In the turmoil immediately following her mother’s death, the soul still in its unsettled and agitated wandering state, neither in this world nor the next, Tema’s father assigned to her, their only child, the interim task of sitting guard over the body, which by the strictest law must not be left alone for even one second until it is pinned down under the weight of the earth and can cause no more harm.
Tema was eleven years old at the time, and what horrified her above all was not the waxen pallor of the corpse, or the fumes of liquefying organic matter already diffusing into the room, or even this cold stranger’s obstinate refusal to respond when Tema addressed her so politely. It was the open mouth, hanging down slack, like a dog’s—that was simply unbearable. Tema tried to slam that mouth shut, shoving the chin upward with the palms of her own hands, but it was hopeless—it just dropped down again and slung there, revealing everything, the deepest and most private secrets of the family.
She looked around the room—it was her parents’ bedroom—for a cord or a belt to strap around the face and hoist up that jaw no matter how unseemly and ridiculous such a contraption would be, like a gauze bandage wrapping for a toothache in an old-fashioned slapstick farce. There on top of the bureau, as always, her mother’s collection of three head-shaped wooden wig blocks were positioned on their stands—one for her everyday sheitel, one for her Sabbath and holidays sheitel, and one for her fanciest, most expensive sheitel reserved for very special occasions such as weddings. In a playful mood one evening a year or two earlier, as Tema was engaged in a favorite pastime, watching her mother getting dressed to go out—attending especially to how her mother, as if she were completely alone and unobserved, leaned forward with utter concentration toward the mirror to apply the red viscous clown gash of her lipstick and then blotted it on a tissue, sending up a stale spit odor mixed with the oversweet artificial fragrance of the lipstick’s perfume and the crushing smell of her mother’s impenetrable unhappiness that would nearly ruin Tema for life—on one of those evenings when she was once again keeping her mother company during this eternally fascinating feminine ritual, Tema had taped a photograph of her mother’s face to the front of each of the three heads on the wig stands, indulging the creative license of a child’s capricious arts and crafts project. Her mother had never taken down those pictures, and now her three faces were staring back at Tema from the wooden heads on their stems on top of the chest of drawers. The special-occasions head was alarmingly bald, its wig on duty on the unresponsive woman they claimed was her mother lying there on that bed with her mouth hanging open like a dog, the face grotesquely made up, a long pearl earring like a teardrop inserted through the slit of one earlobe.
From this mannequin on the bed, Tema’s eyes moved to the nightstand, where she noted once again her mother’s favorite book, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in the Modern Library hardcover edition translated by Constance Garnett—a very fat volume, nearly one thousand pages long. This is what Tema took to wedge under that chin and prop it up, succeeding at last to clamp shut that mouth with the moist scarlet rim of the lipstick that had exposed the fleshy tongue, the teeth packed with gold fillings, the obscenely dangling pink uvula—until her father, Reb Berel Bavli, strode back into the room, accompanied by the professional shomer who had been hired to take over bodyguarding duty from Tema, to escort the remains and recite the chapters of Psalms through all the stages from transferal to the funeral home to awaiting burial after the ritual cleansing away of all earthly nonsense and artifice including wigs, makeup, and jewelry, the purification with poured water, the plugging with earth of all the orifices, the dressing in plain white shrouds for the grave. With barely a glance at Tema or her mother, in a kind of backhanded stroke as if in passing without breaking his stride, Reb Berish flicked the book out from under his late wife’s chin, releasing the jaw to flop right down again and cast open the mouth in that imbecile expression. To Tema, the drop was audible. Reb Berish just shook his head. “At least you didn’t stick in there a holy book with God’s name,” he said. “Forty days you would have to fast.”
It is true that she could have used the Tanakh on the nightstand on her father’s side of the two pushed-together beds for this purpose, to elevate her mother’s chin and seal her lips, since it was more or less the same thickness and heft as the Tolstoy, but the presence of the divine name on its pages and especially the unmentionable Tetragrammaton between its covers rendered it unthinkable, even to one as young as Tema was then, to defile such a holy volume by contact with the dead. The Hebrew Bible was a book you just did not fool around with. You did not deface it, you did not underline in it, you did not scribble comments or exclamation points or question marks in its margins or doodles or drawings of idealized girls’ faces and fantasy hairdos during the numbingly boring Bible and Prophets classes, and if by some misfortune it fell on the floor you picked it up reverentially and kissed it in the hope of the unforgiving author’s forgiveness.
Nevertheless, though Tema exploited only the work of a mere mortal to prop up her mother’s face and restore it from the face of a dog, she still undertook over the course of the following year of mourning a series of mortifications of the flesh, including fasting from food and drink every Monday and Thursday when the Torah is read in the synagogue, and also a ta’anit dibbur, fasting from speech all week excluding Sunday after school, when she would take two trains and a bus out to her mother’s grave plot still unmarked with a stone in the Old Montefiore cemetery in Queens and pour out her heart like water lashing her mother’s face.
On top of that, she privately undertook several additional personal corrections, including sleeping with rocks packed in her pillowcase like Jacob Our Father in Beit El on his flight from his brother Esau to Haran, as well as the Tikkun Hazot, awaking at midnight every night and sitting barefoot on the cold floor of her locked room in a rent nightgown to mourn the destruction of the Holy Temple and the exile from Jerusalem for our sins almost two millennia ago with the prescribed prayers and lamentations, a trove of ashes from sheets of notebook paper burned in an empty lot sprinkled on her head. She also recited the Tikkun HaKlali, the ten psalms specified by the holy Rav Nakhman of Bratslav, and often for good measure she would even recite the entire book of Psalms, all one hundred and fifty of them, as well as immerse herself three hundred and ten times in her improvised mikva, which consisted of the bathtub filled with ice-cold water. All of these mortifications she undertook to repair the damage she had inflicted on her spiritual core when, while lying in bed awake, she could not in her weakness resist the temptation to explore herself in a place she could only think of as “down there,” somewhere on an uncharted map like the South Pole, or, while asleep, when she had no control over her thoughts or actions, she would be assaulted by a dream that she could never remember but that would startle her into consciousness with spasms of shocking intensity—spasms so powerful and so unlike anything else she had ever experienced that she wondered why human beings did not occupy themselves with trying to reproduce this sensation every minute of every day and night, but, at the same time, she understood without having to be told that, whatever this was, it could only be a sin, religion had surely been invented to keep this thing under control.
Now and then over the course of that year, someone would take her father aside in the synagogue or in one of the stores on Thirteenth Avenue to remark that Tema looked like she was losing too much weight or that Tema had become “such a quiet girl.” Reb Berel Bavli would simply absorb these presumably well-meant bulletins regarding the troubling changes in his daughter and shrug his shoulders, putting out both of his large hands with their meaty palms upward in a wordless gesture that translated, What do you expect? The girl just lost her mother.
For thirty days following his wife’s death, Reb Berish abstained from trimming his fiery red beard, a personal vanity he privately indulged, but Rosalie Bavli, Tema’s mother, was, after all, his second wife; his first wife he had divorced on the day after the anniversary of their tenth year of marriage when she had still failed to produce an offspring of any flavor. The woman he took shortly afterward, the woman who became Tema’s mother, was nearly fifteen years his junior, in her early thirties at the most by his reckoning when she departed this world, they were almost of different generations not to mention different sexes.
On the shloshim after her death, following the prescribed thirty days of second-stage mourning, Reb Berish bared his throat to his trusted barber for a nice beard trim, commissioned a local synagogue hanger-on to say Kaddish during prayers three times a day over the duration of the eleven months’ mourning period for his late wife, Rosalie—Rachel-Leah Bavli—who had failed to plan ahead and leave a son qualified to perform this service in her behalf, and he let it be known to everyone in his circle as well as to professional matchmakers that he was now in the market for remarriage. He also threw himself even more intensely than ever into his business, which was prospering beyond his wildest dreams, providing the most highly regarded, strictest kosher certification to meats of all kinds based on his years of experience as a shokhet, a ritual slaughterer, now employing a sizable staff of authorized personnel, butchers and overseers, and branching out to a whole range of other food products in addition to meats. The Berel Bavli logo—the double-B seal of approval, evoking the two tablets of the Ten Commandments—was worth its weight in gold, a guarantee of the highest, most trustworthy level of supervision. Of course, by the time his second wife Rosalie passed away he no longer worked hands-on, so to speak, as a shokhet, but there is no doubt that the accumulation of years he had spent standing in pools of blood cutting the throats of cattle and sheep and fowl and inspecting their entrails gave him a realistic perspective on physical mortality that extended to humans in the image of God as well, not excluding women—a perspective that could not be expected of a sheltered child such as Tema assigned to sit watch beside her freshly dead mother whose mouth hung open like a dog’s.
Even so, during that first year following the death, Reb Berish took sufficient heed of the trouble signs in his daughter that were being brought to his attention with increasing frequency, and based on the advice of his rabbi, the Oscwiecim Rebbe, he took Tema out of the neighborhood girls’ school, Beis Beinonis, which was considered slightly more to the permissive side, and transferred her to Beis Ziburis off Bedford Avenue in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, which was reputed to be a stricter institution that kept the girls rigorously focused on what was expected of them regardless of personal problems or life situations. Reb Berish banged on the door of Tema’s bedroom one morning after he had tried to open it by turning the knob, which was how he discovered that she had installed a lock to carry out her mortifications in private, and informed her that he would be driving her to her new school in half an hour, after which she would be going there and back on her own on the subway—which was how Tema discovered that she would be switching schools.
It was also during that year before the stone was unveiled over the grave plot that Reb Berish married again without informing Tema of his intentions or even that he had been looking much less found a bride. A small, private ceremony, without music of course out of respect for the recently deceased, was held in the living room of the Oswiecim Rebbe, who officiated under a tablecloth held overhead as a huppa canopy by four old Jews dragged in from the street along with their folding shopping carts. Afterward, the rebbe’s wife pushed aside the great maroon volumes of Talmud and other books of law on the long dining room table where her husband usually presided and served some schnapps in little fluted paper cups and slices of sponge cake on napkins, and, as a special treat, because it was she who had been the successful arranger of this match, a plate of herring, each piece skewered with a toothpick topped with a brightly colored decorative cellophane frill.
Naturally, Tema was not present on that occasion. She met the new wife the next morning after her father had already gone off to shul for prayers and then onward to his business when there was a knock on her door in the wake of a tread that she could tell was not his. Tema opened the door to a woman in a pink chenille bathrobe who inquired with a heavy Eastern European accent where the linen closet was located. She needed to change the bedsheets.
Her name was Frumie Klein, she was seventeen years old, and Tema recognized her instantly as one of the older girls from Beis Beinonis known collectively as the “refugees” who were coming into the high school during that period from a black hole referred to as “over there,” where terrible but not surprising things were happening to the Jewish people too shameful to talk about but which everyone accepted in the cosmic scheme as predictable and no doubt deserved punishment for our sins against the Master of the Universe acting through his evil agent, Adolf Hitler, may his name and memory be blotted out. Frumie, originally from a cosmopolitan, secular Budapest family where she had been known as Felicia, was a silent, gaunt girl of fifteen when she arrived from a displaced persons camp aboard an American troopship setting sail from Bremerhaven and was collected at the dock in New York City by distant ultra-Orthodox Boro Park relatives who regarded it as a great mitzvah that could only redound to their credit in the divine ledger to take in such an orphan, may such misfortunes as befell this poor girl never befall any of us.
Over the ensuing two years Frumie occupied herself with eating steadily mostly in secret and with stealing small change from her host family in order to buy facial creams and lotions from the drugstore to cope with a devastating case of acne, a mask of pus pimples and inflamed sores that all the ladies sitting in the balcony of the synagogue remarked was so unusual in Hungarian women, universally acclaimed for their flawless complexions and for the skincare secrets they possessed, which produced legendary cosmetics magnates female by sex and Jewish by race.
By the time Frumie turned seventeen her petty thefts were discovered, her face was permanently scarred, cratered and pitted in texture like the landscape of the moon and medium-rare in color, her figure had filled out, especially the womanly parts, ballooning breasts and buttocks cinched by a cartoonish small waist, a caricature of voluptuousness. A decision was made to marry her off as soon as possible while she at least had her youth. With the guidance and encouragement of the Oscwiecim rebbetzin, Reb Berel Bavli, though a bit on the older side, was presented as a suitable candidate—still vigorous and in the prime of life, extremely well-off financially and a good provider, with only one child from a previous marriage who was no longer a baby and would likely within the next few years also be married off herself. One morning, standing across the street from Beis Beinonis alongside Reb Berish as the girls were filing into the school with their books and looseleaf binders pressed to their bosoms, the rebbetzin pointed out the merchandise, confident that her client possessed an expert eye that could quickly and accurately appraise the livestock. A few days later, a deal was struck.
When Tema turned twelve, Frumie was already pregnant with the first of the daughters she would produce almost each year—five by the time Tema herself left home and lost track. Though she had the opportunity to run into Frumie again several decades later and repay her in some measure for the small motherly kindnesses she had extended during their time together, including slapping Tema hard across the face to stir up the blood in her cheeks by way of cautionary congratulations when she got her first period, and supplying the sanitary pads and belt, and offering intimate guidance related to bathing and body odor and so on and so forth, she completely lost all contact with the little girls, her half sisters, to the point that, years later, when she would on occasion try to summon up their names, inexplicably they would elude her. In her mind, she would refer to them by the names of the five proto-feminist daughters of Zelophekhad—Makhla, Noa, Hagla, Milka, and Tirza—who very respectfully had stood before Moses Our Teacher and all the chieftains in the wilderness at the entrance but not inside the Tent of Meeting and collectively petitioned for their rightful parcel of land among their tribesmen of Menashe as their father, Zelophekhad, who had died for some unmentionable sin, had left no sons and heirs. Doubly punished their father Zelophekhad had been, or, more precisely, punished twice as hard—whatever this sin was that he had committed must have been in a class unto itself—punished not just with death but also with having as progeny only daughters and no sons to inherit his portion and perpetuate his name, a compounded form of death, like leprosy—erasure and obliteration. Oh yes, said the Lord who knows everything, both text and subtext, Rightly the daughters of Zelophekhad have spoken.
But what she was above all eternally grateful to Frumie for was the endlessly tactful, entirely ungrudging and unresentful way she left her alone, asking almost nothing at all from her throughout those years they lived under one roof, not even occasional help with the whining little girls throwing their tantrums or babysitting duties for a moment’s relief. It was thanks to Frumie’s policy of benign neglect that Tema was left free to read undisturbed through all of her mother’s small but treasured collection of books that she had claimed as her rightful inheritance, including the Anna Karenina, which she reread once a year around the time of her mother’s yahrzeit throughout her adolescence and thereby entered into her complicated lifelong involvement with her divine but disapproving and intolerant Reb Lev.
And not only that. Because of the benevolent, even conspiratorial, blind eye that Frumie turned, every Friday on her way home from Beis Ziburis, when school ended early in anticipation of the Sabbath, Tema was able to stop off at her local branch of the public library and totally free of charge take out the maximum of four books from the “adult” section even when she did not yet quite qualify by age, aided and abetted by a lax, perhaps subversive, librarian, possibly an anti-Semite, Tema sometimes speculated, sniffing out rebel or apostate material. Tema would carry these library books home on Friday afternoon, crushed to her heart under her schoolbooks and spiral notebooks and looseleaf binders, spirit them into her bedroom, tear up some pieces of paper and insert them between the pages where the words BROOKLYN PUBLIC LIBRARY were stamped on the outer edges of the closed volumes, so that, in reading the books on the Sabbath, opening and closing them and turning their pages, she would not be forming these words and thereby violating one of the thirty-nine categories of labor prohibited on the Sabbath by in effect writing, for which the punishment is death or being totally cut off from your people.
Lying on her stomach on the floor of her bedroom with the door slightly open as everyone else slept and her father’s male snores rattled that silenced house, Tema would read very late into Friday night by the hallway light left illuminated for the entire Sabbath, since switching on the electricity was tantamount to igniting a fire, another one of the thirty-nine forbidden categories of work—and she would also read through the entire Sabbath afternoon as everyone obeyed the fourth commandment and rested on the seventh day within those close, musty walls, knocked out by the heavyweight lunch of the bean and meat and potato cholent stew that had simmered on the stove on a low flame under a metal sheet for twenty-four hours, never lifting her eyes from the page lest she forfeit her focus on the letters and words as the sun set and darkness descended. Without any outside interference, Tema would read unmolested a minimum of four books almost every week, making her way through the adult literature section of the library in alphabetical order, from Aeschylus to Zola, checking out four new books every Friday before the Sabbath after returning in perfect condition the four she had read, never marking or soiling them in any way or folding down the corners of their pages to indicate her place or smearing snot on them, since the injunction against desecrating holy books with which she had been inculcated carried over to a respect for all books in general.
In this way, in spite of the fact that Beis Ziburis allocated only the minimum of two hours a day to secular general studies to meet government education requirements, from four to six in the late afternoon, under the apathetic instruction, considered good enough for these girls, of terminally exhausted and battle weary teachers who would trudge into their school to earn a few extra dollars after having just survived a day of toil and abuse at the nearby public schools, Tema managed, thanks to Frumie’s silent collusion and the amateur course of independent study she had designed for herself, to gain through these alien books at least a glimpse of what else lay out there in the world. And she managed also, by penetrating these works, to begin to acquire her mastery of the interpretive powers that she would later bring to the holy texts—the texts that even then already gripped her above all others and broke her heart with their sheer cruelty, with the coldness and finality with which they, no less than these strangers’ books, dismissed and excluded her.
Women, slaves, and children are exempted from studying Torah. That is the first axiom stated by the second Moses—Rabbi Dr. Moses son of Maimon, the formidable medieval philosopher and physician known as Rambam or Maimonides. To Reb Berel Bavli, man of action and appetites, Maimonides’ dictum meant that even if a woman appeared to be studying, in reality she was not. It was an illusion since she was exempt; it was impossible since her mind was not suited as Maimonides the rationalist correctly pointed out; it could encourage lasciviousness, Maimonides the moralist cautioned.
Still, Reb Berish was not worried. A girl with her nose all the time in a book who never even bothered to look up to give you a little smile once in a while was not exactly high on the charts in the hoo-ha department. Whatever she was doing by herself all the time with those books, it was not something to be taken seriously. It was like a hobby, nothing more, a phase that would soon pass when she was married off and had children of her own and no time to waste on such shtoos, such nonsense and extracurriculars.
Reb Berel Bavli was a busy man; he had more important things on his mind than to monitor this moody girl’s reading habits and materials. He had a growing business and a growing new family to deal with—though unfortunately, year after year, no son yet, and he such a virile specimen, ruddy and robust, condemned to drown in a quagmire of pink; it was as if someone were playing a joke on him, making him look ridiculous. There must have been something wrong with this fat Frumie too, just like with his other wives. Had she taken the trouble to give him a son for a change, with his years of experience wielding the knife, he could have, like Abraham our father, circumcised the boy on the eighth day after the birth and initiated him into the covenant himself with his own hands instead of delegating this sacred task to a surrogate acting in his behalf. Had this lazy Frumie cared enough about him to produce a son instead of just another tiresome version of a female, when the boy turned thirteen and became a bar mitzvah, responsible for his own sins, with what joy Reb Berish would have boomed out in front of the entire congregation his gratitude to God to be released from the punishment of this one—and he would have pointed with such pride to his own strapping son in his image, may the evil eye spare him.
Reb Berish was not responsible for his Tema in the same way. When Tema turned twelve, the age at which a female (who matures more quickly than the male and, it follows, more quickly becomes overripe and wilts) is legally and halakhically accountable for her own sins, he was not charged with making sure she study Torah, as he would have been for a son who was not exempt. Still, around the time of Tema’s twelfth birthday, which, as it happened, coincided roughly with the establishment of the State of Israel, Reb Berish did privately mark her passage into adulthood by noting as he presided at the head of the Sabbath table that she was the same age as Germy, the dog that belonged to the goy next door—and the average life span for a German Shepherd, for your information, was, or so he had heard, more or less the same as for the Nazi regime—twelve to thirteen years. “A very old dog, an alter cocker. Makes you think, no?” Which led to his next observation, concerning the newly established Jewish state: “We’ll know already soon what this world is coming to when the people over there in Eretz Yisroel start talking to dogs in Loshon Kodesh.” A few days later, Tema approached Germy safely locked up where he could do no harm for all of his twelve years in the neighbor’s backyard due to the surrounding Diaspora Jews’ fear-of-dogs. She looked into his demented eyes and his moronic open mouth with the tongue hanging down. “Higi’a hazman,” Tema said to the dog in the Holy Tongue. Your time’s up. And, like an executioner, she opened the gate.
Years later, she would mentally flip to the image of the wild dogs in the Valley of Jezreel lapping up the blue blood and tearing the royal flesh of her beloved majestic Queen Jezebel, and she would forgive herself in some measure for opening the gate that day and liberating the Brooklyn descendent of those dogs, the wretched Germy, to go forth and almost instantly meet his fate with that wreck of a truck, its bells jingling as it clattered down the street driven by Itche the junkman. But in the months that followed the event itself, the image that gripped her was of a pulped and bloody mess in the middle of the road moments after a brief canine burst of hope and exhilaration at having been set free at last. This was the image she would return to again and again in those days, like a dog returns to its own vomit, as the author of the book of Proverbs said, reportedly King Solomon.
On a Sunday morning at Beis Ziburis not long after the fateful meeting between Germy the dog and Itche the junkman, the girls were reviewing for a final exam on the second book of Samuel that they had just completed under the instruction of their Prophets teacher, Miss Pupko, a sallow-faced young woman eighteen years old, recently engaged to be married, who had just graduated from the school the year before and was translating verse by verse, chapter by chapter from the Hebrew directly into Yiddish. Suddenly Tema’s daydreams were brutally interrupted by the words in chapter nine of Mephiboshet, the crippled-in-both-legs son of Jonathan, groveling before the bandit kingpin David who had just promised him a permanent seat at the royal table and restored to him all the lands of his grandfather, the crazy King Saul: “What is your servant that you have shown such regard for a dead dog like me,” Mephiboshet said, so hideously obsequious. Tema raised her hand and asked permission to leave the room, which was the only way to earn the privilege to use the toilet to relieve yourself.
In all her years at Beis Ziburis, Tema had never once used the toilets for the purposes for which they were intended, to relieve herself—including by crying—they were too filthy and public. She exercised extreme self-control throughout the long day, she held everything in until she came home, then dashed through the house straight to the bathroom; the women of her family knew what to expect and they all gave way. Now Mephiboshet the dead dog sent Tema wandering through the halls of the dingy firetrap that was Beis Ziburis, the peeling and flaking walls, the gashed and stained linoleum, the smashed light fixtures and exposed wires, the cracked windowpanes, all of it in violation of building codes and officially condemned by municipal inspectors but considered good enough for the girls by the overseers of the school, who kept it in operation through private arrangements with elected city officials.
There was a door that Tema had noticed many times but never opened. This time, though, she turned the knob and went through, down the stairs into the cellar. She switched on a light and, by the grimy yellow wattage, she gazed around her, surveying the hundreds of cans of food of all kinds and sizes that filled the shelves along the walls and spilled over into great mounds and heaps on the floor. Some of the cans were fairly new, but others had torn or missing labels, the metal smashed and dented, rusted and bloated and exploded, so that even as she stood there taking all of this in she could hear toxic popping noises that caused her to turn around and come face-to-face with the principal of her school, Rabbi Manis Schmeltzer, the only male on the premises all day until four in the afternoon on weekdays when the defeated public school teachers plodded in to provide the minimum mandatory secular instruction. For some reason, the principal’s presence down there in the cellar did not surprise her in the least.
“I guess you never got around to giving those cans to the poor starving children we collected them for,” Tema said.
“Ah,” said Rabbi Schmeltzer, quoting from one of the great comic scenes of the Torah, “And the Lord opened up the mouth of the ass. And I thought you were such a quiet girl. Everybody tells me you never say a word. Who would have ever imagined you had such a fresh mouth on you?”
He laid both of his hands on top of her head as if he were about to bless her, but instead he pushed her down to the cement floor of the cellar onto her knees, even though everyone knows that a Jew may never kneel before another human being. A Jew bows down only before God, Tema had been taught, but maybe that rule applied only to men, such as Mordekhai the Jew who refused to prostrate himself before the grand vizier Haman, thereby aggravating the villain even more, rendering him nearly apoplectic, nearly bringing about the annihilation of the entire Jewish population of Persia and Mede, one hundred and twenty-seven principalities from India to Ethiopia, a death sentence that required a major knee job, with Mordekhai the court Jew’s full support and encouragement, on the part of his hot niece Hadassah / Esther to get it repealed. “This should shut you up,” Rabbi Manis Schmeltzer said. He unbuttoned the fly of his trousers and took out what he called his bris and shoved it into her mouth, which he called her pisk, and began schuckling back and forth as if he were swaying in prayer with particular concentrated kavanah and focus—all of which Tema observed with an odd detachment, as if it were happening not to her, not to Rosalie Bavli’s daughter, but to someone else, she didn’t even bother to try to raise her voice to protest in some way as even Bilaam’s ass had complained in that great comic scene in the Bible—even that donkey had dared to inquire what it had ever done to deserve this.
When he was finished with his business, Tema turned her head to the side and vomited on some corroded cans with their contents splattered and disgorged. “This will be tsvishn uns,” Rabbi Schmeltzer said as he reassumed his usual disguise. “Between us—get it? One word about this, and I will simply let it be known that you’re out of your mind, crazy, like your late mother, may she find some peace at last. You’re a smart girl, Tema Bavli, I’m sure you get my point. It will not help your marriage prospects one little iota if anyone ever hears about this, believe you me. Number one, what were you doing cutting class? Number two, what were you doing alone down here in the cellar anyways? Try to explain all that to your father and to the ladies auxiliary and to the entire congregation of Israel.”
Tema returned to the classroom, slumped, head lowered, seeking to enter as unobtrusively as possible. “Gai avek!” Miss Pupko cried out sharply in Yiddish. Jolted, Tema raised her eyes despite her ardent wish at the moment to remain invisible. Was the teacher ordering her to get out? Could the news have already spread so rapidly like a plague? But then Tema recognized this as the translation into Yiddish of the words of King David’s son Amnon to his half sister Tamar, right after he was done raping her—“Get up, Get out!” Amnon had barked to the Jewish princess Tamar, and then to his royal attendant, “Get this thing out of here and lock the door behind her.”
As Tema made her way to her desk in the back of the room and sat down, turning her head from the swampy girls’ smell of stagnant menstrual blood and underarm sweat to stare out the streaked window, Miss Pupko continued with the lesson, leaning in toward the class. “Memorize these words, girls, wear them like a seal on your heart if, heaven forbid, you are ever tempted to give in to the evil inclination. ‘And Amnon now hated her with a very terrible hatred, the hatred he hated her with was much greater than any love he had ever felt for her before.’”
They were up to chapter thirteen. Tema realized she had been out of the room for four chapters and look at all that had happened in the meantime. She wondered what happened to princess Tamar who, following the rape, was taken in like a casualty to her brother Absalom’s house, and two years later he exacted his revenge, setting up their half brother Amnon to be terminated. But beyond that, concerning Tamar’s fate, not a word. Did she take her own life from shame? Did her brother arrange to have her stoned in an honor killing for disgracing the family by letting herself be violated? The text is finished with her, except perhaps indirectly when it informs us that Absalom had three sons with names not listed, and one daughter, a beauty called Tamar. Jews name their children after dead relatives.
Miss Pupko gave Tema a lacerating glance. Between the two of them, there was a long-standing entrenched tension. The teacher was exceedingly aware that Tema conducted her own private study of Tanakh and had even memorized entire books, including such long ones as Isaiah and Psalms, to the point that you could just spit out one word and this strange girl could supply the entire sentence that encased it complete with chapter and verse citation. Who would ever marry such a freak, and motherless besides? She was like some kind of illui, a prodigy who had mastered the complete Talmud, except that an illui was an honored category reserved exclusively for boys—in a girl such precocious flashes of brilliance were simply bizarre and superfluous and disturbing, there wasn’t even an accepted feminine form for the term. Miss Pupko felt in her heart that Tema had nothing but contempt for her knowledge of the Scripture, and she was keenly wounded. Tema regarded herself as too good for this review, Miss Pupko thought bitterly, there was nothing she could learn from it, that was why she had stayed out of the room so long, doing her business, whatever it was, in the toilet or wherever.
“Tema Bavli,” Miss Pupko bellowed, “Read!”
Slowly and deliberately Tema turned back toward the stifling, puberty-laced interior of the room from staring outside through the grimy window down into the street where she had been observing Rabbi Manis Schmeltzer opening the door to his car illegally parked in front of a fire hydrant, removing the CLERGY sign from the windshield, flipping the sign along with his black fedora hat onto the front passenger seat, cupping his black velvet yarmulke and readjusting it on his head, hoisting the tail of his glossy black kaftan in order to slide his haunches more comfortably into the driver’s seat—and then she pictured him jiggling his hindquarters, easing them into the bowl of the seat with a palpable sense of well-being, and jutting his chin forward toward the rearview mirror, drawing back his lips and baring his teeth like a primate to examine them proprietarily before inserting his key into the ignition and setting forth with a roar. Tema gazed at Miss Pupko in complete confusion. “Aha, so you weren’t paying attention,” the teacher said. “You don’t even know the place.”
When school ended, Tema walked to the subway station intending to make her way home to purge herself in privacy, to brush her teeth thoroughly and rinse out her mouth, to stand under the shower for as long as possible before someone started banging on the door. But since it was a Sunday, with no secular instruction, late afternoon in early summer but still daylight, Tema went instead in the other direction almost without being fully aware of her movements or that she had made any particular decision at all, and she boarded the train that would take her to the second train that would take her to the bus that would bring her to the Old Montefiore cemetery in Queens where, once, her mother could always be found waiting to listen to everything.
But ever since the stone had been unveiled over her mother’s grave, a slab of granite with the minimal inscription entirely in Hebrew from right to left—name, date of birth and death in accordance with the Jewish calendar linked by a minus sign, and the generic double-edged one-size-fits-all compliment for females from the book of Proverbs, A WOMAN OF VALOR WHO CAN FIND—Tema’s visits had grown more and more infrequent. Her mother was no longer there, no longer nearby, she was packed away, sealed off, she no longer cared. And this was what Tema also felt now as she approached the grave in the twilight with the darkness beginning to descend, her mother moving even farther away from her to a cold point in the distance.
“Mama, Mama!” Tema began screaming into that distance, her cries bouncing from headstone to headstone in the cemetery emptied of all other living beings. She bent down to gather a handful of pebbles and small rocks and granite and marble chips that had cracked off the gravestones, but instead of setting them down on her mother’s grave as a sign that she had come by to visit, she began throwing them, pelting her mother’s monument with missile after missile. Horrified by her actions, Tema broke out in sobs, “I’m sorry, Mama, I’m sorry!”—and she fell down on the plot as if splayed on her mother’s body with her arms hugging its headstone, crying so hard, crying like she used to cry when she was a little girl, her entire body heaving until the breath seemed to be sucked out of her and all her moisture drained, and she swooned, collapsed from sheer physical depletion.
She woke up in the pitch dark and began staggering around the cemetery like the abandoned children Hansel and Gretel in the Black Forest fairytale, only at least they had each other whereas she was entirely alone, utterly lost and with no bearings at all as to where she was in the world, groping in the darkness until she fell partway into an open grave awaiting its dead the next morning, grasping onto one of the two mounds of soft, freshly dug up earth that rose on either side. This is where she was found at dawn by the caretaker of the cemetery making his first rounds. For the remaining weeks of that school year Tema was sick in her bed. She never took the final exam on the second book of Samuel for the Prophets class or in any other subject for that matter, and they didn’t bother with makeup tests either since, as the principal Rabbi Manis Schmeltzer himself so wisely pointed out, “Who are we kidding? Let’s face it, it really doesn’t make a difference one way or the other in the overall life schedule of these girls.”
During the first stage of her illness Tema barely responded at all. But after about a week she returned from wherever she had been; she recognized that she was completely altered, that she had undergone an event terrible and undeniable, that she had given up one form of bondage in exchange for being bound to something else—she would never be free. She had come back from the dead with secrets, with forbidden knowledge, weighed down by a calling. The first person she saw when she opened her eyes was Frumie sitting with legs apart on a chair at the bedside in her pink chenille bathrobe stretched taut and pulled open to expose a patch of the great smooth mound of her pregnant belly with a dark line trailing downward from the plug of her navel. “Oh my God, why did you leave me?” Tema cried out, and her voice came up as if from below—deeper, riper, the voice of the blood of her mother crying out to her from the ground. Frumie’s head sank low over her belly, her hair tightly bound up in a married woman’s headscarf. “I’m sorry, Frumie, I don’t mean to hurt you,” Tema said. “Such a life is just not meant for me.”
For much of the remainder of the period that Tema lived under her father’s roof, until she left home at the age of twenty or so, one of the signature refrains by which she was tagged within the family was her rejection of “such a life”—and as if to elaborate by way of a concrete example, she would inevitably specify that she was never getting married. While she was still in school at Beis Ziburis, her father, Reb Berel Bavli, dismissed it as an adolescent trifle, though from time to time as the years accumulated, at the expanding Sabbath table with more and more miniature female offspring lining the sides flowing from his seat at the head as from the source of the river, when Tema would once again be provoked to restate her refusal with respect to marriage, Reb Berish would lean back in his armchair to allow more scope for his ample gut, blow his nose into his napkin, give out a loud and succulent belch to which he felt fully entitled as the sole and dominant male, feeder of all these female mouths, and he would launch into some variation of “Takkeh? You should excuse me if I have to comment with a greps—but is that so? Not getting married? You think maybe you’re too good for anyone, Miss Hassenfeffer? So, tell me something if you don’t mind, what else will you do with yourself if you don’t get married? Bang your head against the wall? Spit wooden nickels? Dance a kazatzka? Nu, so I’m waiting to hear—explain me already.”
The matter, however, grew far more urgent after Tema finished high school and still refused to budge from her position as, one by one, like ducks in a shooting gallery, each of her classmates either became engaged or was married and some could even be spotted already pushing a baby carriage down the street. Tema alone was taking no steps to begin real life. The time had come for her father to pay attention. A girl could not forever remain in such a holding pattern; before you knew it a new crop, younger and fresher, would be moved to the front of the shelves, and she would have to be sold off at a bargain price past the expiration date, cut-rate goods, remainders, as is. Meanwhile, though, for his sins, under no circumstances would this prima donna daughter of his consent to fill this gap in her life in a respectable way by teaching at Beis Ziburis, for example, for which she was remarkably qualified though she herself claimed she did not know enough.
Reluctantly, therefore, Reb Berish gave Tema permission to attend night courses at Brooklyn College just so she would have something to do with her time during this limbo; she could after all make some practical use of this dead space by working toward a degree in elementary school education, for example, which, God willing, he hoped and prayed she would never have to complete, though it was a very good backup career for a woman if it came to that since it fit so compactly into the schedule of a wife and mother. During the day, Tema continued with her own private curriculum of Jewish studies behind the locked door of her room at home, and for a brief period she came into his office part-time several days a week at her father’s insistence, to contribute to her “room and board,” as he put it, helping out with the phones, especially with handling complaints, until the day the other ladies, the secretaries and the bookkeepers, listened wide-eyed as the boss’s daughter explained to a caller that No, that wasn’t rat feces in the box of chocolates, it was the candy itself, and even if it was rat feces, the Berel Bavli hashgakha seal meant that it was one-hundred-and-ten-percent kosher, you can count on it, ess gezunt aheit, eat in good health.
Privately, Reb Berel Bavli put out the word to all the yentas on the circuit that he was now in the market for a suitable shiddukh for his daughter, Tema, and naturally he got in touch with every one of the recommended matchmakers operating in the territory. The professional assessment was that Tema Bavli was an exceptionally beautiful and brilliant girl. Both of those attributes were on the minus side. Also on the minus side was the fact that her mother had died young of circumstances that were not exactly clear, from a physical or a mental problem, either of which was not good news, either of which could, God forbid, be inherited by the children, may they multiply. In addition, certain rumors did not exactly improve her prospects, including reports by witnesses that she had often been seen coming and going from the public library, which suggested that she polluted her mind with English books and other garbage. Finally, the matter of her having been found one morning in an empty grave in a cemetery reportedly after having experienced some kind of mystical vision that many suspected could more accurately have been described as a nervous breakdown of some sort was common knowledge in certain circles, and though this event had occurred several years earlier when she was considerably younger and more impressionable and understandably still overcome by the loss of her mother, unfortunately it did not help in the delicate situation of pinning down a girl’s destined mate.
On the plus side, however—and this, by universal agreement of the professional matchmakers, was a tremendous plus—the prospective bride’s father, the distinguished Reb Berel Bavli, was an extremely wealthy man. In comparison to this, every other plus paled and was not worth mentioning, even and including the plus of Reb Berish’s well-documented record as a benefactor of many worthy causes and his numerous notable charitable acts such as his weekly custom of putting each of his little girls on the meat scale every Friday morning and then distributing their weight in top rib or chuck roast stamped with the Berel Bavli kosher seal of approval to the poor for the Sabbath stew. The consensus, then, of these experts who dealt day in and day out with delivering perfect matches from heaven was that, with regard to Tema Bavli and her special situation, they should narrow the search to a young man acclaimed to be brilliant and diligent, a beacon in holy studies, a talmid hokhom of the top caliber, but also dirt-poor. Once the couple was married, may it be in a good hour, the boy would sit and learn all day, while the wife would have babies, and her father, Reb Berel Bavli, would support them for as long as necessary, maybe forever.
With this plan in mind, they plunged into the search. One suitable candidate after another was put forward, all of whom, without exception, Tema refused to even consider. She stuck her fingers into her ears and made clacking noises with her tongue to drown out a recitation of their glowing qualities. She ran to her room, slammed the door, and locked it from within.
In desperation, Reb Berel Bavli made a decision to bring his daughter to his spiritual guide, the Oscwiecim Rebbe, to talk some sense into her. There was no question of refusing to go to this consultation. Reb Berish made it crystal clear that should that be the course Tema chose, he would wash his hands of her for good; she could go sleep in the streets for all he cared and eat from the garbage pails and squat down to pish and cock behind a bush.
The Oscwiecim Rebbe was already in place in his designated chair at the head of his dining room table in which only he was permitted to sit and which stood empty as if occupied by his ghost when he was not there to fill it. Behind him in the shadows stood his son, Kaddish, his chief shammes and right-hand man. Reb Berish, his major donor, took a seat to the rebbe’s right, with Tema standing before them to their left like a defendant in the dock, and the rebbetzin, with her everyday oxbloodshoepolish-colored wig slightly askew on her head and in her flowered housecoat with the sleeves pushed up to her elbows, listening in through the open kitchen door as she continued rolling and shaping more than two hundred matzah balls for the forthcoming Sabbath’s chicken soup.
Stroking philosophically his long white beard yellowed around the mouth by tobacco and tea, the rebbe mumbled a few perfunctory questions in Yiddish to Tema since he was already familiar with the main points of the case through her father and chose to avoid being troubled by her side of the story. After a brief consultation with his wife, who now stood beside him mopping the sweat from her forehead with a dishrag, the rebbe announced his diagnosis that Tema was possessed by a dybbuk, the naked soul of a dead sinner condemned to wander the earth in restless torment, possibly even the girl’s own mother, who had invaded the vessel of Tema’s body to take refuge there. It was this dybbuk that was speaking through Tema’s mouth insisting she would never get married, the rebbe explained, these were not the words and certainly not the thoughts or desires of a respectable and sensible girl like Tema Bavli herself from such an outstanding and reputable family.
It would be necessary to expel this dybbuk from the vessel of Tema’s body, and since they already had her there in the room, it made perfect sense to proceed with the exorcism at once. Tema briefly considered turning and running out of the house of the Oscwiecim Rebbe to make her escape, but where could she go? She was trapped as if in a dream in which she was both actor—or acted upon—and observer. It was a Thursday evening in early winter, darkness was descending. Ten men were rounded up, trudging in from the street in their galoshes with their shopping bags, to make up a minyan. The rebbetzin turned on a lamp, and for atmosphere she lit the candles in all of her Sabbath sterling silver candlesticks, which approximated, since one is forbidden to count, the number of her children and grandchildren, close to one hundred.
She directed Tema to remove her shoes and stockings, and pointed to the chair in which Tema must sit. Pinning Tema in place for the procedure with one arm encircling her neck in a kind of headlock and the two fingers of her other hand pressing down firmly on Tema’s pulse where the demon resided, the rebbetzin whispered urgently into Tema’s ear, “Push! Push! Push that dybbuk out, daughter!”
At the same time, the rebbe, her husband, was stationed at Tema’s bare feet, which were resting on a stool. At his wife’s behest, he was holding out a bowl to catch the exiting demon while intoning Psalm ninety-one over and over again, forward and backward, for what seemed like an eternity—You who sit in the high mystery, You who rest in the shade of Shaddai—his eyes glued to Tema’s big toe as it was sinful for his gaze to stray any higher up for the sign of the blood that must trickle down to mark the exit of the dybbuk.
“Shmiel,” the rebbe’s wife called to him from her end, “do you see anything yet?”—but the rebbe only shook his head despondently. The rebbetzin brought her mouth close to Tema’s ear and hissed, “So nu, what about getting married already? We don’t have all day. I have fifteen kugels to make for Shabbes!”—but Tema raised her hand, the one that was not being pressed down by the rebbetzin at the pulse, and motioned with her index finger from side to side—No.
They were dealing with an exceptionally stubborn dybbuk who was not cooperating at all, the rebbetzin indicated to her husband. A more extreme measure was now called for to finish this business. Dutifully, the rebbe gave the nod to Kaddish, who joined forces with his mother at Tema’s head with a shofar clutched in his fist, which he raised to his mouth and blasted directly into Tema’s ear, into the very same ear that she had plugged with a finger when the names and attributes of eligible young geniuses scouting for a rich bride were presented for her consideration. The rebbe’s son Kaddish now filled that ear with a ringing so intense that Tema thought she was hearing voices, and all of the voices were chanting in chorus, No, No, No.
Over the course of that winter, Reb Berel Bavli dragged his daughter Tema from rebbe to rebbe to straighten her out even as he recognized that his search for a cure would inevitably leak out into the community and lower the value of the goods in the marketplace.
The Chernobyler Rebbe listened to the whole story as transmitted by Reb Berish, then brought his face as close to Tema’s as was decent within the constraints of modesty and, expelling sour whiffs of constipation, he enunciated very deliberately as if to a person who is deaf or mentally deficient or an alien, “Listen to me, young lady—act normal! Even if you are not normal, you must act normal. Remember my words—Act Normal!”
The Kalashnikover Rebbe’s face puffed up in a fury, turning blazing scarlet and blaring, “What this little nudnik needs is a few good potches in tukhes to knock some sense into her head!” as he came charging toward Tema wielding his cane, only to be deflected in time by the massive slaughterer’s forearm of Reb Berish who said, very deferentially but firmly, “Excuse me, rebbe, but I am the father.”
The Brooklyner Rebbe recommended a psychiatrist on Central Park West who, though secular himself, had been thoroughly vetted by the religious leaders so that there was absolutely no danger whatsoever that he would inject heretical or forbidden ideas into the vulnerable heads of his ultra-Orthodox patients such as lascivious thoughts about their own mothers or murderous feelings toward their fathers, or attempt in any immoral way to brainwash them by opening sinful valves of temptation for relief. In fact, with his exclusively haredi practice, talking was kept to an absolute minimum in his treatment room; his specialty was dispensing and renewing prescriptions for drugs and medications at a good clip. Tema sat in his crowded waiting room filled mostly with men and a few depressed older women clumped together, all of whom, from the tiniest variations in their Hasidic uniforms, could be zoomed-in on the map to their exact neighborhood and even in certain cases their block in the five boroughs of New York City and the counties beyond, but she left before her appointment when a young Hasid rushed in with his earlocks and fringes flying, feverishly agitated and shaken, and went around the waiting room, from person to person, demanding that each one in turn tell him if it was really true that he looked so crazy since as soon as he had walked into this fancy building just a few minutes ago, the doorman had pointed him to this office—the office for the nutcases.
Through the long brooding nights of that winter, after Tema returned home from Brooklyn College where she took courses in Western philosophy and Eastern religion, and ravenously devoured in the library anything she could lay her hands on—every footnote was precious—about the punished life of the charismatic and uncompromising Puritan dissident Bible teacher Anne Hutchinson, confident that all this extracurricular study was only a minor deviation from her contract with her father that he had neither the time nor the interest to scrutinize, after reading into the early morning hours Tema would switch off the light and lie on her back in the dark in her girlhood bed with her eyes open wide listening to the night noises of the house. Terrors were lurking everywhere, she could sense them closing in upon her as they had when she was a child. The steam hissed in the radiators, monster shapes were pitched onto the ceiling of her room from the headlight beams of passing cars, toilets flushed, appliances cycled on and off, she could hear Frumie’s heavy, eternally pregnant tread making its way through the hallway down the stairs to the kitchen, the sucking sound of the refrigerator door opening, the scraping of the chair being pushed back as Frumie sat down at the table with a deep sigh to eat in peace whatever food in whatever combinations and quantities her heart desired. She could hear the little girls whimpering in their beds, or crying out from some Black Forest nightmare, she could hear her father lumbering down the hall into and out of their rooms to attend to them.
One afternoon, while her half sisters were napping or away at their nursery programs or kindergartens, as Tema was preparing to set out to college she passed the partly open door of her parents’ bedroom. Frumie was sitting at the very edge of the bed staring numbly ahead, completely dressed as if to go out, in her black coat with the white mink collar and cuffs and her matching white fur hat and her boots and her gloves and her black patent leather pocketbook in her lap, and what seemed to be a fully packed suitcase on the floor beside her. Her eyes registered Tema leaning in the doorway. Tears were coiling down her blotched, ravaged cheeks. “I was going to leave for good,” Frumie said, “but look at me”—and her hand brushed against the globe of her pregnant belly. “And who will take care of the girls? And how would I live without a penny to my name? And where would I go anyway?”
Later that evening, sitting in the lounge after philosophy class with Elisha Pardes, having the coffee that had become an illicit pleasure, drinking in public a strange brew from a strange cup with a strange man, their foreheads drawing closer like magnets in the intensity of their talk, Tema told herself it would not be a betrayal of Frumie to describe their encounter that day, which had imprinted itself on her mind like a bruise. Elisha was a married yeshiva boy of medium height, slight in build, pale transparent skin as if he were not quite of this earth or in a perpetual state of recovery from a grave illness, dark eyes with long heavy lashes. When they were together strangers often asked them if they were brother and sister, more because of their shared aura of being set apart in the same place rather than their physical resemblance—to which Elisha would always answer, “All Israel are brothers—even the sisters are brothers.” He supported his growing brood of daughters by devoting his days to rigorous holy studies for which he received a stipend from the prestigious Ivy League Academy of Advanced Higher Jewish Learning Kollel, but, like Tema, he had also been granted special permission to take some secular courses in the evenings, because his rebbes believed that a measure of flexibility might save this brilliant, restless mind from tipping over to the side of apostasy and rejection, this rare soul from being snatched away by the mystics and ecstatics.
When she finished relating to Elisha how she had found Frumie sitting on the edge of the bed in desolation with the packed suitcase beside her, for a reason she could not fathom and never anticipated, Tema went on to dredge up an account of all of the rebbes her father had hauled her to against her will over the past few months to force her into marriage as if she were chattel in some kind of medieval bondage, and all the suffering and humiliation that had been inflicted upon her. Elisha listened pensively, and when she was done, for a long time continued to remain silent, tugging at his wiry black beard. Finally he said, “You should go see the Toiter Rav. The Toiter will have the answer. I will let him know.”
The elevator up to the Toiter Rabbi’s penthouse on Fifth Avenue was operated by a uniformed attendant and actually opened up in the apartment itself rather than in a common hallway, an astonishing revelation that Tema had not expected and had never experienced before, as she had also never before inhaled the smell of marijuana, or even heard the word. The young acolyte waiting to greet her as she stepped out of the burled-wood casket of the elevator, luminous in his white robes rent at the collar and his crocheted skullcap pulled low over his hair so that only the two ringlets of his earlocks dangling down were visible, explained that the cloud of smoke that filled the room by day and the cloud of fire by night was a celestial drug, a healing essence that eased the eternal agony of the rebbe, since every Toiter Rav was always in excruciating pain, terminally ill and dying. That was the Toiter’s condition, it was his state of being. Moreover, there could never be a son to succeed him, and were a son to be conceived or actually born to him, the boy would die in the womb or before the age of two at the latest, as had been the fates of Yaakov and Shlomo-Efraim, the two sons of the original Toiter, Rav Nakhman of Bratslav. Because he had no sons, he was considered dead, like a leper or a blind man, and so he was known as the Toiter, the Dead One—his followers, the Dead Hasidim. The present Toiter now at death’s door was the eleventh in the line and the next one was already waiting in the wings to take his place, he too already mortally sick and dying, and so it will be from one zaddik of his generation to the next until the true messiah arrives may it be quickly in our time.
Tema was led through a labyrinth of sumptuously furnished and carpeted rooms with cloths draped over the mirrors in their gilt frames. In every room she passed, and in distant rooms beyond them, she could see unshaven men clothed in white garments ripped at the lapels milling around in stocking feet as if floating, or sitting on low stools with their head in their hands like mourners, in woeful or meditative poses, or swaying in prayer in small clots, and she thought, too, that she had glimpsed Elisha Pardes standing alone and apart with his thin arms raised as if in agonized petition, the mouth on his pale face open as in a scream but no sound coming out—and soon she lost all sense of where she was in the world and how she might ever find her way out again.
At last she was led into a small room with no other furniture but a plain pine wood box in the middle of the floor. Her escort who had accompanied her up to this point now backed out of the room as from the presence of a king and closed the door. A thin swirl of smoke curled up into the air from the open box in the center of the room, and the smell that was quickly becoming familiar to Tema suffused the space. Soon the joint itself from which the smoke was emanating levitated before her eyes, and the withered hand that was holding it emerged and beckoned to her to draw nearer.
Inside the box the Toiter Rav was lying supine wrapped in pure white linen shrouds; only the veil that would ultimately conceal his face and the mittens that would enclose his hands had not yet been placed on him by the saintly members of the holy burial society. The skin of his cadaverous face was drawn tautly back exposing his stained teeth and his black gums, outlining the contours of his skull so close to the surface, and even through the shrouds, the bulges and lumps of the tumors that riddled his body were everywhere discernible, but in the deep hollows of his eye sockets something still glittered like a jewel at the bottom of a well and his eyes continued to laugh.
With his free hand the Toiter began to stroke Tema’s cheek, murmuring in a voice that seemed to be coming from below, “Such a krasavitsa you are, what a beauty, skin like velvet”—and his hand descended to her breast where it rested gently, cupping without moving, and he said in a still, small voice, “Ah, my Shunamite, allow me—this may be my last time. I can feel your heart throbbing, throbbing. You don’t have to say a word—I feel everything, I know everything about you. There are only two ways out for you. My way is one way. It is not your way—not yet. You will find your way for now. You have not yet completed your task on this earth. Your task is great. You are my regent, a shadow Toiter. Remember, I am always with you—my rod and my staff. Your mother and your father may abandon you, but the Toiter will never leave you. The main thing is not to be afraid at all.”
As winter faded Tema began setting off to school earlier and earlier in the day, directing Frumie to explain to her father if he happened to notice that she needed to spend time in the college library to look up information in books that could only be found there and nowhere else in order to complete her homework. She would often walk the entire distance to school as the weather grew warmer, some four or five miles or so by her calculation, making her way slowly and meditatively, as if in a stately solo processional, stopping off regularly at the Israel kosher delicatessen on Coney Island Avenue near Avenue J for a glass of tea and a piece of apple strudel, which she would take lingeringly while reading one of her books. After a while, the young man in the white boat-shaped paper hat who worked behind the counter brought her the tea and cake as soon as she sat down. One day, as he was placing it in front of her on the Formica-topped table, he demanded to know in an accent that was distinctively New York but not Brooklyn, more Italian than Jewish, why she never ate any real food, like a tongue sandwich maybe, or maybe some chopped liver. She raised her eyes from the pages of her book and took him in for the first time—short, stocky, curly dark hair already thinning, intense eyes set a little too close together, a few days’ growth of beard, an unlit cigarette drooping from his mouth.
“My father’s a butcher, so I’m a vegetarian,” Tema answered, and she lowered her eyes back to her book.
From then on, if the restaurant wasn’t busy, or even if a few other customers were there, already slurping their mushroom barley soup or gnawing their pastrami on rye, as long as the boss was out, he would make himself comfortable in the chair opposite hers, straddling it backward, leaning over to plant his elbows on the tabletop between them and settling his chin in the sling of his joined hands. He would stare at her relentlessly with fierce concentration as she continued to ignore him and read, now and then disengaging slightly from her book to lift her glass to her lips for a sip of tea or pressing a finger down onto her plate to suction up a crumb of pastry and place it on her tongue like a lozenge.
Tema recognized that this open association with a young man however unsuitable he obviously was would not help her at all in the treacherous marriage minefield. She understood very well that her father would be livid when word reached him, as inevitably it would, that she had been seen talking to a strange boy in the public arena, and she also knew without question that she would earn no points whatsoever by virtue of the fact that she herself hardly uttered a single word—it was this obsessed guy who mainly was doing all the talking. Even so, she continued to stop off at the Israel delicatessen on her walk to school to test where this new danger was taking her and she never demanded that he get up from the seat he had staked out opposite her and leave her in peace, she never slapped his face or complained to the boss or called the cops, all of which he interpreted as warm encouragement.
His name was Howie Stern, she heard him say as she continued turning the pages of her book. His father worked at Ratner’s on Second Avenue, a waiter like Howie himself, though the old man was a card-carrying union member whereas for him, Howie, this gig at the Israel kosher deli was only temporary; the trunk of his pop’s Chevy was so stuffed with little black bowties that they erupted and overflowed like a steaming manhole whenever you opened it. His mother was a custom girdle and brassiere fitter in Ozone Park, Queens, mostly an Italian neighborhood, for her information, distinguished by Mafia types among whom there were some who had even made stabs at recruiting him for stuff she wouldn’t want to know about, which explained why he hopped boroughs to work at this menial and anonymous job in Brooklyn.
He was a Zionist and an artist, in that order; those were the two main facts you needed to know about him, he told her, the rest was commentary. He had dropped out of yeshiva to earn money to fulfill his consuming dream of making aliya to Israel, yes, ascent, ascent to the heights of the Holy Land, ever upward, the sooner the better, where he planned to immediately enlist in the army—to put on a uniform and fight to defend the Jewish homeland. “If you will it, it is no dream,” Howie declared, quoting Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, but, meanwhile, the closest he could come to the fulfillment of that dream was the Israel restaurant on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn—and he swept his hand morosely before him in the direction of the trays of kishke and knishes, the tubs of potato salad and cole slaw. Once he made aliya, though, between wars and annual reserve duty, which he would fulfill with overflowing joy in his heart, his ambition was to learn the craft of a sofer—to enable him, as a scribe of the parchments folded inside mezuzot and tefillin boxes, to earn a living by channeling the main element of his art, Hebrew calligraphy, in the name of heaven. Eventually, God willing, he hoped to master the trade to such a high level that he could write entire scrolls including the Megillah of Esther and the holy Torah itself.
One day he presented to Tema a sheet of paper rolled up like a diploma, which he opened before her after giving the table a quick cleansing swipe with a foul-smelling rag. At first glance the image he displayed in front of her eyes seemed to be that of a naked woman with fantasy-defined breasts and hips such as might appear on a calendar in a men’s locker room or in any dirty magazine, but, when you examined it more closely, you saw that it was a mosaic made up of thousands of minute parts that Tema of course recognized at once as Hebrew letters. “Micrography,” Howie Stern declared proudly. “Recognize yourself? It’s a picture of you. That lady is you—made up of the whole Song of Songs, the whole thing, every single letter and word, all eight chapters and one hundred and seventeen verses.”
Later that evening, in the lounge after philosophy class, she cleared away the coffee cups and cookie crumbs and unrolled Howie’s offering in front of Elisha Pardes, who stared at it for a long time in silence twisting as usual the coils of his beard. “To paraphrase what Shekhem son of Hamor told Jacob’s sons after he had raped their sister Dina,” Elisha spoke at last, “Ask anything you want of me, including my precious foreskin and the foreskin of every single guy in my town, and I’ll give it to you—as long as I get the girl.”
What she should ask of Howie Stern soon emerged with pure clarity from the hints embedded in Elisha’s words. Because she had accepted his first gift, Howie was emboldened not long after to present her with another, this time with trembling hands—a small, flat object folded into wax paper such as might be used to wrap a corned beef sandwich with a pickle.
“I’m giving you the most precious thing I own,” Howie said as he slid the package in front of her. Tema made no move to claim it, so Howie himself peeled back the wax paper to reveal a crisp new United States passport, opening it lovingly and flattening it out on the table to show off a mug shot of his street-battered face, and then flipping through the entire booklet to reveal one blank page after another.
“I’m trusting you with my life. I’m giving it to you to hold on to until I get the money together to make aliya to Israel. It’s very valuable—you know what I’m saying?—and I live in a lousy neighborhood, so the main thing I’m asking is you should keep it in a safe place for me—okay?”
Tema sat frozen in her seat staring at this object that was like lifeblood for him. She reached out to draw it closer. She picked it up with two fingers as if it were a spider, slipped it down the front of her sweater and tucked it into her bra, from where it instantly gave off a small puff of aroma like an atomizer, smoked meats and brine.
Not long afterward, Tema asked for what she wanted, putting her proposal before Howie, laying out the terms on the table without embellishment. It was quite possible, she told him by way of incentive, for him to get to Israel much sooner than he had ever imagined, to live there in far greater comfort than he had ever dreamed of for as long as he liked, even to enjoy what amounted to a grant to cover in full his training as a scribe, provided he agreed to two things.
The first thing he would have to agree to was to marry her. Her father, an extremely wealthy man as it happened, would support them in style for as long as was necessary, even forever if that’s what it took. Her father already considered her damaged goods anyway, so he was in no position to reject her marriage even to the poor schlemiel deli worker she had been seen talking to at the Israel restaurant like some kind of slutty pritzeh. Thanks to Howie, Tema informed him, her reputation was now completely mud, ruined beyond repair. Howie could trust her on this—her father would come through with the money after arriving at the dead-end conclusion that Howie was the best she could do under the circumstances. There was absolutely no doubt in Tema’s mind that her father would stamp his Berel Bavli kosher seal of approval smack on the flank of their marriage and proceed to do the right thing by her for all to see.
The second thing Howie would have to agree to, Tema went on, was that, even though they would be married in the eyes of the world and the law and of Moses and Israel, it would be a marriage in name only. Privately, between the two of them, where it counted the most, they would live like brother and sister. What Howie needed to keep in mind above all else, Tema stressed, was this: she would only be like a sister to him, nothing more. If he ever dared to try any funny business with her, to make moves on her in the slightest degree in private in a way that crossed the line from brotherliness, for example, she would walk out on him immediately if not sooner, no ifs, ands, or buts. Her father would rally to her side and cut him off completely while continuing to support her generously since she would not hesitate to accuse him of all manner of atrocities. And even if he threatened to exercise his masculine prerogative under religious law by refusing to give her a get, she wouldn’t care; it made no difference to her one way or the other if he gave her a divorce or not—she had no intention of remarrying anyway, she had never wanted to get married in the first place, all she wanted was to get out of her father’s house; marrying him was an act of necessity and survival on her part, even, you might say, of desperation. To put it simply so that Howie could grasp the big picture, Tema elaborated, what they would have between them would resemble a marriage between an alien who needs a green card and an American citizen; for the alien such a marriage was the only way in, and for Tema such a marriage was the only way out. So that’s the deal, he was never to touch her, never, Tema summed up for Howie—take it or leave it, and she folded her arms in front of her chest, staring at him grimly.
“But what about my health?” Howie said finally, practically whining, passing a hand forlornly across his crotch to make his point. “How about my needs?”
Tema barked out a sharp laugh that caused almost everyone in that restaurant to stop chewing and turn around to stare.
“What are you laughing for?” Howie asked sullenly.
“Don’t worry,” Tema said, “I’ll find an outlet for you. Scout’s honor.” And she drew his passport out from inside her sweater, placed her left hand flat upon it, and raised her right hand as if taking a solemn oath.
They were married at the end of August at the Roosevelt Hotel on East Forty-fifth Street in Manhattan. Tema’s father, Reb Berel Bavli, pronounced “Roosevelt” to sound like “rooster,” and in honor of the occasion he personally with his own hands slaughtered hundreds of hens and cut the throats of a herd of cows for the impressively lavish smorgasbord and the elaborate wedding feast that people could not stop talking about for many months afterward. The morning after the wedding an article about it appeared in New York Times—not an announcement in the society section but on the front page itself, as Reb Berel Bavli had privately arranged with the New York City police commissioner to close off the entire block in front of the hotel between Madison and Park Avenues so that the ceremony could be held outside in the street under the sky as the dusk settled into darkness. At the bottom of page one of the Times there was a photograph shot from the roof of the Roosevelt Hotel showing a sea made up of the tops of thousands of black hats, and in the corner, if you looked very closely, a lonely white dot, the crown of the head of the bride, Miss Tema Bavli, later to be known as HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, Ima Temima, her face so heavily veiled with a white satin cloth of such weight and thickness that she could not see her way at all and had to be guided by her stepmother the refugee, Mrs. Frumie Bavli, and her mother-in-law the corset fitter, Mrs. Mildred Stern, to her place under the marriage canopy like the condemned, blindfolded on the road to the gallows.
One week after the wedding Mr. and Mrs. Howard Stern boarded the Zim Lines SS Zion in New York harbor. Howie’s eyes misted with emotion as he gazed up at the blue-and-white flag with the Star of David of the Jewish State hoisted proudly on top of the ship, waving in the breeze like the flag of any other normal and legitimate country in the community of nations with a fleet of its own. The newlyweds, traveling with thirty stiff new leather suitcases, one of them stuffed exclusively with toilet paper at Tema’s insistence since she had heard that the still-very-young state had not yet evolved to a civilized level in that department, were installed in a first class cabin. Waving from the deck to family and friends, including Elisha Pardes who was standing alone in the distance with arms raised, palms uplifted, and the mouth on his wan face in the shape of a silent scream, and whom she acknowledged with a discreet nod, Tema left her homeland and her birthplace and the house of her father and set sail for Israel, never to return.