He, She and It

by Marge Piercy

  “And I am not a man.”

  “No, Joseph, and that’s part of why I like you. You’re strange too. So am I. I can read and write, not just one language but seven languages, Joseph. Are there twenty women in all of Europe with whom I could converse about the matters that interest me? I like midwifery. I like to try my hand now and then at cooking and making nice. But my real life is going back and forth between women’s business of birthing and what men have made their business, the life of the mind, my studies.”

  “Then you’ll marry Isaac Horowitz. To him you can talk about what matters to you.”

  “If I can play on a spinet, should I marry somebody else who plays spinet? Besides, I tell you truthfully, Joseph, nobody but us being up in the house: a man may want to marry you because you’re a brilliant scholar, but what he wants is a wife. So it was with Samuel Bachrach.”

  “Did you love this Samuel?”

  “I did, oh, how I did, Joseph!” Chava shakes her head. Her hands rise slowly as if of their own volition, cross each to the other shoulder, till she is clutching herself. “With passion. I thought it a miracle. To be loved by such a man, a man with whom I could share my feelings, my body, my intellect. But I was no different from other women. They see how it is with women and men, but they think, For us it will be different.”

  “Did this Samuel love you?”

  “Very much. We had a good marriage, as good as my parents’, as Judah and Perl’s. But we had a short time. Four years, three months and eleven days. That was my married life.” A deep sigh shakes her, and she looks as if she may weep. She scrubs at her nose with her fist and draws rapid breaths.

  The hands of Joseph clench and unclench. He wants to comfort but does not know how. What he touches usually breaks.

  “For those four years, my life was what will we eat, is his shirt clean, feelings of the bed, pregnancy, then my son, Aaron, colic, dirt, feeding, seeing him grow and unfold. The flesh closed over me, and I drowned.”

  “I don’t understand.” Joseph feels as if he is stretching far, far up to something beyond his grasp. It hurts to stretch, but it will hurt more to fail to comprehend her, when she is talking intimately to him. “You say you are glad to be free, and yet you look as if you may burst into tears.”

  “When Samuel died, I was stricken with grief. I tore my hair and wailed. I felt alone, wrenched open. But, Joseph, I tell you truthfully, when the grief subsided a little, I began to remember who I had been, before I had loved, before I was a wife and mother. My old dreams came back.”

  “I don’t sleep, I don’t dream.”

  “Not night dreams, Joseph. The dreams that drive us. What we most want.” She leans toward the fire. Her wig is pushed back on her hair, and the flames make the locks of brown hair that slip out lighter, as if the edges were bleached. “Dreams are the fire in us.”

  “I don’t have those dreams either. I wish I could want something. Sometimes I almost can.”

  “The Bachrachs would have kept me in Worms. They expected me to live out my life with them. They’re a huge and warm family. I did something other women will never understand, so I seldom tell anyone I had a son. I let the Bachrach clan keep Aaron, as they wanted, and I journeyed here to my grandfather to act as his secretary.”

  “Why, Chava?”

  She adjusts the little pot so that it will cook more slowly, moving it to a hook not directly over the fire. Then she breaks off another piece of matzoh, chews and swallows before answering. “I knew my father had outgrown being the Maharal’s assistant. His own matters absorb all his energy. He continued out of respect. I thought this was a good way to apprentice myself to a great scholar and a great thinker, to come back to life intellectually. And so it has been.”

  “But how is it better? First you worked for your husband. Now you work for your grandfather. He controls all our fates.”

  “No, Joseph, no! Can he halt the violence gathering against us? I prefer being an intellectual servant to being a physical servant. I get more out of it. There is no son. I am the son. I am taken care of. I go into the kitchen only when I choose. I’m spoiled here, and I appreciate that, because I know exactly how much work it takes to make things go in a house.”

  “Dreams…I have none, Chava. Give me one.”

  “I will. My dream is to go finally to Eretz Israel, to make my aliyah. It is my dream to travel there.”

  “A long, long journey. I have seen David Gans’s room, with all the maps. The world is enormous, and Eretz Israel is far. You must cross Christian lands and Muslim lands, land and sea. I hear the men praying for it always. At the end of both Seders, we all said, ‘In Jerusalem next year.’ But even the Maharal has never gone.”

  “But I’ll go. I want to talk to the scholars in Safed who work so excitingly with the kabbalah. Luria has ideas about the Shekinah that make my mind dance. I want to pray in Jerusalem. I want to walk where Abraham and Sarah walked…You want a dream? Come with me. Travel with me to our land.”

  Joseph leaps off his stool. He seizes her hands and then lets them go for fear he might injure her. “I will go with you! Yes. That will be my dream too.”

  “It even makes sense, Joseph. You would be a perfect traveling companion for me. No woman could ask for gentler company, and no woman could ask for better protection than you offer. And you’d be far away from here.”

  “Do you think the Maharal will let me go?”

  “I don’t think he’ll let either of us go. But, Joseph, he’s very old. My duty is to prepare his books for the press. I’m young still, and you are too. It is sad to say this, but we will outlive him.”

  Joseph seats himself on the stool again. “Unless you marry Isaac Horowitz or somebody.”

  “Joseph, my grandfather gives me room and time for my papers, my books. I support myself with midwifery. Between my breasts I carry a knife in a little sheath for protection. If I’m set on by a group of men, as I was the night you saved me, then I can be raped and killed, but so can every other woman. Marriage doesn’t make that less so.” The water in the kettle is boiling hard. Chava picks up her midwife’s bag, motioning to Joseph.

  Joseph hauls the kettle of boiling water to the bench for her. There she washes out her tools and her cloths. A thick unpleasant smell of blood clings to everything. In cooler water she washes her face, her arms, her hair.

  Joseph peers into the bag in curiosity. “What’s this?”

  “An amulet. Leave it be, Joseph.”

  “An amulet?” He shakes his head in disbelief. “And you a scholar! I’ve heard the Maharal fifty times decrying the use of magic amulets and stones to protect children and houses and travelers and horses.”

  “Now, are you going to stand there, Joseph, and tell me you don’t believe in magic?” She flings back her head and laughs.

  Joseph sits, confused. “Do you believe in amulets, then? Do you believe if you call on the right angel and use the forty-second hidden name of the holy one that you will be able to save a woman’s life?”

  “I think that people believe amulets help, and therefore amulets help. A woman clutches a birthing stone, and yes, it’s just a field stone worn smooth with a hole in the middle, but hundreds of other women have clutched it, and most of them survived and bore healthy children, so why shouldn’t she have something to hold, too? It has a power, Joseph. When I reach in the dark into my birthing bag, I can always feel it. My hand closes on it.” She finishes her cleansing, and he empties the water in the yard for her, refills the kettle at the pump in the street and puts it back on the fire.

  But he does not sit again on his low stool. Instead he kneels in front of her where she sits gazing into the fire. Her hair hangs loose and wet on her shoulders, like willow leaves, he thinks, although she tries to keep it decently covered with the towel as her wig dries. Fire glints off her dark eyes. “Chava, if I were a man and I could marry you, I would never ask you to be my wife but my teacher. I would cherish you for your company.” He takes her hands in his
own very carefully, lightly. Hers are warm and still damp.

  Gently she withdraws her hands from his clutch. “Joseph, I don’t want to marry anyone—not even an angel or a golem. Be my friend. I will be a true friend to you.”

  The house is beginning to stir. Outside in the street, the first cart clatters by. The odor of soup fills the kitchen. “I will be your friend. I would die for you, if I can die. It is said a thing of clay cannot love, but I know that I love you.”

  “Love is many things, Joseph. You can travel farther than Eretz Israel and still know only a little of love.” She smiles into his eyes, and he knows she is not offended or laughing at him, but tender. She is his friend. “Now the day begins when we find out whether we live or whether our blood runs again on the stones of the street.”

  Joseph stands. “While we wait, I have a weapon I want to make for myself—something I saw. But I need a good stout piece of wood.”

  “You know that any scrap of wood in the ghetto, somebody burns to keep warm. Why not look by the river?”

  “Tell the Maharal I’ll be back soon.” He looks forward to reporting, for this night he did not kill but only bound. The Maharal will be pleased with him. Judah’s look will not be heavy and fierce with judgment.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  One Lazarus, Two Lazarus

  Shira was astonished to discover that in tandem with Yod and Nili, she could actually enjoy Gadi’s company. Oh, he might throw her a significant lingering glance from time to time, allude to some memory they shared, mutter some comment to her, but basically his attention was caught, impaled on Nili’s impersonal curiosity, her capacity to be with him and against him at once, the glint of her judgment. He did not seem so much infatuated as mesmerized.

  The world interested Nili more than Gadi did; he was not accustomed to that order of business. It kept him edgy, trying constantly to prove he was fascinating, knowledgeable. Nili viewed them all as along on sufferance, unconvinced that they wouldn’t get in her way on this venture into the Glop. They were piggybacking on the instructions Riva had given only to Nili about how to make contact with the alleged rebel organization.

  To Shira’s surprise, Nili, who carried almost no clothing, had a standard black cover-up. Shira had borrowed Malkah’s for Yod. Gadi had his own. The cover-ups went over everything, including the backpacks they were all wearing. The hunched-back look of cover-up over pack was common enough in the Glop. They moved in a band, keeping an eye out for trouble.

  Yod and Nili were particularly tense. The Glop was new to them; neither had ever been in a place as crowded, as fetid with human smells and the overwhelming stench of pollution and decay. Yod offered ongoing analyses of the toxic properties of the air—they wore filter masks, of course—until Gadi requested that he stop.

  In parts of the Glop, domes had been constructed. In other parts, the outdoors was unprotected, and people tried to stay inside, while the lively street life simmered underground. Here, where the old dome was in place although filthy, giving the streets an air of perpetual half-twilight, they walked what had been a wide avenue, back when there were cars. A strip was kept open in the middle for fast tanks and motocabs, but the walkways on either side ran between rows of tents and stalls hung with bright rags and banners, signs that glittered and beckoned, the smell of cooking sausage, probably dog. Here people did not wear masks, so they lowered theirs. The rule in the Glop was never hesitate and never stand out.

  “Allo, Duke, you want nice fresh molly? Ten-year-olds, younger.”

  “Rod, the latest earbos.” Earrings that played music. “Tomas Raffia’s last stim.”

  “Damn,” Gadi said. “They pirate them before they’re out. I worked on that, and I haven’t even seen the final cut.”

  “Raw stickers, splatters. Slab your noids. Keep safe.”

  “Pings and pongs and every joy and toy. Want to go up, go down, want to feel the fires of desire, want to burn like a nova—come on, Duke, I bet you’re the nervebright type.”

  “Off it forever.” Gadi walked faster.

  “Come on, amie, you want it. You want it bad. You can feel it giving you that rush like nothing else can.”

  The first time the band passed a gang beating a man to death, Gadi and Shira could scarcely restrain Nili and Yod from interfering. “Look,” Gadi said. “This is Ram Blaster turf. If you stop a group of them, you have to fight the whole gang. For all you know, they’re administering justice. As they explained to me once, they believe in justice being fun. Unless you’re prepared to take over this sector and run it, stay out of the way.”

  “How do we travel?” Nili asked. They had released the float car at the edge of the Glop. First they had traveled through the tunnels of the old subway warren; now they used the surface.

  “Depends on where we’re going, Tigress. What have you in mind?”

  Nili recited to him the coordinates she had been given. They all squatted in the shade of a building while Gadi and Nili managed to translate the grid reading into a sector they could head for.

  In the cracked mud by the building—it looked as if it had been a public building, perhaps a department store, but now it was housing where hundreds squatted—Shira noticed two small desiccated bodies, that of an animal, perhaps a cat, and that of a child. The bodies had been well chewed by local scavengers. There they had died huddled together, and dogs or rats had eaten them. Two little lives, accounted no price. Right across from them, a woman dressed in an unusual red cover-up was diagnosing illness by reading electrical impulses and a drop of blood. In the next stall, a short figure was selling stolen and expired medicines—patches, pills, elixirs, implants. Obviously the two were working in tandem. Nobody read by the woman failed to stop to buy something from the short dealer in pharmaceuticals. A troupe of fire dancers was setting up at the end of the block, blowing a horn Gadi remarked was based on the sound of twentieth-century fire engines.

  The committee had reached agreement, and they stood to leave, but they had loitered too long. From the building a phalanx of gang members marched, wearing the Ram Blasters’ brass-and-red body armor and carrying an assortment of knives, clubs, guns, laser rifles; one girl dragged a cannon that shot trash, broken cement. The people bargaining in the street scattered.

  “I told you we should keep moving,” Gadi said. “Now let me see if I can negotiate passage.”

  “Never mind. Put these in.” Nili handed out cold little blue jellies. “Put them in your ears, now!” She touched something on her wrist, and nothing at all happened that Shira, still pondering the strange sensation of the cold wet jellies boring into her eardrums, could feel. What she saw was simply that the Ram Blasters all became very tired and lay down. The warriors dressed in the brass-and-red body armor fell asleep sprawling on the cracked mud with its patches of remaining asphalt and its clumps of sumac. But the girl pulling the cannon did not fall down. She looked around, puzzled, then dropped to aim the cannon at them. Yod was on her in five great bounds. He picked her up, gave her a gentle toss on the pile of bodies. Then he smashed the barrel of the cannon.

  Nili was motioning wildly for them to follow her, mimicking removing the jellies. Shira obeyed. Her ears still stung as if with great cold. They trotted together out of the square, just as people ran from the building to help the Ram Blasters, and others ran equally fast to rob them. “What happened to them?” Behind the would-be rescuers and the would-be thieves were fighting hand to hand.

  “Sonic stun,” Nili said. “More powerful than the one your house uses. They’ll be on their feet in ten minutes, so let’s move it. I repeat, how do we get where we’re going?”

  “We flag down a cab. Until we see one, we just keep heading south and west,” Gadi answered.

  Public transportation in the Glop had long ago disintegrated. Below the cities were long tunnels, but people lived in the ones that hadn’t flooded when the ocean rose. The way you traveled, except for the few rich enough to have their own fast tanks, was by bargaining with cabs
to take you inside their sector. To cross between sectors, you had to change cabs. Unless there was an agreement between neighboring gangs, cabs couldn’t cross a sector barrier.

  Most were small tracked vehicles that could move quickly over the uneven terrain that had once been streets, and that was the sort Gadi flagged down, painted with the brass-and-red colors of the Ram Blasters. Gadi carried out the negotiations in Glop patois, language rich and gamy with constantly changing slang.

  Gadi waved his palm. “I got a raw betty—I wouldn’t jack you.”

  “Lots of done betties around this days. You a grud?”

  “In stimmies, but loose now. Still, I can cover it easy.”

  “Who all’s going? They your meat?” The driver nodded at the others, hovering on the edge of the opaque conversation.

  “Just my dokes. Four of us. Cuanto?”

  Once they got in and were crouching in the belly facing each other, Yod played his recording of the exchange, requesting Gadi to define all the strange vocabulary and teach them the language.

  Betty—credit card or chit

  Rod—man

  Nook—woman

  Splatter—weapon, gun, laser

  Sticker—any form of knife or razor

  Ping—up drug

  Pong—down drug

  Bat—attractive partner of either sex

  Molly—boy or man willing to be fucked by other men

  Cheese—any young human sold or rented for sexual use

  Duke—a man or woman with money or credit

  Meat—a woman available for sexual use, usually but not necessarily for money

  Hook—where you live or squat

  Grab—(noun) any job, any way of making a living

  Slab—(noun) a corpse; (verb) to kill

  Stuff—sexual intercourse

  Barb—sexual intercourse

  Rock—sexual intercourse or music

  Jack—sexual intercourse