One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (14 page)

In all her years at Beis Ziburis, Tema had never once used the toilets for the purposes for which they were intended, to relieve herself—including by crying—they were too filthy and public. She exercised extreme self-control throughout the long day, she held everything in until she came home, then dashed through the house straight to the bathroom; the women of her family knew what to expect and they all gave way. Now Mephiboshet the dead dog sent Tema wandering through the halls of the dingy firetrap that was Beis Ziburis, the peeling and flaking walls, the gashed and stained linoleum, the smashed light fixtures and exposed
wires, the cracked windowpanes, all of it in violation of building codes and officially condemned by municipal inspectors but considered good enough for the girls by the overseers of the school, who kept it in operation through private arrangements with elected city officials.

There was a door that Tema had noticed many times but never opened. This time, though, she turned the knob and went through, down the stairs into the cellar. She switched on a light and, by the grimy yellow wattage, she gazed around her, surveying the hundreds of cans of food of all kinds and sizes that filled the shelves along the walls and spilled over into great mounds and heaps on the floor. Some of the cans were fairly new, but others had torn or missing labels, the metal smashed and dented, rusted and bloated and exploded, so that even as she stood there taking all of this in she could hear toxic popping noises that caused her to turn around and come face-to-face with the principal of her school, Rabbi Manis Schmeltzer, the only male on the premises all day until four in the afternoon on weekdays when the defeated public school teachers plodded in to provide the minimum mandatory secular instruction. For some reason, the principal's presence down there in the cellar did not surprise her in the least.

“I guess you never got around to giving those cans to the poor starving children we collected them for,” Tema said.

“Ah,” said Rabbi Schmeltzer, quoting from one of the great comic scenes of the Torah, “And the Lord opened up the mouth of the ass. And I thought you were such a quiet girl. Everybody tells me you never say a word. Who would have ever imagined you had such a fresh mouth on you?”

He laid both of his hands on top of her head as if he were about to bless her, but instead he pushed her down to the cement floor of the cellar onto her knees, even though everyone knows that a Jew may never kneel before another human being. A Jew bows down only before God, Tema had been taught, but maybe that rule applied only to men, such as Mordekhai the Jew who refused to prostrate himself before the grand vizier Haman, thereby aggravating the villain even more, rendering him nearly apoplectic, nearly bringing about the annihilation of the entire Jewish population of Persia and Mede, one hundred and twenty-seven principalities from India to Ethiopia, a death sentence that required a major knee job, with Mordekhai the court Jew's full support and encouragement, on the part
of his hot niece Hadassah / Esther to get it repealed. “This should shut you up,” Rabbi Manis Schmeltzer said. He unbuttoned the fly of his trousers and took out what he called his
bris
and shoved it into her mouth, which he called her
pisk
, and began
schuckling
back and forth as if he were swaying in prayer with particular concentrated
kavanah
and focus—all of which Tema observed with an odd detachment, as if it were happening not to her, not to Rosalie Bavli's daughter, but to someone else, she didn't even bother to try to raise her voice to protest in some way as even Bilaam's ass had complained in that great comic scene in the Bible—even that donkey had dared to inquire what it had ever done to deserve this.

When he was finished with his business, Tema turned her head to the side and vomited on some corroded cans with their contents splattered and disgorged. “This will be
tsvishn uns
,” Rabbi Schmeltzer said as he reassumed his usual disguise. “Between us—get it? One word about this, and I will simply let it be known that you're out of your mind, crazy, like your late mother, may she find some peace at last. You're a smart girl, Tema Bavli, I'm sure you get my point. It will not help your marriage prospects one little iota if anyone ever hears about this, believe you me. Number one, what were you doing cutting class? Number two, what were you doing alone down here in the cellar anyways? Try to explain all that to your father and to the ladies auxiliary and to the entire congregation of Israel.”

Tema returned to the classroom, slumped, head lowered, seeking to enter as unobtrusively as possible. “
Gai avek
!” Miss Pupko cried out sharply in Yiddish. Jolted, Tema raised her eyes despite her ardent wish at the moment to remain invisible. Was the teacher ordering
her
to get out? Could the news have already spread so rapidly like a plague? But then Tema recognized this as the translation into Yiddish of the words of King David's son Amnon to his half sister Tamar, right after he was done raping her—“Get up, Get out!” Amnon had barked to the Jewish princess Tamar, and then to his royal attendant, “Get this thing out of here and lock the door behind her.”

As Tema made her way to her desk in the back of the room and sat down, turning her head from the swampy girls' smell of stagnant menstrual blood and underarm sweat to stare out the streaked window, Miss Pupko continued with the lesson, leaning in toward the class. “Memorize these words, girls, wear them like a seal on your heart if, heaven forbid,
you are ever tempted to give in to the evil inclination. ‘And Amnon now hated her with a very terrible hatred, the hatred he hated her with was much greater than any love he had ever felt for her before.'”

They were up to chapter thirteen. Tema realized she had been out of the room for four chapters and look at all that had happened in the meantime. She wondered what happened to princess Tamar who, following the rape, was taken in like a casualty to her brother Absalom's house, and two years later he exacted his revenge, setting up their half brother Amnon to be terminated. But beyond that, concerning Tamar's fate, not a word. Did she take her own life from shame? Did her brother arrange to have her stoned in an honor killing for disgracing the family by letting herself be violated? The text is finished with her, except perhaps indirectly when it informs us that Absalom had three sons with names not listed, and one daughter, a beauty called Tamar. Jews name their children after dead relatives.

Miss Pupko gave Tema a lacerating glance. Between the two of them, there was a long-standing entrenched tension. The teacher was exceedingly aware that Tema conducted her own private study of Tanakh and had even memorized entire books, including such long ones as Isaiah and Psalms, to the point that you could just spit out one word and this strange girl could supply the entire sentence that encased it complete with chapter and verse citation. Who would ever marry such a freak, and motherless besides? She was like some kind of
illui
, a prodigy who had mastered the complete Talmud, except that an
illui
was an honored category reserved exclusively for boys—in a girl such precocious flashes of brilliance were simply bizarre and superfluous and disturbing, there wasn't even an accepted feminine form for the term. Miss Pupko felt in her heart that Tema had nothing but contempt for her knowledge of the Scripture, and she was keenly wounded. Tema regarded herself as too good for this review, Miss Pupko thought bitterly, there was nothing she could learn from it, that was why she had stayed out of the room so long, doing her business, whatever it was, in the toilet or wherever.

“Tema Bavli,” Miss Pupko bellowed, “Read!”

Slowly and deliberately Tema turned back toward the stifling, puberty-laced interior of the room from staring outside through the grimy window down into the street where she had been observing Rabbi Manis Schmeltzer opening the door to his car illegally parked in front of a fire
hydrant, removing the
CLERGY
sign from the windshield, flipping the sign along with his black fedora hat onto the front passenger seat, cupping his black velvet yarmulke and readjusting it on his head, hoisting the tail of his glossy black kaftan in order to slide his haunches more comfortably into the driver's seat—and then she pictured him jiggling his hindquarters, easing them into the bowl of the seat with a palpable sense of well-being, and jutting his chin forward toward the rearview mirror, drawing back his lips and baring his teeth like a primate to examine them proprietarily before inserting his key into the ignition and setting forth with a roar. Tema gazed at Miss Pupko in complete confusion. “Aha, so you weren't paying attention,” the teacher said. “You don't even know the place.”

When school ended, Tema walked to the subway station intending to make her way home to purge herself in privacy, to brush her teeth thoroughly and rinse out her mouth, to stand under the shower for as long as possible before someone started banging on the door. But since it was a Sunday, with no secular instruction, late afternoon in early summer but still daylight, Tema went instead in the other direction almost without being fully aware of her movements or that she had made any particular decision at all, and she boarded the train that would take her to the second train that would take her to the bus that would bring her to the Old Montefiore cemetery in Queens where, once, her mother could always be found waiting to listen to everything.

But ever since the stone had been unveiled over her mother's grave, a slab of granite with the minimal inscription entirely in Hebrew from right to left—name, date of birth and death in accordance with the Jewish calendar linked by a minus sign, and the generic double-edged one-size-fits-all compliment for females from the book of Proverbs, A W
OMAN OF
V
ALOR
W
HO
C
AN
F
IND
—Tema's visits had grown more and more infrequent. Her mother was no longer there, no longer nearby, she was packed away, sealed off, she no longer cared. And this was what Tema also felt now as she approached the grave in the twilight with the darkness beginning to descend, her mother moving even farther away from her to a cold point in the distance.

“Mama, Mama!” Tema began screaming into that distance, her cries bouncing from headstone to headstone in the cemetery emptied of all
other living beings. She bent down to gather a handful of pebbles and small rocks and granite and marble chips that had cracked off the gravestones, but instead of setting them down on her mother's grave as a sign that she had come by to visit, she began throwing them, pelting her mother's monument with missile after missile. Horrified by her actions, Tema broke out in sobs, “I'm sorry, Mama, I'm sorry!”—and she fell down on the plot as if splayed on her mother's body with her arms hugging its headstone, crying so hard, crying like she used to cry when she was a little girl, her entire body heaving until the breath seemed to be sucked out of her and all her moisture drained, and she swooned, collapsed from sheer physical depletion.

She woke up in the pitch dark and began staggering around the cemetery like the abandoned children Hansel and Gretel in the Black Forest fairytale, only at least they had each other whereas she was entirely alone, utterly lost and with no bearings at all as to where she was in the world, groping in the darkness until she fell partway into an open grave awaiting its dead the next morning, grasping onto one of the two mounds of soft, freshly dug up earth that rose on either side. This is where she was found at dawn by the caretaker of the cemetery making his first rounds. For the remaining weeks of that school year Tema was sick in her bed. She never took the final exam on the second book of Samuel for the Prophets class or in any other subject for that matter, and they didn't bother with makeup tests either since, as the principal Rabbi Manis Schmeltzer himself so wisely pointed out, “Who are we kidding? Let's face it, it really doesn't make a difference one way or the other in the overall life schedule of these girls.”

During the first stage of her illness Tema barely responded at all. But after about a week she returned from wherever she had been; she recognized that she was completely altered, that she had undergone an event terrible and undeniable, that she had given up one form of bondage in exchange for being bound to something else—she would never be free. She had come back from the dead with secrets, with forbidden knowledge, weighed down by a calling. The first person she saw when she opened her eyes was Frumie sitting with legs apart on a chair at the bedside in her pink chenille bathrobe stretched taut and pulled open to expose a patch of the great smooth mound of her pregnant belly with a dark line trailing downward from the plug of her navel. “Oh my God,
why did you leave me?” Tema cried out, and her voice came up as if from below—deeper, riper, the voice of the blood of her mother crying out to her from the ground. Frumie's head sank low over her belly, her hair tightly bound up in a married woman's headscarf. “I'm sorry, Frumie, I don't mean to hurt you,” Tema said. “Such a life is just not meant for me.”

For much of the remainder of the period that Tema lived under her father's roof, until she left home at the age of twenty or so, one of the signature refrains by which she was tagged within the family was her rejection of “such a life”—and as if to elaborate by way of a concrete example, she would inevitably specify that she was never getting married. While she was still in school at Beis Ziburis, her father, Reb Berel Bavli, dismissed it as an adolescent trifle, though from time to time as the years accumulated, at the expanding Sabbath table with more and more miniature female offspring lining the sides flowing from his seat at the head as from the source of the river, when Tema would once again be provoked to restate her refusal with respect to marriage, Reb Berish would lean back in his armchair to allow more scope for his ample gut, blow his nose into his napkin, give out a loud and succulent belch to which he felt fully entitled as the sole and dominant male, feeder of all these female mouths, and he would launch into some variation of “
Takkeh
? You should excuse me if I have to comment with a
greps
—but is that so? Not getting married? You think maybe you're too good for anyone, Miss Hassenfeffer? So, tell me something if you don't mind, what else will you do with yourself if you don't get married? Bang your head against the wall? Spit wooden nickels? Dance a kazatzka? Nu, so I'm waiting to hear—explain me already.”