The Righteous Men (2006)

by Sam Bourne

  He could feel Sandy tugging at his elbow. He tried to shake him off, but the tug was persistent.

  ‘What is it? I’m talking to TC ‘Look.’ Sandy was pointing, not back at the cathedral but directly across the street.

  ‘TC, I’ll call you back.’

  They were facing the Rockefeller Center, Sandy breaking into a semi-jog so they could get a closer look. Barely checking the traffic, he crossed the street, Will behind him, until they were standing before it.

  Or, rather, him. Even in shimmering metal, his stomach rippled, the lines of a perfect, mythic abdomen. His thighs were enormous, each one as thick as a bison. One leg was placed before the other, in the manner of a weight-lifter steadying himself. Except this was no ordinary weight.

  His arms were fully outstretched at his sides, curving slightly upward to mould themselves around his load. For there, on his shoulders, was nothing less than the universe itself, rendered as an intersecting series of circles, like the lines of latitude and longitude that girdle the globe. On each of the metal arcs were marked the names of the planets. They were looking at the Rockefeller Center’s largest sculpture, the two ton statue of Atlas.

  ‘Behold the lord of the heavens but not of hell.’ Sandy was murmuring the words almost to himself.

  ‘I can see why he’s the lord of the heavens,’ said Will. ‘But what’s the hell thing?’

  Sandy was struggling to get the words out. He was panting with exhilaration. ‘It’s a famous thing about this statue. When they did it—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘—they hadn’t discovered Pluto yet. So there’s no Pluto on here.’

  ‘And Pluto’s the God of the underworld,’ whispered Will. Behold the lord of the heavens but not of Hell. This was the right spot. He dialled TC’s number and instantly described what he could see.

  ‘OK, you need to pick me up,’ she said. ‘And then we’ll go to your apartment.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I think I finally know what’s going on. And Atlas has just confirmed it.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Sunday, 5.50pm, Brooklyn

  There was no time to be self-conscious. Even so, he could tell TC felt strange to be in this place, the home of the man she had once loved and the woman he had made his wife. He saw her stealing glances at the photographs, especially the wedding collage — perhaps two dozen pictures, pressed under glass — that hung in their kitchen.

  If it was odd for TC, it was horrible for Will. He had not been back since the day Beth went missing, visiting here only in his mind. Now he saw the calendar, covered in Beth’s handwriting. He saw a cardigan of hers, slung over a chair. He felt her absence so strongly, it made his eyes sting.

  ‘TC, you have to tell me what’s going on.’ Throughout their journey from Central Park, from the moment they had ditched Sandy, he had been pressing her to talk. But she was adamant.

  ‘Will, I’m not sure I’m right. And I know you: the moment I start talking, you’ll run off and do something and it could be a big mistake. We have to get this right. One hundred per cent right. There’s no room for guesswork.’

  ‘OK, I promise I won’t run anywhere. Just tell me.’

  ‘You can’t make that promise. And I don’t blame you. Trust me, Will. Please.’

  ‘So when am I going to find out?’

  ‘Soon. Tonight.’

  ‘You’ll tell me tonight?’

  ‘You’ll find out tonight. It won’t be me who tells you.’

  ‘Look, TC. Seriously. I’ve just about had it with riddles. What do you mean, it won’t be you who tells me?’

  ‘We’re going to Crown Heights. That’s where the answer is.’

  ‘We? You mean, you’re coming with me?

  ‘Yes, Will. It’s about time.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s true, I mean it makes sense—’ Will stopped himself. TC was staring at him expectantly. It took him a while to realize what her expression meant. She was waiting for him to ask another question.

  ‘What do you mean, “it’s about time”?’

  ‘Haven’t you guessed, Will? This whole weekend, everything we’ve been doing? You really haven’t guessed?’

  ‘Haven’t guessed what?’

  She was turning away, avoiding his gaze. ‘Oh, Will. I’m really surprised.’

  His voice rising: ‘What are you surprised at? What are you talking about?’

  ‘This is very hard for me, Will. I don’t quite know how to say it. But it’s about time I went, you know, back.’

  ‘Back? To Crown Heights?’

  ‘Yes, Will. Back to Crown Heights. I thought you’d guess ages ago. And I’ve been meaning to say something, but the moment never felt right. There’s been so much to think about, so much to work out. The Hassidim, the kidnapping and … Beth. But you have a right to know the truth.

  ‘So here is the truth. My name is Tova Chaya Lieberman.

  I was born in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. I am the third of nine children. There’s a reason I know this world, Will. I’ve always known it, inside out. It’s my world. These crazy Hassidim? I’m one of them.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Sunday, 6.02pm, Brooklyn

  Will could say nothing. He sat pressed against the back of the sofa, as if pinned there by a fierce wind. He listened hard, his mind trying to absorb everything TC was saying. But it was also racing, rewinding wildly through the events of the last forty-eight hours, seeing each moment in a new light.

  And not just the last forty-eight hours, but the last five or six years. Every experience he and TC had shared now looked utterly, entirely different.

  ‘You saw those families with a dozen children. That’s what my family was like. I was number three and there were six more after me. Me and my older sister, we were like mini moms: cleaning and preparing meals for the babies from the day we were old enough to do it.’

  ‘And did you, you know, look like that?’

  ‘Oh yes. The whole business: long dresses brushing the floor, mousy hair, glasses. And my mother wore a wig.’

  ‘A wig?’

  ‘I never explained that to you, did I? Remember, the women with “unnaturally straight” hair you saw, and how they all seemed to wear their hair in the same style? Those were sheitls, wigs worn by married women as an act of modesty: they’re only meant to show their real hair to their husbands.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I know you think it’s weird, Will, but what you’ve got to realize is, I loved it. I lapped it all up. I would read these folk tales in the Tzena Arenna, old legends of the Baal Shem Tov—’

  Will turned his face into a question mark.

  ‘The founder of Hassidism. All these stories of wise men journeying through the forest, paupers revealed as men of great piety and honoured by God. I loved it.’

  ‘So what changed?’

  ‘I must have been about twelve. I would doodle in my exercise books a lot. But at that age I started surprising myself with what I could do. Even I could see the drawings were becoming more elaborate and, you know, quite good. But there were so few pictures to look at. You see, ultra-orthodox Jews are not that big on graven images. There were hardly any around. And then, one day at sem — sorry, seminary; kind of the girls’ school — I found one of those “Introduction to the Great Painters” books. On Vermeer. I stole it and hid it under my pillow. I’m not kidding, for months I would wait till my sisters were asleep and then, under the covers, I’d stare at these beautiful pictures. Just staring at them. I knew then that’s what I wanted to do.’

  ‘You started painting.’

  ‘No. There was never any time. At sem, it was just study, study, study. Holy texts. At home I had to clean, cook, change diapers, play with the baby, help the younger ones with their homework. I shared my room with two sisters. I had no time and no space.’

  ‘You must have gone out of your mind.’

  ‘I did. I’d dream every day how I could get out. I wanted to go to the Met
ropolitan Museum. To see the Vermeer. But it wasn’t just the painting.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I know this sounds funny, given what I’m like now, but I was really good at religious studies.’

  ‘No, sorry, I don’t find that surprising at all.’

  ‘I was top of my class. I found it easy. The texts, all those multiple meanings and cross-references, they just seemed to open up to me. Once a rabbi told me I was as good as any boy.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘I was furious. It was like, girls are only meant to go so far. Once you’re seventeen or eighteen you become a woman — and that means getting married, having babies, keeping house. Men could carry on at the yeshiva forever, but girls were only allowed to acquire the basics. Then we had to stop. Those were the rules. Five Books of Moses, a bit of Gemara maybe. That’s a kind of rabbinic commentary. But that was it.’

  ‘So all this kabbalah, you never studied that.’

  ‘Wasn’t allowed. Only men over forty can even look at it, remember.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘Exactly. You know me, if there’s a forbidden zone, I want to go there. I found the odd book among my father’s things, but I knew I couldn’t do this on my own. I needed a guide. So I asked Rabbi Mandelbaum.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The one who told me I was as good as a boy. I told him I wanted to study. I came to him with all the relevant texts that proved I had the right, as a woman, to know what was in those books.’

  ‘And did he agree? Did he teach you?’

  ‘Every Tuesday evening, a secret class at his house. The only other person who knew about it was his wife. She would bring a glass of lemon tea for him, a glass of milk for me and rugelach, little pastry cakes, for both of us. We did that for five years.’ She was smiling.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He got worried. Not for his sake — he was too old to care what people thought — but for me. I was approaching “the age of marriage”. He told me, “Tova Chaya, it would take a very strong man not to feel threatened by so learned a wife”. I think he was worried that he had ruined me: that, thanks to him, I would not be happy keeping house. I wouldn’t be a good wife like Mrs Mandelbaum. He had lifted my sights. In a way he was right.’

  ‘But he needn’t have worried; by then I had planned my escape. I applied to Columbia; I gave a PO Box address so that no one would see the correspondence. I applied for tons of scholarships, so that I could afford a room. I presented myself as an independent adult; as far as the college were concerned, I had no parents.’

  ‘So when the day came, I gave the kids breakfast, as always, called out goodbye to my mother, as always, and I walked to the subway station.’

  ‘And you never went back.’

  ‘Never.’

  Will’s mind was speeding, spilling with questions. But he was also overrun with answers. Suddenly, he saw so much that had been hidden. TC was no toddler nickname, its origins forgotten. It was a vestige of Tova Chaya’s former life. And no wonder TC’s parents were such a mystery: they were from a past she had abandoned. Of course there were no pictures: that would have betrayed her secret.

  ‘Do they even know you’re alive?’

  ‘I speak to them by phone, before the major festivals. But I haven’t seen them since I was seventeen.’

  In an instant, TC made sense. Of course she was brilliant but knew nothing of pop music and junk TV: she had grown up without them. Of course she spoke no French or Spanish: she had devoted her time to Yiddish and Hebrew instead.

  Will suddenly thought of TC’s eating habits — the fondness for Chinese food, studded with jumbo prawns, the fry-up breakfasts, with generous rations of bacon. She loved all that stuff. How come? ‘The zeal of a convert,’ she said wryly.

  Now that he had been to Crown Heights himself, Will realized the scale of TC’s rupture from her upbringing. He looked at her now: the tight top revealing the shape of her breasts; the exposed midriff; the navel stud. He thought back to the notice he had seen in Crown Heights.

  Girls and women who wear immodest garments, and thereby call attention to their physical appearance, disgrace themselves …

  Her break from Hassidism could not have been more complete. And he was forgetting the biggest rebellion of all: him.

  People from her world did not have sex outside marriage.

  They rarely married people from outside their own sect of Hassidism, let alone non-Jews. Yet she had had a long, physical relationship with him — not her husband and not a Jew.

  For him it had been a wonderful romance. He now understood that for her it had been a revolution.

  He suddenly saw TC differently. He imagined her as she would have been: a bright, studious girl of Crown Heights groomed for a life of modesty, child-rearing and dutiful observance.

  What a journey she had made, crossing this city and centuries of tradition and taboo. He stood up, walked over to her and gave her a long, warm hug.

  ‘It’s a privilege to meet you, Tova Chaya.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Sunday, 6.46pm, Brooklyn

  He wanted to interrogate TC for hours, about her life, about the secret she had kept for so long. Lots of Jewish people became orthodox; they were known as chozer b’tshuva, literally ‘one who returns to repentance’. She had gone the other way: chozer b’she’ela. She had returned to question.

  But they had no time for that conversation, no matter how much they wanted it. They had to get to Crown Heights. Yosef Yitzhok had been murdered, though neither of them had any idea why. The last messages Will had received directing him to Atlas at the Rockefeller Center — had been sent after YY’s death, proof that he had not been the informer after all. So why would anyone want him dead? Will was baffled. All he knew was that things were turning steadily more vicious. The rabbi had not been exaggerating: time was running out.

  Just as pressing was TC’s promise. All would become clear, she had said, once they were in Crown Heights. She could not tell Will herself what was going on. But the explanation lay there. They just had to find it.

  ‘I’m going to need to use your bathroom. And I’m going to need to borrow some of Beth’s clothes.’

  ‘Sure,’ Will said, trying hard to shrug off the potential symbolism of that request. He led TC to Beth’s closet and, steeling himself, pulled back the sliding door. Instantly his nostrils filled with the scent of her. He was sure he could smell her hair; he could think himself into the aroma of that patch of skin below her ear. He breathed in deeply, through his nose.

  TC pulled out a plain white blouse, one Beth wore for formal work meetings, usually under a dark trouser-suit. It was cut high, Will noticed. We request that all women and girls, whether living here or visiting, adhere at all times to the laws of modesty …

  She turned to Will. ‘Does Beth have any really long skirts?’

  Will thought hard. There were a couple of long dresses, including a particularly beautiful one he had bought for his wife on their first anniversary. But they were evening wear.

  ‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘Let me look at the back here.’ He wondered if Beth had gotten around to throwing it out; he knew she planned to. It was a long, drab dark velvet skirt that Will had mocked mercilessly. He called it Beth’s ‘spinster cellist number’. She put up a mock-defence, but she could see his point: it did make her look like one of those silver-haired lady players spotted in every orchestra. But she felt attached to it. To Will’s great relief at this moment, she had never got rid of it.

  ‘OK,’ said TC, moving towards the bathroom. ‘These will have to go.’ She cocked her head to one side to take off her earrings. Then she pressed her face closer to the mirror and began the complex manoeuvre of removing her nose-stud.

  Finally she gazed down at her middle and unscrewed the ring that pierced her belly button. She now had a small pile of metal in her hand, which she placed by the basin.

  ‘Now for the toughest job of all.’ She reached into he
r bag to produce a newly purchased bottle of shampoo, one specially designed for the task at hand. She started running the tap, grabbed a towel and slung it around her shoulders. As if bracing herself for a nasty ordeal, she bent down and lowered her head towards the water.

  As Will watched she began to lather up and rinse. She had to scrub hard, but soon her effort was paying off. The water in the sink began to turn a blueish purple. The dye was coming out, a stream of it swirling around the white porcelain and away. Will was fascinated by the coloured water. It was not only removing a chemical from TC’s hair; it seemed to be washing away the last decade of her life.

  He left to collect a few things of his own. What had the rabbi said? ‘All will become clear in a few days’ time.’ That was two days ago. Perhaps he was about to close in on the truth, at long last. What would it be? What was this ‘ancient story’ into which he and his wife had somehow fallen? Once he knew, would he be back with her? Would he hold her again? Would that be tonight?

  ‘So, what do you think?’

  Will wheeled around to see a different woman. Her hair was now dark brown, brushed straight and long into a 1990s style bob. She wore sensible black shoes, a long black skirt and a white blouse. She had borrowed a thick, quilted jacket of Beth’s that, in other circumstances, might have been fashionable but which now looked only practical. Standing there in his apartment was a woman who could have passed for any of the young wives and mothers he had seen in Crown Heights two days earlier. She looked like Tova Chaya Lieberman.

  ‘I’m so glad for the shoes. Thank God, they fit me and that’s all that counts It took Will a moment to realize what TC was doing. She was trying out the sing-song, Yiddish-inflected accent of a New York Hassidic woman. It came to her so easily, it persuaded Will immediately.

  ‘Wow. You sound … different.’