by Tova Reich
Howie for his part found it oddly comforting to wander in now and then—it was his own tent after all, he was master of the tent—and sit there gazing at that pile of rags that seemed inanimate but reportedly contained his own wife. And thanks to her fast of speech he could talk to his heart’s content to this practically inert protuberance on the chair, without interruption, without fear of mockery or scorn, at ease in the knowledge that she would not betray him and she would not answer back as he recounted at length the details of the exploits of the previous nights—so many and so many spikes driven through earlobes, beards half-shaven-off, clothing half-shredded to reveal hairy tukheses, thumbs and big toes added to their collection—until the day came that Temima broke her vow of silence and spat out, “You think you’re such a big man, Howie? You’re just another pathetic American loser trying to get some respect on the West Bank. Don’t you realize you’re sacrificing the kid all over again for your own glory? It’s plain avodah zara, good old idolatry. You’re using him dead like you used him alive. Asshole!”
After Ketura had removed all the outer garments, letting them slip to the floor in a perverse kind of strip tease, Temima continued to sit there in silence in a loincloth she had fashioned out of a torn-up white sheet, strips of which she also used to bind her engorged breasts as with a bandage—she had still been nursing Kook Immanuel when he was so cruelly wrested from her—squashing them brutally against her rib cage. She was, Ketura saw, more beautiful than ever, tragic and mythic, her dark eyes even larger and her cheekbones even more prominent from the austerity she practiced, her skin flawless like a hothouse specimen, her body so shapely with its tiny waist, the twist on which her entire female form pivoted, it was no wonder she was so dangerous and had to be buried alive.
Ketura took a large wooden comb from the bag she was carrying and began to pass it through Temima’s long black hair, working it gently through the knots and tangles filled with lint and threads and dust and other sheddings that had collected there from the layers of head coverings, and the minuscule forms of life that seemed to have been generated spontaneously. Tucked deep inside all of it as if in a nest Ketura found a bead, a luminous tear-shaped pearl, and she could only smile to herself—despite everything Temima was a woman, adorning herself.
“Stop grinning—it was my mother’s,” Temima said without moving, “from an earring. Keep it. It’s yours—a present.” These were the first words she had uttered since Ketura’s arrival, and though for Ketura it was as if the limitations of her own thoughts and assumptions, the narrowness and conventionality of the possibilities she could imagine and conclusions she could draw were exposed by Temima’s words, she was nevertheless swept away once again by the gifts of penetration of this remarkable woman. However numb and detached she appeared, she knew not only what Ketura had found, but also had parsed Ketura’s brain waves and plunged straight to the depths.
“You mother would weep to see you now,” Ketura said.
“My mother is very far away by now,” Temima replied. “She doesn’t care about me at all anymore. She never really cared in the first place. Otherwise, she would never have left me.”
Still, Ketura went on, what Temima was doing to herself was very unhealthy—it was a sin. She, Ketura, had climbed this hill at great personal risk. She could have been shot by a trigger-happy settler or a jittery new recruit stationed on this army base if she were recognized as an Arab, or she could even have been assaulted by her own people who wandered in this area, punished yet again for shaming them by daring to move about freely, a loose woman with a death sentence hanging over her head who in all honor deserved to be killed. Ketura’s hand reflexively brushed a wing of the bird scarred into her cheek. Nevertheless, she continued, she had not hesitated. She had made this trek because she had heard that Temima had taken herself out of this life and she, Ketura, had come to bring her back. She had come to bring Temima to Abba Kadosh’s place in the Judean Desert near the Dead Sea, to cure and revive her.
There was nothing in this for Ketura herself. Yes, it is true that once upon a time long ago she had been a pilegesh to Abba Kadosh, one of many concubines, but now of course she could no longer live in his community herself since he had banned the presence of their son Ibn Kadosh, he had evicted and exiled the boy as a threatening element. Nevertheless, out of grinding worry over Temima, because of the profound love she felt for her and the history that bound them together like sisters, the sorrows and travails they had passed through together, she had sought and been granted from Abba Kadosh permission to bring Temima to his compound for a period of recuperation and rehabilitation, as to a spa—to bathe in the rich minerals of the sea, lie in the sun and soak in the healing rays, massages and facials, salt baths and mud masks, enemas and colonic irrigations, wholesome exercise and breathtaking walks, pure water and clean food beautifully prepared free of the taint of any animal product. Temima could stay as long as she desired and then she could leave, no questions asked, no problem.
Ketura went on in this way, not knowing if anything she was saying was having an effect on Temima who continued to sit there as if made of stone. Not far from Abba Kadosh’s retreat, Ketura said, were the caves of Qumran where the Essenes had lived in extreme asceticism, where the Dead Sea Scrolls had been found by a Bedouin boy searching for a goat that had strayed. Temima could wander there, it was the authentic biblical epicenter, it was in complete harmony with her interest and absorption in the Hebrew Bible. Abba Kadosh’s community was also as it happened purely biblical, it had nothing to do with the rabbis, it was post-rabbinical, the rabbis rejected him and he returned the favor, they didn’t even consider him a Jew. And had Ketura mentioned the music? They had a choir of angels there—the heavenly voices of young boys, sweet as honey—and ancient instruments clear as crystal, lyres, ouds, timbrels, bells.
She had no idea which if any of her words had moved Temima—or perhaps it was not something she had said but rather a leap in Temima’s own thoughts—but the moment came when Temima rose and dressed quickly, then paused as if frozen, as if she were trying to remember something vital. She found a piece of paper and a pen, sat down at the table and after some further inward foraging wrote a note paraphrasing from the prophet Isaiah—In the wilderness where wildcats meet hyenas, and demon goats call to each other, there too Lilith will repose, and find a resting place for herself. She folded the paper in half and left it in the crater in the cushion of the chair she had occupied for nearly six months. The two women stepped together out of the tent, and made their way along the perimeter of the the camp down the hill.
It was the heat of the day when they left, everyone was inside resting during the early afternoon, no one observed them leaving except for the little boy Howie called Pinkhas who had been given permission to spend part of his nap time standing outside opposite his mother’s tent, his thumb in his mouth.
A white Cadillac was waiting for them at the bottom of the hill. The driver was introduced to Temima by Ketura as the two women climbed into the backseat—Melekh Sinai, formerly Miles Sinclair of Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York, Abba Kadosh’s right-hand man. A small, wiry black man somewhere in his forties, he was bopping on his stem in his champagne-colored leather seat as if tuned into his own private beat, craning his neck and jutting his jaw forward as if his collar were too tight, swiveling his head to get a good long look at Temima. “Yes, Sister Temima,” Melekh Sinai confirmed, “Brother Abba and me we go way way back—to Yazoo City, Mississippi, to be exact, federal penitentiary, maximum security.”
Temima took in his round rimless sunglasses, grizzled beard stippled with silver, a pink scar snaking down his left cheek, gold hoop in one ear, white dashiki overlaid with a fringed garment, and a generous-sized white skullcap that somehow she knew covered a bald head as if it were shining through. Melekh Sinai turned back to attend to his driving, expounding over his shoulder that she was not to infer anything nasty or untoward from where he had first had the good fortune to run in
to the holy brother, the prophet and messiah, Abba Kadosh. Brother Abba, then known as Elmore Clinton of Selma, Alabama, was in bondage thanks to the pharisee pharaohs who as everyone knows are international superpower control freaks, the official rabbinical Jewish conspiracy who rule the world in exile as well as in Israel. So these bigshot guys did not appreciate it one bit that Brother Abba he was exercising his constitutional rights to worship freely as a Jew, descendant of one of the ten lost tribes of Israel, the tribe of Ephraim. Like they claimed Brother Abba was a harasser, a trespasser, a kidnapper of souls, a messianic Jew for Jesus bent on proselytizing among them—and then they throw in for good measure some other garbage about a drug cartel and a human trafficking ring and what not that they cooked up to get him sold back into slavery and put away for good. But Brother Abba he just shouted straight out, he was no Jew for Jesus, he was just a plain old Jew for Jew, he wasn’t even Jew-ish, Brother Abba says to ’em, like two-ish or blue-ish or true-ish, he wasn’t a sort-a, kind-a Jew, he was the genuine article, the real McOy, he was a good old Jew boy from the South, shalom y’all, count him in for the minyan, sisters—and count yourselves out.
As for himself, Melekh Sinai, he had the honor of finding himself in Yazoo City thanks to a frame-up pertaining to some respectable young ladies he was doing his best to protect the way all young ladies need protecting, nobody but nobody knows the trouble he’d seen, but as soon as he met Brother Abba, prophet and messiah, he knew like a flash of lightning that he, Miles Sinclair, he too was a lost Jew, he had always felt a soul kinship with those crazy guys with the beards and black hats rushing around his neighborhood, in Crown Heights, worshipping that cool old rabbi guru dude who gave out the dollar bills on Eastern Parkway. So suddenly it hits him like a ton of bricks that he’s a Jew too, from the tribe of Zevulun, and ever since then, him and Brother Abba have been joined at the hip like David and Jonathan, our love for each other more wonderful than the love of women, and that’s pretty wonderful, sisters, making our life’s journey together—liberated from slavery in Yazoo City, go down Moses, wandering through the Diaspora desert, and now here we are at last in the Promised Land, Hallelujah, roll Jordan roll, kumbaya, we shall overcome, amen selah.
A life story so complex and intricate as Melekh Sinai’s was far too long for most distances traversed in a country as small as Israel. In less than an hour the Caddy was climbing a twisting road through crags and boulders in every shade on the sand-and-stone spectrum revealing with each turn staggering panoramas of the lowest spot on earth, the Dead Sea, the Sea of Salt, Yam HaMelakh, coming to a sudden halt at what seemed to Temima to be the very edge of a cliff, the point to which her life had now brought her, like the scapegoat on the brink of Azazel. Before them was a gate inscribed across the top with the words BNEI HAELOHIM BERUKHIM HABA’IM. Yet, despite this hospitable welcome, blessing all comers, the entrance to Bnei HaElohim was blocked as they drew up like the entance to the Garden of Eden after Adam and Hava had been driven out for biting into the fruit of the tree of knowledge good and evil, a revolving sword of flame set before it to bar human beings from the tree of life bearing fruits that would render them immortal like God Himself.
Blocking passage into Bnei HaElohim was a regal Nubian ibex framed by the gate, tan in color and a darker stripe down his back, with great ridged horns rising majestically from his head and arching eloquently backward. He stood there perfectly still, unmoving like a statue, taking them in from an elevated plane with the rutting slant and moistness of his eyes, considering them in all their aspects at his leisure as if stroking lasciviously his dark silken beard, a higher form of mountain goat.
“Ah,” Temima said, “Abba Kadosh himself has come out to greet us in all his glory—b’khvodo uv’azmo.”
“Amen sister, you tell ’em,” Melekh Sinai sang out in response, “Abba Kadosh, the whole earth is filled with his glory.”
Ketura leaned in across the seat and kissed Temima on the cheek. “This is as far as I can go,” she said. She reached for her bag, jumped out of the car, slammed the door, and vanished like a gazelle leaping on the mountains, bounding over the hills.
A full month passed before she met Abba Kadosh for the first time in his human guise. Awaiting her upon her entrance into Bnei HaElohim was a welcoming committee consisting of his head wife, Em-Kol-Hai Kedosha, a heavyset woman in her fifties dressed in a dazzling kaftan of woven gold-and-maroon kente cloth draping down from the prow of her dowager bust, and a stately coordinated turban denoting her lofty position in the community, accompanied by Shira Silver Kedaisha in a green cotton print African blouse and wrap skirt and matching head wrap who had been appointed as Temima’s special liaison to oversee all her needs. They were carrying against the merciless sun Chinese umbrellas made of lacquered paper, and Shira handed one to Temima as well. The three women proceeded under these parasols down the path that cut through the center of the village, lined with date palm trees and blooming cactuses and succulents in clay pots. Along the way Em-Kol-Hai speaking in English with an unfiltered New York accent pointed out some of the major landmarks—the Bedouin tents, the largest and most elaborate housing Abba Kadosh himself surrounded by smaller satellite facsimiles each allocated to a wife or a concubine and her children, with similar constellations on a lesser scale revolving around other men and their households.
Two wooden structures stood out for their size. The first, Em-Kol-Hai said, was Health House in which the women gave birth in the most natural and enlightened manner, lovingly supported by their sisters, birth control was of course strictly forbidden in Bnei HaElohim, and where spa services were provided to paying guests and spiritual seekers. Temima’s eyes came to rest on a large sculpture in front of the entrance to this building fashioned out of metal depicting a bulb and syringe set at an angle on a stone base as if taking aim like a cannon.
“That’s our monument to the enema,” said Em-Kol-Hai. “We’re renowned throughout the Holy Land as the place to go for the best enemas, five-star high colonics. We believe in full body irrigation, cleansing outside and inside.”
The second structure was the kitchen where the freshest food was prepared from the green plants of the earth and the fruit of the trees explicitly given to us to eat by God when He first created the world, free of the taint of anything that might once have had eyes or a mother; alcoholic beverages, with the exception of wine for blessings made from organic grapes, and drugs of any kind from tobacco to you name it were absolutely off-limits, they were pollutants banned from the body as well as from the village, both holy temples whose desecration was a grave sin, all violations severely punished. Alongside the kitchen was a spacious pavilion with a roof of linked trellises bedecked with palm fronds and dried herbs, the floor spread with straw mats and lined with cushions and low banquettes; this was the dining hall, synagogue, village green, all-purpose meeting place, Em-Kol-Hai explained. There were also smaller wooden buildings, bungalows and cottages and huts for guests of the spa and the ashram, and here and there hammocks hung woven from multicolored strings.
Along the way they encountered no signs of human life except for one girl, perhaps thirteen years old, jumping rope while a little boy crawled around on the ground nearby stuffing fistfuls of dirt into his mouth. Em-Kol-Hai stepped up to her, whispered something in her ear, then gave her a sharp smack on the behind, at which the young girl scooped up the child, straddled him on her hip, and ran off into one of the tents. It was only then that Temima noticed that Em-Kol-Hai’s left hand was missing; she had whacked the girl with her stump.
They continued on past the hub of the village climbing a short distance until they came to the opening of a large cave in the mountainside. “Our VIP quarters, our superdeluxe suite,” Em-Kol-Hai said. “Your reputation has preceded you. Abba Kadosh, prophet and messiah, regards you as something like a colleague. He has given specific orders to treat you like visiting royalty, like the Queen of Sheba.”
This was where Temima was to be accommodated, and t
here was nothing she lacked. The floor was covered with deep burgundy Bokhara rugs, the walls lined with tapestries depicting in sequence the story recounted in the first chapters of the book of Genesis—the six days of creation and the seventh of rest, a black Adam and Hava in the Garden of Eden, the serpent and the expulsion, the tragedy of the first brothers Cain and Abel—drawn in a delightful primitive style in vivid primary colors with all of the human figures garbed in fur pelts like prehistoric cave dwellers.
Books, writing materials, linens and clothing modest but suitable for the hot climate, proper lighting, everything was provided for Temima’s comfort, she could leave the cave at will for her pleasure, but all of her necessities were brought to her like room service. Three times a day her meals were delivered by one of several young girls between the ages of eleven and fourteen, Temima estimated, often carrying in a pouch on her back a little boy no older than three whose hair had not yet been cut. One day she complimented one of them on how nicely she took care of her little brother. The girl opened her eyes wide as if incredulous that there could be in this world someone as uninformed as Temima, and said, “He’s not my brother. He’s my husband.”
This was confirmed to Temima by Shira Silver Kedaisha, her designated lady-in-waiting, on one of the many walks and hikes they took through the stark wilderness terrain and the wadis down to the Dead Sea, excursions during which over time the two women grew increasingly close. Shira had been working as a nature guide in the area when she first encountered Abba Kadosh, prophet and messiah. She held Temima’s hand as they climbed the steep cliffs and explored the caves, she named the birds soaring overhead or perched on crags—buzzards, falcons, pelicans, once even a golden eagle, the hoopoe, the bulbul—lizards underfoot, everywhere the ibex. She gathered wild flowers and braided them into wreaths with which they crowned one another as they descended the rocky bluffs past the salt marshes, the mountains of Edom and Moab a twilight purple in the distance on the Jordanian side, and bathed naked in secluded freshwater springs she found for them, or lay on their backs floating on the saltwater bed four hundred meters below sea level, silent and inward in each other’s company for hours and now and then talking.