One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (12 page)

Part
II

In the turmoil immediately following her mother's death, the soul still in its unsettled and agitated wandering state, neither in this world nor the next, Tema's father assigned to her, their only child, the interim task of sitting guard over the body, which by the strictest law must not be left alone for even one second until it is pinned down under the weight of the earth and can cause no more harm.

Tema was eleven years old at the time, and what horrified her above all was not the waxen pallor of the corpse, or the fumes of liquefying organic matter already diffusing into the room, or even this cold stranger's obstinate refusal to respond when Tema addressed her so politely. It was the open mouth, hanging down slack, like a dog's—that was simply unbearable. Tema tried to slam that mouth shut, shoving the chin upward with the palms of her own hands, but it was hopeless—it just dropped down again and slung there, revealing everything, the deepest and most private secrets of the family.

She looked around the room—it was her parents' bedroom—for a cord or a belt to strap around the face and hoist up that jaw no matter how unseemly and ridiculous such a contraption would be, like a gauze bandage wrapping for a toothache in an old-fashioned slapstick farce. There on top of the bureau, as always, her mother's collection of three
head-shaped wooden wig blocks were positioned on their stands—one for her everyday
sheitel
, one for her Sabbath and holidays
sheitel
, and one for her fanciest, most expensive
sheitel
reserved for very special occasions such as weddings. In a playful mood one evening a year or two earlier, as Tema was engaged in a favorite pastime, watching her mother getting dressed to go out—attending especially to how her mother, as if she were completely alone and unobserved, leaned forward with utter concentration toward the mirror to apply the red viscous clown gash of her lipstick and then blotted it on a tissue, sending up a stale spit odor mixed with the oversweet artificial fragrance of the lipstick's perfume and the crushing smell of her mother's impenetrable unhappiness that would nearly ruin Tema for life—on one of those evenings when she was once again keeping her mother company during this eternally fascinating feminine ritual, Tema had taped a photograph of her mother's face to the front of each of the three heads on the wig stands, indulging the creative license of a child's capricious arts and crafts project. Her mother had never taken down those pictures, and now her three faces were staring back at Tema from the wooden heads on their stems on top of the chest of drawers. The special-occasions head was alarmingly bald, its wig on duty on the unresponsive woman they claimed was her mother lying there on that bed with her mouth hanging open like a dog, the face grotesquely made up, a long pearl earring like a teardrop inserted through the slit of one earlobe.

From this mannequin on the bed, Tema's eyes moved to the nightstand, where she noted once again her mother's favorite book, Leo Tolstoy's
Anna Karenina
in the Modern Library hardcover edition translated by Constance Garnett—a very fat volume, nearly one thousand pages long. This is what Tema took to wedge under that chin and prop it up, succeeding at last to clamp shut that mouth with the moist scarlet rim of the lipstick that had exposed the fleshy tongue, the teeth packed with gold fillings, the obscenely dangling pink uvula—until her father, Reb Berel Bavli, strode back into the room, accompanied by the professional
shomer
who had been hired to take over bodyguarding duty from Tema, to escort the remains and recite the chapters of Psalms through all the stages from transferal to the funeral home to awaiting burial after the ritual cleansing away of all earthly nonsense and artifice including wigs, makeup, and jewelry, the purification with poured water, the plugging with earth of all the orifices, the dressing in plain white shrouds for the grave. With
barely a glance at Tema or her mother, in a kind of backhanded stroke as if in passing without breaking his stride, Reb Berish flicked the book out from under his late wife's chin, releasing the jaw to flop right down again and cast open the mouth in that imbecile expression. To Tema, the drop was audible. Reb Berish just shook his head. “At least you didn't stick in there a holy book with God's name,” he said. “Forty days you would have to fast.”

It is true that she could have used the Tanakh on the nightstand on her father's side of the two pushed-together beds for this purpose, to elevate her mother's chin and seal her lips, since it was more or less the same thickness and heft as the Tolstoy, but the presence of the divine name on its pages and especially the unmentionable Tetragrammaton between its covers rendered it unthinkable, even to one as young as Tema was then, to defile such a holy volume by contact with the dead. The Hebrew Bible was a book you just did not fool around with. You did not deface it, you did not underline in it, you did not scribble comments or exclamation points or question marks in its margins or doodles or drawings of idealized girls' faces and fantasy hairdos during the numbingly boring Bible and Prophets classes, and if by some misfortune it fell on the floor you picked it up reverentially and kissed it in the hope of the unforgiving author's forgiveness.

Nevertheless, though Tema exploited only the work of a mere mortal to prop up her mother's face and restore it from the face of a dog, she still undertook over the course of the following year of mourning a series of mortifications of the flesh, including fasting from food and drink every Monday and Thursday when the Torah is read in the synagogue, and also a
ta'anit dibbur
, fasting from speech all week excluding Sunday after school, when she would take two trains and a bus out to her mother's grave plot still unmarked with a stone in the Old Montefiore cemetery in Queens and pour out her heart like water lashing her mother's face.

On top of that, she privately undertook several additional personal corrections, including sleeping with rocks packed in her pillowcase like Jacob Our Father in Beit El on his flight from his brother Esau to Haran, as well as the Tikkun Hazot, awaking at midnight every night and sitting barefoot on the cold floor of her locked room in a rent nightgown to mourn the destruction of the Holy Temple and the exile from Jerusalem for our sins almost two millennia ago with the prescribed prayers and
lamentations, a trove of ashes from sheets of notebook paper burned in an empty lot sprinkled on her head. She also recited the Tikkun HaKlali, the ten psalms specified by the holy Rav Nakhman of Bratslav, and often for good measure she would even recite the entire book of Psalms, all one hundred and fifty of them, as well as immerse herself three hundred and ten times in her improvised mikva, which consisted of the bathtub filled with ice-cold water. All of these mortifications she undertook to repair the damage she had inflicted on her spiritual core when, while lying in bed awake, she could not in her weakness resist the temptation to explore herself in a place she could only think of as “down there,” somewhere on an uncharted map like the South Pole, or, while asleep, when she had no control over her thoughts or actions, she would be assaulted by a dream that she could never remember but that would startle her into consciousness with spasms of shocking intensity—spasms so powerful and so unlike anything else she had ever experienced that she wondered why human beings did not occupy themselves with trying to reproduce this sensation every minute of every day and night, but, at the same time, she understood without having to be told that, whatever this was, it could only be a sin, religion had surely been invented to keep this thing under control.

Now and then over the course of that year, someone would take her father aside in the synagogue or in one of the stores on Thirteenth Avenue to remark that Tema looked like she was losing too much weight or that Tema had become “such a quiet girl.” Reb Berel Bavli would simply absorb these presumably well-meant bulletins regarding the troubling changes in his daughter and shrug his shoulders, putting out both of his large hands with their meaty palms upward in a wordless gesture that translated, What do you expect? The girl just lost her mother.

For thirty days following his wife's death, Reb Berish abstained from trimming his fiery red beard, a personal vanity he privately indulged, but Rosalie Bavli, Tema's mother, was, after all, his second wife; his first wife he had divorced on the day after the anniversary of their tenth year of marriage when she had still failed to produce an offspring of any flavor. The woman he took shortly afterward, the woman who became Tema's mother, was nearly fifteen years his junior, in her early thirties at the most by his reckoning when she departed this world, they were almost of different generations not to mention different sexes.

On the
shloshim
after her death, following the prescribed thirty days
of second-stage mourning, Reb Berish bared his throat to his trusted barber for a nice beard trim, commissioned a local synagogue hanger-on to say Kaddish during prayers three times a day over the duration of the eleven months' mourning period for his late wife, Rosalie—Rachel-Leah Bavli—who had failed to plan ahead and leave a son qualified to perform this service in her behalf, and he let it be known to everyone in his circle as well as to professional matchmakers that he was now in the market for remarriage. He also threw himself even more intensely than ever into his business, which was prospering beyond his wildest dreams, providing the most highly regarded, strictest kosher certification to meats of all kinds based on his years of experience as a
shokhet
, a ritual slaughterer, now employing a sizable staff of authorized personnel, butchers and overseers, and branching out to a whole range of other food products in addition to meats. The Berel Bavli logo—the double-B seal of approval, evoking the two tablets of the Ten Commandments—was worth its weight in gold, a guarantee of the highest, most trustworthy level of supervision. Of course, by the time his second wife Rosalie passed away he no longer worked hands-on, so to speak, as a
shokhet
, but there is no doubt that the accumulation of years he had spent standing in pools of blood cutting the throats of cattle and sheep and fowl and inspecting their entrails gave him a realistic perspective on physical mortality that extended to humans in the image of God as well, not excluding women—a perspective that could not be expected of a sheltered child such as Tema assigned to sit watch beside her freshly dead mother whose mouth hung open like a dog's.

Even so, during that first year following the death, Reb Berish took sufficient heed of the trouble signs in his daughter that were being brought to his attention with increasing frequency, and based on the advice of his rabbi, the Oscwiecim Rebbe, he took Tema out of the neighborhood girls' school, Beis Beinonis, which was considered slightly more to the permissive side, and transferred her to Beis Ziburis off Bedford Avenue in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, which was reputed to be a stricter institution that kept the girls rigorously focused on what was expected of them regardless of personal problems or life situations. Reb Berish banged on the door of Tema's bedroom one morning after he had tried to open it by turning the knob, which was how he discovered that she had installed a lock to carry out her mortifications in private, and informed her that he would be driving her to her new school in half an hour, after which she
would be going there and back on her own on the subway—which was how Tema discovered that she would be switching schools.

It was also during that year before the stone was unveiled over the grave plot that Reb Berish married again without informing Tema of his intentions or even that he had been looking much less found a bride. A small, private ceremony, without music of course out of respect for the recently deceased, was held in the living room of the Oswiecim Rebbe, who officiated under a tablecloth held overhead as a
huppa
canopy by four old Jews dragged in from the street along with their folding shopping carts. Afterward, the rebbe's wife pushed aside the great maroon volumes of Talmud and other books of law on the long dining room table where her husband usually presided and served some schnapps in little fluted paper cups and slices of sponge cake on napkins, and, as a special treat, because it was she who had been the successful arranger of this match, a plate of herring, each piece skewered with a toothpick topped with a brightly colored decorative cellophane frill.

Naturally, Tema was not present on that occasion. She met the new wife the next morning after her father had already gone off to shul for prayers and then onward to his business when there was a knock on her door in the wake of a tread that she could tell was not his. Tema opened the door to a woman in a pink chenille bathrobe who inquired with a heavy Eastern European accent where the linen closet was located. She needed to change the bedsheets.