Jerusalem Maiden (12 page)

Aba sent a messenger to appeal to a prestigious doctor to come from Jaffa, and paid baksheesh to a Turkish officer so his soldiers would guard the
diligence
, the horse-drawn carriage in which the esteemed physician arrived.

The doctor stayed with Ima for a long time. The air in the house was thick with hope and dread. Aba and the three boys wrapped themselves in their
tallits
and
dovened
in monotonous indecipherable voices. If Esther could paint the family anticipating news, she thought, she would use not the airy pastels of the Impressionists, but the somber ochre palette of Rembrandt. Then she caught herself. Her days of indulgence must be over. Never again would she take pride borrowed—sucked, really—from someone else's blood.

She pressed her ear against the wooden door but heard nothing. She smelled the lemon-scented oil. How full of bliss had Ima been when polishing this door for Passover.

The doctor finally came out. “Beside the blood consumption, two babies are fighting one another,” he told Aba.

“Bless Hashem,” Aba mumbled.

Two? Awe and apprehension at God's design pulled Esther in opposite directions. After sharing their mother's womb, Esau and Jacob's animosity had been eternalized for generations to come in the battle between their children—the cousins Arabs and Jews.

“The babies are sucking your wife's bone marrow,” the doctor said.

“Aaaghhh.” A yelp of anguish erupted from Aba's chest. “What is there to do?”

“Reb Shlomo,” the doctor asked. “How many children do you have?”

“Six, Hashem bless them,” Aba replied, and Esther thought,
And four in heaven.

“Your six children need their mother. As Hashem is my witness, if we don't remove these two fetuses, they'll take her away.”

When she was strong enough, Ima cried aloud. When she became too weak, she cried softly. She cried about her neglected children, her house in the hands of another woman, and the unborn babies, who, in their race to come to the world, doomed all three of them.

“You need your strength.” Esther told her, her eyes misted. “And I need you.” She fed Ima sweetened tea with a spoon, then sat down, gazing at a pot of hens-and-chicks cactus on the windowsill. A pack of offspring clung to the mother hen plant's roots. Splotches of pale orange on the hen's waxy leaves indicated that she was dehydrated, but the newly sprouted brood gleamed in fresh green. Were mothers destined to give everything they had to create new lives until there was nothing left?

A
ba led the rabbi in. The revered man's fingers gathered and caressed his beard as he observed the sleeping Ima. Esther busied herself straightening the room.

The rabbi offered a prayer, then, his eyes on the sick woman, told Aba, “According to the book of Sanhedrin, phrase seventy-two B, the fetus is a pursuer, a
rodef
, and thus may be terminated. The mother's life is sacred. Saving it is a decree that supersedes all others.”

Two hours later, the midwife arrived with her bulging leather bag. While the three boys stayed at their yeshiva, a neighbor led Hanna and Miriam out. Esther refused to leave.

“Esther, pray for me. Hashem listens to the prayers of innocent children,” Ima cried.

Innocent? Esther tasted the kindness Ima had conferred upon her as sweet as candied fruit. In Ima's eyes she was no longer the daughter who had brought her shame. If Ima had finally found the purity of Esther's heart, God must too—

“Soon, with the rabbi's blessing and God willing, you'll be well again,” the midwife told the weeping Ima.

Esther gave Ima wine and then made herself useful when the water hauler delivered clean water from the Hezekiah's water duct. She boiled one of the tin cans and carried it to the bedroom. There, on the table, cotton strips and a cornucopia of cold metal instruments made her teeth chatter in spite of the heat.

She closed the bedroom door behind her and broke into a run, never stopping until she had climbed a barren hill. She fell on the ground. The parched earth beneath her was cracked, and its thick skin curled at the edges, scratching her face. The scattered rocks were hot and might be a refuge for scorpions. Esther didn't care. The worst was happening already. Her fingers closed around clumps of hard soil. She sobbed until she was empty of tears. Then she prayed with all her might; God listened to innocent children, Ima had said.

But God knew she wasn't innocent. Why, even as she had made her promise at the Western Wall she had impertinently conditioned her obedience on God's behavior, not her own! She had tried to scheme God into a deal. Of course He had judged her unworthy. He wouldn't believe her regret unless she made the ultimate sacrifice.

Esther jumped to her feet and sprinted. She vaulted over rocks and camel dung, cut through the fields into alleys, jostled around vendors' stalls, bumped into people, and collided with a donkey. She ran up the main thoroughfare to the Hospice Saint Vincent de Paul.

Mlle Thibaux was fanning herself and reading when Esther burst in and grabbed her notebook off the shelf. “I can't talk now,” she blurted in response to Mlle Thibaux's surprised look. “
Merci.
” She sprinted out again, up the hill, down the valley, up another hill where Bedouins had pitched their tents among the pine trees, and then into an open rocky field. The last time she had been here, the dells had been coated with green moss, and shy cyclamens had peeked bashfully from under rocks—

Esther refused to allow memories to weaken her resolve. Faith was absolute, as Abraham's had been when proving his trust in God's will. Esther collected stones into a small altar and broke off dry thistles with her bare hands until they bled. Gingerly, she placed her notebook on top. The wind rustled the leaves, as if God was taking a last look at the evidence.

The flint was already hot under the sizzling sun, the stone's fire inside captured from volcanic activity eons earlier. Esther struck one fragment against another, smelling the tang of burned sugar. Another strike and another, and the spark caught the fine hairs in the heads of the thistles, sending up a thin plume of smoke. The breeze caught it, swelled it, and Esther added dry grass to make the flame burst.

This was the moment when God intervened with Abraham's plans to kill his beloved son, Isaac. Esther glanced around. No ram with its horns tangled in a bush. Nothing but blinding sky pressing down on her and flies biting her ankles. “
Shma Israel, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai e'had,
” she prayed with deliberation as the breeze leafed through the pages and the fire licked them hesitantly before devouring the notebook whole.

A
s soon as Esther crossed the communal yard, she heard the screams. Neighboring women stood outside the Kaminskys' kitchen yard, whispering, some holding their Books of Psalms. They parted a passage for Esther. She hadn't imagined Ima's feeble lungs were still capable of emitting such cries, pitiful and petrifying.

In the front room, Aba, wrapped in his prayer shawl,
dovened
against the wall. Upon Esther's entrance, he halted, collapsing into his upholstered chair. His hands gripped the arms, and his frozen face, framed by the thicket of his reddish beard and hair, was ashen.

Esther dropped to the cold floor at his feet. Smoke still coated her nostrils, and the loss of her notebook tightened her stomach into a bitter persimmon. Was it acceptable to God if her sacrifice hurt? She couldn't make the pain stop, but perhaps that made her offering more meaningful. It wasn't regret, she told God silently.
I made it willingly. I would do it again. Please, please, please, save my Ima.

She laid her head on Aba's knees, and his hand came to rest on her hair, his touch reassuring. Yet, Esther's palms closed into fists so tight that the nails dug into the skin. She welcomed the sting; it diverted her attention from the pain inside.

The screams stopped, and the midwife came out of the bedroom carrying a pail covered with a bloodstained towel. The sticky, hot odor of sick blood walked along with her, but stayed inside as she took the pail to the outhouse. When she returned, the towel was gone and the pail seemed lighter, but the stench, as nauseating as in the butcher's shop, dominated the room like a conquering army.

Aba's breathing was heavy. Shulamit emerged from the bedroom, her permanent cheer gone. “It's over. With Hashem's help, she'll be better now.” She went to the kitchen. “I'll make tea. You need it,” she said over her shoulder.

“May we go in to see her?” Aba asked.

“In a while. Esther, go fetch water from the cistern. I'll wash the bedroom floor first.”

When Esther returned from the communal well, Aba's wails tore from the bedroom.

Ima was dead.

Marriage

Do not converse much with any woman,
your own or even less, your neighbor's.

—AVOT 1, 5

C
ones of dancing dust swirled up the barren slope, until they fainted from exhaustion. A few years ago, the hills had been thick with firs and pines, but the Ottomans had chopped them all down to feed their war trains. Esther pushed a cart laden with the huge
cholent
pot uphill, digging her feet in to prevent the heavy cart from sliding back down. The cauldron contained food for the twenty people expected at the Kaminskys' Shabbat table. This week it even included chunks of fatty meat given to Aba as payment by an insolvent merchant for negotiating with the creditors. With the Ottomans imposing new taxes and confiscating every rope and nail in desperation to salvage their frayed four-hundred-year-old empire, poverty was spreading like maggots in a carcass. This Shabbat stew was the Kaminskys' only full meal of the week.

The cart's weight pressed on Esther's hips. She stopped and wiped her brow with her sleeve. She had enjoyed the preparations of the
cholent
, but it would have been only fair if her stronger brothers did the schlepping of the heavy pot. At least there was no water in it; she would add that at the baker's, where the meal would simmer in his oven overnight. The juices of the
cholent
's many ingredients would mix to produce a delicious smoke-flavored feast. The thought made Esther's mouth salivate.

The street teemed with people hurrying about, carrying prayer bags, food wrapped in Yiddish newspapers, water cans and towels for the Friday ritual baths. Just days before Yom Kippur, everyone was anxious about God's impending judgment and eager to be cleansed of his or her sins. Esther took a deep breath. In the odors of cooking and the steam from the
mikveh
, she could detect the scent of the Shabbat waiting at the community gate. But deeper than that was the sense of the High Holidays, a month-long time of alternating introspection, observance and renewal.

“Here, let me push,” said a high-pitched voice. She turned to see Asher. Again. For more than two years now, ever since their chance encounter by the monastery ruins, he paid her more attention than was proper, even between cousins. Having unburdened herself of his secret, she had never learned how Aba halted her cousin's decline into the abyss of heterodoxy. Or had he? Since Ima's death, Aba had been distracted.

“Aren't you supposed to be at the yeshiva? Or did you spend the day playing flute to an Arab's herd of sheep?” Esther asked, and Asher blinked. “One of these days you'll be kidnapped by Turkish soldiers,” she added. With the Ottomans' insatiable hunger to replace its dead fighters, boys were no longer safe in the streets.

Crimson spread under the fuzz of what should have been Asher's beard. At seventeen, his bones remained fragile, his beard was late and his skin pink and soft. His delicate fingers—like her brothers'—never dipped into hot dishwater, scrubbed linens with Nablus soap or wrung coarse burlap to scour floors.

Asher leaned on her cart and gave it a shove. “Two can do better than one.” In spite of his light weight, the cart jerked and rolled uphill. Esther kept her pressure on the left side, shrinking away to keep her distance. Yet dozens of pairs of eyes must be bearing down upon her. Her cousin's improper nearness would ruin whatever remained of her reputation and by association harm Hanna's. Her sister already blamed Esther for lowering her prospects by losing both their reputation and their dowry to the spice merchant.

“Pull the rope.” Esther pointed to the front. Asher moved forward, and though Esther was grateful for the help, she kept the scowl on her face; whoever saw them should know that this dishonorable behavior was imposed upon her.

“My Ima always invites you all to have Shabbat at our house,” Asher said. “We're family. You shouldn't be home without a woman at the table.”

“I am the woman at the table.” Inheriting Ima's drudgery had been her just punishment. Aba didn't recite Woman of Valor for her on Friday, because she wasn't his wife, but he blessed her along with the other children. For those few moments it felt as if God was smiling at her again, and it pulled her out of the black well into which she had sunk after killing her mother with her sins.

Running Aba's household had also given her an out from marriage.

“There will soon be another woman.” Asher strained to puff out the words. “I hear that your father will marry Shulamit.”

Esther stopped, and the handle of the cart punched her in the stomach. She hadn't considered Aba getting married again. Shulamit hadn't worked for them since Ima's death. She'd wed Aba? With all her lovely character, Shulamit, whose husband and two of her five children had perished in last winter's epidemic, was neither clever nor pretty enough for the learned, handsome Shlomo Kaminsky.

Esther glanced at her exposed toes; she was too old to go barefoot, so she had cut out the front of her shoes to allow her recent growth. “We can't feed her three children. My Aba's bank is almost defunct.”

“The rabbi has been arranging marriages after so many people died.” Asher's tone changed to that of a ponderous rabbi. “The first step in rebuilding the Temple starts with rebuilding the decimated Jewish homes in the Holy City.”

Esther giggled at the clever imitation, though she kept an eye on the entrance to the bakery lest anyone see her immodesty. “He may call it ‘rebuilding the Temple,' but it's girls like Ruthi who make the bricks and mortar.” Ruthi was getting married the next day. She and Esther had repaired their relationship on the condition that Esther not mention Yossel.

“The rabbi matches hardworking brides with widowers whose orphaned children need care.” Asher stopped pulling the cart and looked straight at Esther. “It may be you, too, since your Aba has neglected to find you a match.”

Esther stubbed her big toe against the jutting bakery's threshold. She gave the cart a shove. “My Aba has been busy trying to ease the misery of the community,” she said, a bit haughtily, to remind Asher that his Aba was but a poor merchant.

Asher seemed unfazed by her conceit. “What can your Aba do? Newcomers are under the patronage of the embassies of their country of origin, but we, Ashkenazi Jews who've lived here forever, have no foreign country to claim and protect us.”

Esther said nothing. She remembered the warning of doom the rabbis had pronounced against looking at an automobile. Now several more of these horseless carriages roamed the streets of Jerusalem, their horns blaring. It was impossible to avoid looking at them. And she couldn't ask Mlle Thibaux to speak on behalf of the Haredi to the French ambassador. Esther had had to drop out of school after Ima's death, and any contact with Mlle Thibaux only brought back her guilt.

Leaving the cart outside the windowless cave that housed the bakery, Esther lugged her pot across the floor, nudging customers to open a path toward the oven dug into the rock. Her eyes took a moment to adjust to the darkness, while her nostrils filled with the buttery aroma of freshly baked challahs. She tried lifting the large pot onto the counter and was surprised to discover that Asher was still around and caught the pot's other side. With more determination than strength, he helped hoist it up.

“Whose
cholent
is it?” the baker asked.

“Mine,” Esther replied. “The Kaminskys'.” The baker surely noticed her signature in the form of a purple string she had tied to the handle so no one else might get her pot “by mistake.”

“How come Asher's doing all the work?”

“
All
the work is inside the pot,” Esther snapped.

The baker laughed. “Esther, Esther. With such a sharp tongue, pity your husband—”

“What's the matter, we're too delicate for some labor?” asked Bilha the matchmaker. The toothless woman stepped from the cluster of customers by the bread shelf and looked up into Esther's face, her breath as foul as rotting potatoes. With knotted fingers, she squeezed Esther's arm. “We aren't too weak to lift a pot, are we?”

“
We
are as strong as oxen,” Esther replied, not masking her distaste. In spite of the weeds, her cycle had finally started when she turned fourteen last spring. If the matchmaker had a groom in mind—surely one for whom Aba must compromise—she would be compiling a list of Esther's shortcomings for bargaining leverage. “You know well that since my Ima died, may her name be blessed, I've been running the household.” There hadn't been time even for Shabbat walks.

“I am trying to do a mitzvah, and what do I get but an insolent girl's scorn?” Bilha asked no one in particular. To Esther she said, “Lucky for you and for your
tzadeket
mother, may her soul rest in peace, I pair people for my reward in the next world, not in this one.” Without taking her eyes off Esther, she poked a small challah, then sniffed both ends as if one might smell better than the other.

“It's fresh. It's fresh.” The baker yanked it out of Bilha's hand. “And you get only half, anyway. You tell me where can I get enough flour for the entire neighborhood?”

“We have no flour because we have no recent tradition of growing our own food or herding our own sheep,” Asher piped up in his thin voice.

“Spoken like a Zionist.” The baker lined up customers' cooking pots ready for his oven. “Jews are the people of the Book. Are you suggesting that we become farmers, like the Arabs?”

“You think the danger for our youth is from those preying missionary Christians? Ha!” Bilha shook a gnarled finger above her head. “It's those Zionist farmers who pretend to be Jews. They pour in from Europe only to fill your heads with sacrilegious ideas.
Tfoo, tfoo, tfoo.
”

“Our ancestors worked the land right here,” Asher replied calmly. “Now look who has vegetables, milk, meat and wool. Arabs and secular Jews.” Esther was surprised that he was such an effusive, bold talker when away from his mother.

“Thieves, all Arabs. They sell everything for exorbitant prices.” Bilha's chortle sounded like a rasp. “And I'd rather starve than ask a modern Jew for a favor.”

“Asher, you get half a challah, too,” the baker told him.

“For my entire family? What about my sisters and their children?”

The baker shrugged. “Take it up with Hashem.”

Leaving, Asher stopped at the door and sent Esther a conspiratorial glance, which the half-circle of customers must have noticed. She seethed.

“This cousin of yours,” the baker said. “He should be married already.”

“Ha! Did you hear what his mother demands for her one precious boy? Only a bride with a respected lineage. And what kind of a
metzi'ah
does she offer in return? You tell me what a bargain he is.” Bilha addressed Esther as if she had made the request. “Looking like a quarter chicken, and not even an
eeluy
, this one. You'd think that at least they would have a great rabbi in the family, but no.” She dug something out from between her back teeth and examined it.

“And what about you?” the baker asked Esther. “Now that your Aba is getting married, Shulamit will take over the household.”

Esther winced. The whole neighborhood had heard the news before she did.

“It was convenient for Reb Shlomo to keep Esther around to manage his house and the children.” Bilha lifted the lid off Esther's pot and examined the contents. Her head nodded with a guarded approval. “Finally got your monthly flow? Right?”

Esther's face was burning. She couldn't speak. She wished she could burrow into the ground.

“Now, with Hashem's help, your calling is elsewhere,” the baker said. A small chorus mumbled, “Amen.” “From your mouth to Hashem's ears.” “Before the Messiah's arrival.”

Esther swallowed hard. “I'm going to be a seamstress.” Surprised at her own boldness, she added, “If you know of anyone needing a new skirt or even a coat—”

“And where will you get new fabric, you tell me?” the baker asked.

“I can do any mending, too. I've just altered my old coat for my sister Miriam—”

Bilha's waving finger almost touched Esther's nose. “A virgin working for money? Not for
tzedakah
? After you're married, you can be your husband's helpmate.”

Esther felt like stamping her foot. “I want to start now.”

The matchmaker turned to the audience. “Who here is going to give her work?”

At the sight of shaking heads, Esther's stomach churned. Her throat tight, she barely managed to say to the baker, “Is your water clear of maggots? Let me see you filter it.”

He added filtered water to her pot. “No more credit. Firewood doesn't grow on trees.” He chuckled.

Humiliation still flooding her, Esther counted two
grushim
and laid them on the counter; handling money upon receiving her pot tomorrow would be forbidden. “I'll pay the balance next week,” she whispered. The Great War in Europe had dwindled donations from the European Jewish communities. Little private money was being transferred to Aba's customers from abroad and loans he had made went unpaid, while the Turks raised the taxes. “Please find my
cholent
a good spot in the back of your oven.”

“For the Kaminskys I always save the best.”

Esther fled the bakery.

Dandelion seeds floated in the air, seeking hospitable spots to land. Asher waited in the alley around the corner, and Esther's irritation flared anew. Still mortified over the scene at the baker's, she wanted to hide somewhere. “Aren't you late picking up your mother so she can show you off?” She marched past him.

“I must talk to you,” he whispered behind her in Hebrew, surprising her. The spoken version was forbidden at his home. “Please.”

Did he know she had informed Aba on him? She glanced at Asher's eager, childish face. “Certainly not here,” she muttered, hurrying on. She didn't want to discuss his secret, and hers no longer mattered. She had left her canvases with Mlle Thibaux. When she missed painting, thoughts of Ima extinguished the fire in her. And though sometimes she longed for Mlle Thibaux's quiet presence, mistakenly believing that the
shiksa
was God's emissary had led Esther to temptation.