“Two hours!” Tamar cried after her. “But I can’t, Rivkie! You said one…”
“It just depends… if… well, I’ll try,” Rivkie called over her shoulder. And then she was gone.
In an hour the mikvah would be reasonably full. In two it would be packed. She walked restlessly around the room. Well, what could you do about it? Nothing. Nothing at all. She walked over to the baby, fast asleep in his carriage in the living room, and tucked the delicate hand-knitted blanket more securely around his tiny shoulders. As she touched him something flamed through her, an ache, a shout of longing for growth, for fecundity, for tiny, perfect, needy creatures to be mothered.
Little sweet boy, little baby! she thought, her finger grazing
the pure silk of his cheek, careful not to scratch him. If only he was awake. If only Moishe was around… Just spending some time holding their soft, young bodies would have erased all her bad feelings…
What was she going to do now? she fidgeted. Like all the houses of young religious couples in Orchard Park, Rivkie’s had no television set and only a few magazines. Walls were dominated by bookcases filled with religious books—the Talmud, the Mishna, the biblical commentaries as well as the whole set of Pentateuch and the major and minor prophets. Tamar glanced up at them. She didn’t feel in the mood for the Pentateuch or the major or minor prophets. So she walked into her sister’s bedroom, turned on the bedside radio, and sat down on the large rocking chair.
The new wig felt suddenly heavy and confining in the warm damp room. She took it off and laid it carefully on the table. A sudden urge to mow her hand through her hair, freeing it, went through her. But she resisted it, letting out a deep, burdened breath. She rummaged through the night table for one of Rivkie’s
tichels
and tied it carefully around her head.
“Please reward me for my strict adherence to your laws. Give me my heart’s desire,” she prayed casually, tucking in the wisps with a determined, righteous finger. G-d was always with her, day and night, a good friend whose hand she held all her waking hours. Her conversation with Him was constant and natural—a breath in, a breath out—needing no outer trappings of synagogue and prayer book.
Curling up on the comfortable chair, she took her sister’s crochet needle and thread and worked on the blanket Rivkie was making for a friend. Even as she worked, she knew her sister would probably tear out all the stitches, which would no doubt fall below her high standards. She didn’t care. The lovely blue and green threads slipped easily over her fingers, dulling her restless
thoughts like a drug. Such pretty colors, she thought. I must make my own baby such a blanket. Someday, she thought drowsily.
And then she heard the footsteps.
Her first reaction was one of pleasure. Rivkie had seen her distress and had come back early to apologize. Or maybe the lesson had been canceled. She put down the crocheting and walked into the living room.
“Rivkie?”
He was a black man of medium height and average build, wearing a pair of unclean brown pants and a checked shirt. “What are you doing in here?” she said reasonably, almost politely, her body tense but controlled, believing in honest mistakes, in polite strangers stumbling inadvertently into lives meant to be detached forever from their own.
Later, her calm, her doubt, would all seem so ludicrous, so much that she would deny it even to herself, ashamed that she had not instantly perceived the winding downward spiral into the stuff of nightmare.
The flash of the knife would always be the beginning of the memory for her.
“Shut your mouth and do exactly what I say. I’ll kill you and…” The knife slashed the air, pausing above the baby’s head.
She froze, her heart, her mind, suspended, as if quick-frozen by some sudden snowy avalanche.
His small, dark eyes looked her over appraisingly. “Now turn around.”
She did exactly as he told her. The strange freezing horror radiated down her limbs, like the numbness of an anesthetic that slowly encroaches into more and more territory. It was a numbness of horror akin to calm, and she felt almost grateful as she looked at the wall, grateful for this tiny space of time, this one moment when she didn’t have to look at him or his knife, when she could concentrate. “
Shema Yisroel
,” she whispered, the proclamation
of G-d’s oneness that is a Jew’s last rites. She heard the wooden slide of drawers, the rustle of materials, the tap of undefined metals.
The moments stretched out and she was still not dead.
“G-d,” she prayed, concentrating all her heart and soul and faith into what she was about to ask, understanding limits, choosing her request wisely: “Just don’t let him kill the baby. Just don’t let me die. Anything but that. Let us live. Please, dear G-d!”
“Now go into the bedroom.”
No!! G-d, no! She couldn’t move. And then she thought of the knife and the small baby, her sister’s child, the child whose fragile skin even the scrape of a fingernail could harm. She took a deep breath and walked into the bedroom.
She found herself facing the dresser mirror. He was standing behind her. He had thin lips, strangely shaped, sunken cheeks pockmarked by bad acne, and thinning hair. He had put on tinted glasses with dark rims.
He fingered her head covering. “You Jewish?” he asked. A simple, neutral question.
Why did he have to ask me that? she thought with sudden rage. Why did he have to make this personal? She nodded.
He ripped the
tichel
from her head.
A deep well of humiliation and rage and hatred ripped through the soft center of her body as the carefully pinned hair tumbled down her back. And suddenly she felt she was no longer just a female, a chance stranger found home alone. And he was no longer just a marauding thief who had stumbled across her. She was a helpless Jewess. And he was a goy, a Roman centurion, a cossack, a Nazi. He was a
schvartze
. A
schvartze
rapist. The living incarnation of every religious Jewish woman’s worst nightmare.
He took a paper bag out of his pocket and pulled it down over her head. It smelled of murky uncleanness, of grease and the sweat of palms.
She felt him push her back, and she lost her balance and fell onto her sister’s bed, the bridal bed bought with her parents’ money as a wedding gift. She could see unclear amber shadows as the paper pressed her long lashes back into her eyes. Sharp, cold metal touched her throat, and then she heard the long swift rip as he sliced through her clothes. She felt the warm damp air touch her skin where he had slit open her lovely new blouse, her Sabbath skirt, her underthings.
He’s going to rape me, she thought, only now fully believing it, fully understanding it. He is going to force himself inside me, inside my most personal and private space. Her mind raced frantically. She thought of advice she’d once read in a woman’s magazine.
“Don’t do this,” she pleaded. “I have cancer, I’m going to die. You might catch it if you do this. It’ll make you sick…”
She could hear his breathing growing thicker and faster as he pushed her clothes to her sides, exposing her body completely.
She felt the icy cold sharpness of metal circle her nipples. And then the brutal warmth of cupping hands take its place.
Now!!
She lashed out at him, but her nailless fingers made little impression.
“Now you stop that fooling, hear? Or I’ll smash your face in and break your arms and make sure you don’t ever have to worry about no birth control,” he whispered with chilling calm, in a way that a woman who did not know him, a woman who was pinned beneath him helplessly in amber shadows, would have no reason to doubt.
She stopped struggling. Never to have children, she thought, almost willing now for it to begin, so that it would begin and then be over. Never, she thought, never to have children.
He was speaking to her, she realized. Terrible things, terrible, disgusting words. Wave after wave of feeling went through
her. She felt a strange energy, a desire, both new and potentially useful, to destroy. So much, so much she wanted to smash, to avenge. But it was stopped up, like a dammed river. Stopped up… She screamed silently as the private pain like no other ripped through her most secret, private self, trampling everything she held sacred, everything she had ever been or ever wanted to be. Desecrating her very core of self, her separate, private oneness of being, that G-d-given self without which we are no longer human. That core was invaded, humiliated, destroyed. She felt his hand over her mouth suffocating her.
When would it be over? Be over, be over… she chanted to herself. Just be over. And then: Die, die, die, she told herself in a rising crescendo of silent disintegration, her whole core of being flowing out like afterbirth. She had no core, no private self. Anymore.
Ugly, she thought, willing herself not to feel, not to understand the things he did to her simply to humiliate her, for no one surely could get pleasure from such ugliness. Cold, strange, penetrating her sacred singleness, going where no one had a right,
no one!!
Her mind screamed with impotent rage. No one, she repeated, already feeling too tired to imagine a shout. She felt the hot tears, like blood, stream down her face.
She had not known there was such ugliness in the world. That one human soul should brutalize another simply for its own amusement. Even animals had no such malice as they tore each other apart. Their instinct was a pure one: survival. But the human predators? Their motives and dark pleasure had nothing to do with survival.
Survival. Her mind drifted to her mother’s tales of concentration camps: “A man is as strong as iron, and as weak as a fly.” To survive. To live.
He pulled the bag off her face. And the smell of him—dusky and unfamiliar—the breath of him, intrusive and unfamiliar,
settling on her eyes and mouth, invading her nostrils, like nothing else, nothing else.
And then, he kissed her on the mouth.
Her whole being rose up to vomit it out, her whole soul. This was worse somehow than the rape, which in comparison had been a battering, a hammer’s blow far away and unseen. This was an act of love transformed into a disgusting violation. This she had seen, and tasted and smelled and felt. She would never forget those lips on hers. Her whole being heaved in utter revulsion.
This she would never, ever forget.
“Now close your eyes and count to ten and I’ll be gone.”
She was beyond feeling hope. Beyond feeling. She closed her eyes and heard him fumbling through the dresser drawers and then his footsteps growing fainter and then silence.
Was he still there? Was he going to kill her anyway? she wondered, wondering, too, why it was she didn’t care.
Chapter two
For several moments (Several years? A few lifetimes?), she lay perfectly still, listening, as if waiting for some kind of command, some indication of what she was to do next. She heard the wind rustle the curtains, and for some reason it reminded her of a rat scurrying through dry, old newspapers. The idea of it made her want to scream and scream and scream until all the neighbors came pounding at the door…
The neighbors. Her mind suddenly reared up, as if out of a dream. She looked at herself. She was half-naked, filthy… She sat up, then stood. She felt disgustingly wet and sticky as the viscous liquid drained down her thighs. She wanted to wash herself off. That mattered more than anything. To wash. To be clean again. But police, she thought dimly. Doctors. Evidence…
She gathered the sheet around her and walked into the living room. The window by the fire escape was still open, showing no trace of the man who had come and gone. She slammed it shut and leaned against it, trembling, staring at the door, feeling the blocked screams rising with almost irresistible force.
She swallowed hard. The neighbors. Her own kind of people. They would gather her in their arms. They would call Josh, her sister, the police… She leaned heavily against the window frame, her whole body aching for those kind, protective arms.
But then she thought: Everyone will know. Every time I come to visit my sister, they will all look at me and think of me this way: violated, repulsive, and somehow blameworthy. I won’t ever again be a young, respectable married woman, part of a young couple, like all the other young couples. The warm conviviality, the social cocoon, would simply burst trying to contain what it had seen. The moment I open that door, I’ll become the worst possible thing in the world. The worst possible thing in
my
world. Different.
In the growing shadows, she touched her tender stomach, envisioning a black-and-blue mark. She touched her breast and face. They were cold but seemed unharmed. She sat down on the couch and rocked, hugging her body like some dear object lost, then suddenly found, but dirtied somehow, and not half so lovely or precious as she remembered it.
What should she do now?
She felt that tightness in her chest, that smothering loss of breath as if some savage wind had flown up her nostrils and down her throat. Her head felt cramped, as if a dozen small hammers were banging above her eyebrows, pressing down, making her lids twitch. Gingerly, she traced her face. There were the bones of her forehead, her eye sockets, her temples, hard and clear, as if she were a corpse, fleshless and unprotected.
My whole life… she thought vaguely, not understanding the end of the thought, then suddenly understanding. My whole life, there was a shine to living. A shine, a glow of beauty that covered the world where G-d sat regally protecting the weak, punishing the wicked, watching over His faithful, like the apple
of His eye. Never again would it have that lovely innocent shine. My whole life… Never, never again.
She wanted to cry. And then she did cry. I’m sorry, so sorry! she cried helplessly until another thought dawned on her. The baby! Shlomie! How could it be that she had forgotten all about him? She walked to the carriage. It was silent, unmoving. A feeling of indescribable horror went through her as she lifted the coverlet.
But he was all right, she saw, feeling his little body warm against her chest. He stretched and twitched in protest, uttering little mewing sounds. Still, she undressed him, her hands and eyes roaming from his tiny, transparent toenails to the soft fontanel, scanning him like an x-ray. He was all right! Thank G-d! She dressed him and put him down. She saw his shoulders heave peacefully as she pulled the covers over him. For a long time she stared at him numbly, the horror of what could have been chasing her relief.