Sotah (52 page)
Strong winds buffeted the plane, making her body shake. But the plane, like the glinting, sharp blade of a sword, cut through all resistance, cleaving heaven itself as it thrust on toward its goal.
F
irst there were the clouds that fogged the windows, and then, as the plane sank and her stomach lurched, she saw the white coastline of Tel Aviv, the lapis blue waters, the clusters of dark rooftops, and the tiny hint of human beings.
The safety of heaven and then the unpredictability of earth.
The transition seemed unbearably abrupt. People began to clap and sing “Jerusalem of Gold” and other cloying little tunes that had never appealed to her before. Yet now they brought tears to her eyes. Home.
She did not push her way out of the plane as the others did. She waited until the aisles were almost empty, then walked down slowly. The light of day seemed almost tangible. The sun was so much closer than in New York! It was close, intrusive, a hand on her chest, a soft palm on her cheek. Home. She wanted to weep.
She showed her passport and waited for her luggage. She had no idea where to go. Her father’s? How could she, with Chaya Leah feeling about her the way she did? Judah? The thought filled her with horror and longing. No. He had sent her this divorce notice. She could not just move in on him. Dvorah? She thought about it. She had not heard anything from her eldest sister. Perhaps …?
She went to the phone booth and dialed, dropping in all her phone tokens, hoping they would be enough.
“Dvorah?”
“Dina?”
Dvorah’s familiar voice, the voice of nighttime confidences, whispered plans, encouragement, friendship. She felt a fist grab the back of her throat as she pressed back the tears.
“I’m at the airport. Can I come to you?”
“Dina! How could you … ?” Her voice was cold with fury, strange, unfamiliar.
“Please, Dvorah. I’m asking a
chesed!
Please, take me in for a little while. I have no place else to go.”
“It’s a disgrace. My neighbors … my husband … How could you put me into this position?”
“Dvorah, just for a little while. I’m begging you.”
“It’s not my decision to make,” she began to hedge in a prissy way that sickened her sister. “I have to ask my husband. He’ll be home around six.”
“But what will I do until then? Where will I go?”
“You should have thought of that, shouldn’t you?” Dvorah said cruelly.
She had held it in and held it in, all the pain, the uncertainty, the humiliation, the regret. Now her heart was finally going to break, Dina thought. “Dvorah, we’re sisters. Please.” Her voice was thick with humiliation, degraded yet somehow refusing to give up hope, to slink away quietly. She didn’t understand herself why she was prolonging her agony, why she didn’t just hang up in anger or shame or simple acceptance.
“You’ve ruined me, destroyed our good name. I have to be ashamed to walk down the street. You should see how they whisper!”
“What good is all your piety, your keeping all the laws, if you can treat your own sister so cruelly!” Dina shouted, her heart breaking, not so much with shame as disappointment. “You’ve learned nothing from the Torah, nothing from our parents, if you’re capable of turning your back on me! I won’t let you become one of them! One of those vile hypocrites that pretend piety, pretend goodness, and are nothing but dirt, dirt—black and common all the way through! I won’t let you do that to
Ima’s
name! It’s worse than anything I’ve done, do you hear, Dvorah! A million times worse!”
There was a moment’s silence, and then the voice on the other end, surprised and heavy with emotion, shouted back, “Dina … come. Come now.” And then the phone tokens ran out and the phone, knowing no compassion, having no curiosity, went dead.
She felt it the moment she stepped out of the taxi. The eyes, everywhere. They peered without mercy from behind gently pulled-back curtains; looked with insolent boldness from the faces of little girls; with sly, cruel enjoyment from young women who whispered behind outstretched fingers. But worst were the matrons who stood near the stoops: solid, unforgiving, ignorant. They stared with spiteful, unrelenting judgment, stares like cold knives, like rocks flung from a high tower.
She looked back at them, friends, acquaintances, suddenly turned malevolent strangers. She walked into the building, her head held high, her heart beating rapidly. Home. Or was it? Could it ever be, again? Then she went in to face her sister.
She knocked apprehensively, wondering where all the determination that had forced this meeting had now fled. She felt dry and empty, like a piece of yellowing newspaper, ready to crumple and disintegrate at the first harsh breath of wind.
The door opened widely. Her sister was standing there, trembling, her eyes red. She was holding a tiny infant in her arms and her stomach was already swollen with the next soul G-d intended to entrust to her care. On both sides of her, small children grappled with her skirt, using it to shyly hide their eyes.
“It’s your auntie Dina, children,” Dvorah said softly. “Go, Shlomie, Malka, kiss her, welcome her.” The children dropped their mother’s skirt uncertainly, taking tiny, hesitant steps forward toward the pretty, sad young woman they dimly remembered. Dina crouched down, holding her arms out to them, and they politely allowed themselves to have their small, tender cheeks crushed against her smooth, wet one, their little backs and waists encircled and hugged.
“She’s crying,
Ima
,” the little girl said curiously, surprised, smoothing away the wetness from her own cheeks.
“Mustn’t. Mustn’t say that!” the little boy reprimanded her in a loud whisper.
Dina looked up at Dvorah. Her elder sister held out the baby. “This is Nechama. Here, hold her.”
Dina took the incredibly soft, delicate bundle, the weight agonizingly familiar on her arms, the feel of the baby skin almost killing her with longing. Yossele, Yossele. Little baby. Little boy.
“Here, you’ll drown her. Give her back to me. She’s wet enough!” Dvorah said, a glint of humor in her tear-filled eyes.
“That’s because you’re such a bad mother. You have no experience changing diapers.” Dina smiled, embracing her sister and the baby, not moving, not speaking, for a long time. She felt her body tremble with love and despair; then, quieted by Dvorah’s responding warmth, the sisterly pats of love and acceptance, she felt calmer.
“It’s all right. It’s all right. You’re home now.”
“Am I? Can I ever be? You were right. The way they look at me. Everyone knows!” Her hands flew to her cheeks, which had gone from paleness to flaming rose in seconds as the truth dawned on her. All those months in New York where no one even knew his neighbor’s name had made her forget what life was like in Meah Shearim.
“Of course. It’s just the thing people love to discuss. But don’t talk anymore. You look so tired. Come, sit down, eat.”
The echoes flooded the room. It was their mother’s voice, their mother’s words. Dina looked at her sister. Her mother had had eight children, one after the other. This is what she must have looked like, been like, along the way. She was overworked, exhausted. Yet there was steel in her, as there had been in their mother, a strength born of acceptance and deep faith. But their mother had not had the disgrace of a close family member to deal with, to add to her burdens. What right had she to ask Dvorah for anything? She, who had done nothing to help but had only added an extra burden to her heavy load?
“I shouldn’t have come to you. You have enough to do. I’m so ashamed, I could die!”
“No, Dina. I’m the one. I’m ashamed. What you said was true. I didn’t want to take you in. It was easier for me to be on their side, to make believe you were a stranger. No, worse. I think I would have taken in a stranger who begged me for compassion. But you, my own sister. I hated you! Can you forgive me for that? What good is all my piety, all my struggling to lead a good life, if it’s made me someone who could do a thing like that to her own sister?” She sat down. Her shoulders slumped, defeated.
“I want you to know, whatever they say, I didn’t … that is … I … am innocent of adultery. Innocent of that, at least. I did some foolish things, horribly wrong things, but I never—”
“Thank G-d!” Dvorah said, shuddering with relief. “For your sake! You have no idea what a wonderful man Judah is! Do you realize how much he loves you?”
Dina’s eyes shot up and riveted themselves to her sister’s face. “Still?”
“Listen, Dina. You’ve put him through hell. But he’s a saint, nothing less. He comes here often. He brings Yossele to play with my children. He’s constantly making toys and putting up bookshelves, and banging together closets and beds … He is a man with a heart very nearly broken. But it’s such a big heart! He’s very, very angry. But I think partly it’s at himself, too. He blames himself. He feels somehow that he never deserved you and so letting you go would be the right thing to do. This is just my guess. I suppose when he filed for divorce he came to some final decision.”
Dina’s face fell.
“But there’s something else you should know. He’s under tremendous pressure from Kurzman and his group to divorce you. They are at him day and night. Yet, if you ask me, he still loves you. It used to make me pity him how much! But he’s lost all hope of your wanting him. Do you? Or perhaps you want it also, the divorce …” She looked at Dina questioningly.
“No! I don’t want that! But what can I do to stop it? I’m too ashamed to even face Judah after what I’ve done, afraid he won’t even want to talk to me … that his eyes will be like those women standing there out in the street. I couldn’t stand that. Not from Judah. I’d rather die than have him look at me that way!”
“Just talk to him. Tell him what you’ve told me, about the other …” She stopped, delicately. It was too awful to even talk about! And yet, sometimes, in the dark of the night, weary with breastfeeding, with folding endless diapers, lonely in the quiet dawn in front of the dark window … What if there had been someone who had looked back at her with equal longing? Someone who promised an attractive diversion, who’d made her feel like a desirable, spoiled girl again? Was it so hard to imagine the secret meetings, the delicious long talks … Was she really so different from her sister? Her eyes softened. “Dina, talk to him.”
“I know, I must,” she answered, twisting the fabric of her skirt. “To him, to
Aba
, to Chaya Leah … It’s just … it’s so hard …”
“They have to forgive you, as I have.”
“Have you?” Dina probed her sister’s face for hints of the truth, reassurances.
“Dina, you’re my
sister!
Bad luck!” She smiled ruefully.
“No, bad education.” Dina smiled back. “Rebbetzin Morganbesser didn’t do her job properly. I might tell her one day …”
“And give her a heart attack …” They giggled, then hugged each other gladly, forgetfully.
“What should I do next?”
“Go to
Aba
next. He hasn’t been well.” Dvorah made an effort not to sound judgmental.
“That’s also my fault! I feel like I’m trying to dig a ditch and with each shovelful the earth keeps falling in on me again.”
“It isn’t so. You and I have spoken, right? We are all right again, aren’t we?” She wiped her younger sister’s face with the edge of a diaper she pulled off her shoulder.
“It smells like sour milk and vomit.” Dina smiled.
“Be glad it’s nothing worse,
fineshmecker
.”
“Believe me, that’s the wrong word to use. Do you know what I did in America? I cleaned toilets. I washed floors on my hands and knees.”
“You were a maid? Why did you do that? How horrible!”
“I didn’t. It was Reb Kurzman. The Morals Patrol. They arranged it all. They forced me to leave …”
“You mean, it wasn’t you who ran away? But we all thought … we thought … it was the man you were going to in New York.”
Dina stared for a moment, the full significance of the idea exploding on her consciousness. “You mean Reb Kurzman didn’t tell Judah it was he who arranged for me to leave? He didn’t explain? He let everyone think that Noach and I … Oh, the miserable, rotten mamzer! …”
“
Ben Zonah!
” Dvorah joined in, shocked at her use of such unclean language, yet feeling no other words would do.
“Then all this time, that’s what everyone’s been thinking of me! It’s so unfair!” she wept bitterly. Then she looked up, her eyes suddenly, strangely dry and clear. “It’s evil, really, there’s no other word for it. And to do such a thing in the name of G-d! It’s a profanation. And all this time I thought they were the zealous ones, the ones so pure in motive, that I was less than they. It’s all a show. They are ugly, base …” She could find no words, the shock of disillusion was too great. Clouds of dust as if from a tremendous explosion seemed to obscure her thoughts, her ability to reason. Only her feelings were clear: utter betrayal and the ultimate disillusion. “I must tell
Aba
, Judah.” Her face was white.
“Soon. But now you must do only one thing: go to sleep. Come, there’s a bed in the enclosed porch. It will be quiet there. Rest. Later I’ll go with you. You won’t be alone. I’ll help you.”
“Dvorah, I’m so sorry. And you’re so good …” She was babbling in total exhaustion. Then her head hit the pillow and the dense white confusion began to clear and lift. The sheets were cool and clean. The hand that tucked her in was a kind woman’s hand. Her mother’s hand, smoothing her brow, comforting her. There was still compassion. There was still affection and kindness. Home.
T
o Dina’s surprise, it was dark when she opened her eyes. At first she didn’t know exactly where she was. A small, strangled cry of alarm rose in her throat. And then she heard the voices: Dvorah and her husband, Yaakov. They were talking softly in the living room. She lay back, almost scared to listen.
“Of course, you did the right thing, Dvorah dear. It’s a great mitzvah. She’s your sister. After all, the Torah tells us to judge every man leniently. Still, what you tell me about Reb Kurzman … he’s a man so respected. I find it hard to believe …”
