Sotah (9 page)

She looked at him shyly. “I always used to think there were so many different worlds all going on at the same time. When I was a little girl, I would imagine that just at the moment I was sitting down to breakfast, there was another child somewhere who was hungry and in her world there was no food. Or if I would fall down, I would imagine that in another world at the same time there was no pain, no blood.”

“I’m not talking about different worlds coexisting so much, but of each human being having different floors, different places in themselves where they get off and live.”

“Like an apartment building!”

He flushed. “It does begin to sound silly.”

“No, no. Not at all. It just means there is no real, one, true you, but many yous, all depending on which floor you choose to live at any given time.” He was so interesting, she thought, forgetting he was a man with broad shoulders and a slim, young man’s body. It was so easy to talk to him, as if they had known each other forever. “How do you move from the basement to the roof, though? Can you do it yourself, or do you need a teacher, a guide?”

“Theoretically, and I’m quoting my own teacher here, you can do it independently. But practically, it’s almost impossible without some help. But that teacher can be alive or can have died two hundred years ago. After all, even something as simple as reading, you have to be taught.”

“I don’t think I have the right teacher,” she said, surprising and almost mortifying herself. How could she have said such a thing? But he didn’t look shocked. He looked interested. He waited patiently for her to continue. “I mean, I don’t ever feel challenged, or even elevated. So many times I just do what I’m told. Yet I so much want to feel some movement upward.”

He nodded, his eyes meeting hers. “It’s a yearning every one of us feels. But we men are fighting our way upward through the Talmud. It’s like a war, a battle. Sometimes I grapple with a text and feel it is winning and I am being pushed farther and farther into darkness, into ignorance. Women are more fortunate. You were born closer to the truth. You can feel it instinctively, isn’t that true?”

Was it true or simply a tired cliché? A way of discouraging women from venturing out onto the battlefield? Not that she had any desire to do that. Talmud study was like the Torah itself: enclosed in a velvet robe and silver chalice, hidden behind the closed doors of the Ark in the synagogue. No woman could ever hope to approach it. But sometimes she wondered about all the things she was taught about the reason for women not learning. “Women’s minds are weak,” the Talmud stated. Women don’t have the ability to learn. And then, in the next breath, they told you women didn’t have the time to learn, that they had another role in life that was equally important but different. But if women didn’t have the ability, why did they need to say the other things? Anyhow, she had heard of a religious group of modern women who had opened their own
kollel
and were studying Talmud full-time. She looked up at Abraham, wondering if she should bring any of this up, deciding not to. After all, what would he think? He might think she was one of those American women who kept insisting women were the same as men. A “libber,” she thought they were called. And if he did, he would never go out with her again.

“I don’t always feel that I know what I ought to be doing.”

He’d been sitting with his head bent, his ear inclined toward her, looking down at his feet with utter concentration. But at these words he lifted his head and looked at her, his eyes intimate and knowing, his mouth sly with mischief. “That is why you need a husband,” he said, sliding a fraction of an inch toward her. It was a movement that seemed to her as bold and intimate as an embrace.

The waitress brought some tea and cake. This was unusual, though she wasn’t experienced enough to know it. Until the situation was more serious between a couple, they avoided the intimacy of watching each other actually eat. It was a delightful treat, the rich cake on china plates, the little china teapot, which she handled delicately, pouring the water into her cup. She gave a moment’s thought to filling his cup as well but dismissed it in horror. It would have been too domestic and unacceptably romantic to be pouring a handsome young man, a stranger, tea. He poured his own, waiting until her hands were safely far from the area so that no accidental physical contact could take place, unthinkable for both of them.

They ate and drank, almost in silence, her eyes wandering over the luxurious surroundings that made her feel delightfully spoiled and catered to in a way she had never experienced before and left her with a slight uncomfortable feeling of sin. It wasn’t right. But it was lovely, she told herself. Surprising how many things were.

They walked out into the cold Jerusalem night, and she shivered deliciously. The wind was mild, and the dark trees swayed with the gentle tinkle of wind chimes. They walked toward Yemin Moshe and its windmill. Once a dilapidated slum on the Jordanian border, a place only the poorest lived, it had been transformed by changes in the territorial map into one of the most desirable areas in Jerusalem. The windmill was real, built by a European philanthropist in the 1890s to encourage Jews to leave the safe—if suffocatingly crowded—Jewish quarter within the walls of the Old City in order to pioneer new settlements. The settlement had failed, and the windmill had never had much practical use other than simply as a quaint historical landmark. In fact, the area had never seen more success than it enjoyed now. The poor had been transferred to small apartments on the outskirts of town while rich foreigners and well-connected local artists had been allowed to restore and lavishly expand the run-down stone dwellings.

It was strange, she thought as she walked along the long narrow cobblestone streets. The houses were so close together, the streets so narrow, it reminded her of her old poor neighborhood in Meah Shearim. And yet, how beautiful it all was! Artistic grillwork had replaced rusting metal. Fine polished wood framed the windows. The houses had been enlarged, while somehow retaining the original architectural detail. And gardens, trees, hanging vines, and potted plants were everywhere. She felt a sudden, untoward respect toward wealth, the kind of wealth that made such things possible. To turn the familiar, the ordinary, into something so amazingly beautiful and charming. To create such loveliness out of the dull, practical ugliness of everyday life. It was a kind of blessed magic, wasn’t it?

Or perhaps, she thought, it is simply the dark beauty of the night that I am feeling, that is speeding through me like a drug. My first night with a handsome, intelligent young man so close beside me, attentive and solicitous in the faint moonlight. The magic hour had touched her with its potent charm. She too was transformed from her everydayness into a creature of infinite loveliness, desirable and gifted.

Their footsteps echoed in the dark as they wandered together down the steps toward the little park below. There the white, illuminated walls of the ancient Old City rose before them like smoky incense out of the darkness, almost a dream. The fresh, raw scent of wet leaves rose from the Aleppo pines, the early blooming almond, and the olive and carob trees. The spicy aroma of bridal veil, cattail, winter jasmine, and lavender combined and wafted around them, filmy and tenacious as a spider’s web. They did not stand very close to each other, so that even a casual brush of arm against coat was not possible. Yet they were breathing the same scent, drinking in the same ancient ghostly beauty of the city, their faces touched by the same gentle wind. They were together.

He was a complete stranger, she told herself, trying to make some sense of it. To be sensible. It was just the thrill of being out with a young man that made her heart beat so fast. It was only because it was her first time. The thick dark color of his hair, the dark, beautiful curve that hollowed his cheeks, the muscles she sensed beneath the good black Sabbath coat, had nothing to do with it. Nothing, she told herself severely, close to tears of frightened joy, nothing at all.

They walked, sharing a short sentence, a word, but mostly in silence. It had begun to drizzle lightly. She watched the drops mist his black felt hat, making it sparkle under the lamplight as if touched by fairy dust.

“Your hat,” she finally said, reluctant to acknowledge the impediment to the evening lasting forever.

“What?” He looked up at her, puzzled.

“Do you like the rain?” she said with a little smile.

“Is it raining?” he asked her.

Chapter six

“
H
ow can I explain it? It just feels like I’ve known him such a long time. Did you feel that way with Yaakov?” Dina asked Dvorah.

The two sisters were walking through the crowded
shuk
in Meah Shearim, buying baked goods for the Sabbath. It was a crisp, cold Friday morning with a sky like blue glass. All along the cobblestoned streets Dina could see the puddles of water being swept out front doors as the tired old houses were scrubbed and polished to a high gloss in final ablutions before the day of rest. The spicy smell of cholent, a heavy stew of beans, barley, potatoes, and meat, wafted into the street. The old stones glistened pink and beige from the morning dew, their dark crevices bleached by the warm winter sun.

Did she really feel that way, after only four meetings? Dvorah thought with a touch of envy. How odd. She still didn’t feel comfortable with Yaakov, even now when their bodies were finally joined together in the most extreme manner possible. She had just found out she was carrying his child.

She hadn’t told anyone yet. First, because it was considered an invitation to the Evil Eye to talk of it until the fetus was three months old; and second, because she hadn’t sorted out her own emotions yet. She knew when she presented this news to the world, she would have to develop the proper face to go with it. The face that revealed the correct feelings of gratefulness to G-d, recognition of blessing, anxious maternal yearnings, undiluted joy. But first, first, she told herself, I must find out how I really feel, and then it will be all right. I can go through anything if I know how I really feel, she told herself. Right now was too soon. There was only shock now, and a secret, shameful dismay. Nothing there she could admit or reveal.

It would take time. She looked at Dina, blossoming and full of calm happiness. “Don’t compare your experience with mine. Remember, Yaakov wasn’t my first
shiddach
.”

“But does that matter? Isn’t it just the way you feel? Does it matter when the person comes along? If he’s your first or your hundredth …”

“Hundredth!”

“Well, you know what I mean.”

“I suppose I do,” Dvorah said uncomfortably. She had no answer. “I’m very happy for you, Dina. Just …”

Dina looked up suspiciously. This was happening a lot lately. Dvorah seemed to be backing off, to be hedging.

“I care for him. He is a good man. He is right for me. I feel this.”

“You’re so incredibly young, how can you know?”

“I know,” Dina repeated with uncharacteristic stubbornness.

“Just don’t get too attached yet. There is a long way to go,” Dvorah warned. She was sorry the moment she’d said it, seeing Dina’s face burn into a flame of unhappiness.

Dvorah felt the complex emotions of unworthy envy and unselfish concern coalesce with uncomfortable results. She was really happy for Dina. After all, hadn’t she engineered it all? Yet she couldn’t help contrasting her sister’s uncomplicated excitement and joy with her own misery and uncertainty. And then there was something else, a conversation with Yaakov that weighed on her like a sack of ice on a winter’s day.

“But what’s wrong?” Dina asked. “Abraham’s already spoken to
Aba
and
Ima
.”

“I know. And
Aba
thinks the world of him. But it isn’t over yet. There’s still, you know, his parents have to meet ours.”

“
Aba
said next week, Thursday. That isn’t so long.” A young man passed her, and she saw the furtive interest in his quickly averted glance. It was something she wouldn’t have noticed just a little while before. But now she’d become highly sensitive, like a quivering bud unfolding in its first bloom. She was aware of every inch of her body, her eyes, her hair, her tiny waist and slender, perfect legs.

The world seemed so different. This connection between men and women was so strong, a current that flowed with the dangerous high voltage of electric power, invisible until you felt the powerful shock in all its numbing reality.

She was not the same person she had been two weeks before. She didn’t even recognize that little, ignorant girl, that sheltered child, satisfied with childish things. The person she was now was frighteningly willful. Something long slumbering had been shaken into life and had sprung up and grabbed her in an intractable embrace, molding her will to its.

Was it Abraham? Or was it simply the sweet, dangerous knowledge that he had brought her?

A person was not supposed to learn Kabala, the mystic secrets at the heart of the Creation, until one was forty, because before then one didn’t have the maturity to survive being swept away by it. Only four had learned this knowledge: one had died, the other gone insane, and the third had lost his faith completely. Only Rabbi Akiva had ascended into the stratosphere of forbidden knowledge and returned unharmed.

But what knowledge was there, she wondered, more perilous than what she had just discovered? The knowledge that the body yearns for connection, for hands and lips and the press of one heart against another? And that these things had nothing to do with her soul? What could be more perilous, more startling, than that? she wondered. And now, traveling so fast into her own stratosphere, which of the four things would happen to her? she wondered. Death, insanity, apostasy, or survival?

She was a little angry, too. Why hadn’t anyone thought to tell her? All the teachers in Beit Yaakov with their mealymouthed hints and pious platitudes. Even her mother and Dvorah, married women! Why hadn’t they prepared her for what her body was going to do, how it would rise up and assert itself and block out all reason? They must have known, she thought.