Tamar blinked.
The bris. The circumcision ceremony that must take place when a male child is eight days old. The big, public celebration welcoming a manchild into the congregation. A celebration of parents, grandparents, friends, and family, where the child is publicly displayed, handed from mother to father, from father to the honored grandparent. A time for rejoicing, for family, for public acknowledgment of G-d’s gift of a new member to the Jewish people.
She had not even thought of it. No one had.
She had not thought of it, because it was unthinkable.
It was also, she realized, the
halacha
. Her grandson was the blameless, legitimate child of two Jews, married with all the meticulous caution of those who love the law. He had to have a bris.
She tried to envision it. The large hall. Long tables set with wine and challah. The venerable
admorim
. The
roshei yeshivot
. The yeshiva boys. The rebbetzins. The friends, relatives, and neighbors. And in the middle of it all, the black baby.
Her whole body heaved in revulsion.
It was impossible.
“
Ima
, can we take some more cookies? They’ve cooled off!”
It was Menachem. He roared in on his wheelchair, playing tricks with the wheels the way boys on dirt bikes did in America. Tamar looked at him and thought of the others: the little girl with the patched-up hole in her heart, the little redheaded boy who could not hear. Adopted by kind strangers, who were not even flesh of their flesh, loved by strangers, cared for by strangers. With such kindness. Deformed of limb, tainted with illness, nevertheless called blessings, acknowledged publicly as belonging. Called “my children” to the world.
She thought of her tiny grandson, alone in his hospital bassinet, fed by nurses.
My
grandson, she suddenly realized.
She would prepare the celebration herself. She would take him from his lonely cradle with bent elbows, cuddle him against her grandmother’s breasts, and hold him out to her son, her daughter-in-law, her husband, her in-laws. She would hold him out to the community, this blameless child, her grandson, and insist they accept him into the congregation. She would try love. Finally. She would test its strength.
“The bris will be on the eighth day. Tuesday. But I don’t know how many people will come. Will you?”
“I’ll bring my husband and the children. You know what else? Hadassah’s in Cyprus doing a documentary on antiquities. I got a call from her last night. That’s only an hour away by plane. Shall I call and invite her, too?”
“Why not? And is the Rebbe of Kovnitz in Israel?”
“He’s always here this time of year. But I don’t know. Do you think it’s a good idea to invite them both? After all these years…”
“Yes. I do. Especially after all these years…” Why not invite them both? Why not invite everyone and just put an end
to the hatred, the lies, once and for all? Just refuse to go on with it. Insist the community live up to its own ideals of piety and compassion. Insist they accept her blameless son and daughters; her blameless grandson. She would do it! she suddenly thought. Yes, I have the strength. It would be all right.
I will make it be all right.
Chapter thirty-three
“We were worried about you!”
“Where did you go?”
“Really, Tamar!”
She walked into the maelstrom and closed the door behind her. She looked them over, her husband, her handsome son, her two golden daughters. All she loved in the world.
She sat down by the kitchen table and wiped a few crumbs off with her pinkie, trying to clean away one small spot on which she could focus. There was a coffee stain. She rubbed at it.
How to begin? she wondered. How to find the right sentence to begin? Would it be better to ramble, to talk in soft, roundabout sentences that would slip over the truth and mask it for a while, dulling its sharp edge? Or would it be better to plunge in with it, like a scalpel, cutting away the lies and illusions like a surgeon going after a cancerous growth in the hope that the patient would somehow survive the pain and violation, would somehow heal?
But she didn’t feel like a surgeon. She felt like an intruder
who had sneaked into the home of innocent strangers and was now about to murder them.
She cleared her throat.
“Saraleh, Malkaleh, I have to talk to your father and your brother. Please go to bed now.” She kissed each of them on their fragrant, warm foreheads.
“Please, we want to hear also!” Malka pleaded.
“It’s not fair! Everyone’s so angry, and we can’t see the baby, and no one talks to us about anything!” Sara wept.
Tamar looked at them helplessly. She had tried lies, silence. And the cancer had responded by spreading its tentacles farther into the living flesh of her family. Now she would try truth, words. She looked at Josh. Perhaps she should have taken him outside and walked the dark streets, telling him alone, letting him decide how to tell the others. But now it was too late. She didn’t have the strength to walk out the door, down the stairs. To be alone with her husband.
Josh shrugged as he met her glance. “If it concerns them…”
She felt a sudden pity for him, for the decision he had now made in such ignorance. They were still so young. Tender young girls. He would be sorry.
She looked at her fingers rubbing away the stains on the table. The work of my hands, she thought as she studied the clipped nails, the torn cuticles. The work of my hands. She began.
“When I was twenty-one years old, I went to baby-sit for your aunt Rivkie because she had a driving lesson. Your cousin Shlomie was less than a month old. I heard a noise and I went into the living room. There was a man standing there, a black man, a stranger. He had come through the window and he stood there looking at me. At first I thought, A mistake. But then I saw the knife. He held it over Shlomie’s head. He told me that he would kill the baby if I didn’t do exactly what he wanted.”
She couldn’t even hear what she was saying; her heart suddenly filled with the unspoken sounds coming from the eyes, the mouths, the eyebrows, the skin of the people around her. There was a tension like electricity, a reaction of sympathy, of pain and compassion. The girls reached out to her, hugging her. Josh and Aaron looked at her in shock and pity.
“All I could think about was the baby. And I didn’t want to die. I prayed for life, for both of us. He took me into the other room. The bedroom.”
How was she going to tell them this, her family, her pretty young daughers, her pious son and husband?
“And he did… he did what Shechem did to Dina,” she said, using the ancient tool of the Talmud to discuss any unpleasant subject, couching the language in words of Torah that would fall more smoothly on their ears. “What Amnon did…”
“To Tamar,” Sara finished for her in a voice of astonishment.
“To Tamar,” Tamar repeated, nodding. Be careful what you name your children, she thought. Be very, very careful.
The room went suddenly white with the crackle of tension. Limbs and muscles tensed, eyes filled with tears.
“I felt like an animal going to the
shochet
. I felt as low and filthy as a person can feel. And when it was over, he told me to count to ten and he would be gone. I counted. And when I opened my eyes, I did not see him. But he wasn’t really gone. Not really. In all these years, he’s never really been gone, never really left my life for a moment.
“I didn’t know what to do. You can understand that, can’t you? I wanted to scream and scream and scream. But I didn’t. I thought of my family. My mother, my sister. And most of all, of you, Josh. Of how angry and ashamed it would make you all. Of how it would hurt you. And I didn’t want to hurt you. To hurt anyone.”
She wiped a single tear from her eye, rubbing it into the
now clean spot on the kitchen table. “I decided to hold it all in. To keep all the pain to myself. I decided not to tell anyone, ever. And so I went to the mikvah. I purified myself. I washed it all off. And then I went home. I went home to your father and tried to begin my life again.”
Their compassion was so palpable. If only she could stop now. If she could leave the story at this point, where she was the only victim. The heroine, the martyr.
“A month later, I found out I was expecting a child.”
She stopped, letting the simple words sink in. Letting them do their savage work.
“I prayed it would be your father’s child, and not the child of the other. For nine months, I prayed. I couldn’t sleep. I kept having a nightmare that the baby would be born black and everyone would yell terrible accusations at me, blaming me. And when Aaron was born, I thanked
Hashem
for answering my prayers.”
Now the dawn of understanding. She could see it, the tiny flickering light of horror suddenly ignited in Aaron’s eyes, the responding reflection in her husband’s eyes. The slow, excruciating dawning of terrifying knowledge.
Aaron stood as stiff as a corpse, his face white, his proud back curved as though someone had whipped it raw.
“Aaron!” Josh reached for him. At Josh’s touch, his rigid posture dissolved. He groped his way into the living room. He sat on the couch. He did not turn on the light.
Josh’s eyes lost their alertness, going wild and undirected. She saw his strong chin, his distinct jawline, quiver. He looked like a man coming home from war to find his home in ruins, his loved ones corpses.
Sara began to weep, throwing her arms around her mother. Tamar held her.
“Does that mean that Aaron is not our brother?” Malka wanted to know.
A small, strangled sob came out of Aaron’s throat.
“Don’t you ever say that! He is your brother!”
Josh exploded.
Aaron didn’t look up.
Josh turned to her. She saw something in his eyes, his face, she could not name, something threatening and primitive and without a clear boundary. More complex, she saw, than hatred. More boundless and perhaps more praiseworthy.
Who was this person? she wondered. What was her connection to him?
He had missed his opportunities, those moments when her life seemed to totter in the balance, abandoned to the dark forces, those moments when his love could have become her true home. He had simply slept through them.
Was it her own fault? For not having wakened him?
And did it matter?
Would the measuring out of blame, the careful, chemical analysis of the elements that had produced this brew, change the brew? Would it change that they had been strangers for twenty years? Would it redeem what had been sacrificed?
And what exactly had she laid down upon the altar?
Her chance for real happiness.
Her chance for true goodness.
Her chance to know a real G-d who was complex and difficult and compassionate, rather than the cardboard image of a deity who responded to human obedience with divine gifts. Some idol as greedy and cruel and unpredictable as the people who created him.
She had lived a perfect picture of a life, a perfect imitation, perfectly lighted, with everyone wearing the perfect outfit, the perfect expression. She felt a desire to weep for all the lost years, the real feelings, the real life she had given up with such simple-minded cheerfulness.
She had not made the sacrifice for Josh, or Aaron, or her
girls, she finally understood. She had made it for all the narrow, attached houses. What’s not nice, we don’t show. Because it’s not nice to make people feel uncomfortable, not nice to show them things they can’t reconcile in their easy, predictable version of a complex faith. Keep it hidden, keep it quiet, so they can go on without questioning or working, without challenges… You create a perfect world by denying the imperfection in it, by forcing the misfits to hide. There are no wife-beaters or adulteresses; no deformed, or mentally unbalanced, or crippled, or retarded, or deaf, or blind among our kind! None of our women are raped, none of our children abused or molested. No one commits suicide. Not on our streets. Not among our kind.
Our world, our grid, is perfect.
She had hidden what was not nice. She had kept the knowledge from him. In this Josh was blameless. But the question that had held her all these years, like some instrument of torture, was this: If she had told him, what would he have done?
She put the girls to bed and then returned to the kitchen to find her husband, to find the answer.
But when she got there, he was gone.
Chapter thirty-four
Aaron had fallen asleep on the couch. She took off his stiff black shoes, loosening the laces, easing them soundlessly to the floor. She put a pillow beneath his head and covered him with a thick blanket, tucking it under his shoulders. She let her hand rest there a moment, feeling grateful to be able to touch him with such simplicity, knowing that awake, it would be difficult and fraught with meaning. Awake, she would need his permission. He might not grant it.
She went into her bedroom and got ready for bed, washing her face and hands and slipping a clean, warm nightgown over her head. Its old flannel was soft and homey and comforting against her skin.
I should feel sad or abandoned or ashamed, she thought. But I don’t. I feel very calm, almost grateful.
This surprised her. Like someone who has watched a loved one die slowly and painfully of some terminal illness, the tragedy was also a relief, she realized. The waiting was over. The worst had happened. The mourning would come later, she imagined.
The heartbreaking loneliness of separation from the old life.
For she didn’t doubt that her old life was over.
Josh, Aaron, the girls… all of them. Their old lives were gone. There was a black baby, and they were responsible. The seas would calm again only when they were all thrown overboard out of the ship.
She looked out of the window, watching the breeze lift the branches in the tarnished light of street lamps, listening to the sound of footsteps on the street grow louder and then softer until they faded away into a heartbreaking silence. And then she listened to the gentle, even breathing of the human beings asleep close all around her.