Read an Excerpt
Jerusalem Maiden
A Novel
By Talia Carner
Harper Paperbacks
Copyright © 2011 Talia Carner
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780062004376
Chapter One
Jerusalem
September 1911/tishrei 5672
Esther's hand raced over the paper as if the colored pencils
might be snatched from her, the quivering inside
her wild, foreign, thrilling. All this time she hadn't known that
"blue" was actually seven distinct shades, each with its own
name—azure, Prussian, cobalt, cerulean, sapphire, indigo,
lapis. She pressed the waxy pencils on the paper, amazed by the
emerging hues: the ornaments curving on the Armenian vase
were lapis; the purplish contours of the Jerusalem mountains
were shrouded by indigo evening clouds. In this stolen hour at
Mademoiselle Thibaux's dining-room table, she could draw
without being scolded for committing the sin of idleness, God
forbid.
A pale gecko popped up on the chiseled stone of the
windowsill and scanned the room with staccato movements until
it met Esther's gaze. Her fingers moving in a frenzy, she drew
the gecko's raised body, its tilted head, its dark orbs focused
on her. She studied the translucency of the skin of the valiant
creature that kept kitchens free of roaches. How did God paint
their fragility? She picked up a pink-gray pencil and traced the
fine scales. They lay flat on the page, colorless. She tried the
lightest brown—
Her hand froze. What was she thinking? A gecko was an
idol, the kind pagans worshipped. God knew, at every second,
what every Jew was doing for His name. He observed her now,
making this graven image, explicitly forbidden by the Second
Commandment, Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven
image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that
is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
With a jerk of its head, the gecko darted away. Esther stared
at the paper, her hand in midair. She had never imagined a sin
like this.
Mlle Thibaux walked in from the kitchen nook, smiling.
Her skin was smooth, luminous, and her brown hair uncovered,
its coquettish ripples pinned by twin tortoiseshell combs.
She picked up Esther's drawing and examined it. "C'est mer-
veilleux! Quel talent!"
Esther blushed. The praise reflected what Mlle Thibaux's
raised eyebrows had revealed that morning in sixth-grade
French class when she had caught Esther doodling. To Esther's
consternation, her teacher must have detected the insects
hidden inside the branches and leaves. The teacher turned the
page this way and that, and her eyes widened. She then asked
Esther to stay after school, and Esther was certain she would
be ordered to conjugate the verb "to be" hundreds of times
on the blackboard: je suis, tu es, il est, elle est— Instead, Mlle
Thibaux invited her to her apartment at the Hospice Saint Vincent
de Paul, a palace like building with arch fronted wings,
carved colonnaded verandas and balustraded stairwells. The
teacher was a shiksa, a gentile. Newly arrived from Paris, she
probably didn't know that while it wasn't forbidden in Esther's
ultra-Orthodox community to decorate with flourished letters
and ornamental shapes, drawing God's creatures was another
matter.
Now, holding Esther's drawing, Mlle Thibaux smiled.
"Here, try mixing these two colors." On a separate page, she
sketched a few irregular lines with a pink pencil, then scattered
some short leaf-green lines in between.
Esther chewed the end of her braid. Fear of God had been
instilled in her with her mother's milk and in the Ten
Commandments tablets displayed everywhere, from her classroom
to the bakery. In addition, the Torah pronounced that
any urge must be suppressed, as it would surely lead to sinning.
The quickening traveling through Esther again proved
that what she was doing was forbidden. Her mother said that
Esther's harshest punishment for sinning would be failure to
become betrothed at twelve, as every good Jerusalem maiden
should upon entering her mitzvah age. Yet, as Mlle Thibaux
handed her the pink and green pencils, Esther silently prayed
for God's forgiveness and recreated the hues inside the gecko's
scales. To her astonishment, they blended as a translucent
skin.
A knock sent Mlle Thibaux to the door, her back erect and
proud as no woman Esther had ever known. The teacher
accepted a pail from the water hauler and carried it to the kitchen
while Esther collected the pencils into their tin box.
Outside the window, slicing off the top of the Tower of
David, a cobalt-blue sky hung low on the horizon like a wedding
chupah with a ribbon of magenta underlining it. A flock
of sparrows jostled for footing in the date palm tree, then rose
in a triangular lace shawl formation before settling again. The
warm smell of caramelized sugar wafting from the kitchen
made Esther hungry for tonight's dinner, a leftover Shabbatchallah
dipped in milk and egg, fried and then sprinkled with
sugar. Closing the pencil box, her hand traced its scene of a
boulevard in Paris, lined with outdoor cafés and their dainty,
white, wrought-iron chairs. Women wearing elegant hats and
carrying parasols looped their arms through men's holding
walking sticks, and the open immodesty of the gesture
shocked Esther even as it made something inside her tingle. In
Jerusalem, only Arab men, dressed in their striped pajamas,
idled on low stools in the souk and played backgammon from
sunrise to sunset. Their eyes glazed over as they sucked the
mouthpieces of hoses coiled around boiling tobacco narghiles.
Paris. Esther had never known a girl who traveled, but when
she had been little, her father, her Aba, apprenticed at a bank
in America. It was a disastrous exposure to "others," her
mother, her Ima, said, because it filled his head with reprehensible
new ideas, worse than the simpleton Hassids'. That was
why Aba sent his daughters to a school so elegant that Yiddish
was frowned upon. Most subjects were taught in English, and
Esther mingled there with Sepharadi Jewish girls who spoke
Ladino and Arabic as well as with secular girls—heretic Zionists
all of them, Ima said—who spoke the sacred Hebrew.
"Chérie, will you light the candles?" Mlle Thibaux walked
in from the kitchen nook and placed a silver tea set on a spindle
table covered with a crocheted napkin. The high collar of her
blouse was stiff over starched pleats running down the front to
a cinched waist, but when she moved, her long skirt immodestly
hinted at legs. Had she ever walked in Paris with a man,
daring to loop her arm in his?
Mlle Thibaux smiled. "It's four o'clock—"
Four o'clock? Esther's hand rose to her throat. Ima, who
expected her to attend to her many chores right after classes,
had been laboring alone while Esther was indolent. Ima would
be furious. "I must go home—"
Mlle Thibaux pointed to a plate with slices of glazed cake
sprinkled with shaved almonds and cinnamon. "It's kosher."
"Non, merci. The neighborhood gates will get locked for
the night." Saliva filling Esther's mouth, she gathered her long
plaid skirt and backed toward the door. She had never tasted
a French cake; it had been ages since she had eaten any cake.
But Mlle Thibaux's kitchen was traife, non-kosher. Esther
wouldn't add another sin to her list. "Merci beaucoup!"
She ran out of the apartment, down the two flights of steps,
and across the stone-paved yard to the street facing the Jaffa
Gate in the Old City wall, where camels awaited pilgrims and
Turkish soldiers patrolled. Restless birds chirped in desperation
to find shelter for the night. Wind rustled the tops of the
tall cypresses and whipped fallen leaves into a spin. Maybe it
would rain soon, finally replenishing the dry cistern under her
house.
Running downhill, she turned north, her sandals pounding
the cobblestones. At least she wasn't barefoot as she had
been that morning, putting her sandals on at the gate to Evelina
de Rothschild school to save the soles. She vaulted over
foot-wide sewage channels dug in the center of the alleys.
Then there was the open hill with only rocks and scattered
dry bushes flanking the dirt path grooved by men, carts and
beasts. Climbing fast up the path, she listened for sounds
beyond the trilling of crickets and the buzzing of mosquitoes. In
the descending darkness, a Jewish girl might be dishonored
by a Turkish soldier or murdered by an Arab. Just on the next
hill, the grandfather she had never met had been assassinated
while inspecting land he purchased for the first Jewish neighborhood
outside the Old City.
A scruffy black dog stood on a rock. Esther's heart leaped.
Dogs were despicable creatures; they carried diseases that
made people insane. It growled and exposed yellow-gray
teeth. When Esther swerved out of the path, it gave chase. She
screamed, running faster, the dog barking behind her. She
grabbed the hem of her skirt, and her feet pounded on rocks,
twisting, stumbling. If she tripped, she'd die. Now that the
Ottoman Empire was crumbling and the sultan neglected his
subjects, hungry Jerusalemites ate even rotting scraps of food,
and starving dogs bit people. The Turkish policemen killed
dogs on sight.
Was that the dog's breath on her heels? She gulped air. Her
wet cheeks were cold in the rush of wind. A blister burned
the sole of her foot. The dog must smell her sweat, her fear.
She couldn't outrun it. Her punishment for drawing idols had
come so soon! It had never occurred to her that there could be
a fate worse than Ima's warning about failing to find a groom.
To Esther, that threat had always sounded like a blessing.
Cold pain sliced her rib cage, and her lungs burned. She
could run no more. She stopped. Whirling, she faced the dog,
exposed her teeth and snarled, waving her arms like the mad
girl she'd become if it bit her.
To her amazement, the beast halted. Another snarl rose
from Esther's chest, tearing her throat, and the animal backed
off. She flailed her arms again, and the dog tucked its tail and
slunk away.
Her heart still struggling to escape its confinement, Esther
whispered a prayer of thanks and then fumbled for the amulet
in her pocket to stave off the evil eye. Her pulse drummed in
her ears. She broke into a trot. Five more minutes to Me'ah
She'arim. Her inner thighs chafed over her belted socks, but
stopping wasn't an option. Wicked winds—worse than dogs—
gusted in search of a soul deserving punishment, one that had
defied God.
Panting, Esther was about to enter the tiny kitchen yard
of her home, when she was startled by a movement in
the shadow. Lilith the ghost? It was common knowledge that
she stalked the night. Or what if these were the robbers Ima
fretted about? Or Turkish soldiers raiding the Jewish streets
to kidnap boys for lifelong military ser vice, as Aba feared?
Esther held her breath as if she could become invisible, then
jumped at the screech from the rusty neighborhood iron gate
swinging shut.
A figure stepped into the patch of yard washed by the last
light of dusk: her friend Ruthi.
"You scared me," Esther said in Yiddish, grabbing Ruthi's
hand. "What happened?" She scanned the large rectangle of
communal space created by rows of identical one and two
room houses clinging together like a frightened herd of goats.
Their back walls bordered the thoroughfare to form an impenetrable
blockade. In the center, the oven, the well, the laundry
shed and the outhouses were all dark and silent, as were the
yeshiva and the mikveh. Only the synagogue's windows shone,
where the silhouettes of praying men would sway until the wee
hours as they mourned the destruction of the Temple nineteen
hundred years earlier. "Did someone die?" Esther asked. After
the recent Day of Atonement, God might have struck a wicked
man—or even a seemingly virtuous nursing mother.
"Did you take a ride in Elijah's chariot?" Ruthi asked. A
smile broke on her face and she gushed on. "Guess what? I am
going to be betrothed! Blessed be He."
"And I'm the rabbi marrying you," Esther said in a
ponderous tone and stroked an imaginary beard. She and Ruthi
had made a pact to refuse marriage until they finished school.
She wanted to report about her afternoon at Mlle Thibaux's,
but right now she had to get in the house. Resuming her own
voice, Esther motioned toward her kitchen yard. "Come in. I
have work to do—"
"Well?" Ruthi asked.
"Well what? I'll beat you at hopscotch tomorrow." They
kept a running tally, and that morning Ruthi had taken first
place.
"I can't play. Not now that I'm an adult."
The rising moon illuminated the delicate line of Ruthi's
thin nose and heart-shaped mouth. If she had Mlle Thibaux's
colored pencils now, Esther thought, she would highlight
Ruthi's clear skin with lavender—
"Nu? Well?" Ruthi demanded.
The fact suddenly penetrated Esther's head with the
sounds of the neighbors' clattering pots and pans, the cries
of babies, the scratching of furniture being dragged to make
room for cots, and the angry thumping of Ima's wooden clogs
on the chiseled kitchen floor. "But, but—Miss Landau said we
shouldn't get married before fourteen, or even sixteen—and
you agreed—"
"That's ridiculous. Name one religious girl in school who's
waited that long."
"I will," Esther said, even though Aba often explained that
marriage was the Haredi community's building block, especially
in Jerusalem, the holiest of all cities, where a maiden
carried the promise of perpetuity for all Jews in the entire
universe.
"My groom is a biblical scholar," Ruthi said.
"All these yeshiva boochers are afflicted with hemorrhoids
from sitting on hard benches all day and all night."
"I'm serious," Ruthi said. "Marriage will make me important."
The amulet in Esther's pocket felt cold. "You'll work
your fingers to the bone from dawn to midnight, you and the
children starving, barefoot, and living off charity, while he
studies—"
Ruthi's eyes widened in shock. "It will hasten the Messiah's
arrival."
Esther knew that her utterings were Zionist blasphemy,
but the subject of betrothal had never hit this close before.
"Do you want to be responsible for the future of all Jews?"
she whispered.
Ruthi stamped her foot. "Just say mazal tov."
A mosquito buzzed near Esther's head. "Who's your
groom?"
"Yossel." Ruthi's tone turned dreamy. "I hear he's handsome."
Yossel? Esther remembered a short boy with buckteeth.
Ruthi was tall, as gentle as a reed by the Jordan River. Esther
sometimes made her balance a jug on her head so she would
move as gracefully as Rachel had when Jacob spotted her at
the well.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Jerusalem Maiden by Talia Carner Copyright © 2011 by Talia Carner. Excerpted by permission of Harper Paperbacks. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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