The Sacrifice of Tamar (43 page)

“That’s a very nice wig. It must be American. It must cost a fortune. Here in B’nai Brak the
rabbaim
have forbidden women to wear long wigs. They say it leads to
pritzus.
”

Tamar felt her insides tighten in fear. She had left her friends and neighbors behind. The people who knew her. And now she had to start all over again, proving who she was. More than losing her home, her family, her familiar stores and comforts, losing her status had bothered her most about the move to Israel.

“My husband allows it,” she said with what she hoped was full confidence, smoothing down the flip on the shoulder-length hair. “He says the
halacha
makes no stipulations about such things. That it is just a
minhag
, a custom.”

“Well, yes, a different
minhag
, and if your husband allows it… My husband, of course, would
never
permit such things.” She touched her hairless forehead, adjusting the scarf that made her look like a nun before Vatican IV. “And I agree with my husband. It’s wasteful, frivolous. Married women walking around
in ponytails like little girls! You can’t tell the virgins from the matrons in B’nai Brak anymore. Maybe you need some help to unpack?” she pursued.

“Oh, thank you so much. But my girls will help,” Tamar said rather desperately.

“But I just saw them both outside. Delicate-looking girls. Pale and thin. I hope they like my kugel. It’ll fatten them up a little. Shouldn’t they be in here, though, helping their mother instead of playing? My girls wouldn’t dream of not being up in the house helping. With ten children, they learn to help. This is G-d’s wish. They play too much in America, I hear. Here we teach them they never have free time. They can always be doing something useful. The boys learn. The girls are at home helping their mothers…”

“They wanted to stay and help, but I sent them out. I think I’d rather unpack myself, in peace and quiet,” she said pointedly.

Like most tactless and offensive people, the woman was also very touchy and sensitive, Tamar could see. Her face registered immediate offense.

“They’re my husband’s
sifre kodesh
mostly,” Tamar apologized. Neighbors. No point in starting out so badly. “He trusts hardly anyone to arrange his library. Even when we packed, he did most of it himself.”

This was true. Josh had given her a long lecture about the subject, instructing her in what the
halacha
said about which books could be placed on the bottom and which on the top, the efficiency of packing giving way before gradations of holiness. It took many more boxes that way.

“So many boxes of books!” the woman said with new respect. “And where is your husband learning?”

Tamar was surprised. She assumed everyone automatically knew. “He is teaching in Lonovitch. He is the new rebbe there.”

“Lonovitch! A rebbe in Lonovitch!”

“My son is also learning there. He is married to the mashgiach’s daughter.” Tamar smiled, feeling wicked as the woman’s eyes continued widening in awestruck misery and respect.

“I didn’t know. They said you were Americans,” she mumbled, her face a bright pink deepening to mauve. “May you have only health and good fortune in your new home,” she gushed. “And please call on me if I can help you with anything,” she fawned, almost bowing out the door.

Tamar nodded pleasantly. After closing the door, she laughed to herself in sheer relief. It had disturbed her more than she cared to think that the grapevine and rumor mill had not prepared this woman for her coming. She did not want to start all over again. Bless the grapevine. Bless the rumor mill… Most people knew all about them. But even those who did not know, all she needed to do was tell them.

Tamar felt a little bird of happiness fly up and sing in her heart.

She unpacked as much as she could and then decided to explore. It was four o’clock, time for stores to reopen following the afternoon siesta taken year round by merchants, come rain or shine. She felt happy as she wandered through the tree-lined streets bereft of threat, cleansed of all dark memories. A clean slate. Streets and alleys and roads without history. Even the shadows of the apartment buildings were benign, she thought, devoid of secrets. They were simple plays of light, cooling and dappling. They hid no potential horrors.

She felt almost giddy with freedom. To walk down any street! To make any turn you wished without the threat of death or violation hanging over you if you made the wrong one! How had she endured the life in New York City? How? It seemed like some dark labyrinthine jungle to her now. But when you were in it, you just didn’t realize you had a choice. That there really was a way out.

She took Sara and Malka by the hand, and had it not been for passersby, she would have skipped down the street as she once had with Jenny and Hadassah so many years ago.

The shine, she thought, the shine. G-d is back in His Heaven. He is back ruling the world, she thought exultantly.

Everything gave her pleasure. Even the street names. Instead of the grid of numbers, there were thrilling reminders of Jewish history. Rabbi Akiva Street. Just a street name! Yet what worlds of meaning it held. Jenny had once written her something to that effect. It was all meaningful. You were connected to everything around you. It was your history. Your culture. Your people.

The stores were bustling and crowded. She stopped at a few dress stores and came out with a look of shock on her face: a hundred and fifty shekels for a house coat! Why, that was seventy-five dollars! Seventy-five dollars. For a house coat. Why, in Orchard Park, there was a store where you could get such a thing for nine dollars… Maybe the storekeeper was crazy. There were always a few like that around. She went into another store. The same house coat, only it was ten shekels more! Maybe it was clothes. Something about fabrics being imported, or something… ? But then she went into a store and saw a baby carriage. And it was six hundred shekels. She blinked, not believing her eyes. Why, that was three hundred dollars! For a locally made baby carriage with plastic sides and plastic upholstery.

Were they insane?

Who bought this stuff? Certainly not rich American tourists, who knew what to do with a dollar. It must be Israelis, who made about one-fourth the salary Americans did. She was beginning to understand Gitta Ghana’s frugalness, her insistence that they would get the baby equipment from relatives and friends instead of buying it. Shopping, she could see, was not going to be the fun-filled hobby it had been in New York. In fact, it wasn’t going to be a hobby at all.

She was never going to shop again.

Next time she needed a house coat, she’d write Rivkie to buy her one on Thirteenth Avenue. She could mail it—or better yet, give it to someone who was coming to Israel. Someone was always coming, she comforted herself.

That wasn’t a bad idea, she thought. Rivkie could shop in Orchard Park and send her packages of things she could sell to Israelis from her living room. Maybe she could even open a little store of her own!

Her mind was suddenly awash with possibilities.

As they said: Change your place, change your luck.

A new
mazel
.

She passed a fruit stall. Luscious apples from the Golan, beautiful oranges from nearby orchards, and carrots and potatoes from kibbutzim in the south. They even smelled differently from the fruits and vegetables in America. Earth fresh, instead of deep-storage chemical, the produce shipped in open trucks straight from nearby farms to local open-air markets. And everything was so cheap and abundant and good! A land flowing with oranges and apples, potatoes and carrots, strawberries and mangoes… She bought as much as she and the girls could carry.

Besides, she already had ten house coats.

Chapter twenty-nine

The phone rang. Josh mumbled in the dark. The light went on.

“What is it?” she sat up, alarmed.

“Gitta Chana. The baby. Aaron thinks it’s time.

I’m going to bring around the car and take her.”

“I’m going with you.” She threw off the covers. “Do you think… ?”

“Don’t say another word. Do you think I could stay here while my first grandchild is being born?”

“You’ll just sit in the hall on those chairs and drink bad coffee in paper cups.”

“And you’ll sit next to me, so what?” She smiled into his eyes.

He smiled back.
Uray vanim lebanecha
. And you will see your children’s children. The ultimate blessing.

Gitta Chana was calm, but clearly in pain. Aaron was hysterical.

“Hurry, hurry! Why did you take so long?” he agonized.

“Calm down. A first baby takes a while. You have hours yet. How do you feel, Gitta Chana?”

“
Baruch Hashem
,” came the weak reply.

Tamar turned around and patted the girl’s limp white arm. “It will all be over soon. How close are your contractions?”

But Gitta Chana didn’t answer. She just held her stomach as her cheeks filled with air.

“It’s her breathing. She’s breathing through the pain,” Aaron explained. He had also been to the hospital’s childbirth class.

A little while later, it happened again. Tamar looked at her watch. Only five minutes between them. This might go faster than they expected.

“When did they start?”

“She got up last night and kept going to the bathroom. But she thought it was a stomachache. We’d been eating sunflower seeds all evening, and she thought her stomach was just upset. But this morning she saw some… something red,” Aaron said, embarrassed.

The show. The plug was out and she was ready to go, Tamar thought, getting excited. My grandchild.

She couldn’t wait!

The private maternity hospital was the most beautiful one she had ever seen. Built for the religious women of B’nai Brak by a wealthy,
haredi
Swiss obstetrician with eighteen children of his own, it looked like an expensive hotel.

“It’s to encourage our women to have many children,” Aaron said proprietarily as he hurried to register his wife. Tamar looked around. The colorful ethnic mix so common in Israeli streets and public institutions was dramatically absent. There were no black Ethiopians or blond Russian Jews. No dark Yemenites or Indian Jews. All one saw were pale, bearded Ashkenazi men with their white-faced pregnant wives. Even the doctors looked like Talmud scholars in their beards and black skullcaps. And the
older nurses all covered their hair with the pious married woman’s
tichel
. It seemed more like a synagogue than a hospital.

The waiting rooms were lovely, too: well lit, clean, and cheerful. She walked over to the window where the newborns lay. Maternity hospitals were so wonderful. Not sickness and death, but birth and life. She looked longingly at the tiny human creatures in their plastic cradles, her eyes resting on one. A little boy, for sure. No need to even bother taking off the diaper to check! A strong face with much character and lots of silky dark hair. Tiny, flailing fists and a pair of lungs, G-d bless him. Healthy and lusty and hungry. A little boy to love and take home and raise. And then when you were all finished, and the little boy was gone and only the man was left, with broad shoulders and enough height to look down at his mother, he’d get married and start the story all over again, atoning for his crime of growing up by producing a little one for you to cuddle again. A grandchild.

She looked at the clock. An hour had passed.

Josh sat in the waiting room, reading. She looked over his shoulder. He was reading psalms.

This surprised her. Of course, things went wrong in births. But she felt strangely confident about this birth, about the health of the baby, so that she really didn’t feel the need to whisper
tehillim
begging for G-d’s salvation in times of trouble. Perhaps because she’d experienced three healthy pregnancies, three normal births. The baby was full term. And even if there were complications, they were surrounded by doctors and the most modern equipment. Worse came to worst, they could always do a cesarean. Not, G-d forbid, that she wanted that! She just thought that as a worst-case scenario, it was not particularly frightening. At least not enough to send her mouthing psalms.

It would be different if it was Sara or Malka giving birth, she realized. With her own daughters she would feel every contraction, agonize over every pain. She wouldn’t care at all about the baby,
who’d be a little interloper that had invaded her own darling child’s body, bringing her pain.

But this girl was not of her flesh. Her suffering didn’t enter into her imagination the way her own daughters’ would. Was that cruel, wrong? No, she decided. It was just natural.

She bought the paper and leafed through the pages calmly.

Suddenly there was a great deal of activity in the hall: A sound of controlled shouting. Doors rapidly opening and shutting. Doctors’ and nurses’ hurried footsteps.

Tamar looked up. Josh stood, his prayer book clasped in his palm.

“What?” she said to a passing nurse, who stopped for a moment but did not answer her. The woman’s face was as white as her uniform. Her arms trembled.

“What is happening?”

Now all the other couples in the waiting room stood and looked around, a feeling of alarm filling the pleasant space with suffocating rapidity. Grandparents like her and Josh, prospective fathers, sisters, older children. Everyone stood with a look of fright on their faces.

“Doctor, please…” one of the other men in the waiting room pleaded with a young intern, grabbing his arm. “Please, my wife?”

“Your name?” the young man asked cautiously.

“Engel,” the man half sobbed.

The doctor shook his head. “She is fine. She hasn’t given birth yet.” The man released the doctor’s arm, sinking with stupefied relief back onto his chair.

“And what about our daughter?” someone else shouted.

“Name?” the intern said wearily.

“Goldberg.”

“I think a girl. Healthy fine,” he answered, his steps picking up speed as he attempted to flee the crowd.