The woman shook her head vigorously. “I can see the problem already, my dear child. Yes, I see it so clearly, as if the scene were right in front of my very eyes.” She leaned forward urgently, taking both of Batsheva’s hands in hers, searching her eyes. “You must not jump to conclusions.
Havey don call adam l’kav zchus
, give everyone the benefit of the doubt. Now, how do you know your dear husband realized the child would want the ice cream? Or perhaps he thought you were planning to take the child into a different room? After all, a husband is allowed to eat a little ice cream in peace, no?” She chuckled, just filled with the comic possibilities of the scene: the husband and baby in childish competition for the sweets; the overprotective, indulgent mother. “And a father, after all, must teach his children the laws.”
Batsheva felt herself blushing with fury at the portrait painted of her in the woman’s scenario.
“Do not be ashamed of yourself, my dear. You are so young. I expect you even wanted some of that ice cream yourself.” The woman gave an indulgent chuckle.
Suddenly Batsheva had an irresistible urge to wipe the smile off this woman’s face. “And what would you say if I told you he beats me?” she asked and had the satisfaction of seeing her goal immediately accomplished.
“That is serious, serious,” she sighed. But there was no shock on her face, as Batsheva assumed there would be, and as she continued speaking, Batsheva understood why. “You are not the first and the last to tell me this. I’ll tell you the truth—men will be men. They will be obeyed. You are not thinking of divorce, are you?” She looked up sharply.
“I don’t…well, know.”
“You must forget about that. Think of your poor innocent, fatherless child! And do you think the men that are out there are any different, any better! You might wind up with no one, and then where would you be? No, I’ll tell you the whole secret, my dear child. Do not make him angry. Obey his wishes, even if they seem a little strange or foolish to you. The man must be the head of the family, otherwise the family crumbles. Be a Woman of Valor, bear up under your hardships as a good Jewish girl must. What you have—a Jewish family—is a holy thing. You must not tear it apart. Give him love and patience and he will certainly change and become the man you hope for. God will help you, my dear. He always does.”
The winter rains came, short and heavy, washing the summer dust from the white stones of the city, making them glisten with light. Then the winds grew gentle, blowing the clouds away and bringing the clean bright days of Passover and spring. Before she would have dreamt it possible, the golden summer had come and vanished and preparations began again for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Succoth. The year had come full cycle, she thought, and was back to the beginning again. Nothing changed. The sun went up, it came down. The pots were washed, then filled again with food and washed again. Clothes were laundered, then worn, dirtied, and washed again.
Only in Akiva did she see the beauty and wonder of growth and change. He had grown so much, his fat baby feet and hands thinning out slightly, turning him into a little man. He was a wild, happy child. He could pass no ball without throwing it up into the sky. He could see nothing with screws and bolts without longing to take it apart. His curiosity was insatiable and with him Batsheva rediscovered the world. The hours they spent alone together or with Gita, hiking up through the hills, picnicking in the grass, were the only happiness she had. Away from the house, she forgot about her husband, her joyless marriage, and lost herself in her child’s delight. A long-tailed lizard’s swift climb up the rocks was a cause for celebration, for shouts of excited happiness. A drink of cool raspberry-flavored water after a long hot walk a reason for total contentment. The heat of the sun on one’s upturned face a reason for living. But all through the long, cloudless days a dread so deep she could not name it lingered just beneath the surface. Our last summer like this, she thought. How will I stand it? After Succoth he would turn three, the age when Hassidic boys started their education in the
heder
. They would go from year’s end to year’s end with no summers, no time off at all. Isaac scoffed at the idea of summer vacations. “Time off from life, from learning, from performing God’s will?”
Sometimes she would wander down to the places where the little ones sat learning their
aleph-bais
and listen to their loud, childish voices repeat the letters in singsong unison. She would peer through the dusty windows with their rusting iron bars into the sunless rooms filled with sweet, pale children and hug Akiva to her, kissing his rosy, sun-kissed face, and ache at the thought of him inside with the others. She discussed it with Gita, who sighed, but agreed with Isaac that boys needed to begin their education early. “But,” she admitted, “I’m so glad I have a girl. At least she will be able to wait another year. But you know, the rabbis are pretty good with the little ones. They dance with them, sing with them. It’s more of a kindergarten than a regular school. Just be careful not to send him to Betsher’s.” She gave a shudder of distaste.
Where had Batsheva heard that name before? Isaac. It was the school he had gone to as a little boy. “Isaac went there, you know.”
“Really? Awful place. The teachers still use canes on the children, like something out of Europe in the last century. It is so wrong. They make the children so afraid they can’t see straight, let alone learn anything. Isaac wouldn’t send him there, would he? After all he suffered himself as a child?”
Batsheva turned away, ashamed to admit she knew so little of her husband and the workings of his twisted mind that she could not even begin to guess his plans for their son. What she was certain of was that she would have little or no say in their son’s education. Her father would be consulted. Isaac would discuss it with his rebbes. But no one would talk to her about it. She wanted desperately to ask Isaac, but each time she began to, she remembered the shoes in the attic.
She had gone up there to take down the special dishes used for Passover—two sets, one for meat and one for milk, used only one week a year. Beneath the cardboard box she found his shoes in a plastic bag. They were almost new. She took them out curiously and turned them over. Sand littered the floor. Beach sand. Other than that she could find nothing wrong with them.
But when she began to polish them she noticed some dark stains she hadn’t seen on the top. They turned the cloth a dark blood-red. Dried blood. She replaced them, terrified he might notice they had been touched. Putting them back, she noticed other things—half-filled cans of kerosene and spray paint. But her mind did not wish to know any more. It stepped back into the darkness of wishful thinking and dark day-dreams.
A listlessness had come over her, a kind of welcome, deliberate ignorance. Unable to control her life, she began to retreat into a world she created each day, day by day. She told herself the long, carefree days would never end, that Akiva would be her baby forever.
His third birthday came in between the New Year and Yom Kippur, during the time known as the Ten Days of Repentance, when pious Jews believe that charity, prayer, and repentance can change any evil decree written down for one in the Book of Life. Batsheva woke at dawn after an hour of fitful sleep in which she had turned from side to side seeking some relief from blackness. But it was so dark everywhere she looked. She tiptoed into Akiva’s room and opened the door very softly so as not to disturb him and sat down in the rocking chair next to his bed, her eyes wide with despair. His long, dark eyelashes, too pretty for a boy, made a soft fringe of shadow on his full, soft cheeks, and his long curly hair framed his face. Sleep softened his alert, mischievous face, making him look like a helpless baby again. She fought the urge to take him in her arms and hug him hard, to rest her hot cheek against his cool, sweet one. Instead, she closed her eyes and prayed: “God, I know that I am full of sin and I am ashamed to ask anything of You. I ask You because You are our Father, my Father, and I am in such terrible pain. I know that You are good, God. Whatever Isaac says, I know that Your ways cannot be hurting and cruel, without pity or understanding. Please. Help me to save Akiva from his father’s cruelty, from his grandfather’s obsessions. Give me strength to protect him and wisdom to keep him from all harm. I promise to bring him up to serve You, to know You and love You. With all of my heart I vow this.” Her tears fell unheeded, wetting her hands, her nightgown, her cheeks. She rocked and rocked, repeating her prayer.
In her dream, a growing shout began in the distance, then traveled like thunder, rolling and crashing through her eyelids. It was like an army marching toward her with knives and sticks and guns, and only she stood in its way, barring it from reaching Akiva. It came closer and closer and she saw it was not soldiers at all, but scholars in long black coats with twisted sidecurls. One had her husband’s face, the other her father’s. Gita and Gershon were there. No! But yes, they were there with the others, marching relentlessly toward her. “Give us the baby,” they chanted. “Give him to us!” They held out long grasping fingers with punishing pointed nails. NO! she screamed, but no sound came. They ignored her and marched right through her as if she were a ghost. She woke with a start and realized the noise was real, out in the street. She went to the window and drew aside the curtain. Thronged below were hundreds of Hassidim in Sabbath finery singing and dancing. They had come to witness the first step of the future leader of the Ha-Levis on the road to greatness. It would become the stuff of parables and myths, she knew. How the child had looked, what he had said. They would have the joy of telling all this to their grandchildren. They had come, she understood, to take possession of her son, to take him forever from her into some dark male enclave where she would be allowed only to hover at the outskirts, like a beggar.
She pressed her lips together and clenched her fists, but then Isaac was already at the door in his immaculate satin waistcoat, a mink
streimel
on his head. His beard, newly trimmed, came to a sharp point. Behind him were six or seven Hassidim. Isaac held a scissor in his hands.
“What are you going to do?” Her voice trembled with fear.
“Just cut his hair, as is the custom.”
She sat Akiva on her lap, hugging him tight. The child’s eyes were still partly closed, hovering somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. She watched with a kind of silent madness as his beautiful curls fell to the floor and they shaved his head so that only his long sidecurls were left. He whimpered when the cold air hit the unfamiliar bareness of his scalp. “It’s all right, my angel, my baby. Sha, sha.” The men handed her clothes and she dressed him: a little black vest and knickers with white stockings and a black skull cap. And when she was finished, her heart seemed to break: He looks like a stranger, she thought. Like one of those children I see in the streets of Meah Shearim: little old men speaking Yiddish, their backs bent from the weight of heavy books, their eyes fearful, terrified of punishment.
Then they took him from her. They fed him apples with honey, making him lick the honey from the pages of a book where the Hebrew alphabet was written so that the words of the Torah would be sweet to him always. The child, still half asleep, suddenly woke. He felt the cold air on his shaved scalp and touched it uncertainly. He looked for his mother, and seeing her far away, began to whimper: “Ima, Ima.” He held out his hands to her. She pushed through, making an urgent swathe through the crowd. They parted for her uneasily. She reached out her hands toward the child, but her husband stared down at her in cold fury, whispering harshly: “Still in your nightclothes, in front of all these men! Dress yourself quickly. We must leave now.”
One of the men took his prayer shawl and wrapped the child in it gently, covering his face. He would be carried this way in his father’s arms, protected from the Evil Eye, to his first day in school. The child, cranky from the sudden wakening, frightened by the roomful of strange men, the unwelcome press of his father’s arms, and the sudden envelopment in the cloth, screamed: “Ima, Ima!” He kicked and bit in a tantrum of grief and terror until finally she was allowed to take him. She held him close to her, murmuring comforting things she did not feel. “It’s all right, darling. Ima is here. You will go to school like a big boy. And I will come with you. You’ll dance and sing with lots of other children. You’ll like that, won’t you?” She smiled at him brightly. His hands reached out, touching her cheeks.
“Crying?” His fingers felt the tears that had overflowed from her bright, almost manic eyes.
“No. Not crying, baby. Ima’s just happy for you. You’re such a big boy now. You will make me proud of you? You will be a big boy now, won’t you?”
Isaac, bending down, swiftly took the child from her. The child’s eyes, perplexed and wide with uncertainty, did not cry anymore, but clung desperately to his mother until he was borne away in the relentless tide of men.
Batsheva dressed quickly and followed the crowd, which swept like a parade through the streets. Forced to linger on the fringes, she was far behind and could not get close to Akiva. A woman fell in step beside her. “Where are they going?” she asked, and Batsheva realized, for the first time, that she did not know. A kind man, overhearing the question, in rare friendliness turned to answer: “To Betsher’s, to begin the education of the heir to the Ha-Levi dynasty.”
Betsher’s. Batsheva did not move, and the crowd surged around her, parting for her still, rocklike figure. She stood very still and closed her eyes.
Her life blood seemed to ebb away from her and within the emptiness a heavy despair gathered
. The words came into her head. But from where?
Her passion seemed to bleed to death and there was nothing. She sat suspended in a state of complete nullity, harder to bear than death
. It was as if someone were talking to her, telling her how she felt…It was Ursula, the words of D. H. Lawrence in
Women in Love
, she realized.
She turned and ran home, knowing she had stumbled upon the answer to all of her questions. She took out the book, bought secretly and hoarded, and read:
Unless something happens, I shall die.
It was as if Ursula were her, thinking and planning within her.
Obliterated in a darkness that was the border of death. She realized how all her life had been drawing nearer and nearer to this brink, where there was no beyond, from which one had to leap like Sappho into the unknown. The knowledge of the imminence of death was like a drug.
There was nothing to look for from life—it was the same in all countries and all peoples. The only window was death. One could look out on the great dark sky of death without emotion, as one had looked out of the class-room window as a child, and seen perfect freedom in the outside. Now one was not a child, and one knew that the soul was a prisoner within this sordid vast edifice of life, and there was no escape, save in death…
How beautiful, how grand and perfect death was, how good to look forward to. There one would wash off all the lies and ignominy and dirt that had been put upon one here, a perfect bath of cleanness and glad refreshment, and go unknown, unquestioned, unabased…
Whatever life might be, it could not take away death, the inhuman transcendent death. Oh, let us ask no question of it, what it is or is not. To know is human, and in death we do not know, we are not human. And the joy of this compensates for all the bitterness of knowledge and the sordidness of our humanity. In death we shall not be human, and we shall not know…
Batsheva closed the book with a kind of joy. This then was what she had been seeking. A way out. The beginning of a new form of existence. Death. She would go to it gladly, beautifully, choosing it with all the intelligence and imagination she had never been allowed to use in planning her life. She took off her wig and let her hair fall to her shoulders. She had let it grow back. It was duller now, with a strawlike stiffness from the hours spent beneath the wig. But as she brushed it, it crackled, sparkling with electricity, and framed her face with a dark halo. She took out a box with a dress her mother had just sent her that Isaac wouldn’t let her wear. A gray silk. Soft, so very soft. She put it on and felt it caress her skin. From the top drawer of her dresser she took out the diamond-and-emerald necklace, taken from its safe deposit box for her to wear to a wedding that night. She put it on, together with diamond earrings she had gotten just recently from her father and then slipped on the big pearl-and-diamond ring she had bought herself on that wonderful day.