Choose Somebody Else

by Yvonne Fein

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Not everything is always as it seems,’ he said. ‘She may be an orphan, but she may also be much else besides. Goodness is not guaranteed among the destitute. Be careful, Nathan.’

  ‘Of what? Of who?’ I felt my face flush as I said it.

  ‘There are those in this world—or in the other—who can make men thrust their judgment aside. It is better not to be among them,’ he said.

  He had no time left for me and I was glad to leave.

  I went back to my room and looked up the passage from Isaiah. There was more to it than Rav Avrum had quoted:

  Come let us reach an understanding,

  Says the Lord.

  Be your sins like crimson,

  They can turn snow-white;

  Be they red as dyed wool,

  They can become like fleece.

  I no longer had crimson sins that I could think of, but in my mind’s eye I saw the young woman on my doorstep. Her dark red boots, her red woollen scarf were a vivid complement to the whiteness of her dress. Was I supposed to deduce—or remember—from such details whether she were saint or sinner?

  Adminah entered my kitchen as I was assembling the ingredients for the stew. She smiled when she saw it all.

  ‘Just the person I was hoping for,’ I said. I could see that it pleased her. ‘Could you set the table? Eighteen of everything, and maybe fold the napkins into those little swan shapes you’re so good at.’

  She flitted wordlessly between kitchen and dining room and I noticed with pleasure how lightly she stepped. As she was winding down her activities I said, ‘No first course, but definitely a dessert. I thought madartej, which means bird’s milk in Hungarian, or floating islands, or œufs à la neige—eggs in snow—they’re all variations on the same theme. It’s a European dessert and—’

  ‘I suppose it was in the box.’

  ‘Of course. I’ve decided to work through all the recipes, from start to finish.’

  Adminah rustled her fingers along the tops of the them. It was a familiar movement.

  ‘So many,’ she said. ‘By the time you get through them all I’ll be long gone, back in Israel.’

  ‘You could stay,’ I said, wondering what possessed me.

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘No, yes, maybe. Why don’t I tell you about the eggs in snow?’

  She inclined her head. We were both discomfited.

  ‘It’s a dessert which uses egg whites whipped with sugar until they’re stiff and then they’re set to float on a mixture called crème anglaise, a kind of vanilla custard.’

  As I began to build the ingredients for the stew into a broad-based pyramid on a wooden board next to the heavy frying pan, Adminah folded the napkins. We worked in silence for a while and the air between us grew tranquil and untroubled.

  Finally, I said, ‘There’s a retro festival at the Astor. On Saturday night—A Gentleman’s Agreement. Want to come?’

  ‘With you?’

  ‘Naturally, with me. I asked the Rav. He said it was all right.’

  ‘Honestly, Nathan, it’s only the movies. And I don’t need a man’s permission, let alone a rabbi’s, to do anything.’

  For a moment she stood there, her stance belligerent, but then she smiled at me, a smile that started at those deep green eyes of hers and wove its strands around my heart.

  She jumped up and left, saying, ‘I’m off to have a shower,’ which momentarily had me picturing her naked and wet. I slammed the lid on that thought and started reciting psalms—a rabbinical remedy for unchaste thoughts—as I slowly sautéed onions and garlic in the oil-heated pan.

  Dinner, with spicy legumes and a fragrant dessert, paid due deference to my grandmother. Her magical box had lifted me out of the realms of the ordinary and deposited me in some alien, some preposterous, sphere. There, in the combining of her ingredients and methods, it had turned my kitchen into a zone bewitched.

  Two of the bokhrim jumped into the breach to help with the clearing and washing up. For the most part they jabbered in Hebrew so fast that I couldn’t follow what they were saying. When they had completely cleared and cleaned, they saluted me, and the taller one said, ‘Funtustic dinnair. Sank you’.

  I was exhausted, but sleep wouldn’t come. For some reason, the Song of Songs had lodged itself in my mind, or rather, a particular verse of it had, a beautiful, tormenting gyration,

  I slept but my heart was awake.

  Listen! My beloved is knocking,

  Open to me

  my sister, my beloved, my dove, my flawless one.

  My head is drenched with dew,

  My hair with the dampness of the night.

  My pillow was hot and uneven beneath my head. My breath came irregularly. Who was she, the beloved who knocked? The ‘flawless one’ was surely Adminah, but the one whose hair was drenched with the dampness of the night—that had to be the other.

  I tried distracting myself with recipes from my grandmother’s box, but they were, as yet, too unfamiliar for me to be able to call them up from memory. I went to the kitchen for a glass of water then sat in the rocking chair I kept there to rest and to mull over menus. Leaning back, I rocked myself gently and the next thing I knew it was morning. I stood up and saw I had only an hour to prepare breakfast.

  The week spun by in a whirlwind of experimentation. Like tumbleweed in thrall of a desert wind, so was I at the mercy of that rosewood box. Every time I dipped my hand into the magic of it, a current of air streamed through me. Catching sight of my reflection in the window one day, I reminded myself of Albert Einstein, his firestorm hair awry with triumph.

  Saturday night and Adminah was felled by bronchitis. When I brought her a cup of tea with lemon and honey she said to me, ‘Don’t go alone’.

  ‘Why? It’s only a movie.’

  She shook her head and I couldn’t tell if her flushed cheeks denoted anything other than a fever. As she lay down she turned her face to the wall.

  ‘Do as you like,’ she said.

  Closing the door, I could have sworn I heard her breathe the words, ‘You always have before’.

  Was I the only one who did not understand, did not remember whatever it was I was supposed to have been a part of? I hated not knowing, yet I felt myself freeze at the possibility of finding out.

  Regardless, I went on my own to the Astor and bought a single ticket. The seat next to me was empty. In the darkness someone sat down and at interval I was startled to see it was the young woman who had knocked at the Yeshiva’s kitchen door.

  The first thing I said to her was: ‘Why did you do that to my recipe box?’

  ‘How do you know it was me, Nachman?’ she said.

  Distracted I asked, ‘How do you know my name?’ My Yiddish name, I thought.

  ‘You told me.’

  I was sure I hadn’t. ‘How did you know I’d be here?’

  ‘I hoped.’

  I knew that her every word was a lie. Had always been a lie. I felt my pulse, and then my breath, quicken. ‘It’s you, isn’t it…?’

  ‘I am only what you see.’

  I shook my head as though to clear it. Where had that question come from?

  ‘Have you been watching me, following me?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t need to do that. I always know where you are.’ On the same current of air, she asked, ‘Could you buy me an ice cream?’

  I was reluctant before I realised it was because I was afraid she would be gone when I returned.

  ‘What flavour would you like?’ I said.

  ‘You choose.’

  ‘I’m no great authority. Most ice creams at the cinema aren’t kosher.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Choose anyway.’

  The conversation was ludicrous, yet I felt dread—or was it desire—
rising like quicksilver inside me.

  When the movie was finally over—why hadn’t I stood up and walked away?—she said without preamble, ‘Could you drive me home?’

  ‘Are you living at Soul of Fire now?’

  ‘No, but nearby. If you drop me off at their door I can make my way.’

  I shrugged, and she took it as a ‘yes’.

  We drove in silence but when we arrived at the synagogue, she turned and kissed me deeply. She left the taste of burnt roses in my mouth.

  ‘Something to remember me by,’ she said, ‘so that next time you won’t have to ask who I am.’

  I needed her out of my car to be swallowed forever by the darkness, but she just sat there, and I did nothing.

  She began to run her fingers through my hair and I couldn’t help it; I closed my eyes to the sensation of it. Then she said, ‘Do you think you are my basherter and I am yours? Do you think we’re destined?’

  The image of my grandmother’s face rose smouldering before me.

  ‘No!’ I said. ‘That’s the last thing I think.’

  ‘It is important for you to know, I am the wife of—’

  ‘You’re married?’

  ‘The widow of a very great man. He died long ago.’

  ‘You’re not old enough to have a husband who died long ago.’

  ‘I’m older than I look.’

  ‘How much older?’

  She shook her head and smiled. Isaiah’s words burned inside my brain: Uphold the rights of the orphan; defend the cause of the widow. It seemed she was both. Had she come to me because I was supposed to help her? Once again, she began to run her fingers through my hair.

  ‘No, this can’t be right,’ I said.

  I leaned across her and opened the car door.

  ‘Please go. You need to go.’ But even as I said it, I knew I lied.

  All night I dreamt of her, her eyes like black glass, splintering as they tried to merge with mine. There was blood, but I could not say whose. When I awoke I did not want to think of her, but in spite of everything, I found myself furious that she had vanished so completely.

  On Thursday night Adminah came into the kitchen, pale from her joust with illness.

  ‘You need chicken soup,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve needed it all week. Where were you?’

  ‘I’m sorry. Busy. The days got away from me.’

  ‘The days? You mean that you got away from yourself.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re not still running a temperature? You’re not making sense.’

  Why was I being so abrupt? Lately my feelings for her seemed to be vibrating from intensity to constraint, wanting to possess her yet fearful of it. As if anyone could possess such a particle of light.

  ‘Forgive me,’ I said. ‘Let’s make the soup. It was my grandmother’s specialty. And we need to make it the night before eating so we can skim all the fat off the top of it in the morning once it’s cool. By Shabbes night it will taste all the better for being in its second day.’

  First, we hacked into a large chicken, covering the pieces with water and setting them to boil. Then we chopped the ends off leeks, carrots, celery and cauliflower. We peeled half a butternut pumpkin and divided it into chunks. We washed, but left the skin on, a brown onion whose burnished covering would turn the soup to gold. By then the water in the pot had boiled and the recipe called for it to be emptied down the drain. I would not have done it, believing that much of the flavour would be lost that way, but I also would not gainsay my grandmother’s injunction.

  Alongside the chicken we now added the vegetables. Having filled the pot to the top with stock and water, we watched it rise to the boil again. Then I turned the flame right down. Now began the two-hour wait.

  ‘Two hours!’ said Adminah.

  ‘Go to bed. I’ll take it from here.’

  She was reluctant, but I insisted. In the silence that followed I remembered my grandmother’s words: ‘The recipe will change the direction of your relationship with your basherte’.

  Whoever that might be.

  While I waited for the soup to simmer itself into completion, I took an outsized pan and made a large but extremely thin omelette. When it cooled, I rolled it into a tight cylinder and cut it into the most fragile, the most delicate, of rounds. Unravelling and halving each round gave me slender egg noodles to float on the surface of the broth.

  I passed the rest of the interlude cleaning the kitchen and beginning to prepare breakfast. Finally, it was time to strain the soup. Just as I had finished upending the pot into my huge colander over another pot, the tapping at the door began again. I felt a pelvic floor clench of seismic proportions.

  I will open to you, my sister, my beloved, my dove, my flawless one, came a whisper from somewhere unfathomable. I felt myself propelled towards the door. When she entered, I saw that now her dress was red and tight, pushing up her breasts so that they clamoured for attention. Her boots and shawl were white.

  ‘Why do you dress like that?’

  She took a glass from the sink and scooped up some soup, drinking it down quickly even though it was scalding.

  ‘Needs salt,’ she said. ‘And I dress the way I do for my work.’

  ‘What work?’

  ‘If I reveal everything there will be no mystery and you will not bother.’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘Me.’

  She took my hand then and led me towards the door.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

  ‘You may drive me home and this time I will let you take me to my house.’

  ‘I need to put the soup in the fridge,’ I said.

  ‘No time,’ she replied, eyeing my work—all the chicken and the vegetables stranded in a colander above the broth.

  ‘At least let me turn off the light.’

  She sighed at my fussiness and flicked the switch herself. Then we were in my car, and in its confines the spice of her patchouli oil and amber assailed me. I opened the window and a blast of ice seemed to pierce my lungs.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I was finally able to say.

  ‘Sarah.’

  ‘Sarah who?’

  ‘Sarah, wife of the greatest man.’

  My head ached. ‘Of Abraham?’

  ‘Oh, please.’ She just looked at me. ‘Now turn left at the crossroads, then right, then left again.’

  She had said she lived at the Soul of Fire, but I’d never driven her there. I had only her word for it.

  ‘So, you’re Jewish?’ I said.

  ‘Like Jesus.’

  We had passed Soul of Fire a little while ago, but she was still directing me through a maze of side streets. After a few more lefts and rights, I became totally disoriented.

  ‘Park here,’ she said.

  I looked around and could see only a line of backyard fences with no entrances.

  ‘I don’t need anyone knowing I’m entertaining a visitor,’ she said. ‘The neighbours don’t like it. We’ll walk around the block to my place.’

  I followed her and when I entered her house, it felt unnaturally cold and smelled as though nobody lived there. Nothing existed with her stamp or scent on it. The air seemed to have been frozen in some bygone age.

  Light came from a single weak bulb which served only to illuminate her in a pale ruby outline, casting the rest of the room in shadow. Yet in that shadow a familiar likeness was struggling to reach the surface of my memory. Now her face radiated light and once again my own image appeared in it, but it was a dull and metallic reflection.

  ‘Dark rooms swirling with the vapour of opium,’ she said. ‘You paid for me, for me alone. You didn’t want others. You didn’t even want your wife even though you came to me with her tears wet on your lapels. And I don’t know how it can be, but your face hasn’t chang
ed at all.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I asked, but she just shook her head, led me to her bed and began to disrobe.

  ‘You, too,’ she said, but I couldn’t.

  Naked, dark nipples erect, she approached me, unbuttoning my jacket, my shirt and my jeans. Her hands had travelled that route before.

  ‘You do the rest,’ she said, but I just stood there, penis perpendicular. ‘Do I have to do everything? You weren’t always like this.’

  She hauled at the sleeves of my jacket and shirt then sat and used her pointed toes to drive down my trousers. Now we were both naked and she thrust her body against mine, reaching up to kiss me. Her tongue was a savage hiss inside my mouth and she took my hands and clamped them over her breasts.

  ‘I’ve dreamed of this for so long,’ she said.

  ‘I haven’t known you for so long.’ But I knew that wasn’t true.

  ‘We have known each other.’

  ‘Tell me where and when.’

  ‘You’re not supposed to remember all of it. It would consume you.’

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked.

  ‘I told you: Sarah, the virgin Sarah. I have not had a husband for so long that the results of my copulations—my fornications, if you like—have reversed themselves.’

  ‘Forgive me, but such a reversal is impossible. Nor do virgins copulate. Or fornicate. It is a contradiction in terms.’

  ‘What do they do, then?’ she laughed, ‘as if you’d know.’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘Still, I’m holy enough for a rabbi, it seems. Do you need to know more than that?’ She pushed me onto the bed and looked down at me. The sheets were icy; I thought I heard them crackle beneath me. She smiled a strange little smile and straddled me but that was as much as I could take. I rolled hard away from under her and found myself on the floor facing the ceiling.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she cried.

  I grabbed my clothes and shoes, hopping and shrugging myself into them.

  ‘Leaving,’ I gasped. ‘I’m leaving.’

  In the mirror I could see my own distress. She stood behind me, her reflection cracking into infinitesimal slivers. I turned around in horror only to find her whole and unbroken.