

“
Il est mon cousin.
” Esther directed her response to Mlle Thibaux.

“
Un cousin, ah.
” Pierre broke off the head of a sunflower that grew in a pile of manure, and a grin lit his face. “Can't I be a cousin, too?” Without waiting for a response, he vaulted onto the boulders at the side of the wall until he reached the top, then started walking with his arms stretched out sideways for balance. He tucked the sunflower behind his ear, where it shone like the blazing sun.

Asher went on in Yiddish. “It would kill my mother if she knew I'm not the Talmudic genius she believes.”

“A genius is born only when Hashem gives him the gift. You can't become one,” Esther corrected him with more sternness than was appropriate in addressing an older male cousin. Asher's fragility erased his status.

“I want to study music. I'm good at it. It's all I hear in my head day and night.” Asher swallowed. “Someone in the Christian Quarter has shown me how to read music sheets. I can't keep copies, but I can memorize the notes and sing them to myself. Or play the flute here.” As if just remembering his sidelocks, he released them with knotty fingers from behind his ears. “The monk is teaching me how to play the pipe organ—”

“A monk?” Esther cut him off.

Just then Mlle Thibaux said to Asher in French, “It was a pleasure listening to your music,” and started back.

“What did she say?” Asher asked.

“We have to go,” Esther replied, and ran to catch up with her teacher.

A cold wind began to blow. A monk was teaching Asher! At least he hadn't seen her paint. Esther buttoned her coat. “What kind of musical instrument is a pipe organ?” she asked Mlle Thibaux.

“A room-size multilayered piano, but its sound is fuller, deeper.” Mlle Thibaux smiled. “Here in the city of the divine, when the music bounces off the church's walls, it gives a true sense of holiness.”

Church music?
Yishmor Hashem!
It was well known that missionaries lay in wait for Jewish children to convert them. Why, even Pierre's Alliance Française offered poor Jewish children free education—even free meals—only to teach them about Jesus. Aba had set up a special
tzedakah
fund to save such boys by paying their tuitions at yeshivas before they were snatched by these foreigners. Esther's own school combated the missionaries' lure by giving the few poor families who agreed to educate their girls free clothes, books and food.

Forgetting the promise of a beautiful day, the sky gathered its clouds, and winter dropped again upon the earth. As Esther collected the paints, the enormity of Asher's betrayal filled her head. She could guess the urge that compelled him to play music; it coursed in his veins the way the urge to paint coursed in hers. But her gift of art was God's, she was certain, while her cousin's must be the lure of Satan cloaked as a monk. In befriending a missionary and setting foot in a church, Asher was hanging over the abyss of obliterating his Jewishness. No Jew could ever twist away from the offense of learning the ways of the
goyim
. It was more dangerous than venturing into the mystical orchard of the kabbalah, where uninitiated men, too young to grasp the complex knowledge, lost their minds.

If only she could tell someone, for Asher's sake, to save him from the Christians' clutches before he became a
goy
. If only she could do that without revealing her own secret.

A
fter morning services at the synagogue, Ruthi looped her arm in Esther's, and, ignoring the cold, the two of them set out to do the mitzvah of walking outdoors on Shabbat to cleanse themselves of the weekday mundane. They ambled around the caves gaping in the chalkstone, where the Sanhedrin's wise men had been buried. They didn't dare to enter the caves, though their imaginations ran wild with tales of crazed biblical prophets who had once lived there, of ferocious lions sometimes spotted coming out of them, and of tragic lovers who had run away from their objecting communities to die here. They hunted for mushrooms that hid fat and docile in the woods underneath blankets of pine needles, the fungi's webbed underbellies signaling that they weren't poisonous. They picked feathery dill stalks and mustard seeds for their mothers' cooking.

Yet something had shifted between them. Ruthi's betrothal and Esther's discovery of God's gift carried each of them over a different threshold into a realm that had no room for the other. Esther's new love of art was between her and God; talking about it might betray her special bond with Him.

And in spite of her entreaties, Ruthi would not allow her to speak ill of Yossel. Returning from the caves, she adamantly refused Esther's suggestion to make a detour into the Old City through the Zion Gate, where she might chance upon him.

As Esther dried the dishes after the festive midday meal and listened to the rare quiet, she decided to keep her mind off Ruthi's betrothal for the rest of the holy Shabbat. Nor would she violate the Shabbat tranquility with worry over Asher. She smiled as she stored away the leftover
cholent
. It had been a delicious affair, worth the week of scarcity and labor. The potful of stuffed
derma
,
meat, potatoes, eggs in their shells and cloth bags of beans, lentils and barley had been cooked in its own gravy since Friday so as not to desecrate the Shabbat with the labor of lighting a fire. Now the entire neighborhood was quiet, resting in a
cholent
-induced slumber. Even Aba, who'd spent the long morning studying in the yeshiva, took his rest on the sofa while Ima retired to bed. In the kitchen yard, wrapped in a blanket, Avram sat on Ima's wicker stool, for once without his books. His knees jutted high from the low seat as he leaned his back against the wall to let his pale face soak in the winter sun.

Esther put on her coat and walked out. At the sound of her footsteps, Avram's eyelashes, golden as spun sugar, fluttered, and he looked up. Correcting the mistake God had made when creating Moishe, Esther thought not for the first time, He had tapped Avram's head to bestow upon him height and blessed him with an accommodating nature. She settled on the stoop.

“Did you see what Ruthi's Yossel looks like?” she asked.

“Eyes, ears, nose, mouth, two arms and two legs,” Avram replied, surprise and mockery mixed in his voice.

“And teeth.”

Avram chuckled. “So she shouldn't appreciate a scholar because of some teeth?”

“What about his character? He's wicked.”

“He's an
eeluy
!”

Esther beat the stone. “We're not some pieces of furniture to be given away!”

Avram's face widened in dismay. “No one dies from being married.” He blushed. “Aba will get us betrothed soon, you know.”

Not as long as she was eating her weeds. “Don't you care who you marry?”

“The book of Mishnah says that ‘
life is only a corridor to the pavilion of the after—
' ”

“Until the world after, I want another life,” Esther said.

“Another life? What kind of another life?”

“I hate this one.” She buried her face in her hands. She couldn't imagine what another life could be. She couldn't even become a teacher; the refined women Miss Landau hired to teach had been educated abroad. Anyway, Esther didn't want her womb to mysteriously swell with a child like Mlle Thibaux's. Esther took in a deep breath as if readying to jump over a cliff. “I want to draw.”

Avram's back straightened. “Draw?”

“For an
eeluy
you're quite stupid. Why are you repeating every word I say? Yes, draw and paint.”

“Paint walls?”

Esther waved her hand to encompass the world. “Paint everything.”

A horrified look spread on her brother's face.

She lowered the intensity in her tone, hoping that in his kindness, Avram would indulge her. “I want to draw and paint flowers,” she whispered.

“An idle pastime. It's forbidden to be idle.” Avram's tone was stern.

If only he knew of her painting her family, the neighborhood, Rachel, the rabbi—Esther squirmed. She wanted him so much to understand what art meant to her. “Look, what would have happened if you didn't want to be a lifetime yeshiva student? What if you wanted to do something completely different?”

“Such as?”

“Whatever. Play the fiddle. Music is not forbidden. Only our
klal
shuns it—”

“To be a
kleyzmer
? Why would I play music when I could study the Torah?”

She blew a strand of hair off her cheek. “What if you didn't want to study the Torah all your days?”

“But I do. It's a blessing to be able to honor Hashem.”

“Well, I want to do
that
, too.”

“Girls can't learn the Torah all their days.”

“I still want to honor Hashem. But not by getting Ima's life.” She sighed. “Don't you see how hard she works?”

“Would you rather have a lazy mother?” Avram spoke as if to a dim-witted girl. “That's how she glorifies Hashem, who bestowed upon her the honor of rearing children for great destiny in His Holy City. How many people around the globe are as blessed?”

“I don't want that ‘blessed' destiny—in the Holy City or elsewhere! You are so thickheaded!” The blood pumped in Esther's temples, and she blurted, “What if I wanted to live in Paris and paint people and animals?” Instantly, seeing the blood drain from Avram's face, she regretted her impetuousness.

“Idols?!” He slammed his palms against his ears. “Don't make me ever hear such immoral words.”

Embarrassment choking her, Esther jumped up. She started to run inside, then slowed to a walk, remembering not to desecrate the Shabbat.
Hashem, please be patient with me. I am still searching for the right question to ask You.

T
he dreaded winter grabbed the four corners of the earth and shook it. Along with the bitter cold, days of unrelenting rain were followed by more days of rain. Water penetrated the porous stones of the Kaminskys' house and seeped into the plaster. Sneaking under the damp feather quilt for moments of warmth, Esther watched blotches of mildew form on the domed ceiling and spread down the walls, shaping continents as on the school map until the white coat of last Passover's lye paint bubbled and cracked.

The bad weather finally broke years of drought, and the blessed showers washed accumulated dust off the city, reviving grass and trees to bloom, while filling cisterns. They also flooded basement apartments, and with no raincoat outside—and with the deepening dampness inside—Esther's clothes and shoes never fully dried. The cold infiltrated her wool socks and invaded her bones, where it settled.

Within weeks, dozens of children in the neighborhood died. From the inner courtyard, Esther watched, dry-mouthed, as each family of a child walked in the rain behind a member of the Burial Society, who carried a flat board on which lay a small body wrapped in white. The rabbis permitted the families to mourn less than the required seven days of
shiva
so parents could cope with illnesses of their other children.

The dread in the air hit Esther like a flying bat when she returned from school one day to the sharp smell of mint leaves boiling on the
mangal
. She rushed to the bedroom. Gershon was in bed, Ima at his side, laying a cold compress on his forehead. Ima's lips moved soundlessly.

“Get out before you catch it too,
Yishmor Hashem
,” she whispered, glancing toward the ceiling as if drawing God's attention. “And watch the other two. Make soup, hang the amulets and bring me a sheet soaked in cold water, but don't pass the threshold.”

Esther doubted that the sickness stopped exactly at the threshold of the unaired bedroom. In his fever, Gershon kicked the covers and called an imaginary playmate. Ima wrapped him in the wet sheet to reduce the fever, forced him down as he struggled, then dried him and laid an alcohol compress on his chest. But his breathing remained labored.

A few hours later, Miriam and Naftali, two and four years older than Gershon, had diarrhea so severe they soiled their clothes. Their little bodies shivered as if wind blew through the room. Esther changed them and dressed them in their coats. But when they continued to clutch their stomachs, crying in pain, she delivered the news to Ima.

“
Oy vey iz mir.
” Ima beat her chest with her fist. “Typhoid. It should have counted as one of the Ten Plagues. Hashem help us.”

The odor of soiled clothes and sheets hung in the tiny house. At least there was water to launder it all. While Aba, Moishe and Avram
dovened
for God's mercy, their bodies swaying back and forth, Esther and Hanna carried the laundry to the communal shed, boiled it in the cauldron, wrung it out, and hung the sheets and clothes to drip for a while before lugging the heavy, still-wet load back inside to hang in the front room. By the third dirty load, the skin on Esther's knuckles was puffy and raw, but that was a small price to pay to keep away the Burial Society and its planks.

Against the background of the men's monotonous praying, Esther shoveled the coals from the stove into the pressing iron, slammed its top shut, and carried it with both hands to the pressing board. Hanna had spread out a sheet and waited with the end of a scallion stalk held between her lips. Esther positioned the pressing iron along the edge of the linen and pushed it forward while Hanna blew through the scallion onto one of the holes in the iron's side. At the gush of air, the coal swelled with red glow, intensifying the heat. The iron felt heavier than a barrel of pickles. After just a few minutes, Esther's right arm stung with the effort of pushing and pulling it across the fabric.

Steam hissed out of the sheet as it dried under the hot pressure, but when a brown spot appeared on the white cotton, Esther called out, “You're blowing too hard. Lower the heat.” Hanna changed to slower blowing through the scallion stalk. The rising heat cooked her cheeks.

Later, Esther prepared dinner and stocked the stove in the front room with coals. Finally, exhausted, she lay down to sleep on the sofa, head to toe by Hanna. Her arms and back were stiff from the repetitive washing, rinsing, wringing, lugging, hanging and lifting the heavy wash loads and pressing iron.

“Let's pray,” she whispered. “
Hashem, God of Mercy. Please spare my two brothers, Gershon and Naftali, and my little sister Miriam, children of Dvora and Shlomo
—”

“The rabbis say that girls can't pray,” Moishe cut in from over the wood plank that partitioned off the boys' alcove.

“We aren't obligated, but we can if we want!” Esther bristled. “Miss Landau says that our prayers are important to Hashem.” But with Hanna shrinking at her side, Esther didn't finish her prayer; better not be impertinent in assuming that He would listen to a girl.

A
week later, Gershon turned five, but the day was purposely ignored in order to keep the evil eye from noticing. Under the cover, Gershon's chest rose and dipped, and his lips trembled in an effort to breathe. All day, the wind howled, rattling the shutters on the window. Ima's reading to the children from her
Tzena Urena
book of biblical lore was cut by her own sneezing.

Aba entered from his evening studies at the synagogue. Esther placed a bowl of hot water on the floor in front of his chair and settled cross-legged on the carpet while he dipped his feet in the water to thaw. She tightened her sweater against the chill in the room and rubbed her eyes. She was exhausted. “What if Ima gets sick?” she asked.

“
Yishmor Hashem,
but He has given your Ima resilience.” Aba's voice sounded tired as the sweep of his hand encompassed the walls blotched with mold. “Under the miserable living conditions to which the Ottomans have subjected us these past four hundred years, only the strong survive.”

His toes, sprouting tufts of reddish hair, appeared pale in the water, making him seem vulnerable. Esther swished soapsuds around them. In the Bible, washing a holy man's weary feet was an honor.

“Ima doesn't sleep or eat,” Esther said, refraining from pointing out the many young mothers in the neighborhood who had recently died. “Even her tea got cold.”

He stroked her hair. “You come from a hardy lot. Did I tell you the story about my mother?”

“Yes. But tell me again.” She vaguely remembered the wrinkled, toothless forty-year-old woman who had died of the plague when Esther was seven.

“At age fourteen, my mother, her memory be blessed, was widowed. Since she was still childless, she needed to obtain
halitza
from her brother-in-law to release herself from a lifetime of widowhood.” Aba sighed as if the dilemma was current. “But her brother-in-law was still a child of eight—and living in Russia. At age fourteen, my mother traveled to Russia by herself. Her journey took many months, often on foot, through snow-covered mountains crawling with bandits.”

The gust of wind outside made a racket. “But Bubby had eight living children,” Esther said.

“After her return to Jerusalem, my mother remarried. She was an old bride of eighteen.” Aba smiled down at Esther. “You have Bubby's strength—and her stubbornness. You also ask wise questions. The sages said, ‘The finest quality of man is asking questions.' ”