The Devil in Jerusalem

by Naomi Ragen

  Daniella sat down heavily. What can I do? she thought, looking around her. It would take two years to build. If they put off starting another year, that would make it three. Three more years! Maybe even four if they put off starting, which was more than likely. Even if she was willing to wait, she couldn’t do that to her children. She was a mother first. Shlomie would just have to get over himself.

  Shlomie showed minimal interest in the architectural plans she had drawn up. Whatever you want, he said dully. He spent more and more time away from the house, learning with the boys in the yeshiva. He went to sleep late at night, and often it was difficult for him to get up in the morning, his tread slower and heavier as he left for work.

  Daniella, busy with four small children, overseeing the building of her home, didn’t have time to notice. She was supervising the contractors, keeping track of the cost of materials, and making sure the workers didn’t steal them blind when floor and ceramic tiles were delivered. Building a house by herself wasn’t what she’d had in mind, but in the end she found she rather enjoyed it. Everything was to her taste, unrestrained by compromises to please her husband.

  “You’re lucky,” a friend told her. “My husband had his nose in everything. Whenever we disagreed, there was a fight, which I usually won. Still, you’re lucky to have a free hand.”

  Lucky, yes, but somehow it didn’t feel that way. It felt downright lonely, especially when the children were in bed at night and she had a few moments to herself and Shlomie was off somewhere at the yeshiva.

  “Can we talk?” She cornered him one Friday night after dinner, when the children had all been put to bed.

  “Whatever you want.” He nodded warily.

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. What do you want to talk about, Daniella?”

  “You are never home. I need your help, and you are never home.”

  “My help?” He seemed truly surprised. “I never get the feeling you need me at all.”

  She bit her lip, her eyes filling with tears. “I need you, Shlomie. So much.”

  He looked into her face, wiping tears from the corners of her eyes with his thumbs. “I don’t know why you married me. I’m not very smart. I didn’t get into an ivy league college like you did. I come from a working-class family. You could have had anyone, some rich lawyer, a doctor, and you’d have a big house, a full-time maid, an au pair.…”

  “I married you because I love you,” she said, trying to feel sincere about the words, wanting them to be true. But honestly, she wasn’t sure, not anymore, not the way she’d once been.

  He didn’t pick up on her hesitation. Instead, he swallowed her words whole, the way a starving man eats bread, without even chewing. “I feel so blessed with you and the children, this beautiful family we’re building. I know I don’t do enough to help you. I’ll try harder to be around more.”

  And for a while, he did. He came home directly after work, helping to feed and bathe the children, washing the supper dishes, allowing her to get out of the house and join her friends at some evening lecture or folk dancing class. For a while the situation between them improved, both of them doing their best to be loving and accepting, encouraged by regular visits to the yishuv’s rabbi, who also acted as a marriage counselor.

  He was an older man with twinkling blue eyes and eleven children of his own. His wife, the rebbetzin, always had a lovely smile on her face that seemed to rise up from her soul. She was a woman that took care of herself, wearing well-made, fashionable clothes on her still-slim body, her expensive wig always coiffed just so. All of the women envied and admired her and the relationship she had with her husband.

  “Remember this,” the rabbi told Shlomie and Daniella, “it takes two to make a marriage and it takes two to destroy one. Both of you are equally responsible. When was the last time you went out on a date? To the movies, a play, a concert? When was the last time you went to a hotel together without the children?”

  They looked at each other, blushing. Such things had never occurred to either of them.

  He shook his head. “Just what I thought. Now, don’t give me excuses. There are plenty of baby-sitters in this yishuv. Go out to dinner in Jerusalem. And you are not allowed to talk about the children, building your house, money, or anything else. Just focus on each other, like you were on a first date. That’s number one. But in between dates, make time to connect during every single day.”

  “It’s hard; I work all day in the hothouses.”

  “So go home for lunch, Shlomie, instead of taking it with you! Sit down, talk to your wife, find out what’s going on in her life. And you,” he turned to Daniella, “make him something good to eat, something he likes, that will keep him healthy and happy. Not just a sandwich. I know you don’t have time, but it doesn’t take more time if while you’re cooking anyway, for Shabbat, for example, you cook double and freeze it. This I learned from my dear wife. You know, when I was a young kollel husband, I’d be away from the house all day. So you know what I used to do? I’d write love notes on the eggs so that every time my wife cooked, she’d find a good word from me.”

  Daniella and Shlomie looked at each other shyly. They laughed.

  The rabbi’s blue eyes danced. “And if you can’t get home for lunch, then make it a habit to call her, or you call him. Talk at least once during the day when you’re apart. And when you get a chance to be together, don’t just chatter. Look into each other’s eyes, feel each other’s soul. Make each other feel loved and appreciated.” He took Shlomie aside: “Make her laugh. Tell her she’s beautiful, that you like her eyes, her dress, her smile. Buy her presents, perfume, jewelry—pretty, thoughtful things. It doesn’t have to be expensive. Let her know that you love and appreciate her.”

  Shlomie nodded gratefully, hugging the rabbi.

  Later, when they looked back at this time, it all seemed like a happy dream, even the problems, which in hindsight shrank into insignificance, like a small child’s worries over ice cream or a toy he craves and cannot have. They were good problems, human problems. Like people lost in one of those medieval mazes, they could not remember how they had veered so far off course, and how everything had gone so horribly, horribly wrong.

  9

  “It’s time,” Bina said to Daniella Goodman, more coldly than she felt. Even though she knew what this prisoner was guilty of, still, to remove a mother forcibly from her crying children was something she’d only seen in films about the Nazis. It was upsetting.

  The children shrieked as hysterically as Bina had expected when their mother was led away, her arms clutched on either side by policewomen. Out of consideration for the children, they waited until they got her outside to handcuff her. The policewomen were also mothers.

  “Are you ready to talk now?” Bina asked her without much hope.

  “I want a lawyer!”

  Bina shrugged. “Take her back to her cell.”

  “No!” Daniella lifted her head and peered at her. “Let’s … let me … it’s not my…”

  “Look, we have nothing to talk about until you come out of your shell. Go get your lawyer. But it won’t help you or your children. I have no sympathy for you. It’s your poor kids I feel sorry for. You’ve left them orphans, with no one to take care of them.”

  “You won’t let me!”

  Bina turned her back and walked away, not trusting herself to maintain her outward show of indifference. Behind her, she could hear Daniella pleading, then shouting, a tussle, a commotion. She stiffened her shoulders and continued walking. Let the bitch suffer the way her children were suffering. Let her open her stupid mouth already, the monster.

  * * *

  It was a short ride in a paddy wagon back to her holding cell. Daniella covered her face and turned from the window, terrified of seeing someone in the streets of Jerusalem who might recognize her.

  She had to get a lawyer, but how? She was confused, unable to think of anyone to call when they allowed her to make
a phone call. Joel? But then she’d have to tell him why.… She shuddered. She hadn’t spoken to him in years, ever since the Messiah had revealed the truth to her about her brother, about what terrible things he’d done to her, things she’d repressed and had refused to recognize until the Messiah, in his great wisdom, had revealed them to her.

  As the cell door clanged behind her, Daniella pressed her forehead against the iron bars. She couldn’t bear to turn around and take in the ugliness of the colorless, gray room with its steel bunk beds and stained, exposed toilet. There was no privacy.

  “Well, look who’s back—the Saint,” her cellmate, a heroin-thin woman with straw-like blond hair, mocked. She wore a short, tight tank top that shamelessly displayed the track marks that climbed up both her arms.

  “Please, leave me alone!”

  To Daniella’s shock, the woman lunged for her neck, wrapping both hands around it. “Didja hear that, girls? The ‘Holy One’ wants to be left alone!” She increased the pressure. Daniella half-turned, frightened, struggling, trying to enlist the help of the others. “Please, help me!” she begged them, choking.

  “She wants to be left alone, she wants your help, you hear that?” the blonde sneered, shaking her like a rag doll, calling out to the other two women who lay in their bunks. At this, they lifted themselves up, resting on their elbows, lazily watching the action. Anything was better than the boredom.

  “Vhy you dress up in outfit? Who you zink you fool?” said the heavy Russian in the top bunk. “Take hands off throat, whore; let her talk.”

  The blonde dropped her hands. Daniella rubbed her throat, coughing, terrified. “What do you want from me, all of you? I’m here, the same as you. Why do you want to hurt me?”

  “She wants to know. Why don’t you tell her, Russkie?”

  “Tell yourself, whore.”

  “Okay. Because in prison there are people who steal. Most of them are poor, and they don’t steal much, but they get caught. And then there are people who steal because they need money for drugs. That’s me. Then there are people who murder, because they are afraid of getting murdered; that’s Russkie over there, with her fat vodka-boy who tried to throw her out the window and by accident fell on his own knife—that’s her story and, you know, I believe her. Then there are the ones like the little flower over there with the blue streak in her hair, who sell their bodies because they are too stupid to do anything else. They are only hurting themselves. But some people here, they deserve it. Bad people, people who make other people suffer for no reason, just because they enjoy it, you know? Murderers, rapists, wife beaters. But the worst people in prison who deserve to rot here are the ones who hurt children.

  “We heard all about you, Your Holiness, you in your dirty white clothes, so modest and pure, head to toe! Heard about how your baby was so badly beaten he’s a vegetable, and how your four-year-old got his skin burnt clear off! Who does fucking things like that? Devils. You’re a devil, so take off the white costume, you bitch!”

  “Yes, enough already with ze act,” the Russian agreed, dropping slowly down to the floor out of her bed, her eyes wet with tears, reaching out and tearing off Daniella’s headscarf. She had two small children of her own. “From father, you sometimes expect—a man, you know? But from woman, from mama, mamochka?” She spit on the floor, hitting Daniella’s shoes.

  “You’re a sick piece of trash! If I could kill you right now, I would and do your kids a favor!” the blonde said, taking hold of Daniella’s blouse and watching it slowly rip as Daniella struggled to pull away.

  “Guards! Guards!” Daniella screamed.

  But if they heard her at all, they were in no hurry.

  The third girl, who couldn’t have been more than seventeen, suddenly joined in, slapping Daniella across the face, her nails digging in. “I know you!” she screamed. “I know exactly who you are!” She pulled back, punching Daniella hard in the stomach, then kicking her, until the Russian finally pulled her off. “You’re like that woman who married Elior Chen, the one they call ‘M.’ You’re like those religious women who dress like Muslims, fucking their own kids. Like my stepfather. You’re the same, the same, as all those monsters!” It was only when the shouting grew into a riot of noise that the guards finally showed up.

  They took Daniella to the infirmary, where an indifferent nurse washed off her wounds, applying a butterfly bandage to her face where a nail had scraped a small hole. Afterward, to her shock, they took her back to her old cell. “I need to be protected from them. They’re animals!” she demanded. But the guards, expressionless, opened the cell door and shoved her back in.

  “I’m going to report you in the morning,” Daniella said coldly. “I’m going to kill myself!”

  The guard blinked, opening the door and hauling her out. He walked her down the corridor toward an empty cell. Daniella hurried inside.

  “No more trouble tonight, okay?” he told her. “But tomorrow, you’re going home to those three, so don’t get used to this. Learn how to behave.”

  Daniella, shocked, her body scraped and sore and aching, nodded. She sat down on the floor, her back against the bars, which felt frigid through the thin fabric of her torn blouse, pressing like icicles down her aching spine. Beneath her the stone tiles chilled her thighs and buttocks. It was like sitting in the middle of a frozen lake, she thought, hugging herself and shivering.

  It was long after lights out. The dark was deep and penetrating, almost palpable, as was the silence. In the other prison cells, there was snoring and an occasional nightmare shout. But now, for the first time in months, maybe years, she found herself cocooned from all outside distractions, alone with her thoughts.

  At first, her mind was like a kaleidoscope, filled with a swiftly changing array of images: the beautiful little house in Yahalom with its window boxes, backyard apple and fig trees, and wooden swing set; the luxurious home in Jerusalem with its large picture windows of the Old City walls; and then the house in Beit Shemesh, with its tiny bedrooms and sinister locked doors, the place where it had all happened. Then came the faces of her children, especially her baby, Menchie, his expression of shock and horror after that first slap that had sent him flying across the room. She held her ears, trying to block out the remembered screams of her children. But more powerful than any image was his face: her rabbi, her mentor, her lover, her husband. The Messiah.

  Where was he? Where? Where was his wisdom and his purity, his mystical connection to God? She needed all of those things now, because without them, how could she begin to explain to anyone what had happened? How could she explain it to herself?

  She looked down the corridor at her cellmates. A murderess, a prostitute, and a drug dealer. All of them looked down on her. How could that be?

  They compared her lover to Elior Chen. She remembered the story, the horror of it, how he had convinced a mother to allow him to abuse her children. And they compared her to that mother. But her Messiah was nothing like Elior Chen, and she was nothing like that mother. The man she loved was truly holy, saintly, the holiest person on the face of the earth, a person who was gentle, kind, and to whom God Himself spoke every single day. And he had chosen her to be his partner, and through him she, too, had become holy, pure. She had sacrificed everything for him, to share in his vision of heaven—to be as close to God as he was, to do God’s will, as he did. She closed her eyes again, trying to figure it all out, to see again his vision of the shining diamond of the World to Come, the sapphire-blue dazzle of the ladder leading up to the highest rung of purity, which he had helped her to climb, step after step, helping her to pull her children up behind her, wanting only for them, too, to experience the pure joy of goodness, of holiness, of serving a higher being. She had wanted so much for their lives to be blessed, as hers had been blessed.

  She had not taken the coward’s way but had bravely followed the more difficult path, a journey others would have lacked the courage to take, preferring instead to see their children consumed by the
terrible evil that had taken hold of them. She had sacrificed herself, done all she had been instructed to do, to save them, no matter the consequences for herself. They were the most important thing in her life. Even if she had to endure the hell of prison for the rest of her days, she would never, ever be sorry.

  But now, in the darkness, in the silence, somehow the words of these criminals, this murderess, this prostitute, this addict, sank like a stone through her heart. They had mocked her for what she had done, called her names. For the first time in a long time, she suddenly felt confused.

  If she could only explain the truth to them, to the police, that she had undertaken a sacred mission out of purest love for her children! But it was impossible. However she tried to phrase it, they would only see her as evil, an abusive, monstrous mother. She would not be able to explain it to them the way it had been explained so clearly to her at the time. She could never make them understand how hard it was to watch what was being done to her children, but that to have stopped it would have endangered their very souls. It was like watching a surgeon cut open a body to cut out a cancer. The pain! The blood! The agony! But what could one do? Run into the operating theater and punch the surgeon in the face, tie his hands behind his back? What would happen then to the patient, lying there helplessly, without hope of ever becoming whole and healed again?

  If only he would come, if only he would explain it to them! For whenever she tried to remember his words, it all became so jumbled in her head, whereas before, with him at her side, it had all been so very, very clear. Crystal clear.

  Where was he?

  All night she sat and thought and thought and thought, trying to make some sense of what she knew and what she thought she knew. And in the morning, she understood.

  “Guard,” she called out.

  “What happened to you?” the morning-shift guard said, peering into her bruised face, concerned.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she shook her head. “I want to speak to Detective Tzedek. There is something I need to tell her.”