One Hundred Philistine Foreskins Read online

  To complicate matters, it was the eve of Passover. Almost every Jew in the city was occupied with the frenetic last-minute preparations for the festival. There was no Jew who did not have a Seder to attend. She too had houses that would open their doors to her as another needy soul and welcome her to their table now that her cowboy husband had headed to the hills to resettle the Holy Land with a critically urgent mandate that could not be put off for another minute; his priorities were fixed even with a wife on the perilous cusp of giving birth to his only child. She was aware with grim resignation that already on this day the hospitals must be severely understaffed, and, the longer she waited, the fewer would be the professionals on duty to attend to her. She would end up being delivered by the Arab janitor on the stone floor of the hospital lobby beside a slop pail and a squeegee. How had it happened that she had lived and sustained herself and arrived at this season with no one to turn to? How had it come to pass that she was so utterly alone?

  The pains were growing more regular but were still tolerable—and so her thoughts drifted to the preposterous idea of approaching her renowned Jerusalem teacher of Tanakh, Nekhama Leibowitz, in whose classes she shone and whose gilyonot handouts with questions on the Torah portion she wrestled with weekly, coming up with answers so startling and original that they shook even the pedagogic rigorousness of her legendary teacher, at times thrillingly, at other times with horror over the basic assumptions that had been tossed out and the boundaries that had been crossed.

  She could picture Nekhama in her tiny apartment at this very moment, with her blind husband settled in his familiar corner, her plain little woolen beret perched at an angle on her head covering her hair, signifying her status as a married woman. Despite the prominence she had carved out for herself as a celebrated teacher of Tanakh to both men and women, territory that had until then been almost exclusively the domain of men, the skin of her hands would still be rubbed raw in the soapy basin, her fingers bloodied from peeling the potatoes, she would scrupulously carry out the menial chores traditionally assigned to women in preparing for the holiday—this was the model she set forth for other women, stepping on the line firmly and publicly, but not, God forbid, overstepping or blurring it.

  There was no doubt in her mind that Nekhama in her lovingkindness would make an effort to help her, even with the strict Pesakh deadline looming, from the immutable Written Law itself that could not on any account be put off. But was it truly possible to seek her out now, at such an hour and for such a reason, as Mother Rebekah had gone to seek out and inquire of God when her pregnancy was killing her, crying, Why me? Why me?—a simple human question. Nekhama would ponder the question in her usual circular way, answering with yet another question from the point of view of the commentators: What is so hard here for Rashi? What is troubling Rashbam? What is bothering Ramban? What is Hazal’s problem? And Tema would cry, My teacher, that is not the correct question. The correct question is right in front of your eyes, What is so hard here for Mother Rebekah? What is troubling Tema?

  Just picturing this scenario exhausted her, and she made her way heavily into the adjacent room to lie down on her bed. She might have turned to Elisha Pardes, her other teacher, but she knew he was not in Israel at this time because, had he been there, he would surely have summoned her at once to his side. As the Toiter successor he was no doubt at this moment in the Fifth Avenue penthouse preparing for the Passover, with his wife and daughters and his disciples already in mourning over him. The veil had already been lowered over the face of the previous Toiter, and the mittens drawn up on his hands after the still glowing roach of his joint had been prized loose from his fingers. He had been gathered back to his fathers. The first time Elisha came to Israel as the new Toiter, not long after Tema’s own arrival, he dispatched a disciple down to Jerusalem to bring her up to him in Haifa. As the car drew up to his villa on the top of Mount Carmel, she saw him walking toward her from among the pine trees, where he had gone for a session of hitbodedut, to pour out his heart to God in seclusion like a child pleading with his father. His hair and beard had turned shimmering white, he resembled Elijah the prophet coming like a vision out of the Carmel. He had aged devastatingly in so short a time, he looked like a man of seventy years.

  Tema turned to her escort and asked, as Mother Rebekah had asked of the servant Eliezer of Damascus who was delivering her to be the wife of his master Abraham’s son, Isaac, Who is that coming toward us from the woods? The answer came, That is my master, the Toiter.

  Like Mother Rebekah who had fallen from her camel in a kind of swoon when she first laid eyes on Isaac and had drawn her veil over her face, Tema’s knees grew weak as she stepped out of the car, and she buckled onto the concrete, covering her face with both her hands in mortification.

  Elisha the Toiter Rav lifed her by the hands and led her into the villa, to a private room stark white overlooking the sea, with a bunch of red poppies in a crystal vase in the center of the table, and he closed the door. He fell on her neck and kissed her, and raised his voice and wept as Father Jacob had wept with recognition when he first set eyes on Rachel Our Mother, she was so lovely in face and form. She was his sister / his bride, he said to her, she was the Toiter’s shadow, his mirror image, his locked garden, his sealed fountain. Her name would no longer be Tema, he said to her, she would be called Temima—because she was blameless and without blemish, perfection, she was the pure Ima, the holy Mother. He placed his left hand under her head and with his right hand he caressed her. Love is as fierce as death, he said to her—and so they knew one another, and, finally, after all the years of grieving, reborn as Temima, she was comforted for the loss of her mother.

  Thereafter, whenever he came to Israel, several times a year, a car would be sent to bring Temima so that she could study at his feet for the duration of his stay, sometimes for as long as a week—an extraordinary privilege and an honor to be singled out in this way by one of the giants of the generation, as she explained to her husband, Howie Stern. In the first years he would arrive by ship to the port of Haifa and never venture out of the Galilee, going as far as Safed or Tiberias but no farther, because, as he told her, more of the Holy Land would be just too much for him, he could absorb it only in small doses. It was like reading the Torah, he elaborated. Often he was obliged to stop at the first words of the third verse—“And God said”—he could not go on, it was too overwhelming; think about it—God said, He spoke, it was more than enough to take in. “But what He said is, ‘Let there be light,’” Temima responded with a laugh, and playfully she switched on the light to reveal their naked bodies, his already sickly and wasted, and she added, “I just wanted you to see for yourself that it’s Rachel this time, and not poor Leah with her bloodshot eyes from too much weeping.”

  Later on, when he began to arrive by plane, he would go no farther than Jaffa, where she would stay with him in a specially prepared suite of rooms overlooking the harbor from which the prophet Jonah set sail to Nineveh. His depleted body was already bruised and diseased as if it had been thrashed around in a storm, swallowed up in a darkness like the grave and then exposed to too much sunlight, and like Jonah he would beg to die, and like Job covered with scabies he would declare, Perish the day I was born and the night in which it was announced that a male child had been conceived. Nevertheless, after each of her miscarriages—five in all, all surely sons, since the Toiter can never produce a male successor of his own blood who could survive—he stroked her hair and comforted her with the words of the holy Rav Nakhman, There is no despair here in the world at all, and he set before her a meal of olives and bread and wine and figs, urging her to eat. “Why should we fast?” he would say to her as King David had said after the death of his baby son by Bathsheba, the woman he had stolen from another man. “Can we bring him back again? We are going to him, but he will never come back to us.”

  She must have dozed off, because now she started into alertness from a clenching pain and found herself soaked, lying in
a wet pool. Her water had broken, liquid was gushing out from between her thighs beyond her control, but the answer had been revealed to her through her ruminations in the realm between here and there. She needed to go find Ketura. It had been Ketura who had taken care of her after each of her five miscarriages, tending to her with blessed devotion and discretion, offering the excuses to Howie that the mistress is indisposed due to female problems—that was sufficient. It was amazing how easily a man could be deceived simply because he did not pay the correct sort of attention, it was a side benefit of not being taken seriously that a woman could count on.

  Temima knew exactly where Ketura lived: on El-Wad Road in the shadow of the Temple Mount with its Golden Dome, in an apartment Temima had rented for her. She had been to visit her there on several occasions in recent months since the Old City of Jerusalem had been breached and opened again to Jews, bringing money to Ketura to tide her over after Howie had dismissed her from their service when Temima had conceived from the single time he had flung himself upon her to collect what was owed him. Officially, Ketura was their Arab housekeeper, but soon after she arrived at their home from the Makhane Yehuda market she also began serving as Howie’s handmaid, his pilegesh, the “outlet” that, in their original negotiations in the other Israel—the Israel kosher delicatessen on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn—Temima had vowed to Howie she would provide for him for the sake of his health, to take care of his needs.

  Temima had found Ketura begging on the Agrippas Street side of the market with an exquisite mocha-skinned baby swaddled in a towel lying in a discarded grapefruit crate some distance from her by a garbage dump. The baby opened his eyes, a translucent pale color, gray almost blue like ancient glass, and stared at Temima. “I just can’t bear to watch the boy die,” Ketura had whispered when Temima had placed a coin in her hand that day in the market, even in violation of her principles against encouraging women beggars who exploited their children because she had been electrified by the remarkable scar in the shape of a black bird with outspread wings stretched across the face of this cast-off woman. Since there was no justice, at least let there be mercy.

  Ketura had just come out of the wilderness, from the patriarchal compound of Abba Kadosh, who had disgorged her with her baby. She left with her child in her arms, calling him Ibn Kadosh because he was his father’s son. The scar that had taken the oracular shape of a bird had been seared with acid onto her face by her father and brothers when she had first dared to brazenly step out on her own. Abba Kadosh had never had a woman so mystically branded. The bird beguiled him, it excited him, it pleased him to trace its outline on Ketura’s face with his finger, its wondrous shape, the wings outstretched across the cheeks emerging from the hump of her soaring refined nose. Howie, on the other hand, avoided looking at it, especially in intimate moments, and deep down he churned with resentment at Temima for this cynical fulfillment of her promise by providing for his needs and his health with damaged goods. Now, ten years later, the boy with skin like brushed sable and eyes like ice and a bearing like an exotic young prince, along with his brutally scarred mother, had been cast out once again.

  Temima folded some hand towels and packed them between her legs to absorb the flowing liquid. Wrapping her head and shoulders in a great woolen shawl, with dark glasses masking her eyes and a basket on her arm filled with the Passover macaroons that Ibn Kadosh loved covered with a white cloth napkin, she set out on foot from her apartment on Ben-Yefuneh, east on Yehuda Street, then up Hebron Road in the northward direction, away from Hebron and all of its madness toward Jerusalem and all of its madness, and passed through the great stone walls of the Old City by the portal of the Jaffa Gate.

  It was already late afternoon, the air was cool and crisp, traffic had stopped, the streets were silent and deserted as each citizen took shelter inside a warm house with the ghost of a blood smear on the doorpost to protect the firstborns and found a seat at the brightly lit Passover table. Every few steps along the way Temima was obliged to pause and lean against some inanimate support, bracing herself, moaning and massaging the writhing globe of her belly as the spasms gripped her relentlessly, wave after wave. By the time she reached the Via Dolorosa through the winding alleyways of the Old City bazaar, all of its shops shuttered and locked fast, she was doubled over with the pangs of labor, like a film run backward of Miriam mother of Yeshua HaNozri making her way along the street of her boy’s future agony, with no place to give birth and begin the story.

  At last she reached Ketura’s apartment on El-Wad Road and collapsed against its door, her wracked body brushing against it as she slumped to the ground—and the Djinn who appeared before her was Ibn Kadosh in his white underpants. He informed her that his mother was not at home, she had a job that night at the King David Hotel—in the kitchen, he stressed, lest Temima assume it was a private commission in the bedroom of a paying guest; she was working the communal Seder on this night for the rich tourists. He asked her what she had brought for him, and sat down on the floor to eat his macaroons.

  Within the hour Temima’s baby was born, extracted by Ibn Kadosh in his white underpants with almond and coconut crumbs stuck to his fingertips on the prayer rug of the living room floor, a procedure not so different from the kidding of the goats he tended on the slopes of Silwan, Temima creating much more of an uproar than the other animals, straining and bearing down frantically with sweat streaming down her cheeks flushed bright red, bleating nonstop, Mama, Mama, Mama!

  When Ketura returned home at dawn, in a headscarf and long tailored coat over her tight jeans and spangled halter top, she found Temima still sprawled on the floor covered with a fuzzy pink blanket stamped with the image of a Barbie doll that Ibn Kadosh had spread over her. The baby boy, still attached by the umbilical cord, was grazing at her breast. Ketura cut the cord and gathered up the pulpy mass of the placenta. She took it into her small kitchen and sliced off a section, hacking the remainder into two chunks like liver, one to be planted in a pot to bear a life-giving tree, the other to be wrapped in clear plastic and stored in the freezer for future emergencies. The fresh piece of placenta now sitting on her scarred countertop she dumped into a wooden bowl and minced with a chopping knife, then stirred it into a tea with lemon juice, sugar, cinnamon, and mint leaves. She brought this infusion to Temima in a glass even before setting about the task of cleaning up the new mother and her infant, wiping away the blood and mucous.

  She squatted on the floor beside Temima and fed her spoonful after spoonful of the tea until the glass was empty. “It is very good for you,” Ketura said over Temima’s squeamish objections. “Yolk-sac tea. It will save you from the sadness of after birth.”

  “But is it kosher for Passover?” Temima asked.

  “You see?” said Ketura. “Already you are joking.” And she smiled with such pleasure the wings of the bird on her face stretched out even wider as if preparing to take flight.

  A week later, Temima woke up in her bed in her Ben-Yefuneh Street apartment after a longer-than-usual undisturbed sleep, her breasts painfully hard like two boulders, swollen and engorged, the front of her nightgown stained with great blots of starch-dried milk and milk still seeping. She wondered why her baby boy, as yet unnamed, had not cried for his usual feeding, and experienced for a moment the pride of a mother with an unusually good child who so considerately sleeps through the night.

  The next morning the baby was to be circumcised. Howie had agreed by telephone, after consultation with rabbinical authorities over the fine points of which mitzvah or obligation trumps the other, to tear himself away from their holy mission of settlement at the Park Hotel in Hebron where he and his comrades were still entrenched, and to come to Jerusalem to partake of morning prayers at a nearby synagogue on the eighth day after the birth during which the holy commandment of circumcision, the brit of his first and only son, would be performed and a simple festive mitzvah meal would be offered.

  Holding herself very carefully, Temima descended from
her bed, her body still tender from the poundings and lacerations of childbirth, and shuffled to the cradle in the corner of her room to check on the baby. Where he should have been lying, she found instead a note from Ketura informing her that, on Howie’s orders, she had taken the boy to Hebron to be circumcised in the Ibrahimi Mosque. “I’m sorry, Temima,” Ketura wrote. “I really need the money.”

  Ketura returned late the next day without the child, telling Temima that they had decided it was in the boy’s best spiritual interest to remain with his father at this unprecedented messianic time. She put out both her hands palms upward and shrugged her shoulders and the wings of the bird seared across her face drooped mournfully. There was nothing she could do about it; they were all crazy, she said. The child was being cared for by one of the women in the hotel group who had given birth a month earlier—a convert with long false eyelashes called Yehudit Har-HaBayit, formerly known as Rapture Reed, Ketura had heard, the daughter of Christian evangelicals from Idaho in America, ardent believers in the State of Israel as the herald of the Second Coming. Now Yehudit Har-HaBayit suckled two babies without favoritism, one at each breast, a wet nurse in a sustained state of exaltation.

  Ketura herself had not been present at the circumcision that morning, having been requested as an Arab and a Muslim and also as a kind of impure “leper” due to the ominous discoloration of her skin, the bird of prey sprawled across her face, to leave the chamber containing the tombs of Abraham and Sarah while the ceremony took place. She stationed herself instead, as a form of protest, on the seventh step leading up to the mosque that had been erected over the burial cave, which was as far as the Jews had once been allowed to ascend for so many years, peering with longing through a small hole in the masonry at their heart’s desire, the mothers and fathers denied to them. She could hardly see anything at all, but she was able to report that she had heard from conversations around her that the gentleman who had carried out the circumcision was Temima’s own father who had just arrived the day before from Brooklyn to do the job. She handed to Temima a note from Howie in a sealed envelope, which Temima slipped unopened between the pages of her Tanakh, at Genesis, chapter twenty-two.