by Tova Reich
Still supporting herself on Shira’s arm, Temima followed the midwives to the suite of birthing rooms set aside for her. It was at this point, with an expression of mortified helplessness on her face, a look bordering on desolation, that Shira detached herself from Temima and entered the larger of the two rooms. Through the open door Temima saw Abba Kadosh wearing only a hospital gown lying on a great plush bed in the center of the room, his head elevated on a lavish bank of pillows, surrounded by all of his women who were not at that time pregnant dressed exactly like the midwives, massaging his belly, applying compresses to his forehead, moistening his lips with ice chips, stroking his arms, his hair, his beard, kneading his shoulders, applying ointment to his chest, taking his pulse, pressing a stethoscope or leaning an ear against his heart and his bloated belly, peering up between his thighs and checking progress with extended arms and probing fingers. Shira stepped into this room, slipped behind a screen, and emerged very soon after dressed like all the others in the costume of a midwife. She went to the basin to wash her hands, then took her place at one of Abba Kadosh’s feet and began to rub it alongside a co-kedaisha assigned to the other foot. Her duties to Abba Kadosh at this time trumped her bond with Temima, as they had when she had been obliged to supplicate Temima in his behalf, standing with all of his other women in front of the entrance to the cave with one breast bared. Shira could not endure raising her eyes from Abba Kadosh’s foot to look at Temima still at the doorway witnessing her debasement, but Abba Kadosh himself, with his head propped high on the pillows, did not take his gaze off Temima for a second. His eyes shimmered with amused triumph and power even as his face wore the mask of agony and his body writhed and his limbs flung out spasmodically though no sounds issued from his mouth, no screams and no cries.
The two midwives delegated to Temima allowed her to remain in the doorway observing the ministrations to Abba Kadosh long enough to begin to absorb the concepts behind the birthing philosophy of the community. When they judged that she had taken in the gist they propelled her respectfully but firmly to the adjacent room, much smaller and strikingly less well appointed than the one in which Abba Kadosh was accommodated, with its narrow austere bed pushed against the wall that separated the two chambers. The younger of the two midwives helped Temima to undress and put on a hospital gown like the one she had seen on Abba Kadosh. While this prepping was taking place, the senior midwife expounded with such fervor on the underlying creed at Health House governing childbearing that the black wen alongside her nose began to twitch like a spider animated by the passionate flaring of her nostrils and the emphatic contortions of her face. It was quite simply and irrefutably the true and authentic biblical way of birth, the older midwife declared. There is not much written in the Scripture about a woman giving birth precisely because it is not the woman who truly gives birth—it is the man. He is the progenitor, the first cause, the child is his offspring in his name so listed and so written as attested to by the begats; the mother gets no credit, and rightly so, she is merely the vessel, the pipeline, the conveyor belt. And Adam lived one hundred and thirty years vayoled in his image and likeness and he called his name Seth; vayoled Seth et Enosh; vayoled Enosh et Kenan; vayoled Kenan et Mahalalel; vayoled Mahalalel et Yered; vayoled Yered et Enoch; vayoled Enoch et Methuselah. And so on and so forth down through the generations giving birth in the masculine conjugation—vayoled, holeid, yalad. Already Abba Kadosh was in the throes of childbearing in the next room, as Temima had observed with her own eyes. All he awaited now was to hear her screams through the thinness and porousness of this partition wall that divided them, which he would then replicate cry for cry, only louder and stronger and more heartrending, overpowering her voice and drowning her out to pierce the very heavens; he would take full possession of her labor and travail and claim it as his right for himself and occupy it, thereby asserting prime ownership as the father.
For this reason, because Abba Kadosh’s full gratification as the vicarious childbearer depended on her screams, the birth of this her last child was the most difficult Temima had ever endured. She resolved then and there not to emit a single sound throughout the ordeal, not a moan, not a sigh, not an audible breath no matter how violently she was ripped apart or how harrowing the pain—a fast of speech undertaken in the furious epicenter of childbirth itself. Whatever relief screaming offered to a woman in parturition, this she denied to herself. Over the ensuing long hours of labor and delivery she travailed, she suffered. Mute, inside her head that black joke of the Israelites rang nonstop, What, there aren’t enough graves in Egypt that you’ve taken us to die in the desert?—yet she remained faithful to her resolve. If she was to be the ghost creator of this child she would be as silent as a ghost even as her two midwives implored her, Cry out, sister, it’s only natural at such a time, make it easier on yourself, sister, scream and yell, twist and shout!
The image she held before her eyes to sustain and strengthen her against involuntary screams was of the boy Ibn Kadosh who had delivered her first child, his flogging in the public square, refusing in his pride to give his tormentors the satisfaction of hearing his cries. And then, like the woman of Endor, she brought up from the dead the still-restless and unsettled spirit of Ibn Kadosh’s mother, Ketura, with the black bird charred into her skin. Did Ketura planted upright and alive and fully aware in her grave in the desert sand scream out in terror as the stones came flying toward her, hurled at her head, pelting and pounding her from the waist upward, or did she summon all of her powers, an act of sovereign self-control, to suppress the reflexive shrieks so as to deny her persecutors the fullness of their obscene thrill? Not a single one of Temima’s pregnancies until now, whether the outcome was a living baby or a dead fetus in a bloody venous sac, had ever been experienced without Ketura at some point faithfully at her side—so she summoned Ketura’s familiar spirit to her side now too. If Temima were to succumb and cry out now, she would cry out in grief for Ketura, bird-branded and bird-devoured, but she drew her spirit inward to harness her vow of silence, to honor Ketura through her defiant silence even as the contractions intensified mercilessly and the baby monstrously large like a giant boulder pressing down on the bowels squeezed its way out of her churning womb and tore her to shreds, even as the midwives urged her on, Push, you miserable ungrateful woman, Push, you witch.
Then came the supreme test to Temima’s will—head and shoulders preposterously large and wide for the absurd opening squeezing brutally through the passage, and in their wake the rest of the newborn slithering out with not a sound from mother or child. The senior midwife grabbed the baby, a dark underworld creature matted with fur, encrusted with a white cheese and streaked with red blood, while her junior colleague swiftly cut the umbilical cord within a hairsbreadth of Temima’s body and set the newborn loose. Without a word to the mother, not even informing her of the sex of the child she had just expelled into this life, the two women ran out of the room, the elder carrying the baby slippery as a freshly netted fish with the hook still in its mouth, her younger sister scurrying behind clutching the end of the long tail of the umbilical cord like a leash, leaving Temima completely alone. They rushed into the adjacent room, shoved the baby with its cord up between Abba Kadosh’s legs stuffing it as high as possible, and along with all the other women assembled there they sang out to him, urging him to push with all his might, Push, holy father, push!
Straining convulsively but emitting no sounds—it was a source of extreme frustration to him not to be able to scream to his heart’s content, he never forgave Temima for denying him the full pleasure of the experience as was his due—Abba Kadosh discharged the baby a second time into this world. His chief wife, Em-Kol-Hai Kedosha, caught it in both hands, held it upside down by its ankles, and announced, “It’s a Zippora bat Cushi. Thank God, one less trip for me.” She gave the newborn a sharp welcoming smack on the buttocks setting her screaming to clear her lungs, and the screaming continued at the same heartwarming volume as another woma
n cut the umbilical cord again, this time as close as possible to the child’s navel, the screams subsiding for a short spell only when they set her down on Abba Kadosh’s bushy chest with her mouth on his nipple where she foraged in vain until she gathered force again shrieking in furious protest.
In the next room Temima heard the cries and said to herself, as Elijah the prophet had said to the widow of Sidon when he raised her son from the dead, See, your child lives. Abba Kadosh said out loud, “This one will be a handful—we will have to marry her off fast,” and bringing his hand flat up to his chin in a gesture of oversatiation he signaled to the women to peel the kid off his chest and take her away from him for bathing and swaddling and feeding and whatever other maintenance might be required by female support staff now that he had done the man’s main job in birthing her; Bnei HaElohim was not an uncivilized hellhole like China, we do not dump even girls on a hilltop to starve to death and be devoured by the carrion-eating birds, we find other ways to recycle them. When the two midwives brought the bundle back into Temima’s room for breastfeeding, they instantly spotted the mass on the bed—the placenta, a congealing clot like the pile of an embarrassing accident. The older midwife scooped it up in the ladle of her bare hands and hurried in her zealousness back to Abba Kadosh’s room to offer it to him so that he might carry through to its proper end the birthing ritual to holy perfection, but he was already rising from his bed and reaching for his clothing to get dressed. “Give that mess to one of my assistants,” Abba Kadosh said with revulsion. “I don’t do afterbirths.”
“Here is your Zippora bat Cushi.” The younger midwife shoved a papoose into Temima’s arms. The dark skin of the baby’s face was sheathed with a thin mantle of fur the sign of a past life in another evolution, the eyes were sealed shut and puffy, the wide nose flattened, the full lips pursed like a gathering raindrop, the head, when Temima removed the little white cap, pointed and dented from having been squeezed and remolded in its arduous passage through the narrow straits of the birth canal into this life. It had not only been she, Temima, who had labored. This tiny being had also been hurled about in that terrible storm, she had wrestled to make her way out through the narrow dark tunnel to the light. She was heroic. Temima was flooded with tenderness for the valor of this little warrior, she felt as if her own heart were breaking. Her name would no longer be called Zippora, Temima decided, but Hagar, in memory of Ketura. Father Abraham took another wife after Mother Sarah’s death, and her name was Ketura. Ketura is Hagar, mother of Ishmael, the rabbis teach, the degraded woman summoned back to Abraham’s tent after her mistress’s death having been banished at Mother Sarah’s behest. Even the rabbis were troubled by how badly Hagar had been used, even they sought to make amends in their way in accordance with their notions of what women want. Temima gazed at her daughter and remembered Ketura, discarded like waste, and offered restitution through Hagar’s happily-ever-after ending.
She settled Hagar at her breast where the child suckled voluptuously for three full years. Over the eighty-day period of ritual impurity strictly adhered to in Bnei HaElohim prescribed after the birth of a girl—two weeks of menstrual infirmity followed by sixty-six days of blood purification—Temima nursed Hagar in Health House. She nursed Hagar in the cave as she resumed her work on Tanakh with Shira, stopping at each of the stations of womanhood, beginning again with Hava created in the image of man as man was created in the image of God, twice removed. Hagar’s teeth cut through her gums, she grew, she walked, she talked; still she continued to nurse with gusto. Sometimes she would take her mouth off the breast to contribute her commentary. She was particularly engrossed during the weeks of discussion of the suffering of her namesake Hagar the black Egyptian slave. “She so black she blue,” the child declared solemnly, and she opened her mouth wide and wailed, thin streams of pale milk running down her chin. Another time she pulled her mouth off the breast so abruptly she raked Temima’s flesh with her sharp little teeth and exploded into peals of laughter. This happened when Mother Rebekah wrapped her younger son Jacob’s smooth arms and neck in the hairy skin of a freshly killed goat to impersonate his brother Esau and trick his father Isaac into giving him the firstborn’s blessing—for Jacob really was the eldest according to Rashi the commentator-in-chief, Temima noted with a wry smile as an aside not intended for little Hagar’s ears, on the principle of “first in last out,” especially in a narrow passageway with no room for maneuvering. And they actually did succeed in fooling the old man Yitzkhak with this gorilla suit. So vividly ridiculous to little Hagar was this great comic scene from the Tanakh that she could envision it as in an illustrated book for the amusement of children. With milk spraying from her mouth, she burst into hilarity, barely managing to get out the words, Yitzkhak—what a retard!
Your curse be upon me, my daughter, Temima reflected.
Abba Kadosh was present on that occasion. Now and then he stopped by the cave to amuse himself listening to the biblical exegesis of these two concubines with an expression on his face as if he were observing a pair of macaques doing higher mathematics. “Where’s your respect?” he boomed ominously at the child, who was already back to nursing avidly. He glared at Temima. “Sister, it is your duty to rein in your daughter. If you don’t, I will.”
“Out of the mouths of babes,” Temima responded coolly, fixing Abba Kadosh with a warning glare. And she launched into an exposition of the text to defend her child, asserting that, in fact, Father Isaac—Yitzkhak—may indeed have been “retarded,” afflicted with Down Syndrome, maybe he was what they used to call in Brooklyn a Mongoloid, Temima said recklessly to Abba Kadosh. After all, he was the son of an exceedingly old mother, an off-the-charts old mother, Sarah was ninety years old when she gave birth to him, well past her female cycles by her own admission—and it is common knowledge that the chances of having a Down baby increase exponentially with an older mother, not to mention the age of the father at the time of this birth, one hundred years old—And my husband is so old, Temima said quoting Mother Sarah while staring at Abba Kadosh without backing down an inch. Abba Kadosh in turn glared spitefully at the oversized overaged baby still nursing at Temima’s breast also no longer in the full glow of its youth, but she pointedly ignored the implication and went on, “Or maybe it was just a case of shell shock, after being sacrificed on the mountaintop by his old man. That would do it. Face it, brother, check out the text—Isaac was a guy who just didn’t have a lot to say. And frankly, Abba dear, I don’t know why you of all people don’t consider Father Isaac a little on the slow side. After all, he was our only patriarch who was monogamous.”
Without giving Abba Kadosh a chance to counter, Temima went on to ask if he by any chance knew how old Isaac was when brought by his father Abraham to be bound to an altar on top of Mount Moriah and slaughtered. Thirty-seven years old! Temima answered her own question—according to many commentators. How do they figure that? Since the report of Sarah’s death comes almost immediately after the account of the binding of Isaac, it is believed by some that his mother had simply collapsed and expired, maybe a heart attack, maybe a stroke, when news reached her of what her old man had been up to this time, it was the last straw. Mother Sarah was one hundred and twenty-seven years old when she dropped dead, she had given birth to Isaac at age ninety, which would have made him thirty-seven when he was sacrificed. And the loopy question he asks as he so docilely tags along with Abraham to the land of the Moriah—My father, here’s the fire and the wood, but where’s the sheep for the burnt offering?—and how passively he allows himself to be bound onto the altar without a peep of protest, a thirty-seven-year-old man, there must have been something wrong with him, something not so beseder upstairs. Temima tapped her temple with her forefinger, and shook her head. Three years later, at the age of forty, he is married off to a wife picked out by his father and delivered from the old country by his father’s consigliere, Eliezer of Damascus—Not one of the local Canaanite sluts for my boy Isaac, the old man had said to
the Damascene, promise me, place your hand under my testicles and swear. And how old is Rebekah when Isaac marries her? Three!—according to the commentators. How do we learn this? Because her birth is announced immediately after the incident on Mount Moriah, directly before the death of Sarah. So at the age of three, Rebekah waves bye-bye to her father, Betuel, and her brother Laban and with a shiny new gold ring in her nose she is lifted up onto a camel by Abraham’s right-hand man Eliezer of Damascus and led away, she crosses over from Aram-Naharayim to the land of Canaan—accompanied by her wet nurse. You have to wonder—What kind of normal man marries a three-year-old?
On the day that Hagar was weaned, at the age of three and one day, Abba Kadosh, prophet and messiah, made a great feast for the entire community, as Father Abraham had done when Sarah weaned Isaac. By that point in her studies of Genesis as transcribed by Shira Silver Kedaisha, Temima was preparing to dictate her teachings on the thirty-fourth chapter: And Dina daughter of Leah whom she had borne to Jacob went out to look over the daughters of the land. Shekhem son of Hamor the Hivite prince of the land saw her, and he took her and lay with her and raped her.