Sotah (28 page)
There was an excitement to an affair with a married woman that had no equal. It was similar to being one of those tightrope walkers who stretched wires between mountains and then rode bicycles over them. Part of the joy was the delicious excitement of contemplating failure. The risk was enormous, for such things were not tolerated in the
haredi
community. Once exposed, it meant automatic divorce for the woman, lost custody of her children, loss of all her property. As for the man involved, he would be disgraced publicly, thrown out of the community.
Yet there is that in human beings, the legacy of Adam and Eve, which longs for the thing denied. What was there about Mrs L., his first married woman, which had surpassed the others, the young girls? She wasn’t as pretty as some, or as supple. She wasn’t as enjoyable company as a few. Still the experience had seared his soul. There was no comparison, he told himself, convinced himself. He simply longed for the next opportunity.
He pulled back the curtain and stared across at the vision of the young woman who combined everything he had ever sought, ever dreamed about. She had physical beauty that was at once that of a young girl’s and yet with that added dimension of passionate experience that belonged to a married woman.
He found his heart beating in excitement each time he even thought he glanced some movement behind the curtained windows of the apartment across the way. Just a glimpse of hand, white and small, was enough to wipe his mind clean of all thoughts, to leave him throbbing with wonderful pain.
He took to waiting by the door in the hope that he might hear her open hers and thus arrange to meet her casually in the hall. This was very complicated, as the building was a noisy one, full of dozens of active children constantly tramping up and down the stairs. Also, since he left for work early each day, and returned only after her husband was home from work, their schedules were totally incompatible. He was not often successful.
“Why don’t we invite the new neighbors over for
kiddush
on Shabbat morning?” he finally was forced to suggest to Leah.
Leah, with maddening slowness, looked down placidly at the newborn child nursing eagerly at her breast, slowly stroked its fine soft hair, languidly took out a tissue and blew her nose, then tucked in all her hair beneath her wig. Only then did she reply indifferently: “What for? We have nothing in common. Besides, I’m not up to company with the new baby.”
“Well, it just doesn’t seem very neighborly to me,” he began, his tone rising with convincing righteousness. “After all, we haven’t been very helpful, or hospitable.” He went on, throwing in admonishing words like
chesed
, compassion;
hachnasat orchim
, hospitality; even “love thy neighbor as thyself”—until even Leah, who was not burdened with anything even akin to an imagination, looked up suspiciously and asked: “Why them? The neighbors downstairs have been there almost two years and we’ve never invited them for
kiddush!
”
“Well,” Noach said, cornered, forced to back away and attempting to do so gracefully, “of course your health and the baby’s is most important. I wouldn’t, G-d forbid, want you to strain yourself. I just thought it would be a kindness …” He exited quickly, closing the bedroom door behind him. He sat on the bed, shaking with frustration, finally pacing to the window. He stood there a long time. Once, he thought he saw the curtain across the way move a little, as if someone might have touched it passing by. A great thudding ache leapt up into his throat.
It was almost two months before he saw her close up. He was on the way home from the synagogue Shabbat morning. He held his two little boys’ hands, waiting to cross the street, when all at once she and her husband came toward him from the opposite side.
He thought his heart would stop as she moved closer and closer to him on the broad sidewalk. She wore a slim-fitting silk dress of blue-green with flecks of gold that matched her eyes. He hadn’t known! The color of her eyes! It was too much, too great to hope for! And her body, so exquisitely small and fine, like one of those rare, antique porcelain dolls he’d taken the children to see at the Israel Museum.
“Shabbat shalom!” he called out a little too eagerly as they approached.
“Shalom aleichem, Shabbat shalom!” Judah returned heartily, extending his hand warmly to the other man.
Dina kept her eyes shyly cast down at the pavement. Noach gave a bare, polite nod in her direction. Yet all the while he exchanged calm pleasantries with the other man, his neighbor, his body was tense, alert, gathering small scraps of precious information, storing them like some obsessed miser: the neat, fine curve of her nostrils, the slimness of her ankles, the intimate rise and fall of her breasts as she breathed. When they continued on their way, he listened intently to the receding tap of her pointed heels on the dry pavement as she retreated behind him, succeeding in isolating that faint and indefinite sound from every other in the entire city.
At home he exulted with a joy he had not known for years: He had been near her! He had nodded to her! Her modesty, the delicate sweep of her gold lashes on her cheeks as she looked at the ground, filled him with a wondrous gratitude. It showed that inside she was as fine, pure, and good as outside. She was the ultimate prize, the ultimate challenge. Just the idea of it made him feel like an explorer at the gateway to a great unknown continent full of unheard-of beauty, unimaginable dangers. It melted away the years, the disappointments, the failures. It made him forget his triumphs, his pleasures. They all seemed so paltry, so inadequate to his needs. His life until now had been trivial in all its aspects, he thought. Even the sins had been pale jokes and silly wastes of good time. All the women he had ever known seemed like bad fruit, overripe and slightly bitter. Juiceless. He had wasted his time, his passion, on things that were beneath him.
Only this, he thought, was worth pursuing without restraint, using every means at his disposal, everything he had ever learned or experienced. To accomplish this was to be alive at last. Was it even possible? He had no way of knowing! That was the beauty of it! Nevertheless, he felt his old confidence somehow overwhelm his doubts. He went to sleep, dreaming only of the morning, the next day, the next opportunity. He set small, manageable goals for himself: Today, I will see her hands, I will watch her fingers move. Or: Today I will catch her eye in the window without acknowledging it. Slowly, he thought. Inch by inch. Minute by minute, day by day. He would establish innocent contact, preparing the way for the use of his greatest ability: transforming innocent contact into something more, coaxing it slowly to the final extremity, where there would be no barriers, no safeguards, and no exclusions.
It might take years, he told himself. Somehow this thought did not discourage him. Quite the opposite.
F
aigie Reich sat down heavily on the worn easy chair that had served her almost all of her married life. It was late Friday afternoon, and the arduous, formidable tasks necessary to usher in the Sabbath had just been completed, as usual, at the very last moment. She sat back, wiping the beads of sweat from her forehead, feeling a tired satisfaction in the fresh, immaculate appearance of the whole house. Each possession, no matter its age or simplicity, had been cared for. The pillows of the couch, simple foam rubber-filled squares, had been beaten clean of dust, wiped free of any speck of dirt. Everything not nailed to the floor had been picked up, dusted, and polished. The floors had been washed and shined with many pails of hot, soapy water. And then, when the floor had dried to a hard shine, everything had been put back into its proper place. All the windows and mirrors had been sprayed with ammonia and rubbed to an immaculate shine with endless newspapers.
Then, of course, there was the cooking, enough for three major sit-down dinners for the family and a few guests, adding up to not less than thirteen or fourteen people each meal. Since no cooking was allowed from Friday night sundown until Saturday night at sundown, and even heating up food was forbidden, there was always a mad rush to get it all done. Of course, all the baking and some of the other cooking was done as early as Wednesday or Thursday. Yet there was always that temptation to add one more delicacy, one more delicious treat, to the Sabbath menu that constantly entrapped Faigie Reich and most good Jewish wives into that great, mad rush with the sinking sun that caught them exhausted and harried each Friday afternoon.
This had been going on almost all of her married life. Still the ushering in of the Sabbath never failed to cheer and refresh her. For once the work was completed, there was a whole, blessed day with hardly anything left to do (the little task of serving and washing up and minor clean-ups didn’t reach the level that entitled them to be called “work,” not in Faigie Reich’s perspective). There was time to talk quietly with her husband on the long, slow Friday nights, a time that reacquainted them as intimate friends rather than just business partners. There was time to simply sit back and watch the children in pleasure as they sat around the table, all scrubbed and clean in their Sabbath best, a time to say, quietly in her innermost being: “Thank you, G-d, for all your gifts.” Most of all, there was the luxury of time to relish the accomplishments and blessings of an uncompromising, austere, and frill-less life.
She wiped her eyes and was just about to get up when she felt the old, familiar pain shoot through her chest. She sat back, waiting for it to finish its stabbing work, to lift and disappear. She tried to get up again. That was when she felt the new enemy she had not met before. It was like having the building fall on her. She felt herself pressed back into the chair, smothered in debris, white hot steel slicing through her chest, ripping up and down her arms, from armpit to wrist. She tried to call out, but the breath had been sucked from her as if by a great wind. She saw a shining light that seemed like a sun rising from the black clouds after an intense and world-shattering explosion. Those around her seemed to be moving in slow motion, as if through some clear, viscous liquid. There was her husband peering into her face; the frightened, pale faces of the little boys; and Chaya Leah’s flushed excitement. She felt herself trying to smile, then to point to the clock as she remembered that it was time to light candles. Was it time to light yet? she thought, drifting slowly past her family, slowly down some clean and quiet path just across from them, very close yet too far to hear them, or them her.
When she opened her eyes again, she was surprised and initially pleased. It was white, immaculate. Like the table-cloth on the Sabbath table. Yet as she tried to move, she felt pins and tubes in her arms bite back punishingly. All around were machines blinking in colored lights, with small incandescent numbers that changed before her tired eyes could focus. This frightened her. But then there was her husband’s kind face. He looked at her hopefully. She tried to smile. So tired, so tired! she thought. Not even a smile can I manage.
She closed her eyes again, and suddenly she was a young woman transported to her first home. She almost laughed to see Dvorah as a twelve-year-old again, her long dark braids touching the tops of her hips. her serious little face straining under the burden of holding year-old Asher up to the sink to help him wash his face. And there was Dina sitting placidly in a corner, patiently retrieving her ball and jacks from Chaya Leah’s relentless, marauding raids. And Ezra looking seriously over her shoulder as she nursed three-month-old Shimon Levi, who lay restlessly, heavy and warm in her lap.
She was back in the two and a half rooms in Meah Shearim. All beds, so many beds! Her head ached to think of them. The tiny half room with its three beds, the two boys in the living room with the couch that opened to two beds, her own bedroom with the twin beds and the baby’s crib in the corner. And the living room filled with books. There was no place to entertain, since the boys needed to go to sleep by eight. The only visitor was her husband’s learning partner, sitting by the living room table, both men immersed in the soft give and take of questions and answers as they struggled with the Talmud. And she, alone, in the kitchen, washing, cleaning, cooking for the next day. Alone, tired. And the dream that had come to her of the little store, of a little more money coming in.
Putting one
agora
next to another
agora.
Saving! All the time. Searching for cans that cost two
agorot
less or fruit a little less nice, a little cheaper by the kilo. Taking out the loans, opening the store. The bright colors, the salty smells of the wool in the cardboard and plastic.
She opened her eyes and saw her husband sitting in a corner of the room, his head bent over his Talmud, rocking gently back and forth.
“There isn’t enough room for another child,” she heard herself telling him. “Please, at least go look at the apartment. I know where we can get another loan!” She was begging him, and his face was mild, placid, skeptical. She hated him for that, for his acceptance. There was another child coming, a seventh, and no place to put it.
“I have seen it,” she heard him say. “Three bedrooms. The man who lives there has twelve children. My darling Faigie, just think. If he can manage in four rooms with twelve children, why do we, who have seven, need more than two and a half?”
She struggled against her resentment, his acceptance. Yet a moment later she looked up and he was there above her, her good husband. He held her hand, he patted it with love and concern. “We have four rooms now and only five children,” she whispered, and she could see he did not understand, but was simply smiling back at her smile. But suddenly she was even too tired to do that, to smile. She, who had risen every morning at four-thirty, who had gone to sleep each night after midnight, who had given birth to eight healthy children, who had worked and supported a husband so that he might learn. Suddenly there was no strength left, not even to stretch her lips upward.