Sotah by Naomi Ragen Read Free Book Online Page B

so important! It was for grown-ups, like Ima and Aba , or those women in the grocery with their long, unkempt bathrobes and tightly wound head scarves. She was still a girl, a young, innocent girl, her conscious mind reiterated countless times. You want to go on the way you are, being home with your family, that same sane, calm voice told her. You want to keep on learning, it insisted. To keep on blowing and blowing into the dreams and watching how they grow and shape themselves into new patterns not yet tried or conceived.
    But there was another voice, hoarse, rude, and dangerous. A voice like the earth—soiling, yet rich and basic and shamelessly fertile. It was like having your period or going to the bathroom or watching your naked body in a mirror. Shameful and yet with the undeniable excitement of dangerous realities coming too close to ignore. She tried desperately to keep it away from her. She pressed it down in her trunk, which she bolted with a heavy steel lock. On the trunk she piled the soft cushions of her proper ideas, her parents’ and teachers’ clear, untainted vision of Dina Reich, soft, pious daughter and dutiful little student. The higher the cushions were piled, the more distant and muffled the voice became, so that she could often convince herself it had gone away for good or had never existed at all.
    And then something totally unexpected would happen, scattering the cushions wildly, springing open the lock, and flinging the trunk lid open with a crash. And then the voice would thrust itself in her face like an angry, violent escapee from prison, a mocking cruel stranger.
    The first time it had happened, she’d been fourteen years old.
    There was a new boy in the grocery. She noticed him immediately. He was crouching on the floor, piling cans on the shelves. She stood just above him, reaching up for the warm, fragrant loaves. And as she stretched, she felt her whole body arch in a graceful taut curve that somehow pleased her, and she knew, just knew, his eyes had also seen it, and the voice all at once shouted at her that it had pleased him, too.
    Instinctively she looked at him and found him looking back, boldly and questioningly. Then he relaxed, his eyes calming into a smile that crinkled the corners of his eyelids and the sides of his nose. A smile not involving his mouth at all. He was very dark, with gleaming coal black hair cut like a good child’s, very short and neat with a well-loved child’s delicate, even part. His eyes were small and slanted, almost hidden under dark, overhanging brows; his skin was olive dark and stretched smooth over high cheek-bones and a square, cleft chin. There was a handsome delicacy about his face that made her heart leap. His eyes caught hers and held them.
    She fumbled with the loaves, almost dropping them. Then dark, shameful voice shouted all manner of terrible things in her ears with the roar of a wild, dangerous beast got loose.
    From then on her heart always tripped a little before entering the store. Sometimes she saw him right away and jerked her eyes down, but never soon enough to avoid his ironic, cool, bold eyes, which were at once insolent and yet flattering. And sometimes he would not be immediately apparent, and she would find herself lingering by the loaves, her head turning furtively in all directions, searching, until very soon she glimpsed the soft, burnished gleam of dark hair behind the shelves, and she felt her stomach ache with excitement and strange foreboding.
    He never spoke to her, nor she to him. Nor did she ever hear him speak. It was as if he had no voice, no actual presence, except in her secretive, fertile imaginings where her own loud voice roared and crashed all around her like high, threatening waves.
    She tried to think of him as a husband. To imagine him sitting down at the table to eat, next to her father and mother. But he wore no skullcap. He had no beard. He did not fit, even in her wildest dreams. And, interestingly and