The Place Will Comfort You (6 page)

T
HIS YEAR'S EARRINGS were reprehensible.

“You remove those, you remove those immediately, and take also the opportunity to go to the rest room and wipe that paint off your lips, all of it comes off. Also your eyes.”

The girl rose and left Mr. Durchschlag's classroom.

Under normal circumstances, he liked to think the girls could find in him a father figure. No, he did not think that, so why should a man even in his thoughts to himself settle on an inadequate coinage? Not a father but an uncle figure they found in him, relatively young, kind, though of an acerbic wit, someone from whom a growing girl could exact her daily toll of male attention without risking a holdup. He was a larger presence to tussle with at no risk. These girls had no concept of the risk, of the urges they were so eager to summon from the aggregate of this world's men. Imagine such earrings as the girl had been wearing before he had sent her out, out! Such ostentation, as if the ear were a rack in the window of a toy shop. If only she understood she advertised not goods but a transaction. However such a transaction she should not consider. How then could he explain what his students would understand only when, as wives, they had to adjust, eyes closed with forbearance,
or, God forbid, when it was too late, which was to say too soon for a little girl? Dealing with these girls' immodesty, their twinkles of metal and jewel or—let him remember where and when he was—plastic, clouds of perfume, gales of laughter, their raids into the meditations of their neighbor, he had no choice but to shed his benignity completely because he was disgusted with how constantly they wanted in.

“Shhh, sha!”

The rising chaos of female voices subsided in declining ripples. Front center by an empty partner seat, Orna Magouri covered her face with both her hands. Across the narrow aisle Mali Shemtov smoothed the pages of her book.

They all commuted here. Perhaps this contributed to the mood of hovering dissolve, the girls so far from home, and moreover placed on crumbly turf here in the dunes of Tel Shamai, to which they flocked from the inner lowlands and the coastal plain, from the cities of Rosh Ha'Ayin, Givat Shmuel, Holon, and Netanya, some even from his native Bnei Brak, to gather here, in one building in an undeveloped area outside Tel Aviv. The sea pulsed near, scenting the air but invisible from the road below the tufted sandy headland. A hotel stood in the distance, a glass-plated tower with no hint of stone, its base hidden upshore but the head seeming to peek up towards the school, as though the waves were less a hold on the imagination than what stood higher and farther inland, in a low maze of corridors, he and they, teacher and students, in a vocational school for religious girls.

Here, on this loose-earthed margin of the country, the girls convened. Their parents paid a deeply subsidized tuition in return for an unusual offer, that their daughters be taught a worldly trade without compromising the work of their Creator—ostensibly. Disadvantaged, the main category of the girls enrolled was called, but what the term commonly referred to was the least of their problems. Didn't the mere act of birth threaten an overdraft at the bank
and an underdraft of the mind? The girls' most serious shortage was neither financial nor academic. For whether a Tami's or a Shoshi's father mixed cement or cake batter made no difference when the real concern was that in no case was he a Jew learned in the commandments and strict in their fulfillment, so forget about his daughter. And how to furnish his Etti or his Dalya and her failing grades with an income upon graduation should weigh immeasurably less heavy on the conscience of a Mr. Edri or Araki or Shimon than the wholesale degradation of the Jewry of the Islamic countries here in the Jewish state.

He could smell their cookery at the mere thought of them, as if before these musings carrying him off he hadn't been standing in a classroom full of fractious and less-fractious girls, but rather had been climbing the stairs to his apartment, near to dinnertime, when suddenly the door of Rahamim Medina and Medina's wife on the third floor had opened: chicken, lemon and tomato and—what were all the other accents? Spice wisdom such households held on to; their grip on God's teachings was feebler. When their immigrant forefathers in, you could still say in some circles, the backward countries, Yemen, Iraq, et cetera, had been summoned here by the exultance and grief howls of the State's birth days, barely had the newcomers brushed grains of Holy Soil from their longing lips and wiped tears of redemption from their eyes, when Prime Minister Ben Gurion had farmed off their children to labor with the Zionists in agricultural cooperatives. The offspring molded into the new local breed while the immigrant forebears were left to squat in tent cities. Young hands dispossessed of holy books, stuffed with shovels, mouths taught to praise radishes and not the Lord above.

And here their granddaughters sat today, descendants of those few young newcomers whose faith was not altogether lopped off along with their apron strings and sidelocks, who would commemorate their thinned but extant loyalty in a moniker: Traditional. Well, so at least not Secular, at least not “Free,” as the bulk of this
regathered nation so shamelessly announced themselves. But also nowhere near Reverent, as he and his fold pledged their souls and their days, not even Observant, as did the rather less committed in their knitted skullcaps and short sleeves and motley fabrics off the same rack as the “Free.” Traditional. As if they bore the foremost loyalty to their tradition makers, to mortals rather than their Maker and His law. How could God's legacy have been so swiftly reduced in the seed of scholars and commentators and physicians to kings? But also silversmiths and poets and spice mixers, embroidering songsters. He believed that this precisely was their problem, Babel crafts, too many towers, striving in too many directions: a tremor and it all fell apart, and lo. Where now was their sky unto which they had reached? But if God's worship could degrade to almost nothing, awe on the other hand could not. Reverence kept smoldering in them, dimly, so they sent their daughters here.

To him. The professions that girls learned here they might pick up elsewhere. His discipline they would not. But did he delude himself? What really could the girls glean from their teacher of Mishnaic Law, their welcomer to the first thickness of rabbinical interpretation, to the day richly ordered in accordance with God's word? Of such devoutness as his they couldn't conceive, such interaction with the holy, action by action prescribed in worship: the fiber of his clothes, the most recent laving of his hands, the bodily thoughts of which he cleared his mind, the precise distance at which he stood from a female. They would see nothing of it, only this: a pale man of the European Jewry, less effusive than their fathers, less undulating in conversational pitch, a figure identical to and identified with so many others in his neighborhood whose name would mean to them just his sort of person. He in particular was built squarish but trim, fast-moving in his black suit, black hair well clipped beneath black skullcap, beard black also, fully black with not one bristle gray.

A man in monochrome trappings, this they saw, but first a man,
and rare at that, one of three in the whole building, the others being the janitor, an old shuffler, and the principal, pock-faced. And so despite his stringent image in black and white, these girls regarded him with dilated eye and flaccid jaw as if he were a pop star. Did he enjoy at least the influence of a pop star on his fans? Recall the earrings, despite everything he said. Thick glazed rounds of plastic in garish colors like sucking candy, the size of them like candy also. A machine spits these earrings out molten and maybe some Arab glues on the posts with which a young unmarried Jewish girl skewers her lobes. Even tiny pearls on a young unmarried girl, however, the smallest chip of gem, what was the need? Why wanton damage to the tissue? And in return for what? How could he but hate this year's gobs of glistening plastic, dazzle bought so cheap?

And when, as today, the earrings called his attention to organs which previously had been notable for function rather than form— that was to say, when a good girl and a listener suddenly became a displayer—this sickened him most of all. The girl in question had worn the very same pair for the first time yesterday, which he had thought the last time, too. For she was not like the others, not by lineage, not in upbringing or character. He had not expected in her a conformity so swift and stubborn. Did the girl take him for an ass? No, she was acting in defiance. Yet only three months ago an exemplary child. On the fifteenth day of the month of Shvat he had brought the class dried fruit in celebration of the Renewal of Trees, and she alone amid the garbling gigglers had mouthed the grace before and after just as if fruit could be eaten only thus.

She had appeared just before the Renewal, new herself this year in his tenth-grade Mishna class, moreover new to the country, a startled face in the front row of the Graphics track home-room, as the vice principal Mrs. Adeena Plyer had told him to expect: began the year in a better school, couldn't keep up with the language, liked to draw pictures. So here was the girl to match the profile, but he would have recognized this Shifra even had every one of the girls in
the class been new to him. Immediately it was apparent to him she had sat at the head of the class not to command his attention so much as to exclude the other girls from her selective field of vision. She could only be appalled by their wild gesticulation and trumpeting voices, this pale girl with a tender fetal quality to her pale skin, such skin as might erupt with prickly heat at the slightest adult touch, and flaxen-haired, perhaps of the Hassids of Hungary, though to Israel she had come by way of Sydney. How such pallor could have survived the hot sun of Australia he didn't know. Perhaps until her family had landed in the safety of the Holy Land the child had been secreted in her mother's pouch. In her mother's pouch. Later that day Mrs. Adeena Plyer also would appreciate the joke after of course a little added commentary on his part and a literal explanation to the janitor. Kangaroo! The very word was humorous, strange, straining the jaw with the deep palate sounds doubled. He had made it his business, all jokes aside, to thank the vice principal for admitting such a student into the school. May such a student, he had told Mrs. Adeena Plyer, be the rule here and not the exception. In her dress the girl didn't follow the strictures of his Bnei Brak set, but though she wore no stockings, her skirt came well below the knees, and though her shirtsleeves bared her elbows, she left only her collar button open; here you called that modesty. And the girl had besides such an awareness of propriety, such a touching shyness, a humble girl, in her quiet, quiet voice and broken Hebrew, catching herself for poise, catching herself for language. Hers was such a delicacy as might be taken for melancholy, having the same unobtrusive waft, like a refrigerated carnation from the florist's.

Then, less than three months after her arrival, yesterday, the earrings.

Well, he had told himself when they affrighted his eye—hanging beside the hinges of her jaws like shields of pitiable inadequacy, and lurid, lurid—the girl was diffident, he had told himself, but still a
girl, concerned with the opinion of her peers. She could not make her voice heard in their din, so had to find another way to be loud. However, the blood that would rush into her cheeks each time he lauded her midot—the word
dimensions
in the ancient Hebrew of the law interpreters, he might remind the tittering girls, in this context indicated the measures of conduct exclusively—convinced him that his estimation of her would hold, ultimately, more sway than theirs. No need to exercise harsh authority. A single private talk, in the public sphere for decency's sake, would do.

So he had held his tongue until recess. After the bell he had taken a stroll through the yard and found her sitting on a manhole cover, gnawing voraciously on Yemeni fried dough dotted with pepper paste. He settled the right distance from her, across four amot's length of spiny turf, tipped his head and winked to signal, in case she couldn't see, that from behind his beard a smile greeted her. He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, warmed it between both hands, then took out what he wanted. Working his fingers as if snapping to a tune, he flipped his famous medal in the air, over and over, the whirling brass sparking in the sun.

“What did you trade away for that, Shifra?”

Shifra had stopped chewing. Until now, it seemed, she hadn't gathered that he'd sat down to address her. But why else would he sit in her vicinity, though facing slightly away, to provide a man and woman release from thrall?

She stared across the four amot in terror, the color rising, indeed, in her crammed cheeks.

“Food you're allowed to barter,” he told her. “Food is no problem, Shifra. Eat. I'll talk.”

She resumed her chewing, her eyes remaining fixed upon the medal. He inhaled in a brief luxuriance at the chance for lasting impact, raised his eyes towards the dunes beyond the fence, nibbled on his whiskers.

“A week ago I wanted to buy my wife for Shabbat to put on the
table some white carnations,” he began. That he had wanted to buy his wife carnations for Shabbat was true, if not last week then in a time he still recalled. Particulars were of no consequence when he told the story by way of a parable. His wife came to mind naturally. In Shifra he had seen something of Elisheva Durchschlag, mother of his six girls, two of them twins, and God willing any day now maybe a boy. Elisheva possessed wrists so slim he might surround them twice with his own fingers if fingers were ropes. The blue veins inside her wrists were misted over by white skin, but the tendons always bulged as his did only when he clenched exasperated fists. The roots of her thumbs were prone to cramps. Repeatedly he told her she must let the girls peel the potatoes and stitch the hems, but she always forgot which were the damaging tasks. To little Shifra on her island of cement he would get across. “At the florist's,” he told her, “my eyes darkened. True, in the refrigerator behind the glass they had a bucket of white carnations, carnations which HaShem had created white as the neck of a swan, pure white. So did I buy my wife a bunch? No! No. And why? ‘Certainly I have white carnations!' the florist woman says to me when I walk through the door. ‘I have white carnations better than white carnations. Something special.' Shifra,” Mr. Durchschlag said, “when I saw these special carnations I shuddered. Instead of pure white, their petals were streaked with a terrible purple that in nature doesn't exist. But the florist was very proud. ‘I soak their stems in dyed water,' she tells me. I looked in the bucket and it was true. The poison chemical had run through the veins of the pure flower and now the petals, instead of being pure and modest as HaShem our God created them, were streaked with an ugly garish color like, you'll excuse me, the painted cheeks of professional women.”