One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (16 page)

One afternoon, while her half sisters were napping or away at their nursery programs or kindergartens, as Tema was preparing to set out to college she passed the partly open door of her parents' bedroom. Frumie was sitting at the very edge of the bed staring numbly ahead, completely dressed as if to go out, in her black coat with the white mink collar and cuffs and her matching white fur hat and her boots and her gloves and her black patent leather pocketbook in her lap, and what seemed to be a fully packed suitcase on the floor beside her. Her eyes registered Tema leaning in the doorway. Tears were coiling down her blotched, ravaged cheeks. “I was going to leave for good,” Frumie said, “but look at me”—and her hand brushed against the globe of her pregnant belly. “And who will take care of the girls? And how would I live without a penny to my name? And where would I go anyway?”

Later that evening, sitting in the lounge after philosophy class with Elisha Pardes, having the coffee that had become an illicit pleasure, drinking in public a strange brew from a strange cup with a strange man, their foreheads drawing closer like magnets in the intensity of their talk, Tema told herself it would not be a betrayal of Frumie to describe their
encounter that day, which had imprinted itself on her mind like a bruise. Elisha was a married yeshiva boy of medium height, slight in build, pale transparent skin as if he were not quite of this earth or in a perpetual state of recovery from a grave illness, dark eyes with long heavy lashes. When they were together strangers often asked them if they were brother and sister, more because of their shared aura of being set apart in the same place rather than their physical resemblance—to which Elisha would always answer, “All Israel are brothers—even the sisters are brothers.” He supported his growing brood of daughters by devoting his days to rigorous holy studies for which he received a stipend from the prestigious Ivy League Academy of Advanced Higher Jewish Learning Kollel, but, like Tema, he had also been granted special permission to take some secular courses in the evenings, because his rebbes believed that a measure of flexibility might save this brilliant, restless mind from tipping over to the side of apostasy and rejection, this rare soul from being snatched away by the mystics and ecstatics.

When she finished relating to Elisha how she had found Frumie sitting on the edge of the bed in desolation with the packed suitcase beside her, for a reason she could not fathom and never anticipated, Tema went on to dredge up an account of all of the rebbes her father had hauled her to against her will over the past few months to force her into marriage as if she were chattel in some kind of medieval bondage, and all the suffering and humiliation that had been inflicted upon her. Elisha listened pensively, and when she was done, for a long time continued to remain silent, tugging at his wiry black beard. Finally he said, “You should go see the Toiter Rav. The Toiter will have the answer. I will let him know.”

The elevator up to the Toiter Rabbi's penthouse on Fifth Avenue was operated by a uniformed attendant and actually opened up in the apartment itself rather than in a common hallway, an astonishing revelation that Tema had not expected and had never experienced before, as she had also never before inhaled the smell of marijuana, or even heard the word. The young acolyte waiting to greet her as she stepped out of the burled-wood casket of the elevator, luminous in his white robes rent at the collar and his crocheted skullcap pulled low over his hair so that only the two ringlets of his earlocks dangling down were visible, explained
that the cloud of smoke that filled the room by day and the cloud of fire by night was a celestial drug, a healing essence that eased the eternal agony of the rebbe, since every Toiter Rav was always in excruciating pain, terminally ill and dying. That was the Toiter's condition, it was his state of being. Moreover, there could never be a son to succeed him, and were a son to be conceived or actually born to him, the boy would die in the womb or before the age of two at the latest, as had been the fates of Yaakov and Shlomo-Efraim, the two sons of the original Toiter, Rav Nakhman of Bratslav. Because he had no sons, he was considered dead, like a leper or a blind man, and so he was known as the Toiter, the Dead One—his followers, the Dead Hasidim. The present Toiter now at death's door was the eleventh in the line and the next one was already waiting in the wings to take his place, he too already mortally sick and dying, and so it will be from one
zaddik
of his generation to the next until the true messiah arrives may it be quickly in our time.

Tema was led through a labyrinth of sumptuously furnished and carpeted rooms with cloths draped over the mirrors in their gilt frames. In every room she passed, and in distant rooms beyond them, she could see unshaven men clothed in white garments ripped at the lapels milling around in stocking feet as if floating, or sitting on low stools with their head in their hands like mourners, in woeful or meditative poses, or swaying in prayer in small clots, and she thought, too, that she had glimpsed Elisha Pardes standing alone and apart with his thin arms raised as if in agonized petition, the mouth on his pale face open as in a scream but no sound coming out—and soon she lost all sense of where she was in the world and how she might ever find her way out again.

At last she was led into a small room with no other furniture but a plain pine wood box in the middle of the floor. Her escort who had accompanied her up to this point now backed out of the room as from the presence of a king and closed the door. A thin swirl of smoke curled up into the air from the open box in the center of the room, and the smell that was quickly becoming familiar to Tema suffused the space. Soon the joint itself from which the smoke was emanating levitated before her eyes, and the withered hand that was holding it emerged and beckoned to her to draw nearer.

Inside the box the Toiter Rav was lying supine wrapped in pure white linen shrouds; only the veil that would ultimately conceal his face and the
mittens that would enclose his hands had not yet been placed on him by the saintly members of the holy burial society. The skin of his cadaverous face was drawn tautly back exposing his stained teeth and his black gums, outlining the contours of his skull so close to the surface, and even through the shrouds, the bulges and lumps of the tumors that riddled his body were everywhere discernible, but in the deep hollows of his eye sockets something still glittered like a jewel at the bottom of a well and his eyes continued to laugh.

With his free hand the Toiter began to stroke Tema's cheek, murmuring in a voice that seemed to be coming from below, “Such a
krasavitsa
you are, what a beauty, skin like velvet”—and his hand descended to her breast where it rested gently, cupping without moving, and he said in a still, small voice, “Ah, my Shunamite, allow me—this may be my last time. I can feel your heart throbbing, throbbing. You don't have to say a word—I feel everything, I know everything about you. There are only two ways out for you. My way is one way. It is not your way—not yet. You will find your way for now. You have not yet completed your task on this earth. Your task is great. You are my regent, a shadow Toiter. Remember, I am always with you—my rod and my staff. Your mother and your father may abandon you, but the Toiter will never leave you. The main thing is not to be afraid at all.”

As winter faded Tema began setting off to school earlier and earlier in the day, directing Frumie to explain to her father if he happened to notice that she needed to spend time in the college library to look up information in books that could only be found there and nowhere else in order to complete her homework. She would often walk the entire distance to school as the weather grew warmer, some four or five miles or so by her calculation, making her way slowly and meditatively, as if in a stately solo processional, stopping off regularly at the Israel kosher delicatessen on Coney Island Avenue near Avenue J for a glass of tea and a piece of apple strudel, which she would take lingeringly while reading one of her books. After a while, the young man in the white boat-shaped paper hat who worked behind the counter brought her the tea and cake as soon as she sat down. One day, as he was placing it in front of her on the Formica-topped table, he demanded to know in an accent that was
distinctively New York but not Brooklyn, more Italian than Jewish, why she never ate any real food, like a tongue sandwich maybe, or maybe some chopped liver. She raised her eyes from the pages of her book and took him in for the first time—short, stocky, curly dark hair already thinning, intense eyes set a little too close together, a few days' growth of beard, an unlit cigarette drooping from his mouth.

“My father's a butcher, so I'm a vegetarian,” Tema answered, and she lowered her eyes back to her book.

From then on, if the restaurant wasn't busy, or even if a few other customers were there, already slurping their mushroom barley soup or gnawing their pastrami on rye, as long as the boss was out, he would make himself comfortable in the chair opposite hers, straddling it backward, leaning over to plant his elbows on the tabletop between them and settling his chin in the sling of his joined hands. He would stare at her relentlessly with fierce concentration as she continued to ignore him and read, now and then disengaging slightly from her book to lift her glass to her lips for a sip of tea or pressing a finger down onto her plate to suction up a crumb of pastry and place it on her tongue like a lozenge.

Tema recognized that this open association with a young man however unsuitable he obviously was would not help her at all in the treacherous marriage minefield. She understood very well that her father would be livid when word reached him, as inevitably it would, that she had been seen talking to a strange boy in the public arena, and she also knew without question that she would earn no points whatsoever by virtue of the fact that she herself hardly uttered a single word—it was this obsessed guy who mainly was doing all the talking. Even so, she continued to stop off at the Israel delicatessen on her walk to school to test where this new danger was taking her and she never demanded that he get up from the seat he had staked out opposite her and leave her in peace, she never slapped his face or complained to the boss or called the cops, all of which he interpreted as warm encouragement.

His name was Howie Stern, she heard him say as she continued turning the pages of her book. His father worked at Ratner's on Second Avenue, a waiter like Howie himself, though the old man was a card-carrying union member whereas for him, Howie, this gig at the Israel kosher deli was only temporary; the trunk of his pop's Chevy was so stuffed with little black bowties that they erupted and overflowed like a steaming manhole
whenever you opened it. His mother was a custom girdle and brassiere fitter in Ozone Park, Queens, mostly an Italian neighborhood, for her information, distinguished by Mafia types among whom there were some who had even made stabs at recruiting him for stuff she wouldn't want to know about, which explained why he hopped boroughs to work at this menial and anonymous job in Brooklyn.

He was a Zionist and an artist, in that order; those were the two main facts you needed to know about him, he told her, the rest was commentary. He had dropped out of yeshiva to earn money to fulfill his consuming dream of making aliya to Israel, yes, ascent, ascent to the heights of the Holy Land, ever upward, the sooner the better, where he planned to immediately enlist in the army—to put on a uniform and fight to defend the Jewish homeland. “If you will it, it is no dream,” Howie declared, quoting Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, but, meanwhile, the closest he could come to the fulfillment of that dream was the Israel restaurant on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn—and he swept his hand morosely before him in the direction of the trays of kishke and knishes, the tubs of potato salad and cole slaw. Once he made aliya, though, between wars and annual reserve duty, which he would fulfill with overflowing joy in his heart, his ambition was to learn the craft of a
sofer
—to enable him, as a scribe of the parchments folded inside mezuzot and tefillin boxes, to earn a living by channeling the main element of his art, Hebrew calligraphy, in the name of heaven. Eventually, God willing, he hoped to master the trade to such a high level that he could write entire scrolls including the Megillah of Esther and the holy Torah itself.

One day he presented to Tema a sheet of paper rolled up like a diploma, which he opened before her after giving the table a quick cleansing swipe with a foul-smelling rag. At first glance the image he displayed in front of her eyes seemed to be that of a naked woman with fantasy-defined breasts and hips such as might appear on a calendar in a men's locker room or in any dirty magazine, but, when you examined it more closely, you saw that it was a mosaic made up of thousands of minute parts that Tema of course recognized at once as Hebrew letters. “Micrography,” Howie Stern declared proudly. “Recognize yourself? It's a picture of you. That lady is you—made up of the whole Song of Songs, the whole thing, every single letter and word, all eight chapters and one hundred and seventeen verses.”

Later that evening, in the lounge after philosophy class, she cleared away the coffee cups and cookie crumbs and unrolled Howie's offering in front of Elisha Pardes, who stared at it for a long time in silence twisting as usual the coils of his beard. “To paraphrase what Shekhem son of Hamor told Jacob's sons after he had raped their sister Dina,” Elisha spoke at last, “Ask anything you want of me, including my precious foreskin and the foreskin of every single guy in my town, and I'll give it to you—as long as I get the girl.”

What she should ask of Howie Stern soon emerged with pure clarity from the hints embedded in Elisha's words. Because she had accepted his first gift, Howie was emboldened not long after to present her with another, this time with trembling hands—a small, flat object folded into wax paper such as might be used to wrap a corned beef sandwich with a pickle.