‘The rabbi’s foreign wife,’ they whispered, drawing their veils across their faces as if her exoticism was contagious. ‘They say she is like a man, that she knows the secrets of the kabbala as well as the Christian Bible.’ They were careful not to touch the anusa for fear they would catch her mystical ways.
Sara Navarro, who after her escape to Amsterdam had reconverted to Judaism, outraged her Spanish relatives in Holland by marrying an Ashkenazi—a community the Sephardic considered well below their own status. A reaction Sara felt more strongly once she had joined Elazar back in Deutz and was struggling for acceptance from his own people, an acceptance that was never realised.
The image of herself as a six year old comes back to Ruth as she stands before the old house, a fierce thin child cowering against her mother’s legs as the women passed, refusing to greet them.
‘Ruth,’ Sara would say, in broken Yiddish laced with a mellow Spanish accent, ‘stand proud, you are the daughter of kings.’ And a sudden vision of what she might be—if of another sex, another faith—would rock the child’s body.
Then Elazar ben Saul would sweep out of the house, young and handsome in his robe and prayer shawl, the deeply serious expression upon his face betrayed only by the wink he gave his young daughter as he marched purposefully towards the temple of worship. He was the great figure of her life, rocking backwards and forwards in the humble synagogue wrapped in the prayer shawl embroidered by her mother’s own hands, a kabbalistic symbol for good health and happiness hidden in the seam.
Only Ruth knew about the amulet. Only she had been there when her mother slipped it in and stitched up the hem. And only Ruth had been there when
, hiding under the benches in the women’s section, she had heard a mysterious cry. Recognising her mother’s voice, she peered down through the balusters and was shocked to see her parents wrapped around each other, their limbs locked in a strange dance the small child did not recognise at the time. Her mother’s hair flung across the temple floor, her cheeks as red as her mouth, while her father, his robe hitched up above his waist, lay on top of her, the pale orbs of his slender buttocks undulating like sleepy sand dunes in the candlelight. There was an ethereal beauty to their movements that held the child in awe and stopped her from calling out. Fascinated, she watched as their dance grew more frantic. The musicality of their sighing and panting reached a crescendo that burst across the rafters like the fireworks Ruth had once seen shooting across the walls of Cologne. Wide-eyed in amazement, the child was convinced that her parents must be praying in the secret manner her father had once alluded to: dancing for God.
Seventeen years later, drawn back to Deutz by such memories, Ruth found herself propelled by the desire to protect her father in his old age.
The shame of Ruth’s flight had almost killed Elazar. How to explain to the elders the sudden disappearance of a young girl on the eve of her marriage, the daughter of a rabbi no less? There were rumours of a Christian lover, a secret pregnancy, of abduction. But Elazar ben Saul, refusing to answer the furtive whispers, had grown his beard and smeared ashes on his forehead, wrapping his grief in a leaden silence. ‘My child is dead,’ was all he uttered to the leaders of the community when they asked. For him, the child he loved had become a ghost and the woman she had evolved into irrelevant.
A goat bleats and Ruth looks up from her thoughts. Two widows from fields beyond the village are tethering their animals outside the mikvah. Both are shyly excited at the prospect of the ritual bathing and the monthly exchange of local gossip. The midwife turns to the boy but he has gone, running with his hoop between the geese and falling snow.
‘Ruth!’ A rich alto voice shouts out the banned name defiantly.
Rosa, her old nursemaid, a bustling buxom woman in her fifties with hennaed hair peeping scandalously from under her cowl, stands in the entrance of the mikvah. She wears the uniform of an attendant.
‘Don’t just stand there gawking at the unbreachable! Come in and sit with me, it’s warm in here.’
As Ruth steps into the bathhouse Rosa enfolds her in a huge embrace, pressing her against the powdery bosom Ruth remembers from childhood.
‘I have news of your father,’ the Spanish woman whispers conspiratorially as she leads the midwife through a low archway into the waiting area adjacent to the first bathing pool.
Women of all ages and sizes, in various stages of undress, lean against the walls or sit talking to friends in reverent muffled tones occasionally broken by a peal of very unholy laughter. This is a sanctuary for women, their domain from a thousand years before and to a thousand years hence.
Ruth sits down next to Rosa on a low wooden bench and removes her headdress. Her thick black hair falls down her back to hang below her waist. Immediately a window of silence opens up around her.
‘Your beauty frightens them,’ Rosa whispers in Spanish.
‘Hush, you know it is not my beauty but my reputation that frightens them. They think I am a female Ba’al Shem, that I can invoke demons.’
‘Let them think. For me you will always be just a strongwilled little girl,’ the nursemaid retorts, sentimentality filling her eyes.
‘So how is my father?’
‘Not wonderful. The reb feels his age, which is good for maybe now he will realise the foolishness of banishing his only child.’
‘He has sickness?’
‘Ruth, your father is near sixty, he has nothing wrong with him except too much religion and not enough soup. He would forgive you if you were to make a marriage.’
‘A marriage? After my broken engagement who would have me?’
‘Rabbi Tuvia.’
‘Tuvia! He’s just a boy.’
‘A man now and a disciple of your father’s.’
‘I cannot, it would be dishonest.’
‘Dishonest?’