Disobedience

by Naomi Alderman

  I called him, not because I need him, or want him back, or any of that bullshit, but because I knew, I just knew, that he’d understand. While the phone was ringing, I almost convinced myself to hang up, because maybe even calling made me weak, when I should be trying to be strong. And then he answered.

  I said, “Hi, it’s me.”

  He said, “Oh. Okay.”

  “Scott, I wouldn’t call, only…”

  I paused for dramatic effect. I did. I admit it. I paused so he’d think I was going to tell him I loved him, or wanted him back. So that he’d feel really lousy, really small-minded and petty when I said:

  “I’ve just heard, my father’s died.”

  An intake of breath.

  “I’m so sorry.” He sounded sorry. A pause, then: “I’ll come over.”

  “No, no, you shouldn’t. I’ll be fine.”

  “I’ll come.”

  “Are you sure? Can you get away?”

  “Yes,” he said loudly. “Yes, I’ll come now and take that conference call.”

  I remember one drunken evening in some bar downtown. It was a team-building night, so it was the six of us: Anna, the trainee, big eyes, short skirts; Martin, account manager, hoping Scott would go home, so he’d be alpha male; Bernice, quiet, husband called at least twice a day; Carla, the boss, wool suit, wanting to be generous but looking nervously at the menu every time one of us ordered a drink; and Scott, the big boss, fraternizing with the troops. And me.

  Martin, as usual, was trying to put his arm around Anna and talking too loudly. He stabbed the table with his finger and said, “You know what the problem with this country is?”

  We shook our heads. Bernice and I exchanged a look.

  “Too. Much. Religion. That’s the problem. It’s the religious rednecks, in Iowa, who are destroying this country. With censorship. That’s what’s ripping this country apart: censorship. You know, Ronit, you guys have got the right idea in Europe.” He pronounced my name wrong, as usual, putting the stress on the first syllable, Ron it, instead of the second: Ron it.

  “Oh, yes?” I said.

  “Yeah. God. Is. Dead. I mean, what’s the point, right? Am I right?” I kept silent. Martin looked around the group and repeated, “Am I right, guys?”

  Carla glanced at Scott. He gave her an encouraging smile. It was his I’m-here-for-you-as-a-mentor-but-you-have-to-deal-with-your-own-team smile. She said:

  “Well, I guess it does seem kind of irrelevant…”

  “Yeah!” said Martin. “Yeah! I mean who the hell remembers the catechism, or the twelve apostles—”

  “Or the Ten Commandments,” Carla chimed in.

  “Yeah, who the hell knows what the Ten Commandments are, anyway? Aren’t they like, don’t litter, don’t smoke, and buy American, or something?”

  Everyone laughed. Even quiet little Bernice giggled, silently, shoulders shaking. Except Scott, I remember.

  Anna, finally catching up to the conversation, said:

  “Yeah, I bet not a person in this room knows the Ten Commandments.”

  I could have laughed then. I could have faked a little mirth. Martin would have gone on to some other rant. But I said, “I do.”

  Silence. They looked at me. It wasn’t absolutely the best thing to say in a downtown bar on a Friday night.

  Carla said, “Bet you don’t.”

  I held up my fingers to count as I said:

  “One. I am the Lord your God. Two. You shall have no other God before me. Three. Do not take the Lord’s name in vain. Four. Honor your father and your mother. Five. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six. Don’t murder. Seven. Don’t commit adultery. Eight. Don’t steal. Nine. Don’t bear false witness. Ten. Don’t covet.”

  They looked at me, openmouthed. Scott’s eyes met mine, a good blue, a bright, good look of respect and I thought: I should have done it in Hebrew.

  Martin said, “Yeah, well, who keeps them, anyway?”

  And, I must admit, he had a point. Because it was that night that Scott offered to share a cab home with me.

  I looked around the apartment, trying to remember if any of the things belonged to him, or to the time we were together. And would it be better or worse if I put them away. Better that he shouldn’t think I was keeping reminders of him around. Worse that he might notice their absence and realize I’d put them away. Crap.

  I stood, holding a wooden cat he’d bought me, wondering what to do with it. It had been a makeup gift. He’d made one of his irritating remarks about how women shouldn’t live alone. I’d said something like, oh yeah? And he said, yeah, especially not Jewish women. You guys get mean. You should at least have a cat or something. And I said, we get mean? I told him he was a self-hating Jew, and he said show me a Jew who isn’t, and then I threw him out.

  A couple of nights later I came home late from the gym to find him skulking in the lobby of my building, holding the cat wrapped in parcel paper. That was the first time he stayed all night. I asked him how he could, and he said his wife had taken the kids to her parents’ in Connecticut; they visit with her family, go to church, country stuff, he said. I hit him and said, church! You married a shiksa?! And he said, you can talk. And I said, I am a completely different situation. And he said, oh really, and he leaned in, and I could smell his skin: cedarwood, linen, and lemons, filling my nostrils.

  Afterward, I told him that my father would want me to try to win him, Scott, back for the faith. He said, wouldn’t he want me to win you back? I didn’t answer that.

  I was thinking about this, and about the smell of his skin, and the size of his hands, which were far too big, ludicrously large, clown hands, when the buzzer sounded, and it seemed like only half a second at most before he came through the door, and I realized I was still holding the stupid wooden cat.

  I put it down on the hall table and said, “Hi.”

  And he said, “Hi. Should I be wishing you a long life or something?”

  “You can if you like. But I kind of thought you wished I were dead.”

  He ran his hand through his hair, looking tired and irritated.

  “I don’t wish you were dead. Christ, Ronit, why are you always so…”

  “Annoying?”

  “Defensive.”

  I don’t know, I nearly said, I can’t think why I’d need to defend myself from you.

  Instead I dug my nails into the palm of my hand—hard, really hard—and said:

  “I’m glad you came.”

  He opened his arms wide and hugged me. I didn’t do anything. We stood like that, in the hallway, he with his arms around me, for a long time.

  “How long can you stay?”

  He took a breath and let it out. He bit his bottom lip, that thing he always does when deciding whether or not to tell the truth. He said:

  “I told Cheryl I’d be gone awhile. I’m on a conference call with Tokyo. I guess I should be back before dawn. Say, two a.m.?”

  “Can you make it four?”

  He looked at me, calculating probabilities. How angry would I be if he said no? What might I do? Would Cheryl be asleep by two anyway? How much sleep did he need before tomorrow?

  “Why?” he said.

  “It’s just, the funeral will be over in England by four, our time. That’s all.”

  I’m pathetic, I thought, just pathetic.

  “Okay,” he said. “Four.”

  It was awkward. We stood in silence for such a long time that I seriously considered saying, hey, how ’bout them Yankees? Or talking about politics or even about work, because we never had a problem when there were things to talk about. Or things to do. The problem was when we were both quiet and he started to get that look on his face like he was thinking about his wife.

  We sat on the couch, almost touching but not quite, and after a little while that started to get to me because I noticed how we were sitting in the exact same posture. So I offered to make some coffee, except I realized as he was accepting that I knew how he took
his coffee and the idea of making it how I knew he liked it seemed so intensely personal that I thought I’d rather open a vein and bleed into the cup.

  So I said something lame like I’m not sure I have any coffee, I’ll check.

  He gave me this really weird smile and said, “You? Not have coffee? Things have changed around here.”

  He said it like he was offering me a gift.

  I didn’t say anything. I walked into the kitchen. And that was the point when I thought, what the hell am I doing? I held on to the enamel of the sink and looked around at the food that I knew wasn’t kosher and the dishes that hadn’t been kept separate and the appliances that I use on Shabbat. And I had a sudden dizzy sensation that none of these things belonged to me. I felt like I’d marched in off the street into the wrong apartment, and I’d never met that man sitting on the couch before. It was all like something I’d read in a magazine a long time ago: alien, unfamiliar, and terrifying. And a little voice tickled in my ear, saying, well, this is what you get.

  I knew that voice.

  It said it again: this is what you get, Ronit. All you have for comfort is a married man. All you have for strength is a job. What did you think was going to happen?

  And I gripped the sink tighter, drew a breath, and said, I’m not listening.

  I didn’t realize I’d said anything out loud until Scott said, “What was that?”

  I said, because it was the first thing I could think of, “What do you think about my going back to England?”

  “What do you mean, what do I think?”

  “I mean, do you think I should go?”

  “Why the hell not? You’ve got the German project under control, haven’t you?”

  I’d forgotten this about him, the tendency to relate all life decisions back to work. I wanted to shout, you idiot, that’s not what I meant, and the anger snapped me back into focus and I remembered that I was here, now, in the middle of my own life.

  I said, “Yes, it’s under control. That’s not the point.”

  I think he said something then, but the kettle started to boil, so I didn’t hear it.

  As I walked out with the coffee I said, “I guess I should go. That’s what you do, right? I should go home, see my people, visit my father’s grave. That stuff.”

  He looked at me.

  “Sure.”

  I sat on the couch next to him and stared silently into my coffee.

  After a while, he said:

  “What is it that you’re afraid of?”

  And I almost laughed, almost but not quite.

  I said, “Maybe that he’ll still be there. Still disapproving. Still disappointed.”

  Scott said, softly, “And maybe that he won’t?”

  And I felt tears starting then, in the itching of my eyes and in the back of my throat, and to stop them I took a sip of coffee and thought about the positives, the black side of the balance sheet. I could visit England, and there’d be no awkward scenes, no difficult conversations. And I could bring home my mother’s candlesticks. I could almost feel myself holding them, their heaviness in my hands. My mother’s tall silver candlesticks, sinuous, wreathed in flowers and foliage. I saw them as my mother used to use them, and as I used to light them later, every Friday night. I saw their beautiful intricacy, each one as long as my forearm, gleaming silver, with a wide, claw-foot base, a slender stem that swelled into a large bulb covered in silver leaves, then on up to a smaller, similar bulb, and then another, before ending with the candleholder itself, large enough to take a candle that would burn for twenty-four hours, if that was required. The candlesticks I never could have asked my father for all these years, because he wouldn’t have wanted them to reside in my heathen home. It would be good, somehow, to have them here.

  I almost said that to Scott, but then I thought, actually, why do you deserve to know this? The time’s passed now for you to know this sort of thing about me, so I stopped talking and looked down. Scott took my hand and said, “Ronit, will she be there, that girl who you…”

  I smiled because he couldn’t have been more wrong. The tears had passed without being shed, and I felt better. I said, “Esti? No, I don’t think so. She’ll be long gone by now. She was worse than me, back in the day.”

  He smiled. I smiled. We sat and drank coffee, just like old friends.

  Later on, we talked. About England, about my dad. I tried to explain how different Jews in Britain are from Jews in America. I didn’t get very far, but it was good to be talking like that, like it was business. That’s one thing about Scott—he makes everything seem simple, because in his mind everything is.

  He said, “He was some big-deal Rabbi, your dad? Wrote a book, founded a synagogue. What happens now?”

  I shook my head. “If I know that community”—I looked at my watch—“yep, they’ll already be talking about who’s going to replace my father.”

  “Now? When he’s not even buried?”

  “Oh, yes, especially now. This is the crucial moment. They’ll want it easy and smooth. You see”—I leaned back in my chair, relaxing now that I had some lecturing to do—“the dynamics of synagogues are really very simple, like the dynamics of monarchies. It’s all about succession. The simpler the succession, the happier everyone is.”

  “So will they have chosen a successor already?”

  “Probably. Or at least the board, which means the money, will have someone in mind.” I looked at the ceiling for a moment, thinking back. “My knowledge isn’t as current as it used to be, of course, but I’m guessing my cousin Dovid’s a front-runner. Although…he’s not that confident. Doesn’t really have the, y’know, va-va-voom for the job.”

  “A Rabbi needs va-va-voom?”

  I smiled. “You know what I mean. Charisma. People skills. Good speaking voice. That sort of thing.” I took another gulp of coffee. “Still, I think Dovid will be their man.”

  “How come? If he doesn’t have the charisma, people skills, good speaking voice?”

  I thought for a moment, staring into my coffee. “He’s obedient. That’s the kind of guy Dovid is: he’s quiet, soft-spoken, does what he’s told. They won’t want another firebrand Rabbi. The board will want someone who they can boss around, tell what to do, who won’t make trouble.” I smiled. “I guess, even if I were a man, I wouldn’t quite fit the bill.”

  He looked at me with a sort of smile, half sympathetic, half amused. Suddenly, I didn’t want to talk about this anymore. And after all, what had I called him for in the middle of the night? It wasn’t to grieve with, it wasn’t to talk over memories of my father, or sit on a low stool.

  I said, “Look, do you know what I need right now?”

  “What?”

  I put my hand at that place at the back of his neck where his hair is short, soft bristles and pulled him toward me. And because it was easy, I guess, or familiar or just because it put an end to the awkwardness, he kissed me back. He smelled exactly like I remembered, maybe even better. And we fell to doing other easy, familiar, forbidden things.

  Chapter Three

  Blessed are you, God, our Lord, King of the Universe, who distinguishes between the holy and the workaday, between light and darkness, between Israel and the nations, between the seventh day and the six days of creation. Blessed are you, God, who distinguishes between the holy and the workaday.

  From the Havdalah prayer, recited at the end of Shabbat

  In the beginning, the Lord created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was tohu vavohu. What is tohu vavohu? This matter is much debated among the sages. There are those who say: formless. There are those who say: void. There are those who say: astonishingly empty, as though they had stood alongside the Almighty in the time before time and had been astonished at the emptiness, had, perhaps, remarked upon it.

  And there are those who say: chaotic. This interpretation seems to allow the words, which are all that we have of the beginning, their voice. Tohu vavohu. Higgledy-piggledy. Upside down. Inside out.
Hither and thither. The Creator wanted to show us the first contraction of all-that-is. All modes of expression were open to Him, every human sense. He chose words—tohu vavohu. Tumble-jumble.

  In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was bingle-mingle.

  In the beginning, therefore, the most important work is of separation. It is of pulling apart the tangled threads. It is of saying “This shall be separate from that. This shall be water, this shall be sky, and this shall be the line between them, the horizon.” It is of setting a line between them.

  What does it mean, that this world came into being at first through a blinding act, but then, subtly, slowly, as elements were teased away, as infinitely fine lines were drawn? It means, surely, that to understand the world, one must understand the separation.

  On Wednesday night, the fifth night of the shiva, Dovid watched Esti cook. He took pleasure in this, in a simple appreciation of her skills. He enjoyed the sense of professionalism in her calm addition of seasoning or her careful reaching for a cast-iron saucepan. He imagined that she liked to cook. He had no way to know, but the fact that she continued to prepare meals seemed to indicate that she must take some pleasure in it. In any case, how else were they to communicate? She cooked and he ate—this, too, was a form of speech.

  The previous year, a new member of the community—Mrs. Stone, the orthodontist’s wife—had approached him at the buffet after the Shabbat service and whispered:

  “Your wife, Rabbi Kuperman.” She had yet to learn how to address him from the others. “Does your wife speak?”

  He saw several of the women around her turn their heads and blink, like birds of prey. He almost smiled. One of these women would take her aside in the next few days and explain how things were, that certain things could be discussed, and certain things could not. Mrs. Stone would be brought into line.

  “Of course,” he said. “Of course she speaks.”

  And it was true. Esti often spoke. There had been a time when they spoke to each other in long, effortless conversations. They had spent nights like that, still talking when the sky grew pale.