Disobedience

by Naomi Alderman

  The women nodded and smiled. A marvelous solution. Pinchas Abramson had completed two years’ study at a men’s seminary and learned Torah five times a week. He would know the answer.

  Given that this conversation had concluded in such a righteous and honorable manner, it can scarcely be considered the fault of these three women if, by the time Mrs. Abramson managed to speak to her husband, seeds of their suspicions had already been swept up by the winds and had begun to fall to earth across Hendon. For a baker’s shop on a Sunday morning is scarcely the place to conduct a discussion that one wishes to remain private. It must be conceded that, as various half-thoughts and barely expressed changes in attitude started to seep from one person to another, several men and women did indeed turn their faces away, saying, “No, this is lashon hara.” And such people deserve our admiration and our respect, for to obey the words of the Lord when every desire within us urges a different course is difficult beyond measure. The rewards due to such souls are surely bountiful indeed.

  But most of the people of Hendon did not possess such strength within their souls. Like Miriam, the sister of Moses, they bore tales, or like Aharon, the brother of Moses, they listened to them. And it is not given to us to know, in the days when the tzara’at leprosy, like all forms of prophecy, has passed from the earth, what punishment the Lord has ordained for them. Whatever it might be, they nonetheless ensured that by the time Pinchas Abramson had discussed the matter with his friends Horovitz and Mench (for, despite the opinions of some of our sages, the dangers of lashon hara are not confined to women), the matter had already become known, or at least suspected, in several houses around Hendon. And by the time Mench, who learned Gemarah with Dovid, had decided to telephone the house in Manchester, the tongues had done their work. And this work, as we have seen, can never be undone.

  For no particularly obvious reason, there are seagulls in Hendon. I mean, there’s no particular reason there shouldn’t be, either—it’s near enough to the coast. And yet it’s incongruous, walking down Brent Street past the kosher shops and the Talmud Trove bookshop to see seagulls whirling in the sky overhead, swooping down to pick up a piece of discarded bagel, their wings so wide, gray and white, and their beaks so unexpectedly large and vicious. I was surprised to find, on my walk through Hendon on Saturday night, that they were still about even after midnight, swooping and circling.

  I didn’t go back to Esti’s house until very late that Saturday night. She was already in bed, the house was dark, and that seemed all for the best. I sat in my bedroom and considered my options. I could go home now, get the hell out of this increasingly creepy, claustrophobic environment, utterly fail to interact with the difficulties of my old friend and lover Esti and her ineffectual husband. And, let’s state it for the record, that option certainly had some attraction. But it also seemed kind of an overreaction. I could talk to Dovid, talk to Esti, sit down and have the three of us “work through it.” I am, after all, to some extent an American now. That’s the good old American, therapeutic way. Does it make me a coward that I felt I couldn’t possibly? That I didn’t want to have that conversation with either of them?

  So where did that leave me? Oh, yes, when in Britain, do as the British do. Stiff upper lip. Repression. Muttering quietly under my breath and carrying on. Sticking it out. In other words, ignoring the issue. I set my alarm for six a.m. and went to sleep. That night I dreamed of the seagulls of Hendon, of the extreme sharpness of their beaks and the flexing of their claws. Of the way they set their heads on one side and look at you with one unfathomable beady eye. It was a Tippi Hedren sort of dream, of running away from flocks of seagulls, except that these birds weren’t doing anything, not attacking or coming down the chimney or cracking glass. They were just looking.

  I woke up promptly, pulled on my clothes, and without stopping to talk to Esti or even see if she was awake, I walked straight over to my father’s house. I had a mission. If I could complete it, I could be on my way and feel that it hadn’t been a completely wasted trip. I pulled open the front door; the house held no fear for me now, not since I’d learned the trick with the radio. I surveyed my work so far. The table in the center of the study was clear, as was the floor. I’d thrown out five black plastic bags full of rubbish and stacked any papers that looked useful along one of the side tables. I spent another couple of hours going through the cupboards. Magazines, thirty years’ worth of back issues of various Jewish papers. A couple of things that made me feel I was on the right track: in a little velvet-lined box I found a small silver kiddush cup I remember using when I was a child. Crammed into the corner of a shelf, trapped behind a pile of Yiddish books, was a glass bowl my mother used to serve pickles in on Friday nights. It was triangular, spiky on the outside but somehow curved inside, with a pattern of red and yellow flowers decaled on the side. It was so redolent of that time in my life that, holding it, tracing my fingers over the smooth inner surface, I could almost smell the vinegary-dill scent, taste the clean-sharp combination of pickled cucumbers and roast chicken.

  Thinking this made me angry. What right had my father to hide my childhood from me in this way? This mess, this confusion, felt as though it had been contrived on purpose to keep me from finding what I wanted. I stood up and surveyed the room. The candlesticks weren’t here. I had been through every cupboard and every shelf. I supposed I could check behind the bookcases but that felt ridiculous. No. In my mind, I felt them in my hands, felt the slight roughness on one of the leaves of the candlestick that always sat on the right. I remembered how he had shown me how to light them, when I was seven and my mother was gone, my hand holding the match, his blue-veined hand clasped over mine to keep it steady. I was a biddable child then, a long time ago. He would not have given them away. No one else in the family had a claim to them. They must be here somewhere. He would have put them somewhere safe. Not on display. They were precious, family things. They belonged…upstairs.

  I walked upstairs. I had done so earlier, had glanced through the bedrooms and had found nothing of interest. I hadn’t been able to enter my old bedroom, the door had been stuck shut and I’d been a little unwilling to force it. But if force was required, force it would be. Perhaps there was a key, though? I would have to look through the other bedrooms.

  In my father’s bedroom, large cardboard boxes filled with, at a cursory glance, manuscripts and old newspaper cuttings, were piled on the bed and the floor. A few yellowed pages had fallen to the floor; articles dating from the 1960s on kosher food labeling and the endless debate over the eruv. The wardrobe had been plundered at some point: the doors were standing open, and some of the clothes were gone, probably moved to the neat drawers I’d seen downstairs. The chest of drawers was also partly open, a tie hanging over the edge of one of the drawers like a lolling blue tongue. It looked as if this room had been ransacked for clothes in a hurry—perhaps when my father was first taken to hospital—and never straightened out. It felt slightly uncanny to stand in this room without him. As if he might still be here, somewhere just out of my field of vision. As if we might be about to have one of those old arguments about the inappropriate shortness of my midcalf-length skirt, or the report he had received about how I had spoken back to one of the Rabbis at school. He did not materialize. I left the room without looking too hard.

  The spare room was far more ordered; I guessed Dovid must have slept here, as he did when he was young, if my father needed him in the night. The single bed was made, spread with a blue knitted quilt I recognized: made by my father’s mother years before. Three or four books were neatly stacked on the desk. I pulled open the top drawer and found two pads of A4 paper and several pencils, all sharpened, all pointing the same way. Dovid. The second drawer, for some reason, contained nothing but a large can of plums, the label old and peeling. Out of the window, I could see the hydrangea bush by the fence, but I didn’t look at it. I sat on the bed, stroking the soft woollen cover and thinking. It occurred to me that I could spend the night he
re, if I liked. It was my childhood home, after all. The house still belonged to the synagogue, but the furnishings and so on were surely mine if I wanted them, and they could hardly begrudge me a few nights’ stay in my father’s house. Yes, that might solve the Esti and Dovid problem very nicely. I could even stay in my old room. I walked across the hall and pushed open the door.

  I suppose I was, in a small part of my mind, hoping that my old bedroom would have been kept as a shrine to me, everything exactly as it was the day I left. There might have been evidence of some private grieving ritual: a hockey stick clearly polished lovingly once a week, a large photograph decked at both sides with vases of dying roses. Of course, there was none of this, but some aspects of the room had remained the same. My school photograph was still on the wall, my netball medal—dating from the brief period after I was made team captain but before I was demoted for making one of the other girls cry by criticizing her performance on the field—pinned up slightly askew beneath it. But these things were only barely visible above the boxes, suitcases, and black dustbin bags piled in a great disorderly mound across the room. The accumulation reached to just above my waist and stretched across the entire floor space; a very small area just inside the doorway was clear, to allow the door to open, but other than that there was no space large enough for a person to enter. I reached into one of the nearest bags and came up with a pair of men’s shoes, one of the soles flapping open at the toe, and a light blue mug, missing its handle. The shoes smelled slightly. After a while, I began to wonder whether the smell was coming from somewhere else in the room. Perhaps, underneath all the bags and boxes and cases and holdalls, there was a mouse or rat’s nest. Listening, I thought I could hear a faint rustling. I can’t say how long I stood looking. I wondered what Dr. Feingold would make of it. Something irritatingly accurate, no doubt. A way to forget I ever existed, perhaps? An expression of anger? An attempt to fill the void of loss? A pathological determination never to throw anything away? Only my father could have told me, and, well, he’s not around to be asked anymore.

  Looking at that room, two things became quite clear to me. The first was that I couldn’t stay the night in this house. Not in Dovid’s room, not at all. And the second was that I was going to cry. Real, proper, huge, gut-wrenching, cheek-rolling, superfluous, unanswerable tears. I half ran to the bathroom, as though I were going to vomit, not cry, sat on the closed lid of the toilet, and cried and cried without being in any way able to explain to myself why. I looked up at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, tearstained and red-eyed, and remembered something, just something, a moment like this, a time like this. Looking at myself in this mirror. Crying. I knew what I was remembering.

  And the doorbell rang.

  I sat quite still. Perhaps they’d go away. The bell rang again, twice in quick succession. Then, through the letterbox came a woman’s voice:

  “Helloo…Ronit…are you there? It’s me, Hinda Rochel…”

  Another brisk push on the doorbell.

  And, hiccupping, I walked down the stairs to answer the door.

  Hinda Rochel Berditcher was, indeed, standing on the doorstep, with two other women I vaguely seemed to recognize, one blond and tall, the other shorter and darker.

  Hinda Rochel beamed. She said:

  “You remember Devora? And Nechama Tova?”

  I frowned.

  “Devora…Lipsitz?”

  The blond woman smiled.

  “And…Nechama Tova…” I squinted. “I’m sorry, I just can’t…”

  The shorter woman smiled, too.

  “Nechama Tova Weinberg. I used to be Nechama Tova Benstock. I was in the year below you.”

  Three matrons of the town, paying a call. Women who had all, naturally, changed their names.

  “We saw the lights on,” Hinda Rochel said. “We thought we’d come and say hello.”

  And I thought: saw the lights on? All three of you? Wandering down the road together early on a Sunday evening just to see whose lights were on? I couldn’t quite piece it together. It was stupid of me, really. I thought: how odd. How strange. How I have forgotten that Hendon really is a village. Instead of thinking what I should have thought, that someone had been watching the house and knew when I was there and when I wasn’t.

  They came in, the three wise women of Hendon. Came in, sat in the lounge, made themselves cups of tea. They knew better than I did where the teabags were kept and which were the milky teacups. Hinda Rochel explained that they’d often been here to help the Rav, may he rest in peace, through his illness. I told her that was very kind of her and she smiled and told me they were only performing a mitzvah. They were impressed by the job I’d done in tidying the house. I explained I was looking for one or two family things to take home with me and they nodded sympathetically.

  After the tea was made, the room descended into silence. I looked at them. They beamed at me. I never could leave a silence alone.

  I said, “So, what are you all doing nowadays?”

  Nechama Tova told me about her husband and her four children. And Devora told me about her husband and their five children: I detected a note of quiet pride in her voice at this. Hinda Rochel works a couple of mornings a week as Dr. Hartog’s assistant and only has two children, but she didn’t seem downhearted. She smiled at me, her lipstick-mouth peeling back to leave a slight film of red on her teeth, and said:

  “What about you, Ronit? Are you married?”

  She said it as though she already knew the answer.

  I looked back at her and said, “No. No, I’m not.”

  There was a pause as the three women took that fact in. Nechama Tova let out a little sigh. There was no doubt that in the eyes of these women it was late, far far too late for me now. It was not simply that I would never marry, but that through never marrying I would never become an adult, would never grow into myself, would remain like the aged grape on the vine, withered without ever having been plucked. Marriage, in this community, isn’t just a religious act or a legal binding, it isn’t even a thing you do because you like someone and want to be with them; it’s a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. Those who never do it never grow up. To say that I had never married was tantamount to saying that I had never become a full human being.

  Nechama Tova wrinkled her brow and said, “Oh! I’m sorry.”

  Devora smiled sympathetically.

  For all the world as if this and not the loss of my father were the real bereavement.

  And I looked at her, sweet, quiet Devora who had always been so good at math and had even—good Lord—taken A levels. Well, one A level at least. And I said:

  “What do you do, Devora?”

  She blinked at me. She said:

  “Just what I told you; Tzvi and I have five children…”

  I said, “You mean you don’t work? But you were always so good in school, so academic! What happened?”

  This was a nasty thing to do. She didn’t really deserve it. Except insofar as they all do, for their collusion in the silence, for simply accepting that things must be thus and so, for never stopping to consider that this little protective world can damage as much as it cushions.

  She began to stumble over her words. “Well, I always intended, th-that is Tzvi and I have always said that maybe when the children are grown…”

  Hinda Rochel broke in. “Why? What do you do, Ronit?”

  She did not, I have to say, sound convinced that any answer I could provide would be satisfactory.

  Still, I told them what I did. It gave me a certain satisfaction. I live in New York. I own my apartment. I’m a financial analyst. Devora gave a little start when I mentioned the name of my firm. Her husband’s company does a lot of business with them, it transpired. I explained some of the enormous transactions I had worked on, household names even in Orthodox Jewish households. Their eyes went wide.

  They were silent when I had finished.

  At last, Hinda Rochel cocked her head to one side and sa
id, with all the appearance of concern, “But does it make you happy, Ronit? Does it make you fulfilled?”

  In the evening, I waited in the house as the day grew dark outside. I kept the radio on, did the crossword in the paper, wondered how long it would be until Esti went to bed. I knew I couldn’t do this forever. But maybe just today and tomorrow. Maybe just that would be enough. And then, because I was lonely, I think, or just tired or far away from people I knew, I went into the hall and picked up the phone, the same phone we’d always had, cream Bakelite with a rotary dial. I put the phone to my ear and listened to the buzz of the dial tone. And before I’d really considered why, I was dialing a number.

  Far away, very very far away, I made a sleek black telephone on a pale wood desk ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Scott? Is that you?”

  “Ronit?” There was warmth in his voice, as though he were genuinely pleased to hear from me. “How are things in jolly old England?”

  Oh, yes, this again. It’s a thing that ceases to rankle after you spend much time in the States but can suddenly begin to irritate again.

  “Old but not jolly,” I said.

  “Aha?” he said, and I thought I could hear the sound of pages turning in the background. “And how’s the family?”

  “Ummm…weird. Listen, Scott, can I talk to you seriously for a second?”

  He paused.

  He said, “Yeah, sure, just a moment.”

  The sound, from 3,500 miles away, of him putting the phone down on his desk, crossing the office, closing the door, and walking back. I felt as though I could hear the distance in the wires, the sound of Scott walking in New York echoing across all those thousands of miles of thin electrical cable. Ridiculous.

  “Okay, I am all yours.”

  There was a smile in his voice, the kind he used to have when he’d call me from his cell phone outside my apartment to ask if I had time for “a brief social call.”