Jerusalem Maiden (5 page)

E
sther entered Mlle Thibaux's apartment from the cold, took off her coat, and rubbed her hands above the potbelly stove. The Arab cleaning woman had just left, and the air was fragrant with lemon polish. It was hard to believe that it had been only three months since Esther had started her art lessons here. The domed room, with its emerald velvet-covered furniture, felt like home.

Mlle Thibaux lifted a letter from the table, her delicate face animated. “My son is on his way from Paris. He'll be studying the next semester at the Alliance Française here.”

“Your son? But you're not married!” It was well known that God blessed only married wombs.

Blushing, Mlle Thibaux touched her hair. “
C'est différent en France,
” she said softly.

Did God have separate rules for French wombs? Esther regretted her blunt comment, especially after Aba and the community elders had visited the French ambassador, who had then intervened with the Arabs. The Jews of Jerusalem had been saved this time thanks to Mlle Thibaux's word.

Her teacher seemed to collect herself. “Pierre likes to sculpt. If he does well in his exams, in two years he may be accepted into the Bezalel Academy.”

Esther bit the end of her braid. The name of the secular Jewish arts college that had rolled with such ease off Mlle Thibaux's tongue rang blasphemous in her ears. The forbidden school, where secular Jewish men's heads were uncovered and women's arms and legs were bare, celebrated idolatry. Even the Hassids, who were stealing Jewish souls from the Haredi to their new, less somber synagogue, prohibited their youth from attending it.

Seemingly unaware of Esther's discomfort, Mlle Thibaux went on to her lesson, introducing the concept of perspective. The greater the distance, the smaller the elements, she explained, and used a ruler to demonstrate the diminishing size of items placed farther in the horizon.

She touched Esther's hand. “Now you're ready to enter a secret world.”

“The Primordial Light?”

Her teacher laughed. “That secret you're already finding on your own.” She opened a wooden box lined with glass jars and small leather pouches. “These are pigments for oil paints. I had them shipped from Paris. They're made from minerals, precious stones, rocks, vegetables, insects and plants. The pouches are animal bladders, which preserve the pigments.”

She showed Esther how to mix the powder with linseed oil in small glass jars and cork each with a fitted top. The Greek craftsman from the Old City who had carved the corks also delivered canvas stretched over small wooden frames, the fabric primed with glue solution and white zinc. “I've also ordered from him horsehair brushes and finer ones made of squirrels' tails,” Mlle Thibaux said. “In France, the stiffer brushes are made out of pigs' hair, but I respect your religious sensitivities.”

Was there any biblical decree about squirrels? None came to Esther's mind; for that matter, she couldn't imagine what one looked like. She had never seen a pig either, but had heard enough to imagine that this abominable, stinking beast was as big as a camel, with a scaly tail and a horn on its head.

As the room filled with tart, pleasant fumes Esther had never smelled before, her head became light with joy. These paints and brushes and canvases were the tools real artists used. In the short hour left, inspired by Van Gogh, she chose a corner of the room as her subject and began to paint in tiny, furious brush strokes. To her amazement, yellow and blue combined into a vibrant green, red and blue turned a pulsating purple, and yellow and red mixed into a glowing orange. But beyond the colors, some new magic took over. Esther's eyes, clear as if the cumin had never blinded her, captured shapes and shadows and threw them on the canvas without effort, without thought. The urge to paint was a fountain that coursed through her, her fingers only a conduit to something so big it was hard to imagine her little heart contained it. Surely, this was the work of God. He must be guiding her hand.

“You should sign it,” Mlle Thibaux said, when Esther was done.

Esther picked at a hangnail. Signing God's name wasn't an option, and if Mlle Thibaux understood the depth of Esther's dilemma, she might stop instructing her.

“You should take pride in your creation, especially when it is so extraordinarily executed,” her teacher said.

At the ring of disappointment in Mlle Thibaux's voice, Esther picked up a thin brush, and in small, black Hebrew letters, which her teacher couldn't read, wrote, “Jerusalem Maiden.”

Mlle Thibaux pulled out Esther's previously finished works and handed them to her. “Sign these, too, while I'll pour us each a cup of tea. It comes from the kosher grocery.”

Esther signed the drawings, but still apprehensive, didn't think before she took a sip of tea. Too late, she remembered. God forbid, this
traife
cup might have stored animal entrails! She set it down so hard that tea splashed over the rim. Her lips burned. If only it were possible to soak them for three days to make them kosher again, like a dairy utensil that had been mistakenly crossed over to the meat.

“Esther, is everything all right?”

“My mitzvah age is nearing. It is incumbent upon me to adhere to the smallest decree.”

Mlle Thibaux examined Esther's face, then nodded. “Your people have so many decrees.”

“They're God's—and all equally important,” Esther responded.

On her way home under darkening, arid clouds, she shivered in the wind. The feel of the impure teacup remained imprinted on her lips as if it had become visible. Today, she had heard words unsuitable for her virgin ears, allowed her mind to become polluted by the blasphemous name of a banned arts academy, signed God's creations as her own, and she sipped from a non-kosher cup. That was how sins happened. Aba often said, “You open the door a crack for one, and others climb over one another in their rush to tumble in.”

How was she to repent, to balance the slate God kept of her transgressions? Especially since He had already made an exception for her over His Second Commandment, which Esther was breaking every day in intention and every week in deed?

For three nights Esther sat at the far end of the dining table, her ears tuned to her brothers' Talmudic debates while she patched clothes and knitted socks for the poor. Beyond these good deeds, she waited for a signal, a special mitzvah that God would send her way.

“
He that has found a faithful friend has found a treasure,
” Avram quoted on the third night. And instantly, Esther knew the one good deed crying for her action. She could reciprocate for Ruthi's standing up for her by embarking upon what her friend refused to do. Esther would either disprove her suspicion of Yossel's identity—or save Ruthi from this dreadful match.

O
ne late afternoon, when the sun still lingered above the horizon, Esther stole time from her chores and ran to the Old City. Circumventing the forbidden souk, she passed the Ottoman police station in Plaza Kishlay and entered the Jewish Quarter through Zion Gate. Nearby, the bright blue dome of the mosque that had appropriated the Temple's Mount dominated the city. Sparse, strained light fell on the small stone houses fighting for space in narrow alleys. Esther climbed the long steps that made up a street until she found Yossel's mother's Judaica store.

Dirty children with diseased-crusted eyes, their legs tucked inside potato sacks, competed in jumping from the front stoop. Inside, mindless of the dust and fallen clumps of plaster, the woman Esther had seen visiting Aba chewed on pumpkin seeds. Spotting a customer, she spit the shells onto the floor.

Esther asked to see a
mezuzah
, and Yossel's mother laid three tiny silver casings on the counter. Esther checked the miniature parchment scroll scribed with the Holy Name that was tucked in each.

She clutched her stomach, feigning a painful grimace. “Where's the outhouse?”

Silently, the woman nodded toward the family residence behind the store.

The one-room apartment was crammed with stacked mattresses, an armoire, chests and a table surrounded by narrow plank benches. The stench of unwashed bodies and sour cabbage hung about like smoke. Two boys, too young to be grooms, sat on the floor giggling as Yossel, the short boy with buckteeth Esther had remembered, held a roll of red wool yarn high out of a small girl's reach. She begged for the ball, cried and tried jumping toward it, but with each attempt he raised it higher, laughing.

The laughter filled Esther with loathing and disgust. This cruel boy was the groom Ruthi dreamed about. This squalid hovel was the life her friend aspired to lead. And if Yossel was such a great catch, what kind of a match would her own tainted reputation yield?

When Esther reached the outhouse, she threw up.

T
oday she would paint
en plein air
. Waiting for Mlle Thibaux on the hill above the Ethiopian empress Taitu's house near school, Esther looked at her own hands, scuffed shoes, and the length of the braid thrown over her chest and felt whole, free, unencumbered by people and decrees—or hints about a looming betrothal. The warm winter day brought out the geckos to bathe in the sun, and the world looked pristine, as if a team of cherubim had polished the hewn stone on the houses and the red and blue anemones carpeting the dells. Past Mount Scopus, pinkish-brown mountains fringed the Judean desert. To the southeast, the tip of the Dead Sea, set deep in a valley, shimmered gray like Bathsheba's looking glass. For Esther, removing her body from her crowded, dank home and placing it in this bright openness lifted an invisible box. For now, she belonged only to herself.

But pleasure was indulgence, and therefore, this pleasure of freedom must be forbidden. Except that in the Passover Haggadah it said, ‘
Every Jew must regard himself as though he had personally been released from Egyptian bondage
' and appreciate freedom. So it was a mitzvah to feel liberated—

As in that tale of Exodus, Esther became Miriam, Moses' sister who, released from the Egyptians' bonds, had danced to the tapping of her tambourine. Esther rolled her head and moved her torso to an internal rhythm, swinging her arms with the momentum. Her tongue clucked to the beat of the imagined tambourine. She kicked her feet, jumped in the air, and twirled around, turning and turning until her coat filled with wind and the world spun.

When she stopped, her vision blurred before her surroundings settled down. She glanced around to check if anyone had noticed her. Freedom was one thing, and
tzni'ut
was another. For a girl of almost mitzvah age, dancing on a hilltop was immodest.

Mlle Thibaux's silhouette emerged out of the Russian Compound. To Esther's surprise, she was accompanied by someone—a man. He wore no hat and didn't quite walk so much as bounce, like a boy. This must be Mlle Thibaux's son, Pierre. Although in the early afternoons when Esther visited Mlle Thibaux's apartment Pierre was still at his Alliance Française high school, she had glimpsed signs of him: a pair of men's two-toned shoes left under the couch, and a thick brush with a short, stubby handle in the washroom. Esther had asked what her teacher painted with that brush, and Mlle Thibaux had laughed and told her it was her son's shaving brush. That further confused Esther. The men she knew honored God by keeping all their facial hair, and she had never wondered how the less-observant Orthodox men shaved around their trimmed beards. One probably needed a knife, but what was a brush for? Last week, she had touched the shaving brush with the tip of her finger. Its softness surprised her.

The man who hopped from one rock to another next to Mlle Thibaux looked fully grown, yet acted younger than a man who wore big shoes and shaved. He carried two easels, while his mother carried a third, the paint box and a basket.

“Pierre is also a talented artist,” Mlle Thibaux said when they reached Esther. Her hand ruffled his hair. She smiled with white teeth aligned like pearls on a necklace, and the adoring expression on her face mirrored the one on Mary's when gazing at Jesus in the art books. Even Ima never looked at her favorite Moishe with so much tenderness.

“
Enchanté.
” Pierre extended his hand to Esther.

Esther grabbed her hand behind her back. Heat surged up her face. She lowered her chin until it almost touched her chest.

Mlle Thibaux scolded Pierre in French. “Remember me telling you that a girl of Esther's background doesn't speak with boys outside her family circle?”

“
Mais pourquoi?
” His questioning petulance mirrored that of Esther's older brothers, picking on Talmudic details the way Ima turned out the lining of a coat before Passover in search of breadcrumbs. But Pierre was no Talmudic pupil. Perhaps the right to question was a male trait, unassociated with learning.

“Never mind.” Mlle Thibaux eased the easel from her shoulder and slid the leather loop onto Esther's. “
Voilà,
it's for you.” She adjusted a leather strap.

Esther wanted to hug the board in her excitement. Having her own easel opened a passage into a privileged kingdom. She started walking, but the legs of the easel flapped against her ankles and bumped into rocks.

“I'll take it,” Pierre said, reaching toward her.

Esther handed it to Mlle Thibaux. The baker and the butcher always laid their merchandise on the counter, where she, too, placed the coins. Although they had no compunctions about prying her publicly with personal questions, it would never have occurred to them to breach her modesty the way this oversized boy tried to do.

Shouldering the easel, Pierre pulled ahead, looking like a giant three-winged bird. He hopped from rock to rock as if the wooden easels were made of feathers. Next to Esther, her teacher's fine leather shoes squeaked and scrunched the gravel. One day, Esther decided, she would own shoes with a white buckle strap like Mlle Thibaux's city shoes. And an ivory cigarette holder.

Low grass and green moss covered soil that, come summer, would turn arid and cracked. Cyclamens peeked out from under the shelter of rocks, pink and shy as brides. Along the path, tall stalks of purple brush-head flowers swayed in the breeze like a flock of hooded priests on the Via Dolorosa. By summer, they would dry into a nasty army of thistles. Esther counted the pebbles in her path in order to prevent Pierre from entering her line of vision. One hundred, two hundred, three hundred pebbles. Yet even though she had avoided looking directly at him, she somehow knew that his cheeks were pink, that his brown hair fell onto his forehead, that the small red scarf tied around his neck had tips like the ears of a surprised hare. He kept hopping about, as if escaping the city boundaries gave him the same sweet taste of the fresh air she savored.

Esther carried the straw basket of food, keeping it as far away from her body as her arm would allow so this
traife
wouldn't contaminate her clothes. She'd rather carry the heavier box of oil paints hanging from Mlle Thibaux's shoulder by its leather straps. The buckle shone in the afternoon sun, and its sight made Esther long for those paints rather than the forbidden food in her basket.

It proved difficult to respond to Mlle Thibaux's chatter, to conjugate French verbs when so many thoughts jumped in Esther's head like the grasshoppers bursting out of nowhere and disappearing just as fast. She wanted to shout to the mountains under the infinite depth of the cloudless blue skies and hear the echo roll back. She wanted to hurl herself atop a giant boulder and dance again for the whole world to see.

A herd of sheep waddled down the incline of the next hill, the undersides of their shabby coats caked with winter mud that would only be removed with shearing. Lambs toddled behind their mothers, an Arab boy following them. He was barefoot, his shirt and
sherwal
tattered, his dark hair matted and speckled with lice eggs. At the sight of Mlle Thibaux, curiosity arched his dirt-smeared brow. He dropped to his haunches and stared as she passed.

Esther looked back to check on him. Arab robbers and murderers were older, but one never knew. The boy rose from his crouch, and to her relief, he withdrew a flute from his rope belt and began playing. The quick, clear curlicues of the music lured the sheep, and they trailed him away.

Farther down the path, bouncing on legs like coiled springs, Pierre sang in French, throwing his voice to the wind. The sound carried back to Esther. No grown man she knew dared sing aloud in the open or move so casually, shedding the seriousness with which God needed to be served.

Pierre vanished from sight in the path below the fir- and pine-stands peak, but his presence lingered. Rounding the curve, Esther gazed down to block his figure from reentering the landscape.

When she finally raised her eyes, she faced a deserted monastery overlooking Wadi El Joz below. Although only twenty minutes from her home, she and Ruthi had never ventured this far out on their Shabbat walks.

“
Magnifique, eh?
” Mlle Thibaux cooled her face with a lace fan while scrutinizing the scenery.

A large section of the monastery's defense wall had tumbled down, and the boulders at its feet rolled away like chicks from a mother hen. The other end of the wall still stood, its corner steeple poking the sky in defiance. Through the break in the enclosing wall, Esther glimpsed an almond orchard in bloom, silky pink flowers fluttering in the breeze.

She put down the food basket. In the shade of an ancient fig tree, Pierre pushed away stones with the sides of his shoes, shifting rocks carelessly as he cleared space for the easels. Esther wished she could warn him that yellow scorpions shouldn't be disturbed in their dens. Their upturned tails were deadly, worse than those of the black ones.

Only when Pierre stopped kicking rocks did Esther relax. She stepped to a carob tree and picked a low-hanging pod whose bulging edges promised hidden delicious meat. Wiping the carob on her sleeve, she mumbled, “
Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, Who creates the fruit of the tree.
” Her molars bit into the hard edges, and the honeyed paste spread on her tongue. No wonder the prophets had been able to live in the Judean Desert on carobs and water alone.

She didn't offer the fruit to Mlle Thibaux; she couldn't imagine her teacher's graceful teeth crushing the tough carob. But Pierre came over and, imitating Esther, picked one and bit into it. His eyes shone with the delight of the discovery, searching Esther's as if to signal a shared moment.

She turned away. “May I set up the paint box?” she asked Mlle Thibaux, and before receiving an answer, released the folded legs and secured them with the leather strap.

In her hands, the glass jars were cool, the engorged animal bladders supple. Esther cupped them, closing her hungry fingers around each one before setting it down. She uncorked the linseed oil and turpentine bottles, and as the mineral smells rose into her nostrils, pungent and delicious, the urge to paint took over, surging from the bottom of her stomach into the tip of each finger.

“Remember.” Mlle Thibaux spoke to both Esther and Pierre, and her hand swept the world around them. “
En plein air
also means no past or future, only the ‘now.' As you take notice of depth and intersection of planes, of tension between shapes and colors abutting one another, experiment. No rules of what's allowed, or how others painted before you.
Oui?
”

Esther sat on the farthest boulder. Intending to paint the landscape, she looked about her, but her attention was caught by her teacher.

Mlle Thibaux had settled on a small cushion over a rock, her profile to Esther. Rapture illuminated her face. A curl that had escaped the pile on top of her head rested on her cheek, and her lips were slightly parted. Framing her head to the left was the end section of the wall, the barren rose-colored mountains behind it. To the right were the blooming almond trees and a patch of baby-blue sky. Against the large square stones of the wall, both eternal and vulnerable to time, the front of Mlle Thibaux's neck was long and creamy.

It took several trials to sketch the outline of her teacher. Then Esther picked up her smoothly sanded wooden palette and collected dollops of pigments. She selected her brushes, then began to fill in the white spaces, touching brush to paint, mixing hues, layering shades, dabbing on a bit more. . . .

The folds of Mlle Thibaux's full rust-colored skirt fanned over the rock in a play of textures, soft against hard. The green shirt disappeared under the deeper green, short Bavarian-style jacket trimmed with a woven ribbon of green and rust. Except for the blue of the sky, not one color slipped out of balance in the composition of rust, brown, green, beige and rose. Esther's hand remained steady as it moved with feverish concentration. Drunk on fresh air, paint oil and the odor of dusty carob, she felt transported somewhere as near as inside herself and as far as God's sky.

Hours passed before Mlle Thibaux stretched with a lazy purr. Checking Pierre's piece, she spoke softly to him. Esther dared not join the lesson even though she was curious to peek at his canvas. What subject had he selected? How did he use colors? The impatient boy in him, she imagined, couldn't be disciplined to tame his lines; his painting would burst with movement.

Mlle Thibaux stepped over to Esther's easel, but Esther shook her head. “Not yet,” she murmured, her cheeks hot. Her teacher must have gathered from Esther's scrutiny that she had been the subject, and Esther still needed to correct many details that fell short of the real person's loveliness.

“I know how you feel.” Mlle Thibaux smiled and unbuckled the food basket. As she shook a cloth over a flat rock and took out plates and utensils, Esther's mouth watered. But she wouldn't touch
traife
food or utensils.

She rested her brushes in the jar of turpentine to melt the caked paint and stepped to the fig tree. She took off her shoes, then braced the arch of her foot on the lowest branch and hauled herself into the depth of the tree, searching for purple figs whose firm skin was pliant yet undisturbed by insects. Opening one, she inspected the pistils nesting in the juicy meat for worms; these non-kosher interlopers masked themselves as pistils and caused the unaware to sin. When none of the fine whitish threads wriggled, Esther ate the fig, then a few more. She climbed down and placed a handful of fruit on a rock next to Mlle Thibaux.

“
Merci.
” Mlle Thibaux gave her an apple and pointed at a package wrapped in a Yiddish newspaper. “It's from the kosher
boulangerie
.”

Pierre grinned and picked it up. “I bought it. I asked the kosher baker—”