One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (2 page)

Maybe the time has come for women to stop looking out of windows,
Temima concluded. What are we hoping to see? What are we expecting? What are we waiting for? Abba Kadosh had a mother too, the late Mrs. Hazel Clinton of Selma, Alabama, and Arad, Israel. Temima supposed that she owed Abba Kadosh's mother a debt of gratitude simply for sticking it out and not running off and abandoning the oiled black boy she had called Elmore, who, when in the fullness of time he had anointed himself as Abba Kadosh, prophet and messiah, affirmed her mastery of Tanakh and forced her finally to surrender to her destiny.

Cozbi had carried the lumpy root-vegetable weight of the earthly corpus of her mistress to the window with the assistance of Rizpa, the second live-in personal attendant. They settled Temima in the saggedout scoop of her capacious ivory wingchair where she presided as upon a throne overlooking the Bukharim Quarter, awaiting the delivery of the brilliant conveyance from which she would offer her final and boldest teaching as she was transported to her personal Astapovo, her fatal encounter with the junkman, the bitch queen's showdown at the gates with her assassin.

She had stopped walking entirely at an appointed hour some years earlier, and without offering any commentary as to whether or not she still was able to, had simply declared one day that she had walked far enough, she refused to take another step, leaving it to her followers to draw from this mysterious abstention whatever wisdom they were capable of, each at her own level. From that time forward, all of her business was conducted in this room, most of it from the vast high bed that was its centerpiece, where she would recline propped up against a bank of white satin cushions under mounds of white satin bedclothes. In her white silk skullcap that bulged with the mortal nodes and knobs of her head, the discolorations and spots on her face concealed by the makeup expertly applied by Cozbi and over which she wore a veil such as masked the blinding flush of Moses Our Teacher, Ima Temima six nights a week presided over her following gathered around the great raft of her bed at least three deep with mouths open to suck in her wisdom. The seventh night, Friday, the bed was transformed into a table, a
tisch
to usher in the Sabbath, a great banquet-sized white damask cloth spread across it, the holy woman HaRav Temima Ba'alatOv enthroned as if at its head leaning
against the bolster of her white cushions tearing with hands gloved to conceal the mottled, loose skin underneath one hallah after another set out by Rizpa, her Hasidim, like ravenous birds to whom the old lady tosses some crumbs, stampeding savagely for the smallest blessed leavings touched by Ima Temima and cast out as
shirayim
.

All of this would come to an end this morning, thank God, Temima thought—it had become tainted, idolatry. Her body had grown flaccid and scaly from age, grotesque like a vermin. Somewhere along the way it had happened; as she herself noted, No one escapes. Yet she had not let her inner self go, she was preparing herself—the shells and
klippot
were being peeled away to expose to those with true vision her purest self contracted to the essence of her all-knowing soul still unborn; she had undergone a kind of divine constriction—
zimzum
—reconfiguring herself into the Place that withdraws to leave some space for others. In the same ironic way, though her outward physical presence had swelled and sagged with lumps and ruts, the physical space she now occupied was condensed to this chamber from which she had not emerged in years. The pot was carried in and the pot was carried out by tiny Rizpa, in her past life the cleaning woman Mazal Shabtai of Rosh HaAyin, Israel, brown and wizened like an old shoe. She was bathed and dressed and groomed and made up and then veiled on the changing table of her bed—by Cozbi, the former masseuse Anna Oblonskaya of Tverskaya Street, Moscow, six feet tall without the three-inch stiletto heels she always wore. Anyone who desired intercourse with her—responsa, exegesis, advice, a blessing, a cure, prophecy, prayers, above all the truth about themselves that Ima Temima possessed and selectively dispensed, the meaning of their troubling dreams, what would happen to them, where to find what they had lost, how to remember what they had forgotten—came and petitioned for access from her gatekeeper, her damaged boy, the son she called Paltiel, the child she had abandoned in Hebron who, in his manhood, had found his way through the woods back to his mother, the only male member permitted unrestricted entry into her innermost-inner court.

Behind her, rimming the upper floor of this stately old Jerusalem stone house bequeathed to her by a benefactor whose name was too dangerous to pronounce out loud, room after room with lofty vaulted ceilings and floor tiles stenciled like Turkish carpets that had once comprised her living quarters opened up in a balcony arc overlooking the study hall and
synagogue below. She could scarcely believe now that there had ever been a time when she had felt the need for so much space. This was the morning when she would remove her presence from her dwelling place, but she would not fold it up and carry it off to the next station like the God of the Testament with his Tabernacle, she would not bear its contents away with her on long poles always in place for portability, ready to travel; she would not blow it up or burn it down, foxes would not be seen prowling among its scorched ruins. Whether she lived in it or whether she left it, whether she wanted it or whether she wanted nothing more than to be rid of this earthly yoke, the house was hers, it was her eternal possession, that was the deal—those were the terms the mentor with hidden face had laid out, addressing her from behind a mask, backlit with fever.

When she vacated it this morning in a public demonstration of great moral consequence, articulating exactly how she meant to be understood in a form that could not be misinterpreted, Paltiel would simply in the natural course of events complete his takeover. The house would be her reparations to him, to erase from her life book the frozen frame that still screeched in her memory—the child following behind her and weeping as she made her way to the car where one of Abba Kadosh's retainers was awaiting her, Paltiel stumbling after her along the path sobbing, Ima, don't go, please don't go, Ima, until his father, the husband she still called Howie, scribe and phylacteries maker of Hebron, took his hand and said, Come home now, and carried him away. Still, there he would always be, fixed ever after, the little boy branded eternally into her memory as Paltiel, walking and crying, walking and crying, like Paltiel son of Layish when he was forced to give up his beloved Mikhal daughter of the paranoid King Saul to that mafia don and bandit, David son of Jesse, anointed in Hebron and soon to consolidate his kingship in Jerusalem over all of Israel, who had first seigneurial rights on the woman because he had bought her from her father for the bride-price of one hundred Philistine foreskins, he had the receipt.

I've been expecting you, Paltiel, were Temima's words to him that day when, as was inevitable, the wounded and bereft boy came back to her with his dark beard tipped with silver and a bald patch on his head, small and soft-paunched, a grown man in outer appearance
only. She appointed him her chief of staff on the spot, number one
shammes
, and gave him full rights and privileges over the property as her authorized squatter. From shreds of chatter gleaned through acolytes who congregated at her bedside each night to drink in her teachings she had heard that he had appropriated the living quarters behind her chamber, converting a portion of it into a private apartment for himself and Cozbi who towered over him, not to mention allocating a room of one's own convenient to the kitchen and laundry for Rizpa, and turning the rest into an administrative complex with banks of computers and other high-tech equipment, everything cutting edge and top of the line, from which he oversaw their entire operation.

The operation, as it happened, was constructed out of air and silken strands, but even so, from what she had been told (she personally collaborated in shielding herself from such matters) the money it brought in had substance. It was a website called MaTov. Paltiel derived touching creative pride from what he considered to be the cleverness of the brand name, a play, on one level, on the intended curse morphed into a blessing that spurted out of the mouth of the pagan prophet Bilaam son of Be'or as he overlooked the goodly tents of Jacob, the dwelling places of Israel spread out in their wilderness encampment in one of the many great comic scenes of the Tanakh, this one featuring a talking donkey. If words could be put into the mouth of an ass, why not also into the mouth of a human dummy by the great ventriloquist above? And what Paltiel was selling in MaTov was her, his own Good Ma, Ima Temima. In lovingkindness she was obligated to repair his vessel that she herself had broken; even as she found his dealings to be squalid she could not deny herself to him yet again, she owed him.

It was all clarified on the website, though Temima herself, of course, had never physically even laid a hand on one of those machines much less, God forbid, worshipped at a screen as at an icon in its designated corner of the room. There was, however, from what she had gleaned, a sliding fee scale, depending on what you were willing or able to spend, ranging from Bronze Standard to Silver Select to Gold Superior to Platinum Premium to Diamond Exclusive—from having your email petition, once it was paid for with your credit card number and your expiration date, printed out and deposited at the foot of the holy woman's bed with heaps of other standard petitions in a white plastic laundry tub or black trash
bags depending on how many had come in that day, to having it placed with a number of select others under one of the holy woman's pillows, to having it set on her tray in a fan of superiors where her eyes might fall upon it, to having it read out loud to her with full premium urgency, and, for an added cost, arranging for her blessing or oracular utterance to be communicated back to you in an email reply. The mere proximity to the holy woman of your petition was bound to improve your self-knowledge and your fortune, and the chances of success were exponentially increased if you paid to have your request brought into her aura more than once, with special package deals for auspicious numbers of times—four, seven, ten, thirteen, eighteen, or any combination of eighteen (thirty-six, fifty-four, and so on), forty days and forty nights—all variations on four or forty were deemed incredibly potent. Fees were also calibrated depending on the request, which, Paltiel discovered, since the clientele consisted mostly of women, fell generally under two very broad headings, Ma and Ov—maternal and gynecological. Petitioning that you might finally find your soul mate, for example, was costly, naturally, but not nearly as expensive or as complicated or as resistant to cure or consolation as anything related to the troubles that derived from the womb you came out of or the sorrows that touched upon what went into your own womb and what came out.

It had, of course, not escaped Temima's notice, as a native English speaker though living in Israel more than three-quarters of her lifespan by now, that a playful deconstruction of her name Ba'alatOv could lead to the hermeneutics Mistress of the Ovary, an especially tempting twist because so many of the lessons she drew were derived from and applied to women—Ovum Ovarum, Sanctum Sanctorum. But the fact was, when she had taken the name Ba'alatOv, she had meant it as a respectful nod to yet another of her dearly beloved Tanakhi women, the despised necromancer, the Woman of Endor, mistress of the
ov
and
yedonim
, with the power to raise familiar spirits and ghosts. And a secondary benefit of this name was that, with it, Temima was also sticking a finger into the eyes of the establishment religious leaders, all men, who considered her an aberration and an abomination, a freak and a menace—a witch and a sorceress—placing their bans and
herems
upon her, the way King Saul had done on all mediums and wizards and magicians and possessors of talismans. Yet Saul in his desperation had sought out the Woman of
Endor anyway—just like those ossified and inflated rabbis whose names she could mention if she were so inclined who had come to her in secret and disguise like the johns prowling the red-light district of Amsterdam, and then gone away to take full credit for her brilliant interpretations of the texts to guide them in their perplexity and her responsa to such questions as whether an hermaphrodite should pray on the women's or men's side of the partition at the Western Wall. And doesn't the book tell us in black and white that the Woman of Endor actually succeeded in raising the cranky prophet Samuel from his freshly dug grave in Ramah? Such powers did exist after all—and this witch possessed them. You had to hand it to her, the hag, the crone, she knew her business, she delivered, she was a professional. But that was not why Temima loved her. Temima loved her and honored her, could only bow her head, marvel, and practically weep at how, after all the bad news for the future of the royal line came spilling like worms out of the spectral mouth of Samuel the prophet, and the beset King Saul collapsed, passed out in her kitchen, the good witch would not even think of letting him out of her house after he was revived until first he ate something. Eat something first—then I'll let you go. What do we learn from this? Ima Temima would pose the question to her students. The answer is: All women are witches.

Before the computer operation installed by Paltiel, Temima had of course helped many people in the old-fashioned way, with basic human raw materials, one-on-one, hands on, so to speak. Not only with her teachings, for which students gathered from the four corners of the earth to the Temima Shul to absorb her wisdom, hanging with raw fingertips from the windowsills even in the dead of winter until they were discovered frozen and buried under the Jerusalem snows, but also, in those simpler times, the sufferers would come to her door on their own, or stop her on the street in those days when she made her way boldly already veiled, stop her with their needs and sorrows and struggles and losses, and she would listen and dispense as necessary. In some such way she had found Cozbi on a cold night in an alley off Sabbath Square, makeup congealed on the cheekbone blades under her slanted Slavic eyes, loose platinum-colored hair giving off dull glints of light, chandelier earrings dangling forlornly, in her trademark stilettos, long legs and narrow hips
and tight buttocks shrink-wrapped in low-slung red pants, a clinging gold halter top with cleavage and midriff bared, smoking something or other as she slumped against the wall beside a yellow poster enjoining the daughters of Israel not to arouse the feelings of neighborhood residents by dressing immodestly. A young man with a sparse beard and a great cupola of a black velvet yarmulke, the blood rushing to his face, was whipping her in a frenzy with the rope
gartel
he had unsnaked from around the waist of his lustrous black kaftan, lashing and yelling
Pritzeh! Pritzeh!
Harlot! Slut! What, you think this is a stable?—pausing only to amass fresh gobs of spit to aim at her. And she didn't even stir, she didn't flinch or cringe, she just went on dragging on her cigarette or bidi or joint or whatever it was she was smoking, as if all of this disturbance and spectacle had nothing to do with her.