The Marrying of Chani Kaufman (5 page)

November 2008 – London

On her way back from the mikveh, Chani sat at the front of the bus, leaning forward as if to urge the bus up the hill. At the back sat several boisterous observant Jewish schoolboys, shovelling crisps and chocolate into their mouths as they mocked and bragged, revelling in the freedom of an early Friday home time. They swiped at one another's skullcaps, their ties loosened, their shirts untucked. They wore the uniform of Baruch's old school and she wondered whether he had ever sat at the back of the bus and behaved so inappropriately. It was hard to imagine. Several rows behind her, sat two young Polish women, slim and glamorous in their immaculate jeans and make-up, talking quietly.

Through the huge windscreen, she watched the world below hurry towards Shabbes and felt a pang of guilt. She should be helping her aunt and sisters prepare the evening meal. This was to be her last Shabbes at home. But it didn't feel like her home any more. She felt displaced – she had neither left nor fully arrived. And now that she had finally reached the point of impending marriage, a state she had thought she would never reach, she felt oddly flat.

Chani was making the same, monotonous journey she had made almost every day of her adolescent life. But this time her mother should have been with her, staring down at the shoppers below, making idle observations about the faces familiar to them. Aunt Frimsche had offered to accompany her to the mikveh instead but Chani had refused. If her mother could not come with her then she would rather go alone. Besides, the Rebbetzin would be there waiting for her.

The huge window shone, warmed by the late autumn sunshine. Chani could see herself reflected in the glass. She felt she looked smaller and paler than usual. A crease furrowed her brow. The chrome of the seat backs gleamed in endless succession behind her. Usually she revelled in such lofty solitude, enjoying the scrape and thump as the bus pushed past the trees. She would stare into the thick, dark green canopies and imagine the trees swaying at night undisturbed, when the traffic had stopped and the streets were silent.

But today she felt neglected. The trees passed by unnoticed. She deserved more than this; a girl marries only once unless she is unfortunate. As the Kallah, she should have come before her silly little sister. Chayaleh, whose hair she had always brushed, whose coat she had always buttoned, whose hand she had always held on the way to school, had now fallen down the stairs and been taken to casualty. Chani wondered whether
her
older sisters must have resented her in the same way but even so, she was certain that her needs had not taken precedence over their first visits to the mikveh. If in the days before the wedding, the Kallah is to be treated like a queen, then why was her mother absent? Another person could have taken her sister to hospital. Chani swallowed hard and stared ahead, gritting her teeth. She would not cry today.

The glow that had enveloped her as she stepped out of the mikveh had dulled. As the bus rumbled on, Chani tried to re-kindle the preciousness of those initial moments after her immersion. She had felt protected, coated in an invisible shield of virtue. The water itself had felt ordinary but she had been imbued with a deep sense of peace, as if her every action and thought had been sealed with HaShem's approval. The abrasive rub of a towel had seemed sacrilegious. Afterwards, in her cabin, she had remained naked for as long as she had deemed politely possible, allowing the air to dry her. The Rebbetzin had waited patiently outside. Chani had examined herself carefully in the mirror but could detect no outward change. Her expression was perhaps a touch deeper, more soulful she had decided, but her body remained slight and lissom. It had not bloomed into womanly voluptuousness. The droplets had traced wet paths over her skin, between her small breasts, over her flat stomach, and had mingled in her dark nest below. She had licked her arm to taste the water. It had no taste. It had been just water after all, even if it was pure rainwater. But it had meant everything.

There was nothing left to be learnt now, no more private tutorials with the Rebbetzin, whispering together behind closed doors to prevent the Rebbetzin's children hearing of matters so intimate and feminine. The mysterious knowledge of Jewish womanhood and wifely duty had been passed on and stored faithfully in Chani's heart. In a month, she would return to the mikveh alone. There may not even be another visit for a while. Chani froze. She was not ready to have a child. But if HaShem willed it, so it would be. There was nothing she could do. The inevitability of her life and role as a woman sank in. Suddenly, Chani felt burdened with her future responsibility, with the weight of being a wife and mother. This new world was hurtling towards her. She had wanted this next stage of relative freedom and adulthood to start so desperately, but now life seemed all too serious. She felt unworthy in her half-baked state. But Baruch would not want a skittish wife; she must pull herself together.

Her stop was coming up but Chani remained seated. She had time. She would just spend an hour there. Ahead loomed the other temple at which she worshipped: Brent Cross Shopping Centre. Its grey towers rose above the concrete loops and gaudy billboards of the North Circular. Chani felt that she was owed some form of compensation even if she supplied it herself. It was her bride's due.

Her heart beat a little faster. In her pocket was her purse and inside that, safely tucked away, was her only credit card. She hadn't spent this month's paltry salary earned as an art assistant at her old school. The endless days of mixing paints, cleaning trays and guiding ineptly held brushes were over. She had saved for a day like this and intended to squander her money on whatever she desired. The anticipation of such reckless spending sent a shiver of pleasure down her spine.

Pleasure. The Rebbetzin had used that word. Chani's greatest pleasure was shopping but the Rebbetzin had alluded to a darker, more mysterious pleasure that had sounded almost as exciting, unlikely though this seemed to Chani at that precise moment, as the bus steamed towards her Mecca of mercantile delights.

Until that conversation, Chani had associated her wedding night with intense and terrifying pain. She knew she would bleed. The purpose of the Sheva Brachot – the seven nights of feasting and entertaining that followed the wedding night – was to keep the newlyweds apart to prevent them from having relations again until the bleeding had stopped, for even the blood shed during the loss of virginity rendered the bride niddah. Unavailable. And if there was blood, naturally there would be pain, Chani had reasoned. She winced at the thought of how narrow she was down there, in her holy of holies. So if she was to bleed, then something must have to penetrate that small, dark space. That something must belong to Baruch. It apparently had the potential of giving pleasure according to the Rebbetzin. Well, thought Chani, the Rebbetzin must know about such things; she is a wife after all, and has been one for at least twenty years. So the Rebbetzin must have had plenty of practice at doing – well, whatever it was that gave pleasure.

If only she had not stopped short. If only the Rebbetzin had continued her small speech about these obscure events that she would soon experience first hand. What had she meant exactly by the phrase ‘explore each other'? Had the Rebbetzin explored Rabbi Zilberman? The thought of the Rabbi's woolly beard grazing his wife's soft flesh was rather unpalatable. And disrespectful. Chani promptly banished this unholy vision. Instead a distant memory re-surfaced. Chani had tried to bury it in a dusty, forgotten corner of her mind but of late, it had come back to haunt her.

Five years before, she had gone on the Year 9 Cornwall Walking Tour. A crocodile of one hundred girls marching in neat pairs, their long, flapping skirts drenched with dew, their voices hoarse from singing psalms, had wound its way along the clifftops of North Cornwall. It was a drizzly yet humid afternoon full of midges that ate them incessantly, however frantically the girls beat the air in front of them. The path was narrow but the brilliant green grass spread for metres on either side of them. The girls were sensible, steering well clear of the cliff edge, carefully following Mrs Dean, their P.E. teacher's lead. She was a small, dark figure in the distance, the only non-Jew amongst them and because of this and the practical nature of her subject, she was the only woman allowed to wear trousers. Her trousers were a source of fascination for the frum girls she taught and they would often be caught staring at her legs when they should have been listening to her instructions. If it wasn't her trousers, then it was her dyed blonde hair worn in a tight, swishy ponytail that cast a spell over them. Being a goya, she did not have to cover it even though she was married. Its artificial brilliance was a shocking but enthralling sight.

Next to Mrs Dean strode the Deputy Head, Mrs Bernard. She was an unusually tall, broad woman and although she was at the front of the line, her bosoms were even further ahead. Wherever she went, they went first. The Deputy Head wore a wide straw sunhat held on by a piece of elastic that cut into her many chins. She was not Charedi but was dressed accordingly in a long skirt and long sleeves. It was rumoured though, that she too wore trousers out of school.

Chani walked next to Shulamis, her best friend. They were singing so loudly, that they did not realise the line had stopped. Their cagoules had given them tunnel vision and muffled distant sounds. They barged into the pair in front. What was happening? Why the delay?

‘Stop, stop!' yelled Mrs Bernard. The Deputy Head was jumping up and down, waving her arms about as her chest bobbed in a disconcerting manner.

It was too late to turn back one hundred girls. For there, on the murky grey sand below lay mounds of pasty flesh, human bodies as naked as Adam and Eve had been in Gan Eden before the apple incident. They had stumbled onto a nudist beach.

‘Back, girls, turn back!' howled the Deputy Head. Dutifully the line turned. But coming towards them along the coastal path from the opposite direction were two figures. The figures grew closer and it was plain to see that they were naked too. There was nothing the teachers could do to prevent their girls from witnessing such abomination. Yet being good, frum girls, they politely turned their backs or averted their eyes. It was not for them to see such things. Not yet anyway. There was only one girl who remained transfixed.

The walkers were a middle-aged couple. They carried walking sticks and wore floppy sun-hats with corks hanging from the brim. On their feet they wore leather sandals. But it was the items on display between the hats and the sandals that had Chani riveted. The woman's pendulous, blue-veined breasts swayed like white party balloons, gently nudging each other in rhythm with her waddling gait. Her navel was hidden by folds of flesh that collapsed around her hips like saddlebags. A murky tangle of hair spread outwards across her upper thighs. The woman beamed at Chani.

However it was her male companion's body that caused greater dismay. Patches of bristly grey hair grew over his sunburnt torso. He was rake thin, his sternum dipping inwards to reveal a small rounded abdomen similar to a starving child's. Beneath this belly, a forest of dark curls grew and amongst their luxuriant foliage dangled even stranger pouches of violet flesh. And between these pouches a pink snout seemed to quiver. The snout had an eye, which stared at Chani. It gave her a sudden wink.

‘Good morning, ladies,' said the owner of the snout. His grin flashed from under his hat.

No one answered him. There were a few snorts and titters, as the couple passed along the column. But the girls stood motionless, staring anywhere but at the greeter.

‘Chani Kaufman –
turn around!
'

The Deputy Head had spotted her. Chani jumped and turned the other away.

‘I will be speaking to you later and – ' Mrs Bernard paused to refill her lungs.

‘
To your mother!
' for a few seconds the Deputy Head held back for dramatic effect.'
And
to Mrs Sisselbaum.'

There was a collective intake of breath. Chani gazed at the ground in pretend humiliation; she wasn't sorry. Finally HaShem had granted her a front row seat at a spontaneous revelation of all that had been concealed from her. However it had not been a pleasant sight. In fact, the man's parts had disgusted her. How ridiculous they had appeared, bouncing about in mid-air. Surely these hidden wonders had been HaShem's idea of a joke. They were not mysterious or beautiful. They seemed useless and ugly. She remembered the adulterated art books and her visit to the Mrs Sisselbaum's office. What a waste of all those white labels, Chani thought.

 

What Chani had not known, was that later that evening Mrs Bernard found herself in a quandary. She was caught. She had made an example of Chani by forcing her to sit separately at dinner. But quarantine was not enough. She would have to speak to the girl. There was one small problem though; she had threatened to tell Mrs Sisselbaum of Chani's brazen behaviour.

Yet if the Head found out that the whole of Year 9 had been led onto a nudist beach, heads would roll and hers would be the first on the block. Mrs Bernard had been reading the map, but she had not realised the beach marked on it had a special purpose. Had she known, she would have made every effort to find a detour, however lengthy. It was her duty to protect her girls in every way, including screening the scenery where necessary.

The other staff could be trusted to keep shtum. The girls were unlikely to tell the Head, but they might tell their mothers and that could lead to complaints. It was more likely that they would conveniently avoid regaling their families with this particular episode since the tour was a resounding success. The girls were delighting in their freedom and in each other's companionship. A strong bond was growing between them. What happened on the Cornwall Walking Tour would hopefully remain on it.

Mrs Bernard called Chani to her side. It was hard to dislike the girl. Chani had character and the Deputy Head liked girls with spirit far better than the meek do-gooders that the school aspired to produce. Chani broke the mould and it made a refreshing change. Mrs Bernard was not a religious woman. It concerned her that all forms of self-expression were bled out of these girls as they grew older. Chani she was sure would suffer, for it was always worse for the brighter, feistier ones, always harder for them to do what was expected, to have their individuality bleached out of them until they became the softly spoken, modest, virtuous girls deemed ready for marriage. However, she would have to come down hard on her because Chani should have obeyed her instructions immediately; Chani knew only too well when to turn away. She had been deliberately disobedient.