Disobedience

by Naomi Alderman

  I found I was still holding the phone in my hand, as if waiting for Scott to come back on the line and tell me it had all been a mistake and that the bricks of my life hadn’t suddenly tumbled over in a disintegrated heap, revealing that there had never been any cement holding them together at all. I put down the phone, and Esti lit her candles, and it was the Sabbath.

  That evening, I sat down with Esti and Dovid and we talked the matter through. Simple as that. Or, not really, but somewhere close to simple, somewhere in the vicinity of simple. It went like this. I explained my situation. In order to leave, I’d have to stay. To get away from Scott, to have months and months of money to pay my bills while I found another job and didn’t have to face him and the unspecified domestic unhappiness I’d been a part of, I’d have to take Hartog’s check and do what he asked. They nodded and tutted and told me that of course I was welcome as long as I needed to stay.

  Then there was a long pause, of me staring at the floor and them looking at me. Kindly, I think. They were looking at me with compassion.

  I said, “Esti, you should come back to New York with me. Leave, at least, but I can help you if you like.”

  I didn’t say it quite like that. I pussyfooted a bit. I hedged around the subject. It wasn’t like me at all. I got there in the end.

  “Sometimes,” she said, “I have thought of little else.” She looked up at me. “I used to dream of coming to find you, you know. Of arriving on your doorstep one morning, with my bags in my hands and saying ‘Here I am.’ I used to dream that a lot.” I drew breath to speak, but she continued: “It’s funny, though. I never used to dream of you coming back here. Somehow, when I imagined it, I always came to find you. Isn’t that strange?”

  I didn’t think it was strange at all.

  She said, “I’m considering it.” And Dovid nodded as if he, too, were considering leaving.

  I said, “You can’t stay here. Not like this, not now that all this has happened. Those whispers don’t go away, Esti. You might think you’ll be able to ignore them, but you can’t. They’ll grind you down a little bit day by day. You need to go somewhere there are no whispers.”

  She said, “Perhaps.”

  She said, “Maybe there’s another way. I haven’t quite worked it out yet. Dovid and I need to discuss it. You should stay for the week. Take Hartog’s money. The shul made its money from your father anyway; it’s owed to you.”

  I noted the way she said “Dovid and I.” I couldn’t work out what that meant. Any way I looked at it, the phrase seemed absurd.

  I said, “Do you know what gets me?”

  She said, “What’s that?”

  “The candlesticks. They were the only thing I really wanted here, and I never found them. My mother’s candlesticks. The ones she used to light every Shabbat when I was little. They’re the only thing I remember really clearly. She used to light the candles and I’d stand on a chair next to her and say the bracha with her. They were huge things, about as long as her forearm and very shiny silver; we used to polish them every Sunday.”

  “Silver candlesticks?”

  I nodded.

  “Did they have leaves and buds on them, with two bulbs along their length?”

  I nodded again. “You remember them. The ones that always stood on a tray in the front hall after she died.”

  “They were in the house. Before your father passed away. I’m so sorry. I should have…I forgot. They were in the house.”

  She stood up and left the room. Two or three minutes later she returned, holding a bulky parcel, about a foot and a half long, wrapped up in brown paper, tied with garden string. She thrust it toward me awkwardly. I knew what it was by the weight, by the manner of wrapping, before my fingers were able to pry the knots apart. It was always my father’s way. He saved wrapping paper and string, reused them over and over again. He must have tied them up himself. Esti said:

  “Your father gave them to me, long ago. He said they should stay in the family but that if ever you should ask for them, they were yours.”

  I pulled off the string and unrolled the parcel. The brown paper crackled as I pulled off two, then three, then four layers until at last I found them, nestling among all that secondhand paper. Blackened with tarnish but still recognizable. Far more hideous than they had been in my memory, clunky rather than sinuous, spiky, ungainly, and awkward, but nonetheless. My mother’s silver candlesticks, which my father had given to Esti in case I should want them.

  Chapter Twelve

  Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until the rising of dawn…

  And the man said: “Let me go, for dawn has broken,” and

  Jacob said: “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”

  And he said to him: “What is your name?” and he replied:

  “Jacob.”

  And he said: “You will no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, because you have wrestled with God and with men…”

  Genesis 32:25–29

  The story of Jacob’s battle with the angel is obscure indeed. We are not told why the angel fought with him, nor how Jacob was able to defeat a powerful messenger of the Lord. All we know is this: Jacob was given a new name and that name is our purpose. We are bound to struggle not only with other men but also with God until the rising of the new dawn and the end of the earth.

  Jacob’s battle with that angel was neither the first nor the last of these struggles. Does not Abraham argue with God when He wishes to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah? Does not Moses challenge the judgment of God when He has decided to destroy the Children of Israel? Not for nothing did the Lord call us a stiff-necked people—a stubborn, willful, disobedient race.

  This is our territory. We stand at the border, engaged in constant battle. We are nothing if we do not recognize that truth. Let us not deny that God asks; let us not doubt for a moment that He requires certain actions of us, and certain refrainings from action. He requires that we do not eat certain foods, that we honor the Sabbath day to keep it holy, that we bathe ourselves if we have become impure—these are simple things. They may be difficult to undertake or understand, but they are within our capabilities: neither revolting to mind or spirit nor harmful to the body.

  But let us not deny that of the many things He asks, some few may perhaps seem to us not only difficult but also unjust, unfair. Wrong. And, in these moments, let us never doubt that we, too, have a voice within us to speak, that we, too, like Abraham and Moses, may argue with the Lord. It is our right. The simple fact of our existence has bought us the space to stand before Him and make our case.

  By three p.m., the ground floor of the synagogue was filled. Names and faces whom one had only previously encountered in the pages of the Chronicle or, according to one’s custom, the Tribune, mingled freely. That freedom was, of course, rather more theoretical than actual, for, although all the chairs had been removed from the floor, the room was still packed far beyond its capacity. In fact, had it not been for the mechitzah, separating the sexes so that the men took the left-hand side of the room and the women the right, the level of crowding, with its concomitant rubbing, squashing, pushing, and—let us not hesitate to say it—elbowing, would have been positively indecent.

  The synagogue had become a landscape of food. Along the center of the room ran a long table, topped by another to form a T shape. There were stacks of gleaming white plates, each separated from its neighbor by a napkin and surrounded by fanned forks. There were salads: potato, coleslaw, cucumber, carrot. There was Waldorf salad and three-bean salad, barley salad and tabbouleh salad, Moroccan salad, Italian salad, and the ubiquitous tomato-cucumber-pepper salad. There was fish: a whole poached salmon, fried fish balls, boiled fish balls—both sweet and salty—herring, cold fried plaice, cod and haddock and an abstract sunset in smoked salmon, mackerel, and trout.

  Many of the women lingered by the fish, and though their attention was fixed upon the food, once their plates had been filled some found a moment to speak with
one another, upon matters synagogal and communal. Bending to reach for a gefilte fish ball, Mrs. Berditcher remarked to Mrs. Stone that Dovid, she had heard, would speak later in the service, and Mrs. Stone responded with a brilliant white smile.

  The men, meanwhile, congregated nearer to the meat. And what meat there was! There were fried chicken wings and barbecued chicken wings, roast chicken legs, a huge dish of chicken schnitzels. There were slices of turkey, duck, and goose. There was salt beef and roast beef, pickled beef and boiled beef, smoked beef and barbecued beef. There was liver, a dish of hearts, and a calf’s-foot jelly, trembling on a long, thin serving dish, a row of coy boiled eggs nestling within. There were meat pasties and meat pies, cut so that their solid, dark pink filling was displayed; there was bratwurst and liverwurst, salami and bologna. Starches accompanied these meats: saffron and coriander rice, almond and raisin rice, chickpea and lentil rice. There was kasha varnishkes and mushroom barley; there were fine squares of egg lokshen mingled with fried onion.

  Among these wonders, Mench spoke to Horovitz and Abramson to Rigler. Was it true? Would Dovid speak? Why, yes. They had heard it from his own lips, or from the lips of those who had heard it. And his wife? Ah, she would prefer to leave, they had heard. A shame, of course, a dreadful shame, but after all, if she’d be happier elsewhere the community surely could not stand in her way.

  At the top of the table was a display of desserts. It is here that the art of the kosher caterer reaches its very apex. Naturally, no dairy food may be served at a meal containing meat. Yet the best, the finest desserts are those concoctions of cream and sugar so beloved of small children. It is a mark of the great gifts of the caterers of Hendon that, to eye and to tongue, the desserts they offered were indistinguishable from the more usual dairy recipes. There was jelly cake and chocolate fudge cake, strawberry gâteau and Black Forest gâteau, orange sponge and lemon sponge. There was a great tureen of chocolate mousse topped with whipped cream (soy cream, of course), surrounded by biscuits: langues-de-chat and coconut macaroons, crisp chocolate chip cookies and melting Viennese fingers. There were tiny cream cakes, each one no bigger than a finger, in almost infinite variety. There was a large basket filled with Belgian chocolates: creams and truffles, nougats and pralines, liqueur-filled and marzipan-topped. The basket itself, naturally, was made of chocolate.

  And by this table, shining with sugar, magnificent in its intricate glory, stood Dr. Hartog and his wife. They greeted guests. They smiled and, as appropriate, inclined their heads to indicate their quiet acceptance of the words of condolence offered to them. They, like the desserts made without dairy, were indistinguishable from the genuine and the sincere.

  Dovid was in the ladies’ gallery, watching. He was sitting in the front row and had pulled back the curtain—just enough to allow him to look down. Beneath him, the guests at the hesped ebbed and flowed in the main hall below. The room was already thick with people, particularly around the central table. So far, there had been one or two accidents—a smashed glass, an elbow nudged, causing a plate of food to be deposited across an elderly man’s jacket. But still the people came. He picked out faces he recognized, and observed many that meant nothing to him, trying to match them to names on the guest list. He saw Hartog, of course, striding from one side of the room to the other, the crowd miraculously parting to allow him passage. Fruma was deep in discussion with one of the caterers, although Dovid could not imagine what more there might be to arrange now. Occasionally, a few words, a greeting or a name, would float upward from the crowd below. Hartog’s voice was louder than usual as he boomed, “Dayan Schachter, Rebbetzin Schachter, welcome!” or “Sir Leon, Lady Birberry, may I offer you a seat?”

  And he saw Ronit. She was dressed in a manner that could not cause offense to even the most religious of the many religious men and women here today. Her skirt was long, down to her ankles. Her blouse was buttoned up to the neck and down to the wrists. Over it she had thrown a loose, shapeless cardigan. On her head, though she was unmarried, she wore a long blond sheitel, with a deep fringe. The wig was so full, in fact, that her face was largely concealed. Dovid smiled. No one who was not looking for her would possibly know she was there.

  They have this show on TV in the States—The World’s Greatest Magical Secrets Revealed. Or something. It might be called How Do They Saw That Lady in Half? or When Good Magicians Go Wild. I can’t really remember. The point is—it’s a show that explains how they do all those magic tricks you see on TV. I love those shows, the ones that take you behind the scenes and show you how stuff works. I guess I just like to know what’s really going on. And what always amazes me about Magicians: How Do They Do Those Tricks? is how simple the solutions turn out to be. I mean, you could have worked it out, it’s just that you never really imagine anyone would go to that much trouble. Or, to put it another way, when they tell you it’s impossible for a woman to fit in that tiny space where the two boxes overlap, you just sort of believe them, rather than working out for yourself whether a really small woman, who was prepared to be pretty uncomfortable for fifteen minutes, could fit there. That’s the thing. If someone tells you something’s impossible, mostly you just believe them.

  The point of which is—it is technically possible to check in to, say, a transatlantic flight, check your bags, go through passport control, wave good-bye to your loved ones (or loathed ones, whichever is more applicable in your particular circumstances), and yet nonetheless somehow not leave when the plane does. You just have to be really motivated. And not be afraid to throw a shameless “Help I’ve just discovered I’m terrified of flying, of enclosed spaces, of food served in a plastic tray, and of the very words ‘overhead bins’” fit in front of three hundred complete strangers. It’s pretty easy, actually. So it is possible to convince, say, a slightly loathsome synagogue functionary that you’re cruising at an altitude of thirty-five thousand feet when, in fact, you’re back in Hendon, none the worse for the experience except for a slight hoarseness caused by all the screaming. Like I say, it’s all a question of motivation.

  The room fell silent. Hartog looked around, a slight, puzzled expression on his face. Dovid smiled a little: Hartog was probably looking for him. He pulled back a little from the rail of the ladies’ gallery, watching the man’s slight confusion. He would go down in a moment, of course. In a few moments. He waited. Hartog summoned Kirschbaum and Levitsky from the crowd with a quick motion of his hand. There was a whispered conversation. The three men looked around the room, bewildered. There was a further, brief conversation, resolved with a shrug and a sigh.

  Hartog stepped toward the microphone at the front of the stage.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “honored guests. Thank you for coming here today, to celebrate the life of Rav Krushka, may his memory be blessed.”

  One by one, the great Rabbis of the country, mostly elderly men themselves, took the few steps up onto the stage and spoke. One or two spoke in Yiddish, but most in English—a few still had the accented speech of those who had spent their boyhoods in Eastern Europe. They spoke words of comfort to the congregation. They spoke the words the people needed to hear, expected to hear. They spoke of the greatness of the man, of his tireless work on behalf of his congregation, of the passing of a light from our world.

  Dovid, listening, found himself thinking of those last six months of the Rav’s life. He thought of the mornings when he would wake to hear the Rav wheezing or coughing and coughing without respite. He would knock quietly on the old man’s door and, as he entered, the Rav would raise a hand in greeting while he choked and retched, as though the cough was merely an interruption, an unexpected visitor who would soon be gone. Dovid remembered how he used to hold one of the plastic bowls—once white, but now yellowed with the constant scalding cleanings—in front of the Rav. He would place his hand on the old man’s back and would rub softly, coaxing out the phlegm and blood, feeling each vertebra sharp beneath his palm. And when the sticky mess had been deposited in
the bowl—more and more as each day passed—he would clean the Rav, wipe his face with a damp rag, sit holding his knotted hand as he regained his strength. It was not respect that made him do so, not the qualities that were being discussed today, not faith nor greatness in learning. It was none of these things, although these things had certainly been part of the man.

  Dovid had a small headache, a thin blue fog, an ice crystal or two floating past his face. In his pocket, though, was a packet of pills Ronit had arranged for him. She had taken him, like a child, to a doctor. The doctor had given him pills. It was simple. He had not taken a pill yet but he tapped the box in his pocket from time to time, just to remind his headache that it was there. It seemed to be working. The headache was behaving well.

  It was time. The words had been spoken, as had other words, following words, and fine ones. It was time for him to speak now. Dovid had rehearsed this moment with Hartog several times. Hartog had talked him through it. Dovid would go up to the stage and would read a carefully prepared speech about the life and work of the Rav, touching on his family, his great contribution to the community. He and Hartog had written the speech together. It was a good speech. It contained beautiful, moving thoughts on the strength of the community’s spirit and the importance of continuity. When it was done, Dovid knew that all present would agree that the Rav had found a worthy heir. The thing would be done.

  Hartog was becoming increasingly agitated. It occurred to Dovid that Hartog did not think to look upward—it did not even cross his mind to look there, in the ladies’ gallery. For some reason, this thought amused him.

  I listened as man after man walked up the stairs to the stage and spoke about my father. I had met most of these Rabbis at one time or another; they might have recognized me if I hadn’t kept my head down, behaved like a demure Jewish woman. I listened as they described a man I’d never known.