I Am Forbidden (9 page)

She lingered in front of the Sorbonne, peeked into the cobbled yard. The bell of the chapel rang. She darted through the crowd on the boulevard Saint-Michel, across the Seine, faster, to get home before Zalman noticed her absence.

W
HEN
Mila began to mention classes that prepared for the baccalauréat, the diploma that opened the doors to university, Zalman withdrew the girls from the lycée. Mila and Atara were to help Hannah around the house until they were of age to marry. Mila was sixteen and Atara fifteen.

Hannah, however, remembered Leah Bloch praising a highly reputed seminary for girls, in northern England. Leah Bloch had spent her happiest years there. Hannah was willing to forgo the help; a few semesters of Torah study, away from house chores and sibling care, would be Hannah’s lasting gift to her girls.

Zalman argued that the seminary, while ultra-orthodox, was not run by Hasidim. Teaching Torah to women was not the Hasidic way, nor was sending unmarried girls far from their father’s guardianship. But the thought of the two adolescent girls idle in Paris, and the recurrent appearance of secular books in Atara’s possession, troubled Zalman. He pondered
recent rabbinic rulings that saw no harm in women studying Scripture and Ethics; he verified that there was no Talmud instruction—which was expressly forbidden to women; he authorized the seminary.

A new urgency pervaded Atara’s forays in the city; these August days might be the last she would call Paris home. After the seminary, she would be expected to marry abroad, in a Hasidic community. Zalman was adamant: not one of his children would settle in France; it was too hard to bring up Hasidic children in France. On the crest of the Pont Saint-Michel, Atara turned her head right, to Notre Dame’s flying buttresses, to the forest of gargoyles and spires; she turned her head left, to the string of bridges arching over the Seine, the Pont Neuf, Pont des Arts.… She loved the story of time the old stones told, time before her, after her, loved feeling herself to be a mere fleck in this immensity. The bells rang the hour, then the hour filled with silence and she filled with longing; must Paris be a mere way station on her wanderings? If Paris had a home in her heart, might she not have a home in Paris?

Atara daydreamed of preparing for the baccalauréat with her classmates at the lycée, but then her family would be erased from the register of good Hasidic families, her siblings condemned to bad marriages, to no marriage at all.… Was it a selfish heart that dreamt of living her own life?

T
HE TAXI’S
horn sounded through the open windows. The girls’ suitcases sat on the landing. Hannah placed a finger on her lips and signaled the girls to follow her into the living room. She opened the dark walnut chest from Transylvania, now emptied except for two stacks of new sheets and pillowcases. “God willing, the chest will fill up, yes, your trousseaus. You are laughing, Milenka? Two, three years go by fast.…”

Hannah kissed the girls, she blessed their journey:
“May the Lord bless you. May He guard your steps.…”

One last time, Zalman exhorted the girls to uphold the family’s reputation and their Hasidic antecedents.
“May the Lord bless you. May He guard your steps.…”

*

T
HE TRAIN
clanked its way north on the last leg of the long journey. Mila read her Book of Psalms; Atara stared out the window.
Northampton … Leicester … Nottingham
. Neither farmland nor city but vast stretches of humble brick houses, row after row of row houses punctuated by slag heaps and tall chimneys.
Doncaster … Newton Aycliffe
. Leah Bloch had challenged Atara; the most erudite rabbis taught at the seminary, some with broad knowledge not only in Torah matters but in worldly disciplines. If Atara applied herself, she would obtain
answers to the questions she had not dared ask Zalman. It was urgent that Atara find answers that would ready her for marriage with the pious young man Zalman would find for her.
Stony Heap … Deaf Hill
. Atara made up her mind to try. She would study the holy texts as intently as she had read secular books.
No Place … Quaking Houses
. She would immerse herself in the seminary’s teachings and perhaps the holy texts would work their magic on her, too; perhaps she would stop dreaming about the baccalauréat and learn to dream of preparing meals for the Sabbath so that Zalman’s and Hannah’s hearts would not break.

The car couplers clattered. The train crawled through hissing smoke and stopped under a dark vault.

Two girls in long skirts greeted Mila and Atara on the platform. In the taxi, the seminary girls talked excitedly about this year’s entering class, the largest ever, forty-five, bless the Lord, almost a hundred in the entire seminary, the principal was very happy, bless the Lord, this year’s T1 girls were all so special.

“T1 girls?” Atara asked.

“Teachers 1—for Teacher’s Training College, but the teacher’s degree is granted only if one stays the entire three years.” The girl’s voice held a note of regret.

“Marguit is engaged!” the second girl chimed in.

Mila and Atara shook Marguit’s hand. “Mazel tov!”

“Esti, too, is engaged!” Marguit teased.

“Mazel tov!”

The taxi stopped mid-block in front of a three-story
house. The older students explained that the seminary comprised four adjoining houses with interconnected corridors. No, Mila and Atara would not share the same room; all T1 girls were encouraged to make new friends.

S
IX BEDS
in two facing rows under a bare bulb. Cloth of faded green-and-wine corduroy screened six shelves. A loud bell, the bulb went out. The orange coil of the wall-mounted heater glowered and went dark. In the middle bed of the row facing the window, Atara pulled the coarse blanket to her nose. She would try; she must. She would learn to fall asleep without reading—where would she have hidden a book and a flashlight in a room shared with five girls? Lulling herself, she fell into the sensation that a train was rocking her to some farther destination,
tournent roues, tournent roues … tournent … tournent.…

In the adjoining house, in a room with two facing rows of beds, Mila also lulled herself. Comforted by the fervor she sensed in the other girls whispering their bedtime prayers, she joined in:
“Michael is to my right, Gabriel to my left, Uriel is in front.…”

Mila woke full of anticipation. She was thrilled to belong to the first generation of Hasidic women who would be studying
Scripture. She looked forward to meeting girls from different walks of orthodox life: from Hasidic communities and Misnaged communities; from Litvak, Yekke, and Polish families; from every corner of Europe, from the two Americas, from Australia and South Africa—all in long skirts and long-sleeved blouses, girls among whom she would be, at last, normal.

The class schedule was: Pentateuch, Prophets, Midrash, Jewish Thought, Conduct. During Pentateuch class, Mila wondered: Had her father come across this very interpretation? Had gematriah enchanted him as it enchanted her? To Mila, gematriah felt occult yet cerebral, mystical yet rational, drawing the Hebrew words of Scripture into the more universal language of numbers.

During afternoon study hours, Mila whispered to Atara, “Did you notice? The letters in the word
(messiah)
sum to 358, which equals the sum of
(snake)
.” Mila recounted the commentary: This equation corroborated that redemption and sin were not exclusive of each other.
Fear not to go down to Egypt
, the Lord tells Jacob; Jacob must go
down
before he can raise a great nation. Descent for the sake of ascent. Redemption
through
sin was a sign of messianic times.

Most of all, Mila cherished the third Sabbath meal at the seminary, when all the girls sang and danced and circled Queen Sabbath to detain her a bit longer. In the last glimmer of sundown, the girls intoned longingly,
Prophet Elijah, come to us with the messiah
, and Mila daydreamed: Who among them would give birth to the messiah, son of David, who among the girls would deliver the world from suffering?

A
FTER
all the years during which Atara’s secular reading had pulled them apart, Mila loved to prepare for classes with Atara, she loved how Atara studied every page of the Mikraoth Gedoloth, the Expanded Rabbinic Bible, not just the assigned commentaries. Teachers began to call on Atara to explain obscure passages, and classmates consulted her during study hours.

Yet, however earnestly Atara tried to embrace the seminary, Mila feared that it might not last. She could tell from the rigidity with which Atara listened to the rabbis’ lectures that they did not satisfy her.

One morning, a teacher called on Atara to sum up a rabbinic argument and Atara wondered aloud about the merit of the argument. The teacher rubbed his eyelids. Mila bit her lip. The class fell still. “Next verse,” the teacher called.

Another day, Atara raised her hand and asked how Rashi had arrived at an interpretation. “Such a shame you’re not a boy!” the rabbi exclaimed. The class understood it was a shame because boys, not girls, needed good heads to study Torah. Then the rabbi quoted another Rashi passage that gave the same reading and he moved on to the next commentator.

“He repeated the interpretation but didn’t explain it,” Atara whispered in Mila’s ear.

The rabbi noticed Atara’s frown and whisper. “Is it possible you have something to add to Rashi?” the rabbi asked.

The class laughed.

But then Sabbath came again, the singing, the dancing. Girls at the seminary who knew of Zalman’s voice asked Atara to sing. After hearing her once, the girls asked Atara to sing every Friday night. The first measures trembled but soon the notes freed themselves. Some girls closed their eyes. When Atara finished singing, girls lined up to shake her hand. “May your strength be firm!” Mila, who recognized Zalman’s modulations in Atara’s song, felt certain that Atara would find her place as the daughter of Zalman and all the generations past.

*

M
ILA
and Atara were studying in the little library under the eave when the door crept open. A gray triangular goatee floated between door and jamb. The goatee retreated. The girls stifled a laugh. “I wonder why he does that,” Atara whispered, returning to the Expanded Rabbinic Bible, but Mila could no longer focus, she was aware of the deep silence around them, that once again Atara and she were the last ones in the Lecture House after study hours, when all the other girls were in their rooms preparing themselves for lights-out.

“A
TARA?
 …” The rabbi’s voice no longer held warm expectation when he called on her in class.

The words she was finding to formulate her question frightened Atara. The question might begin: When the Bible commands to kill babies and animals, in warfare—or, When God commands that a child suffer for his parents’ sin.… To Atara, these seemed good questions, with implications in
real
life, questions that might matter to Mila, too, but Atara’s pulse quickened when the rabbi’s dark eyes came to rest on her raised hand, her throat contracted; her voice would quake and strangle as it did every time she tried to ask this kind of question.