One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (53 page)

The next time she heard him lumbering in the night in the direction of her room she turned on her stomach and remained frozen in that position as if in deep sleep, his co-conspirator as he attended to his pitiful needs. She numbed her mind by counting methodically to herself until his suppressed moan was released and he was done, she did not even reach sixty, she was merely a receptacle, a dumping ground. Thereafter, whenever she would hear him approaching, she would turn on her side, rendering everything that would take place far more impersonal, as if it were happening not to her but to her dark sister curled up on the bed with her face to the wall while she was hovering above like a pure angel with white wings shielding her eyes. She was not present even to him, her being was so irrelevant that even as she was simulating sleep on her side she could on occasion open her eyes and stare unblinking into the darkness like a corpse in its tomb though she would never have risked raising her fist and thumping it against her chest over her pounding heart as she
calmed herself by reciting inside her head the ritualized Day of Atonement confession, We have been guilty, we have rebelled, we have robbed, we have spoken slander, we have caused perversions, we have been evil, and so on, until he gasped and was done. One time she heard him beseech her plaintively to touch him as if in acknowledgement that they both always knew she was really awake, another time he asked more irritably as if she were not performing well as a woman, as if she were no good in bed, but still she would not stir inside the webbed net of her counterfeit sleep. Sleep and wakefulness blurred in the nights. She never knew whether she was truly in one state or the other. Dark shadows rimmed her eyes and seeped inward through her skin spreading all over.

Her alien body no longer belonged to her, it was occupied territory. She detached her mind from it by telling herself stories as he made his pit stop in her room and went about his business on his way to the toilet—stories of princesses in locked towers or lost in black forests or smothered in ashes or tangled in thorn bushes or cast into sleeps so deep there was almost no hope of ever reviving them. One of the stories she recited to herself during those nights, she realized only later, resembled in so many ways Rav Nakhman of Bratslav's tale of the lost princess that she wondered if she might have sat at the master's feet as he told it long ago in another life. In Tema's story, too, there was a princess whose father once loved and prized her but she did something to anger him and he cursed her so that she was taken in the night to an evil place from which she could not break free. In Rav Nakhman's story as transcribed by his disciple Rav Nosson of Nemirov since the holy mystic of Bratslav did not write his own words down himself, he recognized how dangerous writing could be, the king is stricken with regret the next morning and sends his viceroy to search for his beloved daughter, the princess. But in Tema's story, the princess must free herself. She struggles over many years and in many places without succeeding, the ordeals of the princess in Tema's story continued as a serial in episodes and chapters through the years over all those nights. Each attempt by the princess to liberate herself would end in defeat caused by some personal weakness in her character. After each new failure she would wake up in a strange place and ask herself a variation of the same question the viceroy would ask when he awakened after going astray and losing his way—Where in the world am I?

On the eve of Yom Kippur in her tenth year, in the morning, her father
Reb Berel Bavli called her down to the kitchen to perform the ritual of atonement. Inside a cage on the floor were a live white rooster and two white hens chosen from among the prime poultry specimens in his slaughterhouse upon which the sins committed by the human members of the household over the past year would be transferred. He pulled out the rooster, gripping it by its legs with his right hand, and swung it around his head three times as it fluttered in a wild panic and shot out pellets of dung, reciting out loud as he performed this rite the verse, This is my substitute, this is my exchange, this is my atonement, this cock will go to its death and I will enter and go on to a good long life and to peace. When he completed his penance, he shoved the rooster back into the cage doomed to be dropped in the soup of the poor, took out a hen and handed it to Tema. “This one is for your sins,” he said. “The other hen will be for your mama if she ever manages to wake up in time from all the pills that doctor of hers
schtupps
her with. So just in case she doesn't make it before the Moshiakh comes, you should keep your mama in mind while you
schlug kapores
.”

Tema clutched the frantic bird by its legs as it quaked in a frenzied blizzard of white feathers, but before raising it to whirl it in an orbit around her head she faced her father and said, “For the sins between one person and another, not even God can forgive you, only the person you have wronged. So I just want to tell you that I forgive you.”

Her father's face darkened. “What are you talking about? You see that chicken you're holding in your hand? She belongs to me. That hand holding the chicken? Also mine. Everything you have I gave to you—the roof over your head, the food in your belly, the clothes on your back. You and everything you are, body and soul, belongs to me. With what belongs to me I can do with it whatever I want.”

The soul is Yours, and the body Your handiwork. Have mercy on what You have labored to make.

By an effort of will, Tema overcame her wish to shut down and fade away. “So you know what I'm talking about, Tateh. It's wrong, you know that. You—we—must stop.”

“I'll tell you what, my little genius”—the natural ruddiness of her father's face deepened like raw meat—“I want you should do me a little favor. Tomorrow in shul, when they read the Torah at Minkha, I want you should pay very good attention to the list of your female flesh and
blood you're not allowed to lay a hand on and show me in black and white where it says one single word about your daughter.” Tema's eyes widened. “Aha, so there's still something left in the Torah you don't know, my little Miss Professor Einshtein-Veinshtein,” Reb Berel Bavli hooted.

“Maybe they just left it out—by mistake,” Tema responded softly.

“God help us, so now I also have a little
apikores
on my hands to add to all my
zorres
. Is that what they teach you in school, such heresy? Excuse me, but who is this ‘they' you are talking about? Didn't you learn that the Torah is written by the hand of God Himself? God makes mistakes? Since when? Such
shtoos
, I never heard such a stupid thing in all my whole entire life, I can't even believe my ears. Bite your tongue, I should wash your mouth out with soap for you. If God leaves something out it is for a reason. If your daughter is not on the list it is because your daughter is not forbidden, plain and simple. Anyways, how can you even know for one-hundred-percent sure with a daughter if she's really your own flesh and blood?” her father added maliciously.

A literalist, her father, a simple man when it suited him. Still, even then, Tema gave him some credit for an inner unease that must have driven him so uncharacteristically to take down the volume and check the text closely enough to put to rest whatever stirrings might have troubled his spirit.

“To tell you the honest truth, Tema'le,” her father went on in the guarded tone he deployed with business competitors, “I really don't even know what you're talking about. This is some kind of story you made up, a
baba maiseh
, from all of the fairy tales you fill your head with, all of your mother's goyische books, those romanen, all of that make-believe crap. I'm telling you, you're imagining things, nothing happened, whatever you imagine happened has nothing to do with real life. You hear about such things sometimes—girls having such meshuggeneh ideas about their fathers—fantasies. Maybe I should make an appointment for you also with your mama's head doctor. You can go there together, have a mother-daughter outing, and after you empty out all that garbage from your heads in his office you can maybe treat yourselves to a little shopping for some nice new matching outfits for
yom tov
. It will cost me plenty, but what's money when it comes to health?”

The next afternoon, on Yom Kippur day, Tema paid scrupulous attention to the Torah reading from Leviticus chapter eighteen of the catalogue of incest prohibitions. Forbidden was exposing the nakedness of
your father, your mother, your stepmother your father's wife, your sister the daughter of your father or your mother, your granddaughter the daughter of your son or daughter, your half sister the daughter of your father's wife, your aunt your father's sister or your mother's sister or your father's brother's wife, your daughter-in-law your son's wife, your sister-in-law your brother's wife, a woman along with her daughter or her son's daughter or her daughter's daughter for this is lewdness, a woman and her sister, a woman in her menstrual uncleanness, the wife of your neighbor to pollute yourself through her.

All of these injunctions are directed to a man with woman (and in one case, a father) as passive vessel, so to cover the territory also included is the commandment that he may not lie with another man as he would with a woman, it is an abomination. In the same vein, he may not lie carnally with an animal to be defiled in this manner. The sole admonition on this roster explicitly invoking a woman in an active role is the stricture against standing in front of an animal for the purpose of mating with it, a perversion. In this entire litany of incest and sexual restrictions seemingly so exhaustive, only a man's daughter is not specifically singled out as off-limits to him.

How had it happened that Tema had not noticed this before? Her father was correct.

Yet after their exchange in the kitchen that Yom Kippur eve of her tenth year, with one stupefied rooster and two dazed hens as witnesses, the pick of the fowl, unless she had been cast from that day forward under the spell of a slumber so deep she truly never again knew where in the world she was, her father Reb Berel Bavli did not enter her room again for his own sorry needs in the night. He no longer found her attractive.

Three months later, in winter, Tema's mother gave her a diary as a gift for Hannuka. It was a small chunky volume bound in satiny ivory leatherette, the border of its cover embossed with an ornate wreath of fuchsia vines, the leaves heart-shaped surrounding the words A Y
OUNG
G
IRL
'
S
D
IARY
in elaborate raised gold script. A gold latch clasped the pages fastened with a miniature gold lock, with its tiny golden key dangling from a thin detachable scarlet cord. “You can write down all your secrets in here, Tema,” her mother said. “It's private, for you alone, no
one will peek, God forbid.” On the first page, also in gold and framed by another garland of hearts, was a quotation from Charlotte Brontë, whose novel
Jane Eyre
, which Temima had found among her mother's collection of books, she had already read and wept over—“The human heart has hidden treasures / In secret kept, in silence sealed.” The secret silent pages that followed were all blank and ruled, awaiting the hidden treasures of her human heart over the forthcoming year as if they already existed in the aura and needed only to be captured and stripped of their veil to be revealed, beginning with January the first and ending with the thirty-first of December, two days allotted per page, the entry for each day already conveniently inscribed with a greeting to her newest intimate, Dear Diary.

Dutifully, on the first day of the secular new year, Tema began her entries in her new journal. She cultivated the practice of writing at the end of each day, filling the designated lines, as if no more could happen to her within a twenty-four-hour span than could fit into that prescribed space. Then she would close the diary, lock it with the key she hid in a sock, and slip it under her mattress, on top of the springs.

Today it snowed but I forgot my boots so my shoes and stockings got soaking wet and my feet turned blue. Today at recess Yentie and Faygie were whispering to each other in the corner of the yard, but when they saw me coming they stopped, so I know they were talking about me. Today Mama was up when I came home from school and she gave me some meat soup with kasha and sat down at the table and watched me eat. Today Yentie told me that there's someone who keeps calling her up on the telephone to tell her he's going to kill me. Today my teacher Rebbetzin Klapholz called on me to read but I didn't know the place, so she said the next time she catches me daydreaming again she's going to send me to the principal's office. Today Tateh sent one of his lady workers to my class with a chicken for every girl to show us how to kosher them for when we get married; I will never eat chicken again in my life and I am never getting married. Today Yentie told me the killer called again, so I said, Give him my telephone number so he can call me up and tell me what he has against me. Today I was sitting on a car that was parked in front of school waiting for Mama to pick me up to go shopping for a new Shabbes coat, but she fell asleep and forgot all about our appointment and a man snuck up behind me and dragged me off the car by my braids and screamed at me at the top of his lungs for sitting on his brand-new
car. Today I finished another book from Mama's pile,
The Scarlet Letter
; I am a sinner like Hester and deserve to be shamed in front of everyone and banished from Gan Eden. Today Yentie told me that she gave the killer my number and she asked me if he called yet and I said, No, not yet. Today it was freezing cold but the boiler broke in school and there was no heat so we had to sit in class wearing our coats and hats and scarves and gloves all day long but Rebbetzin Klapholz said, It's a very good lesson for you, girls, because it's much more important to save the money to fix the boilers in the boys' schools in case they break, this is a great tradition of our people for the women to sacrifice so that the men can fulfill the mitzvah of sitting and learning Torah. Today I went shopping with Mama for a Shabbes coat and she slipped and fell down the stairs in the DeKalb Avenue Station and her nylons ripped and her knees were bleeding and I heard someone in the subway say she was a drunk or maybe a drug addict. Today Yentie asked me again if the killer called yet and I said, No, not yet. Today on Thirteenth Avenue I saw an old lady in a baby carriage and a little child all wrinkled walking with a cane. Today Faygie tapped me on the shoulder during a Humash test and I let her see my paper so she could copy the answers. Today I told Yentie that the killer finally called me and we had a nice conversation on the telephone and straightened everything out and he promised
b'li neder
not to kill me. Today I passed a store window and saw the reflection of a person who looked like a liar and a cheater and a sinner, and then I recognized myself. Today was my birthday and Mama made cherry Kojel in a fancy mold for me with Del Monte Fruit Cocktail trapped inside and she stuck eleven candles in it and sang Happy Birthday, Tema, and she gave me a booklet called Very Personally Yours for a birthday present with one long-stemmed pink rose on the cover, and she told me to read this book in private very carefully to learn all about the blood that will soon come flowing out of a secret opening in my body; This is a true story, Mama told me, It is not a fairy tale, Everything it says in this book really happens to every girl, You are no exception.