Can’t change that it happened, where it happened, how it
happened. But can simply go away and never see those places again. Go away and never, ever come back!
She unlocked her seat belt and lurched forward, groping the backs of the aisle seats, making her way to the bathroom. There, in the tiny, uncomfortable cubbyhole, sitting on the toilet seat, the smell of chemical wash and soap bars filling her nostrils, she wept.
Finally gone, she thought. Finally left behind! The shadow-filled, cavernous darkness of the never-ending jungle…
She had never realized how much she hated it!—all of it, all of these years! Her whole body rose up in racking, silent sobs until she felt raw and fragile and clean, like a woman taking her first bath after giving birth.
She wiped her eyes, straightened her wig, and splashed some water on her face. Then, carefully, she made her way back to her seat. Her step was light.
It was a wonderful flight. She emptied the little Styrofoam food trays with appetite; she watched the foolish movie with pleasure. She chatted with the young girls sitting next to her and even with an elderly, bearded man across the aisle.
She chatted and laughed and ate and felt dizzy with freedom, like a helium-filled balloon slipped out of a child’s grasp, making its way, up, up into the stratosphere. The ten hours passed like ten minutes. She saw people looking out the windows at the first glimpse of the Israeli coastline, but she made no move to see. She didn’t want to land, she realized. She was happy just as she was. She didn’t want to put her feet on anything as real and incontrovertible as concrete. She didn’t join in the singing, the hand clapping. Her euphoria left her, smokelike. She was suddenly afraid.
Where am I? she wondered, thinking not of a place, but of an inner landscape gone fuzzy now, like the scenery through a windshield battered by rain. Was she in another place, really? Had
the past faded behind her as easily as the solid ground? She stepped out into the mild November sunlight of a perfect Indian summer day.
Israel. The Middle East. Thousands of miles away, she told herself. But it didn’t seem that way. It felt so familiar. As if she had always lived here and was simply coming home. But to a different home. There didn’t seem to be any darkness, anything to fear.
“
Ima!
”
“Aaron!” His handsome face was warm with pleasure. He wiped his sweating forehead, pushing his dark hair beneath his black Fedora. She wanted so much to embrace him, but it would not have been seemly for a bewigged matron to publicly caress a young yeshiva boy. Even if she was his mother. So she satisfied herself with a long, caressing look.
“Thank you so much for coming! I can’t wait for you to meet Gitta Chana…”
“Gitta Chana! So, we’re on a first-name basis already,” she teased him. But he blushed so furiously, she stopped. This was serious business, she thought, her stomach beginning to churn with tension. “So when are we going to see this lovely girl?” she added with the utmost seriousness.
“Reb Lehman has set it up for Sunday morning. Cousin Velvel and Cousin Drora apologize for not coming to the airport. She’s expecting the new baby any minute.”
The short ride from the airport to B’nai Brak was filled with Aaron’s excited whispers. How much he was learning! How wonderful his
chavrusa
—his learning partner—was… what a fine man Reb Lehman was… what a fine man the girl’s father, Reb Kleinman, was… what an important man…
“And Gitta?” Tamar laughed.
“Oh,
Ima
, you’ll meet her. You’ll see!” His eyes glowed.
Her eyes misted. Maybe it would all be fine in the end, she
thought, her own heart growing warm and light, like the air in early morning filled with clean, fresh sunlight. Maybe that fear too would be washed clean, that fear that hid in the dark place of her soul, afraid to say its name.
Out of the windows of the taxi she glimpsed the palm trees, the first she had ever seen. She smelled the orange groves’ strong perfume and saw the green, healthy fields. Only then did she allow herself to connect time and place. This was not around the corner from Fourteenth Avenue. It was the land of the Bible, where David fought Goliath, where Saul chased the Philistines… Jewish beyond the black clothes of sad European ghettos. Jewish, in the way that Joshua and the twelve tribes were Jewish: hard, spare farmers and shepherds, lean warriors…
“The land into which you cross over is not like Egypt… It is a land of hills and valleys…” She remembered the words of the
posuk
, as Moses described the land to the tribes. She didn’t have an ounce of Zionist blood in her veins. For her, Israel wasn’t a political entity, forged by an army, by international treaties. For her, Herzl had been an ignorant semigoy, his vision of a secular homeland a simple travesty that discounted the holiness of the land. In her mind, the two thousand years of Diaspora was simply erased, a blip on a screen. For her it was simply Joshua back again, the land divided into
nachalot
, each piece of land farmed by a tribe member.
And she was a member of the tribe.
And then, suddenly, they reached B’nai Brak, and she was back on Fourteenth Avenue. The same kerchiefed women pushing baby carriages; the same black-garbed yeshiva students; the same bustling streets with food and clothing stores filled with Hasidim. Her heart sank. It was too familiar.
Velvel and his wife, Drora, were the warmest of hosts. They plied her with cakes and drinks and enveloped her in family conviviality. People she had met only once, twenty years before,
at her wedding. Drora insisted on going with her to meet the girl on Sunday, even though the conversation with the parents would take place in Yiddish and there would be no language barrier. Tamar was grateful for the company. It was still a different country, with different ideas of etiquette. She didn’t want to hurt Aaron or disgrace Josh.
It was a beautiful sunny day, but not the sun of summer—that burning, pitiless heater that scorched foreheads and singed eyelashes—but a friendly bulb that lightly warmed their clothes as they walked down the main avenue, Rechov Rabbi Akiva. Aaron’s face as he said good-bye before leaving for the yeshiva haunted her. It was so aglow, so wretched with hope, so anxious that she be pleased, that everything go well…
“Don’t be so nervous! I won’t eat her! I’m sure she’s a lovely girl, I’m sure it will be fine,” she’d told him.
Now, she hoped it would be true.
She was happy for the constant chatter of Cousin Drora, her easy small talk. How much does a skirt cost in America? How much a lighting fixture? How much curtains? . . . She seemed fascinated by the answers. “So cheap! And how much does rent cost? . . . And how much salary does a
kollel
student make?”
The apartment was in a modest, older building on the third floor. There was no elevator. Tamar felt her face flushing red and her armpits drenched by the time she stood at the front door. She felt so sorry for Drora, so heavy with child. But Drora was used to steps. Hardly any of the older buildings in B’nai Brak had elevators.
The door opened wide and beaming faces rose to greet her. A short man with a vigorous black beard and an even smaller wife, her head done up in an elaborate conical headdress known as a
shvis
. Two older, married sisters, each wearing a pretty wig in shades of ash blond, reached warmly for her hands.
The sisters were small and round and gentle looking.
Ah, Tamar breathed out. It will be all right, then. This is not so hard to do. She looked over the table. Great trouble had been taken. There were platters of delicacies: herring, knishes, meatballs, pastry-wrapped chopped liver. Trays of cakes and marzipan fruits had been set out, enough for a dozen guests. She envisioned meeting the girl, loving her, and sitting down to eat in peace.
And then they ushered in Gitta Chana. Tamar looked up with an expectant smile, and then her heart suddenly gave her an enormous
clop
, a blow that made her ears ring.
She sat down a little too abruptly, aware that the girl’s mother was eyeing her strangely. “All the steps,” Tamar excused herself lamely. The mother and sisters rushed to bring her a drink.
She couldn’t stand her.
What’s the matter with you?
a voice inside her complained bitterly.
There is nothing wrong with this girl! She is gentle and sweet looking, with thick, dark hair and pretty brown eyes. Her fingers are smooth and well cared for. Her body slim and charmingly petite in her well-made, sophisticated suit of lavender crepe. What don’t you like?
But there was nothing she could do. Her spontaneous, overwhelming rejection of the girl was so enormous that she could not even begin to bargain with herself. She wiped her forehead wretchedly.
The girl’s expression didn’t change. She seemed unconcerned, as enthralled with Tamar as Tamar was with her.
Tamar added this to her list of complaints.
“Well, I understand you have met my son. It is very important to get a few conditions settled. I hope Reb Lehman discussed them with you.”
“What conditions?” the girl demanded.
She isn’t fragile and shy, I’ll give her that much. Tamar breathed out. “One, that Aaron continues to live in Orchard
Park. And two, that he continues his studies. We, of course, will contribute to his support for at least two years… then, hopefully, he will leave the yeshiva and get a job…”
“What!” The young lady exploded into a heated Hebrew debate with her parents, which was so fast that Tamar could hardly make out more than every tenth word. The parents wrung their hands. “I absolutely refuse to leave B’nai Brak! That is no life for religious Jews, in America. Even the food is not kosher, at least not to our standards… As for Aaron leaving the yeshiva, I would not consent to marry a man whose life is not Torah. I don’t want a
balabos
, a businessman. I want to be the wife of a
talmid chachom
,” Gitta Chana said in a big voice, enunciating the Yiddish words with absolute clarity so that Tamar should have no doubt as to what she was saying.
Ah, Tamar sighed. Good. She doesn’t want. She refuses. It gets me off the hook. Obviously she hasn’t been told the two main conditions of this match, conditions Aaron would never forgo. He is adamant about remaining with his rebbe in Orchard Park, at least for the next two years. And he has often said that the life of poverty of a perpetual yeshiva student is not for him. That he expects to work and support his family… “Well, there must be some mistake,” Tamar said, looking at the young woman with something akin to kindness.
She’s got a pretty little face, but there’s a little shrewdness around the eyes, and her mouth is wide and aggressive looking. She is also very petite. Maybe that was it. The incongruity between her delicate appearance and the aggressiveness in her manner… Her dogmatic, aggressive goodness. Her rock-hard piety. Maybe that was it. (But you disliked her before she even opened her mouth! she reminded herself, trying to be fair.) Never mind. What difference did it make now? So they would part company, polite strangers, never to cause each other aggravation again.
Tamar looked out the window. The sun was still shining. It was still a lovely day. Soon this would be over and she would enjoy herself. Shop for Chanukah menorahs in Tel Aviv, pray in Jerusalem…
“Something to eat?” the mother interrupted, her gentle face confused, disturbed.
“How can I refuse?” Tamar smiled graciously. They would find another boy for their daughter. An Israeli yeshiva bochur, a perpetual student who would be content to live on family handouts and community dole to buy his one chicken a week, his two challah breads, sliced into twenty-five small pieces when guests came…
“You know, Rebbetzin Finegold, I am very confused,” the other woman said mildly, pouring her a cup of tea. “When your son was here, Gitta told him exactly the same things she is telling you, and he was most enthusiastic. In fact, he
kvelled
. He said he wanted just such a life…”
Tamar slowly put down the fork of chopped liver-filled pastry, pushing herself slightly away from the table. “My son, Aaron, said this? He said he would move here and spend his life in
kollel?
”
“He did!” little Gitta exclaimed, her little jaws slammed together unforgivingly.
Cousin Drora frantically waved her hands, throwing out compliments like confetti. “Such a beautiful dress, Gitta! Did you buy it or have it made? And where did you get it? Uhm, these mandlebrot are delicious, Rebbetzin, you must give me the recipe. Not that I need more cake, I mean, just look at me…”
“When are you due, may
Hashem
watch over you?” Gitta’s mother asked, glad for the distraction.
“Any minute,
shyehiyeh b’shaah tova
.” She smiled.
“Amen, may it be in a fortunate hour,” the women chorused.
“I think I should go. I will talk to Aaron. Perhaps some mistake? . . .”
“That’s what he said,” Gitta repeated charmlessly.
A block away she already spied Aaron leaning over the porch railing, his hand shading his eyes like some picture of an Indian scout. He looked so anxious and childishly hopeful. Her heart sank.
She repeated the girl’s story. “Is it true, did you tell them it was what you wanted?”
“Yes!” he said defiantly.
“But we discussed just the opposite!”
“I know. But that was before I came here. I’m just so happy here. I see the lives of the rebbes in the yeshiva, so involved in learning, in charity and kindness… Of course I have to talk it over with you and
Aba
first, but I would be happy to stay on here… As for learning, I know I agreed to get a job in a few years. But it’s not what I really want. I want to learn, to teach. I want to follow in
Aba’s
footsteps. It’s just so hard to find a girl in America who would agree to live such a hard, simple life. I thought I needed to compromise. But Gitta, she’s everything I want! She would help me live the kind of life I want. A life of
kedushah
.”