by Marge Piercy
Gadi…Gadi glared at her. “Are you spying on me?”
She could not speak. Her throat closed. She could not cry out or breathe. Instead she stumbled down the hall, rebounding off walls, down the steps like a box falling, slipping and sliding, breaking into pieces. She must have made so much noise that Avram heard her, for he stood in the hall. “Quiet,” he said, taking her arm hard. “Who is he up there with?”
“Hannah Leibling,” she choked out and pulled free of him.
“I won’t have anyone else up there,” Avram said, shoving his hands in the pockets of his smock. He seemed to be trying to comfort her. “I’ll get rid of her for you, little Shira.” She began to cry then, the tears choking her. “Then you go to a good university and forget my useless son. He’s not worth your care, Shira. The best universities are in Europa. Go and enjoy.”
She was sobbing too hard to breathe. She could not stand for anyone to see her. She ran past him and down the steps to the street.
After her Avram called, his voice sharp with concern, “Shira, be calm! Be calm! It doesn’t mean anything to him.”
She ran on to the shed where they kept their old sec skins. Pulling hers on, she headed out into the raw. She did not go far. She climbed a dune and fell on the warm sand. On one side the vast shallow bay stretched, the ruins of the destroyed city poking from the eddies of the waves. Turning south, she could see over the robot desalinization plant to the sea beyond. The cooler in her sec skin hummed on. She could read the little red line in the corner of her face plate that gave her the temperature. It was twenty-eight degrees centigrade, a slow oven, a typical late May day in New England.
She thought perhaps she had died, for a great numbness overcame her. But it was only the trough of the wave of pain that slammed her a moment later. She did not know what to do with herself. She felt like a mangled thing, a rabbit that had run into a fan.
How could Gadi make love to that vulgar twit? They had always laughed at Hannah. Hannah had been making eyes at Gadi for years. Shira could hear her loud giggle, a glottal stop like water sucking down a drain. How could Gadi? She wanted to feel anger at him, but the pain drowned it utterly.
She would take off her sec suit and expose herself to the murderous sun, whose radiation would kill her. She would die, and Gadi would understand how much she had loved him and how his betrayal had wounded her. She saw herself lying peacefully on a board. She saw the simple cairn that would mark her grave. Gadi would come to mourn there.
That was a slow death, heat and dehydration. Radiation took months to kill. She would not remove her suit, no matter how much she felt like dying. Malkah had made her too pragmatic. Moreover, she could not stand the idea of Hannah telling the other girls, Oh, don’t you know, I feel so terrible. Shira killed herself over Gadi and me. He just couldn’t stay away from me, and the poor girl was consumed with jealousy. Shira rose to her knees, then to her feet. Jealousy was ugly, embarrassing, disgusting. She stumbled back. The wrap glittered like false hope floating over the town.
She went home without remembering as she spoke to the door how she got there. Hermes was lying in the courtyard, sunning himself—the sun that came through the wrap was filtered, safe, warm but not searing. He was in middle age now, twelve years old and as big as ever, not fat but hefty, more serious and more placid than he had been. She flung herself down on the warm tiles, pillowing her face in his hot brown flank, and freely wept.
“Are you in pain, Shira?” the house asked gently. “Should I call Malkah? Do you need assistance?”
“I want to be left alone!”
“Tell me. You know I keep your secrets. What’s wrong?” The house knew how to coax. It had been her other mother. Did it really keep secrets from Malkah, who had programmed it?
“Just leave me alone!”
She did not hear Malkah come in, becoming aware of her only when Malkah said very softly, squatting on her heels, “I’m making schav, little one. Sometimes something so sour can help.”
For a moment she was pierced by the suspicion that Malkah knew, everyone knew; then her pragmatism won, and she realized that her position gave away her state. “I’m not hungry.”
“So eat to please me. A little soup, how hungry do you have to be?”
Sensing the indignity of her sprawl facedown on the tiles, Shira sat up. Malkah called her “little one” but was the same size, except a few pounds fleshier. They had the same dark hair, black in lamplight, red-tinted in the sun; the same large very dark eyes, big in their heart-shaped faces; but Malkah of course was an old woman, sixty-one years old. She wore her dark hair braided around her head and fixed on top with a silver ornament in the form of a dolphin. A salvage diver had given it to her. Only recently had Shira realized he had probably been Malkah’s lover. Shira had been too young to understand then, nine, then ten; and Malkah had been discreet. No man had ever lived in this house. Malkah had never married. If you married and a man hurt you, Shira realized, you had no place to run home to, no place to hide and nurse your pain.
Malkah handed her a big handkerchief. “I have to go see to my soup. Did you feed your friend there?”
“Not yet.” She had forgotten, and Hermes had not reminded her. Now he rose, stretched, stretched again and started for the kitchen, looking back for her expectantly.
She daubed at her face. How could she live with so much pain? She could not imagine how she would continue.
She did eat the soup. Malkah was right: it was soothing in a minor way. She was glad Malkah had decided to cook tonight. Most evenings one of them picked up supper at the Commons; sometimes they ate there with half the town. Other nights Malkah cooked, and once in a while she would have the house ask Shira to cook that night. Malkah sometimes did that when she knew Gadi was coming to supper. Another part of Shira’s life laid waste, as spoiled as the vast tracts of dead trees that had been maples on the mountains before acid rain, before the climate got too warm for them. Would Hannah take him home to supper now? How could he choose Hannah?
“Didn’t your auction results come today?”
“Oh.” Shira blinked hard. “What did I do with them? I had them with me when I…I’ll get them. I dropped them in the courtyard.” She rose from the table and ran to look for the printout.
Malkah took it from her, scanned it. “Obviously this is not what upset you.”
Shira looked into her empty soup bowl. “I’m fine now.”
“Your young man, then.”
“He isn’t mine! Not anymore.”
“Shira, you’re too young to be plastered together for life. You’ve never listened to me about Gadi, and you’re not about to start now, I’m sure. I couldn’t stop you. No one can stop children in love unless by exile. But you’ll never grow up if you don’t let go of each other.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Shira rose. “I’ll clear now if you’re finished eating.”
“Still, we must talk at some point.” Malkah fixed her with her dark gaze, like a beam of energy and will. “We must also decide about this auction.”
“What do I care about that anymore?”
“Gadi was never going to get into the same universities you’re sought by, Shira. You’ll be paid to go. Avram will have to pay for him.”
“He’s bright! He’s as smart as I am.”
“But lazier. And scattered.”
“But he’s more talented than any of us…No, I don’t want to defend him anymore, I don’t want to explain him. I hate him!” Shira began clearing.
“You love too hard. It occupies the center and squeezes out your strength. If you work in the center and love to the side, you will love better in the long run, Shira. You will give more gracefully, without counting, and what you get, you will enjoy.”
Malkah did not know what love was. Shira refused to argue.
After supper the two of them sat in silence in the late ivory twilight of the court. Malkah was accessing the Net, plugged in in full projection. Everyone in Tikva wa
s equipped with interface. They did not have the lavish stimmie spectacles other towns went in for, they did not have fast foils or wind cars, but every child born to the town was equipped to access the Net directly, heir to all the knowledge of the ages.
The Net was a public utility to which communities, multis, towns, even individuals subscribed. It contained the mutual information of the world, living languages and many dead ones. It indexed available libraries and offered either the complete text or precis of books and articles. It was the standard way people communicated, accepting visuals, code or voice. It was also a playing field, a maze of games and nodes of special interest, a great clubhouse with thousands of rooms, a place where people met without ever seeing one another unless they chose to present a visible image—which might or might not be how they actually looked.
Shira had her eyes closed, too. Hermes lay in her lap awkwardly, for he more than overlapped, while she pretended to be studying. Instead she was tuned in to a program in the Net of lights and shapes that formed on her closed eyes, vaguely watery, shimmering grays, greens, bronzes. She was not fully projected but detached, watching from without, letting her pain fill her lightly now as flowing water.
Suddenly, at half past twenty, the house announced Gadi. Shira jerked to her feet, displacing the cat. The jack wrenched from the socket in her temple, leaving her nauseated at the sudden disconnection. The house had been programmed for years to recognize and admit Gadi, so it had simply opened to him and spoken to them. Stupid house!
Shira resolved to stand there in a dignified silence and wait him out. But the moment he came ambling with his loose long gait into the courtyard, she burst out, “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you with her?”
Malkah was present but not conscious, blind and deaf, fully projected into the Net. Gadi glanced at her, recognized her state, and they both proceeded as if she were a piece of furniture.
“Come on, that didn’t mean anything,” Gadi began in a voice that suggested he was cosseting a child in a tantrum. “Here I am, with you as usual. If you hadn’t come barging in today, you wouldn’t be upset at all.”
“Oh, you can do anything, and it’s my fault if I find out!”
“Are we married? That’s how you act. We’ve been married since we were seven, and it’s a damned prison.”
“If you think I’m keeping you in prison, escape! The door’s open. Use it.”
“I intend to. I have a right to live, to know other people, to find out who I am and who they are.”
“Oh, was it a transcendent experience, finding out about Hannah’s twat?”
“Shira, we’re seventeen years old. Ask Malkah if we shouldn’t be open to knowing other people.”
They both glanced at Malkah, oblivious, eyes shut. She might be researching something, she might be involved in a seminar with twenty other projected minds, she might be carrying on a flirtation or a debate.
Shira vibrated with outrage. “Now all of a sudden common sense rules, adults are right, let’s forget we love each other and play at being cartoon teenagers.”
“Why did you come charging over there anyhow? Because you got your auction results. Right?”
“I wanted to talk about what we were going to do about college.”
“We? Show me your auction results. Come on, show it to me.”
“I don’t want to show you anything.”
“They’re fighting over you, aren’t they? They think they can make money off you. Just keep bashing away for four more years, and they’ll get a good price when multis bid on you. Who wants an artist? Old Avram’s going to have to pay to get me into college, tough on him. You see, we don’t have the same options, do we?” He stepped close, his face twisted with anger.
“Not if your option is to fuck Hannah in the same bed we shared.”
“It’s my house and my room.”
“You wanted me to walk in. You knew the same as I did the results were coming this afternoon. You’re punishing me because you didn’t do as well. But that doesn’t matter, Gadi, it doesn’t! I believe in you.”
He walked away from her to stand in the center of the courtyard, looking around warily as if the house might attack him. He was as uneasy as if he were hitting her. The house of course would attack with sonics if he were doing physical damage. “I’ve got to get out, Shira. We’re dying, the two of us. We’re dying together. Don’t you feel it?”
She stared at him as he stood braced, seeming taller than he ever had, or perhaps her knees were buckling. He was lost to her. She wanted to die. There was no more Shira, only bleeding meat, a roaring vacuum. Couldn’t he see he was killing both of them? They were a double organism, one being. “All I feel now is pain.” She would put an ocean between them. She would punish Malkah for insulting her love and Gadi for betraying it; she would go far, far from both of them, to Europa. She would take Avram’s advice and remove herself to Paris, to Prague, to Edinburgh. Anywhere far away from here.
SEVEN
Under No Moon
The Maharal is speared through by what he has conceived, a task he can neither persuade himself to proceed with nor allow himself to abandon. Is this unbridled ambition? He quizzes himself incessantly. Making a golem stands as the masterwork of a true practitioner of kabbalah. Does he fear that he might fail? Is he afraid to risk himself in that ultimate attempt to harness the power of the Word in creation? Is he afraid to fail, or is he afraid to succeed? He has been a man of peace, a rabbi, a teacher, a sage whose influence is exerted through the power of the law, the force of intellect, the charisma of a strong character. This contemplated manufacture of a weapon would be a commitment to taking action in the world. He is halfway to making a force capable of violence. Is that not a negation of the values by which he has lived—study and prayer and good works?
He tries to think to whom he can turn. His wife? The rebitzin, Perl, is four years older than her husband and wise in entirely other ways: she has learned through the years how to run a household on hope, how to cook feasts out of not much, how to hide money from a man who would give the last cent away, how to intercede between Judah and his children, who were expected to be far holier than they desired. Judah and Perl had been engaged for ten years before the rabbi had enough money to marry her. Her own father had lost all his money (which had never amounted to much except in his reminiscences) when his business failed. She had waited all that time, running a bakery and saving for the day when they would finally be together as husband and wife.
When she was thirty and he was twenty-six, they finally married. Perl gave birth to six daughters and to one son, of all those children who lived beyond infancy. She started late and she continued late. She bore her last daughter when she was fifty-two and her oldest daughter was also pregnant.
To say that Perl adores Judah would be true; to say she worships him would not. She is perhaps the only person who knows Judah well but does not fear his temper, for she has one of her own. She is used to giving orders, to managing a bakery, to keeping track of details and pennies. She is a big woman with a still handsome ruddy face. She had been zoftik in her middle years, but age has whittled at her so that her bones are more obvious now than her flesh. She has strong hands, big enough to engulf the slender shapely hands of Judah. Her pelt of white hair is kept clipped to ringlets that look like lamb fleece under the henna-red wig she wears as a respectable wife whose hair might tempt the angels.
All the daughters married, two of them to the same Itzak Cohen, for after his young bride Leah died of pneumonia from a cold that should have passed off easily, he married the next sister, Vogele. Three of her own children Perl has outlived, two daughters and her only son; she does not want to survive the others. Let them bury me and not otherwise, she prays to the Eternal. She prays in Yiddish, for like most women, she never learned Hebrew.
Judah knows what she would advise him. Forget this nonsense. Pay attention to your grandchildren, who are growing up too fast, pay attention to your congregation,
for there are two adulterous couples I know about already. No, Perl would rail against such a dangerous experiment.
Chava would understand, but it does not seem appropriate to consult with his own granddaughter. The year before, Itzak’s daughter Chava had come back to live with them. Chava had married young and been widowed young. She is content to be the Widow Bachrach.
Chava is attractive and learned and always has suitors. Perl is in no hurry to see Chava married again, because Chava is a great help to her. Perl is slowing down with arthritis. She does not want to be left at home alone with the Maharal, who knows himself to be poor company to a woman. Chava works as a midwife in the ghetto, and she has taken over her father Itzak’s duties as the Maharal’s secretary.
The Maharal, too, feels in no hurry to find her a second husband, although he would have leaned hard on any of his flock who behaved as he is behaving. He has often remarked and still believes it: Chava is his smartest child. She has the drive that his own son lacked. How he tried to push Bezalel, to train his son’s intellect to surpass his own. He pushed too hard. He pushed his son away. Now Bezalel is dead, and there are no second chances.
He himself taught Chava Hebrew and even Aramaic, like a son. She helps him in his researches, she fair-copies his sermons and his writings for him in her beautiful Hebrew script and she sees his books through the Gersonides press, the Hebrew printing press of Prague. No, he does not want to lose her to some dolt of a husband who will wear her out with childbearing. Of course she must bear more children besides the son her in-laws kept; she must be fruitful and multiply with the right husband, but Perl did not marry till she was thirty and did not bear her first child till she was thirty-one, and she was healthy and strong to this day, bar a little arthritis of late. Plenty of time.
Chava for her part shows little interest in young men, even the pious ones the Maharal briefly considers for her. She likes working as a midwife, earning her living. Judah has heard her say to Perl, I deal with babies all day and all night. All the babies born here are mine. I have a huge family already.
