The Golem of Paris

Chapter fifteen

LOD AIRPORT, ISRAEL

JUNE 2, 1969

The El Al stewardesses pin their little hats on with one hand, using the other to hold back the crush of bodies in the aisle.

Children wail and adults shove and bags rain from the overhead bins. Fourteen hours in the air, and Barbara hasn’t slept one second. Dazed, dehydrated, she clings to Frayda’s sleeve, and together they inch toward the exit.

When they finally step out, they’re hit with a blast of heat and light. Barbara hesitates at the top of the steps, blinking, and receives a swift elbow to the back from the octogenarian behind her.

Nu!

She stumbles her way down to the tarmac. The welcome committee consists of a pair of rust-bucket minibuses belching exhaust. A few people have already climbed aboard and are tapping their feet impatiently, waiting to be driven to the arrival terminal. Many more of the passengers have fallen to their hands and knees, pressing their lips to the cracked, oil-stained ground. They weep and chant prayers of thanksgiving.

Bless you, Lord, our God, Ruler of the universe, Who has given us life, and sustained us, and enabled us to reach this moment.

Frayda drops to her knees.

Barbara shakily sinks down beside her. Gravel bites into the flesh of her palms.

She kisses the earth.

Her first impression of the land of Israel, ancestral home of her people, will always be smarting hands, the astringent stink of jet fuel, sacred dust coating her tongue.

The Sulam women’s seminary is located in the West Jerusalem suburb of Bayit V’Gan, atop a hill that forms the third point of a triangle with Sha’arei Tzedek hospital and the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.

Sulam, Frayda explains, means “ladder” in Hebrew.

Bayit V’Gan means “a house and a garden,” and that’s essentially what the place is, or was, before Frayda’s uncle Rav Kalman bought it: a shambling pile of Jerusalem stone plopped down at the end of a dirt cul-de-sac.

Barbara drags her suitcases into a stuffy foyer dimmed by metal shutters, the air vaguely redolent of noodle soup. She starts looking around for food, but there’s nothing doing, and within a day or two she will come to realize that the whole school smells that way, all the time, an aroma equal parts salty human sweat and floury baked paper, finished with a glaze of bookbinding glue.

Books huddle three deep on cinder-block shelves.

Books on the tables, on the chairs; books the upholstery of cast-off furniture.

Books the only adornment, unless you count the small tapestry hanging from a nail in the dun-colored plaster, a verse embroidered in golden thread.

And you shall meditate on it, day and night.

Books, a landscape in flux, like the city of Jerusalem itself. Put one down and leave the room and it might very well materialize elsewhere, opened to a different page. The same principle of communal ownership applies to hairbrushes, pencils, socks, cosmetics — a loosening of the boundaries between yours and mine.

The student body consists of seven girls, including her and Frayda, the others a pair of Israelis and three from England. All except Barbara were raised religious. All except Barbara speak Hebrew.

As such, she is an object of fascination. Why has she come? It’s not a challenge, just friendly interest. They know the literal answer. She came because Frayda brought her, and Frayda came because her uncle runs the place.

But why?

Upstairs are two bedrooms, shockingly inadequate by American standards. Some miraculous geometry has enabled Rav Kalman to fit three beds in each room. The Brits — Wendy, Dafna, and Margalit — bunk together, and Barbara moves in with the Israelis, a pair of warmhearted girls from old Jerusalemite families. Allegedly this arrangement will help her practice her Hebrew, although her roommates refuse to speak anything but English to her, so that they can practice their English.

“I am so exciting to meet you,” Zahava says.

“Excited. ‘I’m so excited to meet you.’”

“Ah, yes?”

“Please,” Shlomit says, “you like petel?”

Barbara warily sips the cup of scarlet liquid, sweet to the point of bitterness.

“Yum,” she gasps.

“Take more,” Shlomit says, pouring.

Barbara has most of the bureau to herself. She packed light, but the Israelis — all the other girls, for that matter — own nearly nothing, content to wear the same skirt two weeks running. Barbara tries to emulate them, to simplify. In the shower, she shuts off the tap while shampooing, in order to conserve water.

Soap runs into her eyes; she wipes it away and looks down and screams.

“What it is,” Zahava says, running in. “What.”

Barbara can only point at the giant roach that has crawled out of the drain.

“Ah, yes,” Zahava says. “One moment.”

She calls Shlomit into the bathroom.

“Wow,” Shlomit, “look this juke.”

“Kill it,” Barbara yells. She is sudsy, smushed into the corner. “Kill it.”

But the Israelis are admiring the insect, using their hands to estimate its size.

“This juke,” Zahava says philosophically, “is a finer juke.”

“Kill it now.”

With a sigh of regret, Shlomit removes her sandal and slaps it down, splattering shell and guts.

And you shall meditate on it, day and night.

There is no curriculum, no real schedule. By six-thirty a.m., everyone’s awake and praying — all except Barbara, who stands with her siddur open, eyes blurring at the muddy field of words.

Afterward they breakfast on sliced cucumbers, feta, tea. Rav Kalman’s wife, Rivka, serves as mother hen and cook. She and her husband make up the sum total of the staff, unless you count Moshe, the ancient Yemeni fixit who pedals around the neighborhood on a rattling bicycle, dropping in to patch leaks or unclog toilets. There’s a sense of adventure, of life improvised, like they’re camping indoors. Everyone has to pitch in, and the girls rotate helping out in the kitchen.

All except Barbara, who doesn’t know the ins and outs of keeping kosher. On her third day, she causes a minor kerfuffle by using a meat fork to break off a piece of cheese, resulting in the whole precious chunk going in the trash, and the utensil being whisked outside for purification by burying.

Frayda lays a comforting hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay. You didn’t know. You’ll learn.”

Barbara fights back tears of humiliation. That’s why she’s here: to learn.

But how?

Trial and error? Until every last fork is jutting up out of the dirt?

Dear Máma and Taťka, Israel is amazing, and I am having a wonderful time.

During the morning session, the girls pair off to pore over passages of Talmud and commentaries. Officially, Barbara is the third wheel attached to Frayda and Wendy. Really, she spends the majority of the three-hour block floating around the room like a homeless electron, awash in Aramaic and Hebrew.

The others do their best to include her, and she puts on a show of gratitude, all the while sinking deeper into despair.

Dear Máma and Taťka, every day I learn something new.

What was Frayda thinking, bringing her here?

What was she thinking, coming along?

And you shall meditate on it, day—

At eleven, Rav Kalman appears, smiling beatifically through a luxuriant gray and black beard that spills like moss from the great tawny cliff of his face. He is a tall man, his shirtfronts tested to the limits. Whenever Barbara sees him, she instinctively cringes, afraid a button’s going to come shooting off and take out her eye.

“My dear, holy daughters, good morning.”

The girls rise out of respect. Then they gather around the dining room table for his lecture — also in Hebrew. Barbara can tell he’s going slowly, for her sake. But it’s still a torrent. Even with Frayda continually translating in her ear, she’s absorbing at most half a percent, and she feels bad for interfering with Frayda’s comprehension.

“I’m fine,” Frayda insists. “And how else are you going to learn?”

Good question.

Dear Máma and Taťka—

Lunch is more vegetables and cheese, followed by an afternoon of free study, the girls recombining into new pairs to review the Bible or Prophets.

They’re on their own for dinner. As a group they tramp down the dirt road to the neighborhood falafel stand, where thirty agorot buys a soft, fresh pita stuffed with shatteringly crispy chickpea fritters, stiff hummus, and watery tomatoes, washed down with a can of Tempo Cola.

Barbara stands at the side of the road, chewing and gazing out at the sunset, honey over the bleached limestone faces. To the north, Mount Herzl swells through the haze raised by a citywide frenzy of construction.

“Right, then,” Wendy says. “What d’you make of it? Some place, no?”

Barbara smiles and tries not to cry.

On a Thursday night, hopeless and exhausted after yet another day of floundering, she slips from her bed at four in the morning.

Bayit V’Gan; a house and a garden.

The garden behind Sulam is a rude dirt patch, sunk into the steep hillside and accessible via a rickety ladder. Nothing grows there except a stark, gnarled tree with oblong gray leaves. Sometimes she skips the afternoon session to sit under its branches, brooding and planning her escape.

The hardest part will be the look in her father’s eye when she admits failure.

She backs down the ladder in the moonlight, touching bottom and feeling immediate relief: she can sob in peace.

Except she can’t.

Rav Kalman sits at the base of the tree, a book in his lap, a penlight in one hand.

His eyes are closed, his barrel chest rising and falling steadily.

She turns to leave, quietly placing her foot on the lowest rung.

“Bina.”

“I’m sorry,” she says. Her heart is in her throat. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Not at all. I wasn’t asleep.” He closes the book, pats the earth. “Please, join me.”

She hesitates, then settles on the ground near him, leaning against the buckling retaining wall.

“Trouble sleeping?” Rav Kalman asks.

She nods.

“Me too.” He holds up the book. “I could read to you. Put you right out.”

She smiles weakly.

“What have you got there?” he asks.

She regards the packet in her hand with surprise. She forgot she was carrying it. “Clay.”

“I see,” he says. She can’t tell if he disapproves.

It’s not real clay. It’s Plasticine. She tossed it in her suitcase at the last moment.

“My niece tells me you met in a pottery class,” he says.

“Yes.”

“She says you’re very gifted. ‘Brilliant’ was the word she used.”

Barbara shrugs. “It’s just a hobby.”

“You’re being modest,” he says. “That’s fine. Maimonides says, everything in moderation, except humility. There’s nothing wrong with being aware of one’s talents, though. We all have them. God is generous.”

“What’s yours?” she asks.

“Lucky me: I have two. The first, you see, is a talent for spotting talent.” He smiles, gestures to the Plasticine. “That’s how I know it’s more than a hobby for you.”

She shifts uncomfortably. “And the second?”

“A strong stomach for adversity.”

That much she can confirm. Whatever Barbara’s feelings about her own place at Sulam, its very existence constitutes an act of bravery.

Men’s yeshivas are commonplace. Frayda’s fiancé, Yonatan, is in Israel, too, studying at a revered institution called the Mir. But the concept of advanced religious education for young women is virtually unheard of, and, to some, deeply threatening. The previous week, someone put a brick through the back window, along with a note quoting from tractate Sotah.

Rabbi Eliezer says: whoever teaches his daughter Torah, teaches her obscenity.

The incident seemed especially frightening given that Frayda’s description of Jerusalem as free of crime has turned out to be largely accurate. Young children wander the streets unaccompanied by adults. There are outbreaks of Arab-Jewish friction, remnants of the Six-Day War, but they are sporadic and confined primarily to the eastern parts of the city. To have violence jam its snout into their mild, book-strewn corner of the universe horrified Barbara.

Frayda, on the other hand, was unbothered, either by the brick or by the idea. The Talmud is lecture notes. Every opinion gets recorded, even the stupid ones.

She dropped the note in the trash along with the swept-up shards.

Now Barbara regards Rav Kalman, the easy manner concealing a well of sadness. In a way he reminds her of her own parents — the unstoppable, grinding will to exist. He and Rivka live on the grounds in a small converted stable; childless, they have given Frayda the room that would have belonged to a son or daughter.

Barbara asks what he’s reading.

“See for yourself.”

She takes the book, sounds out the title: “Dorot shel Beinonim.”

It’s unlike any text she has encountered in the last month, consisting not of paragraphs and chapters but page upon page of elaborate, hand-drawn diagrams, labeled in Hebrew, but also Latin, Arabic, Chinese...

“Yes,” he says. “A little different, n’est-ce pas? You won’t find us studying it in class, at any rate. Not many copies in existence. I consider myself fortunate to have one.”

She wants to keep reading, but he is waiting, and she returns the book to him.

“Thank you,” he says, wrapping it inside his jacket. “I know this has been difficult for you. A journey of a thousand steps, yes?”

“I’m not learning anything.”

“Nonsense. I’ve seen myself how much you’ve grown.”

Searching for a new subject, she asks what the tree is.

Rav Kalman glances up at the weathered branches. “An olive. A friend of mine who knows such things told me it’s a thousand years old.”

“Can you eat the olives?”

“It doesn’t give fruit. It never has.”

“It might have at one point, if it’s that old.”

“True.”

“Or it might in the future. Don’t lose faith,” she says.

Rav Kalman laughs heartily. “Touché. And what a day that will be.”

He sweeps his hand over the slumbering hills, dotted with orange light. “You’ve arrived at an auspicious moment. For the first time in centuries, we control our holy places. It would be a shame if you left before you had a chance to experience it.”

She hasn’t said a word about leaving. She thinks about it nonstop, though.

Gawd, it’s pathetic, how transparent she is.

He says, “Do you know the story of Rabbi Akiva?”

She shakes her head.

“There lived a man, one of the wealthiest in Jerusalem. His name was Kalba Savuah. I should point out that names are vitally important in our tradition. They reveal a person’s character. Your own name, for example.”

Her mouth twists. The irony is lovely, just lovely: Bina means “understanding.”

“‘Kalba Savuah’ means ‘satisfied dog.’ The Sages say that anyone who entered his home ravenous as a dog left satiated. Though, of course, there are other interpretations, not all of them as complimentary.”

Barbara enjoys the wryness in his tone.

“At any rate, Kalba Savuah had a daughter, Rachel, who fell in love with one of his shepherds. Now, this fellow, Akiva, was illiterate, from the lowest class. Yet Rachel looked beneath the layers of ignorance. She saw his soul.”

“A talent for spotting talent,” Barbara says.

Rav Kalman claps his hands delightedly. “Yes. Exactly. It’s a skill we all possess when it comes to the person we love. Akiva and Rachel became secretly betrothed. Think of Rockefeller’s daughter eloping with... eh...”

“Steve McQueen?”

A belly laugh. “Maybe Steve McQueen’s poorer cousin.”

“What does ‘Akiva’ mean?”

“Good question. It derives from ‘Jacob,’ which itself comes from the word for ‘heel,’ because our forefather was born holding Esau’s heel. Jacob, too, was a shepherd with a difficult father-in-law. And ‘Rachel’ — who was both Jacob’s and Akiva’s beloved — means ‘ewe.’ The words, the themes, they repeat, time and again. That’s a fundamental principle. The cycle of history.”

Barbara has friends back home who dabble in Eastern religions. The notion wouldn’t sound weird coming from them. But she’s surprised to hear it from a rabbi.

“When Kalba Savuah found out about the engagement, he threw Rachel out of the house and disowned her. Think of the fortitude required for her to remain by her husband’s side: she went from bathing in golden tubs to selling her own hair for money. Akiva, naturally, lost his job, but Rachel insisted that he forget about getting another and devote himself to learning Torah. He left and studied for twelve years, beginning with the alphabet and rising to become the greatest sage of his generation.”

“While his wife supported him.”

“Yes.”

“Classy,” Barbara says.

Rav Kalman’s eyes twinkle darkly. “I thought American girls believed in a woman’s right to work... In any event, at the end of twelve years, Akiva decided to pay his wife a visit.”

“How generous of him.”

“As he walks up to the door, he overhears a neighbor taunting Rachel, saying her husband has abandoned her. Rachel says, ‘If it were up to me, he’d stay another twelve years.’ So he does. He turns around and goes back. He never steps foot inside the house. Never even says hello. What do you think of that?”

“I think,” she says, “that’s incredibly cruel.”

Rav Kalman nods slowly. “Perhaps it is.”

“I think that Rachel is the real hero of this story.”

“That is without a doubt true. When Rabbi Akiva came home at last, after his second twelve years, he brought his disciples with him, numbering twenty-four thousand. They arrived in his village, and a wrinkled woman came running out to greet him. The students started to push her back. They had no idea it was his wife. Rabbi Akiva said, ‘Let her be. Everything that I know, and everything you know, belongs to her.’”

Silence.

“There’s a happy ending,” Rav Kalman says. “Kalba Savuah apologizes and gives them half his estate.”

“Of course he does,” Barbara says.

Rav Kalman chuckles and twirls his beard. “You’re very cynical, you know that?”

“I guess.”

“It won’t help you here,” he says.

“It doesn’t hurt, either,” she says, but she feels ashamed.

“I don’t pretend that real life is simple,” he says. “That’s why we tell stories.”

The sky hints at dawn.

Rav Kalman says, “Let’s see if we can’t figure out a way to help you get a foothold, eh? In the meantime, you should get out a bit, see the country. Make art. The bottom line is to do whatever it takes to make yourself feel at ease.”

“What if nothing makes me feel at ease?” she says.

He rises, dusts himself off. “Then, my dear, you are human.”

Monday afternoon, she sits beneath the tree, creating and destroying a series of shapes. She forms a giant cockroach, squashes it; raises and demolishes a ladder. She hasn’t been to class in four days. She spends her nights in the garden, sleeps through the morning session, skips meals, rising to action only when Frayda comes to warn her that the solar heater is running low; better hurry up if she wants a hot shower.

She has an idea that she will never be this lonely again.

The odd truth: she will miss it.

“Hello?”

A male voice, not Rav Kalman’s.

Barbara sets aside the bird she has been shaping and rises on tiptoes to peer over the retaining wall.

A young man of about twenty-five stands halfway up the slope. For a second Barbara wonders if he’s drunk: he’s tottering, arms out for balance, a book in each hand. Painfully thin, with a long, curious face and a close-cropped beard, he wears a large black knitted yarmulke, pale blue polyester slacks, a short-sleeved white button-down shirt, and cork-soled sandals. He peers at her through dense eyeglasses.

“Bina?”

Without waiting for an answer, he drops to his haunches and scoots downhill toward her, triggering an avalanche of pebbles. “They said you were out here.”

She backs away as he descends the ladder.

“I’m not interrupting you, am I?”

“Who are you?”

“Right,” he says. He hops from the bottom rung. “I’m Sam. Rav Kalman asked me to come. He thought maybe I could show you the ropes.”

She appraises him coolly. “Ropes.”

“With Hebrew, or just in general. Anyhow, sorry for barging in. We don’t have to start — I can come back tomorrow. Or never, it’s really up to you.” His eyes shift. “Wow. That’s incredible. Did you make that?”

Once again he’s moving before she can reply, striding toward her bird.

“Don’t,” she shouts.

Sam goes rigid, his arm outstretched. He’s paler than a moment ago, if such a thing is possible.

Feeling a little bad, she explains that it’s Plasticine, not real clay. “It doesn’t dry hard, so if you don’t handle it carefully—”

She makes a squelching noise.

“Got it,” Sam says. He cranes over, studying the bird through those thick, distorting lenses. “What is it?”

“Uhm. A bird.”

“Right,” he says. “But what kind?”

She’s at a loss there. Her models are the tiny creatures who visit the olive tree, delicate brown and orange bodies that flit through the leaves.

“It looks like a finch,” he says.

“Are you a bird person?”

“Not in the slightest,” he says.

“Then how can you know what it is?”

“I don’t.” He grins. “That’s the first thing you learn in rabbinical school: how to pass judgment with complete confidence, especially when you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. Anyway... Marvelous.”

Barbara bites her lip.

“Right,” Sam says. “Like I said, I’m here to help if you want.”

“You’re wasting your time.”

“Not the first person to tell me that,” he says, sitting cross-legged in the dirt.

After a moment, she joins him, waiting for him to open the books.

Instead he smiles at her. “How about we start like this? Shalom, Bina.”

She rolls her eyes. “Shalom.”

“Toda raba,” he says.

“You’re welcome.”

“Ma shlomech?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“Right on,” Sam says. “Now you try.”

She thinks a moment. “Slicha,” she says, leaning over to shove him playfully.

Sam falls back on his hands, gaping at her, and in an instant her pleasure curdles. Frayda has warned her about avoiding physical contact with religious men. Barbara forgot; she was just beginning to feel comfortable in Sam’s presence, she wanted to impress him with her Israeli street savvy.

She starts to stand. “I’m so sorry.”

“No no no no,” Sam says. His hand on her arm, gentle but insistent. “Really.”

His glasses have slid to the end of his nose.

She must have pushed him harder than she thought.

She is half up, half down.

“Please don’t go,” he says. “Please stay.”

Barbara chooses down.

“Thanks,” he says. “I appreciate your tolerance. But: question? What did you mean by that, ‘slicha’?”

“That’s what people say on the bus when they knock you out of the way.”

Sam explodes in laughter.

“What?” she says.

“Slicha,” he says, “means ‘excuse me.’”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Oh my God,” she says, starting to laugh, too. “I thought it meant ‘push.’”

“Welcome to Israel,” he says.

They laugh and laugh, and she watches it leaving her, the loneliness that has become her companion, she watches it spread its wings and rise, good-bye, good-bye, you’ve been a good friend; a second self, undiscovered, rising to fill the void; and she finds herself forming her own question, almost unconsciously.

“Sam what?” she asks.

“Lev.”

“That means ‘heart.’”

“There you go,” he says. He smiles. “You know more than you think.”