When the sun had set and darkness sheltered her from the eyes of the
curious, Ruth Ben Shoushan walked into the sea, the nameless infant tight
against her breast, until she stood waist deep. She unwrapped him, throwing the
swaddling cloth over her head. His brown eyes blinked at her, and his small
fists, free of constriction, punched at the air. "Sorry, my little one," she
said gently, and then thrust him under the dark surface.
The water closed around him, touching every inch of his flesh. She had a firm
grip around his upper arm. She let go. The water had to take him.
She looked down at the small, struggling form, her face determined, even as she
sobbed. The swell rose and slapped against her. The tug of the receding wave was
about to pull the infant away. Ruti reached out and grasped him firmly in her
two hands. As she lifted him from the sea, water sluiced off his bare, shining
skin in a shower of brightness. She held him up to the stars. The roar in her
head was louder now than the surf. She cried out, into the wind, speaking the
words for the infant in her hands. "Shema Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai
echad."
Then she drew the cloth from her head and wrapped the baby. All over Aragon
that night, Jews were being forced to the baptismal font, driven to conversion
by fear of exile. Ruti, exultant, defiant, had made a gentile into a Jew.
Because his mother was not Jewish, a ritual immersion had been necessary. And
now it was done. Even as the emotion of the moment brimmed within her, Ruti was
counting up the days. She did not have very long. By the eighth day, she would
need to find someone to perform his bris. If all went well, this would be in
their new land. And on that day, she would give the child his name.
She turned back toward the beach, hugging the baby tightly to her breast. She
remembered she had the book, wrapped in hide, slung in a shoulder sack. She
pulled on the straps to raise it out of the reach of the waves. But a few drops
of saltwater found their way inside her careful wrappings. When the water dried
on the page, there would be a stain, and a residue of crystals, that would last
five hundred years.
In the morning, Ruti would begin to look for a ship. She would pay the passage
for herself and the baby with the silver medallion that she had pried off the
leather binding, and where they made landfall—if they made landfall—would rest
in the hand of God.
But tonight she would go to her father’s grave. She would say the Kaddish and
introduce him to his Jewish grandson, who would carry his name across the seas
and into whatever future God saw fit to grant them.
(Pages 275-276)
We do not feel the sun here. Even after the passage of years, that is still
the hardest thing for me. At home, I lived in brightness. Heat baked the yellow
earth and dried the roof thatch until it crackled.
Here, the stone and tile are cool always, even at midday. Light steals in among
us like an enemy, fingering its narrow way through the lattices or falling from
the few high panes in dulled fragments of emerald and ruby.
It is hard to do my work in such light. I must be always moving the page to get
a small square of adequate brightness, and this constant fidgeting breaks my
concentration. I set down my brush and stretch my hands. The boy beside me rises
unbidden and goes to fetch the sherbet girl. She is new here, in the house of
Netanel ha- Levi, and I wonder how he came by her. Perhaps, like me, she was the
gift of some grateful patient. If so, a generous one. She is a skilled servant,
gliding across the tiles silent as silk. I nod, and she kneels, pouring a
rust-colored liquid that I do not recognize. "It is pomegranate," she says, in
an unfamiliar tribal accent. She has green eyes, like agate stone, but her skin
gleams with the tones of some southern land. As she bends over the goblet, the
cloth at her throat falls away and I note that her neck is the golden brown of a
bruised peach. I puzzle on what hues I would combine to render this. The sherbet
is good; she has mixed it so that the tartness of the fruit still tells beneath
the syrup.
Stranger than fiction, blending tragedy and farce, How to Create the Perfect Wife is an engrossing tale of the radicalism, and deep contradictions, at the heart of the Enlightenment.
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