One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (49 page)

The total span of Reb Berel Bavli's life was one hundred and four years. He let out his last breath and he died, at a good ripe age, old and contented, and was gathered back to his kin, including his daughter Temima who in the eyes of her family had already officially been delivered up to the angel of death and duly mourned. For this reason many months elapsed before she learned of her father's passing. The news reached her during the period when she returned to the rabbinic texts struggling to understand further the point of the life of Bruriah, that token woman sage, if ever such an aberrant creature even existed, the marvel whose clever ripostes occasionally bested even the sharpest minds it was noted to the astonishment of all, such a precocious little performing monkey.

The man said to be Bruriah's father, Rabbi Hananya ben Teradyon, unlike Reb Berel Bavli, suffered a monstrous death, one of the ten sages executed by the Roman occupiers of Judea, burned at the stake wrapped in the scroll of the Torah with water-soaked wool packed against his flesh to prolong his agony, his final vision as the parchment was being consumed by the flames of the letters themselves bursting free and taking flight soaring upward black cinders to the heavens. If the sins of the daughters have any consequence at all, the punishment was also visited upon the father, for the brilliance of this woman, judging by the testimonials,
too often expressed itself in the form of ironic, aggressive, show-off coquettishness, which her father might even have encouraged for his personal entertainment due to the sheer cuteness of this brazen talking anomaly, such as when she scolded Rabbi Yossi the Galilean for using too many words to ask her the directions to Lod, “Galilean fool, Did not our sages say, Do not talk over much to a woman?” But there was no one who was punished more mercilessly than this smart girl herself, she was just too smart for her own good, every human connection unraveled in disaster. Not only the auto-da-fé of her father, but her mother killed by the Romans, her sister (or was this Bruriah herself?) sold to a brothel in Antioch or Rome, her two sons struck dead suddenly one Sabbath day, her husband the Mishna luminary Rabbi Meir pimping her for the sake of prevailing, dominating, teaching her a lesson about the essentially light-headed nature of the female mind, climaxed by her own suicide. She even had a brother, it is reported, whom she also outshone in learning, whose life also spun out miserably. He went sour, it is said, turned into a gangster, an outlaw and an outcast, his mutilated body dumped at the side of the road. At his funeral, Bruriah displayed her freakish brilliance, her over-the-top erudition once again by summing him up and disposing of him with a citation of the perfect verse from the book of Proverbs: Sweet may be the bread that a man gains through falsehood, but afterward his mouth will be filled with gravel.

Temima learned she had a brother at the same time she found out about her father's death. Cozbi opened the door to the study heralded by the rhythmic popping of her stilettos to inform her mistress that a fat boy was sitting on the balcony claiming to be her brother, Getzel—but everyone, or so Cozbi reported based on information this stranger apparently had volunteered, called him Glatt. He was just sitting there picking his nose waiting to see her, one of the fringe clusters of his
zizit
caught in his fly. He had brought something from Brooklyn to give to her, Cozbi passed on the message.

Temima shook her head. All Israel are brothers, she commented, but are the sisters also brothers? She had sisters, she was aware of that, half sisters, Frumie's five daughters, but to the best of her knowledge her father's wish for a son of his own had, for his sins, never been granted. She lowered her head to the volume of the Babylonian Talmud spread open before her, an indication that she would not grant an audience to this
petitioner, though she registered within that had she truly had a brother, the son of her father but not her mother, he might indeed have been called Getzel, since that was the name of Reb Berel Bavli's own father.

A few minutes later Cozbi clattered into the room again, this time carrying a bag. She set it down on the table, careful to avoid contact with the holy texts. No doubt she had already inspected its contents for any suspicious objects. It was an amazingly used and reused shopping bag wrinkled like the skin of a reptile, smudged with dirt and grease stains, but nevertheless Temima recognized it instantly—the Berel Bavli logo, the two
B
s like the two tablets of the Ten Commandments bisected, cross-sectioned, flipped on their sides with their humps facing in opposite directions but sharing a common dividing line, and the familiar slogan, S
TRICTLY
K
OSHER
! S
TRICTLY
G
LATT
! S
TRICTEST
S
UPERVISION
! When she checked inside the bag she saw the remains of the refueling this brother pretender required for the trek to her quarters, the last bite of a sour pickle, several crumpled napkins and wax paper wrappings from street food such as falafel and pizza, emptied greasy bags of Bamba and Bisli, some flattened Fanta and Maccabi Beer cans—at least this boy did not litter in the Holy Land—and she also saw the book, her mother's copy of
Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy in the Modern Library edition translated by Constance Garnett, aged, soiled, moldy, bloated, water-damaged, the cover ripped off, the spine broken, smelling of brine and blotched with oil and fat. Temima drew her veil down over her face.

“Is our father still living?” were the first words out of her mouth to this brother after she regained control over her emotions, the sight of her mother's worn book like a familiar spirit emerging from underground had threatened her composure, brought her to the verge of raising her voice and crying in sobs so loud they would have been heard in the streets of Egypt.

“What—you didn't know? Almost a year ago already he was
niftar
. By now already, God willing, his soul got called up to the Torah in Gan Eden, or maybe at least they gave him
hagbah
—like maybe they let him pick up that Torah in the next world and open it up really really wide and twirl it around to show off his muscles like some kind of freakin' bodybuilder strongman, his supersized
knaidlakh,
they were awesome. He really dug
hagbah
, it was his friggin' favorite thing in shul. Even when he was already a really old guy he was still strong like an ox, a tank, he
could still rip the Manhattan Yellow Pages in two with one single rip. Me? Yours truly? I still can't even do Staten Island.”

He elaborated on her father's death genially, an extended footnote, as if by virtue of it being already old news it had lost its sting, the moment of the telling itself, who tells it, how it is told and to whom, could be of no consequence, it could have no special meaning for her the daughter even upon first impact, the shock of this death had already been absorbed by the universe and the earth continued on its course, the sun still rose and set. She watched as he seated himself opposite her without awaiting an invitation, a nicety he most likely had never been taught, and jiggled in place to adjust his apparatus for comfort.

A long silence followed as Temima took in this brother through her veil—a young man, twenty at most, in the uniform of a yeshiva boy, black pants, white button-down shirt without a tie, ritual fringes hanging out from underneath on one side as he worked on liberating another cluster from the teeth of his zipper without a pause in the stream of his jabber, a black velvet yarmulke perched like a cupola on top of the fuzz of his close-cut hair the color of a melting orange popsicle. There was no doubt he was her father's son, the resemblance was comical, manifesting itself almost point for point in the form of caricature. Where Reb Berel Bavli was a gigantic presence, with huge hands and feet, a thick beard oxygenated red in color when he was a young man, shrewd eyes heavily lidded as if to provide screening when closing a deal and a ruddy complexion rough textured like granite, his son Getzel Glatt Bavli was soft and flabby, a blubbery heap, large pudgy hands with savagely bitten fingernails, baby-fine sidelocks tucked behind each ear and sparse coiled sprouts of new beard pale persimmon in color, the small eyes receding as if to take cover from a punch coming his way, his complexion rouged with flush like a chronic case of low-grade embarrassment, the skin powdery white, baby smooth. He was like a chicken stunted in a factory into all breast destined to be pounded into millions of schnitzels, he was a capon, whereas his father was red meat, roast beef, top cut, prime. No wonder the boy was called Glatt, not only because it alliterated so naturally from Getzel, so intuitively, and not only because the father he reincarnated in the form of parody was king of the kosher meat business, but also for the creamy glatt smoothness of his flesh, like the kosher standard for the insides of the lungs of a slaughtered animal, with no adhesions or perforations.

“Blessed is the True Judge,” Temima said at last, pronouncing the traditional phrase of acceptance upon learning of a death. She forgave him in his youth and self-absorption for his failure to appreciate the momentousness of such a message when it is brought to any human being, for dropping it upon her so casually, as if it could not in the scheme of things matter that much or have retained any shattering significance even for the ghost of a daughter. The legendary Bruriah, with respect to her own father, Rabbi Hananya ben Teradyon, is reported to have asked how such a man could truly have deserved such a death. I could also ask the same question about my father, Temima reflected as she gazed at this brother. She rent her garment over her heart as was required, in a sign of mourning for a close relative, the cloth giving out a keening screech.

Getzel Glatt now confided that he had always had it in his head to bring her that book. It had always been on his to-do list when he was finished with high school and got to go to Israel to learn for a year or two in some yeshiva or other until his mother found for him a nice
frum
girl to marry. He had always wanted to meet her, his notorious half sister Tema, star of the religious underworld, the temptation was irresistible
davka
because no one was allowed to even mention her name in the house, she was one-hundred-percent
treyf
, she was considered like dead meat. But just
le'hakhis
, just to get everyone pissed off because she was so
assur
, totally off-limits, which in his opinion completely sucked, he made up his mind to actually meet her. Anyways, one of Frumie's girls, the one who sells all those Armani suits and Borsalino hats in her Boro Park basement at a tremendous discount, she explained to him about the book since it was always laying around the house somewheres or other, and that it used to belong to Tema's mother and that she always had her nose stuck in it. So he figured he'd schlepp it along with him to Israel even though it's a pretty fat book you know, and even though he would have to hide it somewheres in his dormitory room under his stuff because he heard it's all about this married lady who fools around with another guy and then jumps on the third rail in the subway—right? A dirty book,
schmutz
, and really long, a million pages—how many times does this writer guy have to say the same thing over and over again? Okay already, buster, we get the point. But he decided he'd take it anyways so that he could use it like a ticket to get in to see her, since she was such a bigshot VIP by now, he heard all kinds of wild and crazy stuff about her, this and that, like she was some
kind of lady guru or something, really cool. And
barukh HaShem
, his plan worked—right? See, here he was right this minute, sitting by this room, he couldn't believe it, everyone's banging their head on the door trying to get in but he actually made it through to the
Koidesh Kedoishim,
even with the bodyguards and the secret service dudes and the hot killer babe in the high heels, here he was in the Holy of Holies and he wasn't even hit by lightning yet. His mother would kill him if she ever found out where he was, she would hock him to death, wring his neck like a chicken, yeah, no problem, she would start hollering that he was spoiling his
shiddukh
chances hanging with someone like her, no good girl would ever consider him for a husband if anyone found out, even with all the money they had, his reputation would be in the garbage pail.

Glatt tipped up a haunch, drew a wallet from the back pocket of his pants, slipped out a picture, and flicked it across the table to Temima. “That's my holy mother, the only wife in the history of mankind to survive our old man. She's running the whole business now singlehanded, the whole shmear, wholesale, retail, on the books, off the books.” Temima's eyes came to rest on the image of a thickset woman significantly younger than herself with a broad glistening face outlined by a tightly wrapped kerchief, her hands firmly clamped on her hips as if to forewarn you against trying any funny business, a long white butcher's apron smeared with blood. Had she been waving a certified ritual knife big enough to cut an animal's throat with a single swipe, Temima's heart would have embraced her. The time had come for women to step out from behind the counter and the scales and the cash register and the ledgers, and into the slaughterhouse.

So that's the whole story, Glatt continued, upturning the plump palms of his hands. Meanwhile, he was just hanging out in Israel until his mother fingers the right
maidel
, his
bashert'e
. She was checking everything out about the girl, she got this list a mile long with these little boxes and she puts checks in the boxes, she's like his one-stop shopping for a
kallah
, there's nothing for him to do right now but just sit back and relax and wait for the bride to be delivered to him on a silver platter like a stuffed Cornish hen at a catering affair. Bottom line, he trusted his mother one hundred percent, she wouldn't miss one single thing about the girl, don't worry, no different than how she checks out a goose in the market, or a side of veal, inside and out, with her eagle eyes, she doesn't miss a thing,
starting from what score the
maidel
got on the Apgar test when she was first born in the hospital—even from before she was born, from if her mother went to the mikva every month when the girl was, you know, conceived, if her mother kept all the laws so that when her father and mother did their business the girl was created in an atmosphere of family purity, blahblahblah,
ve'hulai ve'hulai
. Do they have a television set in the house? How long are her skirts? Does she wear flashy colors? Do her shoes make noise when she walks? Did she get good marks in school? Was she a troublemaker? Does she have a big mouth? Did anyone ever see her hanging out at the pizza store talking to a boy? You know the deal. A nice
zniusdik'e
girl, modest, long sleeves, quiet voice, a good shopper,
eidel, balabatisch
, sweet, sweet. Like his mother says, we're shooting for good looking but not drop-dead gorgeous, common sense but not a genius—been there, done that, know what I mean? He shot Temima a complicitous grin.