One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (3 page)

Temima, a formidable if notorious figure in the neighborhood—as much as you disapproved of her you definitely did not want to risk starting up with her—trailed by a band of her students, including her Cherethites and Pelethites, her
kraiti and plaiti
, four husky male acolytes who had become the designated bodyguards she called her Bnei Zeruya, paused in her processional and inquired of the beater and the spitter, “So tell me, Reb Yid, how do you know this is not Elijah the prophet you are assaulting?”

“Eliyahu HaNavi? What kind of idiocy, what kind of
shtoos
? Heresy,
apikorsus
! The Messiah a woman? A whore—a
zona
?”

“Like Rahab the
zona
,” Temima nodded with galling calm, “purveyor of
mazon
—nourishment—as Rashi the commentator-in-chief spins it. Which may, after all, be the definition of whore. On the other hand, the Talmud tells us that the mere mention of the name of Rahab the whore of Jericho was enough to bring men to climax.”

They took Cozbi home with them that night, her hips thrust forward like a roast on a tray, grinding in intentional provocation as she staggered the entire distance up Yekhezkel Street back to the Temima Shul in the Quarter of the Bukharim.

And not only Cozbi, but Rizpa too arrived on her own at Ima Temima's in her need without the help of a computer in those more primitive and intimate times. To be more precise, in Rizpa's case, she was delivered, levitated from the Satmar girls' school Beis Ziburis across the road between two married ladies, teachers at this ultra-ultra school most likely, with
their shaven skulls tightly wrapped in black scarves, in their loose, boxy suit jackets over perpetually pregnant bellies, long skirts, thick black stockings and lace-up shoes, and the severe tight-lipped expression on their scrubbed faces as they deposited their burden in front of Temima and declared, “This one is your type—another lost soul for your collection. Her name is Mazal—but she's not so lucky, poor thing, not so
beseder
.” They spoke mostly in Yiddish, mixed in with granite Hungarian—the Holy Tongue, Loshon Kodesh, was not meant to be tainted by daily use in the manner of the insolent and accursed Zionists—but now and then they inserted some Hebrew words they had picked up through osmosis despite themselves from the commerce in the air, such as when they said
beseder
, and to illustrate, in case Temima did not get the point as it related to Mazal, each of them, with her free hand, rotated cuckoo spirals at her temple.

As it happened, the behavior over the course of the last few days of this wretched Mazal they were hauling between them had attracted even Temima's attention from across the street, who could not but notice her coming out onto the upper balcony of the Satmar girls' school Beis Ziburis with a squeegee and a bucket splashing with a dark sudsy liquid, and she would mop furiously, screaming shrilly the whole time, “
Schmutz
,
schmutz
, this place is stinking with
schmutz
, must get rid of all this
schmutz
,” using, oddly enough, though she was Sephardi from the Arabian Diaspora, the Yiddish word for dirt, filth. She would overturn the bucket on the stone parapet of the balcony, dumping the slop and contagion onto the street below, onto the head of whoever was passing by; with any luck it would merely be a woman, but it could also be a man, ranging from a
schnorrer
with his hand out begging for a shekel to a rabbi of great reputation with his hand out making a point, a sage before whom everyone rose when he stepped into a room, from the top of the black hat you couldn't tell who was who—she did not discriminate but continued dumping the offal in this way until she was dragged back inside the school building. After an interval, when she reckoned no one was looking, her eyes darting in this direction and that, she would come out again with her squeegee and her sloshing pail and start her whole routine all over again, yelling, “
Schmutz
,
schmutz
!”—swabbing the floor and dumping the fetid liquid on unfortunate heads, male and female, young and old, Arab and Israeli, Jew and gentile, holy and unholy, passing below, never looking up as they ought to have done.

“She claims that we Satmar Hasidim stole her babies from their hospital bassinets after she gave birth to them and told her they were dead,” one of the righteous matrons said to Temima in Yiddish. “I'm not saying yes, I'm not saying no. But just between us, it would not have been such a bad thing for these poor dark
kinderlakh
to be handed over to families that would raise them in the proper religious way. Sometimes extreme measures are necessary in the name of the Master of the Universe.”

Temima said, “Leave her here with me. I will call her Rizpa.”

“Rizpa—very nice. It means ‘floor' in Loshon Kodesh—no? Good. She mopped our floors, so now she'll mop yours.”

In Beis Ziburis across the street, as Temima knew only too well, they instructed the girls in how to kosher a chicken and the laws of
niddah
relating to menstrual impurity and ritual bath procedures, all the rules and regulations regarding getting rid of the blood, the chicken's blood, the woman's blood, and so on and so forth, that was education enough for them. Why should Temima have expected them to recognize this reference to the concubine of King Saul, Rizpa daughter of Aya, whose two sons were impaled on the mountainside in a political deal to appease the enemy? Spreading her sackcloth over the rock by the mountainside, Rizpa sat guard there from the beginning of the barley harvest until the rains came pouring down, and she would not allow the birds of the sky to touch the bodies of her sons by day, or the beasts of the field at night.

So here was another womb made crazy by the important affairs of men. Ima Temima ordered that Rizpa be put to bed and that simple, familiar Yemenite foods be carried in to comfort her until she regained her strength, sweet mint teas and
malawah
breads. And once in a while, in those pre-computer days when she still moved from room to room, Temima herself would come and sit at her bedside and listen to her stories about her life in Rosh HaAyin as one of the four wives of the revered teacher Baba Rakhamim, and about all the hens in her backyard with only a single cock who ruled over them, bothered them day and night, wore them out so utterly that, one after another, the hens came right up to Rizpa, then known as Mazal, in her kitchen and willed her to slaughter them and dump them in the soup. But Paltiel had informed his mother that, now, with the far-reaching tentacles of his computer network, they were beginning to make headway in learning the fates of Rizpa's babies; the graves in which they were supposed to have been buried had been opened and discovered to be empty, for one thing, and there was now
also an army of Sephardi activists and hotheads ready to grab by force if necessary swabs of DNA from the insides of the mouths of extra dark Satmar Hasidim with extra corkscrewed sidecurls and more refined physiques briskly walking down the streets of Mea Shearim and Bnei B'rak in Israel, Williamsburg in Brooklyn, or Monroe in New York State, bizarrely speaking and gesticulating in Yiddish, and match this evidence against the genetic map of the eternally bereft and inconsolable mothers. Even if the Satmars didn't believe in DNA and regarded it as idolatry, the authorities had faith in science, which in the end mattered, it mattered on this earth.

And not only that. Thanks to the powers of his computers, Paltiel was now happy to report he believed they were also closing in on the pimp who went under the name Stalinsky who had trafficked Cozbi to Tel Aviv in the days when she was known as Anna Oblonskaya with the promise of a job as a childcare provider in the home of an oligarch living in a guarded compound of stupefying ostentation near Herzliah, robbed her of her passport, drugged her, raped her, beat her, and then sold her into prostitution in the Monopol Hotel in Tel Aviv on the corner of Allenby Street and HaYarkon. “In this day and age,” as Paltiel explained to his mother, “one-on-one is just no longer cost-effective.” One-on-one had to be reserved only for the clients of MaTov who chose the Diamond Exclusive option, which for an undisclosed fee entitled them to a private audience of maximum thirty-minutes duration with the world-renowned master teacher and guru, the charismatic wise woman and reputed miracle worker, HaRav Temima Ba'alatOv, who revealed to them many things about themselves that they both knew and did not know—rendering it all the more imperative, as Paltiel reminded her repeatedly, that she no longer indulge in spontaneous personal ministrations with any single individual, including (and especially since she no longer went out anymore) any of the followers who gathered around her bed to soak in her vibrations night after night. Such simple human encounters were a luxury of the past, Paltiel stressed, they would fatally drive down the market value of the Diamond Exclusive if word got out that the same product could be gotten free of charge if you came to the nightly Torah salon at Ima Temima's bedside and snatched an unguarded opening to lean over and steal what others paid for, deposit into her ear the burden of your troubles and be healed.

Now when the purchasers of the Diamond Exclusive option arrived
they would be ushered up the stairs behind Cozbi in full distracting motion and conducted to one of the benches on the balcony that constituted the rear portion of the second floor of the building beyond the living quarters, and that, in the old days, had served as the men's prayer section. There they would sit obediently waiting to be summoned into Ima Temima's bedchamber for their appointment, gazing down at the women's section below, the long narrow sanctuary and study hall with its rows of dark wooden benches and tables and stacks of worn volumes and its satin-sheathed ark housing the holy scrolls and the podium from which the exalted and universally renowned HaRav Temima Ba'alatOv, Ima Temima, may she live on for many good long years, had presided and taught through her veil lest her audience be blinded by her light until she had willingly and deliberately contracted her world to a single room upstairs where she was now sitting at the window, preparing to shed even this paltry four cubits for her final and most instructive stop before the grave.

And while we're on the subject of women at windows and all the troubles this position has brought down upon them, let us also not neglect to mention King Saul's daughter, the princess Mikhal, for whom that extravagant show-off David had actually overtipped with two hundred Philistine foreskins though the asking brideprice for her, true, had been the bargain rate of the mere one hundred at which her value had been assessed. Two hundred Philistines for a yield of two hundred foreskins, think about it, maybe circumcised after they were killed, maybe while they were still alive like Dina's rapist Shekhem and all the men of his town, a major bloodletting, a wild scalping, but David liked to do things big, he liked to make a splash, and Mikhal, after all, was a princess, a Jewish princess, worth every foreskin.

Mikhal, whose loins must have once throbbed for that irresistible bad boy David so that she even betrayed her father to save him, letting him down out of the window of their bedchamber to escape the assassins the old man had sent after him and tucking idols (What? Another Tanakhi lady, like Rachel Our Mother, who could not bring herself to part with her
teraphim
?) in the bed with an absurd tuft of goat hair sticking up on top to trick the pursuers in another of the Bible's great comic interludes. How much bitterness and loathing and alienation must have encrusted the heart of this degraded woman as she stood years later at the window,
a prisoner of the harem, staring down at David in his triumph, observing him as he whirled and leaped half-naked in the street like a lunatic in front of all the riffraff and lowlife, despising him in her heart as he led the processional bearing the Ark of God back to Jerusalem.

Temima let out a sharp, caustic laugh, like a bark, the first sound she had emitted all morning not counting her prayers, which launched Cozbi and Rizpa straight to the window. There below, turning into the Bukharim Quarter and propelling himself toward them, was a small man girded only in a loincloth and a fringed garment threaded with azure strings and a snug-fitting white crocheted openwork skullcap drawn low over his head, spinning ecstatically like a Sufi or a dervish and singing with such fervor that rills of drool snaked down from his mouth, matting his beard, chanting more than singing, over and over again, the refrain, “Te-Tem-Ima-Temima-from-Brooklyn.”

“It is Paltiel,” Cozbi said. “They are coming. We better get ready.”

Forgive me, Paltiel, Temima beseeched him in her heart—not denying, as had Mother Sarah, her indiscretion of laughing at some masculine absurdity. Inwardly she begged him to pardon her. Her laugh that to some ears might have sounded contemptuous had just burst out of her in an unforgiving flash before she had recognized him as her own son, in the fraction of a second when she had seen him coldly through a stranger's eyes.

At the head of the great throng that began streaming into the Bukharim Quarter behind Paltiel, heavy with women and girls, but also including multiple kosher prayer quorums of tens of men, surging forward to the front of her shul, dancing, stamping their feet, twirling, clapping their hands, swaying, many bearing musical instruments, drums, tambourines, rattles, bells, roaring, ululating, whooping, chanting the Te-Tem-Ima-Temima-from-Brooklyn mantra, she now also easily spotted her eighth and last child, the daughter Zippi she had with Abba Kadosh. Temima's eyes even in the dimness of age were instantly snagged by the bright yellows and reds of the African kente cloth turban that wrapped the mass of Zippi's dreadlocks and the coordinated robe that cloaked her matronly form, the solid protruding bolsters of breasts and buttocks. In each of her upraised pumping fists Zippi waved a tool of her trade—a double-edged knife in her right hand, a shield to hold back the prepuce
in her left. She was a
mohel
, a circumciser, like her namesake Zippora, the reputedly black-skinned wife of Moses Our Teacher, the blood groom too busy having visions and saving the Jewish people to attend to his own sons, forcing her to do the job and sacrifice their boys herself. The third tool of Zippi's trade were her own plump lips, with which she performed the
meziza
, sucking the blood from the wound, and with which she now was chanting Te-Tem-Ima along with the swelling congregation packing the entire area in front of the Temima Shul in the Bukharim Quarter, snaking around the corner to Yekhezkel Street with no end in sight.