by Nomi Eve
The young woman didn’t say a word to Miriam during the entire interview, even while they were alone, and Miriam was draping her figure with fine bolts of cloth. Miriam breathed deeply. She knew that her handiwork was magic and she saw no reason why magic couldn’t mate with materialism. She nodded at the young woman. She would accept this commission.
Miriam walked home slowly. Her hands were heavily laden with silks from China, damask from the fashionable Parisian neighborhood of Neuilly, and linens from Morocco—white, purple, and black. When she reached home, Miriam put the cloth aside and joined her mother in the kitchen. She wouldn’t start work until the next day. She needed time to choose a story.
That night, Miriam shut her eyes; she browsed through all the stories of their lives, and all the stories of their neighbors’ lives, and all the stories of the lives of people she had never met, but only imagined. Finally, coming back close to home, she chose the perfect story for this wedding. In the morning, she took up her needle and began to embroider it into the cloth.
MY FATHER WRITES:
My grandfather, Yaacov Mandelkern, was a man of high morals and good intentions. In 1918, before they immigrated to Palestine (and when they still had some money!), the family lived in the small Russian city of Kovno. They lived there until 1923. In Kovno, there was a very large, well-known yeshiva, or House of Study. Every day, Yaacov invited a yeshiva student home to share the family meal. Each day, a different student came. This was for two reasons. First, to give as many students as possible the opportunity to come, and the second was so as to make sure that they did not fall in love with his daughters—my mother and aunt, Miriam and Noona. Miriam had long brown hair. Noona was blond. Both girls were very beautiful.
I WRITE:
So Yaacov Mandelkern had made his rule. The young men came to lunch. One by one. And yes, each one came only a single time. Yaacov took great pride in discussing with the student a variety of topics: the latest Talmudic tract, the newest fashions in Minsk, the unfortunate way so many horses were losing their shoes in the deep, deep snow. The boys always answered with fumbling eloquence. They spoke in soft voices. They never looked at their host, but down at their hands.
Miriam and Noona refused to join in the conversation. They kicked each other under the table. And always, they tried to memorize the boys’ faces so that afterward they could giggle about each one. The boys had scraggly beards and sad eyes. They had high cheekbones. They were fat. Or skinny, and had little mouths. Big mouths. Big noses. The boys had high, bushy eyebrows. Eyebrows that met in the center, over the bridges of their noses.
And so it went. A boy came to lunch. And always, the next day a different one replaced him. The system seemed to work. Yaacov Mandelkern felt his daughters’ virtue safe and his sense of civic pride swell.
But then, just weeks after the inaugural invitations, the House of Study in the city of Kovno ceased to recognize itself. What happened was this. Every day a student came to lunch. And every day he answered Yaacov’s questions. And every day he looked shyly down at his own hands, trying his best to avoid looking at the daughters. But every day the student was undone. Miriam and Noona’s beauty wafted across the table toward him, colliding over the main meal—the chicken, the meat stew, the potatoes—with their father’s attempt to prevent any alliance. The effects of this collision were severe and sensual, illicit, irresistible. Unexpected spice rained down over the food. The students ate of the food and were changed by it. By the end of the meal the young men’s hands were shaking, and their shyness was turned to thoughts of seduction, love, and lust.
They left lunch possessed, returning to the House of Study with wide eyes and clammy skin and bulges below their bellies with which many of them were unfamiliar. And in this state, they began to read a new Torah. The young men, bent over their regular books, read the daughters of Yaacov and Bela Mandelkern. The matriarchs took on their mellow faces. The patriarchs and prophets (minor and major) began to touch themselves, touch each other, began to even reach out and touch the students in new ways.
The students kept attending the Mandelkern table. And they kept returning to the House of Study with new insight into their religion.
Kovno felt the effects. Students stumbled around its streets with odd loping gaits and funny twisted grins on their faces. And as time went on, the gaits got lopier and the grins grew more and more twisted. For the students were experiencing the indignity of Yaacov Mandelkern’s injunction. Their portions of pleasure were true to their origins—they were unfulfillable, unrepeatable, and lasted only the length of a single meal. In just three months, the House of Study in the city of Kovno had metamorphosed into a container of pure carnal frustration. It was a school that had been known, prior to the onset of the invitations, as a place with an excellent reputation for close textual study.
All regular learning was abandoned. Many spent their days and nights flipping through the pages of the holy books, searching for the esoteric incantation that could save them, that could break the spell. Others searched in the opposite direction, looking for the miracle hidden in time that could bring satiety to Kovno. The young men searched through centuries mystical and epochs momentous. They searched the future, the past, the present. They searched the illicit epics of their own erections. They searched and they searched.
By the time three months had passed and more than forty boys had been to lunch, the House of Study in the city of Kovno was transformed completely. Its walls like sponges took the boys’ sorrow into the paint. The floors and ceilings too, so that the building buzzed like a hive of bees aching in the eternal absence of all honey.
It was a strange time in Kovno. It was a frustrating time. A time of intensity, desire, and disarray. A time so transformative that the love and lust that those young students felt for the daughters of Yaacov and Bela Mandelkern became incorporated into their bodies, like extra hearts or special silken breaths. And when the family finally left Kovno it took many months for the matriarchs and patriarchs to disentangle their bodies and resume their ancient attitudes of sated grace. The students themselves were quite changed. All were left touched by the memory of a gentle madness that would serve them throughout their lives, especially in the most difficult moments when the seconds ticked away in shades of gray because time had lost its color.
Yaacov Mandelkern, my great-grandfather, a man of high morals and good intentions, never knew what trouble he had wrought. Noona and Miriam knew exactly what trouble they had wrought. They listened to the servants’ gossip and then walked around Kovno with proud, jaunty steps, two girls commanding the gusts of local weather.
Miriam worked with fury. None of the young men from Kovno were recognizable on the white damask, the black linen. But Miriam translated their aching essences into geometrical shapes, into loops, and lines, and circles, and double circles, and squares, and rectangles, and flowers of feverish variety. She concentrated not so much on the lust and love as on the frustration. She worked with fantastical imagination. She used color combinations that had not been seen on earth since the days of the Temple when the high priest wore a garment embroidered with a magically hued design known only to select ancient initiates, and which had been revealed to her in a waking dream. She worked for ninety days, up until the day before the day before the wedding. And then, just before she was about to complete the task, she paused. She held the cloth up to her face, losing herself in it. And for several seconds she wondered if the Ten Commandments weren’t a document like this, some queer history recorded as revenge. She wondered if there was no such thing as a prophet. “Maybe,” she mused, “Moses was really a master tailor and revelation just a practical joke.” She stitched the last border on the groom’s waistcoat and then went to work on the veil.
On the night of the wedding, the bride and groom, under the carnal influence of the boys of Kovno, were possessed by a fierce sexual urge. And the urge was infectious. It seemed to waft through the wedding canopy, causing its cloth to billow upward
even though it was a night with no wind, and causing all the men who were standing under the canopy to press closer together and then bump violently backward when they realized what their pressing was all about. The bride and groom were, of course, the most affected. After the ceremony and feast, they retired to the marriage chamber and took each other to the verge of a pleasure never before experienced in Palestine. But just as they were both on the verge of satiety, a captivating flaccidity possessed the groom and they were undone. All sex jumped the ship of his body and he was left feeling like an embarrassed infant—deflated, tiny, shriveled, and with not a single tickle or tender touch left in his lips, hands, or hips. The mortification continued for days: in public his privates were stiff and ready—pressing up out of his pants in a way that made most members of the community avert their eyes against the indiscretion. But in private the groom’s privates were flaccid, unfulfilled. He drooped and drooped and drooped. There was not even the tiniest possibility of a rising. Not at the sight of his bride’s naked body, and especially not at the sight of her very frustrated face.
Miriam, down in the valley, heard all about it. She did not smile at her neighbor’s misfortune, but knew that she had done the proper thing. One day, perhaps, she would send them a present: a small tapestry on which she would sew the story of her own parents’ marriage. Yaacov and Bela had a love like an onion—with many interesting layers and a good strong flavor that stays long in the mouth. But not yet. No, not yet. Miriam liked to let things stew.
Part Three
Chapter 8
ZOHAR AND MIRIAM
MY FATHER WRITES:
Both my parents were excellent athletes. My mother was an accomplished gymnast and my father was a champion soccer player. When he played on the home field, the crowd used to shout: “Zohar-Koach! Zohar-Koach!” (Zohar-Strength!)
My parents met on the soccer field in 1933; she was twenty-two, he was eighteen. Zohar was warming up for a practice when he saw Miriam across the field. She was hanging upside down from parallel bars, doing gymnastics. He crossed the field, waited for her to come down, then asked her for a date. A fifty-nine-year romance ensued.
When my father was just sixteen years old, he bought a motorcycle—a British Rudge license plate 536. The price was 100 liras. The motorcycle became a very important part of his life. He loved to drive and to travel up until his very last day. Back then, the borders were open, and he traveled all over the Middle East. One of my father’s many motorcycle trips was to Syria. He went with three other young men on two motorcycles. They traveled all over Syria, and reached the Turkish border. They also spent several hours in jail, in Damascus, after fighting with “Arabs who attacked them.” My father told me that the four of them had stood back-to-back with their fists up, warding off a whole mob. Syrian and French officers came to the jail to see “Jews from Palestine who fight and do not run away.” My father often rode to Beirut where he and his friends visited nightclubs; he traveled all over Lebanon.
DAMASCUS
The Rudge played an important role in my parents’ lives. They often took rides together, when they were dating, and later, when they were married. They were really a wild couple. Perhaps with some exaggeration, my father once told me that it took them only six minutes to ride from Petach Tikvah to the Mugrabbi theater in Tel Aviv—a distance of six miles! And in those days there were only dirt roads. They rode everywhere on the Rudge: to Jerusalem, Netanya, up and down the Mediterranean coast. A popular place among the youngsters of Petach Tikvah was the ruins of the Fort of Antipater, on the Yarkon River near the town. My parents loved to ride the Rudge to the fort and then camp out there with a whole group of good friends, build a fire, cook some simple food.
My parents were married on the first of Iyar, 1936. After their wedding, they left Petach Tikvah on the Rudge. They went to spend their honeymoon in Jerusalem with Zohar’s grandfather, my great-grandfather Eliezer, in the house on Rav Pinchas Street.
Grandfather Eliezer was eighty-two years old. He hadn’t left Jerusalem since his seventy-fifth birthday—not because he was never invited but because, as he told people, he had “stopped believing that anything existed outside the walls.” My father told me that in the latter years of his life Eliezer seemed puzzled by visitors, but also appreciative of their presence. Zohar and Moshe visited regularly and so he and the twins had remained very close. My father once told me that wedding ride up into the mountains of Jerusalem, with his “new bride hugging his back,” was the most wonderful trip of his life.
I WRITE:
Zohar carried Miriam as far as the Rudge, which was leaning against the side of the house. Both climbed onto it, and they began their journey. She had taken off her veil, but for the whole ride she felt as if she still had it on, and it was flowing after them.
They reached Jerusalem just after dark. The family house on Rav Pinchas Street was now entirely decrepit and just the ghost of grand. Old Eliezer was quite excited by the prospect of hosting an active young Love in his house. He knew that the consummation of marriage was a special blessing, and he very much liked the idea of providing the proper place for this kind of prayer. Also, Eliezer suspected that the physical decline of his house had less to do with ordinary material aging than it had to do with the absence of inhabitants in love. He often walked around the empty rooms trying to conjure back kisses of generations past.
The grandfather welcomed the young couple in from the dark with strong cups of spiked tea and a hearty meal. But he barely let them finish it. Zohar and Miriam hadn’t been in the house for half an hour before Eliezer was shooing them up to bed with an obvious utilitarian haste that made Miriam blush.
This was the bedroom where Zohar’s great-grandparents Esther and Yochanan had slept and dreamed and prayed and curled close together and sometimes moved far apart. Their ghosts were not entirely present, but nor were they very far away. It was the sort of night when ancestors inhabit the middle distance of soul, a hazy curious place just left of memory and to the right of the current moment. Both bride and groom felt themselves possessed of a hushing, comfortable quiet. They shed their clothes and lay down in the bed whose linens were fresh but whose frame was a gossipy relic. They lay side by side, not speaking. Their silence seemed part of an old ritual that was joining them, kin to the wedding canopy, but also like the glass Zohar had broken with his foot—something simultaneously over their heads and under their feet.
Zohar stared at the ceiling and soon he found himself murmuring a silent self-prayer. Zohar said the prayer of first things in honor of his first night as a husband and Miriam’s first night as a wife. Shehechianoo vekiemanoo, veheegianoo, lazman hazeh. The rhythmic cant of the words felt good in his mouth. He added a hearty inner Amen, and then he looked over at his wife.
Miriam was also immersed in quiet. But she was not praying. Rather, she was looking out of the window, at the Dormition Abbey in the distance, letting her thoughts slide up and down its dome and sharp apogee cross, because the Jerusalem in her soul was wakeful and warm and in its own twisty mystical way, unrelenting. Miriam wondered about the cross and the dome, and about the creak in the bed. She wondered about the darkness, she wondered about her new grandfather, she wondered about her new husband, she wondered about herself. And as she lay there, she felt her marriage well up inside of her, and begin to throb and pulse and protect her. She was surprised and amazed by this phenomenon. And she wondered why nobody had bothered to tell her that a marriage was an organ your soul grows. That it was every organ at once, and all of them together—that marriage was skin and liver, and heart, and stomach and lungs. This seemed to her, at that moment, so obvious. Miriam lay in bed in the house on Rav Pinchas Street absolutely amazed. She began to think of the way she would embroider this new information. What color the cloth? What quality the thread?
CITY OF JERUSALEM FROM MOUNT OF OLIVES
It seemed to both of them as they held each other in bed that the other had become a kind of door. And that the do
or led to Love, a territory invisible, eternal, and accessible only like this. Miriam wondered if all people weren’t created for this—as building tools in a secret city that otherwise had no entrance. Zohar also wondered. He told her, in between kisses, that he suspected that the rest of life was just a diversion, “to keep us humans occupied while we are busy doing the real work of life—being doors and windows, and other kinds of walls.” They laughed out loud, and then pressed their naked bodies together and kissed some more.
Old Eliezer heard their laughter and the loud, tidal creaking of the bed and laughed too. He fluffed up his pillows and shut his eyes. In the dark of his own head he had a vision of so many shiny new Jerusalem stones flying through the alleys of the city, zooming right and left, under the half arch, down the Street of Death’s Angels, toward Rav Pinchas Street, where they adhered, one by one, to the front of the house, on top of the stones that had molded practically to dust.
