Sotah (38 page)
The skin on her hands was wrinkled from the long immersion when she finally dried herself off. She wasn’t entirely satisfied. She knew, in small, hard-to-reach crevices, the sand still lingered with irritating permanence. She put on clean underwear, a pretty flowered dress, clean stockings, and a newly cleaned and set wig. She was about to leave when the doorbell rang. Through the peephole she saw them. It was an odd group, the
spodiks
of Hasidim and the felt hats of Misnagdim mingling strangely. She opened the door without hesitation, thinking they were collecting money for some yeshiva.
“Mrs Gutman?”
She was startled they knew her name.
“We have some business to discuss with you. May we come in?”
“My husband isn’t here. I don’t think …”
But they were already inside, the stocky one with the thick beard and white gloves, the burly, sullen younger men. She felt a sudden flash of inexplicable fear.
“We’ve already spoken to Judah,” the white-gloved one said.
Judah? They knew who her husband was? she wondered, feeling strangely queasy at the way they said her husband’s first name. It was so intimate, so personal. And these men were strangers. Yet they were in her house, hers and her husband’s, without her permission. She felt a helpless rage.
“Before you start to be alarmed, I want to tell you that despite the horrible, disgusting crime you have committed—may
Hashem
have mercy on your soul, which is forever damned!—we are here not to punish you, but to help you.”
She felt her hands trembling and groped her way to the couch. They grouped around her, their hands clasped behind their backs or in hard, white-knuckled balls before their stomachs. She had no way to escape.
“We know everything, from the beginning. The trip to the American Colony …”
She felt her face flame. They knew everything, everything! Even that! All this time! … She covered her face and sat absolutely still. “I want to see my husband! I want to talk to Judah, to make him understand what really—”
“Don’t cover your eyes, it won’t help you. Open them for a change! ‘Her faithlessness was in her skirts; she was not mindful of the end’; ‘and the land became full of lewdness,’” he shouted at her with stunning cruelty. “Open your eyes, take a look at these.” He handed her the photographs, taken seconds after the ones Judah had seen (they had taken triple of everything). She looked at the first one, recognizing her thighs in the bathing suit, white and vulnerable and unspeakably licentious exposed to these men in the privacy of her home. She didn’t cry. She didn’t say anything.
“Judah has seen them also.”
She felt hypnotized with horror as she thought of these photographs in Judah’s familiar hands, his unruly head humbled over, studying them. She wanted to die. She covered her face with a pillow and wept until she thought her heart must stop or else beat in separate pieces.
“Good, my daughter, cry.” The voice went on with mild approval. “Repent. But there can be no repentance without justice. Without punishment. After all, your sin endangers the whole community. Didn’t Achan the son of Zerach sin, and wasn’t the whole community punished for it? Isn’t it written: ‘Thou shalt surely rebuke thy neighbor and not bear sin because of him’? Your sin is great. And the punishment for the adulteress is death.”
She hung her head, unafraid. She agreed with everything he said. She was grateful for the words. They were true and good. She deserved to die. It was just.
“But only G-d can decide such a thing. The power has been taken away from us, along with the Sanhedrin and the holy Temple. But this is our power. You are forbidden forever to your husband and your lover. Your husband will divorce you, and he will get the child. All property is his. You have forfeited your marriage settlement with your behavior. And forget about seeing your husband, beguiling him with any more lies. The sooner you leave, the less disgrace will fall on your family. If not, then by tonight there will be posters all over Meah Shearim with the whole story. Every child who goes to
heder
will know what Dina Reich Gutman has done—”
“No!
Please!
” Her family. Her father, her mother’s memory, her sisters and brothers. The disgrace that would fall on them all! And it would never end. It would go on and on and on. Like Sruyele’s. Her body was frozen. No blood flowed, the roaring in her ears made her faint with a growing sickness. “Please,” she begged softly, falling to the ground, utterly boneless, like a newborn too weak to hold her head erect. “Does everyone … do they have to … know?” she begged humbly, utterly crushed. She felt powerless, dangled high above a dark canyon of treacherous rocks, in the hands of a great, implacable force. “Why do they need to be disgraced? It was me, only me! They are so good …”
There was silence as the men glanced at each other meaningfully. “While you are still here, we will have no choice but to publicize the matter, as an example to the community, a warning. But if you should leave right away, simply disappear, leaving only a note behind to your husband, admitting your guilt, telling everything, then I suppose justice might be tempered with mercy.” The last words rose in the form of a question addressed to the general group, which nodded in reluctant approval.
“Thank you, bless you,” she wept, heartbroken yet with a sense that the worst had not yet happened, that she had the power to prevent it. They placed a pen and paper in front of her, being scrupulously careful not to hand it to her lest their hands accidentally touch hers. She picked it up, trying not to think of Judah or the baby. If I think of them, I’ll scream, she thought. I can’t think of it now. Now I have to do what they ask me to. To do it blindly.
If she had only done what G-d had asked her to, blindly! If she had never questioned, but simply followed the good life of her mother and sister! She forgot Noach. What was he to her? Where was he now? She picked up the pen and began to write. When she finished, she handed it to Kurzman.
He read it with unrushed concentration, his brows furrowing, his white gloves meditatively stroking the full length of his dark beard. Then, with surprising violence, he crumpled it and threw it on the floor.
Dina watched him, terrified.
“Now …” He placed a clean sheet in front of her. “Now, my daughter, for the last time, will you write the truth?”
“Wasn’t that the truth?” she asked, mesmerized by despair. She had written what she understood. But perhaps he was right. Perhaps there were other things she had overlooked that he knew about, as he seemed to know about everything. Like G-d. Why else would he be so angry?
“You know it wasn’t. Tell about the hotel room, about how you took off your clothes, how you got into bed with Noach Saltzman, how you let him have you the way only a husband should have a wife.” His voice grated with a harshness that made her want to scream with fear.
“I can’t write that, please!” she begged.
“You can and you will, or everything I have warned you about will come to pass.”
She hesitated, looking him over in shock. He was dressed in the immaculate dark clothes of the
kollel
man. He was a man, a rabbi, a scholar, the kind of authority figure she had been taught to respect and obey unquestioningly. All her upbringing, all her understanding, combined to defeat her, to take away all her resistance. This was what he wanted her to write. This was what he insisted was the truth. What did it matter what she knew, what had really happened?
Like a prisoner who has been drugged and beaten, she took up the pen. She wrote and wrote and wrote, until everything he told her had been clearly described.
She handed it to him obediently.
Again the slow, meditative stroking, the careful examination. But this time his forehead was smooth, his eyes light with satisfaction. He folded the letter and placed it on the telephone, where Judah was sure to find it. “Good! Progress!” He rubbed his hands together briskly. “Now you may pack a small suitcase,” he ordered her.
“A suitcase,” she repeated numbly. “But where will I go?”
“My child …” His voice was suddenly, strangely accommodating, even fatherly. Her heart, like parched and battered earth, welcomed the stingy drops of mercy. “We will not abandon you. You too are our sister, a member of our people. We have made arrangements for you to leave the country. You will work for a Jewish family in New York as an au pair. They have children and a big, comfortable house. You will have shelter, food. You will not be in the street. We are not entirely heartless, as our Creator teaches us: ‘Thou shalt not harden thy heart nor shut thy hand from thy needy brother.’ ‘If one is merciful toward his fellow creatures, Heaven is merciful to him; and if one is not merciful toward his fellow creatures, Heaven is not merciful to him.’”
If the
halacha
had not forbidden it, Dina Reich Gutman would have gone down on her knees in gratitude and kissed Reb Kurzman’s white-gloved hand.
D
ina looked up at the sky, shocked. Rain! In summer! She, who had never known anything but the brilliant blue of Mediterranean skies from April to October, stared at the dark clouds that pressed heavily against the rim of the horizon, the smoking wetness that boiled around her, obscuring her vision. She stepped out of the cab onto the New York City pavement, feeling that the whole world had undergone a frightening, cosmic transformation. This was not merely a new place. It was an unpredictable new planet.
“Well, what do you know. Here already. Wasn’t a bad trip, was it? You’re going to love this location, dear,” Bertha, the agency woman, said warmly. “Upper East Side, right near Bloomie’s …”
Dina strained to understand, but the woman’s heavily accented English was almost impossible for her to follow. What was “whadayahno”? What was “wazinabadtrip”? What was “yugunna love”? The words ran together like boxcars, leaving behind only an incomprehensible rumble.
“Idgivya a little tour, but whacanyudu? This weather,” Dina heard. She smiled gratefully anyhow, giving up her effort to understand the words, relying on the earnest friendliness of the tone. There was no mistaking the woman’s goodwill.
Besides, it was too terrible to even imagine what would have happened if the agency woman hadn’t been at the airport to meet her. The noise, the crowds, the confusion … Why, she would probably have still been there, like some abandoned and forgotten suitcase, an inanimate object weighted down by fear.
Bertha put an arm around the shivering girl and ushered her quickly beneath the shelter of the porte cochere.
“Home sweet home!” Bertha said gaily, her eyes filled with concern and no slight guilt. She was delivering the goods, as promised. But she hated these Israeli deals. More and more often lately the girls were arriving barely out of their teens and scared to death, not at all like the Israelis they used to get: tough, adventurous young women who’d been through the Israeli army and were ready for a good time. Those types had bounded off the plane in tight jeans, their eyes shining with eagerness, full of a million questions. But these girls, with their long dresses and shocked, painfully shy eyes, reminded her of little netted sparrows, too exhausted even to beat their wings. Most of them didn’t stay more than six months to a year. There had been rumors of pregnancies terminated as well as babies born and spirited away. She didn’t check into rumors. And of course there were the ones who stayed on and on and on with a grim kind of hopelessness.
It had been going on for about two years, ever since those mysterious phone calls from Jerusalem and the meetings between her boss and those Hasidic types. And it stank, Bertha thought hotly. But she wasn’t being paid for her opinions. She was being paid to match maids, cooks, and au pairs with the wealthy New York families who needed and could afford them. Usually she did it quite efficiently.
But there was an added problem with this one she had not been able to overcome. The application had been done hastily, over the phone. The callers had specified, as usual, an Orthodox religious home for the au pair. But then, without waiting for an answer, they had simply put the girl on a plane and sent her over.
Well, it so happened that there weren’t any Orthodox Jewish families who needed an au pair at present. So she had done the best she could.
Joan Rosenshein needed a maid, not an au pair. But she was a nice person. And the town house was beautiful. Besides, the Rosensheins were good, longtime customers who just happened to be at the top of the agency’s waiting list. As far as religion was concerned, that wasn’t one of the things agency applications got into. The Rosensheins were Jewish. At present, Bertha told herself, gnawing her lower lip, that was the absolute best she could do. She knew it was not nearly enough.
Extremely sophisticated and expensive wiring succeeded in turning the pleasant chiming doorbell of the Rosensheins’ elegant Upper East Side town house into a shrieking buzz in Joan Rosenshein’s office, breaking her concentration. Reluctantly she put down her paintbrush and slid off the drafting stool, her warm brown eyes fixed with critical scrutiny on the illustration on her drawing board. She felt a sinking sense of failure. The colors were all wrong! Gophers were brown, even if they did have names and wore trousers and pink ruffled blouses. But James, beautiful, slim, blond James, Mr Art Director, god of the free-lancers, was insisting that yellow was a happier color. That it would sell more books.
The yellow didn’t look happy. It looked hideous.
“Yes?” she sighed deeply into the intercom.
“Joan? It’s Bertha. I’ve got the new maid with me.”
“Stupendous. I’ll be down in a minute.”
Joan ran down the staircase, making a halfhearted attempt to tie back her thick, curly brown hair. It wasn’t long enough for a ponytail and yet not short enough to just shake and forget. A style only a hairdresser (who didn’t have to wear it) could love. Why, oh, why did she always let her hairdresser talk her into these things! She always came with an exact idea of what she wanted, and he always succeeded in making her feel that he couldn’t be responsible for the results. The outcome was always something she mildly disliked, which he loved. And no matter how many times it happened, she always smiled and gave him a big tip. Well, what could you do? He always looked so absolutely thrilled at the results. Why should both of them feel bad?
