Immodest Read online

  To my husband, with endless love

  Producer & International Distributor

  eBookPro Publishing

  www.ebook-pro.com

  Immodest

  L.S. Einat

  Copyright © 2020 L.S. Einat

  All rights reserved; No parts of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information retrieval system, without the permission, in writing, of the author.

  Translation from the Hebrew by Susan Treister

  Contact: [email protected]

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Acknowledgments

  Message from the Author

  These shall be your fringes, and when you see them, you should remember all the commands of the Lord and do them. Do not stray after the thoughts of your heart and after the sight of your eyes, which you tend to stray after. Remember to do all my commands and be holy before your God. I, the Lord, am your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God. I, the Lord, am your God.

  (Numbers 15:39-41)

  One

  The door to my bedroom opened slowly, letting in the hazy light from the bulb in the hallway. The door opened without a sound as only the day before the squeaky hinges had been oiled. Now for sure no one will ever hear, I thought. Before that, I’d had hope that someone would wake up and hear what was happening, but that was never to be. He came into the room as usual, hopping over the mattresses scattered on the floor, and like a tiger spotting its prey in the darkness, he came straight to my bed. As usual, I pretended to be asleep. My senses were sharpened, and every rustle or movement in the house sounded to my ears like noisemakers at a reading of the Book of Esther1.

  “Move over!” he demanded, and I made a faint snoring noise to convince him that I was asleep. The room was silent except for the monotony of the breathing around me. The realization that nothing would stop him even this time hit me hard, as had been the case almost every night that year.

  I lay on my side and he lay close to me and pressed his body into my back. His adolescent hands started to grope me. First he stroked my legs, and gradually his hands climbed to my undeveloped chest. I felt something hard against me from behind and was afraid to move, lest I be hurt by this thing. His hands chiseled into my stomach, pinching the skin mercilessly. His body moved up and down, rubbing and scratching my body and my soft soul. I was like a heavy boulder that even strong winds would not budge from its place. I closed my eyes tight, and clenched my lips in disgust, my whole body contracted and waiting for it all to end. As always, I heard a long, faint sigh. Afterward, the door opened and closed behind him, leaving me in tears and wondering exactly what had happened.

  The next day, the usual morning commotion provided cover for the previous night’s events, and it was as if nothing had happened. My mother was busy with the little ones, issuing instructions all around. Our home ran itself according to the long-standing familiar routine. Sentences were launched into the air: “Bring me your bag;” “Don’t forget to pick up Yossele from daycare;” “I gave you sliced cheese;” “Don’t forget to make a blessing before you eat.” Each to his own concerns. Only I walked around looking down with a tremendous feeling of shame stuck in my throat because of an act that I didn’t understand at all. We were nine brothers and sisters. He was the second after the oldest son.

  The event that had repeated itself for almost a year scarred my memory forever. In time I realized what was going on in that dark room, and later learned to deal with what had happened.

  We never talk about things that are even remotely connected with relations between a male and a female. It was absolutely forbidden to say—even in jest—words that might allude to a connection between a boy and a girl, or between a husband and a wife.

  One day, while wiping my little brother’s mouth, I tried to tell my mother about the nightly incident. I felt I could no longer keep it inside. I knew that what was being done to me was wrong, but our upbringing overrode any will or pain that I held in my heart. That morning, my mother was in a lighthearted mood, and even kissed my cheeks, something she usually avoided doing altogether. Her cheerful behavior inspired courage in me, and suddenly the words came out of my mouth without my first having rehearsed them. “Momme,” I said, “Did you know that Baruch comes to my bed every night and does all kind of things to me?”

  My mother, who usually moved slowly, turned around to face me in an instant. The sandwich she was preparing fell out of her hand, and her eyes flared a look I had never seen on her face until then. I was so frightened that I ran to the kitchen doorway in an attempt to flee for my life, but she was quicker than me and grabbed my arm.

  “What did you say?” she flicked at me through clenched teeth.

  My voice became a thin whisper. “Baruch comes to my room at night...”

  Before I finished the sentence, her hand flew in the air and landed hard on my cheek. I was in such shock that I continued to stand in my place, planted like a tree whose little leaves had deserted it and left it naked. Her grip tightened around my arm, and she pulled me forcefully out of the kitchen, my cheeks burning. We reached the girls’ room. She threw me on the bed, grabbed my arms, and sat me down, turning my face toward her. Her arms flung my body as if I were a rag that needed shaking.

  “You listen to me!” she said with lips thin as paper. “And you listen good. Never—but never—are you to talk about that. Not with me and not with anyone else. Do you hear?”

  When she realized I was not responding, she repeated herself. This time her voice sounded like that of the crow who woke us up every morning with its screeches. “Did you hear?” her arms again flinging my rag-like body. “Answer me when I talk to you!”

  I felt his hands poking around my body and his hard organ pushed against my back. I experienced the nasty night over again, but this time it was morning and my mother was standing before me, threatening and bullying me.

  “Promise me that you’ll never talk about that!”

  I nodded my head. That’s all I could do at that moment.

  “I didn’t hear,” she insisted.

  “Okay,” I whispered, and all I wanted to do was to lie back and close my eyes.

  “Louder!” she commanded.

  “Okay!” I yelled.

  I couldn’t bear her looking at my face. I pulled my arms away, pushed her back and left the room through the door whose quiet hinges prevented it from divulging the sins performed under cover of darkness.

  The next night, and also the ones after that, he d
id not come into my room. Before I fell asleep, I heard my mother hurrying the boys to finish getting ready for bed, and then I heard the door slam and the sound of a key. My mother locked the boys’ room and took the key with her.

  Five years have passed since then, during which the acts were subsumed into a routine of instructions, rules, and conventions. Occasionally, the memory reared its ugly head in my thoughts, decisions, and mainly in my behavior. In the family, I was considered different. Also in the community. My name was pronounced in a mocking tone, followed by a shaking head and clicking tongue that attested wordlessly to that fact that my parents were to be pitied for having a daughter like me.

  One day, my father called me and asked me to give him some of my time. That was his custom. “Perele,” he said, “can you give me a few minutes of your time?” I was a teenage girl, in high school, with a head full of questions I had not found answers for. Confused, with no clear identity, and a tendency to argue about almost everything, I felt as if I lived on a deserted island, with water raging in and out, and each of the waves trying to pull me out with it. I worked with all my might to escape the endless trap around me. The loneliness had become an inseparable part of my existence.

  Though I had several friends from school and most of the time I was busy, the feeling of loneliness lived inside me like another part of my body. I wondered if everyone felt that way, that, like a stomach or heart or intestines or diaphragm, we had a loneliness in our body. I was afraid to ask my friends about this, lest they make fun of what I was saying, like the other times I had asked them all kinds of questions. It wasn’t acceptable to talk about falling in love or relationships. These words belonged to the secular world that we were supposed to distance ourselves from. Our lives were organized around instructions and rules that determine our daily routine; how we dressed; how to behave, whom to marry, whom we could and couldn’t look at.

  We were disciplined and obedient soldiers, at least on the outside. What happened in our hearts was something else. Despite the strict order and organization, inside we were confused. I learned that at a later stage, when I gathered up the courage to speak with a few friends about how I felt. I found out that they too were full of questions they had no answers for. That deep in their hearts they were scared, just like me. That they also dreamed of love and falling in love. Rachel even dared to admit that she didn’t like that life at all. She spoke about how one day she was walking on one of the streets in the city and saw a couple that had stopped to kiss. She was floored by it but said that it looked really nice. That she also wanted that, to kiss with someone. Of course after she said those things, we were dumbstruck, and I envied her courage for saying her feelings out loud. A bit over a year after that conversation, Rachel was already married to someone she had met just the month before. When I met her after her wedding, she said that what she wanted then was to carry a baby inside of her, and after that another one and another one.

  I went into the living room. My father was sitting, dressed in his haletel2, his hands stroking his gray beard. He followed my movements until I sat down expectantly. The clock on the wall ticked away the minutes. The holy books crammed on the shelves of the cabinet behind my father were shiny and clean. The table we sat at was covered with transparent plastic to protect the cotton tablecloth underneath. My father smoothed the plastic, and his bowed head, deep in thought, accelerated my heartbeat. I knew this would be an important conversation. Always before important conversations my father hesitated before he got started, as if checking mezuzah parchment from the doorpost to make sure it was free of defects.

  “Perele,” he finally began, raising his head and looking me straight in the eye, “it’s time for you to get married.” I was so stunned that even after many minutes had passed, I still had not responded. My father interpreted my silence as agreement and continued. “You’ll soon be seventeen. It’s time to think about the future. Yesterday, I went to the matchmaker to ask about finding a shidduch [match] for you. It won’t be easy, but we must be patient. Ultimately, it’ll be all right,” he tried to calm me.

  “But Tatte, I’m still young, I don’t want a shidduch.”

  My response surprised him. He raised his head, and his eyes were no longer warm as they had been before. “Perele, look around you. Most of your friends are already engaged, and you have no prospects.”

  “But Tatte, I’m still a girl, I don’t know anything...” I pleaded.

  My father began to lose patience. “Perele, whatever you need to know you already know, and whatever you don’t know, you’ll learn when you’re married. There’s not so much to know, and it’s time for you to get married.”

  “But Tatte...” Tears of fear and frustration streamed down my cheeks.

  “Perele, I don’t want to hear anything. I fixed a time with Mordechai for tomorrow and that’s it. There’s nothing more to talk about.”

  With that sentence, he ended the conversation. He got up from the chair, and without giving me another look, turned his back and left the room. I remained reproached and rooted in the chair that without warning had turned into a torture rack. My heart pounded, my stomach churned, my throat was dry and swollen, but mostly, my loneliness hurt. The “part” of my body more powerful than any other physical pain. Undisputed domination.

  In the days following that discussion, I walked around dazed. I just went through the motions. I did whatever was expected of me. I got up at six in the morning, helped my mother with the little ones, took Yossele to day care, and Esti and Shmuel to nursery school. I met up with friends in school, went to class, wrote when I had to write and nodded my head when required to nod. In the afternoon, I picked up all the little ones and helped my mother make supper. Days passed like that, one after the other. My friends felt that something wasn’t quite right, but they knew that sometimes I withdrew inside of myself and didn’t ask what had happened.

  The community is a bloc of people who must live according to agreed-upon codes that are protected by people in charge of making sure that everyone stays on the predetermined path. At school, we also had someone who was responsible for checking the length of our skirt and the length of our hair, measuring the appropriate space between the skirt and the knee, and between the hair and the shoulder. Everything had to be precise. Life is so easy, there’s no need to think about practically anything. There’s no need to decide. Any dilemma can be solved by consulting the rabbi. Even our clothing was determined for us. What we wore during the week, and what we wore on the holy Sabbath. Like solving a crossword puzzle, when it gets too hard, you can look up the answers. You can try to think, but if it’s too hard, the answer is there with the wave of your hand.

  In one of the conversations I had with a friend, I dared to say that I didn’t like people telling me what to do. “I want to think for myself, I want to decide for myself.”

  Devorah looked at me as if I was out of my mind, and said, “But Perele, it’s great that you don’t need to worry about making hard decisions and there’s someone who tells you what’s the right thing to do.” I didn’t continue the conversation because I knew exactly how it would end. And that’s indeed what happened. “Okay, Perele, you always were a bit strange...”

  Until I was ten or eleven, I didn’t know I was strange. I first found out that people thought I was different one day when I was with Devorah in the school yard. We left the classroom, and I told her that I really liked the teacher because she was really pretty. And then Devorah told me that she had on too much jewelry and things, and her mother had told her that that wasn’t right.

  “Why?” I asked naively.

  Devorah shrugged her shoulders and said, “I don’t know, but that’s what my mother said.”

  “I actually think it’s pretty,” I decided.

  Devorah looked at me, arrogantly, and said, “Okay, Perele, everyone knows you’re weird.”

  “Why weird?” I asked her in an insu
lted tone.

  “Because you always think the opposite of everyone else,” she answered immediately.

  “What do you mean?” I wanted to know.

  I think that from that conversation I began to understand why there were people who stayed away from me or glanced at me dismissively. I’d always thought it was because of my appearance, but in that short conversation between classes, I learned that my direct sentences had become a wreath of thorns over my head.

  Since that conversation with Devorah, I started to pay more attention to what the people around me said. I realized that none of my friends talked anything like me. None of them fired out their thoughts. Everyone had an active filtering mechanism. My mechanism didn’t work. Everything that I thought came out, unfiltered.

  When we got close to seventeen, the conversations focused on those who had already gotten engaged, on their husbands-to-be, on their aspirations for marriage, on children. Serious topics. We were already considered women on our way to marriage, and the old nonsense had left our heads, like in some kind of internal ceremony that happened deep inside of us that we had no control over. Nonsense until a certain age, after that disillusionment. When I spoke with the girls about how sometimes I wanted to be alone and sit and think, they would exchange glances and their eyes said everything they were thinking.

  I felt the looks of the children in the neighborhood too. I also knew why that was, because sometimes when I left the house, I placed on my ear a flower that I’d picked in the abandoned yard next to our building. The little children would chase after me and try to snatch the flower with cries of contempt and snickering.

  The fences that delimited our community stabbed me hard and hurt me terribly. I wanted to be like everyone else, to think like everyone else, and accept the rules as obvious. I just didn’t know how to. Something inside of me wanted to cry out. To be heard. A private, personal voice, a separate one. I didn’t want to be different at all. That was difficult and complicated. I didn’t like the mocking looks I got, or the pitying stares directed at my parents for having me as their daughter. I saw everything. And despite my seeming indifference, my soul was consumed from the inside like a burning bush. I felt bad for my parents, but I couldn’t help them. I knew exactly why my father was in such a rush for me to meet with Mordechai the matchmaker. He was concerned that as time went by, my chances of getting married would diminish.