One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (50 page)

Also, they wanted from a family with no sicknesses, no meshuggenehs, no wackos, no inherited crap, that goes without saying, all this his mother was checking out for him. From the business side, they were looking for comfortable but not loaded super rich because his mother wants the girl she should always be grateful for the upgrade, she should come from a family with a father who sits and learns Torah all day, we don't want a father who goes out and works for a living, God forbid, it's a very bad male model example for a young lady—right?—she'll get very bad ideas what to expect from a husband, you know what I'm saying? Anyways, we have plenty of money, thank God, which is the other headache his mother has to deal with now, because Frumie's girls were yelling and screaming bloody murder all day and night for an equal share in the business and the profits, it really stinks, they were driving his mother nuts. They even hired these lawyers and they got hold of some rabbis on their side, Modern Orthodox, you know, touch-me, feel-me. Come on, gimme a break man, it's like a pogrom. Hey, maybe he shouldn't be telling her all this, she was also a sister, he hoped he wasn't giving her any ideas. But like his mother says, by Jews, girls don't inherit, not one penny, period, end of story, whatever a girl gets is like a tip depending on the service, you know what I mean? For sure, his mother won't budge one inch, so it's like this huge fight between the chicks, like cats and dogs, like lady wrestlers in the mud, because
kitzur
, bottom line,
takhlis
,
tukhes
on the table, his mother
has his interests at heart one hundred percent, he is number one in her book, it's like, don't mess with my kid or I'll scratch your eyeballs out. So meanwhile, here he is sitting in Jerusalem just passing the time, learning a
blat
Gemara, a little Yoreh De'ah, maybe some
mussar
, you know the drill. Sometimes he went with his roommate Simkha to the mall to hang out a little, Internet café, whatever, sometimes they went on a trip to a festival, Hasidic rock, klezmer, Reb Shlomo, Jewish soul music, fooled around a little in the mosh pit, Simkha was teaching him a few chords on the guitar, on a good day there was maybe a demonstration so they can get a little exercise, throw around a few stones, turn over some dumpsters, whatever. So that was his life. He wasn't complaining. His rebbe will tell him everything he needs to do when the time comes for him to
pish
or get off the pot, you get the point. Any question he has about what you have do by the girl when you get married, any
qasha
no matter what, worst comes to worser, he can go to his rebbe and ask, because like he said, the
ikkur
is she should get along with his mother, that's the main thing.

Temima sat for a long time reflecting in silence, staring at this brother through her veil, this sluggish, soft variation on the male child her father had longed for so desperately, a sinister joke played by God that ultimate prankster on the strutting colossus who was her father, she riveted him with her gaze seeking to draw in the wounded essence of this son like an undertow in order to return him to himself restored as if after a close brush with death.

“Brother,” Temima said at last, “I understand now that you have come to ask me a question about yourself and the true longings of your heart and how our father would have reacted. I understand your suffering, I know your question. For the kindness of bringing to me my mother's book, I will spare you the embarrassment of having to ask your question directly. The answer is, our father would have had no interest at all in what you feel, he would have had no tolerance or sympathy, he would not have cared, no more than he cared how a cow feels. Which bull the cow liked or did not like, or even if the cow loved another cow, the heart's desire of the cow or the cow's broken heart, all this were of no importance to our father, may he rest in peace, as long as the cow stood still and didn't give him a hard time while he cut her throat. In this respect, our father was a traditional man of faith. We have in many ways a very great religion but also in many respects a very cruel one. What you feel in your
heart, whom you love or desire, mother, father, girl, boy, all this is beside the point. The point is what you do and what you don't do. The point is practice. But our father is now dead—and there is some consolation. You know how King Solomon goes on and on in the book of Proverbs with so much sensible advice—Listen my son to your father and mother, don't be lazy, stay away from the seductions of ‘strange' women, abominations one and all, though as everyone knows the king himself was the biggest transgressor of all in that department. Who can explain the pull of human desire, however ‘strange'? Yet when it is thwarted, it is sickness of heart. And when it is realized—even in the face of the loss of all your comforts, the disapproval and rejection of father and mother—it is sweet to the soul, Solomon tells us, it is the tree of life.”

Temima shoved the shopping bag containing the leftovers and rubbish across the table to the brother and had him escorted out of her private chambers. She gave orders that until further notice she was not to be disturbed for any reason, including the sudden appearance of a newly declared relative or news of a death in the family. The ensuing days were consecrated to a close rereading of this painfully intimate copy of Reb Lev's novel, in search of her mother. What drew her mother so personally to Anna, such a lost and tragic figure finally? “She throws herself under a train in the end,” her mother once commented. “She says to herself, They'll be sorry—but does anyone really care? She's the one who's crushed, she's dead, they're alive, they go on living, nobody cares.”

A woman's cautionary tale for herself, for her girl child, a book with a moral, a lesson to teach—was that how her mother saw it? Temima read slowly, closely examining the text, turning the brittle pages cautiously, seeking a fingerprint, a clue to her mother. Anna Karenina, AK, AK47, a weapon that could kill you. Reading it again now after so many years she found herself too often exasperated with Anna, so spoiled and self-absorbed, another brilliant woman wasted. The spiritual struggles of Levin were far more engrossing to her on this reading, sections that as a girl she occasionally found onerous, interruptions in the romance, but would plow through dutifully nevertheless especially because she secretly was convinced that Levin, like his creator Reb Lev, were fellow Jews, their names alone betrayed them. So she could never quite accept
the solace Levin found in Christianity, a faith that had always seemed to her to have ecstatically, pornographically, appropriated the blood that the God of the Jews had forbidden to humankind, reserving it for Himself.

Now Levin and Anna were minor characters, footnotes and gloss. She was hunting for the overwhelming presence of her mother brooding between the lines. Page after page, nothing yielded itself up, no signs of a dog-eared corner once folded down, no comment or exclamation point or question mark in a margin, no underlining, no phrase bracketed, no torn slip of paper tucked into a cleft of the spine, no lipstick mark, no coffee stain, no dried bodily fluid, no lingering scent. The stack of pages grew higher and higher on the left, on the right they diminished relentlessly, no treasure could be dredged up from these black depths.

Temima was ready to despair, she was approaching the end, the twentieth chapter of the seventh book, and that was when she noticed the faintest swelling, like water damage, alongside the passage where Anna's brother, Stepan Arkadyevich Oblonsky, remarks, “But what possesses you to get mixed up with railways and Jews? Any way you look at it, it's a stinking business.” Here was a glimpse into the disappointed soul of her mother, a slap in the face, a fatal blow. All of Anna's passion and spirit, her operas and balls, a life intensely and daringly lived—this was a world into which Rosalie Bavli was not welcome, a party to which she would never be invited.

One day her mother revealed yet another personal disappointment. Temima must have been about five years old at the time, it was one of her clearest early memories, it occurred not too long after her mother returned home from one of her periodic disappearances of a few days that always seemed to the child Tema to drag on for an eternity; this one, as it happened, would be the last until her mother vanished irreversibly when Tema was eleven. During those absences, she would wander around the house clutching a blanket and crying, “I lost my mama, I lost my mama,” a detail she herself did not recall but rather one her father summoned up now and then even when she was a teenager and her mother long gone as an element of the selective mythology by which she was packaged within the family, inevitably appending the observation, “And even to this day my highfalutin daughter kvetches and schlepps around her old schmattehs.”

Her mother was lying on the couch in the living room as if recuperating
from an illness that had drained her of her vital strength, one arm crooked over her eyes, the other encircling Tema nestled at her side, drawing her close. She was a small woman with high cheekbones and thick brows that met over the stately arc of her Mediterranean nose forming a kind of shade, like a visor, as if to protect from unwanted scrutiny her large dark eyes, always slightly moist, a faint mustache shadowing her wide mouth. Even lying down in her housecoat and kerchief her face was made up; a heavy pearl earring hung from one ear, the piercing stretched into a slit by the weight of the jewel while the lobe of her other ear had split entirely and healed in two cushiony, downy flaps that Tema liked to stroke. In a soft voice her mother said to her, “You're big enough already, Tema, to understand that when I go away it is because a baby inside my body decided it is better not to be born. Even before I had you there were two others who also refused. But for you I cried so much and prayed so hard in shul, like Hannah the mother of Shmuel, that everyone must have thought I was drunk or crazy, and I said to God, ‘If you give me a child I will dedicate him to You.'”

From this revelation Tema understood and accepted as her fate that she was the child of a mother who had struck a deal, who had made a bargain with the Lord—a mother who had given her up and had sacrificed her to God for her entire life.

On a Sabbath not long after this, before the blessing over the wine, her father, Reb Berel Bavli sitting at the head of the table, sang as always the hymn from the book of Proverbs in praise of the Woman of Valor, so enterprising and hard-working, a ferocious warrior in the cause of husband and family. As usual, when he came to the verse, Charm is false, and beauty is vanity, a God-fearing woman, she will be praised, his voice swelled as he enunciated each word distinctly, looking hard and meaningfully at his wife who was universally regarded as an exotic beauty.

When he was finished with this obligation, as if on cue, Tema's mother dismissed the serenade in her honor with her usual quip, “A good slave.” This exchange had become a regular feature of the family routine when only the three of them were at the Sabbath table, with no guests. But this time, her father's eyes froze and his red beard seemed to flare out tongues of flame; Tema herself could never have known the provocation, she sensed it to be something like a vapor oozing out from under the closed door of their bedroom, related to her mother's recent return from the
hospital. “It also tells us about the Woman of Valor,” Reb Berel Bavli accentuated every syllable, “that her sons rise up and praise her. But this one”—he fixed his glare on the wife sitting to his left, the closest point to the kitchen—“this fancy-schmancy madam here manages to squeeze out for me only one measly girl and now she's closed for business.” He flicked a but-I-love-you-anyway wink in Tema's direction like a dart. “This is my reward for marrying a skinny-malink,” Reb Berel Bavli declared. “My next wife, she will be a baby factory—zaftig, zaftig—knocking off one product and one product only—sons, sons, and more sons!” He stretched out his arm and pinched his wife's cheek—a gesture to be interpreted as conciliatory,
shalom bayit
, peace in the household above all else for which the woman usually takes the pinch and pays the price, he was only kidding, it was a joke, a joke.

Tema spoke up. “It also says about the Woman of Valor that her husband is renowned among the wise men of the city, and she's cheerful all the time.”

“And not just a measly girl this skinny-malink for a wife gives to me,” Reb Berel Bavli pressed on, “but a girl who is too smart for her own good, with a brain too big for her head, a brain like a man, a freak of nature.”

Even so, when there were guests at their table, Tema's father would allow himself the pleasure of lifting her under her arms and standing her up on her chair to sing and recite from memory all of the Sabbath tunes and hymns, in Hebrew and Aramaic, despite the questionable nature of such a performance by a girl. There were even occasions, after Reb Berel Bavli chanted the Kiddush over the wine extolling the creation by God of the universe culminating in the seventh day of rest, that he would require her to do so as well in front of the guests although this was a role usually reserved for the male members of the family, demanding that everyone remain respectfully standing as she performed flawlessly. It was as if he were stepping back like an impresario flaunting his discovery, like the opening act who had just warmed up the crowd for the star attraction. Despite his flamboyant lamentations about what a shame it was that such gifts should have been squandered on a female, it shone through—his pride in his little monstrosity. “Not normal, am I right?” There was in his pronouncement an element of taking precautions to avert the menace of the evil eye. “If it was a boy, everyone would be dancing in the streets—a little genius, an
illui
, the next Gaon from Vilna. But on a girl—such a waste!”