Disobedience

by Naomi Alderman

  “The Rambam also speaks of those people who can see the soul—the neshama. The neshama comes from God, it is part of His light and His glory. Thus, if it can be seen, it is a light, or a color, which are the same thing, truly. This may have been what you saw, Dovid.”

  Dovid found that he could hear his own breathing, soft and rhythmic, in the stillness of the room. The Rav closed the book on his knee and kissed it. He traced the outline of the gold-embossed letters on the front with one flat, pale finger. Dovid watched the yellow, ridged nail move across the open houses of the two letter beits, then around the broken hei, letter by letter over the surface of the book.

  The Rav drew a long breath, and said quietly, “You should be careful whom you tell of these experiences, Dovid. They are not to be shouted in the playground.

  “I will telephone your parents, and explain what has happened.” He stood up, holding the book. “I think you should visit here more often, Dovid.” He nodded. “Yes, I think that would be best.”

  Lying in his bed, finding himself too dizzy to stand up, Dovid considered himself in a new light. He could not feel these experiences as a gift or a blessing; the pain was too great. He thought of his four brothers at home, considering how long a thing like this could be kept secret from them. He imagined fainting in front of them, or at school, or in synagogue among the other boys. He had always been a quiet boy, not one of those who ran along corridors or fought, but this was something quite different. For the first time, Dovid felt afraid of seeing others, or being with them.

  In a day or so, when he felt well enough to sit outside, Ronit asked him to tell her what had happened. He hesitated, but she was insistent, and he decided that there could be no harm in telling the Rav’s own daughter. He described his headache, the pain and dizziness, the sudden explosion in his senses. He kept his description vague, concerned that Ronit might be frightened or upset. She looked at him with large eyes and he worried that she might begin to cry. After a few moments, though, she exclaimed:

  “You’re a wizard!” A grin peeled across her face. “And I’m purple!” She danced off across the scorched lawn.

  When Dovid returned, the next holiday, and the holiday after that, Ronit would often pester him to tell her other people’s colors. He had already learned to keep his secret better and better as the months went on, to notice the signs that he would faint, to make his excuses and leave the room. He had cultivated excuses, explanations, and denials. Nonetheless, Ronit, watching him closely, would sometimes be able to tell if he was seeing something. When the vision had passed, he would find her tugging his sleeve, asking:

  “What do you see, Dovid? What do you see?”

  Dovid blinked. He found he was leaning against the bimah rail. Hartog was looking at him, puzzled. The ice tentacles had gone. His eye was whole. The yellow hum had ceased. His head thumped, a dark roar of pounding blood, but there was nothing else.

  “Are you all right, Dovid? You look pale.” Hartog sounded accusatory.

  Dovid remembered. Yes. Hartog had been angry about…something. He could not properly identify the memory. He had learned how to conceal this, however.

  “Yes, yes, it’s nothing. Just a slight headache.”

  Hartog’s voice softened. “Of course, we don’t need to finalize this today. Just think it over.”

  Dovid nodded. If he waited long enough, Hartog would lead him back into the conversation, repeating enough for him to follow once more.

  “You needn’t worry about taking a more active role in the community, you know,” Hartog said. “The Rav thought a great deal of you. He wanted you to be central.”

  Ah, yes. It became clear now. The hesped. Hartog wanted him to speak. Because the Rav had wanted him to be “central.” Dovid wondered how Hartog had formed this opinion. He was, despite himself, impressed by the man’s certainty.

  “By the way, you and Esti must come for dinner tonight. This is no time to be alone; you should be in easy company.”

  Dovid was amused by the phrase. Easy company.

  “I don’t think we can.” He spoke quickly. “We have a guest.”

  “Oh, bring your guest!” Hartog smiled. “My wife always makes too much. You know how it is.”

  Dovid spoke slowly.

  “I don’t think it would be appropriate, Dr. Hartog. You see, the guest is…is a relative of the Rav’s…”

  Hartog’s eyes brightened. He smiled more broadly. He clasped his hands together.

  “In that case, you must certainly bring him! It will be an honor.”

  Dovid drew breath to speak, but a smoky yellow thought began to curl at the back of his mind. He said:

  “All right. I’m sure we’d love to come.”

  As Dovid walked home, the residual pain telegraphing across his skull dissolved into simple bone-tiredness. He thought of Esti, who would be cooking, the ticking of the clock becoming louder in her head as the Sabbath approached. He thought of Ronit and of the absurd items in her carrier bags—the running shoes, the drawstring trousers, the mobile telephone and electronic diary. He thought how ridiculous it seemed for them to be together. And, in another way, not ridiculous at all.

  He remembered how they used to talk and plan. In those years when the three of them were always making some plan. Ronit used to bind them together with words. She would say:

  “Either we all go, or we all stay.”

  She would make them repeat it. There was a fierceness to the words, a certainty. “Either we all go, or we all stay.”

  And in the end, she had left, and accused them of betrayal.

  In her father’s house, sifting and resifting another heap of useless belongings, her dream of that morning already forgotten (although we are told that a dream is one-sixtieth of a prophecy), Ronit did not yet understand. But, Dovid saw, she would.

  And it was evening, and it was morning, the sixth day. And when the sun set, it was Sabbath. I almost missed it completely. Dovid had to come around to my father’s house to find me. I was in a happy frenzy of black rubbish bags and orderly piles slowly progressing across the room. Despite Hinda Rochel’s reminder, I had forgotten, as the hours went past, the significance of sunset.

  At the door, Dovid tapped his watch, smiled, pointed at the sun low on the horizon.

  “It’s time,” he said. He looked different somehow. I was reminded of that game we used to play as children, where he would pretend that different people were also different colors. I almost had the urge to ask him what color I was.

  As we walked home, he told me what he’d done and I found it barely surprised me. It seemed like something that had been waiting to be done. Something to do with rusted locks and wax-sealed caskets. Home again, home again, jiggety-jog and here were the Hartogs, just waiting to be startled. I relaxed into the sensation again; this was the person I could be here, the glamorous, unexpected guest, a bewildering presence.

  I considered the Hartogs as I changed my clothes for Shabbat. I’d never liked them, even when I was quite small—he smelled funny and she wore real fur coats that made me sneeze. As I grew up, and saw what influence they had in the community, that dislike expanded into full-grown loathing. They’re wealthy. That’s not a crime, of course. But in the hothouse of humanity that is the northwest London Orthodox Jewish world, money can mean power. It can mean deciding the curriculum of a school, or choosing the Rabbi of a congregation, supporting one grocery shop by allowing it to undercut another, which goes broke. It can mean giving money only to education programs that, though they don’t say so in the glossy brochures, do not allow women to study Gemarah. It can mean funding people like that guy on the street in New York, who hand out leaflets and persuade. All this, and more, Hartog had done.

  For Mrs. Hartog—Fruma—I had a particular loathing, not so much institutional as personal. There was a period of my life when I used to spend every Sunday at their house. My father would be judging cases at the Beth Din until the evening, the housekeeper had her day off, and I would
go to their house, to sit amid their opulence and do my homework. Fruma gave me lunch. She did not make good lunches; that wasn’t her thing. Dry bread from the fridge and slices of cheese were about her limit. She wore clickety-click high heels all around the house, even when she was preparing food, and she was always telling me whether or not I looked pretty. Mostly not.

  What I hated most of all, though, was the way she’d talk about my mother. For example, “Ronit, your mother wouldn’t have liked you to eat like that,” or “Ronit, your mother wouldn’t have wanted you to shout so loudly.” Even then, I didn’t believe what she said, and even then I didn’t feel guilty about it.

  So, dinner with the Hartogs as an uninvited, unexpected guest. I chose a tight blue skirt with a long slit up one side and felt positively gleeful.

  Sabbath, at Esti and Dovid’s house, came in a welter of tiny, forgotten details, and sudden dashes to make sure that the stove was turned off, or the oven turned on, the urn plugged in, the hotplate properly ordered. I didn’t participate; Esti and Dovid made it happen around me, reminding me strangely of children, playing at being adults while their parents are away. I was oddly charmed by the experience; it had been so long since I’d last seen anyone participate in this peculiar form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Everything, everything must be ready before the Sabbath, nothing must be left undone. Esti had set up a pair of candles for me to light, next to her own. She offered me the matchbox shyly, looking down as she did so, and I thought what the hell and lit them. I thought of my mother’s silver candlesticks, of the leaves and branches of them and the shining reflective surfaces. And I did feel it, a little bit. That feeling from long ago: Sabbath peace.

  We walked to Hartog’s house. I remembered which one it was perfectly: grand, set well back from the pavement behind a screen of trees, on a street of large houses. Everything about it was a little too big: the doors much taller than could be needed to accommodate anyone, the plant urns at each side of the doors oversized, the lion’s-head door knocker twice the size of a fist.

  I wondered what Hartog was trying to compensate for, which meant that I still had a smirk on my face when he came to the door, smiling, bustling, because she was still in the kitchen. He was wearing a dark suit with waistcoat, expensively tailored to hide the bulge over his waistband, a dark kippah, not quite concealing the increasing bald spot that was creeping out from under it. He smelled of a little too much very good quality aftershave.

  Amazingly, he didn’t seem to recognize me at first. He looked me hard in the face for a moment, as though he knew he ought to know me. Or perhaps to confirm his first, awful impression, that I was indeed a woman, and not some distinguished Rabbi. He said:

  “Good Shabbos, Dovid, Rebbetzin Kuperman.”

  Dr. Feingold would probably say it was denial, shielding his mind from unpleasant truths.

  So, I stuck out my hand and said:

  “Dr. Hartog. Maybe you don’t remember me. I’m Ronit, the Rav’s daughter?”

  As though we’d met at a cocktail party once. My God. I think if I’d gone through it all, the whole of the last thirty-two years, just to experience that moment, it would have been worth it. The man jumped. He literally jumped, as though a charge had jumped from my hand. I could almost hear a fizzing and popping in the air, could almost smell singed hair. His face turned a strange kind of yellow. He opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, his shaggy eyebrows moving as if they were trying to crawl off his forehead.

  He said: “Ron ah, Ron ah, Miss ah, Miss Krushka. I don’t, I don’t, I didn’t, I mean I wasn’t, I mean, Dovid didn’t, I mean…”

  And he stopped. He looked at me, he looked at Dovid. And I swear, I swear, there was no sound from the kitchen, but he suddenly said:

  “Coming, dear!”

  And left us standing on the doorstep.

  There was a very quiet moment. The three of us wandered into the vast arched space of the entrance hall and stood, our coats still on. We could hear some muffled conversation coming from the kitchen. Dovid was looking guilty as hell. Esti whispered:

  “Do you think we should go?”

  And I said:

  “I think we’re just getting started, don’t you?”

  And Esti and Dovid smiled, just a little, as they had when we were young. We took off our coats, leaving them on one of the velvet-covered benches next to a green marble side table, walked across the hall toward the main lounge, sat down, and waited. The place was just as I remembered it. The room was red: the carpet burgundy, the wallpaper scarlet with a repeated pattern in gold, the curtains dark crimson. I hadn’t recalled the opulence, though, on the grandest, least tasteful scale. The huge mirrors on either side of a marble fireplace, decorated with gold curlicues, the vast crystal urns on the mantelpiece and the windowsills, the Versailles-style oil paintings, covering almost every spare inch of wall space—all of fruit and flowers, of course, rather than naked women, but nonetheless the style implied that Mrs. Hartog rather fancied herself a Marie Antoinette.

  I sat back in one of the patterned velvet armchairs and waited. Eventually, Hartog and Fruma emerged from the kitchen to join us. Evidently they hadn’t run screaming into the night, then. Hartog was smiling his what-big-teeth-I’ve-got smile, and Fruma had on a smaller, tighter-lipped version. She said:

  “Ronit, how wonderful to see you again. We thought we never would.”

  Hoped you never would, I thought. I raised an eyebrow.

  Hartog chimed in:

  “Yes, it’s a real mechaya to see you, Ronit. And a surprise.”

  They started a duet, each finishing the other’s sentence.

  “Dovid never mentioned you were back in London…”

  “No, you never said, Dovid. We haven’t heard anything from you…”

  “And it’s been so long, although of course we understand…”

  “At a time like this you’d want to be home. With family…”

  “And old friends. Which is good.”

  “Yes, it’s wonderful, only we didn’t know.”

  “Although of course we wouldn’t have minded if we had known.”

  “But you see, we’ve got some people coming.”

  “We invited them before we knew…”

  “We thought Dovid might like to see them.”

  “Seeing as they knew your father so well.”

  “Dayan and Rebbetzin Goldfarb.”

  Fruma stopped at that, but Hartog’s voice was left, lonely and small. I almost felt sorry for the man. He said:

  “And there won’t be any trouble, will there?”

  I said:

  “Trouble, Hartog?” and attempted to look innocently puzzled.

  There was a long pause, before Fruma smiled nervously and offered us drinks. Far away, I thought I could scent blood in the air. Or perhaps it was the smell of old, rusty iron.

  The anxious waiting was positively delicious. Hartog lapsed into an uncharacteristic silence, while Fruma became ever more twittery and indecisive, roaming restlessly between hall, kitchen, and reception room. When the sound of knocking at the door finally came, they both leapt to answer it. We heard a whispered conversation in the hall, a protest from Hartog, a strangled yelp from Fruma.

  I muttered to Dovid, “Do you see what’s going on here?”

  He frowned and shook his head.

  “Succession, Dovid. Succession.”

  Esti and Dovid exchanged a glance.

  Dovid said, “We don’t think so. We talked about it this morning. I’m not eminent enough.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Look at what’s happening here. Do you think it’s a coincidence you were invited with the Goldfarbs?”

  Dovid looked blank.

  “Dayan Goldfarb was a good friend of your father. He supported the shul.”

  I sighed.

  “Dovid, Dayan Goldfarb is one of the most influential Rabbis in Britain, and that’s the reason he’s here tonight. If Hartog wants you to become Rav, Dayan Goldfarb wo
uld be a perfect person to support you. With him behind you, the transfer of power would be smooth; no one would argue with the Dayan’s backing. Just you wait and see. By the end of the evening Hartog will have impressed on him what a learned young man you are, how you’ve been too modest to step forward until now, what trust the community puts in you.”

  Dovid blinked. The door swung open and the Goldfarbs entered the room.

  I was right. Naturally. Over dinner, Hartog attempted on several occasions to swing the conversation around to Dovid’s achievements and merits. But, of course, Dayan and Rebbetzin Goldfarb were far more interested in hearing about what I’d been up to for the past few years. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, really. It was only to be expected; the Goldfarbs hadn’t seen me for seven or eight years, weren’t the kind of people to listen to malicious gossip, really were genuinely interested to find out about me, to listen to my little stories of New York life.

  Fruma served her five courses with increasing irritation. They’d evidently had someone in to cook for them; the food was much too good for Fruma’s mean-spirited catering. The gefilte fish arrived, each creamy disc crowned with a circle of carrot, as Dayan Goldfarb asked my opinion of Stern College, where I’d taken my undergraduate degree. The gefilte fish plates departed and the golden chicken soup arrived. We spoke about work prospects in the city; the Goldfarbs had a nephew working in the financial district. The soup bowls were gathered and two roast chickens were presented, dripping clear fat onto the roast potatoes beneath, accompanied by their vegetable entourage. Rebbetzin Goldfarb named and assessed her eight children and thirty-seven grandchildren, now living in London, Manchester, Leeds, Gateshead, New York, Chicago, Toronto, Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, Antwerp, Strasbourg, and two, she gasped, in Melbourne. Imagine. The plates were cleared and the desserts placed in the center: orange cake with oranges in thick, alcoholic syrup in the middle, circular meringues topped with strawberries. Hartog tried in vain to talk about Dovid’s future; the Goldfarbs asked about my career prospects. We ate the cake. Rebbetzin Goldfarb took tiny bites and made appreciative noises.