One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (39 page)

There was a deep pause as this news sank in. Tears pooled in the corners of Temima's eyes and slid down the sides of her face, staining her cheeks.

“Yes, sister, my own son, my own flesh and blood, he is out to kill me—
that's
the bad news. It
is
for me you are weeping now, I take it. Those tears are in my behalf—correct? I do appreciate your sympathy, sister.”

He gazed at her coldly. “For the record, sister, I didn't do it, and I didn't order that it be done, though in all candor I cannot say I don't approve. It is an ancient tradition—an honor killing carried out by her own people for her whoring and promiscuous ways that brought only shame to her family and tribe. Stoned to death, probably by her own father and brothers and uncles, with her mother and sisters ululating and dancing in the
background, by the way. You might consider it a primitive Arab custom, sister, but as far as I am concerned, it is one of the few practices still upheld by the followers of that ruthless bandit Muhammed, a model to all of us cult leaders, prophets, and messiahs, that I can relate to and respect. Her remains were discovered near Be'er LaHai Ro'i in the Negev desert, in the land of the south, where Father Isaac settled after he was sacrificed. They carried out her punishment in the time-honored way. Buried her in the sand up to the waist, then stoned her to death to uproot the evil from their midst. The flesh of her upper body and her face were already almost entirely eaten away by the buzzards and vultures of the desert down to the eye sockets, like her sister Jezebel, licked clean by wild dogs. The shadow of bird wings rested on the sand, as if peeled off her face. A pearl earring was snagged in the petrified wires of hair plugged into her skull. That's how the boy identified his mother. What is such an earring worth without its mate? What is the value of such a used and defiled woman? She is worth nothing, a woman like that—not even one
grush
, not even a single Philistine foreskin, not even a mouthful of spit, not even half a shekel. She is not counted, and she does not count.”

Seven months after losing her Ketura, less than two years after losing her baby boy Kook Immanuel, on a hot and dry day at summer's end in the Judean Desert, Temima was seized by the first pang of her labor, astoundingly fresh in its unnegotiable iron ferocity. She was sitting in a lawn chair outside the entrance to her cave with her Tanakh open on her lap, Shira Silver Kedaisha stretched out on the ground at her feet in the posture of a disciple, left arm propping up her head and a notebook in which to record the teachings at ready beneath the pen poised in her right hand. They still had not advanced beyond the first three chapters of Genesis, the creation of the world through the expulsion from Eden, pondering the mystery of Hava, the original woman, the template, mother of all that lives,
em-kol-hai
. Temima asked, Why did God forbid Adam (though not Hava, at least not directly) from eating from the fruit of the tree of knowledge but not from the tree of life tucked in the center of the garden like the heart in its rib cage? Because in doing so He rendered the fruit of the tree of knowledge the most tempting and irresistible, turned it into the lure to deflect and distract humankind from the tree of life,
the garden's real prize. Taking a bite out of its fruit, so good to eat, so enticing to the eyes, so desirable as a source of wisdom, Hava traded the true divine attribute of immortality for the divine delusion of knowledge poisoned with the consciousness of one's own impending death, she relinquished immortality for all of her descendants because that was His will. And what was her reward for fulfilling His will? Painful childbirths, everlasting subservience to man—the curse of Eve—odium and contempt down through the ages too entrenched ever to be eradicated despite lip service, the indelible and immutable image of woman as temptress, root of all evil and sin, polluted and polluting.

Temima grimaced, her breathing sped up and deepened and grew audible, springing Shira to her feet. “Not yet. Let's wait.” In a regal gesture, Temima raised her hand palm out as if to slow things down. For some reason she had never taken the time to look into the secret birthing protocols and rituals as practiced in Health House in Bnei HaElohim though she had heard they were extraordinary. But this was her eighth pregnancy and the third baby she was bringing to term, her entrails had loosened. Within an hour after the first contraction had gripped her, a liquid began to seep out of the hollowness of her body through the webbing of the lawn chair in which she was sitting, dripping onto the ground and soaking it; in seconds the puddle was lapped up by the blistering heat as if by the slack tongue of a parched dog. Temima groaned. How much grace will you show when the pains come upon you, the travail of childbirth? the prophet Jeremiah asked. How much dignity?

Hoisting Temima upward with both hands, Shira helped her out of her seat. They went inside the cave where Temima found her cloth bag into which she placed her Tanakh and her little mother Torah, though she hardly knew what use they might serve since they contained essentially no descriptions of such behind-the-scenes women's business as childbirth, absent most glaringly in the scroll of the Pentateuch itself. Yet they were her comfort. I will fear no harm because you are with me. With her elbow linked into the loop formed by Shira's arm, they began an eloquently slow processional as if following a coffin down the pathway from the cave using what Shira called with a muted giggle “baby steps,” bringing one foot in front of the other in minimal increments as the fluid continued to leak from between Temima's legs and evaporate almost instantly in the arid soil. All eyes behind curtains and shutters and shades fixed upon
them as in exquisite slow motion endowing their advance with a kind of grave significance they made their ceremonious way to the birthing center in Health House as to a place of execution in the heart of the village.

Outside of Health House a circle of ten men was seated on the sand around the enema monument, which Temima now noted resembled the male sexual organ more than anything else in all of its blooming menace. Abba Kadosh was notably absent from this group. The men rocked back and forth reading psalms traditional for childbirth as their leader, Melekh Sinai, chanted over and over above their murmurings like an incantation the blessing from the daily morning prayers, thanking God for not having made him a woman. Temima, with Shira at her side, stood for a while at the edge of this circle listening to their petitions on behalf of women in confinement, and then raised her voice to inquire of Melekh Sinai why he was not also saying the blessing thanking God for not having made him a goy. “The sister is too clever for her own good,” Melekh Sinai said, reducing and dismissing her in her exposed female weakness. Immediately two midwives who had been stationed at the doorway a modest distance away from the ring of men came forward dressed in identical immaculate uniforms including long white aprons and white headscarves like sisters of mercy from another century in a war casualty hospital. They relieved Temima of her bag containing the sacred texts, assuring her that her personal possessions would be held in a safe, uncontaminated place through the period of her impurity, her bleeding and discharge, forty days if she gave birth to a boy, eighty days for a girl.

Still supporting herself on Shira's arm, Temima followed the midwives to the suite of birthing rooms set aside for her. It was at this point, with an expression of mortified helplessness on her face, a look bordering on desolation, that Shira detached herself from Temima and entered the larger of the two rooms. Through the open door Temima saw Abba Kadosh wearing only a hospital gown lying on a great plush bed in the center of the room, his head elevated on a lavish bank of pillows, surrounded by all of his women who were not at that time pregnant dressed exactly like the midwives, massaging his belly, applying compresses to his forehead, moistening his lips with ice chips, stroking his arms, his hair, his beard, kneading his shoulders, applying ointment to his chest, taking his pulse, pressing a stethoscope or leaning an ear against his heart and his bloated belly, peering up between his thighs and checking progress
with extended arms and probing fingers. Shira stepped into this room, slipped behind a screen, and emerged very soon after dressed like all the others in the costume of a midwife. She went to the basin to wash her hands, then took her place at one of Abba Kadosh's feet and began to rub it alongside a co-
kedaisha
assigned to the other foot. Her duties to Abba Kadosh at this time trumped her bond with Temima, as they had when she had been obliged to supplicate Temima in his behalf, standing with all of his other women in front of the entrance to the cave with one breast bared. Shira could not endure raising her eyes from Abba Kadosh's foot to look at Temima still at the doorway witnessing her debasement, but Abba Kadosh himself, with his head propped high on the pillows, did not take his gaze off Temima for a second. His eyes shimmered with amused triumph and power even as his face wore the mask of agony and his body writhed and his limbs flung out spasmodically though no sounds issued from his mouth, no screams and no cries.

The two midwives delegated to Temima allowed her to remain in the doorway observing the ministrations to Abba Kadosh long enough to begin to absorb the concepts behind the birthing philosophy of the community. When they judged that she had taken in the gist they propelled her respectfully but firmly to the adjacent room, much smaller and strikingly less well appointed than the one in which Abba Kadosh was accommodated, with its narrow austere bed pushed against the wall that separated the two chambers. The younger of the two midwives helped Temima to undress and put on a hospital gown like the one she had seen on Abba Kadosh. While this prepping was taking place, the senior midwife expounded with such fervor on the underlying creed at Health House governing childbearing that the black wen alongside her nose began to twitch like a spider animated by the passionate flaring of her nostrils and the emphatic contortions of her face. It was quite simply and irrefutably the true and authentic biblical way of birth, the older midwife declared. There is not much written in the Scripture about a woman giving birth precisely because it is not the woman who truly gives birth—it is the man. He is the progenitor, the first cause, the child is his offspring in his name so listed and so written as attested to by the begats; the mother gets no credit, and rightly so, she is merely the vessel, the pipeline, the conveyor belt. And Adam lived one hundred and thirty years
vayoled
in his image and likeness and he called his name Seth;
vayoled
Seth
et
Enosh;
vayoled
Enosh
et
Kenan;
vayoled
Kenan
et
Mahalalel;
vayoled
Mahalalel
et
Yered;
vayoled
Yered
et
Enoch;
vayoled
Enoch
et
Methuselah. And so on and so forth down through the generations giving birth in the masculine conjugation—
vayoled, holeid, yalad
. Already Abba Kadosh was in the throes of childbearing in the next room, as Temima had observed with her own eyes. All he awaited now was to hear her screams through the thinness and porousness of this partition wall that divided them, which he would then replicate cry for cry, only louder and stronger and more heartrending, overpowering her voice and drowning her out to pierce the very heavens; he would take full possession of her labor and travail and claim it as his right for himself and occupy it, thereby asserting prime ownership as the father.

For this reason, because Abba Kadosh's full gratification as the vicarious childbearer depended on her screams, the birth of this her last child was the most difficult Temima had ever endured. She resolved then and there not to emit a single sound throughout the ordeal, not a moan, not a sigh, not an audible breath no matter how violently she was ripped apart or how harrowing the pain—a fast of speech undertaken in the furious epicenter of childbirth itself. Whatever relief screaming offered to a woman in parturition, this she denied to herself. Over the ensuing long hours of labor and delivery she travailed, she suffered. Mute, inside her head that black joke of the Israelites rang nonstop, What, there aren't enough graves in Egypt that you've taken us to die in the desert?—yet she remained faithful to her resolve. If she was to be the ghost creator of this child she would be as silent as a ghost even as her two midwives implored her, Cry out, sister, it's only natural at such a time, make it easier on yourself, sister, scream and yell, twist and shout!

The image she held before her eyes to sustain and strengthen her against involuntary screams was of the boy Ibn Kadosh who had delivered her first child, his flogging in the public square, refusing in his pride to give his tormentors the satisfaction of hearing
his
cries. And then, like the woman of Endor, she brought up from the dead the still-restless and unsettled spirit of Ibn Kadosh's mother, Ketura, with the black bird charred into her skin. Did Ketura planted upright and alive and fully aware in her grave in the desert sand scream out in terror as the stones came flying toward her, hurled at her head, pelting and pounding her from the waist upward, or did she summon all of her powers, an act of sovereign self-control, to
suppress the reflexive shrieks so as to deny her persecutors the fullness of their obscene thrill? Not a single one of Temima's pregnancies until now, whether the outcome was a living baby or a dead fetus in a bloody venous sac, had ever been experienced without Ketura at some point faithfully at her side—so she summoned Ketura's familiar spirit to her side now too. If Temima were to succumb and cry out now, she would cry out in grief for Ketura, bird-branded and bird-devoured, but she drew her spirit inward to harness her vow of silence, to honor Ketura through her defiant silence even as the contractions intensified mercilessly and the baby monstrously large like a giant boulder pressing down on the bowels squeezed its way out of her churning womb and tore her to shreds, even as the midwives urged her on, Push, you miserable ungrateful woman, Push, you witch.