The Sacrifice of Tamar (7 page)

And what if his answer was the one she had just discovered?

Do I really want to know?

A chill of horror passed through her as she considered the blasphemous thought. “Do not do what is just in your own eyes!” How many times had the Children of Israel been warned? How many? It was heresy. It was… almost idolatry. To put yourself beyond the Law? A cold sweat broke out on her forehead.

She got into bed, and her eyelids, weighty and burdensome, closed over her aching eyes.

She awoke in a blaze of light. “What… ?”

“Darling…”

“You’ve been sleeping for two days, Tamar. You had us…”

“You were burning up with fever!”

“Tamar, tell us what’s wrong!”

Her mother was sitting on the bed, stroking her hand. Josh was standing nearby, his expression a mixture of exasperation and genuine concern, his fingers nervously fiddling with his black skullcap. Her sister, Rivkie, stood at the foot of the bed, baby Shiomie in her arms, little Moishe tugging at her skirts. Jenny stood close by, her high, intelligent forehead white and troubled beneath the girlish dark bangs, her green eyes full of compassion.

She looked at them in confusion, her heart yearning for them, almost forgetting she didn’t deserve to be one of them anymore, almost forgetting she was a defiled, filthy, shameful thing that had no place in this clean, beautiful religious family. She kneaded the sheet, looking at them wretchedly.

The faces of those she loved looked back at her with such care and love and compassion. The dark glass shattered. She buried her head on her mother’s shoulder and wept, her shoulders heaving. Mrs Gottlieb looked questioningly at Rivkie; her once pleasant, amused face made stoic with pain uncharacteristically frightened. Rivkie shrugged in surprise, and Josh moved swiftly
closer to his wife. Tamar looked at him in alarm, remembering she had not seen a doctor as he’d demanded.

But he was not angry. “Tamar, what is it?” he pleaded, genuinely worried.

“I was… I am…” she began, her voice almost inaudible.

Her mother’s warm, familiar arms held her close, and the small child in her wept and wept and grew stronger through the unconditional love. But it was not her mother’s arms she needed. She needed her husband’s adult love, his compassion. His unconditional acceptance. She lifted her head. She could see him straining toward her, wanting to comfort her. But because he thought she had seen a spot of blood, he would not touch her. It was the Law.

And suddenly she felt inexplicably better. She loved him. She admired his honesty, his steadfast loyalty to his beliefs, his decent struggle with his human emotions when they clashed with those beliefs. Why should she harm him by telling him the truth? Why should she place him in some heartbreaking dilemma, giving him some terrible choice to make? Why should his life be defiled? She would protect him by taking it all on herself. She had been raped, but she had not cried out. She had been raped, but she had no witnesses.

She did not want to get divorced.

She would take that burden, the burden of her secret defilement, all on herself, out of love for all those around her. Her family. The way her mother had swallowed in silence the horror of her past in Hitler’s camps. Her mother too had never described what had happened to her in the camps. It was the past. It had not been her fault. She had raised her family with joy.

She would be strong, the way her mother had been strong, surviving the defilement of brutal men. Had it been her mother’s fault? She’d been an innocent bystander. It could have been anyone in that place, at that time. The idea blossomed. An innocent
bystander. It could have been anyone. My mother did not do anything wrong. I did not do anything wrong.

She took a deep breath. “When I was walking to the mikvah, I was attacked by a strange dog.”

“A dog?” her mother repeated in disgust.

“Tamar, why didn’t you tell me!” Josh said, shocked. Then he considered. “Was it before you went to the mikvah or afterward?”

“Before,” she answered him, her eyes hardly flickering.

“Ah, it’s all right, then. If it had been after, some would consider the immersion invalid. You would have had to go back, to immerse again.” He stroked his beard, and she could see his almost palpable relief in knowing that he had not lain with her when there was some doubt as to her purity…

“Have you seen a doctor?” Rivkie remarked authoritatively. “Are you sure the dog didn’t have rabies? Or some kind of infection? You know you can get an infection from an unclean bite.”

Only Jenny said nothing, simply reaching over and taking her hand, squeezing it encouragingly. The two women looked at each other, a tiny flash of questioning, a responding flash of refusal passing between them, in the intuitive, profound way there is between women who have been friends for a very long time. Jenny wasn’t fooled. Tamar avoided her eyes.

“I was afraid to go. I thought they’d give me rabies shots in the stomach. And I don’t think I was actually bitten. At least that’s…” Her mind raced on inventively.

“Tamar, so foolish.” Her mother stroked her head. “You just need a good antibiotic, a good rest. I’ll stay with you.”

“It’s all right,
Mameh
, I’ll take a few days off from the yeshiva,” Josh offered, very worried.

Tamar looked at her husband, a spark of love warming her heart. Days off from the yeshiva! It was, she knew, a supreme sacrifice. One she would not let him make. “I’m all right, really.”
She shook her head, holding on to Jenny’s hand, squeezing it like a woman in labor squeezes the hand of the midwife, magically transferring some of the pain.

Chapter four

There followed a gradual return to life. It was not that the nightmares disappeared, or that the iron pipe melted, but just that she awoke at two
A.M
., having slept three or four hours, and was able to return to sleep at four until the light of morning broke. Slowly, instead of the sharp, unbearable pain of a life ripped asunder, she began to feel the soft itch and ache of a scar wound beginning to heal.

And then, about a month later, she began to feel strange again. Her stomach bloated, and she felt the unmistakable signs of her monthly flow. To her surprise, nothing happened. She waited a week, wondering if she could have been injured in some way, or if just the emotional trauma had put off her cycle. She remembered hearing tales of women during the war whose periods had stopped altogether.

And then one day, as she was going down to the grocery, she felt an unmistakable small movement inside her womb. She stopped and put her hand over it, as if to hold on to its reality.
But it vanished too swiftly for it to have been anything more than her imagination, she concluded.

A tiny movement, like the swish of a fishtail moving silently through the water, she thought. And the thought refused to leave her.

She waited for the reassuring rush of blood that would tell her that her body had been cleansed, restored to normalcy. She, who had so much wanted a child, now prayed this month, of all months, for that cleansing flow.

Five weeks. Six weeks. Seven. Eight.

Her clothes would no longer button. And now, early in the morning, the nausea that had begun weeks before and that she had dismissed as a mild flu slapped her down like a tidal wave. She, who even as a child had never once thrown up, found herself in the bathroom on her knees, retching green bile.

She called Jenny.

“Mazel tov!” Jenny said.

For a moment, she forgot. A pure wash of happiness streamed through her. It lasted only seconds. And then the horror struck her full force. It was like a looming nightmare when you are a sick child and your comfortable, familiar room becomes a dark jetty of sharp rocks and the tidal waves rush toward you, unstoppable from the distance, assuring you that you will die. That nothing can stop your death, your horrible death.

Not this month, O G-d! Not this month!

There was silence on the line, and then Jenny’s calm, intelligent voice, the voice of her best friend: “What’s wrong, Tamar?”

“Nothing!” she shouted, then took hold of herself. “Nothing,” she repeated in a strangled voice.

“I’m coming right over.”

“No! Don’t!” To hide what needed to stay hidden. She couldn’t. Not from Jenny. “I think I need to see a doctor first.”

“Are you afraid? Is that it? I thought you wanted a baby more than…”

Not afraid. Afraid is to lock the door. Afraid is to hide. What is it called when the horror is inside you? When it is there or not there? When it can be either the greatest good or the darkest curse?

“I know it seems scary, a little stranger moving into your body, sitting on your stomach and liver…” Jenny laughed sympathetically. “Do you want me to go to the doctor with you?”

Come with me Jenny, please! Make me tell you everything, the way I did when we were children. And you were always so strong. You, who had so little—no father, a distant mother—were always so self-reliant. My parents were kind and soft and caring. Except for
Tateh
dying, there has never been any toughness in my life. Would it make a difference now if there had been? And what would you do, Jenny, if there was a child growing inside you that was either planted there by the honorable man you loved or by a goy and a rapist?

A black rapist.

Why did that matter, his color? Was she a racist? If it had been a blond German who had come in through the window, would it have been any different?

Yes, she thought. It would have been a different kind of horror, a different kind of violation. Maybe worse, she thought. But there was no point pretending it didn’t matter that he was black. It mattered.

Yes, she thought. Shem, Ham, and Japhet. The three sons of Noah, from whom were descended mankind’s three separate races. Shem had fathered the Semites, race of the spirit; Ham, the dark races of passion and physical instinct; and Japhet, the descendants of Greece and Rome, the race of intellect and aesthetics. She had learned it all in Ohel Sara. She was of Shem, he of Ham.

It mattered.

Whose child? She felt the room go dark and seemed to lose consciousness a moment.

“Tamar… ?” Jenny’s voice, far away, sputtered through the phone.

Tamar opened her eyes and cursed the unforgiving clarity of morning light. The world was bathed in that strange ugliness, like an amateurish photograph of an aging woman taken in the harsh sunlight… a strange, hostile clarity. She might have to do things, terrible things involving blood and death, things she did not want her best friend to know about or talk her out of. It was one thing to go to the synagogue, to bake lovely cakes for the Sabbath—but quite another when religion asked you to do something that you believed would damage you forever. She did not want Jenny’s preaching. She did not want a rabbi’s opinion. She did not want her husband’s straight and narrow goodness and adherence. This was her life, her body. She wanted to do her own will, not G-d’s.

She was shocked at her bitter determination. Disappointed and thrilled beyond words. Her love of G-d, of the Torah, was it so shallow, then? Such a thin veneer? And was she really able to cast off this way, alone and determined, with no lifeboat? Was she really more like Hadassah than Jenny? A feeling of unpleasant excitement flashed through her.

“Tamar?”

“I will… I think… my own doctor would be better. I’d just feel more comfortable. You’ll be the first to know, though.” Her hands caressed her bloated stomach. It might still just be water. It might still be a delayed period… Please, G-d! Not this month, please don’t answer my prayers this way… not this way…

She put on her new wig and clean underwear and called a taxi, unable to bear the thought of being on public transportation where strangers might rub up against her or look into her eyes. Besides,
she wanted to minimize the time when she would be far from a bathroom if she needed to throw up.

The waiting room was painted in gentle nursery pastels that calmed her brittle nerves like a lullaby. How she had longed to be in an obstetrician’s waiting room feeling nauseated! And now…

“Mrs Kahanov?”

She did not look up until the voice repeated the name impatiently. Only then did she remember it was the name she’d made up and given the receptionist over the phone.

She lay down on the examining table, closing her eyes against the burning light, her hands gripping the sheet as the cold metal speculum slid inside her. Her feet strained against the stirrups. The horror of opening yourself so wide, of revealing the hidden, the private… His gloved fingers probed her gently, professionally. She was so grateful to hear those blessed words: “You can get dressed now.”

She sat across from him, her legs crossed, her skirt lowered.

“How old are you, Mrs…”

“Kahanov,” she lied, but not easily. She was not used to lying. Not yet, she told herself grimly, thinking of a future where—depending on what he was about to say—lie might be piled upon lie, a growing mound without end. She had gotten his name from the phone book. A gynecologist at a big, anonymous hospital clinic. “I’m twenty-one.”

“And have you been using any kind of birth control?”

“No. It’s against our beliefs… That is, we wanted children.”

“Wanted?” he questioned

“Want,” she stammered in confusion.

“Well, then let me congratulate you!”

It’s true, true! The nightmare leaping into the light, staying there! Everything suddenly went black.

She awoke, lying on the examining table covered with a blanket.

The doctor smiled down at her. “You aren’t the first woman to take it this way.”

“It?”

“A pregnancy.”

The nightmare.

“Doctor, I can’t be pregnant. I mustn’t be…”

“Musn’t? Can’t?” He raised a gray eyebrow quizzically. “Young married religious girls are always thrilled about their first. Is there something you’d like to tell me?”

Doctors were like priests, weren’t they? You could tell them anything, and they couldn’t reveal it?

“Doctor, I’m not sure who the father is.”

He looked very surprised, but said nothing.