For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories (20 page)

“Are you still with us, Berel?” Liebman held on to the back of his seat.

Berel nodded, licking his lips.

“Any chance you’re thinking clearly now? Might you reconsider before we kill you?”

“That’s what you’ll have to do,” Berel said, perking up. “Like in the American ceremony. Till death do us part.”

Liebman pulled off his mask and rubbed at his eyes. He nodded to the men.

This time when Berel was lowered out the door he felt the car speed up and the grip tighten on his hair. The one with his legs used maximum control. And like artisans attending to that final detail, Berel’s head was forced to the grindstone, his face to the road. For an instant. For a touch. The Esthers took off a perfect circle, a sliver—not deep—of Berel’s nose.

Berel screamed outside her window, taunts and threats, declarations of a love he’d never shown. And his refrain, “Why do they beat me?” This—as if he couldn’t come up with a reason—he yelled again and again.

Gitta had things she would have liked to scream. She’d have liked to stand under the window of every Jew in Royal Hills and scream at the top of her lungs, demand to know why her divorce needs an excuse or a consent, anyone’s help at all.

After Berel left, Gitta carried her chair back to the table, put on a sweater, and wandered over to the bridge. She followed the walkway, gazing out at the river, the traffic speeding by on her other side. This was the old decision Gitta had pondered. Not life or death for Berel, but traffic or river, traffic or water, to which side should she dive?

Little Liebman handed Gitta an apple and leaned against the file cabinet. “Showing already,” he said, looking at her stomach.

She stared back at him, the corners of her mouth turned
down. She didn’t appreciate the familiarity and didn’t trust Liebman’s invitation. It was the first time he’d asked her over since the beatings began.

“Every nightmare has its end, Gitta. Berel has come to his senses.”

“Nonsense. What, he promised a divorce while you twisted an arm? He came to my house after, same as always. Floated outside my window screaming in my ear.” Gitta lowered herself onto the couch as if she were indeed carrying extra weight. She sniffed at the apple. “When he throws the get in my face, Little Liebman, then I’ll know it’s done.”

“We put a fear into him and he wouldn’t budge. We dumped him in the alley half dead and still swearing he’d never see you free. Then three days ago he shows up here, then yesterday, and again this morning. Each time more remorseful, each time clearer in what he had to say. It’s the little mamzer that got him,” Liebman pointed at his belly. “Not for you or himself does he have any mercy, but only for the unborn. The suffering of the father, he said, should not be borne out on the son.”

“Suddenly there is sense?”

“He’s never lied before. Stubborn and coconut brained, he runs around spouting nonsense. But never has he agreed falsely to a divorce. He too, like you, thinks there is some trick. He says meet him once and tell him to his face that you carry another man’s child. He doesn’t ask for the man’s name. He doesn’t want to hear a tiny heartbeat or see a note from a doctor. He says, after the degradation of how he learned, he will only bring you a divorce if you tell him about the baby yourself.”

Lili bent a needle. She put down the wand and fished around for a replacement, talking all the while and working herself into a rage.

“Eighteen years it takes you to build up the courage and then you buy into nonsense like this. I’m coming with you, Gitta. I’m going to strangle that bum myself.”

“The matchmaker is right. Berel’s never lied.”

Lili slid the magnifying light out of the way and moved her face right to Gitta’s so that crooked eyes crossed.

“You’re meeting in a hotel, fine, perfect. But let me tell you something, Berel’s not offering you a divorce, Gitta, he’s offering an alibi. Why not have it so, when he leaves, a gypsy cab jumps the curb and runs him down? You can be the first to scream, to yell in a lobby with one hundred witnesses, while Berel is hit-and-runned right outside.”

“I lived with him for too long not to know what goes on in that miserable mind. Berel is finally tired. He is going to give me my divorce. Soon I’ll have my life back and then who knows what I’ll do? Get to work on those roots, Lili. I might yet find romance.”

Yes, she is bitter. Her second date in fifty-four years and again with Berel. Again in the lobby of a Manhattan hotel. Her corpse will rot, she is sure, without ever having anyone hold open a door.

Gitta stepped down the three stairs into the deep, narrow lobby, chose a couch and a chair unoccupied by any of the long-legged, knife-chinned men and women—so smartly dressed and fortified.

Before she had sunk fully into the chair a waitress approached. Gitta ordered a crème de menthe which she would not touch. Her way of paying rent for sitting.

Over the years, Gitta had crossed the street more than once to avoid Berel, hurried into the women’s section or out a side door to escape a confrontation at shul. This wasn’t the first time she’d laid eyes on him since, but as he made his way
down those three steps, her only lover in a lifetime, her husband and tormentor, she realized that she’d not uttered a word to him since she’d left.

He’d gotten old. His beard was full of white and his cheeks hung loose on his skull. And then there were the bruises. She could see the blood-black of one under his beard and the more shocking perfect scab on the end of his nose.

“I came to ask you,” he said, in a voice detached, as if sending a message with this Gitta to take back to his wife, “if you’ll give me the child.”

Gitta chewed at her bottom lip, lowered her chin. Despicable from the start.

“Not this way,” Gitta said. “I say what you want to hear and you give me what’s left of my life.”

“I’m allowed to ask, no? Denied so many things, you couldn’t expect I wouldn’t ask.” He was sad, suddenly. She could see. Amazing. How many crimes produce only victims, Gitta wondered, everyone claiming innocence and everyone hurt.

The waitress put down a napkin and set a glass in front of Gitta.

“You’ve fallen so low that you eat in a trayf hotel? So adultery is not your only sin?”

“It’s only a drink, Berel, and I’ve yet to touch it. And what I do is none of your business. I want from you only one thing.”

“And I wanted from you only one thing. The duties of a wife fulfilled.” He did not change his tone, but the old, loose skin began to tighten, his rage, as from an organ ruptured, began to seep into cheeks and purple tongue, spread through the broken veins of his nose. “All I wanted. To see my name live on.”

“Wasted energy, Berel. You hear me say it and then you give me a divorce. Agreed? Just as you told Liebman.”

Berel snorted at that.

“What is my word to Liebman who beats and degrades me and is said to be the father of your bastard child?”

“What is this, Berel? This is not what was planned.”

“No, neither did I plan a life of misery because of you. I was about to give you a divorce, you should know. Thought it out, talked to my rebbe, I was literally on my way over to arrange it the first time they pulled me into that car. Later, even with those Nazis hounding me, I saw it was time to give in. Then Liebman told me you were pregnant.”

How he knew her, understood how to tear her in half, not Lili’s peaceful, electric-needle magic, but how to tear her whole being apart, rip her brutally in two.

“You weren’t ever going to give anything,” she said. “This is another of your tortures.”

“Shaming me, making me a shame in my community, and you talk of torture. What does a whore need a divorce for when she sells herself either way?”

Gitta went hot with panic. Her recurring reality was as bad as her nightmares. It was supposed to improve. Somehow, sometime, her life was supposed to get better. She grabbed at Berel’s sleeve and pulled him close.

“There is no baby,” she said. “My own trick. I’ve been loyal all these years.” Gitta tried for a smile but got tears. “Now you must,” and she was crying, “must,” and she was yelling, “must give me a divorce before I die.”

“I only came for the truth,” he said. And like that he was up, shaking her hand free, and taking the three stairs in a stride.

Gitta stood and watched Berel push his way round the revolving door, saw a handsome young man pop out in his place.

She tried to imagine the high-pitched screech of brakes, the car hitting and thumping, the gypsy cab racing off into the night. Gitta could call Lili from a phone booth and see it over
with before morning. She could wake up knowing he was gone and say her prayers with fervor. Because she could take it, she could live with his murder.

Gitta unzipped her wallet and shook her head.

How close he comes, her Berel. His whole life a near-death experience, teetering on the blade of her courage.

She thought too of Liebman, who said he knew, he felt, suffered right there along with her. Even when she makes a denial, even when no baby comes, he will still be tied to the rumors. Royal Hills would make it fit, with an adoption, a miscarriage, a hairy dwarf child not well and locked away. Let him know from it, she felt. She did not feel generous. Did not at all care.

Then Gitta thought of herself, the years remaining, the end of this life. Let it be short, she thought. Though she knew she would see a hundred and twenty years. It would be like in the old wives’ tales, corpses laid to rest still growing thick, yellow nails and wiry hair. And this Gitta knew, folktale or not, would be her doom—buried, waiting, the wrong man’s ring going loose around her finger, and a scholar’s beard growing and growing. Roots buried deeper than even Lili had dreamed. Hair growing from bone.

For the Relief of Unbearable Urges

T
he beds were to be separated on nights forbidden to physical intimacy, but Chava Bayla hadn’t pushed them together for many months. She flatly refused to sleep anywhere except on her menstrual bed and was, from the start, impervious to her husband’s pleading.

“You are pure,” Dov Binyamin said to the back of his wife, who—heightening his frustration—slept facing the wall.

“I am impure.”

“This is not true, Chava Bayla. It’s an impossibility. And I know myself the last time you went to the ritual bath. A woman does not have her thing—”

“Her thing?” Chava said. She laughed, as if she had caught him in a lie, and turned to face the room.

“A woman doesn’t menstruate for so long without even a single week of clean days. And a wife does not for so long ignore her husband. It is Shabbos, a double mitzvah tonight—an obligation to make love.”

Chava Bayla turned back again to face her wall. She tightened her arms around herself as if in an embrace.

“You are my wife!” Dov Binyamin said.

“That was God’s choice, not mine. I might also have been put on this earth as a bar of soap or a kugel. Better,” she said, “better it should have been one of those.”

That night Dov Binyamin slept curled up on the edge of his bed—as close as he could get to his wife.

After Shabbos, Chava avoided coming into the bedroom for as long as possible. When she finally did enter and found Dov dozing in a chair by the balcony, she went to sleep fully clothed, her sheitel still on top of her head.

As he nodded forward in the chair, Dov’s hat fell to the floor. He woke up, saw his wife, picked up his hat, and, brushing away the dust with his elbow, placed it on the nightstand. How beautiful she looked all curled up in her dress. Like a princess enchanted, he thought. Dov pulled the sheet off the top of his bed. He wanted to cover her, to tuck Chava in. Instead he flung the sheet into a corner. He shut off the light, untied his shoes—but did not remove them—and went to sleep on the tile floor beside his wife’s bed. Using his arm for a pillow, Dov Binyamin dreamed of a lemon ice his uncle had bought him as a child and of the sound of the airplanes flying overhead at the start of the Yom Kippur War.

Dov Binyamin didn’t go to work on Sunday. Folding up his tallis after prayers and fingering the embroidery of the tallis bag, he recalled the day Chava had presented it to him as a wedding gift—the same gift his father had received from his mother, and his father’s father before. Dov had marveled at the workmanship, wondered how many hours she had spent with a needle in hand. Now he wondered if she would ever find him worthy of such attentions again. Zipping the prayer shawl inside, Dov Binyamin put the bag under his arm. He carried it with him out of the shul, though he had his own cubby in which to store it.

The morning was oppressively hot; a hamsin was settling over Jerusalem. Dov Binyamin was wearing his lightest caftan, but in the heat wave it felt as if it were made of the heaviest wool.

Passing a bank of phones, he considered calling work, making
some excuse, or even telling the truth. “Shai,” he would say, “I am a ghost in my home and wonder who will mend my tallis bag when it is worn.” His phone card was in his wallet, which he had forgotten on the dresser, and what did he want to explain to Shai for, who had just come from a Shabbos with his spicy wife and a house full of children.

Dov followed Jaffa Street down to the Old City. Roaming the alleyways always helped to calm him. There was comfort in the Jerusalem stone and the walls within walls and the permanence of everything around him. He felt a kinship with history’s Jerusalemites, in whose struggles he searched for answers to his own. Lately he felt closer to his biblical heroes than to the people with whom he spent his days. King David’s desires were far more alive to Dov than the empty problems of Shai and the other men at the furniture store.

Weaving through the Jewish Quarter, he had intended to end up at the Wall, to say Tehillim, and, in his desperate state, to scribble a note and stuff it into a crack just like the tourists in their cardboard yarmulkes. Instead, he found himself caught up in the crush inside the Damascus Gate. An old Arab woman was crouched down behind a wooden box of cactus fruit. She peeled a sabra with a kitchen knife, allowing a small boy a sample of her product. The child ran off with his mouth open, a stray thorn stuck in his tongue.