Jerusalem Maiden (26 page)

A delicious smell rose from an open fire where a vendor grilled meat. Esther pinched her nose. The meat was surely
traife
, but she was amazed that it was in such abundance that it could be cooked and sold on the street.

She meandered in a loop and crossed a bridge over the Seine onto the Île de la Cité, where the gigantic Notre Dame towered with all its magnificent buttresses, spires and gargoyles. A second bridge led her to the Seine's left bank, and soon she found herself in an alley similar to those of Le Marais, except that it had a sidewalk edged with cafés, their caned chairs spilling outside. Men and women dressed similarly in elegant yet simple jackets and open white shirts sat together with aromatic cups of coffee. Men smoked cigarettes and pipes. Some women drew on cigarettes, their fingers casually holding ivory holders. All were absorbed in heated discussions.

A pram missing a wheel and a cracked washbasin rusted on the pavement in front of a store. Behind the dirty window, a cat lounged atop a pile of scuffed velvet and wrinkled silk. Esther had never seen a cat kept as a pet, nor had she peered into one's green eyes. The animal returned her gaze through half-closed lids. Next to it, an unfinished painting leaned at an angle, propped up by junk. Something about the shades of blue and splash of red drew Esther's eyes to the mother and child in the center. A blotch of flat blue that looked like the beginning of a sea spilled to their right, while the sky and the child's undetailed face were still the primed off-white canvas. Esther cocked her head, studying the work. She walked away, but then returned to look at it again. The signature, if it existed, was obstructed by an assortment of unwashed bottles.

A gangly teenage boy nudged a bony, short woman toward the door and she came out, wearing spectacles as thick as magnifying glasses. “You like? You can have it for thirty francs.”

“That's a lot.”

“For a Picasso?”

Back in Jerusalem, Mlle Thibaux had told Esther about the new Spanish painter. Now one of his canvases was selling in a used-goods store. “Are you sure?”

“No one likes his blue paintings. Too depressing.” The woman lifted her spectacles as if she could see better without them. Her gaze traveled over Esther from her feet back to her head. “All about poverty.”

“It's only a study. Unfinished,” Esther said. “I'll pay you fifteen francs. But I must see the signature.”

The woman narrowed her eyes as if only now noticing Esther's
tichel
. “A Jewess?” She spat on the ground. “I wouldn't sell it to you for a hundred.”

Esther jolted as though slapped. “I am from Jerusalem.” She squared her shoulders, turned and left, the sting of the insult burning in her cheeks. The hatred, coming not from an Arab but from a Frenchwoman, was hard to absorb.

Quick footfalls behind her were followed by a tug on her sleeve. The teenage boy spoke fast. “We'll take twenty-five francs. You want it?”

Esther swallowed. It couldn't be a Picasso, could it? The anti-Semitic woman stood in the street, arms crossed, the painting resting on the ground against her knees. The blue vibrated. The unique composition drew Esther back against her instinct to walk away.

“Let me see the signature,” Esther said. She shouldn't give these people her money. Yet she was the one with the moral clarity; she had God on her side—

She lifted the canvas. Only a master could have made the sparse, meticulous pencil lines that still showed. Only a master could dare make brushstrokes so carelessly, yet with such precision.

She traced the signature with her finger. “I'll take it only with an apology from your grandma.”

W
alking down the street with the painting flapping at her ankles, Esther could barely catch her breath. She had never owned a piece of art, nor thought of buying one. Certainly not one by Picasso, and one with graven images, no less.

An artisan's store without a front wall allowed her to see a man blowing a stick of iridescent glass into an urn. Bowls, vases and bottles of all sizes shattered the sunlight into glowing colors. Esther paused, transfixed. It was a small miracle to blow air to create something that beautiful.

Moving on, she realized that she had stumbled upon a colony of craftsmen at work. She observed men carving wood furniture, printing fabric, boiling and molding soaps, chiseling stone and hammering wrought iron. She watched a bookmaker fashioning paper drained from pulp and a doll maker creating Lilliputian courtesans. Her spirits high, Esther entered a ceramic shop filled with mud-covered pottery wheels and tools. A robust man with delicate fingers dotted the surface of a bowl with red, white and green. She strained to peer past him through the open back door at a stone-paved courtyard with tables for painting and drying. He motioned that she could go look.

Edging the courtyard on the left, a wisteria vine climbed the wall of a shack, purple flowers dripping from its branches. Stacks of ceramic tiles and a gigantic kiln filled the space against the right and back walls. In the center, a woman worked at a long table, painting tiles arranged six across by three high. Her brush stroked a pastoral scene that carried over from one tile to the next. Canisters of colored powder were strewn about her.

“They will burn into a smooth, shiny glaze,” the woman said, answering Esther's unasked question. “But not in the colors you see here. They'll change completely in the heat.” She dabbed blue on the crest of a peacock.

“How do you know which colors to use?”

“Experience.” The woman glanced at Esther's painting. “You want me to finish that?”

Esther laughed. “Oh, no. Thanks.”

The woman shrugged. “Here. You try me.” She held out a cup of pencils and nodded toward a pile of blank tiles.

Esther hesitated.

“I'll color and fire it tonight. Come tomorrow to see how it turns out.”

Esther picked a pencil and took her time drawing curlicues and leaves spreading to all four corners. “Could you use different hues of blue and orange?” she asked shyly.

“
C'est très jolie,
” the woman said. Her eyes rested on Esther for a moment before she dabbed the tile with pigments from her little pots.

Only when Esther walked back to her room in the still-bright early evening hour, the Picasso flapping against her leg, did she grasp how different she felt in this city. She was liberated, as if her real self had been released from some internal cage. It had never occurred to her that the Almighty God would stay behind in His Holy Land, where her children were now sleeping, dreaming their innocent dreams. Her heart contracted. If only she could give each a good-night kiss—Dvora. Gershon. Eliyahu.

S
he was relieved at dinner that a woman sat at her side, for Raysel's guests brushed elbows when they ate. She sipped wine, which she had never done midweek. Unlike the sweetened kiddush wine, this carried a hint of fresh straw that left a pleasant sensation on her palate. The residents of the house—both men and women—argued, joked and cut into each other's sentences in Yiddish laced with Polish and French. They compared prices of coffee beans, wristwatches and silk, and the cost of shipping them to their respective countries. A young man entertained them with his quips. The men in the room sported trimmed beards and wore only yarmulkes. A couple of ladies let out unrestrained laughter, like daring secular women—or kibbutz women who worked side by side with men by day and sang along with them in the evening.

The diners interrogated Esther about
Eretz Yisrael
. One woman's uncle had traveled there to die and be buried on the Mount of Olives. A man's cousin had become a Marxist and emigrated there to found a kibbutz.

“Jews are blooming the desert,” said Raysel, hovering behind the seated guests. “Such a miracle!”

“Why would anyone prefer the desert to living here?” a guest replied.

Thinking of the two anti-Semitic incidents of the day, Esther said, “In the Holy Land, Jews need not question themselves. They know who they are and where they come from.”

“But no Jew knows where he's going,” Raysel said, and raised her glass. “May the Messiah arrive soon and bring our salvation.”

“Why will the Messiah choose a place full of dust?” a woman asked.

Esther shrugged. “Dust you can wipe away. Holiness you can't pick up anywhere else.”

“Touché.” Everyone laughed.

“Before long, we'll have parks in Tel Aviv, too,” Esther went on. After seeing what a boulevard looked like, she understood Nathan's passion to see Tel Aviv, the first Hebrew city, grow into a modern metropolis where tall trees, flower beds and park benches would split the center of traffic.

Since daylight lingered until ten o'clock, Raysel's guests escaped the heat indoors by pulling chairs out to the cobblestoned street. The commercial traffic had ceased, and the tenants reclaimed the only open space. Neighbors chatted and called out from one stoop to the next, boys raced wheels, girls hopscotched, and twin
kleyzmers
in baggy, oily pants broke into a cheerful violin-and-accordion song accompanied by the stamping of their feet. Esther thought of the crowded, sorrowful Jerusalem neighborhood of her childhood. Even though the two-story houses of Me'ah She'arim had exhaled their share of stench, the open, clear Jerusalem sky sucked it away. And yet, despite the inescapable urban decay of sweat, mildew, urine and garbage, Parisian Jews were full of this gaiety in a way that Jerusalem Jews had never been.

Raysel came outside looking for her. “The letter you sent this morning? Her concierge told the boy that she'd left for the summer.”

Esther gasped. Left for the summer? “I'll never be in Paris again!” she cried out. She went inside and walked up the stairwell shaft, sadness weighing her down. But as she watched the late-day sun cast a bronze glow onto the roofs of the houses, the occasional flicker of a candle or a kerosene lamp indicating life in a gabled window, she reminded herself of her good fortune. She was in Paris at last.

Asher had wanted to bring her here. Miriam had written that he had quit his yeshiva studies, cut his sidelocks and was conducting an orchestra in Vienna. His family had excommunicated him, and Aunt Tova had died from sorrow. From the periscope of adulthood, Esther could now see that he had been a friend, one who spoke to her as his equal. He had been brave to challenge the conventions of their elders' interpretations of God's intentions.

For the first time in years she dared ask herself, “What if ?”

R
aysel set down her coffee cup. “Why didn't you write to let this teacher know you were coming?”

“I arrived faster than a letter would have.”

Raysel played with a curl. “Is she married? Does she have a family?”

“Uh, she's, uh—” Esther swallowed. “She had a liaison with the French ambassador to Jerusalem. She had a son with him—”

“A courtesan! How delicious! Imagine a Jerusalem maiden befriending a French back-street mistress.”

Esther winced. “She lived in the embassy, so she wasn't a ‘back-street' woman.”

“Same thing. French men aren't shy about keeping their mistresses public.” Raysel checked her reflection in the glass of a talisman hung on the wall and tugged at the loose skin under her chin. “She's a real
Parisienne
. Maybe she has her own salon.” Her eyes glowed with a dreamy look. “How I wish to be invited to one, even once.”

Dust particles danced in a ray of sunshine cleaving through a gap between the velvet curtains. Esther regarded Raysel. The woman had lived in Paris for years, yet forever remained an outsider. In spite of Jerusalem's ghetto-like enclaves, Jews were the city's majority. They clustered by choice only to keep out the “others.” Here, a minority, they felt excluded, confined to Le Marais.

Even so, Esther felt she belonged here. The anonymity she had discovered was an unexpected gift of freedom, something she hadn't imagined when fantasizing about Paris. And she couldn't ignore the way her skin tingled with life here, her sexual urges stronger. It was hard to avoid the sculptures of nude men on the buildings' façades or the city's fountains, and the rush they sent through her was a jumble of wants, both physical and creative art.

Raysel brought her back from her musings. “When your Mlle Thibaux returns, you must be dressed properly.”

“She won't be back until after the summer. I'll be long gone by then.”

Raysel's eyes traveled down Esther's shirt and skirt. “I'm a good Jewess, but Hashem help me if I allow the maids to dress better than me.”

Esther looked down at her leather shoes poking out from under her skirt. They were sturdy, with strong laces, meant for walking. She also owned leather sandals she polished on Fridays.

“If you have money to come to Paris, you must have money for decent clothes,” Raysel said. “We're going shopping.”

Esther bit her lip. At home, she was instantaneously recognized as a Haredi, an example of piousness. Here, the same clothes marked her as poor and had unleashed anti-Semitic remarks.

“You're in Paris now,” Raysel exclaimed an hour later, as she watched Esther trying on a dress in a tiny Le Marais shop whose proprietor copied designs from the fashion houses up Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. “With your face and deportment, you can be a real Parisian beauty!”

Esther had never shopped for clothes in a store, nor dressed in a mirrored stall. The sharp edge of forbidden vanity in front of a mirror had dulled, she noticed when pulling the dress over her slip. Raysel was right: she almost looked
Parisienne
. And, she'd lost weight. Her milk had dried, she had been sick at the start of her Mediterranean crossing, then rationed her kosher food, and these past two weeks, she'd spent long days walking the cobblestoned streets of Paris, where she ate nothing until she was safely back in Raysel's kosher dining room. There, traumatized by the shortages of the Great War, Raysel doled out rationed portions onto her guests' plates. There hadn't been four fried eggs twice a day, nor Malka's cakes.