The Sacrifice of Tamar (29 page)

“You’re right, Jen. I don’t care about myself. I never have!” Tamar said with sudden passionate despair. “I wish I could just die—disappear. That would be best. Josh would remarry… some nice girl who’d give him many children. My mother would have her faith to sustain her. Rivkie would find another baby-sitter doormat… It would solve everything—”

“You don’t really mean that,” Jenny interrupted her.

“Yes she does,” Hadassah mocked. “Poor little self-sacrificing me. Let me put myself on the altar, like Isaac. A real
tzdakis
. . .”

“I hate you!” Tamar shouted.

“Who cares? But you know what? Since you came here for my wise advice, I’ll tell you what you should do: You’ve chosen your life. Now live it! Do what a pious matron in Orchard Park would do in your situation. Have faith. Have the baby. Surely G-d, your good pal, your close friend, wouldn’t let it turn out black… After all, He’s the one who controls these things, isn’t He? So what are you worried about?”

“Hadassah, shut up!” Jenny said with sudden fury. “Tamar, listen to me. We aren’t Catholics who put the unborn child’s life before the mother’s! If this baby threatens your life physically or emotionally, it’s considered a
rodef
, someone who’s trying to kill you. Your life comes first.”

“But what if it isn’t a
rodef
? What if it isn’t the rapist’s child? What if it’s Josh’s child?”

“Josh? Your husband? But how could that—Tamar! You didn’t?! Not the same week!”

“The same night,” she whispered.

“How could you!”

“It was my mikvah night. You’re supposed to make love on your mikvah night. But it was more than that. I thought if I made love to Josh, that would wash it all away, all the ugliness and pain and degradation. His body would wash away the other man’s, his kisses would cleanse me…”

There was complete silence.

“You idiot!” Hadassah shrugged.

“Hadassah, stop it!” Jenny pleaded. “Tamar, what’s done is done. Don’t decide this by yourself. Don’t have it on your conscience. You and Josh should talk…”

“It isn’t fair,” Tamar said almost inaudibly, ignoring them both, her eyes looking off into some dark, distant corner of the room. “We had a deal. The window shouldn’t have been open. I shouldn’t have agreed to baby-sit. The rapist should have been run over by a car on his way…”

“There is no deal, Tamar.” Jenny shook her head.

“
Yes!
There
is
a deal!” she screamed, a primal, awful sound that stunned them, a sound like an animal’s caught in a torturing trap. “There is! G-d is supposed to interfere—to watch out for His obedient children…”

Jenny put her arms around her, hugging her tight, swaying with her back and forth as she sobbed. Hadassah leaned back, her face pale, her fingers trembling.

“Why? Why me? And my parents, all those horrible things in the Holocaust, why them?”

“Why anyone?” Jenny said softly. “G-d can’t stop evil things from happening. He can’t stop rapists and murderers and dirty old men… Because if those people can’t choose to do bad things, then none of us can choose to do good. We’d all be like little
machines, wind-up toys, puppets. What value would our lives have? What value any good thing we choose to do? But you must have called on Him when it was happening? Are you sure He didn’t hear you?”

G-d, just don’t let him kill the baby. Just don’t let me die. Anything but that. Let us live. Please, dear G-d!

Tamar looked up, surprised, her tears gone. “I did call on Him, and He gave me everything I prayed for,” she whispered with strange wonderment, startled by the sudden insight. “And I want a child so badly, so badly! I’ve prayed so hard and so long, and now I’m pregnant…” A tremor rolled downward through her body, making her shake. “G-d, I don’t know what to do!” she said suddenly, hugging herself, all her anger suddenly, piteously, draining away, like a bottle left gently on its side.

“Here, drink this,” Hadassah said, handing her a drink and pouring another for herself. She looked down into Tamar’s tearful eyes and felt a stab of compassion and a curious sense of bitterness.

“What’s in it?” Tamar mumbled, looking at the orange liquid.

“Trust me on this one small thing, dear. I don’t know much about anything else. But in this one area, I’m sure I’m right.” She sighed. “Just drink it.”

“She’s right. Drink it, Tamar. And then just tell us what you think it is you want. What would make you happy,” Jenny urged.

Tamar drained the glass and felt the liquid course down her throat, heating up her veins, dulling some of the sharp pain in her soul. She felt her eyelids grow heavy and her chest grow warm and light. She thought that she now understood drunks. Sometimes life couldn’t be borne unanesthetized.

“All I want is to know where I went wrong.” She shook her head despondently. “That’s the worst part of the… the… whole… Afterward, picking over my entire life, searching for
what I’d done that had earned me such a punishment. It’s like sifting through some stinking garbage can, looking for something you’ve accidentally thrown out that you desperately need back.

“Over and over I’ve gone through my life. I thought maybe it was because I wore that hat instead of covering all my hair with a wig that time… Or maybe it was because I had these bad thoughts about the mikvah that night, wishing I didn’t have to stand there naked and be inspected. Or maybe because I once put cold chicken to warm on the hot plate Shabbos morning even though I knew it was against the
halacha
to let it get so hot the fat would melt. Josh told me I had desecrated the Sabbath and made me throw it out… I still don’t know… can’t figure… But I was never very smart, both of you know that.

“I could never keep up. Rivkie is perfect. She always comes out on top in every situation. And Hadassah is so beautiful and from such an important family, and Jenny is so smart and self-sufficient… And what am I? Remember what Freda Einkorn called me? ‘The only ugly Queen Esther.’ You have no idea how many years it’s taken me to get over that! I don’t know if I ever will. I felt so lovely and glamorous in all those veils and all that lipstick. But that’s me. I always think I’m doing the right thing, that I’m
b’seder
, but it’s not true, never… never true… right… not right,” she slurred, the vodka gradually loosening her control. “Exact opposite. Nothing I do, think, feel…”

She closed her eyes for a moment as a weariness washed through her. “Can’t understand cruelty… cruel people. Makes me feel like… choking. Parents’ fault. They are… were… still can’t believe
Tateh’s
—my
tateh’s
—dead.” She wiped her eyes harshly. Jenny patted her arm.

“I’ll be all… Just… wait a minute… Kind. My parents… always so kind. And both of you. My friends. Kind. To spend this time with me… Hadassah has other things… better things
. . . And you, Jen… I tried not to… didn’t want you to have this pain. Wanted to keep it all hid, not to hurt anybody, embarrass anybody. Not to make anybody sad. Just like…” She took another long sip and sat quietly, contentedly, her eyes closed. They watched her sleep.

Her eyes opened drowsily and she smiled at them sadly. “
Mameh
and
Tateh
. They always smiled. They never talked about the camps, the war… Only last year I found these photographs in
Mameh’s
drawer. A picture of a handsome young man and a pretty woman holding a beautiful little boy in her arms; a photograph of a small, charming woman with a little girl and a baby boy in her arms… ‘Who are they?’ I asked
Mameh
. ‘Me,’ she said, ‘and my first husband and my firstborn, my little Duvid. And the other is your father’s first wife, his two children.’

“My half brother Duvid starved to death in my mother’s arms on the train to Auschwitz. My father’s children were gassed with their mother. I had two half brothers and a half sister who were murdered, and I never knew! My own parents’ children, and I never knew! And because I never knew, I had a happy childhood, you understand? My parents protected me.

“Hadassah makes fun of ‘what’s not nice we don’t show.’ But I understand it. All you have sometimes is appearances. Self-respect.
Mameh
told me that in a factory in Auschwitz she used to make white collars out of bits of material and iron them against the factory radiators. She would sell these collars to the other prisoners for bread. And you know what? Even in Auschwitz starving people were willing to give away their precious bread for a clean, ironed white collar…

“When Rivkie got engaged, there was no money, but nobody was allowed to know it. My parents took out these huge loans for the wedding and for her trousseau.
Mameh
said we had no choice. And the in-laws kept asking
Tateh
for more and more… You know—lamb chops instead of chicken for the wedding.
And to pay the couple’s rent for a year. And to buy them living room furniture. It just went on and on.

“It was a beautiful wedding. And six months later my
tateh
. . . they called us from his job. He had to be rushed to the hospital. But when we got there… I think he must have died at his desk at work, and his boss just didn’t want to tell us. He wanted the doctors to tell us. Anyhow, this is how I comfort myself for getting there too late.

“I loved him.” She wiped her eyes and stared at the backs of her hands. “My mother had to take charity from relatives for the funeral. Afterward I lay in my bed without getting undressed for two days. I just lay there on top of the cover, trying to figure it out, to understand. Death, suffering…” She felt Jenny’s hand squeezing her shoulder comfortingly. “You both knew him. It wasn’t just because he was my father.”

“He was one of the finest men I ever met,” Hadassah whispered. “I always envied you your parents, Tamar. Especially your father.”

“You? Envied me?”

“Remember that first Purim when you came to give us
shalach monos?
I couldn’t believe a father could take off a whole day from work just to be with his family, just to be with one daughter… I never had that.”

Tamar looked at her, her eyes suddenly softening. “He didn’t even get to see me married. But he would have loved my husband and been so very proud.” She took a deep breath. “After
Tateh
died, most of the matchmakers stopped calling. It got around about our finances. Rivkie’s in-laws talked. You know. My mother couldn’t really offer anything financially.

“Then my aunt called and said she knew a wonderful boy who was a great
talmid chachom
not interested in money.

“ ‘What could it hurt to try?’
Mameh
said. And I said: ‘It could hurt. A lot it could hurt.’ But in the end I agreed.
What choice did I have? I spent the whole afternoon bathing and perfuming myself, curling my hair, and putting on my best Shabbos clothes. I remember standing in my room listening to him come in and talk to my mother. I’ll never forget how my fingers tingled when I opened my door and went out to meet him. The moment I saw him, my knees got weak and my heart began beating so… He was the handsomest man I’d ever seen. Dark blond hair and blue eyes. There was something strong but sensitive about his face and hands. Sensitive and fine. And when we spoke, he bent his head to me, looking down so that I wouldn’t be embarrassed and could talk without blushing my head off. He had a soft voice, yet he could be very passionate too when he spoke about the things that mattered most to him. And what mattered most was learning. He had this fire, this flame, inside him. Nothing would stop him, he said. He didn’t want to be bothered with running after all the silly material things other people spent their lives acquiring. That was the exact way he’d said it: spent their lives acquiring.

“I’d never heard anyone speak that way. It seemed so educated and old-fashioned and gentlemanly. I told him I wanted to spend my life as the wife of a
talmid chachom
. That I would consider it a great honor to sacrifice in the name of Torah. That the real things that were important to me were spiritual things. I don’t know how much of it I meant. Some of it, I guess. I had nothing else to offer him, did I, but my piety?

“He nodded and nodded, and seemed to get happier and happier. ‘And where do you think we should look for an apartment?’ Josh finally asked me.

“And somehow, when he said ‘we’ like that, I understood I’d passed a certain line. The word kept sounding in my head as I listened to him speak. ‘We’ I kept thinking. This man and myself. And when he spoke about the hardships of being the wife of a Torah scholar, I thought: Yes. We could do this. I would
wear rags and eat stale challah for you, for the honor of being yours, the wife of a great Torah scholar.

“You have no idea how people treat me now. As his wife, I sit in the best seat in the
shteibel
, and all the older women smile at me and get up and shake my hand after davening. They come to me and say: ‘Please, Rebbetzin, could you ask your husband to make a little time for me? I have an important
shaileh
to ask him.’ And ‘Good Shabbos, Rebbetzin.’ And ‘For you, only forty-nine cents a pound, Rebbetzin. I hope the rabbi enjoys the roast this Shabbos. I’ll have your order delivered right away.’

“I’m not Tamar Gottlieb anymore. I’m Rebbetzin Finegold.” She turned to the other two with a desperate kind of sadness in her eyes. “Do you get it now? Do you understand? That’s all I am. I’m a ‘we.’ It’s the best I can ever be. If this thing gets out… the disgrace, the blot… if Josh should ever leave me…” She drained the last drops from her glass. “I’d rather be dead.”

“Well, in that case, why risk having a black baby?” Hadassah said matter-of-factly. “Wouldn’t the easiest way out be to have an abortion? It isn’t illegal anymore. You can easily hide it from Josh. Just tell him you’ve got your period. By the time you need to go to the mikvah, you’ll be all healed…”

“But if she aborts this baby, she can’t hide it from herself or from G-d.” Jenny shook her head thoughtfully. “What if it’s a perfectly healthy, legitimate child? Josh’s child?” She turned to Tamar. “Do you really want that on your conscience your whole life? Would that really be the easiest choice to live with?”