Sotah (37 page)
That had been a week ago. She wasn’t thinking about it anymore. It was all arranged, she told herself now. His mother would watch the baby until Judah picked him up after work. And she’d be back by the next evening in time to make her husband dinner.
They’d just left, her husband and little son. Judah had agreed to drop the baby off at his mother’s on his way to work. “So you can get to your friend faster,” he’d said, making her heart thump with a sickening sense of guilt. She’d searched his eyes as he stood by the door, the baby cradled in his big arms, tugging at his mustache. Her husband and son, she’d thought, studying them as one sometimes studies the minute, precious details of a rare photograph of loved ones long gone. A little panic shot through her as Judah inclined his rough, thick head of hair down to her to accept her customary kiss. His complexion was as smooth and pink as an innocent little baby’s, she noticed, wondering why she’d never seen it before … She held the baby’s round, active little fist, kissing his tiny fingers, which continued to pummel the air in aimless fury and joy.
“I’ll miss you both,” she said without a trace of irony. It was absolutely true. As she heard Judah’s footsteps descend, growing softer and more distant, a cold panic began to grow, spreading in concentric circles to every part of her body. A part of her wanted to run after them and weep, tug at their clothes and beg them to stay with her and never leave.
She ran to the window and opened it. But no sound came out as she watched Judah’s large, powerful body stride away, his back to her. Perhaps if he had looked up. Perhaps if the baby had looked over his father’s shoulder and caught her eye and waved, perhaps everything would have been different. But that is not what happened. Judah disappeared, never seeing her white and pleading face staring at his back. The baby played, totally absorbed in his father’s shirt buttons, oblivious to his young mother’s desperation. Then they were both gone. She closed the window and turned her back to it, heading toward her bedroom.
She began to pack a small suitcase. As she went through her lingerie, a knot grew in the back of her throat, an ache of shame and excitement beyond anything she had ever known. She felt the silky material of the skimpy gown flow over her fingers. She felt the soft cotton of the clean underwear, the bra. Her shame began to grow until it mushroomed into an explosive silent shout of disgust. She didn’t want to do this! How had she gotten herself into it!
Then she packed her bathing suit. It was a new one—green and yellow flowers on a white background. She closed her eyes and felt the lids tremble. The sun, the sparkling waters, the joy of doing something new. And Noach waiting. She wanted to do it with all her heart. Yes! How lovely it would be! What a pleasure it would be! She folded the pretty suit, trying to imagine herself in it, diving under the waves, all the while her fingers working mechanically, folding, tucking in loose ends, making the final closure. The suitcase, a little overnight bag, closed with difficulty. Now if I can only keep it closed until I reach the hotel room, she mused, trying to forget the intimate things inside; to forget that she would have to open it and put them on in front of Noach Saltzman, a man who was not her husband.
She finished the final straightening of the bedroom, picked up a few of Yossie’s toys, washed the last of the breakfast dishes. Then, automatically, almost thoughtlessly, she picked up her prayer book to say the morning prayers.
The pages felt cold and strange on her fingertips. “I am thankful before Thee, King Who lives everlasting …” The words came slowly, falteringly. They felt sour and disgraceful on her tongue, as if she had bitten into something rancid. She felt a flash of sudden fear. There was a third party involved in all her plans. She could not keep Him out. He was there, looking over her shoulder, inside her head. She blushed with shame in an agony of painful revelation. Yet she felt beyond choice. She had made the commitment. Noach was waiting. His pull was stronger.
She kissed the worn, familiar pages, the front and back cover between which was stored the lifelong conversation she had kept up with her Creator since she was little more than a baby. Then she put it aside, picked up the suitcase, and locked the door behind her.
She walked thoughtfully down the first set of stairs. Yet by the time she’d reached the second, her footsteps were already growing lighter and swifter. In the end she flew down the last landing to the street, happily, carelessly, recklessly.
O
f all the types of woodworking that he did in the shop, turning the wood gave Judah the most satisfaction. There was something magic about the way a rough, clumsy board without shape or character was transformed in seconds on the turning lathe into an object of smooth, delicate beauty. Sometimes he lost himself in thought, watching the furiously spinning wood as it turned with dizzying speed, an object to be molded in his hands to his satisfaction. And sometimes he identified with it, thinking of himself as just such a blunt and ordinary human stick who was whirling helplessly in a maelstrom of confusion as G-d chipped away at his imperfections, turning him out to His satisfaction.
The night before had been the first in his marriage without Dina beside him. The house had seemed cheerless and dark and oddly hollow. He was anxiously anticipating her return that evening, his eyes light with expectation as he watched the turning lathe. The wood was beautiful, soft, shapely.
He felt it before he saw it. There was someone in the shop. A flash of white peeked out of the darkness. Judah felt his heart drop with strange foreboding. He turned off the machine and looked up, expressionless.
“
Boker tov
, Reb Yid.”
“
Boker tov
, Reb Kurzman,” Judah answered reluctantly, wiping his hands on a towel. He watched the other man move toward him, his white-gloved hands strange and menacing in the dim shop light. He remembered the first time he had seen this man, the rage and disgust and disbelief with which he had thrown him out. “I thought I asked you not to bother me again.”
“No, my good friend. You asked me not to come again without proof. If you had listened to me months ago when I first came to you, then I would not have the unfortunate honor of bringing you such proof as I bring you now. G-d forgive you for not heeding my warning!”
Judah found his legs suddenly weak. He stumbled against a stool and sat down. “You’ve brought me … proof?”
The other man nodded. “Pictures. Everything. We don’t like to do this. But you gave us no choice with your blindness, your obstinacy, all these months. It is G-d’s will that the homes of his people Israel be pure. You must purge the evil, the sin, from your midst, even if it is the wife of your bosom.”
“You’ve brought proof?” Judah repeated in a voice so pitiful it would have broken the heart of any man less self-righteous and firm in his belief than Rabbi Kurzman. With the eyes of a condemned man who first glimpses the gallows, Judah watched the white glove vanish into a pocket and reappear with a stack of photographs. He felt his stomach heave with fear and disgust. He got up and backed away. He flipped the switch, and the little shop once more was filled with the roar of the lathe, turning and turning. He picked up the wood and carefully mounted it.
The noise covered all the other voices which suddenly filled the shop, five or six sturdy young men in their black outfits. He listened to nothing, to no one, save the still, small voice in his own head. It told him to turn off the machine. It told him to look at the photographs.
Again, with slow precision, he turned off the machine, wiped his hands, and reached out, touching the cold, almost slimy surface of the pictures. His eyes grew dim with hot tears of anguish. There, walking hand and hand on the beach, her thighs white and shameful in the bathing suit, her hand clasped in the other man’s. His neighbor’s. Noach Saltzman. The other man’s arm around her shoulders. The two of them at the entrance to the hotel. He flipped through the stack, more and more and more. Yet all basically the same.
He rubbed his sleeve roughly against his eyes, took the pictures. “To whom have you shown these?”
“No one but you,” Kurzman answered, watching him carefully.
“And they have no negatives?”
“No. They are Polaroids,” the other man replied. The questions were neutral. He had seen many men react in exactly the same way. First they ensured privacy, then they gave in completely.
“What must be done?” Judah asked, but he wasn’t talking to the other man. It was a question he was asking himself in the depths of his heart.
“Death by stoning, for both of them,” Kurzman replied, misunderstanding. “This is the law. But since we have been cursed and punished by our Creator with the terrible Exile and the destruction of our holy Temple and Sanhedrin, and have no courts to enforce the law, we must satisfy ourselves with allowing G-d to visit such punishment upon them. What is left to us is the pale residue of our duty. You must divorce her, immediately. She is forbidden to you and to her lover forever. She must be thrown out into the street. She gets no marriage settlement. Nothing. She cannot see the child, she takes nothing with her. This is the law.”
“There must be witnesses,” Judah began.
“We are all witnesses,” Kurzman answered.
“But to what? You did not see the act itself. You bring me pictures of hand-holding,” he said contemptuously. “If this is all you have, you have nothing.”
Kurzman stood up. “You are a man who makes holy things. The very wood that holds the Torah scrolls themselves. You are not blameworthy. She is entirely at fault. But if you do not act, the word of your sin will spread. Do you think anyone will allow you to make them holy objects, a man like yourself? You will be ruined. And your son, do you think they will take him into any decent yeshiva? Do you think he will ever find a wife with such parents? You will be an outcast.” He put his arm around Judah’s hunched, dejected shoulders. “You cannot save her. Save yourself, my good man.”
Judah straightened his shoulders slowly, releasing the grip of the other man’s arm, then he got up and walked toward the little stove where he kept a small kettle always humming. Before anyone could stop him, he threw the photographs into the fire, blocking the angry rush of men with his broad body. One grabbed Judah’s arm and another his shoulder. With a push of enormous strength, the carpenter sent them slamming against the wall with a violence that nearly shattered the glass storefront.
“Enough!” Reb Kurzman said with commanding menace. “Leave us!” The young men picked each other up, dusting the sawdust sullenly off their immaculate black coats and pants. Together they filed out of the store, congregating around the entrance.
“Are you still not satisfied, Reb Yid?” Kurzman said softly.
“You have no proof,” the carpenter repeated dully, his passion spent. “To hold a hand is not the other thing. You have no proof.”
“There is only so far we can go. We don’t hide our boys underneath beds,” Kurzman said, his voice gaining menace.
“Then she’s a
sotah
,” Judah said. “We must take her to the holy Temple and have the high priest give her the bitter waters to drink. If she’s guilty, she will die. And if she is innocent, nothing at all will happen, will it?”
“But there is no holy Temple. There is no high priest.”
“And you have no proof,” Judah said doggedly.
“Why don’t you just ask her?” Kurzman said with deceptive mildness. “Discuss it with her.”
“Yes,” the carpenter answered, shocked that he had not thought of such a thing earlier. All these months. All those late nights waiting up. And never even the smallest suspicion until Kurzman had come to him the first time. And then he had waited and waited, refusing to believe. It had been unthinkable. Until now.
“
You have no proof!
” Judah got up, throwing his shoulders back, his powerful chest and arms, corded with muscles from the honest physical labor he had toiled at his whole life, pushing toward the other man, who was pale and delicate from a life spent in study, in pursuing ideas.
Reb Kurzman backed out. “It is the law. You must throw her out. She is forbidden to you,” he said loudly, once outside the door and once again surrounded by his burly entourage, who closed ranks around their leader.
Judah closed the door behind him and locked it. He went to the back of the store and swept up the ashes where they had fallen from the stove. Only one photograph remained. Charred by the fire, only his wife’s delicate blond head was still visible. His big thumb caressed it. And then he sat weeping, his soul a heartbroken lost child’s within a grown man’s powerful, helpless body.
D
ina walked gingerly into the house, feeling the gritty pillow of sand press against her soles with each small step. Her clothes were full of sand. Her hair was full of sand. Even the wig was full of sand. Not to think, she told herself. Not to feel. Just to move, one foot in front of the other. To do. Wash out the clothes. Bathe. Then go pick up the baby from her mother-in-law’s. She was home hours earlier than she’d planned. She wanted to see the baby, to feel him safe and whole, solid against her breasts. But most of all she wanted, she longed, to see Judah. She wove her way through the house, drunk with tiredness and the confusion of wandering through a desert storm which leaves one helplessly lost, directionless.
Each time she paused the images would start up again, the feelings, violent, shameful, and joyful beyond imagination. Each time she felt it, she pressed her palms against her face, trying to wipe it away, to suppress it.
To wash off all the sand, all the dirt. To be clean and pure and without thought. That was what she wanted. But the sand was so pervasive. There was no place so secret and intimate it had not penetrated and touched. It was so difficult to rub it away. She tried, scrubbing and scrubbing and scrubbing. There was always a tiny speck she’d missed—beneath her breasts, in the corner of an eyebrow. Never, never clean enough.
