Jerusalem Maiden (8 page)

I
n preparation for Passover, which would arrive a week after Avram's bar-mitzvah, oil lamps were repainted, clothes laundered and mended, the house aired of the odor of naphthalene and fried foods, the walls whitewashed with lye, and the accumulated mold and soot replaced by holiness.

Esther loved the bustle of activity in the communal yard, but not groping for fresh eggs in the lime putty that preserved them in a small barrel. The smell of the lime was biting and its whiteness blinding, and her skin stung from elbow to nails. She pulled out her arm, rinsed it in the bucket of standing water, then dipped it again in the cold yet hot, white mud, searching for more eggs, careful not to crack any. She counted her finds in the basket at her side. Thirty! Such extravagance for Avram's bar-mitzvah was excessive even for Aba, who had been to America and seen streets paved in gold.

At the tables set near the well, female relatives and neighbors gathered to help prepare for the big event. Unlike the Hassids, there would be no
kleyzmers
' music, dancing or imbibing—not as long as Me'ah She'arim was in mourning for the destruction of the Second Temple and waited for the Messiah, who tarried. Nevertheless, an aura of festivity flooded the house and yard, mirroring the chaos eighteen months earlier of Moishe's bar-mitzvah.

“It's so unfair,” Esther whispered to Ruthi, who was chopping onions at her side. “I turn twelve and Avram thirteen the same week. Both of us are becoming adults. Yet Hashem considers me, His daughter, less precious than my brother.” She washed her arms again.

“Wipe my eyes.” Ruthi turned to her with eyes narrowed by onion-induced tears.

Esther dabbed them with a clean damp cloth and went on whispering, “I hear Avram when he studies the weekly Torah portion.” Esther dabbed at Ruthi's eyes again and continued, “I can recite his
parashah
by heart.”

“You're funny.” Ruthi, who had already turned twelve three months earlier, said, “It felt no different to enter my mitzvah age. Not until I'm married.” She pressed the heels of her hands onto her eyes. Her voice took on the dreamy note that seeped into it with every mention of her betrothal. “I've heard that Yossel chanted his
parashah
beautifully at his bar-mitzvah.”

“That's not a qualification for a good groom,” Esther said.

Ruthi peeked at her with wet eyes. “Isn't that what you envy Avram for? You've just said so yourself.”

“Not quite.” Esther wouldn't dare launch into a quarrel about Yossel within the neighbors' earshot. The women chattered over the noise of toddlers playing at their feet. When one woman sang softly, “
By the waters of Babylon, There we sat, and also wept, in our memories of Zion,
” the others joined the lament. “
In our memories of Zion.
”

Esther's eyes began to tear, too, from Ruthi's pile of chopped onions. “Finish it fast,” she told her friend, “or we'll both be crying by the dirty waters of Me'ah She'arim.” She walked to the well and hauled up a pail of water, sifted it through a colander for maggots, and scoured the other end of the table in preparation for her next task. Then she washed piles of pots and utensils in a tub of reused water. The Nablus soap—the burlap-smelling soap used even for washing hair—felt harsh on her raw skin.

Ruthi joined the singing around them, her clear voice sweet, yet kept low, as no single voice should climb above the others.
Kol-isha
, a woman's voice, should not be heard by an unsuspecting passing man, or it might entice impure thoughts.

But Esther was the one failing to stave off improper thoughts. The week before, at Mlle Thibaux's, Pierre had burst in the door and flung down his leather school bag. Esther, who had been reproducing the Mount of Olives and the tiny graves spilling down its slope, dropped her brush to the floor. Pierre was preparing for his finals and wasn't supposed to be home. He gave his mother a hug that lifted her feet off the floor and made her laugh. Ill at ease about being a voyeur into someone's private domain, Esther also experienced a pang of envy at this display of affection, so foreign in her family, so ordinary here.

Pierre leaned toward Esther's easel. “
C'est incroyable!
The light, the lines—”

“Pierre!” his mother called out, and Esther felt the blush on her face burning deeper.

Pierre picked up Esther's brush and made a show of setting it on the easel's narrow shelf rather than handing it to her. He took a step back and bowed from the waist, but his gaze studied Esther's face as if he had come closer.

How had she missed that blue of his eyes? She had never seen such a clear, cerulean color except in the blue sky of her own painting. She dared not raise her hand to the brush he had touched lest he notice her fingers trembling. She felt on edge, but in some mysteriously delicious way.

With a parting kiss, Mlle Thibaux sent her son on errands. He glanced at Esther's unwashed bare feet, his mouth opened as if to say something, then he stepped out without a word. The room had emptied at his exit, yet the spark that had propelled his body as he had burst in the door and the eagerness in his blue eyes as he had studied her face remained imprinted in her mind.

“Esther, come here,” Ima now called, bringing her back to the activity in the courtyard.

Esther positioned herself in front of a huge ball of dough to knead for potato pies. It took all her strength to pull its edges, fold them back onto themselves, then throw the bulk on the wooden board, bang on it with her fists, lean against its mass with all her weight, and dig her fingers into it repeatedly until no lumps remained.

Finally came her favorite part: she cut strips and braided latticework of dough for ten tops. Ima inserted a hard-boiled egg in the center of two of them. “For good luck. One for Avram so he'll have strength, and one for you so you'll be as fertile as an egg.”

Esther rolled her eyes. She wished Ruthi, some distance away, shared her disdain. But her friend was preparing to leave; on the afternoons she did not apprentice at the print shop, she was required to help her married older sisters with their broods of infants.

As Ruthi waved good-bye, someone asked Ima, “Did Esther get her cycle yet?”

No!
Esther wanted to scream, but Ima replied only with an ambiguous head gesture. “Her mitzvah age marks her puberty.”

“How come Reb Shlomo has neglected the mitzvah of seeing his daughter betrothed?” asked a girl who held a baby to her breast under a shawl.

“No dowry left after he paid that spice merchant,” replied another.

“A good
shiddach
is in Hashem's hands.” Ima's hands rolled a dough pin so fast they blurred.

“There's always a
shiddach
even for a contaminated daughter,” Aunt Tova retorted. “Building a home in the Holy Land is rebuilding the ruins of Jerusalem,” she said to Esther, as if she knew Esther was sabotaging her calling by eating her weeds. Tova was kneading her own brand of bread rolls, the ingredients of which she would share with no one. “It's your religious duty to contribute to the public good.”

Thankfully, Esther's weeds were working; Hanna was getting breasts, while Esther wasn't. “Is there anything else to talk about but my
shiddach
?” Esther took a herring and chopped its head with a cleaver. Whack. She picked up another herring. Whack. Whack.

“The fish is already dead,” Ima muttered.

Esther caught herself. She sucked on a piece of herring, and her mind drifted away, up above the courtyard, where the biting remarks and chatter didn't reach her. She imagined she could look down at the communal space and the dozens of tiny kitchen yards flanking it, all crowded with pails, oilcan stoves, broken furniture, boxes and laundry lines. Her fingers ached to draw it all—the nakedness of the roach-infested squalor and the dust- and grease-covered floor stones below. In the Arab villages there were trees; even the Jewish Sepharadi neighborhoods had blooming kitchen gardens. But where, in the Haredi community, was the sacredness in the stench-filled air that invaded every crack? It occurred to Esther that perhaps, at the time of her birth, God had mistakenly planted her here instead of in Paris—

Tova changed to her favorite topic. “My Asher,” she said, her face lighting up, “is a Talmudic
eeluy
. Ask the rabbi. My Asher, he says, is intended for great deeds.”

Esther smiled. If only Tova knew the truth. Unlike Ima, who had been blessed with five sons, three still living, Tova's one son was squeezed in the midst of nine disappointments. The five girls who had survived infancy never learned to read, and Tova had married them off at twelve. With neither dowry nor room and board at Tova's one-room basement home, the marriages were arranged with poor, lame, old or feebleminded suitors.

“Tova, your bragging will bring bad luck upon all of us,” a woman told her. “
Tfoo, tfoo, tfoo.
” The women spat behind themselves three times to banish any evil spirit that might be eavesdropping on their conversation. Ima broke into a series of sighs. “I lost three babies. This year I buried my precious Gershon. And I have one son—he should live long—who's a dwarf.” The other women joined her in a litany of complaints to ensure that the evil eye wouldn't land in their homes instead.

Esther's knife marked long, straight lines in a sheet of dough to cut
kreplachs
while she listened to the women spouting grievances—food shortages, sick children, troublemaking neighbors, austerity, and the fear of zealous Arabs, Turkish soldiers, Christian missionaries and the Ottoman governor. “He should have a speck of chaff in his eye and a splinter in his ear so that he wouldn't know which to remove first,” Ima murmured.

“Since we're the chosen among Hashem's Chosen, wouldn't He want us to live in comfort and good health?” Esther asked as her fingers sealed a triangular pocket of dough.

“What a tongue! He hears your insolent questions,” said Tova, her tone warning.

“I ask Him the same thing directly,” Esther replied. “Anyway, doesn't He see the truth in each of us? He even remembers the dreams we forget by the time we wake up.”

“What are you, a rabbi?” Tova turned to Ima. “You'd better tame that impertinent daughter of yours. That brazen Greenwald girl who ran away with a
goy
?
Tfoo, tfoo, tfoo.
One brother was stung to death by a swarm of bees, the other kidnapped by pirates, her father walked into an Arab's knife, her sisters got leprosy, and her mother died of sorrow. It all started with her first doubting Hashem!”

“
Tfoo, tfoo, tfoo,
” came the wet refrain all around.

“I don't doubt Hashem,” Esther said. “And my Aba says that asking Him questions is the first step to learning—”

Ima elbowed her to shut up.

“Dvora, it's that school of hers,” a neighbor told Ima. “Religious it may be, but it gives your daughters profane ideas. No one sends good girls to school.”

Esther's arm swept the worktables around the yard. “Why doesn't Hashem let girls study and give the hard tasks to boys?” she asked.

“You want to change His order? Like a Zionist?” one woman said, and the other shook a finger at Esther. “Hashem didn't give girls the brain and diligence for studying, or He would have made them boys.”

“If my grandmother had you-know-what”—Ima laughed in what Esther knew was an attempt to diffuse Esther's outrageous words—“she would have been my grandfather.”

“How much do you pay to corrupt your girls' souls?” a woman with a huge belly asked Ima.

“Miss Landau sells Esther's lace and crochet aprons in overseas markets. It pays both girls' tuitions,” Ima said, for once meekly, and Esther cringed for her sake. “The school teaches cleanliness, loyalty, obedience, and the reverence of Hashem—”

“Obedience? Didn't you just hear this daughter of yours?” Tova cut her off, and the others giggled.

A
t dusk, as the women collected their pots and utensils, Asher came by to fetch his mother, who didn't need “fetching” as much as showing off. Spotting him, Esther announced, “Here comes ‘My Asher,' ” and even Ima giggled. Asher's eyes gleamed in amusement as he glanced at Esther, until his mother's scowling stopped him. As Esther scrubbed the long wooden tables before dismantling them, she thought that if she had ever envied Avram's or even Moishe's spots at the feet of God, she wouldn't have traded places with Asher. She had yet to decide what to do about the danger to this sorry, frail boy, whose soul
goyim
lay in wait to rob.

Exhausted, she helped Ima pack the food into the tin cans ordered from the tinsmith and arrange the delicacies in the front room into cages of metal mesh hung from the high ceiling out of the reach of mice. As she examined the display, for a fleeting second, she understood the satisfaction that enticed Ruthi. Yet, the day among the neighborhood women made it clear that she had been carved from a different Adam's rib.

The sweet aroma of almonds nestled in the embrace of pitted dates, and sesame candies coated in caramel sugar teased Esther's nostrils as silence fell on the house. The only sound was the creaking of the bed behind the curtain. Ima was probably giving herself an enema; constipation was the curse of the Jews, she had told Esther. As the bed rocked in a soft rhythm, Ima groaned, and even Aba grunted.

Sleep pulled Esther into its deep well as she wondered why God had placed so many curses on the Chosen People.

E
sther dawdled until everyone was outside, heading for Friday-night services at the synagogue for Avram's bar-mitzvah. The rich and heady smell of the food cooked before three stars had appeared in the sky to announce the Shabbat permeated the house. The table was covered in white linen and snaked from the front room through the doorway into the bedroom. At the end of the table, the candles Ima had lit to usher in the Shabbat flickered in their silver holders and cast their blessed glow onto the wineglasses.