Jerusalem Maiden (35 page)

Esther's tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. Her own show? Did he mean at his gallery, with clients like Barnes, who bought fifty-two paintings at one swoop? Early December meant she would go six months without seeing her children.

“I see you're not one of those talkative women. I like that.” Ormaz dropped the bills on her worktable, pinched her cheek, turned and left.

Esther remained rooted in place, grateful for the pinch on her cheek as evidence that she hadn't dreamed the visit. How many more gifts had God in store for her?

As if awakening from a trance, she sprinted to the door to share the news with Pierre.

I
t was late afternoon as Esther came out of the chicken shop at Le Marais, having just paid half price for a whole chicken still unsold at the end of the day.

For some days now, the evenings had grown cooler. The approaching festivity of Rosh Hashanah was present in every street and store in Le Marais, where placards announced glazed fruit, honeyed preserves and apples in caramel crust; the banging of carpets being beaten reverberated in the alleys; and the smells of cooking overpowered the stench. Esther missed being in the Holy Land, preparing for the holiday in her own home. In her head, she planned the sweet meal she would cook in ten days for Pierre, Mlle Thibaux and a selected group of Jewish artist friends. She would prepare gefilte fish with sugar, bake a kugel with raisins, and would sprinkle her vegetables with honey so the coming year would be sweet. Regrettably, there would be no learned man at her table to discuss passages from the Torah as Aba had done, or to sing holiday melodies as Nathan did so well.

She stopped at a yarn shop to purchase more wool for the cardigan she was making for Mlle Thibaux. Knitting kept her hands occupied in the evenings at the café among Pierre's friends, where he shared plates of food she couldn't touch with other artists. She drank water or sipped wine from her own tin cup while listening to their debates, her needles clicking to the dance of her fingers. She wished she could knit sweaters for her children to keep them warm in the approaching winter, but everything of value was stolen in postal transit. Fingering the wool in the store, Esther smiled with fondness at the memory of Mlle Thibaux's reaction last month when she and Pierre had shown up at her country home.

“I was afraid it would never happen,” Mlle Thibaux had said, hugging both of them, “even as I knew Pierre's heart.”

“You didn't help move things along,” he told his mother.

“How could I?” she replied. “One of you wasn't ready.”

Esther squeezed Pierre's fingers. “I'm so happy.”

“
Je t'aime,
” Pierre told Esther in front of his mother, and Esther realized how far she'd gone. Love. In her world, no one ever expressed that emotion. She herself had only used the word “love” in connection with God, or with that broadening of heart she felt for her children.

Later, she asked Mlle Thibaux whether she minded that her son was with a married woman, the mother of three.

“We French have a saying, ‘It's better to have loved and suffered than not to have loved.' ”

Why are you so certain that Pierre or I will suffer?
Esther wanted to ask. Her happiness and her love must last forever. God wouldn't have led her to become an adulteress if it didn't suit the rest of His plans. But why had He planned for her to have children first before tearing her away from them?

Shaken out of her musings, Esther now found herself back in the street staring into a ground-level window, where a curtained four-poster bed filled most of the one-room apartment. It created a warm enclave for an entire family of
goy'im
to huddle and sleep. It seemed scandalous. No matter how cold it had been in Jerusalem, Aba had never put himself at risk of contact with a grown girl, nor would bar-mitzvahed brothers with their sisters. Yet there was closeness in a family in which parents and children belonged together. Esther made a quick sketch of the room. She would paint it with a hint of herself outside the window looking in. Touching the cool glass with the tips of her fingers in farewell, she moved on. Ten weeks to complete fifteen more paintings while still working at Vincent's.

There was so little time, and the days were growing shorter. Heading toward the Seine on the narrow sidewalk, she pondered her options for the remainder of the dwindling daylight. She could go home and put the chicken in a pot on the stove for a couple of hours while she ran back to the studio to paint. Or, she could cook the chicken in her studio and then carry the heavy pot back home and eat before joining Pierre at the café.

On the meter-wide sidewalk at the intersection of Rue de Rosiers and Rue Vieille du Temple, a tall, hatted man in a dark overcoat surveyed the street. For a split instant, she thought she was seeing his ghost. “Nathan!” she called out. “What are you doing here?”

Nathan did a double-take, then looked at her as if she were a stranger. “Esther?” he whispered. His hands clasped her shoulders, the fingers checking her bones as if they might be broken. “Esther. Are you sick?”

“Sick?” She hadn't seen him in almost four months, and although nothing about his soft hair and soft gaze and soft skin had changed, he somehow looked like someone she had only met in passing.

“I don't recognize you.” She knew what his gaze must register as it traveled from the short hair peeking from under the bell-shaped hat to the cheeks that had lost their roundness, to her cinched waist under the long open cardigan. “You're so thin!”

“I thought you were on your way home,” she said.

He grabbed her elbow and turned her toward a waiting carriage. “Get in,” he commanded in a tone he had never before used with her.

She pursed her lips in question, then thought better of it, though she did shake her elbow to free it from his hand. For him, she was contaminated as in her
nidah
days.

“We'll talk in my hotel room.” He climbed in behind her.

Of course he wouldn't stay at Raysel's; he was too refined for this decaying neighborhood. Her mind wrestled with the questions he would ask and the answers she should give. She had never lied to him, yet had never told him the truth. The sin of adultery should have shaken her to the bones, but lately, God in His mysterious ways made her at peace with it.

For several city blocks neither spoke. Against the
clip-clop
of the horses' hooves, she noticed the tightness of Nathan's jaw. His hands clasped his knees, the knuckles white.

He was a good man. He didn't deserve this rebellious, adulterous wife. “Did you receive the letter in which I included notes from the children?” she asked to break the tension.

“I did.”

“Did you have a good trip? Finished placing your orders?”

“Everything is fine, except that nothing is.” His words lost their terseness, and he turned to face her. “You no longer live in Le Marais. You don't even draw money from the bank; you didn't write to me anything about that. I've asked around. People see you food shopping here every day. You show up at the synagogue for Friday night services, and then you're gone. They say that when you lived here you disappeared every day, all day.”

“That's what tourists do in Paris.” Esther looked at the Seine to their left. “They don't sit in hot rooms under rotting eaves and breathe the stench of garbage. They're out, taking in the beautiful sights. Isn't that what you wanted me to do?”

“I wanted
us
to do that. Our grand tour. Together.”

“We would have, had I not missed you in Marseille.” That had been a sign from God, Esther thought. One of many.

The carriage stopped in front of a narrow house, a barely visible sign indicating it was a hotel. In the foyer, Nathan retrieved a key from a porter and led Esther up a narrow stairwell whose wallpaper of yellow roses failed to lift her sense of doom. For a wild second, she thought she could just refuse to enter the room. The chicken in her string bag would go bad if not put either in the boiling pot or the icebox.

Inside, a nightstand separated the twin beds. Nathan didn't know whether she was in her
nidah
days and wouldn't pose the question directly. Esther almost smiled at the thought of how open she had become with Pierre in such a short time.

A bouquet of flowers wilted on the dresser. Nathan's valise sat on the floor, its strap still buckled. He closed the door, removed his hat, and turned to her. His green eyes looked pained behind the spectacles. “Esther, what has happened to you?”

Her lips twitched.
I've changed,
she could say, but no words could sum up the shift of the ground under her feet or her own transformation these past few months.

Nathan examined her from top to bottom, then sat down on the upholstered chair. She remained standing. Everything about him was so decent that it made her heart contract. “Esther, please. There must be some explanation I haven't figured out.”

She still held the string bag with the chicken, as if putting it down would render her presence here permanent. She took in a deep breath, weighing what problems she could bring up that he would be able to understand. Even her adultery wasn't the issue; it was the journey that had led her to it that would forever remain outside Nathan's comprehension.

“Nathan, did you ever wonder why my family has barely kept in touch in spite of your generosity? Not everyone's siblings are as devoted as you are to your sisters.” Esther put her palms together as if pleading him to understand. “I tried to be kind, to do this important mitzvah for Hanna. I also wanted to protect you from her insults—”

“The poor woman had no place to go.”

“So you gave her mine?” Esther tried to suppress the tinge of impatience in her voice. “You meant well, and being with our children has made her happy. But no matter how low she's sunk in life, she has the audacity to look down upon you because you are ‘merely' a merchant.”

Nathan rose to his feet and paced the room. “I've tried to be as generous to your sister as I am to mine—”

Esther hated getting embroiled in the same tired bickering. “Nathan, it's not about Hanna or your sisters. It's about you and me. Regardless of how poorly your sisters treat me, you're loyal to them first.”

“Maybe it isn't Hanna—nor my sisters. Maybe you just don't get along with anyone.”

She could remind him that she got along with Abigail. “That's what I am talking about. You've taken your sisters' side in viewing me as different, as the only one who must adjust—” Esther halted. Forever, she would be different from any woman in her old world. “You say you respect me, but you don't consider what I want, what agrees with who I am. You decide for me what my needs are. Why didn't you consult me about such an important issue before making an offer to Hanna that could never be rescinded?”

He stared at her. “I've treated you like a queen! I can't believe how ungrateful you are—”

“You're right. You're better off to rid yourself of me.”

“Meaning what?!” His voice rose. “Have you gone mad?”

“In a way. I'm a woman you don't know and probably don't want.” She gulped air and caught a whiff of the wilted flowers. Unable to utter the word
divorce
, she covered her face. How hard it had been for Ruthi, a battered teenage-wife, to divorce. It shouldn't be this hard for the mature woman Esther had become to demand the same. If she didn't, this marriage would yank away her freedom, her newfound self that was the sum of all her passions—

Nathan moved and touched her shoulder tentatively, still unsure whether she was in her
nidah
days, as if this should have ever been relevant. She could almost laugh through the tears tightening her throat. How could she explain to Nathan that God had led her to a new Promised Land as far from her roots in the real Promised Land as possible? How could he understand that nothing from her past belonged in the present, that nothing here made her feel excluded or unclean?

“You are not well.” Nathan's tone, quiet again, exuded patience. “I assume you've been staying with Mlle Thibaux. Let's go get your things. We must catch a train in the morning.”

“A train?”

“To Marseille. Our ship to Jaffa is already docked—”

For a second, Esther ached to fly with the wind across the sea and, just for a short hour, feel her children's little bodies, their arms around her neck, and hear their bell-like voices. She shook her head. “I'm not leaving.”

“Esther, you've been gone since June!”

“You know me as a wife and as a mother. You love me as a wife and a mother.” She couldn't bring herself to say that he hadn't loved her when she had given in to her urges. “But I am not good at either.”

“Of course you are. You're talking nonsense! Is that the
shiksa
's influence on you? Is Mlle Thibaux planting these insane ideas in your head?”

She bit her lower lip hard, tasting blood. How she wished it were possible to make him understand. “Nathan, you won't even talk to me about your Torah studies. How many times have you ignored my questions? Am I not clever enough just because I am a woman?”

“If that's what it takes to bring you back—”

“Too late.” She shook her head. “Go home. The children need their father.”

His hands flew up in a gesture he used for a Talmudic debate. “They need their mother.
I
need you with me.”

“They're better off with Hanna. She's the perfect mother. And Dvora only misses
you
.” Even at this moment, both facts hurt terribly.

“But you're their mother! You're my wife! You belong with us!” He panted, as if needing more air to help his head make sense of it all. “Fine. I'll find a widower to marry Hanna. Please come home.”