The Place Will Comfort You

by Naama Goldstein

  If he paid her to leave him he will have paid a prostitute. He would know this for the rest of his life. Bad enough he had even spoken to one, as little as he had. He couldn’t help but think that if there had been an opportunity to avoid this encounter, he had missed it early on.

  “I can give you new ideas,” she said.

  He must scold her immediately at his sharpest or soon she would describe her mechanics. But what were even his roughest words compared to her daily dealings? How to overcome her? If it weren’t for the proscription against touching any woman save one’s wife, he would strike her and be done. She had chosen a life of violation but why must she violate his? He would strike her out. But she had assaulted the purity of his thought, not his life. If no life was at risk, the decree could not be overruled.

  Unless he considered Shifra, lost in depraved surroundings. Three years ago a body had been found here, an elderly tourist robbed and dumped, a grandmother outside the watch of her community. American of course, an old Jew, and from what city, in what neighborhood and whose congregation, where the members simply carried on with their business when a woman wandered off to a wild remove? An elderly lady unprotected overseas. It emerged finally that she had been murdered by women, a pair. He had not kept his ear open to more foul details. The principle was enough: A woman traveling alone invites aberration, end of verse.

  He couldn’t give up. For Shifra’s sake he must strike the whore down, not with intent to injure, not to relish, only strike out and proceed as planned. First he must be sure he wouldn’t delay his search further. The professional had mentioned a colleague nearby. What if there were many, organized to charge up from the seashore in their heels? But he went too far. More likely, a pander would pounce out from between the dunes, wielding brass knuckles.

  “Are we alone?” he asked.

  The woman tried to step around and face him. He turned where he stood.

  He heard her let out a harsh breath. “Just you and me. I keep a secret.”

  He twisted partway towards her. He began to see a glaring, opalescent stain in the far margin of his vision, her skirt. “You don’t have nearby an overseer? A manager?”

  “What do you want with a pimp?” she said. She craned to see his face, and he adjusted his stance in accordance, away.

  “So you don’t have one?”

  “What do you have in mind?” she said.

  “I’m wondering. I’ve never frequented these parts before. I’m not well versed. You said yourself that you could give me ideas.”

  “A pimp,” she said slowly, “knows when to stay put, and when to show up.”

  “I notice you’re not answering the question,” Mr. Durchschlag said. “I notice more than a hint of evasion.” He joined his palms, lightly this time.

  His gesture was cut short when the woman’s shape snatched itself out of sight and, just as quickly, his arms were pinned behind his back. Something rammed at the backs of his knees. His legs buckled. He was pushed down onto his stomach, his arms still held behind him. He hacked on sand. Someone was sitting on his legs. He heard a brief metallic spring, and the sensitive skin of his back raised an alarm against a needlelike sharpness, a fearful sharpness.

  “What did you want to pull on me, you shit?” The woman’s spittle moistened the inside of his ear. “I know exactly where your kidneys are. You need them? Right here’s my pimp, understand? My pimp takes care of me. My pimp won’t put up with the rough stuff and never takes a cut. Not from me. Cutting in general we like. I know where your kidneys are. You’re small. Small was the first thing I saw after holy. Small holy man. You never show your big bastard to the world and you won’t get to show him to me. I’m not interested. I’m never interested.”

  “I was only going to push you down,” he said.

  At this she slit his shirt to the collar, letting the blade sear a fine fiery line all along his spine. Her weight rose from his knees. She spit on the sand beside his cheek.

  “Stay absolutely quiet,” she said. “I have to think. You’ll help me. Think what we should do with you. Let’s decide.” After this she said nothing for a long time.

  A cloud evidently passed before the sun. The glare abated, then intensified. The ocean seemed to dash its waves upon the nearby shore with greater might but at increasingly irregular intervals. Each assault came sooner or later than he predicted, tearing into the silence. Finally his nerves had had enough. She couldn’t be thinking at such length.

  But of course she had never meant to think. She had simply left. Mr. Durchschlag pushed himself up onto all fours, grains of sand nipping their way into his raw palms. Nothing shoved him down again, so he righted himself and sat heavily, facing west. She had left recently. The sands remained unsettled. Her chemical fruit smell clung to each lingering mote, the haze descending over him. He had reached near the lip of the headland. He had seen the vileness of that woman but hadn’t noticed this. Now, through the blur, he saw the blue sea sparkling, and the sallow filth-specked beach. The dust sank and let through the smells of the ocean. Perfume gave way to seaweed, salt and rust, beach refuse. Strongest was the scent of his own blood. A warm wind played at the exposed skin of his back. The cut was shallow, but long and still oozing, stinging badly at a touch, worse where he couldn’t reach. When he wiped his hands on the rear of his trousers, he felt only his knitted muscles through the fabric. His wallet was gone.

  In his front pocket, maybe? He patted himself. Of course not. Gone. His wallet for years.

  Today in the wallet had been thirty-two shekels, and as always a spare key to the flat, his papers, and a stamp-sized piece of parchment minutely inscribed with the Prayer for the Way: . . . and preserve us from the hand of every foe and lurker. . . . Had he walked seventy amot and two-thirds, without praying, from the margins of what constituted built-up ground? The school? An unwitting breach. He would recite the prayer when he headed back. One had to be standing to recite.

  The image of his wallet would not leave him. Gone? Black, polished, and embossed to resemble reptile skin. The heft and texture in his palm, never again? The wallet had cost him fourteen lira and seventy-six agorot years before inflation had forced the change of currency to shekels. A young unwedded Yeshiva boy, he had brought it down from seventeen-fifty at a shouk stall. A few stalls down he had rewarded himself with as many loquats as what he’d saved would fetch, pale orange loquats plentiful in season and then nothing until the next, when again he could roll the hard smooth pits between the tongue and palate once the teeth have burst the mild flesh and pulped it.

  With age the black hide had fissured between the fake scales, so that now the simulation was more convincing. Last year one of his twins had picked off three scales in the right corner of the zippered change compartment, leaving gouges for which he had excoriated her. Initially he had hated the feature of a change compartment. He could remember a time when his thumb would recoil from the extra pouch as if the property weren’t his, as if he had picked up the wallet of another. A young unwedded boy, he had tried to detach the change compartment from the rest with a paring knife. A change compartment made a wallet a purse. He had succeeded only in scarring the hide. Now his fingers sought the old scars, even the recent, daughter-inflicted ones. He had grown attached to the extra feature, liking the safety of the zipper, though of course he never used it to keep change. The pouch now bore the impression of an out-sized coin, but it was only that of his medal, which had found its proper place there, protected on his waking person always. No more. His medal, his dignity, forever lost to a slut.

  What would he give the girl with the most serious essay when he returned? As a teacher he always followed through. But what had been promised was lost. What substitute? His clothes were the color of sack, the shirt cut and bloodstained. A thorny vine could have ripped it, ripped the surface of his skin. His jacket awaited him back in class. He could cover the damage and prepare his wife. But would Elisheva believe he had gone out on a field trip with the students whe
n it had been years since he had agreed to do so? Pale, brittle Elisheva with a big bump through the middle, expanding like her distance.

  A great wave hurled itself ashore, and then another. He pressed the heels of his palms onto his ears so for once he might hear his own guiding thoughts. Sand chafed his earlobes. He let his arms fall and hang limp. The sea whooshed and roared. She wouldn’t believe him.

  One time and one time only Mr. Durchschlag had agreed to escort his students on the annual school trip. Every year since, he had refused. He disagreed with the administration’s policy of allowing the girls to wear trousers for the length of the event. Scorpions and snakes may wait along the path, true, and thorns like razor wire cross it. So let them take the girls where there are no snakes and scorpions and thorns like razor wire. Girls! Girls, not soldiers. A nice trip to the zoo. One time and one time only he had agreed and, though a mistake, though never to be repeated, the trip had had a groundbreaking impact on discipline in his classes. On the occasion of the trip he had shown the girls his medal for the first time.

  He had agreed to go because he had been a new hire and hadn’t known the policy, couldn’t have imagined it in a religious school. On the day of the trip they had slung a gun over his shoulder and beckoned him onto a bus loaded with girls clothed in men’s garments. He had protested, of course he had protested. But Mrs. Adeena Plyer had said that with him or without him they would have to go. The parents had all paid, the hostel beds had been reserved, the driver held a contract. If in the Judaea desert the girls should fall victim to such a catastrophe as an armed chaperon could have fended off, be it on his head.

  Then, without a blink of the eye, she had allowed the girls to sing with men present on the bus, both he and the driver. It had been clear from the wear and fit of many of the girls’ trousers, from their indifference to their limbs delineated in the public eye, that the garments hadn’t been reserved for the annual trip. The landscapes of the trip he couldn’t remember at all. Two girls dehydrated, one busridden with pains disclosed only to the females. He had been a young man then, with only the first two daughters, hoping for a boy soon with whom to study the holy writ, to journey through the branching laws and not the complex mist of sweats that filled the bus.

  Why this fate? Why had he ended up surrounded with the female progeny of compromised Jews? Not by choice. New to teaching, he had tried to secure a position at a Yeshiva, then at some of the devout boys’ schools, then reverent girls’ schools in Bnei Brak, with no success until Tel Shamai. Perhaps his scholarly record at the Yeshiva hadn’t been stellar, perhaps he did not come close to the levels of absorption which might approach the rapture of those hallowed days when God spoke directly to His sons. Perhaps even in those days he wouldn’t have been favored. But to the task that finally was revealed as his lot he applied himself with good intent. He arrived furnished with the strategy of scented erasers in a bag as incentives to participation. And participate they did, but wrongly. Every day Mrs. Adeena Plyer complained about the noise. The girls would clamor for the scented nubs and he would submit in return for brief quiet. When he implored them to attend and forge their link in the Jewish chain the girls rolled their eyes at him, chewing gum.

  On the second day of the annual school trip, after spending the night in a hostel room, alone in the company of the cold gun to which he had allotted the top bunk, as howls of jackals drilled through the night, Mr. Durchschlag had fallen asleep on the bus and dreamed he was a girl.

  His last wakeful sensation had been the window rattling against his cheek. Later he understood that the smells, to which he had grown inured, had crept up on him again in his slumber. In his dream the cloud of female odor in the bus emanated from his own body. His flesh was swelling in new places. He felt brassiere cups pressing. Young breasts they must have been, intent on every subtlety of pressure, knowledge hungry. He had become breathless. A soft wind slipped under his elbows as if he wore short sleeves, a cool current lapping at his shoulders, slipping under them to breathe a thrilling chill onto damp hairs, then swirling between his thighs as if he were entubed in a skirt, out of which the breeze curled back and emerged ripened, reinvented as a sour animal spoor that set in motion a response in him to open wide, somehow, the whole of him widen like a yawn, expanding, ravenous, gulping. When the bus had lurched up an incline he awakened to his jaw hanging slack. He snapped it shut.

  In a front passenger seat Mrs. Adeena Plyer and the girls’ homeroom teacher had been asleep, the two girls seated across smiling at the bus driver who had smiled back through the rearview mirror. One of the girls offered the driver a sucking candy and he took it.

  An orphan child, Mr. Durchschlag had felt himself then, stranded, without recourse. His ribs bore down upon his heart, outside the window nothing but desert sands. What to do except reach out and hold the girl across the aisle from him? If only he could, the two of them would have pressed together like twin sisters in a world of sisters, the closest of the close, yet of pure intent. Instead he had taken out his wallet.

  Unzipping the scarred change compartment, he had pulled out his medal. The brass plating caught the light as he twisted it beside the window.

  “Mr. Durchschlag,” the girl, now he couldn’t remember who, had yelled over the noise of the engine, “do you have more chocolate coins maybe?”

  He corrected her.

  “A medal?” she said. Other heads turned his way. “For what a medal, Mr. Durchschlag?”

  He held the medal closer to her and let her read the inscription: To Shahya Durchschlag, our esteem. Company Seven.

  The girl flattened her hand to receive the medal, which he let drop to be scrutinized, first by her, then all around. He watched it travel from the fingers of one girl to the next, the etched olive leaves and the letters of his name catching the dazzle of the day.

  “I’ll tell you, girls,” he said, “about my time in the military.”

  “But men like you, they don’t go to the army,” the girl, or else another girl, said. “Don’t you get exemptions and stay in Yeshiva instead?”

  “To study the laws and protect us all in the eye of God. Who then is exempting whom? And why is such scant notice paid to men like myself, who serve on both fronts?”

  “You served in the army?” She squinted at the medal, the olive branch curved in a familiar way, but the Israeli Defense Force symbol absent its sword.

  “I served the army,” Mr. Durchschlag said. “As a member of the Holy Society, I was stationed with this particular border patrol troop and in their station I received the fallen. The boys all chipped in for a medal, custom-made. A private gesture, hence not the full emblem. They recognized the voluntary risk. And you? Before every Independence Day you thank the armed forces for your lives. The Holy Society you don’t thank. We’re equally exposed, dangling over death itself to secure your position in the lap of safety.”

  The switch in their perspective had been visible, as tangible as the luster of imminent tears. Only a teacher was privileged to witness these rare moments of concentrated growth. For the first time, he warmly treasured his job.

  “You buried the dead?” the girl asked.

  “I prepared them for burial. I also took the pictures.”

  “The pictures?”

  “The pictures,” Mr. Durchschlag said. “For the family to identify.”

  By then half the bus had become his audience, a warm desert wind nuzzling his nape.

  “Mr. Durchschlag,” a girl whispered. “They show the family a picture of a dead face?”

  Mr. Durchschlag smiled at her. “The family think the face is of a living man because we open the eyes and because, here.” He leaned forward, further than allowed by law just this one time because of the tricky balance on the jostled bus, and spread his thumb and pointer finger as far as he could. With his fingers he framed the girl’s jaws as if to caress her, but stopped short of touching. “This is a professional secret.” Eyes all around him widened. “We pinch the jaw at a very
particular point, and the corpse grins.” Withdrawing his hand, he demonstrated on himself, baring his teeth. “His own mother is convinced he is alive.”

  The girls stared at him. Two or three tried the maneuver on themselves without success. He showed them again, afterwards turning his palm this way and that, twisting it like a key while they gazed upon it. The medal kept passing around, the bus groaning.

  After the annual school trip, Mr. Durchschlag discovered that Mrs. Adeena Plyer the vice principal had lied. The trip could not have proceeded legally without an armed escort. Had he chosen to remain behind, the girls would not have been in danger because they could never have left the school. But disciplinary difficulties did end after the trip, with his switching from erasers to the medal. Classes passed through and changed over. The new girls learned the meaning of the medal from the girls before them, and its potency prevailed.

  In the dunes of Tel Shamai Mr. Durchschlag rose and turned his back to the sea. His time slot in the class had closed. By now the teacher to follow the Mishnaic studies would have discovered the girls abandoned, or else Meshulam Banai would have made a stink. The students would be queried, an administrative interest in pedagogical idiosyncrasies newly whetted. She wore what? And he said what? No doubt the first time he said such a thing. Not the first time? If the story of the medal were to come out, Mr. Durchschlag would deny it. What medal, what ill-selected reminiscence, and according to who? Girls gab and gossip. He turned out the undirtied linings of his pockets in a motion to convince the hand once and for all, no wallet, none, gone, and neither would he find his girl.

  Pickled Sprouts

  IN FIFTH GRADE comes the call to duty, and a new layer in the uniform. A white apron will protect the pink school blouse and the gray skirt, a tiara of white cotton will secure the head. You’ve never eaten in the cafeteria, but just like everyone you will prepare the food when your turn arrives.

  It’s part of the curriculum. But of the coarsening in your hair you have not been forewarned. The auburn baby-silk predominates still, yes, but tougher, darker stuff is threading through. There is talk of blood, the knowledge always secondhand, not from the source. Her?