One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (6 page)

Temima and her people stopped there frozen as the old man darted back and forth flailing his arms, shrieking No! No! No! within a gradually constricting circle, as if he were being sucked down a hole that was inexorably drawing him in. In her aperion Temima was singing from the one-hundred-and-sixteenth Psalm, The cords of death have encircled me, and the straits of the underworld have found me. She was sending her message along the waves of the air to this old father, Run, my heart, run Reb Lev, flee, escape, get away from them! Chasing after him were three younger men all with dark beards, all of them crying out, Tateh, Tateh, Tateh, one of them waving a large black velvet yarmulke, yelling, “Tateh, how can you go outside without your
koppel
on your head?”—the second crying, “Tateh, Tateh, your little
schmeckel'e
is popping out from your
gotchkes
, it's not dignified for a man your age to let people see his whole business hanging out in the street, it's not becoming”—the third racing after their ancient father with a wheelchair as if to scoop him up in a net like a writhing fish already bloodied by the hook.

It was astounding how long it took them to catch the dying old man so fired was he by his last exalted struggle—long enough for a delegation from among Temima's followers toward the rear of the crowd not in a position to witness in its full misery this futile resistance at the last barricade, the group that called itself the Daughters of Bilha and Zilpa, to enter the hardware store with its goods spilling out into the market square and buy up every single cleaning implement they could lay their hands on—so that once the old man was finally trapped and restrained with ropes and bungee cords and the
gartel
belts from his sons' kaftans in the wheelchair still screaming Oy, Oy, Oy, No I won't, I don't want to! No, You can't force me! and speeded away in all his unseemliness
out of sight and out of hearing forever and the aperion set off again followed by the throng out of the
shuk
and up the hill toward Ethiopia Street, throughout the moving mass, women, including Temima's own Rizpa, now had their heads wrapped in turbans made of cleaning rags and dishtowels and they were pumping into the air brooms, mops, squeegees, carpet sweepers, dustpans, toilet brushes, plungers, and so on, chanting Te-Tem-Ima-Temima-from-Brooklyn, and balancing on their heads plastic buckets and metal garbage cans, strainers and colanders, like pilgrims to Jerusalem bearing offerings of first fruit to the Temple.

By now, word was already spreading throughout the city of a wondrous procession making its way no one knew where for a purpose no one could say what as they entered the top of Ethiopia Street, past the compound sheltering the great round domed Abyssinian Church, past mysterious gardens heavy with silence behind stone walls, past the house in which Eliezer ben Yehuda, fanatic resuscitator of the Hebrew language, once resided, its historical marker ripped off yet again by fanatic defenders of the faith offended at the sacrilege of the Holy Tongue deployed for common intercourse, leaving only a gouged-out frame marking the ghostly whisper of a plaque. They veered into the Street of the Prophets, and from there to HaRav Kook Street, pausing at Temima's command in front of the home of the first chief rabbi of Israel, Abraham Isaac Kook, halting at this spot for personal reasons—to grant Temima a few minutes to focus inwardly in silence on the memory of her baby boy named for this towering Zionist mystic—her baby Kook Immanuel, tucked for so many years now in his tiny cradle blanketed with dirt in the ancient Jewish cemetery of the old city of Hebron.

Let me not look upon the dying of the child, Hagar cried as she cast her boy Ishmael away from her in the wilderness
.
A savage cry came out of Ima Temima—she did not know from what depths within her it had come up or how it had escaped her, she did not know if it was a cry of grief or a cry of shame. And then she lost all connection to that cry entirely, she concluded it had not been her cry after all, it had not come from her at all but from outside of her where it was amplified many times and reverberated over and over again as her aperion lurched forward into the moving traffic of Jaffa Road, bringing progress to a dazed halt as this epic caravan
from an apocalyptic age lumbered across the road. The cries were coming from every side—from the ululating women of the east running toward them from the Makhane Yehuda market, skidding on rotting fruits and vegetables, cracking sunflower seeds with gold teeth and spitting out the shells, from the shrieking bands of
klikushi
pouring forth from the Russian Compound, letting out great convulsive fits of lamentation like professional mourners, writhing spasmodically and barking like dogs as if possessed by demons, tearing at their hair and rending their garments. Behind them, riding on broomsticks fashioned from the wood of birch trees, cackling wildly, came the Baba Yagas with long loose ash-colored hair, word having reached them of a great and powerful sister witch making her way in a proud demonstration through the streets of city.

The
erev rav
have fastened themselves to us now, the mixed multitude, Temima noted, the riffraff, the
asafsuf
. She accepted the inevitability of this. Maybe she was not at the same level as Moses Our Teacher of whom it is written that there never arose again in Israel a prophet like Moses to whom God had spoken face-to-face—even more intimately, mouth to mouth. Unlike Moses in his old age, the vigor and moist freshness of Temima's youth had fled her and was gone, it was true, but she too was leading a congregation of obnoxious neurotics and malcontents and complainers from one slavery to another, and to their ranks a mixed multitude of hangers-on and groupies and assorted fans and freaks and misfits with all varieties of baggage were now also attaching themselves as they had to the eternally ripe Moses in his grand exodus from Egypt, as if she didn't have enough problems already, bringing nothing but more headaches.

They proceeded into the Ben-Yehuda pedestrian mall, with this great cast of extras metastasizing wildly on their back, their numbers multiplying every step of the way, more and more fellow travelers joining their ranks like the pilgrims who had once streamed by foot to Jerusalem three times a year to bring their sacrifices on the altar of the Holy Temple. More and more marchers hooked on to them here until the space was packed from end to end, some tagging along out of coarse curiosity and the itch for distraction, it is true, but others also gripped by the hope that periodically seized this superficially Westernized land and threw its inhabitants into spasms that salvation was arriving at last.

The cacophony of sounds was overwhelming, surging in waves that were practically visible to those with eyes that could see as they passed
over the crowd, in volume greater even than at Mount Sinai when the chosen people received the Torah. Whereas at Sinai there were only your standard voices and thunder and a trembling mountain and God Himself calling out from the plumes of fire and smoke, here on Ben Yehuda stretching all the way to Zion Square there was also what amounted to a full symphony orchestra of Russian musicians, including a pianist still banging on the grand he dragged out every morning to the mall for busking purposes, now being pushed along on its wheeled platform behind Temima's parade followed by the entire string section, including a harpist, the brass, the winds, the percussions, not to mention several bands of varying configurations of Slavic accordion players in authentic folk costumes, as well as klezmer fiddlers and clarinetists decked out in Eastern European vest and cap concepts. Also latching onto Temima's procession was a clutch of Breslover Hasidim just released for holiday furloughs from prisons and lunatic asylums bedecked in white crocheted skullcaps with pom-poms pulled over their shaven heads down to their eyebrows inscribed with the phrase N
A
-N
A
-N
AKH
-N
AKHMAN-FROM
-U
MAN
, which they were also bellowing ecstatically in counterpoint with the official anthem of the parade, Te-Tem-Ima-Temima-from-Brooklyn. They were followed by half a dozen Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach clones strumming the same three holy chords in a minor key on their untuned guitars, two Elvis impersonators, one with a glossy white satin yarmulke topping his slicked black wig stamped with the words B
AR
M
ITZVAH OF
S
EAN
S
CHNITZEL
, to which were glued iridescent sequins to flash the King's proud Jewish roots, and also a Bob Dylan impersonator with a harmonica strapped in front of his mouth like an orthodontic torture device who many in the crowd claimed was the actual troubadour Bobby Zimmerman himself going through yet another stage of spiritual crisis and rebirth and accordingly they approached him for his autograph, which he graciously provided.

Needless to say, more shofars were also added to the tumult—even in this respect Temima's extravaganza was not outdone by Sinai—blasted for the most part by messiahs in white robes astride white donkeys, and there were, in addition, assorted King Davids, one of them a dwarf, in cardboard crowns covered with tin foil plucking harps and lyres and lutes, which, unfortunately, could barely be heard to sooth the anguished soul in the great din. A Moses with horns on either side of his head—not the useful kind that could be blown to contribute to the medley—also
honored Temima with his company, and there were, in addition, a good number of competing Jesus Christs from all corners of the globe resurrected for the season conducting choirs of pilgrims who had descended upon the Holy Land for the Easter holiday singing hymns responsively in a babel of tongues, bearing enormous wooden crosses, the two beams lashed together with duct tape, and flagellating themselves with leather whips still reeking of freshly flayed stray cat purchased for this purpose at full retail payable exclusively in dollars or euros from the shops on the Via Dolorosa in the Old City.

Reports of all of this churning activity amassing at her rear were relayed to Temima Ba'alatOv on her cell phone by Kol-Isha-Erva at the head of her school for prophetesses and from the high priestess Aish-Zara leading her band of priestesses. I don't already have enough meshuggenehs of my own? Temima thought to herself, poaching another one of the great Tanakh comic vignettes, the quip of King Akhish when David fled from the manic-depressive King Saul to Gat, disguising himself as a crazy person, scratching at the walls and letting his spit drool down into his beard. If King David could turn himself into madman, why can't your local psychotic also turn himself into King David?

Temima accepted all of these developments with resignation, even a level of tolerance. She had anticipated a circus of this nature, but the prospect would not deter her from setting out from the Bukharim Quarter as her life on earth was constricting, to carry out her final intentions purely on her own terms. Through the window of her aperion she followed the movements of hordes of beggars, male and female, who had also attached themselves to her procession and could not be shaken off. They had descended on the mall in their legions that morning to profit from the flood of tourists funneled in by the high Paschal season, working the growing crowd tenaciously.

Poverty did not confer righteousness; this is what Temima taught. Do not favor the poor in their disputes, the Torah in one of its more progressive passages instructs us in matters of justice. The beggars in their destitution were in principle no holier than the tourists with liquid assets they were scavenging among or than your standard recognizable mall habitués whose ranks also unfolded in great crests in Temima's
wake—the youth groups spanning the entire range of the political and religious indoctrination spectrum, right, left, and center, every one of their members identically hooked up and wired to their equipment like marionettes, yelling into their cell phones and flailing their arms in emphatic gestures, squealing, hugging, bouncing up and down in ritual circles; the tough guys strutting in their tank tops and gold necklaces and natal crease décolletage tearing with their teeth great chunks of kebob off sticks, twitching to their inner trance; the gay Arab boys from Nablus and Jenin, eyes rimmed in kohl, openly holding hands on the sinful side of Jerusalem; the Muslim girls in headscarves and tight jeans lugging overflowing shopping bags; the Hasidic men looking for some action, along with the foreign workers, the Romanians, the Thais, the African slaves imported for the dirty work, all with matching unhealthy skin colors due to excessive self-abuse; and swarms of North American shoppers for souvenirs of little olivewood trinkets and Israel Defense Force knockoffs and silver ritual objects who were filling up to capacity the Jerusalem hotels for the Passover festival, including Mr. and Mrs. Peckowitz from Teaneck, New Jersey, he insisting over her shrill protests that they check out the action, join the parade, this was the authentic Israel they were finally seeing, videoing with his new camera given to him as a going-away present by their son the mob massed in front of them in every stage of its progress through the Ben-Yehuda pedestrian mall down to the end of King George Street, past the mausoleum of the Great Synagogue evoking the destroyed Temples of Solomon and Herod toward the open space of French Square where the entire procession was alarmingly brought to a dead halt by a phalanx of police mounted on horses in full body armor with rodentlike masks and helmets, at which point Flo Peckowitz screamed, “What did I tell you, Stanley, you schmuck? It's a terrorist attack! They're drawing us all to one spot so they can kill every last one of us in a single stroke, the lousy Nazis. The ingathering of exiles—follow the leader to Israel like lemmings—one great big concentration camp—so we can all be wiped out with one bomb and they can finish the job for Hitler once and for all. That's what we call efficient—the
final
final solution! Stanley, you're such a pathetic schmuck, how many times do I have to tell you?”