One Hundred Philistine Foreskins Read online

  “It was a hard birth,” Temima reported to Howie. By now, the child he called Pinkhas had found his way into her bed, under the covers, rooting into her side. “Thank God I had Ketura’s hand to hold,” Temima said. And Ketura showed Howie her hands, pierced with the stigmata of Temima’s fingernails, the Braille by which her agony could be read, the glyphs of her travail, the blood that had streamed down drying now in a palette from mud black to mottled orange.

  “An extraordinary baby, may the evil eye not befall him,” Howie heard someone say, and he turned his head to take in what appeared to be an older man with a long white beard sitting in a wheelchair in the corner of the room. He had not noticed him until now just as he had not noticed the potted plant, so central was the vision of the mother and child.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Howie, I should have introduced you,” Temima said. “This is my teacher, the Toiter Rav.”

  “The Toiter!” Howie rose to his feet and swiveled around breathlessly. “Forgive me—my back was to you. What an honor—such an honor!”

  The Toiter smiled gently. “Never mind,” he said. “I’m at the hospital, as you can see,” and he indicated the wheelchair. “I came to bless the child. May he eat butter and honey. May he despise evil and choose good.” He raised both of his hands, which were trembling like Father Isaac when he realized he had blessed the wrong son, passing them in benediction in the airspace over the newborn, and declared, “His true name is Immanuel. I would be honored to perform the brit in the Makhpela.”

  Despite the unsteady hands, Howie agreed at once to have the Toiter wield the knife upon his son, so awed was he by the offer from such a mythic holy man. Eight days later, by the tomb of Father Abraham in the Cave of Makhpela, the Toiter performed the circumcision much to the disapproval of Reb Berel Bavli, who on this occasion was demoted to the position of kvatter, handing the baby over to Howie’s father, the waiter from Ozone Park, Queens, Irwin Stern, who sat in Elijah’s chair as sandek with a pillow across his lap upon which Reb Berish deposited the baby as on an altar. The Toiter turned to Howie and said, “With your permission, since the mitzvah is incumbent on the father, I am fulfilling the role of the father.” He raised the skirt of his gold-striped kaftan and swagged it upward, tucking its edges into the gartel around his waist so that it should not impede him as he worked on the infant. Hunching over the baby, in deep concentration, his tongue sticking out from between his teeth, he sliced off the foreskin and, bending in even closer, he placed his mouth over the wound to suck up the blood—“His hands shaking like nobody’s business,” Reb Berish reported later to his wife, Frumie, who was recovering from a hysterectomy at Maimonides Hospital in Boro Park, Brooklyn. “Such a klutz, you should excuse me, I wouldn’t hire him to kill even sick chickens. It took him a year and a Wednesday to get the job done, the baby was hollering bloody murder for five minutes straight, they couldn’t shut him up. Where do they get all their money from anyways, those Toiters? The Oscwiecim rebbetzin says they’re all meshuggeh, and they have some kind of anonymous meshuggeneh donor who supports them, maybe Howard Hughes.”

  When the baby was quieted at last, the name was announced—Kook Immanuel son of Haim—may his two-hundred-and-forty-eight body parts and his three-hundred-and sixty-five veins recover fully, by his blood he will live, the sign of the covenant sealed in his flesh.

  The good convert Ruth, in front of whose tomb Temima had once presided, is a success story. The boy she gave birth to, Oved son of Boaz, grew up to become the grandfather of King David, but while he was just a baby he was the delight of Ruth’s former mother-in-law, Naomi, who took him to her bosom and became like a mother to him, inspiring the matrons in their Bethlehem village to remark to one another, Naomi has a son again, though between you and me, her daughter-in-law Ruth is better than seven sons. But for Temima in her tent not far from Bethlehem, in the military compound overlooking Hebron during the period following the birth of her son Kook Immanuel, there was no wise mother Naomi at her side to turn to when her baby let out a piercing shriek in his sleep and woke up as if bludgeoned from the nightmare of being born, and there was no trusted mother to confide in when, a week or so after the circumcision, the wound itself having mostly healed, she began to notice blisters and sores breaking out in the area of the covenant, swellings and rashes and inflammations and whitish discolorations such as are described in the chapters in the book of Leviticus devoted to zora’at, what is commonly translated as leprosy, immediately following the section on the uncleanness of a woman who has just given birth.

  Temima acknowledged to herself that what she was observing could have been contracted from the mouth of the Toiter in the course of the circumcision when he performed the meziza be’peh to suction up the blood, and she recognized the danger of the public disgrace and defamation that could ensue were she to bring the matter to the attention of the official medical and health authorities. She knew it was necessary to act immediately for the sake of the child, but her first instinct was to cover up—to take the precautions of allowing no other hands but her own to touch the baby, of never changing his diapers in front of the eyes of another, never leaving him for a minute. She slept with him on a mattress at one end of the tent, with Howie, on account of the blood of her post-birth impurity, accepting exile to a separate mattress at the other end of their tent along with the child he called Pinkhas, both babies wailing through the night.

  In this way, Temima allowed a period of time to elapse from when she first noticed the eruptions, until one morning, entirely without planning consciously, she slipped her little mother Torah into her cloth sack and her baby Kook Immanuel into a shawl slung like a pouch across the front of her body with his face pressed toward her so that he could nurse at will, and announced to Howie that she was going down to the Makhpela for a session of hitbodedut, to meditate and cry out in solitude.

  “But you’re not alone,” Howie retorted, pointing to the baby. “Leave him with me.”

  “He’s a body part,” Temima said, and she stepped forth from the tent with Howie following behind carrying the whimpering child he called Pinkhas, as Temima went to find the four soldiers who had stood watch over her from the days when she used to sit on top of Tel Rumeida at Ruth’s tomb. “Where’s your faith, Tema?” Howie demanded. “What do you need those guys to guard you for anyways? It’s safer down there in the Makhpela than in the streets of the Bronx, in case you want to know.”

  At the Makhpela, Temima’s security contingent stepped discreetly back to grant her the privacy required for the proper practice of hitbodedut as she approached the cenotaph draped in a heavy cloth embroidered with Arabic calligraphy and lavish Islamic designs marking the spot somewhere in the caves below where Mother Sarah lies. It was to bury his wife Sarah, after all, that Abraham bought this field from Efron the Hittite for the inflated price of four hundred silver shekels. Sarah was living nearby when she died, in Kiryat Arba, which is Hebron, and Abraham came up from Be’er Sheba to take care of the final arrangements.

  Temima rested her forearm against the side of the long domed monument that was Sarah’s tomb, pressed her brow into her pulsing wrist, and closed her eyes, awaiting the words that would come pouring out of her mouth like the cries of a daughter to her mother. It seemed to her as she leaned against the stone mound that she could feel the rise and fall of the maternal breast and the lump of the stopped heart behind it, and from its very depths a smothered voice—Oh yes, we were living apart by then, he in Be’er Sheva, I in Kiryat Arba which is Hebron. I would never live with the old man again after he took my son up to the mountaintop to sacrifice him. I should never have let the child out of my sight for one minute, I should never have left him alone with the old man—I’ll never forgive myself. The boy was never the same again. The Isaac who went up that mountain with the old man never came down again. That Isaac was slaughtered, burnt on the altar as an offering. No, I never saw the old man again after that, and the ghost of my Isaac rising from his own ashes, he als
o never saw the old man again except when he came with his half brother Ishmael to bury him here, somewhere alongside me I’m told—the death ride is mercilessly solo. But at least the old man spent the money to buy this plot. I set my mind on this field and I took it. I am your original Woman of Valor. (Here she gave out a bitter laugh; she was famous for her inappropriate laughter.) He was always hearing voices, the old man—but the true test is to distinguish the voice that is meant to be disobeyed.

  Temima opened her eyes and looked around. There was Ketura on all fours with a bucket beside her, swabbing the stone floor around Mother Sarah’s tomb with great flourishes of her rag. From this sign she recognized at once that the voice she had heard was a voice meant to be obeyed, and she understood its message. She signaled her four bodyguards, and instructed them to convey her and the infant, along with this Arab cleaning woman, directly from the Makhpela to Jerusalem. In less than an hour, an armored tank with smoke puffing out of the gun from the soldiers’ Noblesse cigarettes pulled up in front of Temima’s building on Ben-Yefuneh Street. She got out with the infant, followed by Ketura, and entered the apartment.

  “You’ve taken the correct steps according to the book,” the Toiter said to Temima when she informed him by telephone of the situation and all that she had done. “Seven days of quarantine outside the camp. After seven days, if there is no spread, wait seven more days, just to be sure he’s clean. Then wash his clothes and return to the camp. Over this entire period of two times seven days, recite nonstop if possible the ten psalms of the Tikkun HaKlali, which are guaranteed to cure all problems related to that troublesome part of the body, adding also Psalm fifty-one, especially verse nine, ‘Purge me with hyssop and I will become pure / Wash me and I will become whiter than snow.’ Also, at the same time, remember to give as much money as you can to charity so that his life’s breath may be mingled with the air of the land of Israel, which is entirely free of the taint of sin.”

  “And if it spreads?”

  “If it spreads, then it’s the plague of zora’at. You must dress him in rags and let his hair grow wild and tie a mask over the lower portion of his face to cover his mouth and hang a string around his neck with a bell attached that will ring whenever he approaches so that people will know that contagion is coming and they will turn away and shun him. And because he is still only a baby and cannot yet speak and call out for himself, you must pin to his shirt the words he would have been required to cry out to warn others that he is drawing near—‘Impure! Impure!’ The added advantage of this will be that no one will envy him, and the evil eye will not be alerted. This is his fate. He is a Toiter. A Toiter is always afflicted.”

  Temima set the telephone down on the bed and stretched out to rest with one arm covering her eyes and the other hand spread out flat on the rising and falling chest of the baby lying on his back beside her as the Toiter went on to describe in detail the ritual that must be enacted when the plague is cured, God willing. Two pure birds are required. Slaughter one of them over an earthen pot on top of running water. Dip into its blood a piece of cedar wood, hyssop, some scarlet stuff, and the living bird. Sprinkle the mixture seven times on the baby to purify him. Then release the living bird to fly free over the fields.

  Meanwhile, with the buzz of the Toiter’s voice in the background, Ketura removed the baby’s diaper as he lay on the bed with his mother’s hand resting upon him and concentrated on applying the first of a pharmacopoeia of remedies to the infected area that she mixed from natural ingredients in different combinations and proportions, ointments and creams and lotions she concocted from lemon balm, aloe vera, sage, tea tree oil, the wax from honeycombs, prunella, vitamin C, mushrooms, rhubarb, and parsley leaves. As Ketura continued to experiment over the course of the ensuing days, it became apparent to Temima that Howie had not been convinced by her explanation for her sudden disappearance, though, as it happened, it had been the truth—her claim that she had heard the voice of Mother Sarah at the Makhpela that required her immediate return to Jerusalem. For several hours every day, Ibn Kadosh now stationed himself on the floor in the hallway directly in front of her apartment door smoking green tobacco that he rolled himself into cigarettes and whittling slingshots while running a tape recorder at top volume blasting the voice of the child Howie called Pinkhas lamenting and crying, Ima, Ima, come home! Come home now, Ima! The neighbors were complaining, whatever Howie was paying Ibn Kadosh she knew she could top, yet Temima could not bear to silence the voice of her child even at the cost of allowing herself to be publicly shamed as a bad mother; the least she could do for this child whom she had already wronged so many times in his short life was to let him be heard.

  She went out into the hallway and stood with her hands on her hips staring down at Ibn Kadosh sitting on the floor leaning against the wall. She could see that he had grown, dark and lanky and still so handsome, his eyes the color of smoky crystal under rich lashes, a silken gauzy shadow over his top lip. She assured him she would be returning home soon, he could communicate that to Howie, but Ibn Kadosh simply shook his head, continuing to whittle with his knife, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, muttering that the mister had ordered him not to stop blasting the tape outside her door until she came back with him and brought the new baby back too, that was the deal, she could expect him here every day at her door blasting this tape until she was ready to pack up and go.

  The chopped placenta had never cheered Temima up, and the elixirs Ketura was brewing and smearing on the baby were creating a mess and having no effect either, so one day soon after Temima bound Kook Immanuel to her chest in the sling of her shawl and crossed the railroad tracks from Baka to German Colony, making her way through the streets of Talbieh to the mysterious door like a cyclop’s eye set flush into the stone wall surrounding the leper colony. The doctor who occupied the apartment inside the wall in exchange for on-call night duty to the lepers opened the door himself to let her in. He was dressed only in a loose pair of khaki Zionist shorts and brown leather Old Testament sandals even though he was expecting her; she had arranged this appointment in advance, giving as her name Miriam Gekhazi, and the baby’s name as Uziyahu, taking this precaution despite the fact that she had been assured he routinely saw patients on the side for a fee who required treatments of a highly confidential and sensitive nature, that he was scrupulously discreet. Temima stared at the sag of the doctor’s bare chest with its curlicues of white hair, and then her eyes were drawn to the long chain with a knob at the end like a torture instrument trailing from his hand. He noticed the trajectory of her gaze and shot her a sly smile. “From our toilet tank,” he explained after a teasing pause. “My wife yanked it off again. Some people just don’t know how to flush with delicacy.”

  The back wall of the salon of his apartment in which they were standing consisted entirely of sliding glass doors, and through them Temima could see the small private garden reserved for the doctor and his family, and beyond that the grounds of the leper colony where some sisters in their starched white uniforms were strolling with arms linked on one side of the path, and on the other side, the contorted figures of the inmates making their way, painfully performing the hopeful act of taking their exercise on feet that had been eaten away and that they could no longer feel.

  “Nu—so how can I help you?” the doctor said, startling her from this distraction, catching her off guard and almost pushing her over into tears by the offer of help.

  She extricated the baby from the shawl, sat down on the divan after telegraphing to the doctor a glance requesting permission, lay the child on his back across her lap, and undressed him. The doctor pulled a pair of spectacles from the pocket of his shorts, set them on his nose where they slipped down until they wedged themselves against the craggy red bulb at the tip, and leaned in to examine the baby’s genitals. After a long interval, during which Temima was heating up to acute apprehensiveness, he stepped back, recognized once again the mother’s existence, and declared, “Health
y, completely healthy!” From a cupboard against the wall he took out some tubes of salve and told her to apply this medication to the infected area four times a day, adding to these instructions the admonition to above all keep the area clean, and then, raising his voice almost to a shout, he lectured her sternly about the danger of constricting the infected area by binding it too tightly—“Such as with that schmatteh you schlep him around in!” the doctor said, pointing to her shawl. “Naked, naked is best of all, like in the Garden of Eden before the snake. Loose and free—natural, nothing is healthier than natural!”

  Temima lowered her head and accepted all of his assaults; she was his supplicant, his slave. She drew out of her bag, in which she had already hoarded the tubes of medicine, an envelope with one thousand American dollars in cash as agreed in advance and set it unobtrusively down on the coffee table instead of handing it to him directly so as not to incur the danger of embarrassing him. He picked it up immediately, tore open the envelope and let it flutter to the floor, counted the bills one by one, folded them into his pocket, and pronounced, “Good, nice and green, healthy like lettuce—beseder!”