Tinderbox (2 page)

None of what Eva said was comprehensible to Marina—everyone knows that Indians aren’t
Jews, rich people in Miraflores and San Isidro are Jews—but she, nonetheless, repeated
it in the morning to her employer, Mrs. Alicia, whom Marina hoped to enlist in the
service of Eva’s removal from her boyfriend’s living-room floor.

Alicia immediately recognized Eva as one of the mestizo self-proclaimed Jews from
Iquitos over which her Lima synagogue has been divided for years—most of the Ashkenazi
congregation wanting nothing to do with these third- and fourth-generation offspring
of Sephardic turn-of-the-century rubber traders and their Indian common-law wives,
whom they view as having no legitimate claim to Jewish identity, while a vocal few,
including two of the synagogue elders, proclaim it monstrous for the congregation
not to respond to pleas for Jewish education, no matter the bloodlines of the seekers.

Retreating to her bedroom, the only place in the house safely out of the maid’s earshot,
Alicia reached for the phone, hitting the automatic dial button for the cell phone
of her sister, Ursula.

Ursula was in her backyard, examining the sloppy work of her gardener. “This,” Ursula
said, after hearing her sister’s story about Eva, “could be a disaster. Remember the
four Indians last year from Iquitos who wanted Rabbi Menendez to circumcise them?
When Menendez said no since they’d all been baptized and couldn’t understand why they
couldn’t also worship Jesus Christ, Clara Bejan contacted that kooky rabbi from St.
Louis, who flew down to meet them. I heard Clara’s children were dropped from everyone’s
bar-mitzvah-party list.”

Ursula looked over the top of the wall that separates Alicia’s property from her own,
behind which she can see the roof of her sister’s pool house. It annoyed her that
Alicia had called when she was so close.

“I have to do something,” Alicia said. “You know Marina, my maid. She’s very cocky.
She’ll gossip and turn me into a brute.”

“Marina probably just wants the girl away from her boyfriend. Is she pretty?”

“She has a nice little figure. But when you look at her up close, she seems unhealthy.
Her hair is too thin, like a woman our age, and her nose is spotted with blackheads.”

“Men don’t notice those things. Marina just doesn’t want this Eva camping out with
her boyfriend.”

“She’s very bright. Her English is excellent, as good as ours, and she says she’s
been teaching herself Hebrew too. There’s just something a little strange about her.
Marina said her boyfriend told her the family had problems.”

With
a woman our age
, Ursula thought of her cousin Myra, a mousy, bookish wallflower when they’d first
met—Ursula a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence, Myra a freshman at nearby Barnard—but now
the handsomest woman she knew of their generation.

“I’ll call Myra. Maybe she knows someone who could use the girl in New York. They
never have proper help there.”

4

Myra picks up after the third ring. It being a Wednesday, a day she doesn’t see patients,
she has spent the morning writing at the farm table: a meditation on the teleology
of love on which she has been working now for nearly a year. Strangely, she had been
thinking about Ursula and Ursula’s obsession with her own breasts, which this morning
struck Myra as rooted in the maternal starvation of children raised by maids. Too
sharp in the nose and broad in the beam to be called beautiful when they first met,
Ursula had been, nonetheless, stunningly sensual. Men and women alike longed for the
dark nipples hinted at beneath the pointy-tipped brassieres she wore under her red
cashmere sweaters in winter, her boat-necked dresses in summer. There was nothing,
she would tell Myra, that she loved more than to unsnap her brassiere, cup her large,
soft breasts in her hands, and feel a warm mouth (man’s or woman’s made no difference
to her) clamped on those nipples and then moving down her flawless olive skin.

Myra listens to her cousin’s latest soap opera. Her father and Ursula’s father had
been brothers, the yin and yang male bookends of the family: Myra’s father, a string-beany
fourteen when he left Ukraine in the fall of 1910, never again to see his roly-poly
baby brother or any other member of his immediate family aside from his older sister,
Misha, whom he’d been conscripted to chaperone on her voyage to New York to join her
fiancé—a fiancé who failed to meet the boat, having left days before it docked for
a prospecting scheme in Utah, from which, if he ever returned, he never notified Misha.

She sips her now cold coffee while Ursula tells her about Eva and Marina and the Sturm
und Drang in her synagogue—the synagogue founded by Ursula’s father, who, three years
after Myra’s father landed in New York, emigrated with the rest of the family to Lima,
where, as an adult, he transformed the import-export business his father had started
into an impressive enterprise diversified in real estate and shopping malls, and then
built a fantastic villa in Miraflores with a swimming pool and trampoline and five
maids, who did the mopping and cooking and tending of his vain wife and two daughters.

Having no experience herself with South American maids and the normativeness of their
duplicities or the extent of the responsibility entailed, Myra tells her cousin that
of course she will keep her ears open for a position for Eva.

“Anything, sweetheart, ironing, cooking, babysitting. I’d find her something myself,
but … It’s a crime the way they snub these people in Lima.”

5

The idea that she might herself hire Eva arrives in the evening while Myra is watering
her garden, her thoughts cycling between her ambivalence about giving up her solitude
and her happiness about having her son and his family, especially Omar, with her for
the year. What she is not looking forward to is a year of laundry and cooking and
dishes. Perhaps she could hire this Eva, bright and hardworking, Ursula said, to help
with the housework and Omar.

Myra waits until she assumes Omar will be in bed before telephoning Adam and Rachida
to hear their thoughts.

“Hi, Grandma,” Omar says.

“You’re up late. Don’t you have school tomorrow?”

“Rachida’s still at her office. She said she’d give me my bath when she got home.
I’m watching a DVD about the human body. Did you know that children have more bones
than grownups? I have almost one hundred bones more than you!”

During the first few years of Omar’s life, Myra struggled, not with her behavior,
which she has always kept in check, but with her inclination to make private judgments
about the way Adam and Rachida handle Omar: their looseness regarding bedtime, their
permissiveness with letting him eat whatever he wants (for years, almost exclusively
grilled cheese), Rachida’s allowing him to call her by her first name. It has all
seemed rife with the overindulgence of first-time parents, with the difficulty she
has seen in so many of her patients with feeling that they are, in fact, the adults.
Her son and his wife have never asked her advice on anything, and she has known better
than to offer it. Now, though, with Omar six and a half, she has to admit that whatever
they are doing, different as it might be from what seems sensible to her, Omar is
a sweet and thoughtful child.

“Can I talk to your dad?”

Not until Adam squeals, “Iquitos? She’s from Iquitos?” does Myra make the connection
of Iquitos with
Fitzcarraldo
, the movie that launched Adam at twelve on the course of becoming a screenwriter.
By the time he was fifteen, he’d seen the movie, set and filmed in Iquitos, a dozen
times and watched the documentary about the making of the movie nearly as many times—the
parallel between the grandiose project of the film’s protagonist, Fitzcarraldo, who
attempts to drag a ship over a mountain so as to reach otherwise inaccessible rubber
trees with which he hopes to finance the building of an opera house in Iquitos, and
that of the filmmaker, Werner Herzog, with his insistence that he film a real boat
being dragged over a real mountain in a real jungle, having struck Adam as nothing
short of mystical.

“Why don’t you talk it over with Rachida?” Myra suggests. “If she’s interested, I
could let Eva come a few weeks before you arrive as a trial.”

6

Rachida finds Omar asleep on the couch and Adam staring at his computer screen.

“What the hell is going on here? I tried to call you half a dozen times to say I was
going to be late, but no one picked up.”

“Did you know that there are several hundred offspring of Moroccan Jews living along
the Amazon? At the turn of the twentieth century, hundreds of young Moroccan-Jewish
men, a lot of them were kids, not even twenty years old, traveled up the Amazon, starting
in Belém in Brazil and eventually making their way to Iquitos in Peru in these crude
boats they made themselves.”

“Did you give Omar his bath?”

Adam takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. He pulls his beard. Fourteen years ago,
when they first met, he still had vestiges of his childhood beauty: his mother’s slender
form and delicate features. Now he has the ungainly middle-aged flab of a once-skinny
child who never developed the muscles to use his arms and legs in a powerful way,
and his face is half-hidden by the scruffy beard. Without his glasses, he squints
in the harsh light. He swivels in his chair so that he faces Rachida, whose outline—the
cropped hair, the practical clothes—she knows he can barely make out.

“It’s an amazing story. These guys basically became the brokers between the native
Indian rubber tappers and the shipowners who transported the raw rubber to Europe.
By 1910, two hundred Moroccan-Jewish men were living in Iquitos, and there were businesses
named, I’m not joking, Casa Khan, Casa Israel, and Casa Cohen. These guys kept their
Moroccan wives, but they also took common-law Indian wives and had lots of babies.
Then this English botanist smuggled 70,000 rubber seeds from Brazil and planted them
in the Royal Botanic Gardens to see if they could survive in a different climate.
When they did, the seedlings were sent to Malaysia and other parts of Asia, where
transportation was easier and the plantation owners didn’t have to deal with unruly
labor who carried poison darts, and, poof, end of the Amazonian rubber boom. The Jewish
guys just packed up and went back to Fez or Rabat or Tangier, leaving behind their
common-law wives and all the kids.”

“Why are you talking about this?”

“This girl my mother wants to hire to help with Omar and the housework. She’s from
this community that’s existed now for nearly a century—the great-great-grandchildren
of those Moroccan-Jewish guys, Indians basically, who identify themselves as Jews
even though they’ve almost all gone to Catholic schools and have only the vaguest
ideas about Judaism.”

Rachida doesn’t even try to stifle her sigh. Adam should know that she doesn’t give
a fuck about Moroccan Jews. When she left Essaouira fifteen years ago, it was to get
away from the dying community there. She just wants to get off her aching feet. She
looks around for somewhere to sit other than the folding chair that came with the
card table, but with Adam in the desk chair and Omar on the couch, there is nowhere
else.

When they first moved in, she intended, not to decorate—she hates that word, which
reminds her of her mother’s pompous aspirations to Europeanize their mellah home—but
to make the rooms comfortable. She wanted to buy an armchair for the empty corner
of the living room and a real desk for the dining alcove and some shelving for Omar’s
toys. But the house quickly turned into an endless series of problems, the leaking
roof, the fuses blowing if they run the microwave with the air conditioner on, and
Adam incapable of producing the tone of voice required to get the landlord to respond.
Then there has been her father, no longer able to stand for hours at his jewelry bench,
so that she’s taken to sending him a few hundred dollars a month, the money she might
have spent on furniture (money she’s not mentioned to Adam and is certain her father
has not mentioned to her mother), and she reached the breaking point with her practice
and it has been all she can do to keep up her office hours and take care of Omar and
fill out the respecialization fellowship applications.

Rachida opens the folding chair and leans down to untie her shoes. It has been years
since she’s been charmed by Adam’s obsessions, and her patience with stories about
the valiant efforts of Jews to worship throughout the Diaspora runs to minutes, but
this particular story about Moroccan Jews in South America does ring a bell with something
her father once told her.

“Some of the women from this community, Ursula told my mother, sent the women’s group
at her synagogue a letter asking for instruction in Jewish cooking and family planning
and including the question if someone could please explain to them why they couldn’t
have pictures of Jesus in their houses. A lot of the younger members, like Eva, have
developed the ambition of emigrating to Israel. Ursula says her synagogue has treated
the emissaries the Iquitos Jews have sent to Lima abysmally, refusing their pleas
for bar mitzvahs and circumcisions on the grounds that not having had Jewish mothers,
they’re not Jews.”

“Who is Eva?”

Adam puts his glasses back on. Reading the scrolling text on his computer screen has
left him with a throbbing behind his eyes. He wishes he could go upstairs and lock
the bedroom door and look at one of the magazine pictures he keeps stashed in a large
envelope in a file box at the bottom of his closet. Thinking about the photographs
gives him a half erection, and for a moment he imagines getting up to touch his wife,
but it strikes him as preposterous. He is afraid she would laugh out loud.

Rachida pulls off her socks. Adam watches while she massages her feet: wide across
the arches and surprisingly small. For a long time, Rachida had been the one who would
get things started between them. Both of them lacked any prior experience, but she
knew exactly what she wanted and gave detailed directions. After Omar was born, she
stopped initiating. Adam’s desire for her has similarly diminished, but there are
still moments like this one, with his erection now pressing against his briefs, when
he wants to have sex and feels no aversion at the thought of it being with her. What
he has never figured out, though, is how to shift from talking about who will take
the laundry to the laundromat to the language of hands and tongues and more.