One Hundred Philistine Foreskins Read online

  The operation, as it happened, was constructed out of air and silken strands, but even so, from what she had been told (she personally collaborated in shielding herself from such matters) the money it brought in had substance. It was a website called MaTov. Paltiel derived touching creative pride from what he considered to be the cleverness of the brand name, a play, on one level, on the intended curse morphed into a blessing that spurted out of the mouth of the pagan prophet Bilaam son of Be’or as he overlooked the goodly tents of Jacob, the dwelling places of Israel spread out in their wilderness encampment in one of the many great comic scenes of the Tanakh, this one featuring a talking donkey. If words could be put into the mouth of an ass, why not also into the mouth of a human dummy by the great ventriloquist above? And what Paltiel was selling in MaTov was her, his own Good Ma, Ima Temima. In lovingkindness she was obligated to repair his vessel that she herself had broken; even as she found his dealings to be squalid she could not deny herself to him yet again, she owed him.

  It was all clarified on the website, though Temima herself, of course, had never physically even laid a hand on one of those machines much less, God forbid, worshipped at a screen as at an icon in its designated corner of the room. There was, however, from what she had gleaned, a sliding fee scale, depending on what you were willing or able to spend, ranging from Bronze Standard to Silver Select to Gold Superior to Platinum Premium to Diamond Exclusive—from having your email petition, once it was paid for with your credit card number and your expiration date, printed out and deposited at the foot of the holy woman’s bed with heaps of other standard petitions in a white plastic laundry tub or black trash bags depending on how many had come in that day, to having it placed with a number of select others under one of the holy woman’s pillows, to having it set on her tray in a fan of superiors where her eyes might fall upon it, to having it read out loud to her with full premium urgency, and, for an added cost, arranging for her blessing or oracular utterance to be communicated back to you in an email reply. The mere proximity to the holy woman of your petition was bound to improve your self-knowledge and your fortune, and the chances of success were exponentially increased if you paid to have your request brought into her aura more than once, with special package deals for auspicious numbers of times—four, seven, ten, thirteen, eighteen, or any combination of eighteen (thirty-six, fifty-four, and so on), forty days and forty nights—all variations on four or forty were deemed incredibly potent. Fees were also calibrated depending on the request, which, Paltiel discovered, since the clientele consisted mostly of women, fell generally under two very broad headings, Ma and Ov—maternal and gynecological. Petitioning that you might finally find your soul mate, for example, was costly, naturally, but not nearly as expensive or as complicated or as resistant to cure or consolation as anything related to the troubles that derived from the womb you came out of or the sorrows that touched upon what went into your own womb and what came out.

  It had, of course, not escaped Temima’s notice, as a native English speaker though living in Israel more than three-quarters of her lifespan by now, that a playful deconstruction of her name Ba’alatOv could lead to the hermeneutics Mistress of the Ovary, an especially tempting twist because so many of the lessons she drew were derived from and applied to women—Ovum Ovarum, Sanctum Sanctorum. But the fact was, when she had taken the name Ba’alatOv, she had meant it as a respectful nod to yet another of her dearly beloved Tanakhi women, the despised necromancer, the Woman of Endor, mistress of the ov and yedonim, with the power to raise familiar spirits and ghosts. And a secondary benefit of this name was that, with it, Temima was also sticking a finger into the eyes of the establishment religious leaders, all men, who considered her an aberration and an abomination, a freak and a menace—a witch and a sorceress—placing their bans and herems upon her, the way King Saul had done on all mediums and wizards and magicians and possessors of talismans. Yet Saul in his desperation had sought out the Woman of Endor anyway—just like those ossified and inflated rabbis whose names she could mention if she were so inclined who had come to her in secret and disguise like the johns prowling the red-light district of Amsterdam, and then gone away to take full credit for her brilliant interpretations of the texts to guide them in their perplexity and her responsa to such questions as whether an hermaphrodite should pray on the women’s or men’s side of the partition at the Western Wall. And doesn’t the book tell us in black and white that the Woman of Endor actually succeeded in raising the cranky prophet Samuel from his freshly dug grave in Ramah? Such powers did exist after all—and this witch possessed them. You had to hand it to her, the hag, the crone, she knew her business, she delivered, she was a professional. But that was not why Temima loved her. Temima loved her and honored her, could only bow her head, marvel, and practically weep at how, after all the bad news for the future of the royal line came spilling like worms out of the spectral mouth of Samuel the prophet, and the beset King Saul collapsed, passed out in her kitchen, the good witch would not even think of letting him out of her house after he was revived until first he ate something. Eat something first—then I’ll let you go. What do we learn from this? Ima Temima would pose the question to her students. The answer is: All women are witches.

  Before the computer operation installed by Paltiel, Temima had of course helped many people in the old-fashioned way, with basic human raw materials, one-on-one, hands on, so to speak. Not only with her teachings, for which students gathered from the four corners of the earth to the Temima Shul to absorb her wisdom, hanging with raw fingertips from the windowsills even in the dead of winter until they were discovered frozen and buried under the Jerusalem snows, but also, in those simpler times, the sufferers would come to her door on their own, or stop her on the street in those days when she made her way boldly already veiled, stop her with their needs and sorrows and struggles and losses, and she would listen and dispense as necessary. In some such way she had found Cozbi on a cold night in an alley off Sabbath Square, makeup congealed on the cheekbone blades under her slanted Slavic eyes, loose platinum-colored hair giving off dull glints of light, chandelier earrings dangling forlornly, in her trademark stilettos, long legs and narrow hips and tight buttocks shrink-wrapped in low-slung red pants, a clinging gold halter top with cleavage and midriff bared, smoking something or other as she slumped against the wall beside a yellow poster enjoining the daughters of Israel not to arouse the feelings of neighborhood residents by dressing immodestly. A young man with a sparse beard and a great cupola of a black velvet yarmulke, the blood rushing to his face, was whipping her in a frenzy with the rope gartel he had unsnaked from around the waist of his lustrous black kaftan, lashing and yelling Pritzeh! Pritzeh! Harlot! Slut! What, you think this is a stable?—pausing only to amass fresh gobs of spit to aim at her. And she didn’t even stir, she didn’t flinch or cringe, she just went on dragging on her cigarette or bidi or joint or whatever it was she was smoking, as if all of this disturbance and spectacle had nothing to do with her.

  Temima, a formidable if notorious figure in the neighborhood—as much as you disapproved of her you definitely did not want to risk starting up with her—trailed by a band of her students, including her Cherethites and Pelethites, her kraiti and plaiti, four husky male acolytes who had become the designated bodyguards she called her Bnei Zeruya, paused in her processional and inquired of the beater and the spitter, “So tell me, Reb Yid, how do you know this is not Elijah the prophet you are assaulting?”

  “Eliyahu HaNavi? What kind of idiocy, what kind of shtoos? Heresy, apikorsus! The Messiah a woman? A whore—a zona?”

  “Like Rahab the zona,” Temima nodded with galling calm, “purveyor of mazon—nourishment—as Rashi the commentator-in-chief spins it. Which may, after all, be the definition of whore. On the other hand, the Talmud tells us that the mere mention of the name of Rahab the whore of Jericho was enough to bring men to climax.”

  They took Cozbi home with them that night, her hips thrust forward
like a roast on a tray, grinding in intentional provocation as she staggered the entire distance up Yekhezkel Street back to the Temima Shul in the Quarter of the Bukharim.

  And not only Cozbi, but Rizpa too arrived on her own at Ima Temima’s in her need without the help of a computer in those more primitive and intimate times. To be more precise, in Rizpa’s case, she was delivered, levitated from the Satmar girls’ school Beis Ziburis across the road between two married ladies, teachers at this ultra-ultra school most likely, with their shaven skulls tightly wrapped in black scarves, in their loose, boxy suit jackets over perpetually pregnant bellies, long skirts, thick black stockings and lace-up shoes, and the severe tight-lipped expression on their scrubbed faces as they deposited their burden in front of Temima and declared, “This one is your type—another lost soul for your collection. Her name is Mazal—but she’s not so lucky, poor thing, not so beseder.” They spoke mostly in Yiddish, mixed in with granite Hungarian—the Holy Tongue, Loshon Kodesh, was not meant to be tainted by daily use in the manner of the insolent and accursed Zionists—but now and then they inserted some Hebrew words they had picked up through osmosis despite themselves from the commerce in the air, such as when they said beseder, and to illustrate, in case Temima did not get the point as it related to Mazal, each of them, with her free hand, rotated cuckoo spirals at her temple.

  As it happened, the behavior over the course of the last few days of this wretched Mazal they were hauling between them had attracted even Temima’s attention from across the street, who could not but notice her coming out onto the upper balcony of the Satmar girls’ school Beis Ziburis with a squeegee and a bucket splashing with a dark sudsy liquid, and she would mop furiously, screaming shrilly the whole time, “Schmutz, schmutz, this place is stinking with schmutz, must get rid of all this schmutz,” using, oddly enough, though she was Sephardi from the Arabian Diaspora, the Yiddish word for dirt, filth. She would overturn the bucket on the stone parapet of the balcony, dumping the slop and contagion onto the street below, onto the head of whoever was passing by; with any luck it would merely be a woman, but it could also be a man, ranging from a schnorrer with his hand out begging for a shekel to a rabbi of great reputation with his hand out making a point, a sage before whom everyone rose when he stepped into a room, from the top of the black hat you couldn’t tell who was who—she did not discriminate but continued dumping the offal in this way until she was dragged back inside the school building. After an interval, when she reckoned no one was looking, her eyes darting in this direction and that, she would come out again with her squeegee and her sloshing pail and start her whole routine all over again, yelling, “Schmutz, schmutz!”—swabbing the floor and dumping the fetid liquid on unfortunate heads, male and female, young and old, Arab and Israeli, Jew and gentile, holy and unholy, passing below, never looking up as they ought to have done.

  “She claims that we Satmar Hasidim stole her babies from their hospital bassinets after she gave birth to them and told her they were dead,” one of the righteous matrons said to Temima in Yiddish. “I’m not saying yes, I’m not saying no. But just between us, it would not have been such a bad thing for these poor dark kinderlakh to be handed over to families that would raise them in the proper religious way. Sometimes extreme measures are necessary in the name of the Master of the Universe.”

  Temima said, “Leave her here with me. I will call her Rizpa.”

  “Rizpa—very nice. It means ‘floor’ in Loshon Kodesh—no? Good. She mopped our floors, so now she’ll mop yours.”

  In Beis Ziburis across the street, as Temima knew only too well, they instructed the girls in how to kosher a chicken and the laws of niddah relating to menstrual impurity and ritual bath procedures, all the rules and regulations regarding getting rid of the blood, the chicken’s blood, the woman’s blood, and so on and so forth, that was education enough for them. Why should Temima have expected them to recognize this reference to the concubine of King Saul, Rizpa daughter of Aya, whose two sons were impaled on the mountainside in a political deal to appease the enemy? Spreading her sackcloth over the rock by the mountainside, Rizpa sat guard there from the beginning of the barley harvest until the rains came pouring down, and she would not allow the birds of the sky to touch the bodies of her sons by day, or the beasts of the field at night.

  So here was another womb made crazy by the important affairs of men. Ima Temima ordered that Rizpa be put to bed and that simple, familiar Yemenite foods be carried in to comfort her until she regained her strength, sweet mint teas and malawah breads. And once in a while, in those pre-computer days when she still moved from room to room, Temima herself would come and sit at her bedside and listen to her stories about her life in Rosh HaAyin as one of the four wives of the revered teacher Baba Rakhamim, and about all the hens in her backyard with only a single cock who ruled over them, bothered them day and night, wore them out so utterly that, one after another, the hens came right up to Rizpa, then known as Mazal, in her kitchen and willed her to slaughter them and dump them in the soup. But Paltiel had informed his mother that, now, with the far-reaching tentacles of his computer network, they were beginning to make headway in learning the fates of Rizpa’s babies; the graves in which they were supposed to have been buried had been opened and discovered to be empty, for one thing, and there was now also an army of Sephardi activists and hotheads ready to grab by force if necessary swabs of DNA from the insides of the mouths of extra dark Satmar Hasidim with extra corkscrewed sidecurls and more refined physiques briskly walking down the streets of Mea Shearim and Bnei B’rak in Israel, Williamsburg in Brooklyn, or Monroe in New York State, bizarrely speaking and gesticulating in Yiddish, and match this evidence against the genetic map of the eternally bereft and inconsolable mothers. Even if the Satmars didn’t believe in DNA and regarded it as idolatry, the authorities had faith in science, which in the end mattered, it mattered on this earth.

  And not only that. Thanks to the powers of his computers, Paltiel was now happy to report he believed they were also closing in on the pimp who went under the name Stalinsky who had trafficked Cozbi to Tel Aviv in the days when she was known as Anna Oblonskaya with the promise of a job as a childcare provider in the home of an oligarch living in a guarded compound of stupefying ostentation near Herzliah, robbed her of her passport, drugged her, raped her, beat her, and then sold her into prostitution in the Monopol Hotel in Tel Aviv on the corner of Allenby Street and HaYarkon. “In this day and age,” as Paltiel explained to his mother, “one-on-one is just no longer cost-effective.” One-on-one had to be reserved only for the clients of MaTov who chose the Diamond Exclusive option, which for an undisclosed fee entitled them to a private audience of maximum thirty-minutes duration with the world-renowned master teacher and guru, the charismatic wise woman and reputed miracle worker, HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, who revealed to them many things about themselves that they both knew and did not know—rendering it all the more imperative, as Paltiel reminded her repeatedly, that she no longer indulge in spontaneous personal ministrations with any single individual, including (and especially since she no longer went out anymore) any of the followers who gathered around her bed to soak in her vibrations night after night. Such simple human encounters were a luxury of the past, Paltiel stressed, they would fatally drive down the market value of the Diamond Exclusive if word got out that the same product could be gotten free of charge if you came to the nightly Torah salon at Ima Temima’s bedside and snatched an unguarded opening to lean over and steal what others paid for, deposit into her ear the burden of your troubles and be healed.

  Now when the purchasers of the Diamond Exclusive option arrived they would be ushered up the stairs behind Cozbi in full distracting motion and conducted to one of the benches on the balcony that constituted the rear portion of the second floor of the building beyond the living quarters, and that, in the old days, had served as the men’s prayer section. There they would sit obediently waiting to be summoned into Ima Temima’s bedcham
ber for their appointment, gazing down at the women’s section below, the long narrow sanctuary and study hall with its rows of dark wooden benches and tables and stacks of worn volumes and its satin-sheathed ark housing the holy scrolls and the podium from which the exalted and universally renowned HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, Ima Temima, may she live on for many good long years, had presided and taught through her veil lest her audience be blinded by her light until she had willingly and deliberately contracted her world to a single room upstairs where she was now sitting at the window, preparing to shed even this paltry four cubits for her final and most instructive stop before the grave.

  And while we’re on the subject of women at windows and all the troubles this position has brought down upon them, let us also not neglect to mention King Saul’s daughter, the princess Mikhal, for whom that extravagant show-off David had actually overtipped with two hundred Philistine foreskins though the asking brideprice for her, true, had been the bargain rate of the mere one hundred at which her value had been assessed. Two hundred Philistines for a yield of two hundred foreskins, think about it, maybe circumcised after they were killed, maybe while they were still alive like Dina’s rapist Shekhem and all the men of his town, a major bloodletting, a wild scalping, but David liked to do things big, he liked to make a splash, and Mikhal, after all, was a princess, a Jewish princess, worth every foreskin.