One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (23 page)

Temima set the telephone down on the bed and stretched out to rest with one arm covering her eyes and the other hand spread out flat on the rising and falling chest of the baby lying on his back beside her as the Toiter went on to describe in detail the ritual that must be enacted when the plague is cured, God willing. Two pure birds are required. Slaughter one of them over an earthen pot on top of running water. Dip into its blood a piece of cedar wood, hyssop, some scarlet stuff, and the living bird. Sprinkle the mixture seven times on the baby to purify him. Then release the living bird to fly free over the fields.

Meanwhile, with the buzz of the Toiter's voice in the background, Ketura removed the baby's diaper as he lay on the bed with his mother's hand resting upon him and concentrated on applying the first of a pharmacopoeia of remedies to the infected area that she mixed from natural ingredients in different combinations and proportions, ointments and creams and lotions she concocted from lemon balm, aloe vera, sage, tea tree oil, the wax from honeycombs, prunella, vitamin C, mushrooms, rhubarb, and parsley leaves. As Ketura continued to experiment over the course of the ensuing days, it became apparent to Temima that Howie had not been convinced by her explanation for her sudden disappearance, though, as it happened, it had been the truth—her claim that she had heard the voice of Mother Sarah at the Makhpela that required her immediate return to Jerusalem. For several hours every day, Ibn Kadosh now stationed himself on the floor in the hallway directly in front of her apartment door smoking green tobacco that he rolled himself into cigarettes and whittling slingshots while running a tape recorder at top volume blasting the voice of the child Howie called Pinkhas lamenting and crying, Ima, Ima, come home! Come home now, Ima! The neighbors
were complaining, whatever Howie was paying Ibn Kadosh she knew she could top, yet Temima could not bear to silence the voice of her child even at the cost of allowing herself to be publicly shamed as a bad mother; the least she could do for this child whom she had already wronged so many times in his short life was to let him be heard.

She went out into the hallway and stood with her hands on her hips staring down at Ibn Kadosh sitting on the floor leaning against the wall. She could see that he had grown, dark and lanky and still so handsome, his eyes the color of smoky crystal under rich lashes, a silken gauzy shadow over his top lip. She assured him she would be returning home soon, he could communicate that to Howie, but Ibn Kadosh simply shook his head, continuing to whittle with his knife, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, muttering that the mister had ordered him not to stop blasting the tape outside her door until she came back with him and brought the new baby back too, that was the deal, she could expect him here every day at her door blasting this tape until she was ready to pack up and go.

The chopped placenta had never cheered Temima up, and the elixirs Ketura was brewing and smearing on the baby were creating a mess and having no effect either, so one day soon after Temima bound Kook Immanuel to her chest in the sling of her shawl and crossed the railroad tracks from Baka to German Colony, making her way through the streets of Talbieh to the mysterious door like a cyclop's eye set flush into the stone wall surrounding the leper colony. The doctor who occupied the apartment inside the wall in exchange for on-call night duty to the lepers opened the door himself to let her in. He was dressed only in a loose pair of khaki Zionist shorts and brown leather Old Testament sandals even though he was expecting her; she had arranged this appointment in advance, giving as her name Miriam Gekhazi, and the baby's name as Uziyahu, taking this precaution despite the fact that she had been assured he routinely saw patients on the side for a fee who required treatments of a highly confidential and sensitive nature, that he was scrupulously discreet. Temima stared at the sag of the doctor's bare chest with its curlicues of white hair, and then her eyes were drawn to the long chain with a knob at the end like a torture instrument trailing from his hand. He noticed the
trajectory of her gaze and shot her a sly smile. “From our toilet tank,” he explained after a teasing pause. “My wife yanked it off again. Some people just don't know how to flush with delicacy.”

The back wall of the salon of his apartment in which they were standing consisted entirely of sliding glass doors, and through them Temima could see the small private garden reserved for the doctor and his family, and beyond that the grounds of the leper colony where some sisters in their starched white uniforms were strolling with arms linked on one side of the path, and on the other side, the contorted figures of the inmates making their way, painfully performing the hopeful act of taking their exercise on feet that had been eaten away and that they could no longer feel.

“Nu—so how can I help you?” the doctor said, startling her from this distraction, catching her off guard and almost pushing her over into tears by the offer of help.

She extricated the baby from the shawl, sat down on the divan after telegraphing to the doctor a glance requesting permission, lay the child on his back across her lap, and undressed him. The doctor pulled a pair of spectacles from the pocket of his shorts, set them on his nose where they slipped down until they wedged themselves against the craggy red bulb at the tip, and leaned in to examine the baby's genitals. After a long interval, during which Temima was heating up to acute apprehensiveness, he stepped back, recognized once again the mother's existence, and declared, “Healthy, completely healthy!” From a cupboard against the wall he took out some tubes of salve and told her to apply this medication to the infected area four times a day, adding to these instructions the admonition to above all keep the area clean, and then, raising his voice almost to a shout, he lectured her sternly about the danger of constricting the infected area by binding it too tightly—“Such as with that schmatteh you schlep him around in!” the doctor said, pointing to her shawl. “Naked, naked is best of all, like in the Garden of Eden before the snake. Loose and free—natural, nothing is healthier than natural!”

Temima lowered her head and accepted all of his assaults; she was his supplicant, his slave. She drew out of her bag, in which she had already hoarded the tubes of medicine, an envelope with one thousand American dollars in cash as agreed in advance and set it unobtrusively down on the coffee table instead of handing it to him directly so as not to incur the
danger of embarrassing him. He picked it up immediately, tore open the envelope and let it flutter to the floor, counted the bills one by one, folded them into his pocket, and pronounced, “Good, nice and green, healthy like lettuce—
beseder
!”

With the baby in her arms now loosely diapered and bundled, Temima made ready to leave when, as if something else had just by chance occurred to her, she turned to the doctor and asked if he would be willing to take a quick look at one more thing. His expression turned bemused, wily. “If the one-more-thing is on you, then please, with pleasure, no charge for looking.” Temima showed him a nodule on her lip, and a bump on her ear, as well as a spot on her neck, each of which he examined attentively without comment. “Anywhere else?” he asked. So Temima allowed him to look at the others, in the private places, which the doctor inspected closely and lingeringly, pronouncing in the end, “Healthy, completely healthy!”—advising her to eat foods such as spinach and lentils and soybeans rich in the right kind of protein, which would also benefit the baby when it would be piped in through her breast milk. Then, as he was letting her out the door, he switched tone and added gravely, with the entitlement of authority, “This is not coming from heaven, you know—not the disease, and not the cure, not the blessing, and not the curse. You have a choice. Choose life if you want to live—you and your child.”

Over the next few weeks it seemed to Temima that things were beginning to fall into place, that her life was taking on a semblance of control. She was not asking for happiness, happiness was not a guaranteed right to pursue, especially in Israel; she was asking only for the right not to be consumed by the land, she was asking for a normal child untouched by danger. The baby improved day by day, until all signs of the outbreak had disappeared entirely; no one would ever have to know there had even been a stigma. She called the Toiter to report the good news. Together they reconsecrated themselves to the child.

They agreed that she would contact Howie to inform him of her return—that she was using her remaining time in Jerusalem to put the apartment up for sale and arrange for storage of all their furniture and possessions in anticipation of the day in the near future when, God willing, the Kiryat Arba villa her father had bought for them would be ready
and they could move out of their tent in the army camp overlooking Hebron. She asked Howie to call off Ibn Kadosh and his tape recorder, to drive him out of the Ben-Yefuneh Street building. With the telephone clamped to her ear by her hiked-up shoulder, the baby naked in her arms reaching out with his pudgy hands to tug at the wire, Temima watched from her window as Ibn Kadosh slowly made his way down Ben-Yefuneh Street toward Bethlehem Road carrying his belongings including the tape recorder in his sack, his mother, Ketura, over whom he now towered, faithfully at his side. She speculated whether, when they arrived at Hebron Road, they would turn left in the direction of the Old City of Jerusalem or right toward Hebron, as she gave Howie the date and time to send the bulletproof car to pick her up and bring her and the child back to the compound. “What do you need a military escort for?” Howie demanded in frustration. “Who do you think you are anyways, Queen Tut? It's a zillion times safer here than on Coney Island Avenue. You're coming home to Hevron, Tema—to the Me'arat HaMakhpela, for God's sakes, the second holiest site in the Jewish world next to the Western Wall.”

The third holiest site is the tomb of Rachel Our Mother. When Temima with her baby Kook Immanuel and her little mother Torah reached this domed shrine by the side of the road as they were traveling in the bulletproof vehicle back to the army compound overlooking Hebron on the appointed day, she asked the driver to stop to allow her to make a brief pilgrimage. Rachel Our Mother was the least maternal of the matriarchs, and yet, of the four, she above all the others had come to most stand for the idea of mother—the voice heard in Ramah, weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted, the Jewish Our Lady of the Highways, wailing and crying bitterly for her children as they pass her in fetters trudging off to exile, greeting them from the roadside as they return to their borders dancing the hora.

Temima brought her little mother Torah up to the tomb of Rachel Our Mother and brushed her against it, in a kind of ritual greeting of soul mates. Temima's mother, Rachel-Leah, lay alone and unvisited in her grave in the Old Montefiore cemetery in Queens, and here was Rachel Our Mother buried alone on the roadside, excluded from the family mausoleum at the Makhpela, the couples' club. This was her punishment, according to the commentator-in-chief Rashi—to lie alone forever for so contemptuously selling a night lying with Jacob in exchange for a bunch
of mandrakes with forked roots that Reuven, the eldest son of her sister and rival-wife, Leah, had pulled shrieking out of the earth, giving off their intoxicating scent redolent of all the possibilities and risks of love and death that enshrouded Rachel Our Mother and those she elected to gather under her veil.

When Temima returned to the military compound a fragrance clung to her, enveloping her like a cloud so intense that people came out to sniff what was in the air. And instantly, as when she had arrived the first time and walked between the raindrops, the sense was renewed and restored of a presence among them endowed with special powers that practically made them bow down as they stood at the entrances of their tents and observed her passage. Soon Temima was holding court again, either up in the army camp itself in the intervals between men's prayer quorums three times a day inside the tent that had been designated as the synagogue, or down in the heart of Hebron at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, under the vigilant eyes of her four bodyguards, where she presided by the cenotaph of Mother Leah, privileged to lie beside Father Jacob for eternity. Wherever she sat, she was never without her two children—Kook Immanuel on her lap or loosely suspended in a sling on her back or front, Temima's fingers encircling a chubby ankle or wrist like a shackle, the child her husband called Pinkhas playing quietly on the floor at her feet, pushing a toy army jeep with one hand and, with the other, clutching a handful of her skirt.

At the Makhpela, Arabs and Jews, men and women, made their way to the holy woman reputed to be endowed with mystical powers—seeking her out for blessings, advice, consolation, cures, foreknowledge and self-knowledge, the interpretation of dreams, restoring the memory of what they had once known and forgotten, leading them to the discovery of what they had lost, from a lost earring to a lost child, for, as Temima taught, When you find sixty-nine objects you have lost you will find redemption.

From all over the land of Israel and from outside the land they risked their lives and ventured into this danger zone to the learned woman sage with questions pertaining to ritual or law, renowned rabbis arrived in disguise or secretly dispatched lackeys to seek out responsa they would later claim as their own to questions ranging from artificial insemination to autopsies, soul birth to brain death and all the confusion in between, whether a woman may elect to take on the risks of cosmetic surgery,
six months marinating in oils of myrrh and six months in perfumes and female ointments, whether a man may be counted as a member of the minyan for prayer if he had been born as a woman who had undergone a sex change, and so forth. In the synagogue tent of the military compound, learning circles gathered around the great wise woman, forums for rigorous study, not only men and boys in mixed classes but, often at Temima's specific behest, drawing on her own priorities, women and girls exclusively, which permitted her to nurse Kook Immanuel as she taught with a blanket draped over her shoulder for modesty, and many of her students were breast-feeding their babies too, including the convert Yehudit Har-HaBayit with newborn twins at her breasts, she who had once so joyously offered herself as a wet nurse to the infant Howie kidnapped and named Pinkhas on his circumcision day, from whom the little boy now turned away in alarm whenever she batted her false eyelashes and bared her long teeth to smile and beckon to him, running to Temima and burrowing his face in her lap.