One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (19 page)

Temima knew exactly where Ketura lived: on El-Wad Road in the shadow of the Temple Mount with its Golden Dome, in an apartment Temima had rented for her. She had been to visit her there on several occasions in recent months since the Old City of Jerusalem had been breached and opened again to Jews, bringing money to Ketura to tide her over after Howie had dismissed her from their service when Temima had conceived from the single time he had flung himself upon her to collect what was owed him. Officially, Ketura was their Arab housekeeper, but soon after she arrived at their home from the Makhane Yehuda market she also began serving as Howie's handmaid, his
pilegesh
, the “outlet”
that, in their original negotiations in the other Israel—the Israel kosher delicatessen on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn—Temima had vowed to Howie she would provide for him for the sake of his health, to take care of his needs.

Temima had found Ketura begging on the Agrippas Street side of the market with an exquisite mocha-skinned baby swaddled in a towel lying in a discarded grapefruit crate some distance from her by a garbage dump. The baby opened his eyes, a translucent pale color, gray almost blue like ancient glass, and stared at Temima. “I just can't bear to watch the boy die,” Ketura had whispered when Temima had placed a coin in her hand that day in the market, even in violation of her principles against encouraging women beggars who exploited their children because she had been electrified by the remarkable scar in the shape of a black bird with outspread wings stretched across the face of this cast-off woman. Since there was no justice, at least let there be mercy.

Ketura had just come out of the wilderness, from the patriarchal compound of Abba Kadosh, who had disgorged her with her baby. She left with her child in her arms, calling him Ibn Kadosh because he was his father's son. The scar that had taken the oracular shape of a bird had been seared with acid onto her face by her father and brothers when she had first dared to brazenly step out on her own. Abba Kadosh had never had a woman so mystically branded. The bird beguiled him, it excited him, it pleased him to trace its outline on Ketura's face with his finger, its wondrous shape, the wings outstretched across the cheeks emerging from the hump of her soaring refined nose. Howie, on the other hand, avoided looking at it, especially in intimate moments, and deep down he churned with resentment at Temima for this cynical fulfillment of her promise by providing for his needs and his health with damaged goods. Now, ten years later, the boy with skin like brushed sable and eyes like ice and a bearing like an exotic young prince, along with his brutally scarred mother, had been cast out once again.

Temima folded some hand towels and packed them between her legs to absorb the flowing liquid. Wrapping her head and shoulders in a great woolen shawl, with dark glasses masking her eyes and a basket on her arm filled with the Passover macaroons that Ibn Kadosh loved covered with a white cloth napkin, she set out on foot from her apartment on Ben-Yefuneh, east on Yehuda Street, then up Hebron Road in the northward
direction, away from Hebron and all of its madness toward Jerusalem and all of its madness, and passed through the great stone walls of the Old City by the portal of the Jaffa Gate.

It was already late afternoon, the air was cool and crisp, traffic had stopped, the streets were silent and deserted as each citizen took shelter inside a warm house with the ghost of a blood smear on the doorpost to protect the firstborns and found a seat at the brightly lit Passover table. Every few steps along the way Temima was obliged to pause and lean against some inanimate support, bracing herself, moaning and massaging the writhing globe of her belly as the spasms gripped her relentlessly, wave after wave. By the time she reached the Via Dolorosa through the winding alleyways of the Old City bazaar, all of its shops shuttered and locked fast, she was doubled over with the pangs of labor, like a film run backward of Miriam mother of Yeshua HaNozri making her way along the street of her boy's future agony, with no place to give birth and begin the story.

At last she reached Ketura's apartment on El-Wad Road and collapsed against its door, her wracked body brushing against it as she slumped to the ground—and the Djinn who appeared before her was Ibn Kadosh in his white underpants. He informed her that his mother was not at home, she had a job that night at the King David Hotel—in the kitchen, he stressed, lest Temima assume it was a private commission in the bedroom of a paying guest; she was working the communal Seder on this night for the rich tourists. He asked her what she had brought for him, and sat down on the floor to eat his macaroons.

Within the hour Temima's baby was born, extracted by Ibn Kadosh in his white underpants with almond and coconut crumbs stuck to his fingertips on the prayer rug of the living room floor, a procedure not so different from the kidding of the goats he tended on the slopes of Silwan, Temima creating much more of an uproar than the other animals, straining and bearing down frantically with sweat streaming down her cheeks flushed bright red, bleating nonstop, Mama, Mama, Mama!

When Ketura returned home at dawn, in a headscarf and long tailored coat over her tight jeans and spangled halter top, she found Temima still sprawled on the floor covered with a fuzzy pink blanket stamped with the image of a Barbie doll that Ibn Kadosh had spread over her. The baby boy, still attached by the umbilical cord, was grazing at her breast. Ketura cut the cord and gathered up the pulpy mass of the placenta. She took
it into her small kitchen and sliced off a section, hacking the remainder into two chunks like liver, one to be planted in a pot to bear a life-giving tree, the other to be wrapped in clear plastic and stored in the freezer for future emergencies. The fresh piece of placenta now sitting on her scarred countertop she dumped into a wooden bowl and minced with a chopping knife, then stirred it into a tea with lemon juice, sugar, cinnamon, and mint leaves. She brought this infusion to Temima in a glass even before setting about the task of cleaning up the new mother and her infant, wiping away the blood and mucous.

She squatted on the floor beside Temima and fed her spoonful after spoonful of the tea until the glass was empty. “It is very good for you,” Ketura said over Temima's squeamish objections. “Yolk-sac tea. It will save you from the sadness of after birth.”

“But is it kosher for Passover?” Temima asked.

“You see?” said Ketura. “Already you are joking.” And she smiled with such pleasure the wings of the bird on her face stretched out even wider as if preparing to take flight.

A week later, Temima woke up in her bed in her Ben-Yefuneh Street apartment after a longer-than-usual undisturbed sleep, her breasts painfully hard like two boulders, swollen and engorged, the front of her nightgown stained with great blots of starch-dried milk and milk still seeping. She wondered why her baby boy, as yet unnamed, had not cried for his usual feeding, and experienced for a moment the pride of a mother with an unusually good child who so considerately sleeps through the night.

The next morning the baby was to be circumcised. Howie had agreed by telephone, after consultation with rabbinical authorities over the fine points of which mitzvah or obligation trumps the other, to tear himself away from their holy mission of settlement at the Park Hotel in Hebron where he and his comrades were still entrenched, and to come to Jerusalem to partake of morning prayers at a nearby synagogue on the eighth day after the birth during which the holy commandment of circumcision, the
brit
of his first and only son, would be performed and a simple festive mitzvah meal would be offered.

Holding herself very carefully, Temima descended from her bed, her
body still tender from the poundings and lacerations of childbirth, and shuffled to the cradle in the corner of her room to check on the baby. Where he should have been lying, she found instead a note from Ketura informing her that, on Howie's orders, she had taken the boy to Hebron to be circumcised in the Ibrahimi Mosque. “I'm sorry, Temima,” Ketura wrote. “I really need the money.”

Ketura returned late the next day without the child, telling Temima that they had decided it was in the boy's best spiritual interest to remain with his father at this unprecedented messianic time. She put out both her hands palms upward and shrugged her shoulders and the wings of the bird seared across her face drooped mournfully. There was nothing she could do about it; they were all crazy, she said. The child was being cared for by one of the women in the hotel group who had given birth a month earlier—a convert with long false eyelashes called Yehudit Har-HaBayit, formerly known as Rapture Reed, Ketura had heard, the daughter of Christian evangelicals from Idaho in America, ardent believers in the State of Israel as the herald of the Second Coming. Now Yehudit Har-HaBayit suckled two babies without favoritism, one at each breast, a wet nurse in a sustained state of exaltation.

Ketura herself had not been present at the circumcision that morning, having been requested as an Arab and a Muslim and also as a kind of impure “leper” due to the ominous discoloration of her skin, the bird of prey sprawled across her face, to leave the chamber containing the tombs of Abraham and Sarah while the ceremony took place. She stationed herself instead, as a form of protest, on the seventh step leading up to the mosque that had been erected over the burial cave, which was as far as the Jews had once been allowed to ascend for so many years, peering with longing through a small hole in the masonry at their heart's desire, the mothers and fathers denied to them. She could hardly see anything at all, but she was able to report that she had heard from conversations around her that the gentleman who had carried out the circumcision was Temima's own father who had just arrived the day before from Brooklyn to do the job. She handed to Temima a note from Howie in a sealed envelope, which Temima slipped unopened between the pages of her Tanakh, at Genesis, chapter twenty-two.

Her father, Reb Berel Bavli, showed up at Temima's apartment the next night still high from the audacious event the day before, raving
with enthusiasm for the entire resettlement project to which he had already made a substantial financial contribution, announcing that he now intended to establish it as his number-one charity, above even supporting the Oscwiecim Rebbe. Imagine, he cried, the first
bris mila
in Hebron since the massacre of 1929, when sixty-seven of our people were slaughtered by the Arab murderers, may their names and memory be blotted out, and the rest, Jews who had lived there for hundreds of years, were banished from our second-holiest city. Well, watch out boys, we're back—believe me, you putzes, we are definitely back, and this time, we're here to stay! The first bris in Hevron in almost forty years—that we have been kept alive and sustained to reach this day!—and in the Me'aras HaMakhpela no less, by the grave of our forefather Avraham Avinu himself of all places, the very same Avraham who performed the first recorded circumcision in Jewish history, the original
mohel
. And who of all people is given the honor to perform this one, with his own hands, for his own grandchild, his only male descendant? I'm telling you, Tema'le, tears were running down my face, and you know me—I'm not the type who usually cries because of a little blood. In thirty seconds flat—a new record!—I snipped it right off, good-bye and good riddance, quicker than a wink, faster than you could say Moishe Pipik. The
sandek
, Rabbi Moshe, the leader of the movement himself, who was given the honor to sit in the chair of Eliyahu HaNavi and hold the baby on a pillow on his lap while I did my business, couldn't believe it was over—it should go in the
Guinness Book of Records
for the fastest bris ever, I'm telling you, someone should write to them, even with my jet lag and my reflexes not so ay-yay-yay I broke the record. The baby didn't know what hit him, he didn't even have a chance to let out one good holler before I sucked the blood from the cut with my own mouth and spit it out into a cup, and then I wrapped his little
schmeckel'e
up in a piece of gauze, it was so delicious, a delicacy like a chicken neck, a
gorgel
, and just as he was getting ready to yell bloody murder I dipped some gauze—a different piece of gauze, needless to say, not the same one I used on his little you-know-what—into the
bekher
filled with nice sweet wine and stuck it into his mouth, and he sucked away happy as a lambchop. I'm telling you, Tema'le, this is a grade-A baby, and I know from grade-A, believe me. He looks just like his father, the spitting image, also with a pot belly, also bald, all he needs is a beard and they could go on the road together and do a comedy routine
in the Catskill hotels, on the borscht belt, Maxi and Mini. Then Howie announced the baby's name: Pinkhas—Pinkhas Hevroni, may he grow up to Torah, to the wedding canopy, and to good deeds. Hevroni, you know what that's for, of course, and such an honor it is for him to be the first boy to be circumcised in the Me'aras HaMakhpela in Hevron, he'll never forget it, he will go down in the history books. And Pinkhas, so that he should be blessed with the balls, the
baitzim
, you should excuse the expression, to stand up and do the right thing by our people in times of danger, when God is so mad at us for our sins He is ready to wipe us out like a bunch of cockroaches—to stand up like Pinkhas son of Elazar son of Aharon the
kohain
, who took his spear in his hand and went straight into that tent, he didn't think for one minute should I / shouldn't I, he stuck that spear right into those two, that bigshot from the tribe of Shimon, what's his name?—stuck it into him right there, while his
schlang
, you should excuse me, was
schtupped
in a place where it had no business being, in that shiksa from Midian, that temptress who leads men to sin, may her name be erased forever. That's the kind of boy we want our Pinkhas Hevroni Ba'al-Teshuva to grow up to be—am I right, Tema'le? And afterward, I'm telling you, such a meal we had, a kiddush like you wouldn't believe, right there in the Makhpela, courtesy of yours truly—super deluxe, catered five stars, one-hundred-percent kosher for Passover, nothing but the best for my grandson, with real tablecloths and napkins and dishes and silverware—no paper or plastic for our young prince, Pinkhas Hevroni Ba'al-Teshuva—and with flower centerpieces and waiters in uniforms, all Arabs by the way, so much for their principles when you wave a few dollar bills in front of their noses, that's the Arab mentality. I'm telling you, it's amazing what you can accomplish, even in so-called Occupied Territory, even in the wild West Bank, with a little money and a little hutzpah. Every kind of smoked fish and salad you can imagine we had—twelve stations, meats like you never saw, and I know from meats, wild ox and leviathan just like in Gan Eden—cakes and fruits, mountains of
shemura
matzah that cost me an arm and a leg, drinks like you wouldn't believe, hot and cold, including the world's best kosher wine to toast a
leHaim
in honor of the occasion, and even two ice sculptures, one molded in the shape of the Holy Temple, may it be rebuilt speedily and in our time, filled with pickled lox, and the other in the shape of the Tomb of the Patriarchs, filled with pickled herring.
I'm telling you, Tema'le, you missed an event of a lifetime, I'm sorry to say. You should have been there. That's where you belong. What kind of mother and wife are you anyways? Your baby is there, your husband is there—what are you doing here, if you don't mind my asking? Howie tells me he sent you a letter asking you to get off your
m'yeh
, you should excuse the expression, and come right away—so tell me already, what are you waiting for, the Moshiakh?