Jacob's Folly (12 page)

After sunset, we all assembled for the Shabbos feast, the men in their black hats and suits seated beside their wives, the unmarried children clustered at the end of the table. A chubby, fresh-faced young student from South Africa named Aron was staying with the family over Shabbos. He was seated between Dovid and Simchee. My beloved Masha had been placed at the head of the table opposite her father this evening, possibly because of her illness. She was wearing her long gray jersey dress, her arms covered with a long-sleeved white shirt, her black hair falling around her face a bit wildly. Her eyes were glazed and puffy. She looked ill.

Mother Pearl had changed into a flowered top and black skirt, and tugged her faded auburn wig over her auburn hair, checking her reflection in the mirror in her room as I danced on her powder compact. With her peaches-and-cream complexion and her generous figure, she looked quite fetching. The other girls had tidied up as well. The little children had all been masterfully put to bed by Pearl, Yehudis, and the now-on-the-bus-to-Brooklyn housekeeper—all but the sour-tempered Ezra, seven, who was allowed to stay up, and the anarchic Estie, who
had wandered back downstairs in her pajamas and hung from the back of her mother's chair like a little monkey. The long table—actually several folding tables put together—was covered in a white-and-gray paper tablecloth, bunches of hydrangeas nestled into four squat vases set along its center line, disposable yet elegant square plastic plates and cutlery for twenty-two arranged by Miriam with characteristic perfection. The table had been set up in the Edelman living room, a bare space normally furnished with a couch and two chairs that were permanently pushed to the edges of the room, the bare floor wide open, as if the place were a public hall. There were few ornaments on the light green walls, no paintings. Photos of the many children were placed on shelves and hung on one wall. The books were all religious, leather-bound volumes, exegeses of the Torah and the Talmud.

The shaggy, fur-hatted Mordecai stood up at the tip of his beautifully set table, twenty-one heads turned in his direction, and chanted the Kiddush, a brimming silver cup of wine in his hand. Once he had finished, he took a careful sip of wine, then poured a few drops, sadly cut with apple juice, into everyone's glass. I realized grimly that I had landed in a family of teetotalers. They all took a gulp of the pathetic concoction, then Pearl and the girls got up briskly to set out the feast: French roast beef, pistachio-stuffed chicken breasts, salmon roulade, gefilte fish with horseradish, quinoa salad, fruit and lettuce salad, potatoes in mustard sauce, roasted garlic, hummus, baba ghanoush, blueberry cobbler. Two of Pearl's sweet loaves of challah were nestled beneath their embroidered crimson velvet coverlet like dew-covered manna. It was paradise. With a shudder of pleasure and surprise, I stepped into a droplet of gravy and tasted the rich, salty fat through the pads in my feet! In a trance of sensory overload, I strolled from one luscious crumb to another, sometimes even flying to a serving dish to drink from the rim, knowing full well that my hosts were forbidden to kill anything—even flies—on the Sabbath. These people were not even allowed to wash lettuce after Friday sundown, lest they kill the bugs hidden in the leaves. I was completely safe. They
shooed me away several times, of course, but nobody dared swat me. Alyshaya's husband, Yitzak, a humorist, even quipped, “He's a Jewish fly; he knows we can't kill him today.” I laughed at that joke along with the rest of the party.

The men sang a hymn with strong voices, rocking their heads, tapping the table with their fingers. While the men sang, the women, forbidden to sing in front of men they were not related to, lowered their eyes and mouthed the words silently.
The singing of a woman is akin to nakedness
. I remembered that from the old days.

Eventually the ladies let the men keep singing and engaged in conversation.

“Mommy, have you ever tried rice kugel?” Miriam asked.

“No, but I heard about it.”

“Dr. Cohen told me about it while she was sewing me up from my last cesarean.”

“What are you talking about?” Pearl said with a laugh.

“You know how I always manage to have my babies on a Friday, right? So she's delivered the baby and she's sewing me up and she's telling me about this great new recipe for rice kugel she's trying and she had to leave it half done because I went into labor. I'm lying there trying to act interested, with my belly open like somebody's purse.”

“Miriam!” said Pearl. “We're eating.”

“How many cesareans you had?” asked Suri, “Two, right?”

“The last three. I told Dr. Cohen she should just put in a zipper.”

“You shouldn't do more than three, I thought,” said Alyshaya.

“We'll see,” said Miriam. The men finished their hymn, unfazed by the women's lack of attention.

Masha, meanwhile, was silent. Her stare was inward, intense. Pearl looked over at her several times, but she didn't want to fuss over her too much. The girl worried her so. I decided to try a little something. Flying behind her shoulder, I noticed she was working the paper napkin in her lap, twisting it with her fingers.

Tear it
, I said. I knew she wasn't allowed to tear on the Sabbath.
Not even toilet paper. They had to use Kleenex. Her fingers kept working the paper, but she wouldn't rip it.

Tear it
, I said, forcing my voice into her head, looping through the air.
Tear, tear, tear
. And then, with a calm, intent face, my beloved tore a single layer of the paper napkin under the table, her heart whomping against its boundary like a carpet beater. The thin layer of paper seemed to take a fortnight to rip asunder. Just one steady tear, on and on, as the men started in on another hymn.

Masha, whom I was now watching from the back of mother Pearl's chair, raised her eyes and watched them sing, all the while secretly tearing the napkin. I tried to listen to her thoughts, but all I got was her voice, singing the same haunting song as the men. They were singing K'vakoras, a prayer generally reserved for Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur, only occasionally dusted off for more ordinary occasions due to its extreme beauty and holiness. Masha was singing very loud inside her head, watching them, eyebrows raised, her lips mouthing the words. And then, to my astonishment, she began to actually
sing
. At first she didn't realize what she was doing. She had forgotten herself. But then, she knew. Her voice became clear, strong, defiant. It drowned out the men's voices. One by one, the men stopped singing and stared at her. She sang with all her heart, her pure eyelids shut. The party looked at her, stunned. Dovid, Simchee, and the young visitor Aron looked down at their plates, rigid with embarrassment, as though she were performing a striptease. Even I was shocked. When the song ended at last, blood came to Masha's cheeks. She opened her eyes and smiled, embarrassed.

Mordecai spoke softly, with disappointment and astonishment. “
Masha
,” he said.

Masha shook her head, looking at her hands. Pearl stood and walked over to Masha's place, gently held her by the elbow. Masha stood. Tears glistened in her great black eyes. The two women walked out of the room, Pearl's arm around her daughter's narrow shoulders. Weakened with joy and pride, I was unable to move at all.

Once they had gone, Miriam exhaled. “What's wrong with her? Is she going crazy or something?”

“Don't say that,” said Mordecai. “She's had a shock. She was in a lot of pain.” Then, turning to the guest, Aron, he said, “I apologize for my daughter's behavior. She has been very sick.”

“She hasn't been the same since she got back from the hospital,” said Suri, wide-eyed, her cheeks flushed and shiny as a fall apple. “Like, remember, she said she never wanted to have kids?”

“But that's Masha,” said Alyshaya. “She likes to say things to get a reaction.”

“Anything for attention.” Miriam sighed.

“Shah! Don't talk like that,” said Mordecai.

“She'll be the one with ten babies,” said Yehudis brightly.

“No way,” said Alyshaya, “
you
will.”

“Daddy,” said Yehudis, turning her face to her father expectantly. “If I had a boyfriend, what would you say?”

“Get married,” Mordecai said, shrugging.

“I wanna get married so bad …”

“You have someone specific in mind?” asked Mordecai.

“No …”

“She's always getting crushes,” said Suri.

Yehudis smiled. “No one will set me up on a date 'cause I'm not nineteen yet.”

“And that's the way it should be,” said Mordecai.

“You need to go to college for a couple years, get some kind of an education,” said Miriam.

“That's what I want to do, I want to study graphic design, I told you, but I want to do everything together, with my husband! By the Sephardic, they get married at sixteen, seventeen.”

“You're not Sephardic,” said Mordecai. “You'll wait till you're nineteen to start dating, like everybody else. It's only, what, three months?” His gaze drifted in the direction of the doorway where his wife and daughter had disappeared.

“I just feel like I'm wasting so much time,” whispered Yehudis.

Upstairs, Pearl was sitting at the edge of Masha's bed. Masha was sitting under the covers, staring at her hands, which rested, palms up, in her lap. “I just did it,” said Masha. “I don't know why.”

“But you have to know why,” Pearl said. “You know you can't do that, all your life you haven't sung in front of the men, suddenly you do it?” She stood now, trying to hide her anger. “I think you should rest a little. You got up too soon, maybe.” She tucked Masha in and walked out of the room, flashing her an encouraging smile as she shut the door. But, once in the hallway, she slumped against the wall. Masha's transgression was a major affront, deep disobedience, demonstrating a total lack of respect. Pearl was so thankful that, up until now, all her children had grown up innocent, protected, and observant.

The next evening, as Pearl walked the few peaceful blocks to the ritual bath, the three-quarter-full moon looked melted away, like a sucked-on candy. Pearl had known for a long time there was something wrong with Masha. The girl had been sickly, intense, oddly, unconciously seductive all her life. Now Masha was twenty-one, the perfect age to find a husband. But who would marry a sick girl, a rebellious girl? No parent would allow it.

Pearl slipped off her robe and walked naked down the steps to the mikveh. If Masha didn't marry by the time she was twenty-four, twenty-five at the most, her chances dwindled, she thought as she submerged herself in the water, feet hovering a few inches from the floor of the tank, her long red hair floating around her, then rising, taking a breath, and going under again. The competition to find a man and start having babies was enormous. The men didn't start dating till they were twenty-five, as a rule, and then they wanted the young ones. Rising once more, Pearl saw the kindly bath attendant, a
tiny old woman in a headscarf, observing her to see she was cleansing herself properly. The woman was nodding with approval. Pearl Edelman was a model mother. She had eleven children, a loving husband, and she knew the depth of happiness family life could bring. Her purpose, the purpose of her children, was to bring good Jews into the world, and teach them the Torah.

I have to get Masha married as quickly as possible
, she thought as she went under one more time.
That's what I have to do
.

Later that night, when Pearl sat at the edge of her bed combing out her long, wet hair, Mordecai walked in, shutting the door behind him quietly. Pearl's pale skin was luminous. Her full arms emerged from the puffed sleeves of her prettiest cotton nightgown, legs crossed. Peeking up, nearly shy, she smiled at him. They would make love. It is written in the Shulchan Aruch, the legal code:

Every man must lie with his wife on the night of her immersion
.

T
he day my fate was to change, the sky was a seamless vivid blue, the air a frigid claw. I had made my usual tense, skittering way across the courtyard to the latrine clutching a wad of rags, my hands chapped and ruddy from the cold. Inside the stinking privy at the base of the stairwell, my pants down, I felt colder than I had outside. At least the smell of crap—largely Hodel's, I guessed—was dulled by the freezing air. Sitting on the rough wooden seat, I gazed up at a circle of cobalt sky through a high round window. When I left, I could not bring myself to say the bathroom prayer of thanks for my crevices.

On my way to morning prayer, the wind sliced through my thin trousers, ran up my sleeves like trickles of freezing water. As I prayed in Rabbi Noé's house, my prayer shawl over my head, I could not keep my thoughts still. I was singing hymns along with the other men, but my mind was on the coming day of lugging my peddler's box through the glacial streets of Paris, hoping to sell a pair of gloves to a man who already had fifty pairs when my own hands were numb, or perhaps a lace collar to a woman who owned a hundred almost exactly the same as what she was buying from me. I sold useless objects to people who didn't need what I sold, in order to support a wife I didn't love, whom I had come to fear in a way. I rocked back and forth, back and forth,
and it suddenly occurred to me that I might ask God to help me. I prayed: “Please, Hashem, Great One, please, change my life.” That's what I said, over and over. I was interrupted by the man to my right. He was whispering my name. At first I wasn't sure, but then I realized that, yes, he was speaking to me.

“Jacob,” he whispered. “Jacob Cerf.” I looked up and saw the cheery face of Blond Nathan, a man I occasionally bought merchandise from. He must have sidled up to me when I wasn't looking. Nathan was an affable fellow with a shady reputation. My father would never go near him because some of his merchandise was stolen. I tried as much as I could to avoid fenced items when I bought stock, and for the most part I think I succeeded. Today, however, I was very vulnerable, low, and frankly I was capable of much more serious crimes than buying a knife that had been lifted from some powdered little turd. Nathan gestured for me to come outside after the morning prayer had ended. I did so, and we both stood outside stamping our feet and breathing into our hands.

“I have a wonderful haul of knives, straight from Thiers, in the Auvergne, I just got back to Paris yesterday,” said Nathan urgently. His front teeth were very prominent, and brown at the tips, as if they had been dipped in tannin. His eyes were round and gray. “I'll give you an excellent price.”

“Bought wholesale?” I asked doubtfully.

He nodded, pulling up his lapels to protect his neck from the wind. “I rode all the way to the Auvergne and back in a cart with a load of onions, just to get the best blades. You know those poor French fellows in Thiers who grind the blades, do you know how they do it? They have to lie down all day on their bellies. They look like dybbuks, pale as death—they lie there right over the gorge, on freezing slabs of stone, holding out the blades against the grindstones, with big shaggy dogs curled up on their backs like living blankets, to prevent them from getting pleurisy! I'm not joking! What a way to live, eh? It's like something you'd expect in Gehenna …”

We were already halfway to Nathan's rented room. The narrow, muddy street was crowded with men, women, and children, nearly all dressed in black. The women sold firewood, the men sold rags, bagels, teakettles, pots, the boys walked dutifully behind their tutors, going off to study Torah, or, if they were urchins, they scampered about looking for pockets to pick or a hunk of bread to make off with. The occasional shop window boasted paltry items: a couple of salted herring, some seedcakes, a barrel of pickled cucumbers, cuts of meat, candy, all displayed side by side. People talked fast and loud; there was a marketplace atmosphere to the neighborhood, which was, in fact, only a few blocks away from where I lived. I was anxious to get inside again; in spite of the rags I had stuffed down my undershirt, I was shivering from the cold.

Nathan, checking left and right, led me through a door into the courtyard of his building, where two barefoot children, a girl and a boy, were chasing a bedraggled chicken, and up a set of cramped stairs. We plodded, shuffling. Dust swirled in a parabola of light let in by a tiny high window. After a three-flight ascent, Nathan stopped at a heavy oak door. Squinting in the low light, he picked out three keys, and tumbled a trio of corresponding locks.

“Now,” he said. Turning to me and smiling with his tea-dipped overbite, he heaved himself, shoulder-first, into the massive door, which gave way grudgingly. I stepped inside behind him. The only furniture in the murky room was a small desk with a few papers fanned out on it, a high-backed chair, and a double bed. I glanced at the papers and noticed that Nathan had written out his accounts in neat Hebrew. On the floor were three large trunks with flat tops.

Nathan took his key ring out again and unlocked the first trunk, flinging it open. Without much interest, I observed the dull steel of many knives neatly arrayed in rows on velvet. There were clearly several tiers of cutlery in each trunk. Nathan took out each tray and set it onto the bed, then lit a meager fire in the grate. This hint of warmth relaxed me; I was suddenly overcome by sleepiness and wished I could
lie down for a few minutes. I did not want to look at knives. Nathan opened the last of the trunks, set all the trays of knives and cutlery onto the bed, sat on the chair by his desk, and lit a small pipe with a bell-shaped bowl he carried in his inside pocket.

“Just knives for me,” I said. “I don't have room for the full sets in my box.” Nathan nodded and frowned down at his accounts, puffing on his pipe. As I watched him, his fair hair was suddenly rimmed with golden light. The sun must have come out from behind a cloud at that instant, because the room was transformed. A rectangle of light threaded through with white veins trembled on the wall to my right, thrown through the warped glass of the window. The lifeless gray knives on the bed had become smears of blazing silver. The illuminated smoke from Nathan's pipe rose liquidly through the air like a sinuous dragon. I felt the warmth of the sun on my face and was suffused with a strange, almost ecstatic joy. Then, as though a great fist had closed itself over the sun, everything went dark again. My doldrums returned. So sad and bored I could have wept, I approached the first of the trays on the bed and listlessly thumbed a few blades. Pocketknives. I could sell these. The blades were sharp, tapered, shining. They had been hinged into simple bone handles, for the most part. A few of them had a bit more detail on them and could fetch a higher price. Very slowly, as though drugged with valerian, I selected eight knives, placing them on Nathan's desk. And then, as I shuffled toward the bed again, an extraordinary object caught my eye, tossed in among knives. It was a pistol dagger—a long knife with a little pistol built into the blade. The handle was a finely carved ivory horse's head. I had never seen a weapon like this before. I picked it up and turned it in my hands. It was as long as my forearm. The blade was very sharp. The barrel of the little gun was burnished steel. The trigger guard of the pistol was shaped like a shell. I took it to the window to examine it more closely. The horse's head had been carved in great detail; it looked alive, the nostrils flared as if in mid-gallop, the mane flowing.

“I was wondering if you would sniff that out,” said Nathan with a smile.

“Where did you get it?” I asked.

“An old woman in the Auvergne sold off her whole estate. Her husband had died and left her nothing but debts. She had great stuff, I wish I could have bought more.” He puffed on his pipe, looking over at me benignly. I tried to lay the weapon back on the bed and feign a lack of interest, but I couldn't relinquish it. The initials
DV
were engraved under the horse's chin.

“What was the name of the man it belonged to?”

“No idea,” said Nathan.

“Well, what was the widow's name?”

“We didn't exactly have a personal relationship. I bought her stuff by the pound. She was desperate to get rid of it.”

“Where are the other things you bought?” I asked.

“Hm?” asked Nathan.

“The other things you bought from the widow.”

“Jacob, I would love to let you browse all day but I have another client who wants to see this stock.” Nathan had grown as serious as a man who can't cover his front teeth with his upper lip can look.

“How much for the eight pocketknives?”

“Three livres.”

I forced myself to replace the pistol dagger on the tray and pretended to forget about it.

“I'll give you two livres for the knives,” I said.

“Two livres ten sous,” he countered.

“Two livres five sous.”

“Forty-eight sous. My final offer,” he said, looking down at his accounts.

“You're robbing me.” I paid out the money.

“And the widow's weapon? Not interested?” Nathan asked as he wrote me out a receipt for the knives.

“Oh, I don't know,” I said, shrugging. “How much do you want for it?”

“Fifty livres.”

“What?”

“It's a rare piece.”

“You said you bought the stuff by the pound!”

“You'll sell it for much more than I'm asking.”

“Forget it,” I said.

“Forty-five,” he snapped. I looked down at him. His clear round eyes were glacial pools.

“Is this going to bring me trouble, Nathan?”

“Not unless you fire it.”

I paid him the money, all I had. He threw in a tooled leather sheath, made in Spain, he said. “It's not the original, of course, but it fits very nicely.”

I rushed home, breathless, as if to a tryst. There was no one at home. Unable to wait another moment, fingers trembling, I unwrapped the dagger from the square of wrinkled linen Blond Nathan had swaddled it in. The weapon gleamed in my hands, the tiny pistol tucked so neatly against the flank of the long blade. The carved ivory horse's head had been rendered by a master; I tried to imagine the tiny chisel he had used to pick out the flared nostrils, the widened eyes. Gazing at that perfect object balanced on my fingers, I felt an intense longing, something like love, rise up in me.

It occurred to me that it might be nice to offer a bit of gunpowder and a few bullets along with it, as an incentive to buy.

Old Aaron Mayer, who provided armor and munitions for the French soldiers, had his shop a few streets away. Locking the weapon in my peddler's box and yoking up, I dashed down the street and walked into Mayer's shop. The room was paneled with dark wood. Glass-fronted cases filled with gleaming muskets and swords lined the walls. Old Aaron, his back badly bent, his gray beard fine as a sprig of
baby's breath, was helping a young aristocrat choose his equipment. The young man stood very straight, chest out, one foot splayed. He wore a powdered wig and was dressed in an exquisite yellow-and-sky-blue-striped coat with matching britches. As was the custom in those days, he was armed with a long, sheathed sword that hung from a fine leather belt around his waist. The young man's face was powdered very white, and he wore a little black dot above his lip. He watched me enter in the neutral, slightly irritated way one observes a wet dog slinking in through an open door. Aaron turned. Seeing me, he gestured for me to sit down in a corner till he was finished. The young man was holding a musket in clean, tapered fingers.

“There is really no reason to begin with the finest gun you can buy,” Aaron said, taking the gun. “It's wisest to begin with something solid but economical, like this.” He held up another, seemingly identical musket. The young man stood there for a moment, one long finger on his chin, thinking. Then he pointed at the more expensive of the two muskets. He told Aaron to put it aside for him for a couple of hours, along with the ammunition. He would be back very soon. “Of course,” said Aaron. The young man walked out, leaving me in a cloud of intoxicating perfume.

“And off he goes to borrow money from Loeb Hildesheim, and so the trouble begins,” Aaron said in Yiddish, shaking his old head. “Not one of them lives within his means. When they go into the army, they all need to buy the fanciest gear. And so they borrow from us, and then their parents get furious at us for lending.” Aaron shrugged. “I'm not complaining. So, Jacob, what can I do for you?”

“I need some bullets and gunpowder. For a pistol dagger I want to sell, but I have never sold such a thing, and I thought it would be nice to have the
accoutrements
.”

“Listen to your accent! You sound almost French.”

“We all have to try, a bit,” I said.

“Of course. Now. You're not wearing the weapon, of course.”

“Are you mad? It's in the box.” Jews in Paris were not allowed to bear arms of any kind on our persons; swords, guns, even hunting knives, were forbidden to us.

“Well, I better show you how it functions. So you can demonstrate for the customer. Always a good idea to know how your merchandise works.”

Tenderly, I removed the wrapped weapon from the bottom drawer of my peddler's box, laid it on a table, and revealed it. Aaron looked at it somberly for a long moment. “Where did you get this, Jacob?” he asked me quietly.

“I bought it along with a load of other knives from Thiers,” I answered casually. Aaron lifted it, examining the carved handle.

“You must have paid a great deal for it,” he said.

“It was a part of an estate. A widow. I did think it was particularly nice,” I said fatuously.

“It's signed,” Aaron said, passing his thumb over a tiny scrawl embedded in the bottom of the handle. “Le Page. You see? Pierre Le Page is commissioned by the finest families in France. You'll need to be careful how you sell this. I can't believe … Who sold it to you?” Sensing my hesitation, he looked up at me from under his wiry gray brows. “All right. Well, first you put a measure of gunpowder down the barrel like this.” He took what looked like a silver hip flask in his crooked fingers, removed a pointed silver measure affixed to its top, then unscrewed its cap. Carefully, he tipped a measure of gunpowder into the pointed silver cap, then emptied the powder into the barrel of the gun.