The total span of Reb Berel Bavli’s life was one hundred and four years. He let out his last breath and he died, at a good ripe age, old and contented, and was gathered back to his kin, including his daughter Temima who in the eyes of her family had already officially been delivered up to the angel of death and duly mourned. For this reason many months elapsed before she learned of her father’s passing. The news reached her during the period when she returned to the rabbinic texts struggling to understand further the point of the life of Bruriah, that token woman sage, if ever such an aberrant creature even existed, the marvel whose clever ripostes occasionally bested even the sharpest minds it was noted to the astonishment of all, such a precocious little performing monkey.
The man said to be Bruriah’s father, Rabbi Hananya ben Teradyon, unlike Reb Berel Bavli, suffered a monstrous death, one of the ten sages executed by the Roman occupiers of Judea, burned at the stake wrapped in the scroll of the Torah with water-soaked wool packed against his flesh to prolong his agony, his final vision as the parchment was being consumed by the flames of the letters themselves bursting free and taking flight soaring upward black cinders to the heavens. If the sins of the daughters have any consequence at all, the punishment was also visited upon the father, for the brilliance of this woman, judging by the testimonials, too often expressed itself in the form of ironic, aggressive, show-off coquettishness, which her father might even have encouraged for his personal entertainment due to the sheer cuteness of this brazen talking anomaly, such as when she scolded Rabbi Yossi the Galilean for using too many words to ask her the directions to Lod, “Galilean fool, Did not our sages say, Do not talk over much to a woman?” But there was no one who was punished more mercilessly than this smart girl herself, she was just too smart for her own good, every human connection unraveled in disaster. Not only the auto-da-fé of her father, but her mother killed by the Romans, her sister (or was this Bruriah herself?) sold to a brothel in Antioch or Rome, her two sons struck dead suddenly one Sabbath day, her husband the Mishna luminary Rabbi Meir pimping her for the sake of prevailing, dominating, teaching her a lesson about the essentially light-headed nature of the female mind, climaxed by her own suicide. She even had a brother, it is reported, whom she also outshone in learning, whose life also spun out miserably. He went sour, it is said, turned into a gangster, an outlaw and an outcast, his mutilated body dumped at the side of the road. At his funeral, Bruriah displayed her freakish brilliance, her over-the-top erudition once again by summing him up and disposing of him with a citation of the perfect verse from the book of Proverbs: Sweet may be the bread that a man gains through falsehood, but afterward his mouth will be filled with gravel.
Temima learned she had a brother at the same time she found out about her father’s death. Cozbi opened the door to the study heralded by the rhythmic popping of her stilettos to inform her mistress that a fat boy was sitting on the balcony claiming to be her brother, Getzel—but everyone, or so Cozbi reported based on information this stranger apparently had volunteered, called him Glatt. He was just sitting there picking his nose waiting to see her, one of the fringe clusters of his zizit caught in his fly. He had brought something from Brooklyn to give to her, Cozbi passed on the message.
Temima shook her head. All Israel are brothers, she commented, but are the sisters also brothers? She had sisters, she was aware of that, half sisters, Frumie’s five daughters, but to the best of her knowledge her father’s wish for a son of his own had, for his sins, never been granted. She lowered her head to the volume of the Babylonian Talmud spread open before her, an indication that she would not grant an audience to this petitioner, though she registered within that had she truly had a brother, the son of her father but not her mother, he might indeed have been called Getzel, since that was the name of Reb Berel Bavli’s own father.
A few minutes later Cozbi clattered into the room again, this time carrying a bag. She set it down on the table, careful to avoid contact with the holy texts. No doubt she had already inspected its contents for any suspicious objects. It was an amazingly used and reused shopping bag wrinkled like the skin of a reptile, smudged with dirt and grease stains, but nevertheless Temima recognized it instantly—the Berel Bavli logo, the two Bs like the two tablets of the Ten Commandments bisected, cross-sectioned, flipped on their sides with their humps facing in opposite directions but sharing a common dividing line, and the familiar slogan, STRICTLY KOSHER! STRICTLY GLATT! STRICTEST SUPERVISION! When she checked inside the bag she saw the remains of the refueling this brother pretender required for the trek to her quarters, the last bite of a sour pickle, several crumpled napkins and wax paper wrappings from street food such as falafel and pizza, emptied greasy bags of Bamba and Bisli, some flattened Fanta and Maccabi Beer cans—at least this boy did not litter in the Holy Land—and she also saw the book, her mother’s copy of Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy in the Modern Library edition translated by Constance Garnett, aged, soiled, moldy, bloated, water-damaged, the cover ripped off, the spine broken, smelling of brine and blotched with oil and fat. Temima drew her veil down over her face.
“Is our father still living?” were the first words out of her mouth to this brother after she regained control over her emotions, the sight of her mother’s worn book like a familiar spirit emerging from underground had threatened her composure, brought her to the verge of raising her voice and crying in sobs so loud they would have been heard in the streets of Egypt.
“What—you didn’t know? Almost a year ago already he was niftar. By now already, God willing, his soul got called up to the Torah in Gan Eden, or maybe at least they gave him hagbah—like maybe they let him pick up that Torah in the next world and open it up really really wide and twirl it around to show off his muscles like some kind of freakin’ bodybuilder strongman, his supersized knaidlakh, they were awesome. He really dug hagbah, it was his friggin’ favorite thing in shul. Even when he was already a really old guy he was still strong like an ox, a tank, he could still rip the Manhattan Yellow Pages in two with one single rip. Me? Yours truly? I still can’t even do Staten Island.”
He elaborated on her father’s death genially, an extended footnote, as if by virtue of it being already old news it had lost its sting, the moment of the telling itself, who tells it, how it is told and to whom, could be of no consequence, it could have no special meaning for her the daughter even upon first impact, the shock of this death had already been absorbed by the universe and the earth continued on its course, the sun still rose and set. She watched as he seated himself opposite her without awaiting an invitation, a nicety he most likely had never been taught, and jiggled in place to adjust his apparatus for comfort.
A long silence followed as Temima took in this brother through her veil—a young man, twenty at most, in the uniform of a yeshiva boy, black pants, white button-down shirt without a tie, ritual fringes hanging out from underneath on one side as he worked on liberating another cluster from the teeth of his zipper without a pause in the stream of his jabber, a black velvet yarmulke perched like a cupola on top of the fuzz of his close-cut hair the color of a melting orange popsicle. There was no doubt he was her father’s son, the resemblance was comical, manifesting itself almost point for point in the form of caricature. Where Reb Berel Bavli was a gigantic presence, with huge hands and feet, a thick beard oxygenated red in color when he was a young man, shrewd eyes heavily lidded as if to provide screening when closing a deal and a ruddy complexion rough textured like granite, his son Getzel Glatt Bavli was soft and flabby, a blubbery heap, large pudgy hands with savagely bitten fingernails, baby-fine sidelocks tucked behind each ear and sparse coiled sprouts of new beard pale persimmon in color, the small eyes receding as if to take cover from a punch coming his way, his complexion rouged with flush like a chronic case of low-grade embarrassment, the skin powdery white, baby smooth. He was like a chicken stunted in a factory into all breast destined to be pounded into millions of schnitzels, he was a capon, whereas his father was red meat, roast beef, top cut, prime. No wonder the boy was called Glatt, not only because it alliterated so naturally from Getzel, so intuitively, and not only because the father he reincarnated in the form of parody was king of the kosher meat business, but also for the creamy glatt smoothness of his flesh, like the kosher standard for the insides of the lungs of a slaughtered animal, with no adhesions or perforations.
“Blessed is the True Judge,” Temima said at last, pronouncing the traditional phrase of acceptance upon learning of a death. She forgave him in his youth and self-absorption for his failure to appreciate the momentousness of such a message when it is brought to any human being, for dropping it upon her so casually, as if it could not in the scheme of things matter that much or have retained any shattering significance even for the ghost of a daughter. The legendary Bruriah, with respect to her own father, Rabbi Hananya ben Teradyon, is reported to have asked how such a man could truly have deserved such a death. I could also ask the same question about my father, Temima reflected as she gazed at this brother. She rent her garment over her heart as was required, in a sign of mourning for a close relative, the cloth giving out a keening screech.
Getzel Glatt now confided that he had always had it in his head to bring her that book. It had always been on his to-do list when he was finished with high school and got to go to Israel to learn for a year or two in some yeshiva or other until his mother found for him a nice frum girl to marry. He had always wanted to meet her, his notorious half sister Tema, star of the religious underworld, the temptation was irresistible davka because no one was allowed to even mention her name in the house, she was one-hundred-percent treyf, she was considered like dead meat. But just le’hakhis, just to get everyone pissed off because she was so assur, totally off-limits, which in his opinion completely sucked, he made up his mind to actually meet her. Anyways, one of Frumie’s girls, the one who sells all those Armani suits and Borsalino hats in her Boro Park basement at a tremendous discount, she explained to him about the book since it was always laying around the house somewheres or other, and that it used to belong to Tema’s mother and that she always had her nose stuck in it. So he figured he’d schlepp it along with him to Israel even though it’s a pretty fat book you know, and even though he would have to hide it somewheres in his dormitory room under his stuff because he heard it’s all about this married lady who fools around with another guy and then jumps on the third rail in the subway—right? A dirty book, schmutz, and really long, a million pages—how many times does this writer guy have to say the same thing over and over again? Okay already, buster, we get the point. But he decided he’d take it anyways so that he could use it like a ticket to get in to see her, since she was such a bigshot VIP by now, he heard all kinds of wild and crazy stuff about her, this and that, like she was some kind of lady guru or something, really cool. And barukh HaShem, his plan worked—right? See, here he was right this minute, sitting by this room, he couldn’t believe it, everyone’s banging their head on the door trying to get in but he actually made it through to the Koidesh Kedoishim, even with the bodyguards and the secret service dudes and the hot killer babe in the high heels, here he was in the Holy of Holies and he wasn’t even hit by lightning yet. His mother would kill him if she ever found out where he was, she would hock him to death, wring his neck like a chicken, yeah, no problem, she would start hollering that he was spoiling his shiddukh chances hanging with someone like her, no good girl would ever consider him for a husband if anyone found out, even with all the money they had, his reputation would be in the garbage pail.
Glatt tipped up a haunch, drew a wallet from the back pocket of his pants, slipped out a picture, and flicked it across the table to Temima. “That’s my holy mother, the only wife in the history of mankind to survive our old man. She’s running the whole business now singlehanded, the whole shmear, wholesale, retail, on the books, off the books.” Temima’s eyes came to rest on the image of a thickset woman significantly younger than herself with a broad glistening face outlined by a tightly wrapped kerchief, her hands firmly clamped on her hips as if to forewarn you against trying any funny business, a long white butcher’s apron smeared with blood. Had she been waving a certified ritual knife big enough to cut an animal’s throat with a single swipe, Temima’s heart would have embraced her. The time had come for women to step out from behind the counter and the scales and the cash register and the ledgers, and into the slaughterhouse.
So that’s the whole story, Glatt continued, upturning the plump palms of his hands. Meanwhile, he was just hanging out in Israel until his mother fingers the right maidel, his bashert’e. She was checking everything out about the girl, she got this list a mile long with these little boxes and she puts checks in the boxes, she’s like his one-stop shopping for a kallah, there’s nothing for him to do right now but just sit back and relax and wait for the bride to be delivered to him on a silver platter like a stuffed Cornish hen at a catering affair. Bottom line, he trusted his mother one hundred percent, she wouldn’t miss one single thing about the girl, don’t worry, no different than how she checks out a goose in the market, or a side of veal, inside and out, with her eagle eyes, she doesn’t miss a thing, starting from what score the maidel got on the Apgar test when she was first born in the hospital—even from before she was born, from if her mother went to the mikva every month when the girl was, you know, conceived, if her mother kept all the laws so that when her father and mother did their business the girl was created in an atmosphere of family purity, blahblahblah, ve’hulai ve’hulai. Do they have a television set in the house? How long are her skirts? Does she wear flashy colors? Do her shoes make noise when she walks? Did she get good marks in school? Was she a troublemaker? Does she have a big mouth? Did anyone ever see her hanging out at the pizza store talking to a boy? You know the deal. A nice zniusdik’e girl, modest, long sleeves, quiet voice, a good shopper, eidel, balabatisch, sweet, sweet. Like his mother says, we’re shooting for good looking but not drop-dead gorgeous, common sense but not a genius—been there, done that, know what I mean? He shot Temima a complicitous grin.
Also, they wanted from a family with no sicknesses, no meshuggenehs, no wackos, no inherited crap, that goes without saying, all this his mother was checking out for him. From the business side, they were looking for comfortable but not loaded super rich because his mother wants the girl she should always be grateful for the upgrade, she should come from a family with a father who sits and learns Torah all day, we don’t want a father who goes out and works for a living, God forbid, it’s a very bad male model example for a young lady—right?—she’ll get very bad ideas what to expect from a husband, you know what I’m saying? Anyways, we have plenty of money, thank God, which is the other headache his mother has to deal with now, because Frumie’s girls were yelling and screaming bloody murder all day and night for an equal share in the business and the profits, it really stinks, they were driving his mother nuts. They even hired these lawyers and they got hold of some rabbis on their side, Modern Orthodox, you know, touch-me, feel-me. Come on, gimme a break man, it’s like a pogrom. Hey, maybe he shouldn’t be telling her all this, she was also a sister, he hoped he wasn’t giving her any ideas. But like his mother says, by Jews, girls don’t inherit, not one penny, period, end of story, whatever a girl gets is like a tip depending on the service, you know what I mean? For sure, his mother won’t budge one inch, so it’s like this huge fight between the chicks, like cats and dogs, like lady wrestlers in the mud, because kitzur, bottom line, takhlis, tukhes on the table, his mother has his interests at heart one hundred percent, he is number one in her book, it’s like, don’t mess with my kid or I’ll scratch your eyeballs out. So meanwhile, here he is sitting in Jerusalem just passing the time, learning a blat Gemara, a little Yoreh De’ah, maybe some mussar, you know the drill. Sometimes he went with his roommate Simkha to the mall to hang out a little, Internet café, whatever, sometimes they went on a trip to a festival, Hasidic rock, klezmer, Reb Shlomo, Jewish soul music, fooled around a little in the mosh pit, Simkha was teaching him a few chords on the guitar, on a good day there was maybe a demonstration so they can get a little exercise, throw around a few stones, turn over some dumpsters, whatever. So that was his life. He wasn’t complaining. His rebbe will tell him everything he needs to do when the time comes for him to pish or get off the pot, you get the point. Any question he has about what you have do by the girl when you get married, any qasha no matter what, worst comes to worser, he can go to his rebbe and ask, because like he said, the ikkur is she should get along with his mother, that’s the main thing.
Temima sat for a long time reflecting in silence, staring at this brother through her veil, this sluggish, soft variation on the male child her father had longed for so desperately, a sinister joke played by God that ultimate prankster on the strutting colossus who was her father, she riveted him with her gaze seeking to draw in the wounded essence of this son like an undertow in order to return him to himself restored as if after a close brush with death.
“Brother,” Temima said at last, “I understand now that you have come to ask me a question about yourself and the true longings of your heart and how our father would have reacted. I understand your suffering, I know your question. For the kindness of bringing to me my mother’s book, I will spare you the embarrassment of having to ask your question directly. The answer is, our father would have had no interest at all in what you feel, he would have had no tolerance or sympathy, he would not have cared, no more than he cared how a cow feels. Which bull the cow liked or did not like, or even if the cow loved another cow, the heart’s desire of the cow or the cow’s broken heart, all this were of no importance to our father, may he rest in peace, as long as the cow stood still and didn’t give him a hard time while he cut her throat. In this respect, our father was a traditional man of faith. We have in many ways a very great religion but also in many respects a very cruel one. What you feel in your heart, whom you love or desire, mother, father, girl, boy, all this is beside the point. The point is what you do and what you don’t do. The point is practice. But our father is now dead—and there is some consolation. You know how King Solomon goes on and on in the book of Proverbs with so much sensible advice—Listen my son to your father and mother, don’t be lazy, stay away from the seductions of ‘strange’ women, abominations one and all, though as everyone knows the king himself was the biggest transgressor of all in that department. Who can explain the pull of human desire, however ‘strange’? Yet when it is thwarted, it is sickness of heart. And when it is realized—even in the face of the loss of all your comforts, the disapproval and rejection of father and mother—it is sweet to the soul, Solomon tells us, it is the tree of life.”
Temima shoved the shopping bag containing the leftovers and rubbish across the table to the brother and had him escorted out of her private chambers. She gave orders that until further notice she was not to be disturbed for any reason, including the sudden appearance of a newly declared relative or news of a death in the family. The ensuing days were consecrated to a close rereading of this painfully intimate copy of Reb Lev’s novel, in search of her mother. What drew her mother so personally to Anna, such a lost and tragic figure finally? “She throws herself under a train in the end,” her mother once commented. “She says to herself, They’ll be sorry—but does anyone really care? She’s the one who’s crushed, she’s dead, they’re alive, they go on living, nobody cares.”
A woman’s cautionary tale for herself, for her girl child, a book with a moral, a lesson to teach—was that how her mother saw it? Temima read slowly, closely examining the text, turning the brittle pages cautiously, seeking a fingerprint, a clue to her mother. Anna Karenina, AK, AK47, a weapon that could kill you. Reading it again now after so many years she found herself too often exasperated with Anna, so spoiled and self-absorbed, another brilliant woman wasted. The spiritual struggles of Levin were far more engrossing to her on this reading, sections that as a girl she occasionally found onerous, interruptions in the romance, but would plow through dutifully nevertheless especially because she secretly was convinced that Levin, like his creator Reb Lev, were fellow Jews, their names alone betrayed them. So she could never quite accept the solace Levin found in Christianity, a faith that had always seemed to her to have ecstatically, pornographically, appropriated the blood that the God of the Jews had forbidden to humankind, reserving it for Himself.
Now Levin and Anna were minor characters, footnotes and gloss. She was hunting for the overwhelming presence of her mother brooding between the lines. Page after page, nothing yielded itself up, no signs of a dog-eared corner once folded down, no comment or exclamation point or question mark in a margin, no underlining, no phrase bracketed, no torn slip of paper tucked into a cleft of the spine, no lipstick mark, no coffee stain, no dried bodily fluid, no lingering scent. The stack of pages grew higher and higher on the left, on the right they diminished relentlessly, no treasure could be dredged up from these black depths.
Temima was ready to despair, she was approaching the end, the twentieth chapter of the seventh book, and that was when she noticed the faintest swelling, like water damage, alongside the passage where Anna’s brother, Stepan Arkadyevich Oblonsky, remarks, “But what possesses you to get mixed up with railways and Jews? Any way you look at it, it’s a stinking business.” Here was a glimpse into the disappointed soul of her mother, a slap in the face, a fatal blow. All of Anna’s passion and spirit, her operas and balls, a life intensely and daringly lived—this was a world into which Rosalie Bavli was not welcome, a party to which she would never be invited.
One day her mother revealed yet another personal disappointment. Temima must have been about five years old at the time, it was one of her clearest early memories, it occurred not too long after her mother returned home from one of her periodic disappearances of a few days that always seemed to the child Tema to drag on for an eternity; this one, as it happened, would be the last until her mother vanished irreversibly when Tema was eleven. During those absences, she would wander around the house clutching a blanket and crying, “I lost my mama, I lost my mama,” a detail she herself did not recall but rather one her father summoned up now and then even when she was a teenager and her mother long gone as an element of the selective mythology by which she was packaged within the family, inevitably appending the observation, “And even to this day my highfalutin daughter kvetches and schlepps around her old schmattehs.”
Her mother was lying on the couch in the living room as if recuperating from an illness that had drained her of her vital strength, one arm crooked over her eyes, the other encircling Tema nestled at her side, drawing her close. She was a small woman with high cheekbones and thick brows that met over the stately arc of her Mediterranean nose forming a kind of shade, like a visor, as if to protect from unwanted scrutiny her large dark eyes, always slightly moist, a faint mustache shadowing her wide mouth. Even lying down in her housecoat and kerchief her face was made up; a heavy pearl earring hung from one ear, the piercing stretched into a slit by the weight of the jewel while the lobe of her other ear had split entirely and healed in two cushiony, downy flaps that Tema liked to stroke. In a soft voice her mother said to her, “You’re big enough already, Tema, to understand that when I go away it is because a baby inside my body decided it is better not to be born. Even before I had you there were two others who also refused. But for you I cried so much and prayed so hard in shul, like Hannah the mother of Shmuel, that everyone must have thought I was drunk or crazy, and I said to God, ‘If you give me a child I will dedicate him to You.’”
From this revelation Tema understood and accepted as her fate that she was the child of a mother who had struck a deal, who had made a bargain with the Lord—a mother who had given her up and had sacrificed her to God for her entire life.
On a Sabbath not long after this, before the blessing over the wine, her father, Reb Berel Bavli sitting at the head of the table, sang as always the hymn from the book of Proverbs in praise of the Woman of Valor, so enterprising and hard-working, a ferocious warrior in the cause of husband and family. As usual, when he came to the verse, Charm is false, and beauty is vanity, a God-fearing woman, she will be praised, his voice swelled as he enunciated each word distinctly, looking hard and meaningfully at his wife who was universally regarded as an exotic beauty.
When he was finished with this obligation, as if on cue, Tema’s mother dismissed the serenade in her honor with her usual quip, “A good slave.” This exchange had become a regular feature of the family routine when only the three of them were at the Sabbath table, with no guests. But this time, her father’s eyes froze and his red beard seemed to flare out tongues of flame; Tema herself could never have known the provocation, she sensed it to be something like a vapor oozing out from under the closed door of their bedroom, related to her mother’s recent return from the hospital. “It also tells us about the Woman of Valor,” Reb Berel Bavli accentuated every syllable, “that her sons rise up and praise her. But this one”—he fixed his glare on the wife sitting to his left, the closest point to the kitchen—“this fancy-schmancy madam here manages to squeeze out for me only one measly girl and now she’s closed for business.” He flicked a but-I-love-you-anyway wink in Tema’s direction like a dart. “This is my reward for marrying a skinny-malink,” Reb Berel Bavli declared. “My next wife, she will be a baby factory—zaftig, zaftig—knocking off one product and one product only—sons, sons, and more sons!” He stretched out his arm and pinched his wife’s cheek—a gesture to be interpreted as conciliatory, shalom bayit, peace in the household above all else for which the woman usually takes the pinch and pays the price, he was only kidding, it was a joke, a joke.
Tema spoke up. “It also says about the Woman of Valor that her husband is renowned among the wise men of the city, and she’s cheerful all the time.”
“And not just a measly girl this skinny-malink for a wife gives to me,” Reb Berel Bavli pressed on, “but a girl who is too smart for her own good, with a brain too big for her head, a brain like a man, a freak of nature.”
Even so, when there were guests at their table, Tema’s father would allow himself the pleasure of lifting her under her arms and standing her up on her chair to sing and recite from memory all of the Sabbath tunes and hymns, in Hebrew and Aramaic, despite the questionable nature of such a performance by a girl. There were even occasions, after Reb Berel Bavli chanted the Kiddush over the wine extolling the creation by God of the universe culminating in the seventh day of rest, that he would require her to do so as well in front of the guests although this was a role usually reserved for the male members of the family, demanding that everyone remain respectfully standing as she performed flawlessly. It was as if he were stepping back like an impresario flaunting his discovery, like the opening act who had just warmed up the crowd for the star attraction. Despite his flamboyant lamentations about what a shame it was that such gifts should have been squandered on a female, it shone through—his pride in his little monstrosity. “Not normal, am I right?” There was in his pronouncement an element of taking precautions to avert the menace of the evil eye. “If it was a boy, everyone would be dancing in the streets—a little genius, an illui, the next Gaon from Vilna. But on a girl—such a waste!”
In the Oscwiecim shtiebel on Sabbaths, Reb Berel Bavli kept his daughter at his side during prayers in the men’s section, which took up three quarters of the front portion of the synagogue until the floor-to-ceiling opaque screen partition behind which the women sat on folding chairs in cramped rows smelling of bodily secretions and talcum powder and chicken fat. It was acceptable for Tema to sit with the men as she was still a very young child, not yet even seven years old, the age of the princess Snow White when the magic mirror broke the news to the wicked stepmother that she no longer was the fairest in the land, the age at which, according to Rashi the commentator-in-chief, a female is at the peak of her beauty. How do we learn this? From the extraordinary delineation of Mother Sarah’s age at the time of her death as specified in the opening of the portion “The Lives of Sarah” (this was a woman who had no life, only lives)—one hundred years and twenty years and seven years. Why the breakdown and repetition of years? To teach us that at one hundred years Mother Sarah was as pure as a twenty-year-old girl who is not responsible for her actions and therefore it is as if she had never sinned, and at twenty years she still retained the perfection of beauty of a seven-year-old girl.
Tema was already reading Hebrew fluently by then. Throughout the services as she sat among the men her father instructed her in the protocol of prayer ritual—when to rise and when to sit, when to bend your knees and bow your head, when to take three steps backward and forward, when to say Blessed Is He and Blessed Is His Name and when to say Amen, when to pray out loud and when in silence, how to keep up with the cantor as he marks the completion of a passage by chanting out loud the last few lines, how to shuckle and sway, how to daven in a low murmur moving your lips never reading silently to yourself as if the Siddur were some kind of story book, how to stand with your feet pressed together oblivious to all distractions during the Eighteen Benedictions silent meditation and especially during the Kedusha sanctification that the angels themselves sing to God on His heavenly throne, and so on and so forth.
Tema grasped every point instantly, swiftly committing the entire liturgy to memory. Reb Berel Bavli could not refrain from caressing the top of her silken head and giving a proprietary tug to one of her two thick long braids, grinning with pleasure at the men seated around him and muttering, “If it was a boy this is what you would call a one-thousand-percent return on your investment. Nu, so tell me? Am I right or am I right?”
On the occasions when the Oscwiecim Rebbe would rise and lean on his wooden lectern to offer in Yiddish some words of Torah, Tema would listen closely, often posing questions provoked by his talk as she walked home with her father after shul. She also asked questions about the weekly Torah portion, following along with the reading attentively in her Tanakh, including the sections skipped over in most children’s classrooms such as the accounts of Lot’s daughters impregnated by their father, the rape of Dina, Reuven sleeping with his father’s concubine, Judah taking as a prostitute his son’s widow, and so on—the dirty parts. She deciphered the cantillation signs and accents above and below the letters like musical notes and rests to aid in the memorization of entire blocks of text that soon she was singing. When they read the portion opening with Jacob’s flight to Haran and his dream of a ladder with angels ascending and descending, she turned to her father and asked, “But aren’t the angels in heaven? Shouldn’t they be going down first?” Reb Berel Bavli beamed. “You hear that?” he boomed to his bench mates. “The very same question Rashi asks. The mind of a man—such a pity!”
Above all her father stressed the obligation to say every word, not to skip a single word of the prayers, though all around her, Tema had already observed, men were davening by rote, itching to get it over with for the thousandth time so that they could go home, unbuckle their belts, and stuff themselves with the Sabbath cholent stew that would knock them out cold like a sledgehammer for the rest of the afternoon. Her father repeated this instruction so regularly that the men in their orbit would chant the refrain along with him like a chorus, Every single word! No skipping!—until the day they were clutching their bellies with painfully suppressed hilarity, and when Reb Berel Bavli glared at them, an expression of confusion and hurt mixed with fury in his eyes, they pointed to the little girl. Tema was reciting the Kaddish. “See how nice she listens to you?” one of them commented, the only man among them who had no business dealings with Reb Berel Bavli. “Such a good girl, she doesn’t skip a single word, just like you said—including the Kaddish. Watch out, Reb Berish, already she has you dead and buried. Either a gold digger or a Dumb Dora—but any way you look at it, the mind of a female after all.”
But the greater portion by far of her learning Tema acquired on her own, through personal diligence and will, by applying herself and cracking the codes, her inner being drawn naturally to the material. Nevertheless, to create the illusion of normalcy, every morning her mother put on her weekday wig and makeup, and, holding Tema’s hand, they walked together the several blocks to the kindergarten operated by Mrs. Moskowitz in the dark basement of her home near Fiftieth Street under the elevated tracks, which set the entire building quaking and shuddering whenever a train rumbled by overhead or jolted to a stop. There the little girls were taught the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the vowels, some blessings and basic prayers for specific occasions, upon waking up and going to sleep, for example, or setting out on a journey or finishing your business in the bathroom, and so forth, a few holiday songs along with a warning not to sing them out loud when boys or men are within earshot, as well as instruction on how to help their mothers in preparing the special dishes and cleaning the house for Sabbaths and festivals. They were also given guidance in personal hygiene, such as the importance of wiping one’s nose in a ladylike fashion with the handkerchief they wore fastened to the bodice of their dresses with a safety pin.
At story time, they would sit on an old piece of carpet on the floor in a circle flowing from Mrs. Moskowitz in a wooden folding chair holding a bundle that contained her newest baby with her toddlers at her feet as she read inspirational bible tales and legends to them in Yiddish from the Tzena Urena, her eyes gleaming with emotion as she recounted Mother Rebekah’s exemplary behavior in offering water from the well not only to quench the thirst of the weary traveler Eliezer just arrived at Padan-Aram where he had been sent by his master Abraham to find a suitable wife for his son Isaac, but also to draw bucketful after bucketful of water for all of his camels as well. “And he had plenty of camels, girls, Avraham Avinu was a very rich man. Do you girls have any idea how much water each and every camel needs and how long it takes for them to drink because they have to store so much up for marching across the whole desert? Girls, I want you to remember how Rivka Imeinu right away ran to feed the camels also even without being asked if you want to find for yourselves a good husband some day.”
At play time, they molded hallahs from brown clay giggling behind their hands at the resemblance between their works of art and little turds, they drew holiday pictures and fashioned decorations from construction paper and paste, they dressed up as brides in white sheets, enacting the high point of their future wedding day, after which the rest of their lives would funnel down as expected.
More and more often, Tema held back when it was time to set out for school. For a full week she cried the entire way as they walked there and had to be dragged down the cement steps, weeds sprouting from the cracks, to Mrs. Moskowitz’s cellar door where she clung to her mother like a sinking person clawing for solid ground. Then one morning she simply sat down full stop on the floor in the foyer with her arms crossed over her chest, shook her head in a slow flinty rhythm from side to side, her lips clamped tight, and refused absolutely to step out the door and leave home.
“What do you mean she won’t go?” Reb Berel Bavli hissed to his wife in their bedroom that night. “Who does she think she is—her majesty the queen or some other fancy lady? Hutz-klutz, Miss Maggie Putz! In this department, she’s your daughter, one hundred percent. Since when do you ask a kid if they want or if they don’t want? Do I ask a chicken what it wants? You just pick her up and take her there, even if she’s kicking and screaming bloody murder the whole way. Don’t worry, she’ll get used to it, I give you my word. Human beings can get used to anything, just like animals.”
But her mother took her in another direction. On the morning that Rosalie Bavli did not paint her face or put on her everyday wig but instead wrapped her head in a dark scarf drawn forward with the ends draped over her shoulders and concealed her eyes behind sunglasses, Tema accepted the hand extended down to her and allowed herself to be led out of the house. The two of them walked together in silence until they came to a hardware store directly across the street from the synagogue of the Oscwiecim Rebbe. They flattened themselves against the shadowy depths of the windowed alcove that led to the store’s entrance showcasing different color variations of linoleum samples in a confetti pattern, timers for Sabbath lights, pressure cookers, and so on, their eyes fixed on the Oscwiecim shtiebel opposite above which the Rebbe and his family lived.
When they spotted the rebbetzin coming out pushing her shopping cart and making her way up the street and around the corner, Tema’s mother signaled by squeezing her daughter’s hand that she was already holding tensely. Together they crossed the street and briskly walked down the alley along the side of the Oscwiecim shtiebel, entered through a door in the middle, and climbed the staircase that led directly into the Rebbe’s dining room where he sat enthroned in his usual place to receive his Hasidim at the head of the great mahogany table covered with an embossed burgundy-colored velvet cloth with the heavy volumes spread open before him. Tema was not quite seven at the time, her hair in its long braids had never been cut, her existence on this earth had been a loan from God in answer to her mother’s prayers, and now the loan was being repaid.
Her mother clicked open her black leather purse with the gold clasp, releasing a familiar, embarrassingly private puff of sour aroma, and drew out a fat sealed envelope that she handed to Kaddish stationed at his usual post a few paces behind his father. “Mazel tov,” Rosalie Bavli murmured. Kaddish tore open the envelope, counted the cash stuffed inside by flipping through the bills without taking them out, gave a receipt in the form of an acknowledgment nod, then slipped the whole package somewhere inside his black jacquard satin kaftan. He had turned eighteen a few weeks earlier and his marriage to the sixteen-year-old daughter of the Kalashnikover Rebbe had just been celebrated with candlelit processions and rapturous dancing in the closed-off streets of Boro Park and a caravan of ambulances with engines running standing ready to speed away revelers overcome by the press of the crowd and palpitations of the heart brought on by exultation at the union of two such illustrious Hasidic dynasties. Tema observed closely how her mother, still standing, leaned in slightly toward the Rebbe, and with commendable modesty and deference, in the softest of voices, practically a whisper, uttered such words as A special child, A gift from God, You know the situation, You were there when I prayed for her, all of which the Rebbe acknowledged by nodding his head sagely, bunching his beard and caressing it in contemplative downward strokes. Then her mother pushed forward with her request—that Tema be allowed to study with the boys, Talmud, Mishna, Gemara, Halakha, Law, Philosophy, Kabbala, Midrash, Rabbinics, the works, she was a special case, a way must be found, perhaps a partition could be erected in the study hall, maybe a thick curtain hung up in the beis medrash behind which the girl would be invisible, but from where she could sit and take it all in.
“Come here, child,” the Rebbe beckoned to Tema. A brief silence followed after she approached while he rummaged inside his kaftan and came up with a hard red candy wrapped in cellophane flecked with lint and shreds of snuff. “This is for you, child.” He held out the sweet. “But before you eat you must say a brakha. So tell me, daughter, which blessing would you say?”
Tema answered at once that she would say a Shehakol.
“But my Kaddish here”—and the Rebbe jerked his head in the vicinity of the son behind him—“he tells me you should say a Borei Pri Ha’etz, because it is a cherry candy, the fruit of a tree.”
Tema shook her head. No, a Shehakol. The cherry candy is very far away from the cherry tree. Maybe it was never even near a cherry tree. Maybe it is only cherry-flavored. A Shehakol—the all-purpose brakha.
“Gut gezugt. Well said. In this matter, I must admit I hold with the female.” The Rebbe cast an apologetic glance over his shoulder at his son. “But if you happen to have already said Borei Pri Ha’etz, that is also good—and you can go ahead and eat gezunt aheit. Better just to eat in such a case than to say another brakha, so you would not be taking God’s name in vain.”
The Rebbe smoothed his tea-stained mustache with the pad of his forefinger and gazed at Tema through lowered lids dripping with skin tags like stalactites. “So tell me, child, the Hebrew word for name is shem—am I right?” She indicated her agreement. “Is it masculine or feminine?” “Masculine,” Temima replied. “Even though the plural is shemot, which is the feminine form?” “Masculine,” she repeated unwavering. “Gut gezugt,” the Rebbe said again, and bobbed his approval. “But why do you think this masculine word has such a feminine sound in the plural?”
At that point in her life, Tema did not yet possess the arsenal of terms and vocabulary to set out her case, so as best she could she responded that the simple answer was there was no reason; that’s just the way language and all things were, there were exceptions. But then she went on to offer a kind of commentary. Maybe because since we say HaShem, The Name, as a substitute for God’s real name, which we’re not allowed to say, maybe the substitute also becomes holy—so how can it be anything but masculine?
The Rebbe’s eyes crinkled and, to check the laugh he felt heaving up in a surge of subversive appreciation, he pinched his nostrils between two fingers and ejected a loud snort into the napkin upon which the two lumps of sugar had rested for his glass of tea with the half-moon of lemon floating inside. “Gut gezugt—very clever. Your voice is the voice of Jacob. You know how to fool and flatter the old man for the sake of the blessing. The blessing is learning.”
After that, ignoring her completely as if she had dissolved and lost all substance and faded into the wall, he addressed himself exclusively to the mother. The girl was to be brought early the next morning to the side of the building where his Kaddish would await them. His Kaddish would then direct her into a small room with an entrance in the backyard and a shared wall with the study hall on the inside. Although this room had once been a toilet—it had in fact been an old wooden outhouse to which pipes had been extended when it was annexed to the building—it had not been used for this purpose for many years, the plumbing had long ago been disconnected, and therefore the Rebbe ruled that it was permissible for her to sit in there and listen through the cracks in the wall to words of Torah coming from the adjacent study hall and even to consult in that once-polluted space whatever holy books his Kaddish could collect and set out for her in advance. Since it was wintertime, she should be dressed in a heavy coat and gloves and hat as there was no heat in that room; there was also no electricity, the only light she would receive especially as the short days darkened was the light of Torah filtering through the crannies from the study hall.
“We shall see if her desire to learn is as strong as Hillel’s who was found frozen under the snow on the roof of the yeshiva of Shemaya and Avtalyon listening with such concentration to the lecture when he didn’t have enough money to pay the fee and enter through the door,” the Oscwiecim Rebbe said to Tema’s mother, as if he had just finished proposing to a collaborator a scientific experiment to be performed on a monkey in a laboratory cage.
The aspiring sage Hillel, later renowned for his tolerance and leniency, was rewarded for his devotion to learning with a scholarship, free admission to the yeshiva. But when Tema was smoked out after five months of faithful attendance beginning in the icy days of February and ending in the scorching June heat (in the midst of which, on the seventh of Adar, also the birthday of Moses Our Teacher, she turned seven years old), she was banished from the study hall forever. During those five months she sat six days a week on a plank laid across the blackened cracked toilet bowl in the tiny cubicle filmy with cobwebs, steeped in the acrid smell of ancient urine, and followed along in the tattered books that had been provided for her—Talmud, Mishna and Gemara. An egg that is laid on a festival, is it permissible? The house of Shammai says, Yes, you may eat it on that day. The house of Hillel says, No.
She strained to peer through the chinks to identify her classmates. Boys sat in pairs at each table, study mates, an older more advanced boy coupled with a younger one, none yet a bar mitzvah judging from their prayer sessions, the youngest perhaps eight. Their teacher, a refugee from Vilna known to have once been a prodigy at the Slabodka yeshiva, slight with a scraggly gray beard and pale bulging eyes and an uncontrollable reflex that never ceased to amuse the boys of flinching like a startled rabbit whenever a car honked or backfired outside in the street, paced up and down the aisles snapping the ruler in his right hand against the palm of his left, now and then bringing it down upon the back of one of the boys caught raising his eyes from the page. The house of Shammai says, A man may divorce his wife only if he has found her to be unchaste. The house of Hillel says he may divorce her if she spoils his dish.
Soon it was no longer necessary to peer through the cracks. She knew all the characters, she could distinguish their tones, she could absorb just by listening. A heavenly voice was heard: The house of Shammai and the house of Hillel are each holy, but the law is in accordance with Hillel. When the school day ended, or if physical urgency forced her to leave early, her mother was awaiting her in front of the hardware store and signaled when it was safe to cross the street. There was never a time during those five months when her mother was not at her station waiting for her; her mother was always faithfully there then with the same certainty as she was not there later on. Anyone who might have noticed the girl coming or going dismissed her as a daughter of the house attending to a domestic chore in a broom closet.
If the spirit moved him the teacher would raise his voice and offer a brief lesson or pose a question in Lithuanian-accented Yiddish. When no one came forth with the answer, he would turn to the back of the room with the exaggerated flourish of scholarly disdain for the ignorance of the rabble. “TAIKU?” he would call out, and point with his ruler to a small boy, the only one sitting alone, who would unfailingly provide the correct answer in a soft voice. The boy’s name was Eliyahu, which rendered this the running joke of the study hall, since it was common knowledge that TAIKU was the acronym for letting an unresolved issue rest in peace until the messianic age and the resurrection of the dead, when the prophet Eliyahu the Tishbite would return to explain all outstanding questions and problems. But this study hall was blessed with its own Elijah, still present and accounted for, the smartest boy in the class.
On an afternoon in May during a pulsing heat wave, as Tema was standing on the toilet peering out of a small window from which she had scraped off some gelid grime, watching the teacher, the former Slabodka genius, reduced to squirting the younger boys with a water gun to cool them off in the yard during recess, her eyes met Eliyahu’s. The next day at recess time he opened the door to her cell and entered. Without a word, he sat down cross-legged on the floor. He was a year or two older than she by her estimation, though he was about her height, small and dark like she was, he could have been her brother, the son her father had been denied. He took out a pocket chess set and lined up the pieces as she sat down on the floor opposite him. Without uttering a single word, he showed her the moves. Thereafter, almost every recess, he came into her place and they played.
On a blistering day in June, as they sat on the floor of the outhouse with the chessboard between them, Eliyahu moved a pawn, then unbuttoned his white shirt and took it off, revealing his talit katan, his personal fringed garment. Tema moved her piece, shed her blouse and exposed her undershirt. It continued in this way in complete silence, move after move, shoes, socks, stockings, pants, skirt, underwear, until they were sitting cool and naked opposite each other. The game then went on but in reverse, they did not speak but with each move he put on one article of her clothing and she one of his, until checkmate, when she braided his sidelocks and secured them with her rubber bands and stuffed most of her own hair under the great bowl of his black velvet yarmulke with two ringlets dangling down on each side for payess, and then the whistle blew, recess was over, he remained in the outhouse while she stepped outside and into the study hall with the other boys and took her place in his seat in the back of the room and lowered her head over his Gemara, open to Sanhedrin 111a, and read to herself how God rebuked Moses: I am El-Shaddai Who appeared to your forefathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, yet you alone insist on knowing My true and ineffable Name and you alone question My ways and accuse Me of harming My people.
“Is it possible that Moses Our Teacher, the greatest of all prophets, sinned through lack of faith in the Almighty, by doubting God?” the teacher raised the question as boys sank their heads lower over their volumes so as not to catch his eye and be called on. “TAIKU?” he finally bellowed, and turned toward Eliyahu as to a colleague, a soul mate, the only one in the room who could understand him.
Tema raised her eyes to meet his. “Moshe saw terrible things in Egypt, just like you saw in Europe,” she said. The teacher recoiled as if shocked by a bolt from another world. He began to advance toward her with his ruler pointed straight out in front of him like a drawn sword. With its tip he lifted her chin, like an alien specimen dredged from the mud that would befoul you if you touched it with a bare hand. “For your information, I am not at the level of Moshe Rabbenu to question the ways of the Almighty despite all the terrible things I have witnessed, and even more so I have never questioned the Almighty’s abhorrence of a female who puts on herself the things that belong to a man,” he spat out, referring to the prohibition in the book of Deuteronomy. “Beged-ish on a woman is an abomination to God, so it is written,” the teacher went on grimly as Tema sprang from the seat of Eliyahu and lurched out of the study hall, past Kaddish smoking a cigarette on the stoop in front of the synagogue, into the arms of her mother who had spotted her at once in her boy’s apparel and burst across the street from the hardware store and swept her up as she sobbed desperately, caressing and comforting her and warbling over and over again, Don’t cry, Tema, everything will be all right, your father will never find out, nobody will ever know.
Eliyahu also did not return to the Oscwiecim yeshiva, and soon after, Tema heard, he and his family moved out of the neighborhood.
It was not until many years later, when she had already acquired renown as HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, Ima Temima, that she learned what had happened to him that day when she ran out of the study hall after Kaddish mashed his cigarette under his shoe. One quiet afternoon, when they were still residing on the Street of the Kara’im in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, Kol-Isha-Erva slipped silently into Temima’s study and handed her a note with a single word written on it in Hebrew—TAIKU—punctuated by a drawing, deftly rendered, of a chess piece, the queen. Temima nodded her acceptance, and soon after a trim, distinguished-looking man, clean shaven and bareheaded, was ushered in, a professor of astrophysics at Caltech, he said—and a chess master, he added with a shy dip of his chin. Kaddish had instantly grasped his strategic advantage when Tema bolted past him that day. He flicked down his cigarette, stamped it out, strode along the alley to the outhouse in back of the building, opened the door, came up behind Eliyahu, and cinched him around the waist humping him over. He flipped up Tema’s skirt and pulled down her underpants. He flipped back the wings of his kaftan and opened his pants. He slammed his palm across Eliyahu’s mouth as a precaution though he was confident there would not be any screaming, and he rammed himself into the boy muttering the whole time, So you wanna be a girl? This is what it means to be a girl. Nice? Like it? “Your dress was ruined, I’m sorry to say.” The professor spat out the dry pit of a laugh. “A bloody mess.”
“Kaddish told me what you did today, shame on you,” her father said to her in the darkness of that night when he came into her room and woke her up by sinking the full weight of his body onto her bed. “You think you’re something special, don’t you, some kind of hotsytotsy? Just because maybe you have a few extra brains in your head, you think you’re a boy? You think you’re different than every other female what ever lived on this earth? Well I have some news for you, girlie.” He threw back her covers, slipped a hand under her nightgown, pincered a nipple and twisted. “You see this thing? It’s flat now like a board, but pretty soon it will get big and fat and juicy—and you know why? To attract the male of the species. Man’s pleasure, that’s what you were made for, that’s the only reason why the Master of the Universe in His wisdom created you.” The hand moved down between her legs. “I’m doing this for your own good, you should know, to knock some sense into that stuck-up head of yours. You think you’re some kind of fancy smarty-pants but you’re no different than any other girl. Put an American flag on your face and you’re just the same. It’s not the noodle that counts it’s the knish, it’s not what’s up there, it’s what’s down here. So you want I should tell you what’s down here? Same by you like by every other girl. Nothing. Zero. A hole.” And he plunged a finger inside.
For three years, from the age of seven to ten as Tema’s beauty began its slope downward in the eyes of the commentators, she could never know in advance or predict when the urge would seize him and he would enter her room in the dead of night. Weeks would pass undisturbed, she thought she had been cleansed of the terrible sin she must have committed and been found blameless after all, but then he would return. The second time he came into her room she lay on her back in the darkness, feigning sleep. He boosted her flat girl’s hips, slipped a pad under her as if to change a diaper, and buried her under the earthly weight of his mortal being. She thought she would suffocate yet she was overcome with pity for him, she was his collaborator. The sudden burst of pain stunned her, but she did not cry out, she continued in that darkness to pretend to be asleep out of compassion for him though he must have suspected how unlikely it could have been that she was still sleeping and taken note in the process that she had surrendered and turned herself into his accomplice. Inside her head she chanted the mantra, mama-mama-mama, until she heard a muffled groan and it was over. There was the wetness of warm sticky secretions and an unfamiliar acrid smell. When he was finished he spent a long time wiping up. She could hear him spitting on the pad, she could feel him rubbing her body between her legs. He drew the pad out from under her and took it away with him, continuing down the hall to the bathroom. Water ran, the toilet flushed. In the morning there were dried blood stains on the insides of her thighs.
The next time she heard him lumbering in the night in the direction of her room she turned on her stomach and remained frozen in that position as if in deep sleep, his co-conspirator as he attended to his pitiful needs. She numbed her mind by counting methodically to herself until his suppressed moan was released and he was done, she did not even reach sixty, she was merely a receptacle, a dumping ground. Thereafter, whenever she would hear him approaching, she would turn on her side, rendering everything that would take place far more impersonal, as if it were happening not to her but to her dark sister curled up on the bed with her face to the wall while she was hovering above like a pure angel with white wings shielding her eyes. She was not present even to him, her being was so irrelevant that even as she was simulating sleep on her side she could on occasion open her eyes and stare unblinking into the darkness like a corpse in its tomb though she would never have risked raising her fist and thumping it against her chest over her pounding heart as she calmed herself by reciting inside her head the ritualized Day of Atonement confession, We have been guilty, we have rebelled, we have robbed, we have spoken slander, we have caused perversions, we have been evil, and so on, until he gasped and was done. One time she heard him beseech her plaintively to touch him as if in acknowledgement that they both always knew she was really awake, another time he asked more irritably as if she were not performing well as a woman, as if she were no good in bed, but still she would not stir inside the webbed net of her counterfeit sleep. Sleep and wakefulness blurred in the nights. She never knew whether she was truly in one state or the other. Dark shadows rimmed her eyes and seeped inward through her skin spreading all over.
Her alien body no longer belonged to her, it was occupied territory. She detached her mind from it by telling herself stories as he made his pit stop in her room and went about his business on his way to the toilet—stories of princesses in locked towers or lost in black forests or smothered in ashes or tangled in thorn bushes or cast into sleeps so deep there was almost no hope of ever reviving them. One of the stories she recited to herself during those nights, she realized only later, resembled in so many ways Rav Nakhman of Bratslav’s tale of the lost princess that she wondered if she might have sat at the master’s feet as he told it long ago in another life. In Tema’s story, too, there was a princess whose father once loved and prized her but she did something to anger him and he cursed her so that she was taken in the night to an evil place from which she could not break free. In Rav Nakhman’s story as transcribed by his disciple Rav Nosson of Nemirov since the holy mystic of Bratslav did not write his own words down himself, he recognized how dangerous writing could be, the king is stricken with regret the next morning and sends his viceroy to search for his beloved daughter, the princess. But in Tema’s story, the princess must free herself. She struggles over many years and in many places without succeeding, the ordeals of the princess in Tema’s story continued as a serial in episodes and chapters through the years over all those nights. Each attempt by the princess to liberate herself would end in defeat caused by some personal weakness in her character. After each new failure she would wake up in a strange place and ask herself a variation of the same question the viceroy would ask when he awakened after going astray and losing his way—Where in the world am I?
On the eve of Yom Kippur in her tenth year, in the morning, her father Reb Berel Bavli called her down to the kitchen to perform the ritual of atonement. Inside a cage on the floor were a live white rooster and two white hens chosen from among the prime poultry specimens in his slaughterhouse upon which the sins committed by the human members of the household over the past year would be transferred. He pulled out the rooster, gripping it by its legs with his right hand, and swung it around his head three times as it fluttered in a wild panic and shot out pellets of dung, reciting out loud as he performed this rite the verse, This is my substitute, this is my exchange, this is my atonement, this cock will go to its death and I will enter and go on to a good long life and to peace. When he completed his penance, he shoved the rooster back into the cage doomed to be dropped in the soup of the poor, took out a hen and handed it to Tema. “This one is for your sins,” he said. “The other hen will be for your mama if she ever manages to wake up in time from all the pills that doctor of hers schtupps her with. So just in case she doesn’t make it before the Moshiakh comes, you should keep your mama in mind while you schlug kapores.”
Tema clutched the frantic bird by its legs as it quaked in a frenzied blizzard of white feathers, but before raising it to whirl it in an orbit around her head she faced her father and said, “For the sins between one person and another, not even God can forgive you, only the person you have wronged. So I just want to tell you that I forgive you.”
Her father’s face darkened. “What are you talking about? You see that chicken you’re holding in your hand? She belongs to me. That hand holding the chicken? Also mine. Everything you have I gave to you—the roof over your head, the food in your belly, the clothes on your back. You and everything you are, body and soul, belongs to me. With what belongs to me I can do with it whatever I want.”
The soul is Yours, and the body Your handiwork. Have mercy on what You have labored to make.
By an effort of will, Tema overcame her wish to shut down and fade away. “So you know what I’m talking about, Tateh. It’s wrong, you know that. You—we—must stop.”
“I’ll tell you what, my little genius”—the natural ruddiness of her father’s face deepened like raw meat—“I want you should do me a little favor. Tomorrow in shul, when they read the Torah at Minkha, I want you should pay very good attention to the list of your female flesh and blood you’re not allowed to lay a hand on and show me in black and white where it says one single word about your daughter.” Tema’s eyes widened. “Aha, so there’s still something left in the Torah you don’t know, my little Miss Professor Einshtein-Veinshtein,” Reb Berel Bavli hooted.
“Maybe they just left it out—by mistake,” Tema responded softly.
“God help us, so now I also have a little apikores on my hands to add to all my zorres. Is that what they teach you in school, such heresy? Excuse me, but who is this ‘they’ you are talking about? Didn’t you learn that the Torah is written by the hand of God Himself? God makes mistakes? Since when? Such shtoos, I never heard such a stupid thing in all my whole entire life, I can’t even believe my ears. Bite your tongue, I should wash your mouth out with soap for you. If God leaves something out it is for a reason. If your daughter is not on the list it is because your daughter is not forbidden, plain and simple. Anyways, how can you even know for one-hundred-percent sure with a daughter if she’s really your own flesh and blood?” her father added maliciously.
A literalist, her father, a simple man when it suited him. Still, even then, Tema gave him some credit for an inner unease that must have driven him so uncharacteristically to take down the volume and check the text closely enough to put to rest whatever stirrings might have troubled his spirit.
“To tell you the honest truth, Tema’le,” her father went on in the guarded tone he deployed with business competitors, “I really don’t even know what you’re talking about. This is some kind of story you made up, a baba maiseh, from all of the fairy tales you fill your head with, all of your mother’s goyische books, those romanen, all of that make-believe crap. I’m telling you, you’re imagining things, nothing happened, whatever you imagine happened has nothing to do with real life. You hear about such things sometimes—girls having such meshuggeneh ideas about their fathers—fantasies. Maybe I should make an appointment for you also with your mama’s head doctor. You can go there together, have a mother-daughter outing, and after you empty out all that garbage from your heads in his office you can maybe treat yourselves to a little shopping for some nice new matching outfits for yom tov. It will cost me plenty, but what’s money when it comes to health?”
The next afternoon, on Yom Kippur day, Tema paid scrupulous attention to the Torah reading from Leviticus chapter eighteen of the catalogue of incest prohibitions. Forbidden was exposing the nakedness of your father, your mother, your stepmother your father’s wife, your sister the daughter of your father or your mother, your granddaughter the daughter of your son or daughter, your half sister the daughter of your father’s wife, your aunt your father’s sister or your mother’s sister or your father’s brother’s wife, your daughter-in-law your son’s wife, your sister-in-law your brother’s wife, a woman along with her daughter or her son’s daughter or her daughter’s daughter for this is lewdness, a woman and her sister, a woman in her menstrual uncleanness, the wife of your neighbor to pollute yourself through her.
All of these injunctions are directed to a man with woman (and in one case, a father) as passive vessel, so to cover the territory also included is the commandment that he may not lie with another man as he would with a woman, it is an abomination. In the same vein, he may not lie carnally with an animal to be defiled in this manner. The sole admonition on this roster explicitly invoking a woman in an active role is the stricture against standing in front of an animal for the purpose of mating with it, a perversion. In this entire litany of incest and sexual restrictions seemingly so exhaustive, only a man’s daughter is not specifically singled out as off-limits to him.
How had it happened that Tema had not noticed this before? Her father was correct.
Yet after their exchange in the kitchen that Yom Kippur eve of her tenth year, with one stupefied rooster and two dazed hens as witnesses, the pick of the fowl, unless she had been cast from that day forward under the spell of a slumber so deep she truly never again knew where in the world she was, her father Reb Berel Bavli did not enter her room again for his own sorry needs in the night. He no longer found her attractive.
Three months later, in winter, Tema’s mother gave her a diary as a gift for Hannuka. It was a small chunky volume bound in satiny ivory leatherette, the border of its cover embossed with an ornate wreath of fuchsia vines, the leaves heart-shaped surrounding the words A YOUNG GIRL’S DIARY in elaborate raised gold script. A gold latch clasped the pages fastened with a miniature gold lock, with its tiny golden key dangling from a thin detachable scarlet cord. “You can write down all your secrets in here, Tema,” her mother said. “It’s private, for you alone, no one will peek, God forbid.” On the first page, also in gold and framed by another garland of hearts, was a quotation from Charlotte Brontë, whose novel Jane Eyre, which Temima had found among her mother’s collection of books, she had already read and wept over—“The human heart has hidden treasures / In secret kept, in silence sealed.” The secret silent pages that followed were all blank and ruled, awaiting the hidden treasures of her human heart over the forthcoming year as if they already existed in the aura and needed only to be captured and stripped of their veil to be revealed, beginning with January the first and ending with the thirty-first of December, two days allotted per page, the entry for each day already conveniently inscribed with a greeting to her newest intimate, Dear Diary.
Dutifully, on the first day of the secular new year, Tema began her entries in her new journal. She cultivated the practice of writing at the end of each day, filling the designated lines, as if no more could happen to her within a twenty-four-hour span than could fit into that prescribed space. Then she would close the diary, lock it with the key she hid in a sock, and slip it under her mattress, on top of the springs.
Today it snowed but I forgot my boots so my shoes and stockings got soaking wet and my feet turned blue. Today at recess Yentie and Faygie were whispering to each other in the corner of the yard, but when they saw me coming they stopped, so I know they were talking about me. Today Mama was up when I came home from school and she gave me some meat soup with kasha and sat down at the table and watched me eat. Today Yentie told me that there’s someone who keeps calling her up on the telephone to tell her he’s going to kill me. Today my teacher Rebbetzin Klapholz called on me to read but I didn’t know the place, so she said the next time she catches me daydreaming again she’s going to send me to the principal’s office. Today Tateh sent one of his lady workers to my class with a chicken for every girl to show us how to kosher them for when we get married; I will never eat chicken again in my life and I am never getting married. Today Yentie told me the killer called again, so I said, Give him my telephone number so he can call me up and tell me what he has against me. Today I was sitting on a car that was parked in front of school waiting for Mama to pick me up to go shopping for a new Shabbes coat, but she fell asleep and forgot all about our appointment and a man snuck up behind me and dragged me off the car by my braids and screamed at me at the top of his lungs for sitting on his brand-new car. Today I finished another book from Mama’s pile, The Scarlet Letter; I am a sinner like Hester and deserve to be shamed in front of everyone and banished from Gan Eden. Today Yentie told me that she gave the killer my number and she asked me if he called yet and I said, No, not yet. Today it was freezing cold but the boiler broke in school and there was no heat so we had to sit in class wearing our coats and hats and scarves and gloves all day long but Rebbetzin Klapholz said, It’s a very good lesson for you, girls, because it’s much more important to save the money to fix the boilers in the boys’ schools in case they break, this is a great tradition of our people for the women to sacrifice so that the men can fulfill the mitzvah of sitting and learning Torah. Today I went shopping with Mama for a Shabbes coat and she slipped and fell down the stairs in the DeKalb Avenue Station and her nylons ripped and her knees were bleeding and I heard someone in the subway say she was a drunk or maybe a drug addict. Today Yentie asked me again if the killer called yet and I said, No, not yet. Today on Thirteenth Avenue I saw an old lady in a baby carriage and a little child all wrinkled walking with a cane. Today Faygie tapped me on the shoulder during a Humash test and I let her see my paper so she could copy the answers. Today I told Yentie that the killer finally called me and we had a nice conversation on the telephone and straightened everything out and he promised b’li neder not to kill me. Today I passed a store window and saw the reflection of a person who looked like a liar and a cheater and a sinner, and then I recognized myself. Today was my birthday and Mama made cherry Kojel in a fancy mold for me with Del Monte Fruit Cocktail trapped inside and she stuck eleven candles in it and sang Happy Birthday, Tema, and she gave me a booklet called Very Personally Yours for a birthday present with one long-stemmed pink rose on the cover, and she told me to read this book in private very carefully to learn all about the blood that will soon come flowing out of a secret opening in my body; This is a true story, Mama told me, It is not a fairy tale, Everything it says in this book really happens to every girl, You are no exception.
An overdose of Today’s and I’s—the exercise was growing tiresome. For more than three months into spring Tema had filled in the lines dedicated to each day conscientiously with what she was now abashed to recognize as little more than childish, banal trifles. It was time to change course. She continued to write, but now freely, at any length she desired, straight through the arbitrary stopping point of the inane greeting to this absurd imaginary best friend she now thought of as Dear Diarrhea, and instead of giving an account of the dull events of her girl’s life she would focus on a theme, a subject. The subject she selected was self-improvement; she would keep a record of her struggle to work on herself to become a better person, to achieve a higher level of perfection. Her most serious character flaw, she concluded, was Pride. Accordingly she reported on her battle against this enemy Pride to Dear Diarrhea, which she attacked on three fronts until her ultimate downfall and defeat. First, there was her pride in her personal appearance, her pathetic vanity, since everywhere she knew herself to be perceived as a beauty though oddly haughty and imperious for one so young. She confronted this weakness through a campaign of extreme modesty in dress and demeanor—loose blouses with sleeves down to her wrists, dark skirts brushing her ankles, thick stockings, walking silently in padded shoes stooped over with eyes cast down to the ground. Second was her offensive against speaking ill of others, the evil tongue, or even speaking well of others that could provoke a difference of opinion in the form of a pejorative rejoinder—lashon ha’rah, a predisposition she acknowledged within herself that implicitly contained a deeply rooted sense of her own superiority. Third was her strategy to obliterate herself figuratively by eliminating the personal pronoun from her vocabulary—I, me, my, myself, mine, and so on into the plural—rendering necessary elaborate circumlocutions to conduct a conversation thereby producing the secondary benefit of constricting all speech drastically. On each of these fronts, all three launched simultaneously, her mother fought her furiously, to the point that Tema reflected it was worth persevering if only to bring forth this desperate gasp of energy from a mother who otherwise passed her days stretched out on the couch in a stupor of medicine and disappointment. All of her mother’s counterattacks Tema reported faithfully to Dear Diarrhea not sparing herself the ways in which they broke her spirit and eroded her resolve. “Stand up straight, Tema, don’t be ashamed of your body! Give up talking lashon ha’rah, Tema, and you take all the fun out of life! Erase yourself, Tema, and you erase me!”
Erase me please from the book You have written, Moses Our Teacher said to the Lord. Tema was felled by the realization that her quest for ultimate humility was the height of Pride—an effort to outdo the man Moshe himself, reputedly more modest than any other human being ever to walk upon the face of the earth. She would continue her program of confiding in Dear Diarrhea, she decided, but she would change the subject, she would seek refuge in the impersonal, in lists. She undertook the project of going through the Five Books of Moses in search of instances when God in whose image He created man allows His human side to show in acts of gentle lovingkindness instead of His usual omnipotent divine wrath decimating everything in sight. She listed the two main instances, the one in the beginning when God fashions garments of leather for Adam and Eve in their exposed guilty nakedness and amazingly dresses them Himself (she could see Him sitting there cross-legged like an old Jewish tailor squinting nearsighted as He pokes the moistened tip of the thread through the eye of the needle, then rising like a designer and contemplating His latest creation from every angle with His head cocked to the side, His forefinger pressed against His lips and thumb under His chin), and the one at the end when He buries Moses on Mount Nebo in the land of Moab (there He is, the undertaker, the gravedigger, leaning on His shovel, wiping His brow). But even those two occasions when God is “nice,” as Tema put it to Dear Diarrhea, come after He had administered the cruelest of punishments—expulsion from Paradise, exclusion from the Promised Land, the Torah’s beginning and end—like a father who gives a present to his child to make up for a merciless beating that will leave its devastating mark forever, ruin the child for life.
In between those two there was almost nothing to add to this list.
So Tema decided to keep another list—a list of instances when her mother seemed happy. This list was also very short. She noted the times she could hear from up in her bedroom her mother playing the piano downstairs, “Ode to Joy,” “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” the click of her mother’s gold wedding band striking the keys of the notes in the bass clef. Was her mother happy at those moments? Tema asked herself. At least she was at peace, there was some relief from whatever roiled her spirit, the item belonged on the list in Tema’s judgment. Then there were the times her mother would reminisce about how she would push Tema in her baby carriage and strangers would comment on how beautiful the child was—“People would stop me in the street,” her mother would always say when she recounted this memory, pure pleasure uncoiling her face. There was even an occasion when her mother laughed, Tema recalled, uncontrollably, alarmingly, insanely, which after some agonizing reflection Tema decided qualified for the list since technically it was laughter after all and should therefore be deposited for safekeeping with Dear Diarrhea.
It happened on a Friday night, at the Sabbath table. Her father was spinning a tale about the past week in the slaughterhouse. So I’m standing there with my knife sticking out all ready to go and this cow comes along and suddenly she opens her mouth and starts talking to me and she says, Don’t kill me today, I have female troubles. I’m so surprised, you can imagine, my mouth drops open, one cow is more or less the same like another cow so it’s not every day you meet a talking cow, so I say, Okay cow, come back tomorrow, I’ll kill you tomorrow. So tomorrow comes and I have my knife out smooth and sharp and along comes this same cow and again she starts talking and she says, Please, not today, I’m not in the mood. I’m telling you my knife almost fell right out of my hands like a wet noodle and dropped on the floor, on top of all the blood and kishkes, I just couldn’t get over it, and before I know it again I’m saying, Okay cow, tomorrow, we have a date. Then it’s tomorrow and here comes this same cow again and my knife is pointed right at the spot ready to go in and do the job, and what do you know? Again she opens her mouth and she says, Please, if you don’t mind, another time, I have a headache. As the story unfolded, convulsive laughter spurted out of the mouth of Tema’s mother, she was practically shrieking with laughter, her chest was heaving so that she clutched herself over the heart with both hands as if the breath were about to be squeezed out of her by savage palpitations, tears flooded her eyes and came gushing down her cheeks streaking her makeup until hoarse sobs erupted from some feverish depths within her and she pushed back her chair with a dreadful scraping sound and ran from the table up the stairs to her bedroom and slammed the door.
Her mother’s laughter was harrowing, Tema was racked by it even as she recorded it. Nevertheless, she resolved to continue her relationship with Dear Diarrhea, she was not yet ready to give up writing, she set herself the goal of filling in all of those empty spaces, the void was terrifying. She took refuge in fiction, page after page unfurling the details of the plot of the lost princess story with which she had numbed herself over the three years when her father would come into her room, a meticulous narration of all of the trials ending in failure and defeat endured by the lost princess in her struggle to free herself from banishment and exile and return to the paradise of her father’s kingdom—ordeals by water and by fire, by sword and wild beasts, by hunger and thirst, earthquake and plague, strangulation and stoning, sleeplessness and agitation, madness, poverty, degradation. What had she done to anger him so grievously to lead to such punishment, how had she disobeyed? She wrote and wrote into the early days of summer but the answer refused to rise from the abyss, and then, in a sphere beyond her awareness, her story merged into a retelling of those nights, night after night, when her father would open her door and enter her room. Fire and brimstone, the world had come to an end. Lot’s daughters, the same two virgins their father had offered to hand over to the doomed Sodomites instead of the two male guests under the protection of the house these sons of Belial were clamoring for, believed there were no men left on earth for them to procreate with. So they got their father drunk with wine in a cave in the hills near Zoar where they had fled from the conflagration. First the eldest lay with their father and became pregnant by him, the next night it was her sister’s turn. The eldest gave birth to a son she called Moab, father of the Moabites, and the younger gave birth to a son she called Ben-Ami, father of the Ammonites. The abomination of the Moabites was the god Hemosh to whom King Solomon built a shrine for wanton, lustful worship on a mountain east of Jerusalem. He also built there a shrine to the abomination of the Ammonites, the god Molekh, upon whose fiery altars the children were sacrificed.
The days grew longer, the school year was over. It was evening but not yet dark, and Tema was sitting in her room reading for the first time her mother’s copy of Anna Karenina. She was up to Book Two, groping her way back to this world, looking up at the twilight after having lost herself in the story of how Anna’s lover, Vronsky, blundered and broke the back of his horse in the steeplechase race. Poor Frou-Frou, there was no choice but to shoot her. Tema was eleven years old and she wanted to howl for this mare who had tried so hard to please her master. She was thinking to herself, this man Tolstoy, here was a rebbe at whose feet she could sit, she would do everything to please him, she would bend her will never to do anything he would disapprove of when she heard her father’s heavy tread shuffling toward her down the hallway. He opened her door without knocking but did not come into her room. Still in his work clothes, with sawdust on his shoes, he planted himself at the entrance and said, “I just want you should know that your mama read your diary, all of that dreck you made up about me. You left it where anyone could see. You did it on purpose to hurt me. Now your mama is saying she’s going to leave me.” Manifesting no interest at all in any response she might offer up, he turned and left. She felt so sorry for him, it left her almost dizzy with hatred.
The next day she waited for her mother to come downstairs, but when by five o’clock in the afternoon she had not yet appeared Tema went up and knocked on the bedroom door. “Yes, come in, Tema,” her mother called to her in a muffled voice. When Tema entered the room her mother gazed at her for a long time with her eloquent eyes, then folded back a corner of the quilt and patted the bedsheet, an invitation to Tema to come lie down beside her under the covers. Her mother was still in her nightgown, her hair spread over the pillow like a dark crest.
Tema lay down at her mother’s side, nestling close to her body, burying her face in the familiar musty smell tinged with perfume, lily of the valley. “I’m sorry, Mama,” Tema said in a choked whisper. Her mother inhaled the sweet young fragrance of her hair and kissed her on the pale exposed whiteness of the part on top of her head.
“It’s all right, Tema. It’s not your fault. It’s my fault. I was a bad wife.”
“Why did you read my diary? You promised you’d never look.”
“It doesn’t matter,” her mother said wearily. “I always knew anyway somewhere in my heart. I didn’t protect you the way a mother should—forgive me. I put my own interests ahead of yours. Besides, it was just too hard to get out of bed.”
Tema shook her head ardently. “It’s only a story, Mama. I made it all up, it’s not real, nothing ever happened. Tateh says you’re going to leave him.”
Her mother laughed to herself, a skeptic’s laugh, but nevertheless Tema heard it through everything that separated them. “Why did you laugh?”
“I laughed? That was a laugh? Don’t worry, maidel’e, I’m not going anywhere. Where would I go anyway? Besides, I’m much too tired.”
Three weeks later her mother overcame her mortal exhaustion and rose from her bed. She dressed herself in her finest clothing including shoes and stockings. She carefully applied black kohl liner and mascara to her eyes, lipstick, powder and rouge. She polished her nails. She adorned herself in her gold necklace and bracelets and single pearl earring. She dabbed perfume on the pulse of each wrist, in the cleft of her split earlobe, in the scoop at the base of her throat. She coiffed herself in her best wig, a long blonde pageboy all of a piece that she wore only to weddings and other special occasions. She uncapped all of her bottles and emptied all of the pills into her mouth and swallowed them without water. She returned to the bed, drew the covers up to her chin, and lay there with eyes wide open looking back at her life until all the vital moisture within was lapped up by tongues of flame and she was turned into a pillar of salt.