Sotah (27 page)
She didn’t ask if Dina’s family was supporting them, because, like everyone else in the
haredi
circle she was part of, she knew everything there was to know about the Reichs’ finances and every other aspect of their lives.
Dina felt the slow burn of disgrace turning her ears scarlet. She wasn’t offended by the probing personal nature of these questions. This was simply the way people in the
haredi
world dealt with each other. Everything was everybody’s business. Knowing how much money you had, how you lived, was important information to be shared since it helped others to figure out how they, being in the same situation, held back by the same stricture of law and lore, could also manage. Nothing was too personal to ask.
She was mortified by the sudden realization of her lowly status as the wife of a workingman. “No, well, actually … my husband is not in
kollel
at all.” It was an embarrassing admission of complete and utter failure. Only at this moment did she fully realize how far her own status had fallen as the wife of Judah Gutman, full-time, successful, self-supporting carpenter.
“Oh,” the other girl said. “I heard he was very talented, a very wonderful man. But I thought he was at least learning part-time …” Her tone wavered between polite embarrassment and self-congratulation.
“Judah has a
shiur
every day after work,” Dina replied defensively, her tone apologetic, knowing this admission would only make matters worse. A
shiur
was just a mere study session, comparable with those dilettante, unaccredited courses given at night in the university to retired people beyond all hope of ever earning a bona fide degree. It marked you as one who would, at the most, reach the summit of a small hill, having abandoned the scaling of serious heights to those more competent. “And what about you?” Dina smiled graciously, trying to cover her chagrin.
“Oh, my husband learns full-time. I hardly ever see him,” the other girl boasted. “Why, I’m working myself to the bone.” She smiled happily.
“Baruch Hashem
, though, I have nothing to complain about.
Baruch Hashem
, he is doing well in his studies. How do you like your classes?”
“Baruch Hashem
.” Dina nodded, tired.
All day it was as if a cloud had descended and was swirling damp and gray around her head. She thought of her luxurious mornings in bed, of her wonderful, appliance-rich kitchen, of her long nights full of her husband’s passionate companionship, and it became a bitter shame to her. She had it so easy because she was not going to achieve the heights in Torah her friends were, as they sacrificed on the home front for their husbands’ gains on the battlefield of learning.
“And what did you learn today, my little dove?” Judah greeted her eagerly that day after work.
Instead of running to him and throwing her arms around his neck with a hug as she had been doing, she walked to him slowly and gave him her cheek for a kiss. He had no beard. It was suddenly shameful to her to be married to a beardless man.
“What did
you
learn?” she challenged him.
His eyes searched hers, surprised but not yet hurt. “Why, we are learning
Mesechet Kedoshim.
”
“Temple sacrifices? Not very useful,” she said unkindly.
“My dearest, every part of the Talmud is sacred and important! Even if we don’t have a holy Temple right now, and cannot bring sacrifices to atone for our sins, still, it must be studied for the future.” He looked at her, not wanting to bore her. Actually he found the topic fascinating. For the tractate dealt not only with the actual sacrifices themselves, but also the principles involved in deciding exactly which sins called for sacrifices and which did not. Had he been less afraid of boring her, he would have elaborated, telling her that as a basic rule a man could not offer any sacrifice to atone for a sin committed with malicious intent. Only the court could punish a man for such a sin. In the case where a court had insufficient evidence, such a man’s punishment was left in the hands of G-d himself. A sacrifice was acceptable only in the case where a man sinned unintentionally—someone who, for example, was forced to disobey or who simply didn’t know the law, didn’t bear responsibility. In such a case he was required to offer a sacrifice to atone not for the sin itself, but for his forgetfulness and ignorance.
But like many pious men, Judah assumed the Talmud was boring to women. He didn’t want to bore his lovely little bride. He wanted to amuse her, make her happy. So he changed the subject. “Shall I show you what I’ve made for you today?” Each day he brought her something, a habit she had found absolutely charming until now.
“I’m not a child,” she said petulantly. “I don’t need to be pampered and indulged. I’m not used to it. We are used to
kollel
men in our family,” she added, wanting to be cruel.
His large, handsome face drooped physically, as if absorbing a blow. “Well,” he said with quiet constraint, “I’ll just put it here then and wash up for dinner.” He placed a small box on the kitchen table.
Her heart ached at the dejected slow movement of his footsteps out of the room, the quiet click of the bathroom door.
How could she have been so spiteful, so horrid? That isn’t me. I don’t know who that is, she thought, walking to the hall mirror. The face reflected seemed odd to her, full of strange new compulsions, profligate, frightening in its capacity for doing the inexplicable. Yet she saw something that pleased her, too. The lovely face, the sparkling green eyes, the tender lips. A sense of her woman’s power surged up, challenging and assuaging her guilt. He would forgive her. This she did not doubt. But would she want, or feel it necessary, to forgive herself? This she did not know.
She walked into the kitchen and picked up the little box, opening it. Inside was a little wooden dove, hand-carved and polished so smoothly that it seemed impossible it could have anything in common with hat stands or furniture. It was an exquisite little work. She studied the wings, beak, and eyes. Only someone who had held a tiny winged creature close in his hand and studied it could ever have pictured it so clearly and lovingly. A little dove, its wings closed comfortably, at rest, content.
A little dove, he called her. Her heart surged with rage at the presumption. Yet the work was beautiful, showing a sensitivity to beauty, a love of living things, that touched her.
He seemed distant all evening. She was extra solicitous in apportioning his dinner. She wanted to put her arms around him, to lay her head on his chest. She was thinking this as she picked the plates off the table. As he handed her his, she looked down at his paint-stained fingers, the broken, work-roughened skin, and felt a faint repulsion.
“Shall we go to bed now?” he asked almost plaintively. They always, until now, had gone to bed together, even if they had to separate the beds during her “unclean” days.
“In a little while,” she told him, not looking up, her eyes fixed on the bright, illuminated page of a book in the lamplight, a page in which she did not see a single word. Had he come over to her and lifted her to him, she would have been his again. She would have forgotten everything. But he didn’t.
She heard the door of their bedroom open, and then she heard it close.
T
he first time Noach Saltzman stood at his living room window and saw Dina Reich, he was stunned. He absolutely couldn’t move. He couldn’t see her body, covered as it was by the modest, loose-fitting robe, but her face was very clear to him. Her forehead was white and smooth beneath the gorgeous light blond hair, her eyes large and soft, her cheeks pink and softly hollowed. She stood on her porch, the one that adjoined his own.
“New neighbors?” he casually asked his wife, Leah, later that morning. Leah, slow and ponderous, whose tendency towards sluggishness was exaggerated by the late days of her fifth pregnancy, had carefully laced up the shoes of her four- and five-year-olds, poured herself a cup of hot milk, and wiped down the counter before replying, “Newlyweds. She’s just a baby, barely eighteen. And he is a carpenter.” Her tone was critical, as would be expected from someone who had herself married with difficulties that had been overcome only at age twenty-four by her family’s rabbinical
yichoos
and her father’s prospering diamond business.
Like the biblical Leah, about whom the Bible can find nothing more positive to say than “Her eyes were soft,” Leah Saltzman had few physical attributes that could be praised. Those that she had had at twenty-four—a clear, fine complexion, a slim, hourglass figure, a striking head of auburn curls—time and pregnancies and religious strictures had slowly eroded. With each child she had added a few wrinkles and ten pounds that had stubbornly refused to yield to any treatment or effort to remove them. Instead of her hair, she now wore the expensive and elaborate concoctions of the wig salon. Only her husband, in the secret spaces of their bedroom, saw her hair as it really was: drained of all vitality by constant covering, shorter than a man’s, dusted with gray.
Like most men who marry for money, Noach Saltzman had also expected that his wife would remain at least as attractive as he had found her under the wedding canopy. That is, tolerably attractive. With the first child and the first ten pounds, he had found himself touched with annoyance. With the second, regret, and by the third he was close to despair. It became an effort to touch her at all. A chore. It was after the third child and the first thirty pounds that he had found himself actively pursuing other “opportunities,” as he liked to call them.
It wasn’t difficult. He was a very attractive man. Tall, handsomely broad-shouldered and slim-waisted, with thick black hair and deep blue eyes, he found women of all kinds only too eager to share his company. At first he had concentrated only on single girls, even insisting that they go to the mikveh before joining him for the long weekends in Paris, Amsterdam, or Eilat he added to legitimate business trips. After all, even though the sages frowned on relations between unmarried partners,
halachically
a man was not forbidden to have relations with an unmarried woman, no matter his own marital status. For a married woman, in contrast, such dalliance was considered a capital crime deserving of death. The inconsistency was explained as a realistic sop to man’s weak nature. Also, since only the woman could carry a child, her crime was worse since her sin could bring illegitimate children into the world,
mamzerim
, who, according to
halacha
, could never marry into the Jewish people and would carry the taint of their birth for eternity.
Thus, a married man who took unmarried women to bed was actually not doing very much wrong. The women were simply considered concubines.
Actually it had worked out very well for Noach. His father-in-law’s offices in Tel Aviv’s diamond district were situated on a crowded trading floor full of young secretaries and diamond cutters, most of whom were from religious homes. They were very young, very innocent. They never even suspected until much too late that his interest and friendliness were not paternal. And by then most were so overcome by the first real taste of romance and danger that had ever touched their sheltered lives that they were ridiculously easy pickings. Most important, they managed to keep their mouths shut when it was over, since that was very much in their own self-interest. Occasionally, in the beginning, he had made a mistake and a girl had refused to cross over that thin line that separated cordial business relations from budding personal ones. Several times he had also miscalculated badly or found himself pushed into carelessness by a girl’s loveliness, her youth and promise. But so far he had avoided exposure and true disaster because even the girls who had spurned him in shocked disbelief had not had enough self-confidence to talk. Or perhaps they had simply been restrained by the strict teachings of their upbringing, which taught them to judge each man leniently and to give each the benefit of the doubt. Most of the time such girls simply blamed themselves, searching for deficiencies in the modesty of their dress, their makeup, the way they smiled, or what they said. They took full responsibility and found jobs elsewhere, leaving Noach Saltzman free to go his merry way.
It was only after his wife’s fourth pregnancy that the slow but steady erosion of all his remaining religious beliefs and scruples was finally complete, leaving him almost totally conscienceless. The teachings of the rebbes in the yeshiva, of his strict, sincerely devout parents, were first rationalized and then discarded. It was only then that Noach Saltzman experimented with a married woman.
Initially he had found this an enormous step. A man who took another man’s wife would be punished by death. There were no ifs, ands, or buts about it. No mitigating circumstances. No way out. This was a very difficult hurdle for Noach, and one that took him a number of years to overcome. At the beginning he trembled at the very idea of G-d sealing his fate so utterly. At the time of the prophets, the judges, the great Sanhedrin, an adulterer accused by two witnesses would have been stoned to death. Nowadays religious Jews believed that all those upon whom the courts could not implement the rightful penalty for capital offenses would receive it from G-d personally.
But then, as is true with anyone who devotes much time and effort to satisfying his body, he found that his body became only more dissatisfied, more demanding. He was like a gourmet in constant, agonizing search for the most delicious food, whose every successful meal simply pushed the limits of the search farther off, requiring that much more effort.
And then he thought about repentance. One could always repent, he told himself, and save oneself from punishment. After all, who in the world did not sin? Even the biggest tzadik had his secret vice. Sometimes it came out and there was scandal, but most of the time no one ever found out.
He thought about that for a while. People could live their whole lives and never get punished at all. He took it one step further: Maybe there was no punishment for such things, because there was no crime. If a man and woman both agreed, who was harmed? The husband? Only if he found out. These things could be managed decently, he thought. And thought. And thought.
