One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (52 page)

At that point in her life, Tema did not yet possess the arsenal of terms and vocabulary to set out her case, so as best she could she responded that the simple answer was there was no reason; that's just the way language and all things were, there were exceptions. But then she went on to offer a kind of commentary. Maybe because since we say HaShem, The Name, as a substitute for God's real name, which we're not allowed to say, maybe the substitute also becomes holy—so how can it be anything but masculine?

The Rebbe's eyes crinkled and, to check the laugh he felt heaving up in a surge of subversive appreciation, he pinched his nostrils between two fingers and ejected a loud snort into the napkin upon which the
two lumps of sugar had rested for his glass of tea with the half-moon of lemon floating inside. “
Gut gezugt
—very clever. Your voice is the voice of Jacob. You know how to fool and flatter the old man for the sake of the blessing. The blessing is learning.”

After that, ignoring her completely as if she had dissolved and lost all substance and faded into the wall, he addressed himself exclusively to the mother. The girl was to be brought early the next morning to the side of the building where his Kaddish would await them. His Kaddish would then direct her into a small room with an entrance in the backyard and a shared wall with the study hall on the inside. Although this room had once been a toilet—it had in fact been an old wooden outhouse to which pipes had been extended when it was annexed to the building—it had not been used for this purpose for many years, the plumbing had long ago been disconnected, and therefore the Rebbe ruled that it was permissible for her to sit in there and listen through the cracks in the wall to words of Torah coming from the adjacent study hall and even to consult in that once-polluted space whatever holy books his Kaddish could collect and set out for her in advance. Since it was wintertime, she should be dressed in a heavy coat and gloves and hat as there was no heat in that room; there was also no electricity, the only light she would receive especially as the short days darkened was the light of Torah filtering through the crannies from the study hall.

“We shall see if her desire to learn is as strong as Hillel's who was found frozen under the snow on the roof of the yeshiva of Shemaya and Avtalyon listening with such concentration to the lecture when he didn't have enough money to pay the fee and enter through the door,” the Oscwiecim Rebbe said to Tema's mother, as if he had just finished proposing to a collaborator a scientific experiment to be performed on a monkey in a laboratory cage.

The aspiring sage Hillel, later renowned for his tolerance and leniency, was rewarded for his devotion to learning with a scholarship, free admission to the yeshiva. But when Tema was smoked out after five months of faithful attendance beginning in the icy days of February and ending in the scorching June heat (in the midst of which, on the seventh of Adar, also the birthday of Moses Our Teacher, she turned seven years old),
she was banished from the study hall forever. During those five months she sat six days a week on a plank laid across the blackened cracked toilet bowl in the tiny cubicle filmy with cobwebs, steeped in the acrid smell of ancient urine, and followed along in the tattered books that had been provided for her—Talmud, Mishna and Gemara. An egg that is laid on a festival, is it permissible? The house of Shammai says, Yes, you may eat it on that day. The house of Hillel says, No.

She strained to peer through the chinks to identify her classmates. Boys sat in pairs at each table, study mates, an older more advanced boy coupled with a younger one, none yet a bar mitzvah judging from their prayer sessions, the youngest perhaps eight. Their teacher, a refugee from Vilna known to have once been a prodigy at the Slabodka yeshiva, slight with a scraggly gray beard and pale bulging eyes and an uncontrollable reflex that never ceased to amuse the boys of flinching like a startled rabbit whenever a car honked or backfired outside in the street, paced up and down the aisles snapping the ruler in his right hand against the palm of his left, now and then bringing it down upon the back of one of the boys caught raising his eyes from the page. The house of Shammai says, A man may divorce his wife only if he has found her to be unchaste. The house of Hillel says he may divorce her if she spoils his dish.

Soon it was no longer necessary to peer through the cracks. She knew all the characters, she could distinguish their tones, she could absorb just by listening. A heavenly voice was heard: The house of Shammai and the house of Hillel are each holy, but the law is in accordance with Hillel. When the school day ended, or if physical urgency forced her to leave early, her mother was awaiting her in front of the hardware store and signaled when it was safe to cross the street. There was never a time during those five months when her mother was not at her station waiting for her; her mother was always faithfully there then with the same certainty as she was not there later on. Anyone who might have noticed the girl coming or going dismissed her as a daughter of the house attending to a domestic chore in a broom closet.

If the spirit moved him the teacher would raise his voice and offer a brief lesson or pose a question in Lithuanian-accented Yiddish. When no one came forth with the answer, he would turn to the back of the room with the exaggerated flourish of scholarly disdain for the ignorance of the rabble. “TAIKU?” he would call out, and point with his ruler to a small
boy, the only one sitting alone, who would unfailingly provide the correct answer in a soft voice. The boy's name was Eliyahu, which rendered this the running joke of the study hall, since it was common knowledge that TAIKU was the acronym for letting an unresolved issue rest in peace until the messianic age and the resurrection of the dead, when the prophet Eliyahu the Tishbite would return to explain all outstanding questions and problems. But this study hall was blessed with its own Elijah, still present and accounted for, the smartest boy in the class.

On an afternoon in May during a pulsing heat wave, as Tema was standing on the toilet peering out of a small window from which she had scraped off some gelid grime, watching the teacher, the former Slabodka genius
,
reduced to squirting the younger boys with a water gun to cool them off in the yard during recess, her eyes met Eliyahu's. The next day at recess time he opened the door to her cell and entered. Without a word, he sat down cross-legged on the floor. He was a year or two older than she by her estimation, though he was about her height, small and dark like she was, he could have been her brother, the son her father had been denied. He took out a pocket chess set and lined up the pieces as she sat down on the floor opposite him. Without uttering a single word, he showed her the moves. Thereafter, almost every recess, he came into her place and they played.

On a blistering day in June, as they sat on the floor of the outhouse with the chessboard between them, Eliyahu moved a pawn, then unbuttoned his white shirt and took it off, revealing his
talit katan
, his personal fringed garment. Tema moved her piece, shed her blouse and exposed her undershirt. It continued in this way in complete silence, move after move, shoes, socks, stockings, pants, skirt, underwear, until they were sitting cool and naked opposite each other. The game then went on but in reverse, they did not speak but with each move he put on one article of her clothing and she one of his, until checkmate, when she braided his sidelocks and secured them with her rubber bands and stuffed most of her own hair under the great bowl of his black velvet yarmulke with two ringlets dangling down on each side for
payess
, and then the whistle blew, recess was over, he remained in the outhouse while she stepped outside and into the study hall with the other boys and took her place in his seat in the back of the room and lowered her head over his Gemara, open to Sanhedrin 111a, and read to herself how God rebuked Moses: I am
El-Shaddai Who appeared to your forefathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, yet you alone insist on knowing My true and ineffable Name and you alone question My ways and accuse Me of harming My people.

“Is it possible that Moses Our Teacher, the greatest of all prophets, sinned through lack of faith in the Almighty, by doubting God?” the teacher raised the question as boys sank their heads lower over their volumes so as not to catch his eye and be called on. “TAIKU?” he finally bellowed, and turned toward Eliyahu as to a colleague, a soul mate, the only one in the room who could understand him.

Tema raised her eyes to meet his. “Moshe saw terrible things in Egypt, just like you saw in Europe,” she said. The teacher recoiled as if shocked by a bolt from another world. He began to advance toward her with his ruler pointed straight out in front of him like a drawn sword. With its tip he lifted her chin, like an alien specimen dredged from the mud that would befoul you if you touched it with a bare hand. “For your information, I am not at the level of Moshe Rabbenu to question the ways of the Almighty despite all the terrible things I have witnessed, and even more so I have never questioned the Almighty's abhorrence of a female who puts on herself the things that belong to a man,” he spat out, referring to the prohibition in the book of Deuteronomy. “
Beged-ish
on a woman is an abomination to God, so it is written,” the teacher went on grimly as Tema sprang from the seat of Eliyahu and lurched out of the study hall, past Kaddish smoking a cigarette on the stoop in front of the synagogue, into the arms of her mother who had spotted her at once in her boy's apparel and burst across the street from the hardware store and swept her up as she sobbed desperately, caressing and comforting her and warbling over and over again, Don't cry, Tema, everything will be all right, your father will never find out, nobody will ever know.

Eliyahu also did not return to the Oscwiecim yeshiva, and soon after, Tema heard, he and his family moved out of the neighborhood.

It was not until many years later, when she had already acquired renown as HaRav Temima Ba'alatOv, Ima Temima, that she learned what had happened to him that day when she ran out of the study hall after Kaddish mashed his cigarette under his shoe. One quiet afternoon, when they were still residing on the Street of the Kara'im in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, Kol-Isha-Erva slipped silently into Temima's study and handed her a note with a single word written on it in Hebrew—TAIKU—punctuated by a drawing, deftly rendered, of a chess
piece, the queen. Temima nodded her acceptance, and soon after a trim, distinguished-looking man, clean shaven and bareheaded, was ushered in, a professor of astrophysics at Caltech, he said—and a chess master, he added with a shy dip of his chin. Kaddish had instantly grasped his strategic advantage when Tema bolted past him that day. He flicked down his cigarette, stamped it out, strode along the alley to the outhouse in back of the building, opened the door, came up behind Eliyahu, and cinched him around the waist humping him over. He flipped up Tema's skirt and pulled down her underpants. He flipped back the wings of his kaftan and opened his pants. He slammed his palm across Eliyahu's mouth as a precaution though he was confident there would not be any screaming, and he rammed himself into the boy muttering the whole time, So you wanna be a girl? This is what it means to be a girl. Nice? Like it? “Your dress was ruined, I'm sorry to say.” The professor spat out the dry pit of a laugh. “A bloody mess.”

“Kaddish told me what you did today, shame on you,” her father said to her in the darkness of that night when he came into her room and woke her up by sinking the full weight of his body onto her bed. “You think you're something special, don't you, some kind of hotsytotsy? Just because maybe you have a few extra brains in your head, you think you're a boy? You think you're different than every other female what ever lived on this earth? Well I have some news for you, girlie.” He threw back her covers, slipped a hand under her nightgown, pincered a nipple and twisted. “You see this thing? It's flat now like a board, but pretty soon it will get big and fat and juicy—and you know why? To attract the male of the species. Man's pleasure, that's what you were made for, that's the only reason why the Master of the Universe in His wisdom created you.” The hand moved down between her legs. “I'm doing this for your own good, you should know, to knock some sense into that stuck-up head of yours. You think you're some kind of fancy smarty-pants but you're no different than any other girl. Put an American flag on your face and you're just the same. It's not the noodle that counts it's the knish, it's not what's up there, it's what's down here. So you want I should tell you what's down here? Same by you like by every other girl. Nothing. Zero. A hole.” And he plunged a finger inside.

For three years, from the age of seven to ten as Tema's beauty began its
slope downward in the eyes of the commentators, she could never know in advance or predict when the urge would seize him and he would enter her room in the dead of night. Weeks would pass undisturbed, she thought she had been cleansed of the terrible sin she must have committed and been found blameless after all, but then he would return. The second time he came into her room she lay on her back in the darkness, feigning sleep. He boosted her flat girl's hips, slipped a pad under her as if to change a diaper, and buried her under the earthly weight of his mortal being. She thought she would suffocate yet she was overcome with pity for him, she was his collaborator. The sudden burst of pain stunned her, but she did not cry out, she continued in that darkness to pretend to be asleep out of compassion for him though he must have suspected how unlikely it could have been that she was still sleeping and taken note in the process that she had surrendered and turned herself into his accomplice. Inside her head she chanted the mantra, mama-mama-mama, until she heard a muffled groan and it was over. There was the wetness of warm sticky secretions and an unfamiliar acrid smell. When he was finished he spent a long time wiping up. She could hear him spitting on the pad, she could feel him rubbing her body between her legs. He drew the pad out from under her and took it away with him, continuing down the hall to the bathroom. Water ran, the toilet flushed. In the morning there were dried blood stains on the insides of her thighs.