One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (46 page)

Just such an image lit up in Temima's mind one night some months later as she gazed out of the window of her private quarters on the second floor over her newly established synagogue and study house in the Bukharim Quarter of Jerusalem. Positioned directly in her line of sight a quorum of ten men was performing the lashes of fire ritual of a
pulsa denura
across the street instead of in a cemetery where this curse is traditionally delivered. Temima was well aware that an exception was being made for her sake so that she could witness the rite with her own eyes and take heed, pack her bags at once, and exorcise herself from the neighborhood. For atmosphere, however, a token coffin was set down at the feet of the ten men lined up in a row facing her, each with a yellow star affixed to his breast over his heart and a crumpled Xerox of the kabbalistically potent curse custom-tailored for Temima clutched in both hands. She was not able to identify any of these men, but she did recognize the coffin, it had her name on it, and certainly she also recognized the impressive wide-screen back in its shimmering black kaftan of the leader of the group, Rabbi Kaddish Lustiger, son of the Oscwiecim Rebbe from Brooklyn. The old man was also in Jerusalem, she had heard, but no one had actually seen him, he was kept hidden away in a state of raving dementia, so they said, unrecognizable and unrecognizing. It was generally believed that Kaddish had kidnapped his father, a necessary act according to his Hasidim for the sake of the perpetuation of the chosen dynasty, in order to restore the court in the Holy Land on the correct path with himself as the designated heir. Meanwhile his mighty mother, the Oscwiecim rebbetzin, ran a rival court from the old house in Brooklyn over which another son, Kaddish's younger brother Koppel, was poised to preside.

Even before Temima's physical arrival in the Bukharim Quarter,
Kaddish had taken upon himself the task of mounting the campaign against her, ordering his men to harass and attack the Arab workers renovating her headquarters and to plaster posters on walls throughout the neighborhood especially in the crucial media-center intersection of Sabbath Square warning of the danger that her existence in their midst would pose. Now from her window Temima could hear every word of his incantation in a Hebrew richly schmaltzed with a Yiddish inflection, each phrase then repeated in unison by the pack reciting from the scripts in their hands illuminated by the streetlights, first zooming in on her by name as at a bull's-eye—Tema daughter of Rachel-Leah of the family Bavli, also known as Temima Ba'alatOv—followed by the plea that the blasphemous perversions and corruptions she promulgates never come to fruition, May they not come to pass, May they not come to pass, May they not come to pass—culminating with the call to bring down upon her head the full wrath of God, May all the curses listed in the Torah cling to her, all the plagues, all the afflictions, all the malignant diseases of the body, all the derangements of mind and spirit, May her name be erased from under the heavens, May she die immediately.

The angel Metatron was disciplined with sixty
pulsa denura
maledictions for passing himself off in paradise as a co-God, thereby encouraging the heretical dualism in the mind of the brilliant apostate, Elisha son of Avuya, known as Akher, the Other. Temima stood at her window with the curtain drawn slightly back as if she were in a theater box observing herself being played by the actor receiving the lashes of fire, and as she stood there witnessing her laceration her mind expanded with the realization that this trial befell her as a consequence of the spiritual penetration of another Elisha, her Elisha Pardes known as the Toiter, the Dead One.

Since the seven days when they had sat on opposite sides of the synagogue tent in the army camp overlooking Hebron mourning the baby boy Kook Immanuel she had not seen him in any form resembling the flesh she had known that had led her deep into the most dangerous and secret levels of understanding, from text to subtext, literal to allusive to interpretive to mystical, contained in the orchard of paradise. Daughters of Jerusalem, if you find my beloved, tell him this—that I am sick with love. Sick unto death he came to her afterward, his apparition, his ghost, his familiar spirit, directing her into the tent of Abba Kadosh in the wilderness and keeping her there until the correct hour, a figure faded and wasting away,
she did not know if it was he or his shadow, if he was alive or dead, he took his hand back from the hole and everything inside her stirred for him. He appeared among the gravestones on the Mount of Olives when she sought her solitude to cry out, a wan and gaunt messenger at dawn with his cloak drawn up across his mouth, tolling a warning bell and calling out Unclean! Unclean!—bearing the news that a grand dwelling place was being prepared for her outside the city walls, on the broad avenue carved out in Jerusalem by the tribal mountain Jews of the Caucasus, now in the quick of the most rigid piety, a divine test of her readiness to go forth without question. Every detail would be in accordance with the required specifications—study hall and house of worship and holy ark on the ground floor, overlooking it the men's balcony, beyond that her private quarters, inner courtyard planted with fig and pomegranate trees.

Within days after she moved into the stately building in the Bukharim Quarter he made his presence known again, masked, backlit with fever, ravaged by mortality, bestowing the estate upon her for all eternity, fusing and welding her to the line of the Dead Hasidim, contaminating her, so that she took to her bed infected and inflamed and did not get up for a week. Rising from her acute contagion she went out again bedecked with the veil, her personal partition that separated her ever after in all her public appearances, rendering her instantly recognizable by the manner in which she was set apart.

Early in that week of confinement Rabbi Kaddish Lustiger stomped heavily up the stairs followed by a small entourage of retainers, pushing past Kol-Isha-Erva as if she were invisible, stationing himself in Temima's room at the foot of her bed that was surrounded and concealed by a heavy burgundy brocade curtain puddling on the floor like pools of melting wax. He began at once to state his position, without bothering to ascertain if Temima was actually present on the great raft within that enclosure; for his purposes he would consider himself completely absolved, in fulfillment of his obligation whether she was there or not.

The notorious path she had carved out for herself, Rabbi Kaddish Lustiger declared, sinning and causing others to sin like Jeroboam son of Nevat that led directly to the destruction of our Holy Temple and our exile from the Holy Land, made it incumbent upon him to set aside any personal connections he might feel toward her through their fathers and shared roots in Brooklyn, New York. At great personal risk, he has
brought himself and a few of his inner circle to her infested residence, a recklessness that would now oblige them to immerse their bodies in the ritual bath immediately after departing from her in order to cleanse themselves from her pollutions. He has come to serve notice that she must without a moment's delay remove herself and her malignant teachings and influence from their midst. As the designated successor of the holy Rebbe of Oscwiecim, the town better known by its infamous German name of Auschwitz, he, Kaddish Lustiger, bore upon his shoulders the responsibility to do everything in his power to prevent another Hurban such as befell our people at the hands of Hitler, may his name and memory be blotted out forever. This catastrophe that overtook our people was, as everyone knows, the deserved punishment for the abomination of men lying with men as they would lie with a woman, the very same sin for which the city of Sodom was gassed and cremated and reduced to ashes.

Her unnatural behavior—her insistence on carrying out commandments and obligations that are the exclusive province of men, on wielding authority and participating in ritual and studying and commenting and pronouncing on texts reserved for men alone, on setting herself up as a special case among women, and so on and so forth—all of this can only be explained in one way. She is in actuality a man—a man locked inside the body of a woman. Her external female shell is possessed and inhabited by the dybbuk of a man who in his lifetime was guilty of the grave sin of lying carnally with men as if they were women. Now his punishment for all eternity is to be imprisoned inside the body of a woman.
Midah ke'neged midah
—as he had sinned so is he punished. And what punishment could be more terrible to such a sinner than to be trapped forever inside the body of a woman, a place that in his lifetime he found so loathsome and disgusting? “You are nothing but a vessel,” Rabbi Kaddish Lustiger reminded Temima, “a putrid vessel for the fulfillment of the ordained punishment of this male sinner. But unlike the vessels of the Holy Temple defiled by idolators, there is no living water, no ritual bath, no mikva, that can ever purify or reconsecrate you. You can only be cast out.”

When he finished he turned at once to leave, neither requiring nor expecting a response from behind the curtain, so when Temima's voice came at him like a heavenly
bat kol
he stopped short as if the breath had been knocked out of his body by a punch in the gut from a hidden assailant.

“I know you, Kaddish,” Temima's disembodied voice called out to him as he reached the door. “The inclinations of your heart have been nothing but evil from your youth. When you go to the mikva bath now to purge yourself of me, beware lest you put a naked little boy on your lap again as you have done so many times in the past. It is an abomination.”

For a few days afterward there was a halt in the defamatory poster campaign that Kaddish had launched well before Temima's actual arrival when news of her impending residence in their midst had first reached him. During this pause he conferred with his kitchen cabinet as to whether to pull back so as not to antagonize this witch lest she unleash a vindictive barrage of false rumors and calumnies against him, or whether to push forward even more vigorously with their righteous mission of forcing her out of their sphere of influence. They determined on the latter course, setting up as a precaution a squad of swift boys to tear down immediately any counter posters that Temima's people might dare to put up.

The new set of posters slathered on the walls by Kaddish's camp setting out like guerrillas in the night armed with brush brooms and flour paste were far more furious and slashing than the earlier ones had been, like the deadly curses on Mount Ebal, calling on Temima and her cohorts to Get Out Now Or The Land You Pollute Will Vomit You Up, bringing down upon her head Blood And Fire And Pillars Of Smoke, Cancer And Heart Attack, Terror And Torture, Madness And Humiliation, Agony And Death, issuing an urgent warning to the People Of Israel to Guard Against This Nazi Who Will Turn Your Skin Into Lampshades And Your Hair And Beard And
Payess
Into Mattress Stuffing, this
Sotah
Adulteress, this
Makhshefa
Sorceress, this Lilith She-Devil, this Delilah Seductress, this Female Who Commits The Perversion Of Standing Naked In Front Of An Animal For The Purpose Of Mating—An Abhorrent Transgression For Which She Is Condemned To Death Along With The Animal—and so on and so forth. All of this was communicated to Temima who absorbed it with a vague smile, noting only that it was instructive and on balance maybe also even slightly insulting how, considering the immediate provocation, Kaddish's new offensive abstained from retaliating in kind by according her at the very least the dignity of the equivalent label of lesbian—no doubt, Temima observed, because there is no specific ban in the Torah against such woman-on-woman activity, it is not taken seriously, no seed is spilled, it leads to nothing, woman's desire is beside the point
and probably does not officially exist in any case, a woman is merely a receptacle, all that is required of a woman is to lay there like a dead carp that is turned into gefilte fish.

For a period of time Temima watched with mild interest while Kaddish's attacks unfolded, as if to gauge the limits of his creativity, until the night she grew bored with the range and predictability of his insults and invective and simply to add interest entered the fray. She gave the order to her Bnei Zeruya bodyguard contingent to fan out and hang up multiple copies of the same poster at strategic points throughout the neighborhood and to watch over them lest they be vandalized in any way. In almost every respect these posters resembled notices that sprang up daily announcing a recent death—Blessed Is The True Judge, Let Every Eye Weep And Every Heart Groan, Oy Vey, We Shall Never See His Like Again—but in this instance the name of the deceased in stark bold black letters was Rabbi Kaddish Lustiger, za'zal, son of the Oscwiecim Rebbe, may his candle shed light.

Kaddish himself was the one who happened to pick up the telephone when the first condolence call came to the house. “Kaddish, is that really you? I expected to get the rebbetzin, you know, the widow, the
almunah
, or maybe God forbid one of your eleven
yesoimim
. Where are you talking from? I'm telling you, I'm so shocked my hand is shaking, I can't even get the words out from my mouth, I didn't expect to find you among the living, much less you should answer the telephone. The notices are hanging up all over the place, about you being
niftar
, God forbid. Maybe it's a different Kaddish Lustiger with a different father the Oscwiecim Rebbe, it shouldn't happen to us. Oy vey, Kaddish, thank God, thank God you're still alive, such a terrible terrible mistake, it should only not be a bad omen, God forbid, it should only not God forbid open up a mouth to the Satan.”

Directly after hanging up, Kaddish buried himself in his bed, drawing the covers over his head. In a muffled shriek as if from underground he ordered his wife not to bother him. “Leave me alone, woman. Can't you see? I'm being hunted down by the angel of death.” Yet over the years, in times of intense tribulation and stress, relief was always at hand for Kaddish by imagining himself already dead, untouchable by his enemies, indifferent to all outcomes. With a kind of morbid onanistic pleasure he would evoke his own namesake by chanting in Aramaic over and over
the Kaddish elegy for himself, Exalted and Sanctified Is His Great Name. But this time the tranquilizer didn't work. The specter of his own death this time had come from outside, he had not summoned it up, it was not under his control. However many times he sought to lull himself with the drone of his Kaddish, no comfort was forthcoming, he was not soothed until, like the holy Rabbi Shimon bar Yokhai setting down the mysteries of the Zohar Book of Radiance in the darkness of his cave while in hiding from his Roman oppressors for thirteen years, Kaddish also dipped into the bottomless well of the kabbalistic mysteries. There in the darkness of his bed he plunged into the mystical depths to retrieve the correct
pulsa denura
curse with Temima's name on it that would bring about the end of his tormentor. He drew forth the white-hot fiery lashes, repeating this
pulsa denura
to himself again and again like a charm until he knew it by heart word for word. When he finally emerged from under his covers and resumed his place in the world as the living heir designate of the Oscwiecim Rebbe, he wrote out the
pulsa denura
personalized for Temima in a fluent stream as if taking dictation from a voice within, channeling it. Together with his elite strike force of loyalists, he then awaited the most auspicious night to deliver this precision bomb that would explode in the face of his persecutor and wipe her and her abominations off the face of the earth once and for all.