Sotah (55 page)

Her whole body began to burn slowly with shame and rejection.
Well, what did you expect? For him to throw out his arms and welcome you back?
a small voice inside her jeered. But this coldness, this … indifference. He was a stranger. She stared at him dully, despairing, not knowing where to begin. “Judah, will you at least listen to me? Let me explain? …”

Judah put down the brush and sank heavily onto an old stool. “So you’ve come back, then, have you? All these months, not a word … and now you want to tell the big fool some more stories?” She had never seen him angry before. His fury was palpable.

A sharp pain cleaved her heart. “Judah, please … let me just speak to you. I know I don’t deserve it, that you can throw me out, and you’d be right. But at least let me try to beg your forgiveness. I want so much to come home.”

“Home?” His tone was dull, expressionless. “You came because of the letter … from the court?”

“No. I came because this is my home, my life. Because I never wanted to leave. It was never my idea.”

“You ran away! You left me, you left your own child!”

“No!” she shouted. “No, Judah, as G-d is my witness, I was forced to leave! Rabbi Kurzman and the others … they arranged everything … They told me I had no choice because of what I’d … what they said I’d … But I never did. Judah! Please, you have to believe me!”

His face registered total confusion.

“I know I’ve lied to you in the past. I went behind your back. I want to tell you the whole truth now.” This was so hard! She wanted to stop and run away. It was the hardest, hardest thing she had ever had to do. The truth was so ugly, so hurtful, and he was so angry and hurt to begin with. She felt her throat knot, her eyes drown. She wasn’t going to cry. No! She didn’t want to manipulate him.

He looked at her, his face frozen.

Where should I begin? she wondered suddenly. With Noach? Her mother’s death? Or long, long before when she was a frightened little girl docilely accepting blame, locking her trunk of passions, burying her needs?

“Judah, all my life I’ve been treated like a good little girl. All my life I’ve acted like one. I was a good student, which meant I accepted passively everything that my teachers, my parents, taught me. I buried my questions, buried my doubts. I wanted to do what was expected of me. But so many times I found that the world was not the place that I’d been taught it should be. And each time it happened, there was this other whole person inside of me that kept shouting at me that I’d been tricked, that kept getting angrier and angrier.”

He took up the wood and began the slow process of burning a design into it. She watched as the fire of the soldering iron seared the surface of the wood, her own face burning with shame. “I didn’t want to listen. I wanted the other voice to go away. It frightened me. I kept trying to smother it, to kill it. But I couldn’t. It was so angry, all the time! Angry that money seemed to decide even who we could marry, even though all the people around us mouthed pieties about how only character, only spirit, had value. It was angry that the university was a closed door, that the army was a closed door. And when my mother died, I stopped fighting the voice. I too became angry.

“I was angry at the hard white ground for yielding so easily to accept my mother’s body so long before her time; at G-d for putting her there; at you …”

He looked up at her, pain, confusion, fury, contorting his features: “Me? You were angry at me? For what?”

“Yes, at you,” she repeated, “for not seeing inside my heart, for not chastising me for my doubts, for not comforting me, for not giving me long, long speeches about G-d’s justice and compassion, speeches that would make everything come all right again. And most of all, I was angry that all my life every single personal choice seemed to be stolen from me, even the choice of who to marry.”

His face was stricken.

How could she have blurted that out? She looked down at Judah’s shoes, her sudden burst of courage leaving her. “But that doesn’t mean … ! I did want to marry you, Judah! I really did! There was something about you I felt I could love, something inside that I knew was there, that I hoped you would show me once we were married. There had to be if you could see the loveliness around you and carve it into wood the way you did.

“Except that after we were married, you were so quiet, so terribly, terribly quiet. Not that you weren’t good to me. You were too good. You made things too easy for me. I wasn’t used to it. I was used to love meaning criticism, demands. And you asked for so little! I felt guilty and then ashamed. That I wasn’t supporting you, that you weren’t a
kollel
man, that …” She looked down at her hands, her face reddening with shame. No. She would not hide anything or make herself nicer than she’d been. “That … that your fingers were stained instead of clean and white. I’m so ashamed to admit that! And I don’t feel that way anymore! But then I was young, narrow-minded, and ignorant! I was like everyone else in our world. I couldn’t appreciate what you were, your specialness.

“When my mother died, my heart was breaking for someone to talk to. And Noach looked at me through the window, he came to the store, he took me out in the car. And for hours and hours and hours, we simply talked. He kept telling me about so many things that were fun to do—going bathing, seeing movies. And I was so angry, I wanted to punish G-d, to tell him I too could break the contract! I too could change the rules! And you didn’t want to hear of it. ‘What would I need with fun?’ you told me. I was angry you wouldn’t be my partner. And Noach … well, he was there.

“It was all words at first. Only later … did we begin … touching. I didn’t need that. You were always so kind and loving! I always loved you to touch me, to feel you against me. But he … it was the price for his words. And then, he wanted more. He demanded it. That I … that I spend the night with him in Tel Aviv. I didn’t want to! And then … then … I thought … perhaps … I did.” She stopped, wiping her eyes. The shop was suddenly filled with the acrid smell of burning as Judah allowed the soldering iron to consume the beautiful wood.

“Judah, no! Please, your beautiful work!”

He placed the soldering iron down carefully on the table. “I knew you couldn’t love me when you married me,” he said softly, his anger gone. “I’m so big and clumsy and awkward. But I was so in love with you! You were everything beautiful and pure and decent to me. I wanted to spoil you! For you to have everything! I thought, if I tried very, very hard, you might come to love me. I was afraid to intrude, to push my way into your life, to tell you my thoughts, to insist on hearing yours. I’m always being pushed and lectured at, and I hate it! So, I kept waiting, waiting for you to come to me, to show me, to tell me that you were ready to let me in, to tell me what you needed, to listen to my needs. If you had only come to me, told me. I would have given you everything.”

“I didn’t want to be given anything! I wanted you to talk to me. I wanted words. And most of all, I wanted to choose—my own engagement watch, my own furniture, my own ideas …”

He was listening, motionless, soundless. His silence, more frightening and threatening than any screamed obscenities, was unendurable. There was no clue to his reaction. So she plunged back in desperately, swimming on. It was either that or slip again into deep, cold grayness. She had promised Joan not to do that. She had promised herself.

“The sand on the beach was warm and lovely. The men and women seemed so carefree, so young. It made me happy to try something new. I didn’t really want to leave the cool water, to go into the hotel room. But I did. I went, willingly. Only when I got there and he got into the bed, I knew it wasn’t him I wanted. It was you. Your face, your hands, your body. I knew he was forcing himself on me and somehow that other voice, that wild, rude, passionate one, finally got through to me. I didn’t want this! I pushed him away. And Noach, he slapped me. He called me a whore. And I knew that all along I’d been fooling myself; that all along that’s what he’d thought of me. And that it was true.

“I ran down to the sand and rested my face against it. I think I was hoping a great wind would come and bury me in it. I was cold and wet and heartbroken. I only wanted to come home to you, to tell you everything, to make you understand. To start again.

“But Kurzman was there at the door. And suddenly everything I’d thought was between me and G-d, me and you, was public! I was so frightened that I did everything he asked, horrible things that made no sense. I even wrote you a letter telling you I’d slept with Noach! Kurzman was so sure, I even thought he might know more about that than I did, too! That somehow it had happened without my knowing about it! It was as if I didn’t trust my own mind anymore, as if I had no right to even think. He said if I left immediately, he wouldn’t make it public, he wouldn’t disgrace you and my family. And I was so grateful to him for his compassion, I almost kissed his feet.”

She wiped the sweat from her forehead, remembering giving birth, the wave after wave of horrible pain, and then the astonishing moment when it was all over, and she was so happy. She tried to focus on that, on it being over. “I was a maid for a wealthy family in New York City. I scrubbed toilet bowls and polished silver. The lives around me were so strange, so full of contradictions. Jewish children who yelled at their parents! Jews who desecrated the Sabbath with work, who ate pig and shellfish. And for a while I began to feel a little better, as if what I’d done was not so terrible compared to the lives these people lived.

“But then I got to know them. The woman, Joan, was such a good person! She was kind to me, generous. She was a caring wife, a loving mother. While I had abandoned you all!

“I didn’t know what to believe anymore. Nothing was simple, straightforward. Only this: I wanted to be with you, with the baby. I was tortured by it, every single day. I worked and worked and worked, washing floors and windows, dusting, scrubbing. I wanted G-d to finish punishing me so I could go home again. And then, Noach came to see me.”

The shadows deepened in the shop. She could just make out Judah’s hands suddenly tightening around the black, ruined wood. “I hadn’t known he was in New York. He—” And for the first time since beginning, she felt her throat clamp closed, choking her. “He asked me to be his mistress. And then he slipped a ruby-and-diamond bracelet around my wrist, as if I were some … G-d! I wanted to kill him!” Her fist slammed down on the tabletop, and she saw Judah cradle his head in his hands. “I had his blood on my hands. I guess I’d scratched him. Nothing worse. But seeing my hands with blood, it must have … something must have … My mind …” She shrugged. “I started walking home. That doesn’t make any sense, does it? Maybe a little part of me was thinking it was silly, that I couldn’t actually get home by walking, but then I saw all of you! And I was in my own home, my own bed. I could hear
Ima
working in the kitchen, I could even taste the Sabbath wine … I was so relieved, so happy, I didn’t care how I’d gotten there, but only that I was home! And then, suddenly, it all changed. Everyone I loved, you, Judah, my father and mother … you all stood around me, pointing and accusing … everyone I loved! I felt myself dying. I was dead.”

She heard his labored, uneven breathing, as if he were carrying a heavy weight up a steep hill. She stared at the shadows moving across the wall, trying to see in them some reflection of his face. But it was dark and meaningless. “I woke up in a mental ward. The horrible noise, the smells! But then I saw your candlesticks, you know, those little ones you carved me for my birthday? And I felt if I could light just those two little candles, maybe the darkness would start to go away. It was the beginning.

“So many people helped me, strangers. Joan and Dr Shulman, and Rabbi Eliezer. They convinced me that it’s all right to be angry, to be confused, to doubt, to fail. They taught me that there is real compassion, real forgiveness, in the world. They helped me see how much I love you, Judah, you and the baby, my family, G-d, Jerusalem. I found out that to be like Him, to be holy, doesn’t mean we all have to be the same. It doesn’t mean keeping out the world with high fences, lead screens. It means listening to your mind and heart, not shutting out the voices that question, that seek answers. And it doesn’t matter if everyone else around you accepts the answers they’re given and are satisfied. I have a right to my own answers.” She took a deep breath. “I need you to help me find them. To love me like a woman, to talk to me, to listen to me. To help me go my own way toward G-d again.”

All this time she had been looking down at her dress, twisting it into knots. She had no idea of the expression on his face. Was it full of anger still, or horror? Or, worst of all, did it look like the faces of the women on the stoop or the men who followed Kurzman? Just the thought paralyzed her. And then suddenly, she had to know. She ran to Judah and sank down on the floor in front of him, looking up fiercely, helplessly, into his face, his stubbornly averted eyes.

“Judah,” she said finally, with desperation, “do whatever you want to me! I deserve it! But before you throw me out of your life, please, please forgive me! I can’t change the past. I can only tell you that person, the one who hurt you, doesn’t exist anymore.” Then, softly, “I’ve suffered so much. Please, at least don’t stop me from seeing the baby. You won’t try to take him away from me, will you?”

His eyes looked down on her steadily for what seemed an eternity. “You’re his mother. He needs you,” he said in a voice hoarse with emotion. Then, softly, so softly she could not be sure it wasn’t simply a strange, happy dream: “I need you.”

She looked up at him, not daring to believe, taking both his large hands into her small ones, kissing them a hundred times, her tears washing off the honest white dust on his battered, stained fingertips. She felt him smooth back the hair from her forehead, trace the clear line of her flushed cheek, her neck.

He crouched beside her, holding her in his arms. “I didn’t do anything right! I could have saved you from all this suffering, if only … if only …”