One Hundred Philistine Foreskins Page 10

  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 a
ll 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.”