One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (7 page)

Then came the explosion, and, as if shot from a cannon, the multitude of hangers-on flew off in every direction, to be recycled in the endlessly absorbent crevices and chinks of the stones of Jerusalem, leaving in the street only Temima Ba'alatOv in her aperion borne by her four Bnei
Zeruya and her original flock of several hundred who had set out with her that morning in unquestioning obedience and loyalty—We shall do and then we shall listen!—following wherever she would lead.

Before they could move onward, however, they were held up behind barricades that were swiftly and efficiently erected, with all the steel professionalism of catastrophic expertise, as the sirens brayed and the medical and emergency and security personnel poured in and the area was thoroughly combed for additional bombs for which this first one might have been designed as a diversion. French Square was a particularly sensitive spot—the prime minister's official residence was nearby, the Women in Black held their weekly vigil against the occupation in this place they had renamed Hagar Square, it was a crossroads where old sins rotted on gallows for all to see and contemplate. In the end, though, it had been a meticulously controlled blast, detonated, as it happened, by Israeli sappers when a lone suicide bomber, girdled in a vest studded with explosive charges with dangling wires visible under a sweatshirt, was observed running in agitated circles in the middle of the square, completely oblivious to the traffic swirling around from all sides and would not listen to reason that might have resulted in a lifesaving defusing. Now the bomber lay alone, the sole casualty, a pulped heap almost exactly in the center of the square as the religious squads arrived in their fluorescent orange vests and rubber gloves to clear away the mortal remains.

That evening Al Jazeera released to YouTube the martyr's traditional farewell video. In the history of suicide bombings, it had been a notable and shocking twist when women began to blow themselves up, including mothers of young children, risking the immodest exposure of a recognizable body part when they were ripped apart, damaged goods exalted by the promise of the restoration of their virginity in paradise.

This time there was an even further variation on the theme. The martyr this time was a dog. According to the narrator of the video, the dog's name was King George. King George was shown staring straight ahead into the camera with his lugubrious eyes against the background of a black, white, and green Palestinian flag with a Kalashnikov planted on either side, his long, mournful brown head framed by a black-and-white checked keffiyeh folded at the peak like Yasir Arafat's in the symbolic shape of a full river-to-sea Palestine.

“King George has chosen his fate willingly and with joy in his heart, with absolutely no tremor of fear and the words
Allah hu akhbar
on his
lips,” the voiceover intoned. “Tomorrow King George will be a
shahid
. Tomorrow King George will no longer be treated like a dog. Tomorrow the gates of paradise will open up to him without a checkpoint and he will be welcomed inside as a holy martyr by seventy-two virgin bitches at his eternal disposal, but as our imams remind us, the pleasure will not be sensual—it will be spiritual.” The dog, people remarked in the comments below—there were millions of hits—looked exceptionally melancholy, and progressively even more depressed as the narration proceeded and came to its end.

Afterward, a huge protest surged up from the animal rights delegation against the government of Israel for blowing him up instead of making a greater effort to entice him with a biscuit, while pundits seized on the material to deconstruct the symbolism and rich ambiguities of a dog martyr. Many people who had been on the scene recalled having seen this dog roaming the streets of downtown Jerusalem that morning, dressed in a canine sweatshirt with a hood inscribed with the logo for Yeshiva University of New York, a costume that, in retrospect, appeared exceptionally incongruous in the heat not to mention bulky on a creature who overall gave such a gaunt, neglected, unloved impression. Flo Peckowitz remembered having seen him too, and even if, looking back, she conceded that maybe she ought to have reported the beast as a suspicious object, at the time she had thought his getup was absolutely adorable, and though the dog seemed to be entirely alone with no owner anywhere in sight, Flo nevertheless had asked out loud where she could get a sweatshirt like that for her granddaughter's puppy Fluffy, and a deep disembodied voice from somewhere in the distance was heard to intone, “The Source of Everything Is Jewish,” as if God Himself had answered her from the mountaintop.

As government agents and military personnel exited the scene and fanned out into the alleyways to penetrate the populace with the mission of hunting down the late King George's human handler, who had taken a pit stop with a Moldovan hooker on Pines Street and neglected in the end to trigger the charges from afar, four police officers astride their horses, on highly classified orders from the very top, were detailed to ride alongside Temima's procession to keep guard over her to wherever her heart's desire was guiding her.

Still, it was especially treacherous maneuvering through the protesters camped out in front of the prime minister's residence, to cut a path between the fors and the againsts on every issue, from territory to religion to reparations to imprisoned spies languishing in terminal stages of horniness, and so on and so forth, through the jungle of signs on poles brandished like paddles, through protesters in chains, in coffins, in cages, in concentration camp costumes, through women in green, women in black, women in white, women in blue and white, through tent cities and shiva-sitters and shofar-blowers and megaphone-screamers and forty-day-hunger-strikers stretched out in sleeping bags. For this purpose the head of state's official quarters was placed on earth. Who made you lord over us? Korakh demanded, backed up by the collaborators Datan and Aviram, and two hundred and fifty bigshots called up to the tribe—who made
you
the boss, Moses?

From within her aperion Temima took all of this in and shook her head. Enough with you already, sons of Levi! It was past noon, she was weary, it was time for her nap, but this was for her a day like no other, a day that was neither day nor night, she had to endure. Still she asked herself again now as had become her habit of late with the advancing years—lifting the curtain to peer out she posed the same question to herself yet again, Is this something I will miss when I am gathered back to my mothers?

The procession continued along Azza Street and looped into Radak Street on instructions from Temima communicated by cell phone to the four bearers of her aperion, her Bnei Zeruya. This was the route that Temima had laid out in advance for her penultimate journey. She had always liked Radak Street from the days when she had walked the city to establish her exact place in the world after her flight from Abba Kadosh in the wilderness with only Kol-Isha-Erva at her side, just one faithful disciple accompanying her in those days to soak in her words—the canopy of its old trees, the privacy of its old stone houses, the dignity of its old dwellers, the narrowness of its old roadway that now, in her triumphant return passage, swelled with her people from seam to seam, heralded by the four horsemen of her apocalypse.

She could have chosen a different route. There were other circuitous paths in the new city along which she could have led her people to arrive at her destination, and naturally she had also weighed the instructive value of taking them through the Old City, with all of its biblical visual aids,
and beyond its walls to the City of David on the flank sloping down to the Kidron Valley and the pools of Silwan. She could have brought them through the ravine of Gehinnom, where our rebellious ancestors built shrines to their idols Baal and the Molekh, putting their own children to the fires as blood offerings—the Valley of the Slaughter, the prophet Jeremiah called it, hell on earth itself—then up to the plateau atop Mount Moriah where the Holy Temple once stood destroyed for their sins as Jeremiah had foretold, where our righteous forefather Abraham brought his own son Isaac to sacrifice him, bound him to the altar and raised the knife to slit the boy's throat at the Lord's command—the closest spot on earth to heaven itself.

To ascend the Mount, though, they would have been obliged to acknowledge the Western Wall, and this was a site that Temima on principle shunned, not because of the unfair and demeaning partition of space between the worshipping men and the women; under the aspect of the divine, how could that signify? No, she avoided this mosh pit because of the flabbergasting idolatry of praying to stones. Not for nothing does the text make a point of noting that no one to this day knows the exact place where Moses Our Teacher was buried (by God himself, as Rashi the commentator-in-chief notes—or, even better, Moses buried himself, as we all do), lest they turn it into a shrine and prostrate themselves before it. And then Temima, in her bed in the Bukharim Quarter that had become like a prison to her, had the dream that directed her how to go.

It was a dream in threes, like the dreams of Pharaoh's head baker and head cupbearer that troubled them one night in the dungeon of the king's chief steward, the dreams that revealed to them who will live and who will die, interpreted with merciless prescience by their fellow inmate, that show-off, that suck-up, that crybaby, that pretty boy Joseph, possibly a closeted homosexual. In Temima's dream there was a house with three impossible entrances—one was so low that only a flat cart could fit through, the second was even lower and much narrower to give access only to a small animal, the third was high up with no way to get to it—but there was no door to this house in the expected place of a size or shape that a normal human being could reach or pass through. In her dream Temima was either inside the house trying to get out, or outside attempting to get in—she herself did not know which. Though her form in her dream was that of a fetus, she knew with utter certainty it was she, she never questioned this at all in her dream or even experienced it as
strange. Inside the womb of the fetus that Temima recognized as herself was another fetus that she knew was her mother, and within the womb of her mother fetus there nested yet a third fetus, an even more miniature Temima—like matryoshka dolls, homunculi, golems within golems. The skin of all three fetuses was transparent so that Temima could clearly see through them one inside the other. The tiniest fetus was struggling to get out of the mother fetus, who was laboring to get out of the biggest Temima fetus, who was attempting to get out of, or perhaps into, the house—but it was all in vain, they were helpless, as if stunned, paralyzed, again and again they were sucked back into the space they were struggling to escape from as into a vacuum or a black hole.

It was so horrifying that Temima squeezed out a stifled scream that brought Cozbi and Paltiel, in bedclothes hastily thrown over their naked bodies, flying to her room to cut the cord and liberate her from this nightmare. But in the last second before she woke up, through the transparent skin of the largest fetus that was herself, Temima could see the heart beating, with its blood vessels lit up in red and blue like the street map of a city. This was the map on which Temima traced the route she was destined to follow on this day.

When she arrived now at the vanguard of her procession to the end of Radak Street and the house of the president of the State of Israel was revealed as if on a stage before them, Temima received the final confirmation that she had chosen the correct path. They had reached the third major station on their road, the last preordained stop before she would come to her destination, when, at one and the same moment, she would enter and exit.

For the first time in her journey that day Temima poked her head fully out through the window of her aperion, to the great exultation of her people whose cries of Te-Tem-Ima-Temima-from-Brooklyn grew even more rousing at this glimpse of her craning her head out to try to view for herself, as much as was possible through her clouded eyes and the veil fluttering in front of her face and the talit hooding her head, the events unfolding before them that Kol-Isha-Erva at the head of her school for prophetesses was reporting from the scene into Temima's cell phone bulletin by bulletin.

The president's wife is standing on the upper story balcony of the house, leaning against the parapet, Kol-Isha-Erva was reporting. Her face is blotched, puffy, bags under her eyes, hair in curlers, wearing only
a lacy bra. She's screaming, “I can't take it anymore, I can't take it!” She's sobbing. People are coming out of the house behind her, moving toward her very slowly. She's climbed over the parapet now. She's sitting on the ledge with her legs dangling down—fresh pedicure, pink panties—crying, shoulders heaving. Now she's screaming again, “I'm jumping, I'm going to jump!” A bunch of kids are standing outside the gate. They're yelling, “Jump, lady—go on, your majesty, jump!” The people behind her are getting closer, very carefully it looks like, creeping up, no sudden movements, don't want to alarm her. They're talking to her. She's turned around now, maybe to hear what they're saying, her back is to us. Now she's sliding down from the parapet, holding on with both hands, she's hanging there from the ledge over the ground below, the lower half of her body is swinging, rolls of fat between bra and panties, significant cellulite. She's let go with one hand now. Now she's let go the other. She's dropping, she's falling, can't tell how many meters to the ground. They're waiting for her down there—it looks like almost the whole staff is gathered there, holding out plastic trash bins. Thank God, they've caught her—she's saved. She's in a dumpster, she'll be recycled. They've put on the lid.