Esther’s hand raced over the paper as if the colored pencils might be snatched from her. The secrets awaiting to be exposed had been around her all the time, wrapped around one another like newborn kittens, and she didn’t see! “Blue“ was actually seven distinct shades, each with its own name--azure, Prussian, cobalt, cerulean, sapphire, indigo, lapis. The shadow breaking in the arched stone window was cobalt, the ornaments curving on the Armenian vase on the windowsill were lapis, the purplish contours of the Jerusalem mountains were shrouded by indigo evening clouds. The paper on the table yielded to the pressure of the waxy Prussian pencil. Esther clutched it, amazed at the hue emerging in the anemone petals she was drawing as they dangled above the vase. In this stolen hour at Mademoiselle Thibaux’s dining room, she could draw and no one would scold her for committing the sin of idleness, Yishmor Hashem.
A baby lizard popped up on the windowsill. It scanned the room with staccato movements until, seemingly unsurprised by a human, it held Esther’s gaze. Her fingers moving in a frenzy, she drew the lizard’s raised body, the tilted head, the dark orbs focused. She hesitated as she studied the translucency of the skin. How did God paint fragility in a valiant creature that kept kitchens free of roaches? She picked up the gray pencil and drew the fine scales.
Her hand froze. What was she thinking? A lizard 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, which He had explicitly forbidden in 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 lizard slithered away. Esther stared at the paper, her hand in midair, the quivering inside her wild, foreign, thrilling. She had never imagined a sin like this. She couldn’t stop it, and she feared what was still to come, as vivid images crowded her head: a fierce Turkish policeman with a red fez sitting on his Arabian horse; a barren woman sobbing at the Wailing Wall; the shochet in his blood-stained apron holding the feet of a chicken he was about to slaughter; an Arab shepherd on a rocky hillside playing the flute to his herd. But each image--horse, wall, rock, sheep--was God’s creation and a graven image. Man, specifically, had been created in His image and was therefore forbidden to portray by the very First Commandment: Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.
Esther chewed the end of her braid. Her knowledge of the Ten Commandments had come to her with her mother’s milk, infused along with the warning against being contaminated by “others“--gentiles or Jews who hadn’t made the strictest adherence to God’s six-hundred and thirteen decrees their sole purpose in life. Any urge, the Torah pronounced, must be conquered. And what she was now feeling about drawing must be forbidden; the quickening that had traveled through her the moment Mlle Thibaux placed the colored pencils in front of her was proof. Her mother, her Ima, said that the harshest punishment that could befall Esther would be failing to get betrothed at twelve, as every good daughter of Israel should upon entering her mitzvah age.
Mlle Thibaux walked in from the kitchen nook, smiling. Her skin was smooth, luminous, and her brown hair uncovered, piled up on her head in intricate, coquettish ripples held back with twin tortoiseshell combs. Esther didn’t know any woman who carried herself with such unreserved pride, the high collar of her blouse stiff, with pleats down the front and cinched at the waist. Mlle Thibaux picked up Esther’s drawing and examined it. “C’est merveillie! Quel talent!“
Esther blushed. The praise reflected what her teacher’s eyes had revealed earlier in her sixth-grade French class when she had caught Esther doodling. To Esther’s consternation, Mlle Thibaux must have detected the insects hidden inside the branches and leaves because she had turned the page this way and that, and her eyes widened. She had 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 est, 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 colonnade verandas and balustrated stairwells snaking inside and outside. The teacher was a shiksa, a gentile, an “other,“ who had arrived from Paris only a few months before and probably didn’t know that while it wasn’t forbidden to decorate with flourish letters and ornamental shapes, drawing God’s creatures was another matter.
Now, holding Esther’s drawing, Mlle Thibaux smiled at her. “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 hesitated, but under Mlle Thibaux’s expectant look, she prayed for God’s understanding and recreated the blended hues inside the lizard’s scales. To her astonishment, they came together as translucent skin. Pink and green?
Mlle Thibaux returned to the kitchen nook, and Esther heard the soft clanking of dishes and the clicking of her teacher’s heels on the tile floor. The warm smell of caramelized sugar made her hungry for tonight’s dinner, a challah leftover from Shabbat dipped in milk, fried in egg, and sprinkled with sugar.
A mouse scurried across the floor and disappeared into a hole. Outside, a tin lean-to below the window rattled, and a spotted cat glided by, perhaps tracking the lizard. Slicing off the top of the Tower of David, a darkening navy-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 among the dust-covered branches of a date palm tree, then rose in formation, like a triangular lace shawl, before settling down again.
Esther stood up and collected the pencils strewn across the table into their tin box. As she closed it, her hand traced its scene of a boulevard in Paris, lined with outdoor cafés and dainty, white, wrought iron chairs. Women in elegant hats and carrying parasols strolled beside men in broad-shouldered suits who held walking sticks. She had never imagined women sitting in cafés. In Jerusalem, only Arab men, dressed in their striped pajamas, lazed on low stools in the sook and played backgammon from sunrise to sunset and, their eyes glazed over, sucked the mouthpieces of hoses coiled around their boiling tobacco nargilot. Esther had never seen a man and a woman walk with their arms looped as they did in this beautiful picture, and the open immodesty of the gesture both shocked her and made something inside her tingle. The titillating picture was like tasting Paris with her eyes--an eye-bite? Just like food, once the image was in her head it could never be taken away from her.
Mlle Thibaux walked in with a tray and placed the silver tea set on a spindle table covered with a crocheted napkin. She was graceful and stylish, although 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?
“Cherie, will you light the candles, please?“ she asked Esther.
As Esther struck a match, she wanted to ask about Paris. She’d never known a girl who traveled, but when she had been little, her father went to America to apprentice at a bank, a disastrous exposure to “others,“ Ima said, because his head filled with reprehensible new ideas, almost as bad as the simpleton Hassids’.
The teacher settled on the sofa and crossed her ankles, revealing delicately buttoned leather shoes that hugged narrow feet. Esther pulled her feet under the chair to hide her scuffed sandals. At least she was wearing them; until a few weeks ago, when the weather had been hot, she had walked to school barefoot to spare the soles. She would only put on her sandals at the gate in deference to the Evelina de Rothschild school, so elegant that all subjects were taught in English.
Mlle Thibaux pushed a plate to Esther with two slices of cake sprinkled with shaved almond and cinnamon. “It’s kosher,“ she said.
Saliva gathered in Esther’s mouth. She had never tasted a French cake; it had been ages since she had tasted any cake. But Mlle Thibaux’s kitchen and dishes were traife, non-kosher. Esther wouldn’t add another sin to her list. She shifted in her seat, searching for a way to refuse politely.
“Thé?“ Mlle Thibaux asked. “It’s four o’clock--“
Four o’clock? Esther’s hand rose to her throat. She was supposed to head home right after classes for hours of chores. Ima had been laboring alone while Esther was indolent. “I must go home. The neighborhood gates will get locked for the night.“ Esther gathered her long plaid skirt and backed toward the door. “Merci! Merci beaucoup!“
She ran out of the apartment, down the two flights of steps, across the stone-paved yard to the street facing the Jaffa Gate that gaped in the Old City wall. Restless birds chirped in desperation to find shelter for the night, and wind rustled the tops of the tall cypresses and whipped dry leaves into a spin. The air had turned chilly. Maybe it would rain soon, replenishing the cistern under her home. Thirsty Jerusalem would finally have water.
Running north, Esther’s legs pumped, and her sandals thumped on the cobblestones. She skipped over foot-wide sewage channels dug in the center of the alleys. Then there was the open hill, with only rocks and scattered bushes flanking the dirt path grooved by men, carts and beasts. She listened for sounds beyond the trilling of crickets and the buzzing of mosquitoes. In the descending darkness, a Jewish girl might be murdered by an Arab, or worse, dishonored by a Turkish soldier. Not far from here, her grandfather had been assassinated while inspecting land he had purchased for the first Jewish neighborhood outside the Old City.
A scruffy black dog stood on a rock. It growled and exposed yellow 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. The barking grew louder, closer. Dogs were despicable creatures; they carried diseases that made people insane. If she tripped, she’d die. Now that Jerusalemites used scraps of formerly discarded food to stretch out meals, dogs were hungry and bit people. The Turkish policemen killed dogs on sight.
Esther was certain she felt the dog’s breath on her heels. She gulped air, and her cheeks were wet in the rush of wind. A blister burned the sole of her foot, wet, sticky. She couldn’t outrun the dog. It smelled her sweat, her fear. She hadn’t imagined that her punishment for drawing idols would come so soon. It had never occurred to her that there could be a fate worse than not finding a groom as Ima had said. And that fate had seemed like a good one.
Cold pain sliced her rib cage, and her labored breathing was loud. This was her end. She could run no more. Esther stopped. Facing the dog, she exposed her teeth and snarled. Once, twice. She arched her back and waved her arms like the mad girl she’d become if the dog bit her. Her eyes wide, she snarled louder. To her amazement, the beast halted, and its yellow eyes homed in on her from under a groveling brow. As in Joseph’s dream, the star bowed down to her, the sun. Another growl rose from Esther’s chest, and the animal backed off. It regarded her from a distance. Esther growled again and flailed her arms, and the dog tucked its tail between its legs and slunk away.
Standing transfixed, her heart still struggling to escape its confinement, she whispered a prayer of thanks to God 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 thighs chafed at the top of her belted socks. She could barely get another breath in, but stopping wasn’t an option. Wicked winds--worse than dogs--were gusting in search of a soul deserving punishment, one that had defied God, whom she couldn’t stare down.
