One Hundred Philistine Foreskins Read online

  Tema returned to the classroom, slumped, head lowered, seeking to enter as unobtrusively as possible. “Gai avek!” Miss Pupko cried out sharply in Yiddish. Jolted, Tema raised her eyes despite her ardent wish at the moment to remain invisible. Was the teacher ordering her to get out? Could the news have already spread so rapidly like a plague? But then Tema recognized this as the translation into Yiddish of the words of King David’s son Amnon to his half sister Tamar, right after he was done raping her—“Get up, Get out!” Amnon had barked to the Jewish princess Tamar, and then to his royal attendant, “Get this thing out of here and lock the door behind her.”

  As Tema made her way to her desk in the back of the room and sat down, turning her head from the swampy girls’ smell of stagnant menstrual blood and underarm sweat to stare out the streaked window, Miss Pupko continued with the lesson, leaning in toward the class. “Memorize these words, girls, wear them like a seal on your heart if, heaven forbid, you are ever tempted to give in to the evil inclination. ‘And Amnon now hated her with a very terrible hatred, the hatred he hated her with was much greater than any love he had ever felt for her before.’”

  They were up to chapter thirteen. Tema realized she had been out of the room for four chapters and look at all that had happened in the meantime. She wondered what happened to princess Tamar who, following the rape, was taken in like a casualty to her brother Absalom’s house, and two years later he exacted his revenge, setting up their half brother Amnon to be terminated. But beyond that, concerning Tamar’s fate, not a word. Did she take her own life from shame? Did her brother arrange to have her stoned in an honor killing for disgracing the family by letting herself be violated? The text is finished with her, except perhaps indirectly when it informs us that Absalom had three sons with names not listed, and one daughter, a beauty called Tamar. Jews name their children after dead relatives.

  Miss Pupko gave Tema a lacerating glance. Between the two of them, there was a long-standing entrenched tension. The teacher was exceedingly aware that Tema conducted her own private study of Tanakh and had even memorized entire books, including such long ones as Isaiah and Psalms, to the point that you could just spit out one word and this strange girl could supply the entire sentence that encased it complete with chapter and verse citation. Who would ever marry such a freak, and motherless besides? She was like some kind of illui, a prodigy who had mastered the complete Talmud, except that an illui was an honored category reserved exclusively for boys—in a girl such precocious flashes of brilliance were simply bizarre and superfluous and disturbing, there wasn’t even an accepted feminine form for the term. Miss Pupko felt in her heart that Tema had nothing but contempt for her knowledge of the Scripture, and she was keenly wounded. Tema regarded herself as too good for this review, Miss Pupko thought bitterly, there was nothing she could learn from it, that was why she had stayed out of the room so long, doing her business, whatever it was, in the toilet or wherever.

  “Tema Bavli,” Miss Pupko bellowed, “Read!”

  Slowly and deliberately Tema turned back toward the stifling, puberty-laced interior of the room from staring outside through the grimy window down into the street where she had been observing Rabbi Manis Schmeltzer opening the door to his car illegally parked in front of a fire hydrant, removing the CLERGY sign from the windshield, flipping the sign along with his black fedora hat onto the front passenger seat, cupping his black velvet yarmulke and readjusting it on his head, hoisting the tail of his glossy black kaftan in order to slide his haunches more comfortably into the driver’s seat—and then she pictured him jiggling his hindquarters, easing them into the bowl of the seat with a palpable sense of well-being, and jutting his chin forward toward the rearview mirror, drawing back his lips and baring his teeth like a primate to examine them proprietarily before inserting his key into the ignition and setting forth with a roar. Tema gazed at Miss Pupko in complete confusion. “Aha, so you weren’t paying attention,” the teacher said. “You don’t even know the place.”

  When school ended, Tema walked to the subway station intending to make her way home to purge herself in privacy, to brush her teeth thoroughly and rinse out her mouth, to stand under the shower for as long as possible before someone started banging on the door. But since it was a Sunday, with no secular instruction, late afternoon in early summer but still daylight, Tema went instead in the other direction almost without being fully aware of her movements or that she had made any particular decision at all, and she boarded the train that would take her to the second train that would take her to the bus that would bring her to the Old Montefiore cemetery in Queens where, once, her mother could always be found waiting to listen to everything.

  But ever since the stone had been unveiled over her mother’s grave, a slab of granite with the minimal inscription entirely in Hebrew from right to left—name, date of birth and death in accordance with the Jewish calendar linked by a minus sign, and the generic double-edged one-size-fits-all compliment for females from the book of Proverbs, A WOMAN OF VALOR WHO CAN FIND—Tema’s visits had grown more and more infrequent. Her mother was no longer there, no longer nearby, she was packed away, sealed off, she no longer cared. And this was what Tema also felt now as she approached the grave in the twilight with the darkness beginning to descend, her mother moving even farther away from her to a cold point in the distance.

  “Mama, Mama!” Tema began screaming into that distance, her cries bouncing from headstone to headstone in the cemetery emptied of all other living beings. She bent down to gather a handful of pebbles and small rocks and granite and marble chips that had cracked off the gravestones, but instead of setting them down on her mother’s grave as a sign that she had come by to visit, she began throwing them, pelting her mother’s monument with missile after missile. Horrified by her actions, Tema broke out in sobs, “I’m sorry, Mama, I’m sorry!”—and she fell down on the plot as if splayed on her mother’s body with her arms hugging its headstone, crying so hard, crying like she used to cry when she was a little girl, her entire body heaving until the breath seemed to be sucked out of her and all her moisture drained, and she swooned, collapsed from sheer physical depletion.

  She woke up in the pitch dark and began staggering around the cemetery like the abandoned children Hansel and Gretel in the Black Forest fairytale, only at least they had each other whereas she was entirely alone, utterly lost and with no bearings at all as to where she was in the world, groping in the darkness until she fell partway into an open grave awaiting its dead the next morning, grasping onto one of the two mounds of soft, freshly dug up earth that rose on either side. This is where she was found at dawn by the caretaker of the cemetery making his first rounds. For the remaining weeks of that school year Tema was sick in her bed. She never took the final exam on the second book of Samuel for the Prophets class or in any other subject for that matter, and they didn’t bother with makeup tests either since, as the principal Rabbi Manis Schmeltzer himself so wisely pointed out, “Who are we kidding? Let’s face it, it really doesn’t make a difference one way or the other in the overall life schedule of these girls.”

  During the first stage of her illness Tema barely responded at all. But after about a week she returned from wherever she had been; she recognized that she was completely altered, that she had undergone an event terrible and undeniable, that she had given up one form of bondage in exchange for being bound to something else—she would never be free. She had come back from the dead with secrets, with forbidden knowledge, weighed down by a calling. The first person she saw when she opened her eyes was Frumie sitting with legs apart on a chair at the bedside in her pink chenille bathrobe stretched taut and pulled open to expose a patch of the great smooth mound of her pregnant belly with a dark line trailing downward from the plug of her navel. “Oh my God, why did you leave me?” Tema cried out, and her voice came up as if from below—deeper, riper, the voice of the blood of her mother crying out to her from the ground. Frumie’s head sank low over her
belly, her hair tightly bound up in a married woman’s headscarf. “I’m sorry, Frumie, I don’t mean to hurt you,” Tema said. “Such a life is just not meant for me.”

  For much of the remainder of the period that Tema lived under her father’s roof, until she left home at the age of twenty or so, one of the signature refrains by which she was tagged within the family was her rejection of “such a life”—and as if to elaborate by way of a concrete example, she would inevitably specify that she was never getting married. While she was still in school at Beis Ziburis, her father, Reb Berel Bavli, dismissed it as an adolescent trifle, though from time to time as the years accumulated, at the expanding Sabbath table with more and more miniature female offspring lining the sides flowing from his seat at the head as from the source of the river, when Tema would once again be provoked to restate her refusal with respect to marriage, Reb Berish would lean back in his armchair to allow more scope for his ample gut, blow his nose into his napkin, give out a loud and succulent belch to which he felt fully entitled as the sole and dominant male, feeder of all these female mouths, and he would launch into some variation of “Takkeh? You should excuse me if I have to comment with a greps—but is that so? Not getting married? You think maybe you’re too good for anyone, Miss Hassenfeffer? So, tell me something if you don’t mind, what else will you do with yourself if you don’t get married? Bang your head against the wall? Spit wooden nickels? Dance a kazatzka? Nu, so I’m waiting to hear—explain me already.”

  The matter, however, grew far more urgent after Tema finished high school and still refused to budge from her position as, one by one, like ducks in a shooting gallery, each of her classmates either became engaged or was married and some could even be spotted already pushing a baby carriage down the street. Tema alone was taking no steps to begin real life. The time had come for her father to pay attention. A girl could not forever remain in such a holding pattern; before you knew it a new crop, younger and fresher, would be moved to the front of the shelves, and she would have to be sold off at a bargain price past the expiration date, cut-rate goods, remainders, as is. Meanwhile, though, for his sins, under no circumstances would this prima donna daughter of his consent to fill this gap in her life in a respectable way by teaching at Beis Ziburis, for example, for which she was remarkably qualified though she herself claimed she did not know enough.

  Reluctantly, therefore, Reb Berish gave Tema permission to attend night courses at Brooklyn College just so she would have something to do with her time during this limbo; she could after all make some practical use of this dead space by working toward a degree in elementary school education, for example, which, God willing, he hoped and prayed she would never have to complete, though it was a very good backup career for a woman if it came to that since it fit so compactly into the schedule of a wife and mother. During the day, Tema continued with her own private curriculum of Jewish studies behind the locked door of her room at home, and for a brief period she came into his office part-time several days a week at her father’s insistence, to contribute to her “room and board,” as he put it, helping out with the phones, especially with handling complaints, until the day the other ladies, the secretaries and the bookkeepers, listened wide-eyed as the boss’s daughter explained to a caller that No, that wasn’t rat feces in the box of chocolates, it was the candy itself, and even if it was rat feces, the Berel Bavli hashgakha seal meant that it was one-hundred-and-ten-percent kosher, you can count on it, ess gezunt aheit, eat in good health.

  Privately, Reb Berel Bavli put out the word to all the yentas on the circuit that he was now in the market for a suitable shiddukh for his daughter, Tema, and naturally he got in touch with every one of the recommended matchmakers operating in the territory. The professional assessment was that Tema Bavli was an exceptionally beautiful and brilliant girl. Both of those attributes were on the minus side. Also on the minus side was the fact that her mother had died young of circumstances that were not exactly clear, from a physical or a mental problem, either of which was not good news, either of which could, God forbid, be inherited by the children, may they multiply. In addition, certain rumors did not exactly improve her prospects, including reports by witnesses that she had often been seen coming and going from the public library, which suggested that she polluted her mind with English books and other garbage. Finally, the matter of her having been found one morning in an empty grave in a cemetery reportedly after having experienced some kind of mystical vision that many suspected could more accurately have been described as a nervous breakdown of some sort was common knowledge in certain circles, and though this event had occurred several years earlier when she was considerably younger and more impressionable and understandably still overcome by the loss of her mother, unfortunately it did not help in the delicate situation of pinning down a girl’s destined mate.

  On the plus side, however—and this, by universal agreement of the professional matchmakers, was a tremendous plus—the prospective bride’s father, the distinguished Reb Berel Bavli, was an extremely wealthy man. In comparison to this, every other plus paled and was not worth mentioning, even and including the plus of Reb Berish’s well-documented record as a benefactor of many worthy causes and his numerous notable charitable acts such as his weekly custom of putting each of his little girls on the meat scale every Friday morning and then distributing their weight in top rib or chuck roast stamped with the Berel Bavli kosher seal of approval to the poor for the Sabbath stew. The consensus, then, of these experts who dealt day in and day out with delivering perfect matches from heaven was that, with regard to Tema Bavli and her special situation, they should narrow the search to a young man acclaimed to be brilliant and diligent, a beacon in holy studies, a talmid hokhom of the top caliber, but also dirt-poor. Once the couple was married, may it be in a good hour, the boy would sit and learn all day, while the wife would have babies, and her father, Reb Berel Bavli, would support them for as long as necessary, maybe forever.

  With this plan in mind, they plunged into the search. One suitable candidate after another was put forward, all of whom, without exception, Tema refused to even consider. She stuck her fingers into her ears and made clacking noises with her tongue to drown out a recitation of their glowing qualities. She ran to her room, slammed the door, and locked it from within.

  In desperation, Reb Berel Bavli made a decision to bring his daughter to his spiritual guide, the Oscwiecim Rebbe, to talk some sense into her. There was no question of refusing to go to this consultation. Reb Berish made it crystal clear that should that be the course Tema chose, he would wash his hands of her for good; she could go sleep in the streets for all he cared and eat from the garbage pails and squat down to pish and cock behind a bush.

  The Oscwiecim Rebbe was already in place in his designated chair at the head of his dining room table in which only he was permitted to sit and which stood empty as if occupied by his ghost when he was not there to fill it. Behind him in the shadows stood his son, Kaddish, his chief shammes and right-hand man. Reb Berish, his major donor, took a seat to the rebbe’s right, with Tema standing before them to their left like a defendant in the dock, and the rebbetzin, with her everyday oxbloodshoepolish-colored wig slightly askew on her head and in her flowered housecoat with the sleeves pushed up to her elbows, listening in through the open kitchen door as she continued rolling and shaping more than two hundred matzah balls for the forthcoming Sabbath’s chicken soup.

  Stroking philosophically his long white beard yellowed around the mouth by tobacco and tea, the rebbe mumbled a few perfunctory questions in Yiddish to Tema since he was already familiar with the main points of the case through her father and chose to avoid being troubled by her side of the story. After a brief consultation with his wife, who now stood beside him mopping the sweat from her forehead with a dishrag, the rebbe announced his diagnosis that Tema was possessed by a dybbuk, the naked soul of a dead sinner condemned to wander the earth in restless torment, possibly even the girl’s own moth
er, who had invaded the vessel of Tema’s body to take refuge there. It was this dybbuk that was speaking through Tema’s mouth insisting she would never get married, the rebbe explained, these were not the words and certainly not the thoughts or desires of a respectable and sensible girl like Tema Bavli herself from such an outstanding and reputable family.

  It would be necessary to expel this dybbuk from the vessel of Tema’s body, and since they already had her there in the room, it made perfect sense to proceed with the exorcism at once. Tema briefly considered turning and running out of the house of the Oscwiecim Rebbe to make her escape, but where could she go? She was trapped as if in a dream in which she was both actor—or acted upon—and observer. It was a Thursday evening in early winter, darkness was descending. Ten men were rounded up, trudging in from the street in their galoshes with their shopping bags, to make up a minyan. The rebbetzin turned on a lamp, and for atmosphere she lit the candles in all of her Sabbath sterling silver candlesticks, which approximated, since one is forbidden to count, the number of her children and grandchildren, close to one hundred.

  She directed Tema to remove her shoes and stockings, and pointed to the chair in which Tema must sit. Pinning Tema in place for the procedure with one arm encircling her neck in a kind of headlock and the two fingers of her other hand pressing down firmly on Tema’s pulse where the demon resided, the rebbetzin whispered urgently into Tema’s ear, “Push! Push! Push that dybbuk out, daughter!”

  At the same time, the rebbe, her husband, was stationed at Tema’s bare feet, which were resting on a stool. At his wife’s behest, he was holding out a bowl to catch the exiting demon while intoning Psalm ninety-one over and over again, forward and backward, for what seemed like an eternity—You who sit in the high mystery, You who rest in the shade of Shaddai—his eyes glued to Tema’s big toe as it was sinful for his gaze to stray any higher up for the sign of the blood that must trickle down to mark the exit of the dybbuk.