Sotah (51 page)
And when she had finished reading them, she knew the decision she had been avoiding was finally made.
At their last session together, Charles took Dina for a walk through Central Park. It was one of those crisp, shining fall days filled with blazing golden-red trees that somehow compensated for the loss of summer.
They were talking about Abraham Breitman.
“I saw him once, about a year and a half later. He looked well fed and miserable,” she said. “His wife was short and dark with no ankles. She was very pregnant.”
“And how did you feel about that?”
“I had fantasized so much about it. But when it actually happened, it was nothing. I felt as if I were seeing some former neighbor, someone I had only known briefly, superficially. But by then I was already seeing Noach.”
Charles waited. Finally he said gently: “Do you want to talk about it?”
She shook her head. “Rabbi Eliezer has helped me over that. I can look at what I did honestly—not making it bigger or smaller. I can understand what drove me to it. I can even hope to make up for it one day. But I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
She’d leapt over the barrier. It was behind her. He felt that odd mixture of satisfaction, pride, and regret that a high school teacher feels seeing his star pupil graduate and go off to college.
He automatically held out his hand to wish her a final farewell, then realized she would probably not touch him or any man again except her husband, father, brother, or son. He wondered what he thought of that, if he had done his job properly. He had not liberated her into a modern Western woman. He studied her face a moment, and his doubts faded. Her beliefs made her happy. They gave content to her life, a richness and depth he sometimes missed. They also provided a safety net that would catch her even if she fell again.
She didn’t need him anymore. He would miss her.
“I’ll always remember the sound of your voice coming into my grave,” she told Joan with a small smile, pulling her coat closer to keep out the wild October winds at Kennedy Airport. “I wasn’t very sure I wanted to hear. I felt so cold, so helpless. I didn’t think I could move. But it reminded me somehow of my mother’s voice waking me on those cold winter mornings, reminding me of my obligations. I wanted so much to see where the words were coming from. And then, I saw your eyes. They were like my mother’s eyes, brown and kind.”
“And yours were so green and sad.” Joan couldn’t help smiling, although her eyes remained somber and pensive.
“I was not sure I wanted to be alive. Being dead was so much safer. But it was also so … cold. All the time. A gray, dull, cold, even darkness that protected me. The first time I opened my eyes and saw you, I felt blinded and I wasn’t sure if it was terror or happiness. I remember the story of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, who hid in a cave from the Romans for twenty-four years. And when he came out and saw the state the world was in, he went back in. I didn’t want to go back in. I am not brave enough. I love life too much, the sounds and the colors.”
“Lincoln Center and the Met.” Joan laughed.
“And Mama,” she threw in.
“MOMA,” Joan corrected her.
For an instant the two women looked at each other across the vast abyss of culture, of purpose, that separated them and that could have pitted them so mercilessly against each other. Instead, miraculously, they’d bridged it, crossing over to bring each other some comfort and understanding, enriching each other’s lives. Instead, they were friends.
“How do you thank someone for your life? For making you want to live? For giving you back your eyes and ears and voice?” Dina said.
“You thank them by living and by being happy,” Joan replied, her eyes swimming brightly. “Want to live, Dina. Don’t be afraid to reach out to the world, to love, to hold on to the things that make you happy with every ounce of determination you’ve got.” The idea of never seeing her again was very painful. “If you ever need … You could write, or come back,” Joan hedged.
“My place is in my own home, with my husband and child. I don’t know what will happen. I’m frightened sometimes. But this I do know: I want to go home. To take the steps I must to be forgiven.”
Her eyes caressed Joan’s with warmth: “Good-bye, my Joan. I hope, one day, I can be as good a person as you are.”
Tears of deep emotion stung Joan’s eyes at the unexpected words. “Good-bye, Dina. You
are
a good person. You deserve a good life.”
They hugged each other, long and hard.
Then Joan watched her walk past the El Al security guards into the glowing terminal until the doors that had opened to accept her slid decisively shut.
T
his was the second time in her life she had ever been in an airplane. The first, only a few months before, had been a completely different experience. She had been frozen. The dark night sky had seemed a chartless road full of painful accidents waiting to happen.
Now she leaned back and looked out at the regal elegance of the blue firmament stretching in all directions like a blue silk canopy over a wedding party. Unlike being in a car, where you felt you had some sort of control, where the dangers were visible and sometimes avoidable, a plane was totally out of your control. You were truly in G-d’s hands. She felt her whole body relax with that knowledge. He could read her thoughts. He knew that her trip back was a step toward atonement. He would not let anything bad happen to her now.
She would not look at the letters now, she told herself as the stewardesses rolled the tinkling carts down the narrow aisles, offering little cans of soft drinks and bottles of wine. She would allow herself the few hours of contentment to build her strength before confronting their difficult messages again. If she read them now, she might lose all control and weep in front of everyone.
She calmed herself by remembering the last conversations with Charles and Joan, the admirable cool rationality she’d been able to achieve then. In fact, she’d been disappointed that they hadn’t seen beyond her good show to her absolute terror of what lay ahead. It wouldn’t have made any difference, though. She was absolutely determined to face the horrors that awaited her in Israel, because she knew she had no choice but to settle the past and push on toward the future. She tried not to think too much, to feel too much.
Yet even as she was resisting the urge, her hands went compulsively to her purse. She opened it and took out the letters.
The first was Chaya Leah’s short, bitter note:
Dear Dina,
I was going to write “Dear Sister,” but after what you’ve done to me, I disown you. Your selfishness is unbelievable!
You’ve ruined my life. Because of you, I will not be able to marry the man I love. I was the only one of the three of us with the guts to find a man on her own, to fall in love, instead of being matched off like a pair of old socks by garlic-breath Garfinkel. But because of the disgrace you’ve brought down on our heads with the divorce
[the first time Dina had read the letter, her heart had stopped at the awful word. Was there going to be a divorce?!]
there is no way I can even hint to Aba I’ve done such a thing. IT IS SO UNFAIR!!!!! After all, I am a single girl. All I did was fall in love with a good man, even if he is a Hasid and he is in the army.
None of this is the reason I’m writing. For myself, I don’t care if I ever set eyes on you again. But you have to know this: Aba has been ill since you’ve left. His heart. The doctor says he needs rest, but I know what he really needs. To see you.
If you have a shred of decency left (which I doubt. What mother could abandon her baby?!), come home.
With no wishes at all, Chaya Leah
Dina rubbed her palm over her suddenly parched lips. Then, slowly, she opened the next letter.
Dearest Daughter, my beautiful Dina, may she live long,
My child, I hope this finds you well. I don’t know what strange and wondrous plans the Almighty has for you, but I have faith that His compassion is vast and everlasting. Whatever you have done—and I know my good child you cannot have done anything that came from a badness of heart, anything that was more than a momentary folly, unintentional and deeply regretted—please remember that repentance is always possible.
I blame myself If I had been a better father to you all … If I had been home more, instead of looking for strangers in the street who needed my help. My heart is broken when I think of how I’ve failed you all. Your sins belong to me.
Your cruel separation from those who love you cannot have been easy for you. Yossele is well, growing, but he needs his mother. Judah, your wonderful husband, has suffered much. But I trust in his good heart and his good sense. Until the divorce is final, we may still hope.
How I pray that I might see you!
With a thousand blessings of good health and good
mazel,
I leave you. Your loving,
Aba
Like some Hindu penitent in India intent on whipping his own skin bloody, she doggedly took out Judah’s letter. Inside was a simple notice from the Jerusalem Rabbinical Court informing her that divorce proceedings would take place on October 15. Just a few days away. In a small note attached to the notice with a paper clip, Judah had written three Hebrew words: “
Bevakasha tovo-e habayta
”—“Please come home.”
“Please come home.” She had gone over the words again and again, analyzing each one separately and all together. She tried to imagine the different ways he could have said them: Please! Come Home!—a heartrending plea. Or softly, whispered with compassion, gentleness, forgiveness: Please come home. She tried to comfort herself that he had added “please.” After all, “come home” would have served the purpose if all he wanted was simply for her to be there to catch the bill of divorcement he intended tossing at her, throwing her out of his life.
It made no difference. Written, they gave her no clues. It was simply a polite request, neither more nor less. But if he had decided finally to do it, she reasoned, why would he have written anything at all? The notice would have been enough to inform her of his implacable intentions. That is, if they were implacable.
Still, as much as she tried to comfort herself, she could not help absorbing with cold horror the incontrovertible fact that he had actually gone to the judges of the rabbinical court and officially asked to be divorced from her. A cold sweat broke over the pinched skin of her forehead, furrowed in agonizing doubt. What would she do if he went through with it? If he insisted on having Yossele with him? Her baby would hardly know her now anyway. He would cling to his father, her mother-in-law. A few months in a baby’s life was like years in an adult’s.
The last letter was the worst. She had no strength to go on. Before she could confront it again, she needed medicine, the best medicine of all, better than anything even good Doctor Charles could offer her. Charles hadn’t realized it, but it was this all along that had provided the megadose of courage she’d needed to get on a plane that would bear her back into the eye of the cyclone that might very well smash her to bits.
It was an ancient remedy, used by her people for thousands of years, through wretched, heartbreaking times so dark with hopelessness and death that words like “hope” and “future” had been simply discredited, like childish fairy tales. It was odd how just the silent mouthing of verses, poems written by another bruised and beleaguered distant relative, could fill her with so much vibrancy, so much confidence that “hope” and “future” were real, meaningful elements in her life again.
She took out King David’s Psalms and began to read:
I have waited for the L-rd in the past, striving after Him, and He inclined to me and heard my cry.
He has raised me up from the pit of desolation, from the miry mud; He has set my feet upon a rock, and firmly established my steps.
He has put a new song into my mouth, a praise of G-d’s mighty acts, so that many shall see, and fear, and at the same time learn to trust in the L-rd.
Happy is the man who has made G-d his trust, who has not turned for comfort to the arrogant, the faithless, the deceivers … Thou, O L-rd, withhold not Thy compassion from me even now; let Thy mercy and Thy truth continually preserve me.
For uncountable evils have surrounded me, my sins have overtaken me once more so that I cannot see; they are more numerous than the hairs of my head, my heart has failed me.
Want, O G-d, to save me; Hurry, O L-rd, to deliver me.
Where was David when he had written those words? she wondered. Hiding in a cave from Absalom, his own faithless, patricidal son? Running from the jealous, murderous rage of King Saul? Or was it simply in the dark of the night as he sat in his palace, alone and friendless, remembering his desire for Bathsheva, another man’s wife, and the great sin he had committed in consummating that desire? Her heart burned with hot compassion and pity for King David, for Chaya Leah, for her father, Judah, Yossele. Herself. Yet David had survived. He had been forgiven. And more than that: he had been blessed.
Her hands trembling, she opened the thick, cream-colored envelope and took out the last letter. She sat with it folded in her lap, not daring to open and read it again. Not daring. Just touching it made her sick with a kind of nauseous fear, the deepest kind of fear a person feels, when the enemy is oneself and those things one might be tempted to do despite all one believes and feels to be right. She had been weak once. Was her new strength real, her regret real, or simply a wrapping that, ripped away, would reveal all the old frailties and imperfections? She held the cream-colored stationery folded between her thumb and forefinger.
