One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (38 page)

It would cost her plenty, however. First of all, there was the matter of child support for the boy he called Pinkhas, over whom she would, as
part of her concessions, naturally relinquish all custody rights and visitation privileges. Then there was compensation for himself for personal insult and injury, not to mention loss of face and loss of conjugal rights, damage incurred both above and below the waist, which could run into the very high figures. He also needed a new car—actually at this point a bulletproof van was absolutely necessary. There was also the matter of annual contributions in the platinum circle in his name to the Greater Israel movement and all of its future projects including the ultimate restoration of the Holy Temple on the Mount by whatever means with all of its accoutrements—golden altars for incense and animal sacrifice, golden menorah, golden showbread table, golden vessels, golden ark complete with golden-winged cherubim, golden priestly garments, suitable equipment for the Messiah's entry through the golden gate of Jerusalem on a white donkey, the white donkey itself, and so on. Her trust fund if she truly had one, her inheritance, her allowance from her father, other money and treasure from other sources, the proceeds from the sale of the Ben-Yefuneh Street apartment, and so forth, whatever she had—all of these assets and all that he omitted in his haste, none of these would be off-limits if she ever wanted to see that divorce. Finally, a bit of research on Howie's part had disclosed that the two apartments already underway bought for them by her father, the one in Kiryat Arba and the other in the hostile heart of Hebron itself, were officially in his, her father's, name—the devious old finagler. If she really wanted this divorce she had better hustle and get on his case ASAP, she had better talk to her sneaky old man to transfer ownership and property rights pronto, to him, to Howie, master of the houses.

“Over my dead body, the
momzer
!” her father Reb Berel Bavli spat out across the telephone wires from Brooklyn so that Temima almost felt the need to wipe off her face when she called him. “What? You think I'm some kind of moron?”

She had not seen her father since the circumcision of Kook Immanuel, she spoke to him infrequently, on the eve of holidays to wish him good yomtov, brief conversations at the beginning and end of which he never neglected to rebuke her for not calling enough. The only time he had initiated a call himself was during the shiva for Kook Immanuel; she had simply shaken her head when she was summoned to the phone, refusing to get up. “What a putz you got for yourself for a husband, Tema'le, I'm
sorry to say, a real dope, you should excuse me, such a smart girl like you. Can you believe this guy's hutzpah? If I were there I'd wring his fat neck like a chicken—and believe me, when a
shoikhet
like me wrings a neck, you hear your neck-wringing ding-dong loud and clear. Even if I could afford it, you think for one minute I would ever be stupid enough to put anything with any value in the name of such a
paskundnyak
like your Howie? I'm telling you, you'd have to be meshuggeh. For your information, in case you want to know or care, right now I'm sitting here in Boro Park with five daughters to marry off, not to mention a very sick wife it shouldn't happen to a dog who's taking her own sweet time to finish up, making all kinds of demands from me, such as like she has to be buried in Eretz Yisroel the Holy Land itself no less like some kind of fancy lady, when who even knows where her own mama and papa are buried—maybe in a lampshade, maybe a bar of soap, maybe an ash can. A nice respectable cemetery on the New Jersey Turnpike or maybe even in Queens is not good enough for her like it was for your own mama, may she rest in peace—oh no, not for such a hotsy-totsy lady like Mrs. Frumie Bavli, she has to see with her own two eyes the deed for her burial plot signed sealed and delivered before she wraps up her business. I'm telling you, Tema'le, it costs plenty to be buried in Israel, like you wouldn't believe—graves, that's Israel's biggest natural resource, for your information, it will cost me an arm and a leg, it just so happens. I need your problems now to add to my own
zorres
like a hole in the head. I'm sorry, Tema'le, you're a big girl now, you're on your own this time. You made your bed, now you have to go lay down in it. Better you should go back to that little
schmendrik
of yours, Tema'le, that s
chvantz
Howie—also, if you'll excuse me, a lot cheaper. Like the Gemara says,
tav lemetav tan
etcetera and so forth, which bottom line means, in case you don't know, it's better for a girl to be married to a jerk, a complete nothing no-goodnik schmuck piece of dreck like what you got for yourself, Tema'le, I'm sorry to say, than to be alone and not married at all.”

Short of opening her own purse or yielding on any level to Howie's vindictive extortion, a number of options presented themselves to Temima, each of which she rejected for one reason or another. She could have arranged to have him imprisoned to coerce him into giving her
the
get
, but if recent experience was an indicator, serving jail time not only did not faze him in his own skewed estimation, it even enhanced his self-image and made him a hero in his own eyes and in the eyes of his fellow travelers. She could have gone the Maimonidean route, one of the rare instances when the formidable Rambam saw things from the woman's side for a change, and declared him physically repulsive to her, disgusting plain and simple, or she could have petitioned for an annulment on the grounds of failure of full disclosure of a pre-existing condition at the time of the marriage, for surely she would never have agreed to take for a husband a mental degenerate, a violent insane perverted hooligan sociopath who lurked around at night cutting off human thumbs and big toes—but she held back for the time being from proceeding in ways that might shame and blacken the name of her child's father. Of course, she could also have sought to make the case that Howie was in violation of their original agreement with regard to the terms of their marriage and the limitations to his conjugal rights, but there was no prenuptial documentation to attest to their singular arrangement and in any case it was altogether an extraordinary and unique arrangement that would have bewildered and staggered the imaginative powers of the rabbis in a Jewish court of law, turning the full severity of their disapproval upon her head, pelting her as with a storm of blame, declaring her terms null and void.

Above all, Temima was driven by an urgency to settle the matter fast in the hope that the baby in her womb could be spared the stigma of
mamzerut
. It was during this period of intense focus on saving at least this child that she received word that Howie had taken for himself another wife without bothering to divorce Temima, without even taking the trouble to go through the nicety of procuring a dispensation from one hundred willing rabbis since the medieval ban against polygamy of Rabbi Gershom the Light of the Exile was precisely that—a ban with an expiration date and without the force of law, more like the accepted practice among Ashkenazi Jews. The new wife was a little sixteen-year-old girl, Abba Kadosh informed Temima, a Moroccan fresh from Netivot in the Negev desert not too far away from Bnei HaElohim, the headquarters of the miracle worker and faith healer Rabbi Yisrael AbuHatzeira known as Baba Sali with a nose like a kebab and more than one wife in his own personal stable, as a matter of fact. Pardon me, but Bnei HaElohim would have been more than happy to express deliver a nice untouched twelve-year-old
virgin divorcée to Howie to compensate for the loss of Temima, a prize package a third Temima's age, an amazing deal, maybe even throw in as a bonus for reparations for any pain and suffering Howie might have incurred a little procedure they could perform on the girl in Health House—a clit slit and other appropriate mutilations, deliver her new but without tags, like they do in darkest Africa for extra insurance to keep her on the straight and narrow, it was something they occasionally opted for when a girl was getting too frisky, Bnei HaElohim's holy sisters knew how to hold a filly down and cut off her ridiculous useless little button with a razor when necessary for her own good. But no, Howie was just too much of a racist and bigot to even consider a Bnei HaElohim girl, not even a black beauty guaranteed virgin who has already been carrying around her nonperforming underage husband on her back for years and already has loads of experience in how to treat a husband right and proper—“Unlike you, sister,” Abba Kadosh commented petulantly to Temima. “So your horny old man he goes for this teenybopper instead of a nice respectable Bnei HaElohim girl, a Moroccan with her henna and her cheap earrings with bells that go dingaling when she sashays around the barn like a cow so you always know where she is. Her name is Timna, by the way—kind of a Temima knockoff, you might say.”

“Timna, the concubine of Eliphaz, Esau's son—mother of Amalek. You must completely blot out the memory of Amalek from under the heavens—Do not forget!” Temima declaimed as if on automatic.

Abba Kadosh rumbled his deep laugh, which rocked his soft belly that seemed to Temima to have been swelling in recent weeks. He was sitting opposite her in her cave, his legs spread wide. “I didn't expect you to take it so hard, sister.” He shook his head with a bemused expression at this further evidence of the peculiar and inexplicable nature of the female mind. No matter how brilliant or accomplished, all women were irrational. “Like I said when I took the trouble to publicly walk unescorted across my entire village and come here in person to see you, sister, I got some good news and some bad news. That little Moroccan chick, Timna, your husband married? That was the good news.” His rolling laugh bounced off the stone walls.

Temima would not give Abba Kadosh the satisfaction of displaying the weakness of curiosity by asking directly for the bad news. She sat there in silence preparing herself inwardly.

“Just say the word, sister,” Abba Kadosh went on to exhort her. “One word from you, and I send some of my best commandos from Yazoo City up to Hebron to take care of your old man, Howie. Believe me, sister, when they finish with him he will fall down on what's left of his knees and lick your feet if he still has a tongue in his mouth and beg you to accept his miserable little divorce. Howlin' Howie they'll call him, since the guy's name is always morphing anyhow, maybe finally he'll get one that fits him.”

Abba Kadosh proceeded with keen relish to run down a list of the various techniques and equipment in his arsenal, from head to toe, electric drill to the skull, pliers to toenails, every variety of sharp or shock-inducing appliance for every orifice and tender part of the body, for every limb and organ, knives and razors, whips and prods, fists and spikes, dogs and rats, darkness and violation, suffocation and drowning, sleeplessness and terror, stretching and shrinking, the full catalogue of tortures straight from Sodom piled in ruins a short distance away. “On second thought, sister, we can save ourselves a whole lot of mess and bother if you'd simply be willing to use your
protectzia
clout with the high and mighty of the land to get his driver's license revoked. Believe me, sister, that will do the trick in no time. You'll get that
get
faster than a speeding bullet, you won't know what hit you.”

He sat back with a wide grin, completely at ease in his skin, a quality in him that always affected Temima physically like crescendoing music. “Frankly, sister, it amazes and befuddles me how a smart lady like you has gone and got herself into such a state over this divorce business, puffing up that ninety-pound-weakling husband of yours, making him feel mighty powerful for the first time in his life, like he has you in the palm of his hands and can just squeeze for all he's worth. I like you fine the way you are, sister,
get
or no
get
. What more do you need? And if you're worrying whether that future little Zephania ben Cushi or Zippora bat Cushi in your belly is going to be a
mamzer
unto the tenth generation—well, face it, sister, there's no way any kid with me for a daddy born in Bnei HaElohim hollering to be accepted as a Jew in the State of Israel is going to be anything but an outcast and a pariah,
mamzer
or no
mamzer
. This kid is fated to be blackballed and blacklisted, literally and figuratively, until the last feather in the faded yellow beards of the chicken-skinned rabbis shrivels and falls out. This is going to be a kid handicapped from
the get-go, sister, wandering to and fro in the land like a leper with a bell, at home only with the other
mamzerim
in Bnei HaElohim. And what's so bad about Bnei HaElohim anyhow? It is paradise, Gan Eden, like the land of Cush completely surrounded by the river Gihon attached to the Garden of Eden like an umbilical cord. My advice to you, sister, is just to sit back and relax and enjoy the show. But like I said—if you still have your heart set on that
get
, if you still want me to straighten out that dead dog of a husband of yours, that pisser against the wall, that worthless scumbag with blood on his hands—then just say the word. I'm at your service, sister, that's why God put me on this earth—to fulfill your destiny.”

Abba Kadosh flashed a sly smile, like a gentleman who opens a door for a lady in order to be better positioned to get a good look at her rear end and give it a good kick. Temima did not say a word, but her eyebrows arced as if into a question mark. “Nothing big,” he replied, “just a small favor in return.”

He anticipated that his son, Yishmael, the wild boy she called Ibn Kadosh, would be haunting the village again very soon despite the risks to life and limb he knew very well, Abba Kadosh told Temima. He suspected the boy might first stop at her cave to inquire as to his, Abba Kadosh's, whereabouts, or might seek refuge with her as a hiding place from which to pounce like a panther. Should that happen, he was asking her out of loyalty to him, the father of the child she was carrying, and in return for his generous offer to settle the Howie business premium class five-stars deluxe all the way, to inform him immediately when the kid shows up. “He's coming to get me, sister. He believes I killed his mother.”