by Nora Gold
“Hey, where you goin’?” asks the greasy-haired guy. “Don’t you like my sign?”
She tries to ignore him and keep walking, but the way in front of her is blocked by a little knot of people having an intense conversation.
“You,” she hears from behind her. “You. I’m talkin’ to you.”
She turns around and faces the greasy-haired guy. He has pockmarks on his face and an arrogant smile.
“No,” she says, “I don’t like your sign. It’s a lie.”
“Oh, yeah?” says the guy. “Well, maybe you don’t know all the facts.”
“I know all the facts.”
“You do? Do you know how many Palestinian children have been killed by the Israeli army in the past three years? Do you?”
She frowns. “Not exactly, but —”
“I’ll tell you. And I do know exactly, because I work with Brier. Me and my friend here.” He nods toward a fat guy, also about forty, in a grey knitted hat. “Hundreds. Hundreds of kids have been killed by the Israelis. Maybe even thousands. And you know why? Because the Israelis target the children.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she says. “That is total bullshit.”
“It’s what?”
“Bullshit. Firstly, your numbers are way off. Secondly, yes, there are some Palestinian children who have gotten caught in the crossfire, and that’s tragic. But it doesn’t mean Israel deliberately targeted them.”
“Yes, it does.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“What are you saying?” he asks menacingly. “You don’t believe me?”
“Of course I don’t. What you’re saying isn’t true.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s a lie. A disgusting lie. And so is that sign you’re holding.”
He brings his pockmarked face closer to hers, his grey eyes glinting dangerously. “Are you calling me a liar?”
She draws back. She wants nothing more than to get away from this man. But she knows that to do this, she will first have to appease him. Crazy people have to be dealt with carefully. She flashes momentarily onto Suzy interviewing that pedophile.
“No,” she says evenly, forcing herself to look at him and not lower her eyes. “I’m not saying that. I’m just saying I don’t agree.”
“In other words, I’m wrong.” Now he turns and calls to the people around them, appealing to them. “Hey, everybody. Here’s someone who says Israel doesn’t kill Palestinians. She thinks what Israel’s doing to the Palestinians is just fine.”
“I didn’t say that,” she starts to say, but her voice falters. Several people have now turned to listen to the greasy-haired guy. Some of them also look at her, and others read his sign. She watches their faces as they read it. She is filled with rage.
“Give me that,” she says, and tries grabbing the sign away. But he takes a step backwards and the sign spins around in his hand, showing its naked back: two sticks of wood nailed together into a cross. “Give me that!” she says again, and once more lunges at the sign.
But this time he steps forward and pushes her. Shoves her in the shoulder. Hard. “Get out of here,” he says. “Get out of here while you still have the chance.”
“No. Not till you give me that sign.” For the third time she flings herself at it. This sign now feels like the most important thing in existence. If only she can destroy it, it will be like she has destroyed all the lies in the world against Israel. But for some reason she can’t reach that sign — she can’t move forward at all. Something is restraining her. Annoyed, she glances behind her: the fat man with the grey knitted hat is holding her by the back of her coat.
“Let me go!” She tries to yank herself loose.
“No,” says the guy in the hat. “Not unless you promise to leave that sign alone.”
“I’m not leaving that sign alone. It’s a lie. A vicious, disgusting lie.” Meanwhile she is twisting and turning to get herself free.
“No, it’s not,” says the greasy-haired guy, standing too far away for her to reach. “You’re the one who’s lying. Everyone else knows the truth about Israel: it’s an apartheid state that oppresses and murders Palestinians, especially children.”
“You’re insane,” she says. “You’re out of your mind. It’s Michael Brier, not us, who believes in murdering children. Listen to him.” His voice is still blaring rhythmically over the loudspeaker. “He’s a nutcase. A hate-monger. Spreading lies …” To free herself, she jerks sharply on her coat, twice, but is unsuccessful, so she turns around quickly and hits the arm that is holding her back. The guy in the grey knitted hat is stronger than her, though, and just laughs. Now the guy with the sign, stepping forward, grabs her right wrist. Tightly, with pincer fingers, hurting her.
“Brier is a great man,” he says, tightening his grip on her. “He’s a fighter for the oppressed, a visionary —”
“Let go of me!” she cries, pulling away as hard as she can. But the harder she pulls, the more it hurts. Pleadingly, she looks at the people standing around, but they all just look back at her blankly. She, having just her left arm, flails around with it, trying to free her right arm and also her coat. She struggles furiously, valiantly, with tears in her eyes.
Then she does not have her left arm anymore either. Someone has grabbed it from behind. She glances backward and sees a woman in a red coat. Now without either of her arms, she feels helpless and terrified, like a small animal caught in a trap. She has no way of defending herself. Adding to her terror, the greasy-haired guy, who is still hurting her wrist, is standing calmly in front of her, grinning a triumphant and cruel grin. A grin of “I’ve-got-you-where-I-want-you.” Seeing this, she knows he wants to hurt her and has the power to.
She struggles even harder against the two people restraining her. She twists and turns more frantically, and then realizes that — though armless — she still has her legs. She kicks at the guy in front of her, kicking furiously and wildly, and gets him hard in the shin. With satisfaction, she sees his hideous grin transform into a scowl of pain.
Her right knee buckles under her. The fat man has tripped her, and she falls onto her knee. Then onto both knees. She starts to get up, but someone trips her again. She tries a second time to stand, and again someone trips her. Somehow she is lying on her side on the snow-covered ground and the two men are standing above her. They look very tall, like trees. At eye level all she can see is their boots: tall boots made of black and brown leather. Cossack boots. These boots advance toward her and kick her four or five times each. They kick her quickly and hard, in her stomach, legs, back, shoulders, chest, and head, and in less than half a minute her body is a ball of pain. She is on the ground curled up, moaning, bleeding. At one point there is a very loud crack followed by a crunching sound — the sound maybe of metal crushing bone — and her leg is on fire. Something warm and sticky is dribbling down her face. She is lying on the cold snowy ground and there is shouting all around her. Between the boots she glimpses something yellow: the campus police off in the distance. She touches her face, it’s wet, and now the wetness is on her hands and it’s red. It’s blood, but whose blood? The snow is also red. But it can’t be; snow isn’t red. Snow is white.
One of the last things she hears before passing out is a galloping sound. Cossacks’ horses. It’s a pogrom. Then she hears a voice. One single voice cutting through all the other noises around her. Cindy’s voice. She’s screaming, “No! No!”
Then from closer, she hears her name being shouted: “Judith! Judith! Answer me!”
But she can’t. She can’t answer Cindy, even though she wants to. She is too far down below. She can’t see or do anything now. She doesn’t know Cindy has knelt beside her and taken her bleeding head into her lap. She is sinking too fast. Sinking into a strange, cold, incandescent light that has just appeared in front of her. Sinking into that shimmering, beckoning, heatless, heartless light.
— 5 —
Cindy, holding her hand, rides wi
th her in an ambulance to the nearest hospital, where she spends the next month. At the rally her leg was smashed in two places by what her doctor guessed were steel-toed boots, and her spine was damaged, too. For the first two weeks she cannot move her leg at all without pain screaming up her back. Adding to her misery, anytime the pain has finally been dulled by enough painkillers and she is managing to doze off, someone comes and sticks something into her — a needle in her arm or tubes down her throat — all supposedly for her own good, but she never gets any sleep and everything hurts and makes her cry. After one month, though, she is moved to a rehab centre where she spends eight weeks recuperating and gradually learning to walk again. This rehab centre, compared to the hospital, isn’t bad at all. As she writes Bruria several days after arriving, this place is quiet and peaceful, and they leave her alone a lot of the time to just read or rest. No one pushes or pulls at her all day long like at the hospital, except the physio, but that’s just once a day, and she’s very nice. Plus every day at lunch they serve a butterscotch pudding she likes, and across the hall there’s a grey-haired Jewish philosophy professor who fell off a ladder, with whom she has a running argument about Spinoza’s relationship to God. He thinks Spinoza ceased to believe; she thinks Spinoza still believed but simply with a different conception of God. “Same thing,” says the philosophy professor. “Not at all,” she says. And so on.
She also writes Bruria that Bobby has been fabulous during all this. He visited her at the hospital every day, and on weekends he was there almost all the time, a familiar sight to the nurses, working quietly on his laptop on a chair near her bed while she watched TV or slept. He was there so often, and was so obviously devoted to her, that the nurses thought he was her husband. Once a nurse even called him Mister Gallanter, but Judith quickly set her straight on that.
At the rehab centre she makes progress, and after two months she leaves and moves in with Bobby. It seems like the logical thing to do. Her own house is still unheated and probably filthy after her three-month absence, and she still can’t manage entirely on her own. And Bobby begged her to come stay with him. He was like a kid, so excited about the prospect of them living together. So she moves from the rehab centre into his house, which, compared to hers, is delightful. It is deliciously warm no matter what the weather outside, the fridge is always crammed with her favourite foods, and Bobby comes home every day as early as possible to be with her.
For the hours he is at work, he has hired the cousin of his once-a-week housekeeper to help Judith. Faith is a kind, maternal woman who comes in the mornings, gives Judith breakfast, helps her to the bathroom to do her “morning ablutions,” and then assists her with dressing. For the rest of the morning, Judith reads, watches TV, or does email or schoolwork on her computer while Faith cooks lunch and does housework. At noon she gives Judith lunch, and for the rest of the day does this and that, but mainly just hovers around at a polite distance in case Judith needs anything.
And it is astounding to Judith how many things she needs. Initially she thought having Faith around would be a waste of money and a nuisance, but after just a few days she can’t imagine how she’d have managed without her. She feels the same way for the next six months. Because instead of gradually recovering as she expected, she develops complications. The fractures in her leg do not set well, and five weeks after her move to Bobby’s, the doctor at the hospital recommends two follow-up operations. These turn out to be very painful and only partially successful, leaving her with a limp. And quite a marked one at that — marked enough that strangers cast their eyes aside when they pass her in the street. She tries putting a brave face on it, writing to Bruria ten days after the second operation:
I still have that limp and there is still quite a lot of pain. My surgeon says that both of these might improve over the next month or two, and I hope he’s right. But at this stage anyway, my leg is a write-off. Oh, well. Better my right leg “loses its cunning” than my right hand. According to the psalm, that would mean I had forgotten Jerusalem, which I haven’t.
Her bravado starts wearing thin, though, after another ten days, when the pain continues unabated and her surgeon refuses to prescribe any more painkillers, because, he tells her, they are potentially addictive and this pain could go on indefinitely. She gets depressed. It finally hits home that this is real. For the rest of her life she will be in pain and walk with this limp, and be perceived, by everyone who sees her, as a disabled person. As “handicapped.” “Crippled.” She knows, even thinking this, that these words are politically incorrect. But she feels that what has happened to her is cruel, and her body is now ugly, so she wants to use cruel, ugly words to describe herself. I am crippled, she tells herself over and over again. I am deformed. I am flawed. Soon this mantra enters her bloodstream like an injection of self-rejection, and she can’t imagine anymore how Bobby could possibly be attracted to her. He seems to still desire her, but she can’t believe this. Maybe he is pretending out of pity. One day when he comes and puts his arms around her, she pushes him away.
“Come on,” she says. “You don’t really want to.”
“What do you mean? Yes, I do.”
“How can you? Look at me.”
“I am looking at you.”
“You know what I mean,” she says impatiently.
“You mean because of your leg.”
“Yes. I’m lopsided now. I’m not … normal.”
“You’ve never been normal.” He smiles. “You’ve always been different from everyone else.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. It doesn’t bother me. I guess I’m lucky — we’re both lucky — that I’ve never been a leg man. I’ve always been a boob man, as you know. And your boobs are still as beautiful as ever.”
Feeling the beginning of tears of relief and gratitude, she asks, “Are you sure? If you don’t want me anymore, you have to tell me.”
“Do I look like I don’t want you?” he asks. He lifts her shirt and starts kissing her left breast.
“No. But —”
“But what?” He lifts his face from her breast. “Do you mind if we stop talking for a moment?”
They stop talking and make love. And that was the end of that.
NEXT YEAR
— 1 —
Well, not quite.
Now, eighteen months later, Judith sits in an easy chair with her leg up on a footstool, resting it and reminiscing. No, she thinks, that was not the end of that. Because that night eighteen months ago, she got pregnant. When she first found out, her reaction was that there had been a mistake. There was no way she could be pregnant just because one time they hadn’t used a condom. There was also no way she could be pregnant because a defective, shattered body like hers could not possibly create anything of value. A cracked clay vessel can’t contain even a teaspoon of water; how could her body be containing a baby? At this point she could not walk even a city block without aid. It was inconceivable that she could be the source of life for another human being.
But apparently she was. And Bobby was so overjoyed at her pregnancy that soon she began believing it was true. Even then, though, she did not believe the baby would be okay. She was convinced that her ruined right leg would somehow be transmitted to the baby, and it would be born crippled like her.
But it wasn’t. It was perfect. They named him Israel Chaim. Chaim after Bobby’s father and Israel after hers. And Israel also after Israel. She nicknamed the baby Issy — not Izzy, her father’s nickname — so she could keep them separate in her mind. Issy was a happy baby from day one, cherubic-looking with big blue eyes like Judith’s mother. Now eight months old, he is quick to smile and laugh, enthusiastically waving his arms and legs. She gazes at him sleeping contentedly on the floor next to her in his flannel-lined baby seat, and she feels contented, too. Her life is good.
Except, of course, for her leg. Her leg hurts. It always hurts when she does even a moderate amount of standing or walking, and she has been doing a lo
t of both this past week, preparing for Pesach. Tuesday she scoured the kitchen and then taped waxed paper onto all the counters and the shelves of the cupboards and fridge. On Wednesday, although it transgressed doctor’s orders, she stood on a rickety stepladder and replaced all their regular dishes with the Pesach ones. Afterwards she went food shopping. On Thursday and Friday, in her shiny, now kosher-for-Pesach kitchen, she cooked. She made chicken soup with matzo balls, chicken, kugel, tzimmes, salad, and a kosher-for-Pesach chocolate cake, and she roasted the egg and shank bone for the Seder plate.
Now it is Saturday afternoon, she has had a restful, peaceful Shabbat, and tonight is the Seder. On Shabbat she never works, which includes not doing any major cooking. But twenty minutes ago she skimmed the chicken soup, leaving her with just one more minor food task to do. This one is fun. It’s making charoset, her favourite Pesach food. Before starting that, though, she is taking a rest. She has learned the hard way that if she doesn’t listen to her body and put her leg up as soon as the pain starts, it just gets worse and worse until she does. And if it gets very bad, she has to take painkillers, which dull her mind and make her weepy, and she hates this.
So now she rests. Rests and smiles. Because five days ago she mailed her last term paper to Dunhill. The last paper required for her M.S.W. She can hear Martin Luther King’s voice saying, “Thank God Almighty, free at last!” She is, thank God, free at last of Dunhill. Of Dunghill. She leans her head back and closes her eyes. It’s wonderful to be able to just sit here like this for a while with nothing to do, with the sun streaming in through the living room window, warming her face, chest, and arms on this splendid spring day. For once to have no schoolwork hanging over her head. Nothing left to do for Pesach, either. Nothing at all, except make charoset, until it’s time to shower and dress for the Seder. How apt to feel this way — so free — just before the beginning of the Festival of Freedom. She will receive the official letter soon in the mail, Phoebe told her yesterday on the phone, but that is just a formality. She is done. She has earned her M.S.W. Daddy would be proud. She is proud, too: she has kept her promise to him. She did what she said she would. Though it has taken her almost three years to get this degree, instead of just one year, as expected. Plus her journey getting here, she is sure, is nothing like what her father imagined. Yes, I’ve gotten an education, she thinks darkly. I’ve acquired knowledge and learned a lot of lessons. But not necessarily the ones Daddy had in mind.