Jerusalem Maiden (36 page)

Esther looked at the lanky man she had known for almost ten years and pitied him. Dear Nathan. He had been so kind, so adoring. It was only fair that she release him, give him his freedom as she had deposited God's misdirected gifts with the one who wanted nothing else.

“Nathan,” Esther whispered. “It's better if we divorce.”

“What? What has gotten into you? Is that some
dybbuk
?”

Dybbuk
, Ima, too, had called her wild ways. That's what streaked through the many unnamed maidens who had been destined by the Creator for special callings, maidens haunted by passions and inquisitive minds that no one understood. God tested them by placing them with the wrong group of people, perhaps even at the wrong time in history. They either broke down, as Ruthi had—or found their way out, as she must do.

“In time, you'll be happier without me. Hashem will reward you for your decent heart.” Esther stepped to the door and put her hand on the handle. “Will you write to me? I need you to tell me how the children are doing.”

“You must come with me! Now!” he cried out. The light behind him made his long-limbed figure look broken.

She wanted to touch his cheek, to stroke away the hurt. “Nathan, please understand. I promise to visit the children. As soon as possible—”

“Esther! The ship will be sailing—”

She opened the door. “I'm going now. If you love me, please let me be.”

She shut the door behind her.

S
he had finished twenty-three paintings. Ormaz liked them all and had them framed. Mlle Thibaux would lend him Esther's old painting from her apartment, for display only. For the opening, Esther's former teacher had sent invitations to a list of dignitaries to whom even Ormaz had no access, and Pierre overcame his antipathy toward his wife's aristocratic friends and invited them, too. Quite a few of them had confirmed that they wouldn't miss this talk-of-the-town art show. Esther had written to Asher, who had responded that he was eager to see her again.

The evening before the opening, Esther sat in a café, surrounded by artists. Outside, the first snow flurries melted into slush. Condensation accumulated on the floor-to-ceiling windows until it streaked down in small rivulets. Esther's fingers furiously worked the knitting needles to finish a sweater for Pierre. She breathed in the dense cigarette smoke; it was good for digestion. She'd bought herself an ivory cigarette holder for tomorrow's reception. Suspended between her fingers, it would look elegant in the photograph. She would wear Nathan's pearl necklace with the rich wool blue dress she had sewn under Raysel's critical eye.

“Have you seen the Architecture Vivante show?” a writer asked Esther. “Crazy, eh?”

Esther let out a shy smile. “I refuse to judge. Every artist deserves respect.”

“What do you think of the
Exposition de l'art Latino-Américain
?” asked a reporter for an American magazine seated across the table.

She recalled how the foreign themes of the Latin-American exhibit had stayed with her for days. The vibrant colors had influenced her choices of hues, as if the tropical sun had illuminated the darkening Paris. “Why is everyone asking for my opinion? My show hasn't bestowed me with any new wisdom.”

The reporter's pencil scratched his open notebook. “Ormaz's discovery has revealed a genius hiding behind a pretty woman. So, what's your opinion?”

Esther shrugged, her needles clicking. She still found it difficult to look into any man's eyes.

“Don't you see that you're part of a trend?” the man pressed. “From Latin America to the Holy Land, Paris is now open to artistic influences from all corners of the world.”

“In that case, may I suggest to your readers a pilgrimage to Jerusalem?”

He laughed. “You're an ultra-Orthodox Jewess, right?”

“We call ourselves Haredi.”

“I've heard that art is forbidden in the extreme version of your religion.”

She cocked her head upward. “That's between me and my
Dieu
.”

“Talk about your work,” Pierre whispered in Hebrew. “What it means to you.”

How could she express the exhilaration of knowing that her art was valued by people who understood her on the most primal level, more than her own people ever would? “Paintings are like offspring. For generations to come, they'll have lives entirely separate from mine.” She chuckled to minimize the implication of these crushing words to herself. Her paintings
were
like her children, who accepted her absence, while she had their every feature, voice and scent imprinted in her mind. And they would be less aware of her existence as years passed. Eventually, with Hanna mothering them well, they would forget she had ever created them. “A painting has no memory of the artist, but an artist forgets not a single detail in her paintings,” she added.

O
n her way to the train station to meet Asher, she stopped at Le Marais and picked up fresh kosher treats for her opening. The morning light was wan, as if the sun was too bashful to break through the snow flurries. Esther shielded her face with the string bag filled with salted almonds, cinnamoned dry apricots and brandied chocolates as she took the long walk and entered the Gare de l'Est.

Her heart beat at the sight of the small-framed man whose elegant coat and top hat did not modulate his effeminate gait as he detached himself from the crowd streaming off the train. He stopped in front of her, lay his valise on the ground and grasped her elbows. Looking into his eyes, she smiled, and they both burst out laughing. The simultaneous, open joy wrapped Esther in old friendship.

“Where to?” Asher asked in Yiddish, standing at the station's entrance. He waved at a coachman. “I don't speak French.”

“I reserved a hotel room for you in Montparnasse. But first I still must pick up cakes in Le Marais. The bakery didn't have them ready earlier.” She had ordered dozens of sweet pastries stuffed with poppy seeds, fruit jam or vanilla-flavored cheese. She now climbed into the carriage, then spread a plaid blanket on both their knees, while registering the ease with which she shared a close space with Asher. It would be delightful to sit with him at the bakery's corner table and talk while drinking hot chocolate and inhaling the sweat aroma of butter baking in fluffy dough.

The snow flurries whirled in the air outside the covered carriage, and the horse's hooves clicked a steady pace on the wet cobblestones. Asher chattered about his orchestra, his musical friends and the appreciative Viennese crowd. What would her life be now if she had run away with him back then? These past several months in Paris, she had met couples with unconventional relationships, arrangements she could never before have fathomed.

“Here we are, in the city we talked about.” Asher's arm encompassed the boulevard, and he smiled. His facial skin looked as fresh as a boy's; he sported neither a beard nor sidelocks. “With some heartaches, we both reached what we should have.”

“Except that my heartache isn't over. I miss my children.” To hide her sprouting tears, Esther batted at snowflakes that landed on her sleeve. “Chanukah will begin one week after my show's closing. If I sell enough paintings—and for a hefty enough sum—I'll be able to afford the round-trip ship passage to Jaffa.”

“Winter sea is rough. The storms are dangerous. And you'll be doing it both ways?”

She'd be sick the whole way. “Spring is too far away.” She might be able to arrive on the fourth of the eight-day candle lighting, a day imprinted in her memory for Naftali's kidnapping. “And it will take all my money. After my return here, I'll have to steal the scarce hours of winter daylight from my painting in order to earn a living. I have a job at a tile studio,” she added.

“What about Nathan?” Asher asked. “How did you get his permission?”

“I didn't.” As soon as they settled in the café, she would tell Asher about Pierre.

He grinned. “Is that what he received for stealing my bride?”

“He had no inkling. It was all my father's doing.” Esther shivered and tightened the coat she had just sewn—another expense for thick wool with a coarser, warm lining. She wished Nathan would send her the fur collar she had only worn that last winter in Jerusalem, but she wouldn't ask him for anything. If she kept her silence, in time he would be the one seeking a divorce. Maybe he would marry Hanna. “Nathan is a very decent man. He deserves a docile wife.”

For a while, Asher said nothing, and she thought of her wild reputation in her maiden years. It had turned out to be justified. Nathan still wrote her often, pleading with her to return. He loved her, he said; he would give her time to reconsider; surely her devotion to the children would prevail. But his words tortured her. Last week, in twilight sleep, she had suddenly heard Dvora and Gershon bickering over a game of cat's cradle in their bedroom. Nathan's anguish saddened her, but she knew from Abigail's letters that Hanna, who had gained weight and color to her cheeks, ran the house well for him.

“This is the Jewish quarter, the Pletzel,” she told Asher as a few minutes later they disembarked from the carriage by the Le Marais bank.

Waving to the manager through the window had become routine; if he had a letter for her, he gestured. Today, even if he had a letter, she wouldn't read it until tomorrow. Esther was starting to cross the street toward the bakery, when she heard the manager's voice, “Madame Bloomenthal! Madame Bloomenthal!”

Resigned, she buried her head in her raised coat collar and turned. Asher held her elbow as they stepped inside. Muddy water from her boots puddled on the marble floor of the lobby.

“This is my cousin from Vienna—”

“I've just received a telegram for you,” the manager cut her off, waving in the direction of his office.

Nathan was ratcheting his pressure, she thought with annoyance. She opened her coat to let the warm air circulate around her dress and, with Asher on her heels, followed the manager.

He handed her an opened telegram. She glanced at him in surprise. The man had never read her letters. A telegram, though, was urgent. “I'll help you in any way I can,” he said gravely.

Esther's pulse pounded in her temples. She unfolded the yellow paper. Translated to French, it read:

Gershon run over by wagon. Legs amputated. Still alive. Nathan.

H
ow did her lungs know to swallow the black air? How did her knees know to bend and straighten, the blood to continue to flow? Esther stumbled between the columns guarding the bank. She ripped up the telegram, once, twice. Again and again and again, until she had a fistful of black-dotted yellow petals. With each tear, the mistake she had made grew fatter with misery. How had she not foreseen God's wrath? She opened her palm and let the yellow flakes fall, marking a trail across the street.

“What? What did the telegram say?” Asher hurried by her side, the weight of his valise making his breathing labored.

“My boy. My five-year-old. Gershon!” Esther cried in Yiddish. The blare of a horn tore the air, and for a wild minute she thought it came from inside her head until looking up she saw the tram barreling down on her. Asher yanked her arm, and they both slipped and fell. Esther lay sprawling, her face in the snow, as a gush of oil-soaked air whooshed past her. In the din, she glimpsed a view of hell in the monstrous underbelly of the tram, a jumble of rusty wheels, warped pipes and pounding rods. For a split second she wished her own legs had been crushed, that she had been Gershon under the wagon. Closing her eyes, she pressed her body down into the cold snow. Nothing had happened to Gershon. She was home now, waking up on Shabbat morning, hearing him in the children's room, already running past her, the white sheet flying behind him like an exotic bird. Running. Running. Running.

Asher tugged at her to get up. As if from far away, she heard the bank manager begging that she rise. She refused to cooperate. Had she not upset her life so with her hubris, it would be Nathan's hand now touching her cheek. He would be dressed for the synagogue when she rose out of bed, planting her bare feet on the soft sheepskin on their bedroom floor. She'd embrace the safety of her steady, protected life, while preparing Gershon to accompany Nathan for the morning services. Father and son, holding hands, would be walking down the street, both erect on four sound legs, two long, two short, all four whole.

More arms supported her, lifted her to stand. “Esther? Esther? Esther!” Voices repeated her name, and someone was shaking mud and clumps of snow off her coat, wiping her wet face. She felt an ice-pick-like pain piercing her ankle, strangely soothing, as if her own pain alleviated some of Gershon's. Hanna had let him run in the street. Hanna, the perfect mother, had failed on the grandest scale. Had Esther been there—the imperfect, reluctant mother obsessed with Gershon's safety—this wouldn't have happened. If not for her selfishness, forever Gershon's legs would have been whole. Trusting Hanna's mothering skills more than her own? Merely an excuse. Believing that God had sent Hanna to free her for His other plans? What self-deception.

“Hashem willing, he's still alive,” she cried out to Asher in Yiddish. “Remember his namesake, my little brother Gershon? He didn't live past age five.” How could she have doomed her son by naming him after a boy who had died at this same age?

A chair materialized in the street and she was eased into it. She sunk her face into her hands and sobbed. If only she could run backward through this tunnel of pain, through this cold of her damp clothes, back a few hours ago before the bad news, to her waking up moments, feeling a spike of happiness. How filled she had been with anticipation for this day. She had believed that today was the day God had worked so hard to steer her to.
Get thee out of your country and from your kindred, and from your father's house, unto the land that I will show thee,
it said in Genesis. How presumptuous of her to have believed that this order had been meant for her! She had lingered in bed this morning. The snowflakes dropping on the skylight had been a sign that Paris would adorn itself in white in her honor. Breathing in Pierre's smell on the next pillow, she had heard him in the open atelier, moving tools and arranging wood in the fireplace. She had smiled, rising toward him. Her Pierre. Her Love. How misguided, delusional, she had been when she pushed aside the curtain of beads that separated the sleeping quarter from the rest of the atelier and heard its clinking as a congratulatory music.

She straightened up. Dirty water dripped from strands of her wet hair into her collar. A strange woman adjusted her lopsided wig. Esther rose to her feet and moved through the crowd of onlookers.

“Where are you going?” Asher grabbed her elbow. “Esther!”

She wobbled along Pont Marie, mindless of the wind, her head and heart a storm of unbearable pain and jumbled recollections. Asher trailed after her. “If Adam and Eve—God's children—and later the Sons of Israel, also God's children—sinned under His watchful eye, how could I have done any better when God was so many times removed from me?” Esther said through her sobbing.

“No, Esther. No talk of sins. You're not back to believing that!”

“I never stopped. Who do you think has led me here—or so I thought?” She turned her face heavenward. “Take me instead,” she cried to Him. “Take my life. Just spare my boy's! I'll go to him. As fast as I can. Just keep him alive!”