Sotah (14 page)
But little Shlomie—she rocked the cheerful, squealing little darling—he was the best medicine. Just feeling him in her arms, so healthy and new and full of careless happiness, oblivious of any taint or care or sin or trial, made her burdens disappear for a time. She straightened up and cuddled him, he who was so warm and wriggling with the force of irrepressible new life! He seemed to imbue her with new joy and strength simply by osmosis.
It was so easy when they were babies. So easy to give them everything they needed or to convince them the things they wanted they didn’t need. You could distract babies, change their minds. Oh, the rattle is gone, take a teething ring. Or a lollipop. They forgot. They accepted.
She looked at her middle daughter, her precious, doll-like Dina, feeling again the ache of regret, the pang of failure. She couldn’t be distracted. Yet the dress was so pretty still. Green silk, like a still lake in the mountains shaded by tall trees. It flowed down her lovely young body fluidly, modestly. If only her eyes would smile again! Who would ever have thought? Dvorah had gone out with at least a dozen young men, maybe more. She had accepted her fate. And Dvorah was … Mrs Reich hesitated. She was not a fool, but a very sensitive, perceptive observer of the people she loved. Whatever affected their well-being beat inside her like a second heart. And so she hesitated to tell herself Dvorah was happy. It was too simple, and she had seen Dvorah’s face at rest, the small disappointed corners of her mouth, the tired eyes.
She remembered her own days as a young bride: the intimacy with the unfamiliar male body, the hesitant, short conversations with the stranger whose life you now shared, the duties piling up with heavy, suffocating weight on young, inexperienced shoulders. Yet there was no other life. If the man was kind, as she knew her son-in-law was, her daughter would eventually find a deep satisfaction and a deeper happiness. Of this, she was confident. Dvorah’s life was rich with all the most important elements: she had a pious, learned man who loved her and who spent his time learning Torah, earning them both a fine place in the World to Come; an earthly home that met all her basic material needs; and a healthy child to love, a son to say kaddish for her when she died, a boy who would learn more Torah and add further to her merits. She would have other children, as many as G-d in His compassion granted her.
As a
kollel
wife she also had status, no small thing. She was an accepted and treasured member of the community, with many friends whom she helped and from whom she received help. Why, when she’d given birth, women in the neighborhood had filled her freezer with enough cooked meals to last three weeks! And they’d taken turns watching the baby weekday afternoons so that she could rest and regain her strength. This was the way in the
haredi
world. You did not live alone. Your neighbors were your friends, and your friends were part of your extended family. Nothing could happen to you—no happiness or unhappiness—in which that extended family was not involved.
Of course, this had its price. She looked at Dina. Everyone had known about the botched match. About the reasons for its failure and about Dina’s difficult recovery period. After all, they saw she came home and did not go out. They saw her face. There was no such thing as a private grief. Everything was shared with the community.
This was the way things were. Rebbetzin Reich could not imagine any other kind of life. The concept of “minding your own business” was a hostile, foreign one. For if you did not know what went on in your neighbor’s home, or in your neighbor’s heart, how could you help him? Guide him? Give him material and spiritual sustenance? Life was one big ship where everyone was rowing toward the days of the Messiah. One who let down his oars because of sickness or heartbreak or sin had to be healed, shored up, because he endangered the whole crew and all its passengers. He slowed down the journey and left the ship open to typhoons and battering winds and the destruction of lethal, mountainous waves that would drown them all.
Dvorah was fiddling with the material on Dina’s dress, pinning it here and there. Dina’s face was listless, frozen.
“There. I’ll sew it up for you now, before I leave, so you’ll have it for tonight.” She felt Dina tremble and laid her palm over her shoulder. She could feel the shoulder blades, fragile and sharp, through the thin material and drew back her hand. She was filled with a spasm of guilt, followed by the familiar brief flicker of anger at her husband. Unfairly, she still had not forgiven him for botching the
shiddach
so badly.
The baby had done nothing to repair their relationship. It was her baby. What had it to do with him, really? She had given him this wonderful gift, and he had failed her. They had not had any more arguments about it, because he refused to argue. He was saintly in his pleasantness, saintly in his calm, affectionate good humor, no matter how she twitted and provoked him. He was kind, gentle, forgiving, understanding, helpful. He did everything she requested: he got up in the middle of the night and at the break of dawn to diaper and rock the child. He brought home mountains of paper diapers so she should never dream of washing a cloth one, as most of her thrifty friends did. He took the baby for walks in the carriage on Sabbath afternoons, giving up his precious hour of afternoon sleep, the only opportunity he got all week. He did it all cheerfully, graciously.
And the more he did, the more cheerful he was, the more she raged inside herself with uncontrollable, unreasonable dislike.
“You will have a lovely time tonight. He is sure to be very amusing,” Dvorah said.
Dina looked up suddenly with interest. “How do you know? Amusing? Why, what a strange thing to say!”
It was. Dvorah couldn’t explain it herself. Why not “learned” or “interesting”—the usual words? Or even “a good personality” or “fine-looking,” the familiar terms in which men were praised?
“Because,
tuchteral
, my dear daughter, you look like you need to be amused,” Rebbetzin Reich interrupted. “I hope he tells you a few good jokes and then you can repeat them to me!”
The girls looked at their mother with amazement. She, who never joked! She, for whom the world was a flinty, duty-filled obstacle course! But their mother’s face was averted, looking down at the baby. The sisters exchanged guilty glances, Dvorah’s a bit sanctimonious (really, how you have been carrying on, Dina, just look how you’ve worried
Ima
to death so that she’s speaking in such a strange way. Jokes, for heaven’s sake! So cheer up now!), Dina’s accepting the criticism, but with hostility (after all, Dvorah, you were the one who started it all, who didn’t know what you were doing!).
Dina forced a smile, taking the baby from her mother. She held his heavy, insistent little head and felt the tickle of silky hair inside her forearm. She ran her thumb over his satin-smooth, powdery knuckles.
What difference did it make whom you married? This was all that really mattered in the end. And wouldn’t the rest all be the same, no matter who the man? The home you scrubbed and swept and shined? The home smelling of fresh clean linens, hot cookies, and brown, crispy chickens? The prayers in the synagogue would sound the same, the cantor’s voice would rise and cry and carry you off with it every Yom Kippur. The smell of the citron and the fresh lulab branches would fill your nostrils every Succoth. Life would go on, one slow, circular motion, like a sluggish merry-go-round, and you would find yourself rising up and down, up and down, against your will, with no place to get off, no reason to get off. The important thing was to hop on before it was too late. To get your ride, along with all the others.
She looked at the baby. A new person, with no past, she suddenly realized. The infant giggled. The sun came pouring through the windows. In the next room her brothers were already clattering in, home from yeshiva, hungry and tired. The smell of warm cooked potatoes and boiling chicken soup filled the spotlessly clean home. She felt inexplicably happy as she thought of the evening ahead.
Later that night, alone in the bathroom, she took out the diary and read it through from beginning to end, a certain sick pain of recognition making her blush. Then she tore the pages into tiny, tiny pieces and flushed them away.
A future. It almost seemed possible.
T
he noise of the lathes, the sawing and hammering, filled the street known in Meah Shearim as the “Street of Carpenters.” The small, matronly woman strode heavily but surprisingly briskly on swollen, ankleless legs, her arthritis-deformed and twisted fingers holding a heavy tray with clumsy care. She nodded curtly to passersby, barely acknowledging the respectful greetings of the workingmen who called out to her at every turn. Her eyes trained low, her head butting forward like an angry bull, she rushed on with frustrating slowness, intent on her errand and filled with anxiety.
“Judah,” she called into the shop, forced to scream with unladylike loudness above the screech and scrape of the turning lathe. A cloud of sparks and dust boiled up out of the shop front. “Judah,” she repeated, exhausted and nearing the extreme limits of frustration bordering on despair. She balanced the tray precariously on one arm and used the back of her hand to create a tiny clean circle in the dirty window, opaque with dust. She peered through and saw her son standing by the machine. Blind and deaf, she thought. Oblivious. Time was passing, it was getting late, and still he worked on! And what would he have from all this? A good living, it was true. But a home with his mother. It wasn’t right! He was already twenty-six years old.
Oh, she knew what the neighbors thought. She a widow and he her only child, and on top of that a
ben zikkunim
, a child born late in life. They all thought she wanted him home with her. That she liked his company. That he helped her.
That was all very well and good. It might even be true. But she could never understand what relation or relevance any of that had to the difficult and nearly tragic fact that he was twenty-six years old and still not married. A man needed a wife. This was the rightful scheme of things. A wife. A home. Children. It was a disgrace to her that he was still at home. She hadn’t done her job right.
She caught a vague glimpse of him within the storm of flying wooden chips and golden sparks and the cloudy screen of sawdust. His eyes were squinting in concentration, carelessly unprotected by goggles; his forehead, intent, in pleats. His whole body was bent toward the wood, which he grasped expertly, in powerful yet oddly delicate hands.
Everything about him was large and handsome: his hands, his feet, his shoulders, his chest. Had there been any arrogance in him, the swagger of a less sensitive, commoner man, his imposing height and broadness would have seemed kingly, even a bit dangerous. But the unruliness of his curly brown hair, the boyish gentleness in his dark, intelligent eyes, drained the threat out of his largeness, leaving behind a presence that was wholly friendly and without demands.
The sight of her son’s absolute absorption only increased Mrs Gutman’s fury, if that was possible. She knocked on the glass and screamed his name through the door. She saw him suddenly rear his head, bewildered, and heard the low moaning protest of the lathe closing down, the slow scraping movement of his footsteps through the wood shavings.
“Momma!” His tone was cheerful, surprised.
She shoved the tray at his chest like a lance. “Don’t say one word! Not another word. Look at the clock, my fine son!”
“The clock?” His tone was vaguely uneasy.
“The clock, of course the clock! The time, dummkopf!” She was in a near panic.
“Momma! Why did you walk so far, and with this heavy tray,” he protested, pained.
“What else can I do if my son is a dummkopf and forgets to come home to eat! Forgets that tonight he has to meet, G-d willing, a bride?”
He hung his head, running nervous fingers through his untamed crop of heavy curls. He towered over his mother, yet his body seemed bent in utter submission, like a bear beside its trainer.
“Is it so late already? I must have forgotten …”
“Four o’clock and you haven’t eaten lunch yet! You’d forget to live, if I let you! Eat, then remember, home by six,” she ordered him. “And don’t forget the haircut!”
“Yes, Momma,” he said dutifully.
“And don’t forget not to lacquer anything today. You know the smell of that stuff is impossible to wash out of your hands.”
“I’ll remember, Momma.”
“And remember, pretty young girls like Dina Reich don’t grow on trees! Although why she’s agreed to go out with you is beyond me. Even Garfinkel doesn’t understand it. So be on your best behavior. And none of that turpentine, either. It never gets out of your hair. You’ll smell like a new table instead of a prospective new husband.”
“Of course, you’re right, Momma.”
The tone was just a bit too respectful, she thought, looking up and scanning his face. He coughed, covering his lips with his paint-stained hands. But she could see the laughter in his eyes. She gave him a shrewd smile, reaching up to slap his shoulder. “So laugh at a mother. What do I care? Just get married already!” She turned to go, lifting her cheek up to him, still aggrieved. He bent down and planted a gentle, dutiful kiss. “And don’t ‘Yes, Momma’ me anymore. Just eat, drink, live, and get married. Do I ask more from life? No. Is that too much to ask? No.” She shuffled off, muttering softly to herself.
He watched her painful progress with guilty relief until she finally disappeared around the corner.
He balanced the tray on a sawhorse, then with a wide energetic sweep of arm cleared a cluttered tabletop, sending wood chips and used sandpaper and old newspapers flying into the air. He washed his hands carefully under a rusty faucet, soaping them with vigor. He dried them carefully on a surprisingly clean towel. He examined his nails under the light to make sure no particles still stuck beneath them, to double-check the absolute cleanliness of the hands from wrist to nails’ ends. Satisfied, he took a large two-handled cup and carefully filled it to the brim, then he poured it first twice over his right hand and then, switching hands, twice over his left. He rubbed his hands together, squeezing out the excess drops, dried them, then closed his eyes and said with devotion: “Blessed are You, O G-d, King of the Universe, Who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us on the washing of hands.” He then took a piece of bread and salted it: “Blessed are You, O L-rd, King of the Universe, Who brings bread from the earth.” Only then did he sit down and eat. He dipped the fresh warm rolls into the thick hot soup and ate like a machine, not tasting anything. His mind was elsewhere, still behind the lathe with the exquisite, emerging stave. He had been working on it for two days, and only now was it approaching the proper smoothness, the correct, perfect swell, the gradual narrowing. He thought about the design of the disks that would hold the holy Torah scroll. Usually he tried to pattern it after the design of the holy Ark in the Tabernacle in the Temple of Solomon. Not that he knew, exactly, what that had looked like, either. But the common imagination ran to a fleur-de-lis pattern, flowers and buttons, intertwined. Sometimes, however, some new idea came to him, filling him with rare excitement. Scenes from the Bible or combinations of letters entwined like branches of a mystic tree. He envisioned the complicated, three-dimensional relief. Just a bit too much gouging and the ends would break off altogether and the disk would be ruined. There was always that constant tension. The more beautiful the design was, the greater the chance of total failure. He didn’t often push himself to the edge, being too practical a man. Certainly not as often as he dreamed of it. The designs were frequently burned into the wood with a soldering iron, and the smell of burned wood, lacquer, and dust filled the air.
