Sotah (34 page)

“Don’t you love your wife?”

“My wife …” He had many cleverly bitter things to say but shrewdly thought better of it. “She is a good person, a very pious woman. But right from the start, I had no say. It was a
shiddach
. I was nineteen years old. I was considered a promising scholar then, and I was active in politics. My family are known as
geonim
. My father-in-law, a wealthy and persuasive man, was very anxious to talk my parents into a match. What did I know? I was nineteen years old. I didn’t even know what a girl was. I had never in my life even talked to one who wasn’t a close relative. Before they set the wedding date, I saw her for ten minutes, and even in that ten minutes my father walked in and asked: ‘So
nu
already?’ But even in only ten minutes, my future wife made it clear what she wanted: Torah, Torah, and more Torah.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that!” Dina felt herself near tears. He was coming too close to her, his words burrowing down deep beneath layers and layers. They were setting something free, a heavily chained trunk was suddenly flying open. It was terrifying.

“You don’t understand, and yet you already judge and condemn! You see, I thought I wanted that, too. I wanted with all my heart to be like my father. But I’m not my father. I can’t be my father.” His fist struck firmly against the steering wheel, like a gavel used by a judge just before pronouncing sentence. “Even before I married, I was different. I liked to know things. I used to read newspapers, and listen to the radio in town inside some cafe. I even went to the movies once.”

“What was it like?” Her tone was dreamy, forgetful, her anger past.

“It was … fun.”

She didn’t even know what that word meant anymore. She wondered if she had ever known. She wanted to weep. She was only eighteen years old.

“I told my father-in-law I wanted to leave the yeshiva and go to work. Ho, what battles! My wife was furious. You’d think I’d announced I wanted to open a massage parlor! Her family was furious. They’d expected me to go on learning, to become a
rosh yeshiva
. But I wasn’t making a decent living. Is it wrong to want to support your wife and children, to want nice things?” His tone turned acid. “So, finally, my father-in-law agreed to find me a position in the diamond business. His family has connections.

“Tel Aviv is different from Jerusalem. I feel free in Tel Aviv. I used to bring bathing clothes with me and go to the beach after work or early in the morning. I’d put on a bathing cap and tuck my
payess
inside and just walk down to the shore. No one would stare at me. I felt like everybody else.”

“You could have gone to the separate men’s beach in Tel Aviv,” she said with a try at severity.

“But I liked the women.” His eyes caught hers boldly. “I liked to see them in their bathing suits. The human body is so beautiful. Like a work of art. G-d made it so. What is wrong with appreciating that?”

How was it that she could not think of an answer to that, an answer she knew so well? Lust, wandering eyes, it all led to evil and
gehinnom.
Why couldn’t she think of that?

He looked at her, monitoring her response carefully. Satisfied, he continued. “But I wasn’t happy leaving it at that. I wanted companionship. Someone to share my life with. My wife is so closed. I can’t even talk to her about the slightest thing that means poking your head outside the synagogue or the kitchen.”

“Did you find companionship?” Dina asked with stunning accusation.

Noach Saltzman was not prepared for such a direct question. It hit him in a sensitive spot for some reason, a place he was not aware still existed in his callous, well-experienced body and mind. But nothing about this girl was typical. He had waited for her with unheard-of patience. He wanted her desperately, and this gave him a new weakness he did not know how to handle.

“Yes, I found it,” he said frankly, shocking himself. “Again, again, and again. I’m a womanizer, I guess you’d call it. A skirt chaser. I am looking for love, for the one great love of my life. And now that at last I have found her, she’s going to spit on me and throw me out. Isn’t that right? Because I am not clever enough. I could lie so cleverly to all the others. I was so wise and practiced. But with you, with the one woman in the whole world … I do everything in the worst possible way …”

He started the car, overwhelmed by the stupidity and hopelessness of his performance. What had gotten into him? What devil? To tell her the truth? It was all over, hopeless.

They rode all the way back in silence. He opened the door for her, afraid to look her in the face. To his astonishment, he felt cool hands burrow into his thick hair, just at the back of his neck. “You mustn’t think these things, Noach. For your own good, we must both forget.” Her breath was cool and fragrant over his eyes and cheeks as she whispered the words. Her little hand burned against his skin. Then he heard her delicate small footsteps, hurrying and anxious on the stairs.

Chapter thirty-one

D
ina opened the door slowly, without knocking. Perhaps Judah would be asleep, she hoped dully. I can’t face him right now. In the morning it would be better. It would be easier. I won’t remember so much. Her fingers still tingled deliciously. She felt enveloped by a new power, a force outside herself that was suddenly pulling the strings to which she had no choice but to dance. It seemed all preordained somehow. Her choices seemed suddenly to have been taken away from her.

She knew, and had always known, that one day it would happen. The illegitimate feelings she had given birth to and tried to smother in infancy would spring up fully grown, monsters of her own creation. And in a strange contradiction, she welcomed the horror, longed for it. Anything passionate was better than this quiet, dull contentment, this correct, proper half living that had been forced on her.

She thought in overwrought, schoolgirl clichés straight out of the romance novels she had never read: he had come for her, the true man of her heart. He had swept her off her feet in passion. He would risk the world for her. She found herself wallowing in joyous pride. To mean so much to someone else! Someone so handsome and learned. Someone with clean, immaculate fingers. A
talmid chachem!
All his faults she easily forgave. They made him, if anything, even more glamorous. He was living out all the sins she knew she wanted to try.

What would it be like to go swimming at the beach surrounded by men in bathing suits who would look at your skimpily covered body with interest and appreciation? What would it be like to sit in a darkened movie theater and watch forbidden, enticing stories acted out larger than life in front of your eyes? Most of all, what would it be like to know? To read and hear and see whatever you fancied?

Without knowing it, by telling the sad and unfortunate truth, Noach had established a deeper bond of intimacy with Dina than he could possibly have done with the most accomplished and well thought out of lies. His sins coupled with his uncharacteristic honesty had won her over. Here was a man who dared all for love! He had tried many women and wanted her! While Judah … why, she was probably the first girl he had ever gone out with! What value did his adoration have, based as it was on so little? With Noach she felt for the first time in her life the perfect fullness of being a woman, the amazing power.

If she had been perfectly honest with herself, she would have had to admit that what she was feeling most was a perverse sense of personal accomplishment. Until now she’d felt she had done nothing on her own. Even her good deeds, her piety, were somehow a legacy, not a personal choice. She had not known evil, and thus the good had fallen into her lap. She had not had to choose. Even in love, in marriage, she had not achieved any triumph. She had not married the man she really wanted, but simply someone who had been chosen for her and who wanted her.

And yet … he was such a good man. She could not be indifferent to that, to his joy in her. Physically she had to admit she loved Judah. But he was no challenge. His love for her proved nothing, neither her beauty nor her goodness nor her rise to a new social status. He had to love her. He was her husband. Whereas Noach, Noach had chosen her from among the many. Noach, who had endless choices. Noach, who was immaculate and learned. He had courage she admired because she could not see its dark roots.

Despite the lateness of the hour, Judah was still up. At the first sight of her husband bathed in golden lamplight, sitting on his comfortable chair, an open Talmud on his lap, she felt a heavy thump of foreboding go off in her head like the sickening noise of an accident. He looked up slowly, a familiar loving smile crossing his warm, gentle lips. “Dinaleh!” He closed the book and put it aside, motioning for her to come. She walked to him, feeling the nauseating sea of guilt break over her insides.

She slipped onto Judah’s lap and laid her head against his shoulder like a little girl.

“Did you have a hard time in the shop?”

She nodded, not looking at him. “Were you worried? You didn’t have to be, you know. I’m not a child.” Her tone was peevish.

“No. I know that, my little darling wife. My little dove …” He stroked her cheek, which grew warm and pink from the caress. “But I can’t help being concerned.”

What was she going to do!

“Judah,” she whispered.

“Yes, my little dove?”

“Judah, did you ever think about going to the movies?”

“The movies?” He was thoroughly puzzled.

“Or reading the newspaper, or listening to the radio?”

“Not really. My life is fine as it is. I have you and the baby and my shop. What would I need those things for?”

“Just to try them. Just for … fun!”

“Fun?” He seemed puzzled. It was not a word
haredi
adults ever used, except perhaps to describe events on Purim, the holiday in which merrymaking, overdrinking, and overeating were considered a positive commandment. “Fun is for children,” he scoffed. “I like my pleasures deep, not shallow. You are my dearest pleasure, my love. You know that. I could never treat that lightly. It means far too much to me.”

She found this answer annoying in the extreme. He took all the small, frivolous pleasures and discarded them because he wanted the big, serious ones. She felt absurdly threatened and defeated, as if he had physically taken something away from her. “But don’t you sometimes wish you could try something new?”

“New is forbidden by the Torah,” he said with a half smile, partially mocking the oft stated rationale behind some of the more extreme
haredi
sects that saw in their fight against the modern world a glowing ideal in itself.

“Why didn’t you call the store if you were worried?” she complained.

“I didn’t want to disturb you. I figured that you must be up to your neck in work.” He found himself surprisingly defensive.

She jumped off his lap. “You might have called just to see if I was all right,” she said unreasonably, with irritation.

“Would you have wanted me to? Wouldn’t it have felt like I was checking up on you?”

She was struck by the truth of his words, which made her even angrier. “And what would I care if you wanted to check up on me? Do I have something to hide? Oh, this is intolerable.” She went into the bedroom and slammed the door.

Judah sat motionless, feeling the sudden cold where her thighs had rested against his legs, her head against his shoulder. He slapped his palm against his head. Dummkopf! Stupid head! But he had been grossly misunderstood. How could she have misunderstood him so perfectly, with such perfect injustice? He chalked it up to his usual clumsiness. My mother was right, he thought glumly. I don’t have any idea about how to treat a woman.

He walked slowly toward the bedroom, opening the door diffidently. But the lights were already out and she was already in bed, thoroughly covered up.

“Dina,” he whispered, sitting beside her on the bed, his large hand resting on the covers. He felt a faint stir. “I’m sorry, forgive me.”

She made no move, feeling his hand warm and heavy above her, holding her down. If I am still, he will go away, she told herself. She hardened her heart against his pleading. Leave me alone. Just leave me alone already, she thought a bit desperately. It was too degrading to see him apologize so abjectly when the fault had been all her own. But her heart was closed now, encased in something hard and cold. He was a nuisance. Soon he would go away. She kept perfectly still, as if her life depended on it.

Nothing changed. Everything changed. She woke up in the morning and did her ablutions, but when it came time to pray, she couldn’t say the words anymore. When you prayed, your mind and heart were open, vulnerable. You conversed with G-d. For the first time in her life, Dina Reich Gutman was afraid of this conversation.

Even the baby seemed suddenly abstract. His cries, his smiles, in which she had taken so much joy, seemed strangely distant, a kiss behind glass. Her mind and heart were elsewhere. She was already in the shop. It was already six-thirty. The little bell was jangling, the door was opening.

A few times she found herself walking toward the window, even though she knew Noach usually left for work around nine. Yet there was this almost irresistible urge to go there, to stand and search for him; to see the longing in his eyes, the white, promising fingers pulling back the white curtains.

Judah left a little later than usual. She had found the right face, the right voice, for Judah. She was bright and careless and hard as stone. She smiled at him without warmth and chattered to him nonstop without interest. A few times he had tried to break through to her, but she had blocked him with that pleasant, hard brightness that was as impenetrable as hatred. She was already dreaming of what life would be like without him.

It was an irrational dream. Always he seemed to just disappear into thin air. There was no unpleasantness or recriminations. No rabbis or divorce courts, no handwringing neighbors or relatives. Just a magic fairy wand floating over her life, taking Judah out without harming him or anyone else, leaving behind Noach and a clear path.