According to her, p.1
According To Her, page 1
According To Her
According To Her
By
Maciej Hen
Translated by Anna Blasiak
www.hhousebooks.com
Copyright © 2022 by Maciej Hen
Translation copyright © 2022 Anna Blasiak
Maciej Hen asserts his/her moral right to be identified as the author of this book. All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
First published in Polish 2004
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-910688-66-3
Cover design by Ken Dawson
Typeset by Jennifer Case
Published in the UK
Holland House Books
Holland House
47 Greenham Road
Newbury, Berkshire RG14 7HY
United Kingdom
www.hhousebooks.com
To the shade of my mother
“Why does the Psalmist assume that only God knows the number of stars? After all with a little bit of patience they could all be counted.” Rabbi Gamaliel replied, “Can you see this sieve here containing nuts? I will make the sieve revolve and you count the nuts.”
(Talmud, Devarim Rabbah, 8)
Contents
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1
Will you have some goats cheese? Do you like it, dearie? Perhaps they make better cheese where you come from, but here, in this country, you won’t find one quite like ours anywhere else. And anyway it’s not easy to get hold of cheese nowadays, not that I’m begrudging you. But you know what the situation is here. Everything’s in ruin. But let’s not complain, let’s be grateful to God for being alive, even if it might be better not to live through such terrible times. There, by the door, there is a jug of water, in case you want to wash your hands. I have wheat rolls for you. Don’t be shy, young man, instead of asking where I got the flour from, just eat. I can see you are hungry. For us it’s a must: hungry people have to be fed, naked ones – covered. It’s the same for you, you say? I doubt it. You know, my dear, I have seen a lot in my life, I am almost one hundred years old. And even though my memory sometimes plays tricks on me, I do remember what I need to. About the hungry ones, I don’t know, you might be right, but don’t kid me about the nakedness. In your country people parade publicly as God created them and nobody bats an eyelid, am I right? Yeah, yeah, I know it’s about sport, about exercising the body… Let me tell you something. Our Yehuda Ha-Makabi has never, God forbid, run around in his birthday suit in front of other people, and do you know what? He still gave all those sporty Greeks a good kicking! No offence, young man, I have nothing against your people, as long as you don’t interfere with our things.
Please eat and don’t be shy, bless you. We are not made of money, but, thank God, there is no shortage of bread and cheese. We run a saddlery here, we make harnesses, belts, saddles, bags and water sacks. People always need these things, even when in the time of war and famine. I also sometimes earn a little bit on the side as a midwife. What will you drink, dearie? We have as much water as you wish here, not like down south, in Judea. They always had water shortages and now all their cisterns are full of stones and sometimes even filled to the brim with dead bodies, so nobody will ever drink that water. Here we have recovered a little bit and, anyway, what we went through cannot be compared to what happened to them there. The news kept coming… What can I tell you? Your hair would stand up on your head! Do you know by chance if that fortress near Yericho, Metsada, is still resisting the siege? They could sit there for another year or two, until their supplies run out. But what for, I ask you? Whoever will benefit from it? In the end they will get them, dead or alive, if not by force, then by starvation, like they did in Jerusalem. And what is there to defend anyway, if there is no Temple anymore, no capital, half the nation has been slaughtered and whoever survived is now wandering around, homeless in rags, half-mad from everything they had seen and gone through.
We can’t complain here – somehow we go on living, we have water, we even have wine, and ours is supposedly as good as the Greek wine, or at least that’s what we heard from the heathens who tried yours. Go on, pour yourself as much as you want, you can add water if pure is too strong for you, but I have a small request: spare me those spells of yours. And no spilling wine on the floor. This is a good, Jewish household. I know you will respect that, you are a cultured man.
Well, lechaim, then. Always when I reach for wine, I think about my elder son, Yehoshua. You are here about Yehoshua? I knew it. I guessed it straightaway. I had a gut feeling. Even though – and this might surprise you – you are the first. Not only the first foreigner, but the first person to come here to talk about my son, Yehoshua. Would you believe it? It’s been over forty years – what am I saying, it’s been forty-six years! – since Hoshi was killed by those bastards, and not a single person bothered to come and talk to his own mother! He had so many friends when alive, and when he died there seemed to be even more of them, but it didn’t even cross anybody’s mind to think about me and what was going on here. Why bother climbing our mountainous roads? And, you know, I was like a mother to all of them. They came here when they were in trouble, I cooked for them, I washed their clothes, even sewed. Eh, don’t get me started… Did you hear that they have already buried me? Or sent me to heaven or something like that. Supposedly I was lifted up alive, like fluff from a dandelion, high up, all the way to the clouds, and that was the last that was seen of me. I would like to know what they needed that for? You can tell all of them that I still keep my feet strongly on the ground, both of them.
Although, in all honesty, it was pointless to come here in the past. I could not talk about it. I was not able to. Do you know what it means for a mother? Do you know what it’s like when you have to watch your son being killed?
I stopped thinking about it. I was just waiting for his return, because he might return any minute, unless, God forbid, some bad luck befell him. Once I was pretty much sure he did come back, but it turned out to be somebody else, not even alike. It was only last year – no, two years ago… People were talking about the forests of crosses that Titus had put up outside of Jerusalem to hang all who tried to escape from the siege and stop others attempting the same, until eventually he ran out of trees in the area for more crosses. It was then that something told me, “Look, Mariamne, what was done to them is the same that was done to your Hoshi.” And then the memories started coming back, perhaps not about those terrible days, the last days of my son, but everything that was before, in the years of my youth. And I wasn’t afraid of those memories anymore, even though they often made me cry, but I needed to cry, because up until then I was like made of stone and I didn’t shed one tear over all those years. I laughed rarely too, only when with children. And just recently it changed and when some funny memories come to me, I laugh. So you see, dearie? You are lucky you got here now, not earlier!
But that you managed to find me in the first place! I like that, it means you are an inquiring person. Hoshi, I mean my son Yehoshua of the blessed memory, he was like that too. When he was very little, he would ask, “Where is the Mount Sinai?” And the father, my first husband, Yossi, would say, “Somewhere in the desert, between our lands and Egypt.” And Hoshi would say, “And when we went to Egypt…”—because we tried our luck for a few years in Egypt—“…did we see it?” “No,” Yossi answered, “because we travelled by the sea shore and it must be somewhere deep in the desert, closer to the other sea.” “Then why didn’t we go by there?” Hoshi wanted to know. And his father had to explain that the desert is huge and dangerous, and that our fathers wandered around it for forty years, and that in fact we don’t even know what the mountain is actually called, Sinai or Chorev, because the Torah sometimes says one thing, sometimes the other.
“So our fathers didn’t even properly memorise the name of the mountain where God appeared?”
Well, yes,” Yossi admitted. And Hoshi went on, “It’s probably because Avinu Shebashamayim,”—that is Our Father in Heaven—"purposefully mixed things in people’s heads so that stupid people would not constantly climb the mountain to meet Him there. But when I grow up,” he said, “I will find it!” “And how will you recognise it?” Yossi asked. Our little son tilted his head, pulled an innocent face and squeaked, “I will, I just will.”
He was so self-assured, the seven-year-old sprog.
They have opened schools now and all the boys are taught things like that, but at that time there was no obligation to educate children and Hoshi studied everything on his own accord. Already in Alexandria he learnt Greek letters from Mr Dimitriadis, an ironmonger who ran a shop across the street from our flat. They would squat together in front of the shop and draw letters with sticks in the
Yossi called Hoshi over, but didn’t tell him off, he just took his chin calmly in his hand and said, “Remember, son, that our Hebrew letters come from the Lord of Hosts himself, given to us on two stone tablets. Whoever changes them, it’s as if he changed the Law received from God. But,” he said, “I will teach you all of it, Hoshi, since you are curious. Even though I am only a simple saddler, I come from a good family, related to King David himself.”
And he not only taught him letters, but also told him the whole history of our nation. Just not in order, because Hoshi first wanted to know who this King David was, his supposed relative. Yossi always boasted about this blood relation, but what was the truth, I don’t really know. He could list his ancestors going all the way back to great-great-grandparents, just not all of them, but it was like listening to stories about some old heroes, because they did live in the times of the first Maccabees. Anyhow there was a lot of talking in Yossi’s family about their noble origins. People even disliked them because of all that putting on airs they did, while my family laughed at them, saying that for such great aristocrats they looked like commoners. Not like us – you can see for yourself what I look like, and I am almost one hundred years old. I don’t look my age? Here, in the mountains, people live healthy lives and, if I may say so myself, I was cut from a good cloth. I was always handsome, shapely, straight-backed. Yossi even liked to quote Song of Songs that King Shlomoh put together, the son of that David… Ah, you know, of course, yes, Solomon… So Yossi used to say in the words of his ancestor that my neck was as a tower of ivory and my teeth were as a flock of sheep which go up from the washing, and so on. Hoshi, my firstborn, took his looks from me, praised be the Lord. He had my eyes, my linked eyebrows, he was a beautiful boy. He only took his father’s meagre height from him – and because he kept pulling his head into his shoulders, he seemed even shorter – and his hair, which was weak, unfortunately. Look at mine, it is strong and thick like wild thyme, and I only have a few white streaks. Hoshi’s hair was soft, wavy, shiny like this fabric from a faraway place, and it started wearing off at the top of the head. Poor lad, he always wanted to have a beautiful mane like his acquaintance Yochanan, the one whose head Antipas had cut off, but, if you ask me, the high forehead looked quite good on Hoshi. If he had only cut his hair short, like his father… But he had weakness for long hair – it fell out in the front, so he tried to make up for it with the hair at the back and on the sides, where it was nice and thick, black as a crow’s wing, again, after me, because his father was golden-haired, as befits the descendant of King David.
2
Did you know, dearie, that when Hoshi grew up he really did go to the desert to look for the Mount Sinai? He never openly admitted it, but we still knew that he was fulfilling his childhood promise and when he was getting ready to go, we talked about it out loud, pretending it to be a joke. Hoshi just smiled, as if to say, “think what you will”. Anyway, he didn’t need to explain anything, since there was nothing unusual in this expedition of his. At that time many young people went into the desert – it was all the rage, you know. Some wanted to be like old Nazarites from the times of the first prophets who walked around in rawhide, never cut their hair or beards and only ate different wild berries and roots because they had no money to buy food with, or perhaps nothing was kosher enough for them, I don’t know. You could still meet them in some remote places. But there were also other ones wandering around the desert and living there: these were the ardent ones who insisted that they were preparing a rebellion against the bad kings, while in fact they lived off robbery, and quite comfortably too, or those who said that nobody else but them understood Torah. These ones were called Essa-einaites from their favourite line in the psalm ‘Shir Lama’alot’, which they always sang at their gatherings as their hymn. Later on it became popular and everybody sang it too, even my Hoshi liked it a lot, despite his dislike for those people, because it was a beautiful tune. Have you heard it?
E-esa einai el heharim:
me’ayin, me-e’ayin ya-avo ezri?
E-e-e-ezri me'im Ha-Shem
o-o-o-ose shamayim va’aretz.
You know our holy language, Hebrew, a little? I’m also only vaguely familiar, but this particular bit, I know that it means, ‘If I raise my eyes to the hills, from where will my help come? My help comes from Adonai, the maker of heaven and earth.’
I was even slightly concerned that perhaps Hoshi joined those Essa-einaites. I’ve heard mixed things about them. Some said that they never marry, which is ungodly and ridiculous, as how can a human being be happy when alone? And I was even more worried because Hoshi didn’t have a good example of married happiness at home. The truth was that his father, my first husband, Yossi, left us and gave me a get, a divorce document, when Hoshi was twelve years of age, shortly before his bar mitzvah. Why, you ask? Well, young man, there was – as they have it in this house of David – another woman. Yossi kept seeing her throughout our marriage, it must have started even before Hoshi had been born. I was sad, but at first I thought that my husband wanted to spare me the trouble while I was pregnant and then that he didn’t want to leave the other woman without protection. I thought to myself that perhaps we should try to live like our forefathers – after all somebody like king Shlomoh could have had herds of wives and even in my memory the old Herod had ten wives, though he was an Idumaean, but they say that among the Jews living on the border with Idumaea this is a widespread custom even now, but not here. Here it always ends in a divorce and children’s suffering. Anyway it was very hard for Hoshi and he kept asking me with tears in his eyes, “Mum, why does our God allow husbands to abandon their wives and children?” And what was I supposed to tell him? I reminded him that our foremother Sarah personally suggested Hagar the Egyptian to Avraham, and then when she herself bore him Yitzchak, she told her husband to send his poor mistress away together with their little son, Yishmael. So perhaps it is because of the injustice done to Hagar that all Jewish women now suffer? Hoshi shook his head and got all clever, like he used to, the egg smarter than the hen!
“No, Mum,” he told me, pinching his hairless chin, deep in thought. “I think that by instructing us how to divorce, Torah wants to tell us that even the worst things need to be sorted decently. But that does not mean that you can change a wife on a whim, just because the husband prefers somebody else, like dad did.”
So then I started crying, because I felt ashamed in front of my child that my own husband didn’t want me anymore. If I only knew what people would say about it later! You must have heard… That Hoshi was not Yossi’s, that I had already been pregnant when Yossi married me and that it was the reason why he didn’t live with me for long. Pish, let the earth swallow all those scandalmongers and immediately spit them out! There is no protection against them. Do you know this story about one of our rabbis who told his disciples off for evil-speaking?
