One Hundred Philistine Foreskins Page 13

  Later that evening, in the lounge after philosophy class, she cleared away the coffee cups and cookie crumbs and unrolled Howie’s offering in front of Elisha Pardes, who stared at it for a long time in silence twisting as usual the coils of his beard. “To paraphrase what Shekhem son of Hamor told Jacob’s sons after he had raped their sister Dina,” Elisha spoke at last, “Ask anything you want of me, including my precious foreskin and the foreskin of every single guy in my town, and I’ll give it to you—as long as I get the girl.”

  What she should ask of Howie Stern soon emerged with pure clarity from the hints embedded in Elisha’s words. Because she had accepted his first gift, Howie was emboldened not long after to present her with another, this time with trembling hands—a small, flat object folded into wax paper such as might be used to wrap a corned beef sandwich with a pickle.

  “I’m giving you the most precious thing I own,” Howie said as he slid the package in front of her. Tema made no move to claim it, so Howie himself peeled back the wax paper to reveal a crisp new United States passport, opening it lovingly and flattening it out on the table to show off a mug shot of his street-battered face, and then flipping through the entire booklet to reveal one blank page after another.

  “I’m trusting you with my life. I’m giving it to you to hold on to until I get the money together to make aliya to Israel. It’s very valuable—you know what I’m saying?—and I live in a lousy neighborhood, so the main thing I’m asking is you should keep it in a safe place for me—okay?”

  Tema sat frozen in her seat staring at this object that was like lifeblood for him. She reached out to draw it closer. She picked it up with two fingers as if it were a spider, slipped it down the front of her sweater and tucked it into her bra, from where it instantly gave off a small puff of aroma like an atomizer, smoked meats and brine.

  Not long afterward, Tema asked for what she wanted, putting her proposal before Howie, laying out the terms on the table without embellishment. It was quite possible, she told him by way of incentive, for him to get to Israel much sooner than he had ever imagined, to live there in far greater comfort than he had ever dreamed of for as long as he liked, even to enjoy what amounted to a grant to cover in full his training as a scribe, provided he agreed to two things.

  The first thing he would have to agree to was to marry her. Her father, an extremely wealthy man as it happened, would support them in style for as long as was necessary, even forever if that’s what it took. Her father already considered her damaged goods anyway, so he was in no position to reject her marriage even to the poor schlemiel deli worker she had been seen talking to at the Israel restaurant like some kind of slutty pritzeh. Thanks to Howie, Tema informed him, her reputation was now completely mud, ruined beyond repair. Howie could trust her on this—her father would come through with the money after arriving at the dead-end conclusion that Howie was the best she could do under the circumstances. There was absolutely no doubt in Tema’s mind that her father would stamp his Berel Bavli kosher seal of approval smack on the flank of their marriage and proceed to do the right thing by her for all to see.

  The second thing Howie would have to agree to, Tema went on, was that, even though they would be married in the eyes of the world and the law and of Moses and Israel, it would be a marriage in name only. Privately, between the two of them, where it counted the most, they would live like brother and sister. What Howie needed to keep in mind above all else, Tema stressed, was this: she would only be like a sister to him, nothing more. If he ever dared to try any funny business with her, to make moves on her in the slightest degree in private in a way that crossed the line from brotherliness, for example, she would walk out on him immediately if not sooner, no ifs, ands, or buts. Her father would rally to her side and cut him off completely while continuing to support her generously since she would not hesitate to accuse him of all manner of atrocities. And even if he threatened to exercise his masculine prerogative under religious law by refusing to give her a get, she wouldn’t care; it made no difference to her one way or the other if he gave her a divorce or not—she had no intention of remarrying anyway, she had never wanted to get married in the first place, all she wanted was to get out of her father’s house; marrying him was an act of necessity and survival on her part, even, you might say, of desperation. To put it simply so that Howie could grasp the big picture, Tema elaborated, what they would have between them would resemble a marriage between an alien who needs a green card and an American citizen; for the alien such a marriage was the only way in, and for Tema such a marriage was the only way out. So that’s the deal, he was never to touch her, never, Tema summed up for Howie—take it or leave it, and she folded her arms in front of her chest, staring at him grimly.

  “But what about my health?” Howie said finally, practically whining, passing a hand forlornly across his crotch to make his point. “How about my needs?”

  Tema barked out a sharp laugh that caused almost everyone in that restaurant to stop chewing and turn around to stare.

  “What are you laughing for?” Howie asked sullenly.

  “Don’t worry,” Tema said, “I’ll find an outlet for you. Scout’s honor.” And she drew his passport out from inside her sweater, placed her left hand flat upon it, and raised her right hand as if taking a solemn oath.

  They were married at the end of August at the Roosevelt Hotel on East Forty-fifth Street in Manhattan. Tema’s father, Reb Berel Bavli, pronounced “Roosevelt” to sound like “rooster,” and in honor of the occasion he personally with his own hands slaughtered hundreds of hens and cut the throats of a herd of cows for the impressively lavish smorgasbord and the elaborate wedding feast that people could not stop talking about for many months afterward. The morning after the wedding an article about it appeared in New York Times—not an announcement in the society section but on the front page itself, as Reb Berel Bavli had privately arranged with the New York City police commissioner to close off the entire block in front of the hotel between Madison and Park Avenues so that the ceremony could be held outside in the street under the sky as the dusk settled into darkness. At the bottom of page one of the Times there was a photograph shot from the roof of the Roosevelt Hotel showing a sea made up of the tops of thousands of black hats, and in the corner, if you looked very closely, a lonely white dot, the crown of the head of the bride, Miss Tema Bavli, later to be known as HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, Ima Temima, her face so heavily veiled with a white satin cloth of such weight and thickness that she could not see her way at all and had to be guided by her stepmother the refugee, Mrs. Frumie Bavli, and her mother-in-law the corset fitter, Mrs. Mildred Stern, to her place under the marriage canopy like the condemned, blindfolded on the road to the gallows.

  One week after the wedding Mr. and Mrs. Howard Stern boarded the Zim Lines SS Zion in New York harbor. Howie’s eyes misted with emotion as he gazed up at the blue-and-white flag with the Star of David of the Jewish State hoisted proudly on top of the ship, waving in the breeze like the flag of any other normal and legitimate country in the community of nations with a fleet of its own. The newlyweds, traveling with thirty stiff new leather suitcases, one of them stuffed exclusively with toilet paper at Tema’s insistence since she had heard that the still-very-young state had not yet evolved to a civilized level in that department, were installed in a first class cabin. Waving from the deck to family and friends, including Elisha Pardes who was standing alone in the distance with arms raised, palms uplifted, and the mouth on his wan face in the shape of a silent scream, and whom she acknowledged with a discreet nod, Tema left her homeland and her birthplace and the house of her father and set sail for Israel, never to return.

  You Shall

  Give Me the

  Firstborn

  of Your Sons—

  and You Shall

  Do the Same

  for Your Cattle

  and Sheep

  On the morning of Passover eve, April 1968, Haim Ba’al-Teshuva, as Howie Ste
rn was by then already known, scribe and phylacteries maker, joined a group of brash ideologues who had responded with blazing enthusiasm to a small newspaper ad—WANTED, FAMILIES OR SINGLES TO RESETTLE ANCIENT CITY OF HEBRON; FOR DETAILS CONTACT RABBI M. LEVINGER. That morning, Passover eve, eighty-eight yearning souls, men and women, many bundling along their children, made their way in caravans from every corner of the land of Israel to the Park Hotel in Hebron, once the summer resort of choice of the Jordanian upper classes for the cool, dry air of the ancient city. Rabbi Moshe their leader boldly set down on the reception desk an envelope stuffed with cash, advance payment in full to the Arab owner of the hotel for accommodations.

  For the remainder of that day the pioneers toiled together in a spirit of common purpose, with an intensity such as Howie Stern had never before experienced even during the euphoric six days of the miraculous war less than a year earlier that had restored the biblical heartland and the holy city of Jerusalem itself to the Jewish people. Making their preparations for the forthcoming festival, they cleaned and scrubbed, they banished every trace of forbidden grains and leaven from the portion of the kitchen allotted to them and stocked it with the Passover supplies they had carted along for this exodus to the pith of the Promised Land.

  When night fell, they celebrated their Seder at a spiritual height so exalted all traces of their physical and mortal bonds seemed to have been overcome, rendered meaningless and beside the point. Afterward, the women and children collapsed two or three to a bed in the hotel rooms, while the men found places to stretch out their bodies on the cold floor of the lobby without even a stone to place under their heads for a pillow, such as Father Jacob had when he stopped to rest in nearby Beit El on his flight from his brother Esau to Haran, and in his dream he saw a ladder with angels ascending and descending, and God Himself appeared to him and said, This ground you are lying upon I will give to you and to your offspring.

  Two days later, Rabbi Moshe their leader announced to the world that the Jewish people have returned to this ground, never to leave again. This ancient city of Hebron belongs to us, it is the site of the Cave of Makhpela, the tombs of our patriarchs and our matriarchs, which Father Abraham purchased at the going rate of four hundred shekels of silver from Efron the Hittite as a burial place for his wife Sarah. Without haggling, without asking for any special treatment or consideration or favors or deals, Father Abraham purchased it at full price, retail, fair and square; it was the legitimate estate of his descendants in the line of the son he had with Mother Sarah, Father Isaac. We, the Jewish people, have prudently and with commendable foresight kept the receipt, its authenticity available for anyone’s examination in the book of Genesis, chapter twenty-three, verses sixteen through twenty.

  Howie Stern, in his new life as Haim Ba’al-Teshuva, scribe and phylacteries maker now at long last of Hebron, had always been struck by the deep and wondrous implications of the Hebrew word for receipt—kabbala. A follower of the great mystic Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, Howie abided by the teaching that every Jew is holy, and, by extension, everything touched by a Jew is holy—and Jews touched a lot of receipts. But when it came to the receipt for Hebron, its sacred powers were truly kabbalistic, it transported you to a state of breathless ecstasy and selfless willingness to be consumed in the mystical fires.

  Howie’s wife, Tema, did not join him in this adventure. She remained at home in Jerusalem, not only because she had serious moral and intellectual reservations about the Hebron offensive, and not only because she did not like living in squalor or roughing it, but also because after nearly twelve years of marriage and a single bout of sexual intimacy with her husband in name only—a copulation episode that may have lasted no longer than a minute in time but felt like an eternity—Tema was in the very last stages of pregnancy. Howie had thrown himself upon her with savagery and violence, screaming, “Hey, I’m fucking you! I’m fucking you! Look guys, I’m fucking her!” His triumphant cries would have been more repellent had they not also struck her as so pathetically comic that she was in danger of insulting him unforgivably by erupting into laughter. Nevertheless, she managed to control herself—taking it like a man—lying there on her back without resisting, her eyes open wide, observing the progress of an oversized juke bug scuttling along the ceiling who didn’t get very far.

  She had made a deal with Howie, and she was doing the honorable thing by living up to her part. The deal was—if he instructed her in the skills of a scribe, which no master sofer would risk imparting to a woman, and if he guided her in the writing and completion of a Torah scroll in accordance with the strictest rules and regulations, she would allow him a single shot at possessing her—she would let him “know” her; that was the euphemism in the text she had just written out letter by letter, as if this alone were the portal to complete knowledge and ownership of a woman, with no equivalent or reciprocal knowledge or possession of a man by a woman. That was the bargain she had made with her husband-in-name Howie Stern, who reinvented himself as Haim Ba’al-Teshuva, the penitent who had returned from sinfulness to full faith the minute he learned that the seed he had sown with tears would bear joyous fruit.

  When her little mother Torah was completed, from the first word, Bereishit, to the last word, Yisrael, over three hundred thousand letters, each one inscribed painstakingly with a turkey feather quill and specially prepared ink on parchment made from the skin of an unborn calf, one-hundred-percent kosher in every respect except that it had been created by a rogue scribe who was a woman, hopelessly impure no matter how many times she immersed herself in the ritual bath, she did not renege on her agreement. She was a good sport. She lay down on her back and paid up.

  Afterward Howie rolled off her, and though entirely spent and panting, managed to inquire, “How come I don’t see no blood?” By way of an explanation, she told him a story about how every day in the springtime when she was a little girl, with her neighbor’s dog Germy locked in his holding cell observing her, lunging at her from the end of his chain and barking madly, she used to climb the trellises bolted to the sides of her family’s garage at the end of the driveway, even in the skirts she was required to wear. She would climb those trellises every day in the spring in order to gather bouquets of roses to bring to her mother and extract a ghost of a smile. And every day when she came down from the trellises her flesh was torn by the thorns and splinters, and blood streamed down her face and arms and legs. That was how she had lost it, she told Howie, that was why there was no blood left.

  Now, on this Passover eve, April 1968, standing on the terrace of the apartment her father had bought for them on Ben-Yefuneh Street in the Baka neighborhood of Jerusalem, watching Howie set off in his Peugeot heading into the Judean Hills past the tomb of Rachel Our Mother who had died in childbirth on the road to Efrat, driving onward to join his band of hotheads and reclaim the ancient city of Hebron, she pressed both hands against the massive heaving mound of her womb as she was seized by the insistent force of her first contraction. She recognized that a process had begun that would have to come to completion one way or another. The course had been set. No power on earth could stop it.

  Supporting her belly from underneath, she waddled back inside to the small study attached to her bedroom, and sat down with her legs apart on the edge of a straight-backed chair by the window to consider how to proceed. What her father had bought for them was actually two apartments, which they had combined into one by knocking out the dividing wall. Howie had his own bedroom on the other side in what had once been the second apartment, though they kept a proper master suite with the two beds pushed together in a room that the former owners had dedicated as a memorial shrine to their son, killed in the 1956 Suez War. This official conjugal chamber was set up for the sake of public image, to forestall the gossips, and for the same reason she visited the ritual bath every month in compliance with the laws of family purity required of a married woman still in her childbearing years so that the ladies could comment to each other in the
market the next morning that they had noticed Mrs. Stern coming home from the mikva last night, may the barren soon rejoice with her sons gathered around her, amen.

  Her father would have preferred to buy in the Rekhavia section, which he regarded as more dignified and established, its streets named for distinguished commentators and sages. But Tema had insisted on Baka, with its streets called directly by the names of biblical characters, plain and simple, a few women’s names too. And even though Ben-Yefuneh was not in the section of Baka mysterious with lush gardens and old abandoned Arab stone houses, there was for her a measure of ironic justification in settling on a street named for Caleb son of Yefuneh, whose first name in Hebrew, Kalev, written without vowels, consisted of the same three letters as the word for dog, kelev. Her life had come full circle; once again, she found herself on the street of the dog. Reb Berel Bavli let his daughter have her way with regard to choice of location despite the fact on the ground that he was the one writing the checks because bottom line he was investing not in real estate but in progeny. Whenever he was in touch with her, usually by telephone which, whether the connection was clear or not, required shouting due to the accepted etiquette for long distance, he never failed to boom out across an ocean and a continent, “So-nu? Something cooking in the pot already? What—I didn’t pay for enough rooms for you maybe?”

  Now, sitting in the study of her Baka apartment looking out to Ben-Yefuneh Street as the labor pains surged up in shorter intervals and with greater intensity, she reflected on her situation. She was a woman past thirty with a history of five miscarriages all in the first trimester of her previous pregnancies about to give birth to the only baby she had ever carried to term. The sensible course to follow would be to call a taxi at once to convey her to the nearest hospital. Nevertheless, she remained in her place, unable to take action.