One Hundred Philistine Foreskins Read Online Free Page A

another, the hens came right up to Rizpa, then known as Mazal, in her kitchen and willed her to slaughter them and dump them in the soup. But Paltiel had informed his mother that, now, with the far-reaching tentacles of his computer network, they were beginning to make headway in learning the fates of Rizpa’s babies; the graves in which they were supposed to have been buried had been opened and discovered to be empty, for one thing, and there was nowalso an army of Sephardi activists and hotheads ready to grab by force if necessary swabs of DNA from the insides of the mouths of extra dark Satmar Hasidim with extra corkscrewed sidecurls and more refined physiques briskly walking down the streets of Mea Shearim and Bnei B’rak in Israel, Williamsburg in Brooklyn, or Monroe in New York State, bizarrely speaking and gesticulating in Yiddish, and match this evidence against the genetic map of the eternally bereft and inconsolable mothers. Even if the Satmars didn’t believe in DNA and regarded it as idolatry, the authorities had faith in science, which in the end mattered, it mattered on this earth.
    And not only that. Thanks to the powers of his computers, Paltiel was now happy to report he believed they were also closing in on the pimp who went under the name Stalinsky who had trafficked Cozbi to Tel Aviv in the days when she was known as Anna Oblonskaya with the promise of a job as a childcare provider in the home of an oligarch living in a guarded compound of stupefying ostentation near Herzliah, robbed her of her passport, drugged her, raped her, beat her, and then sold her into prostitution in the Monopol Hotel in Tel Aviv on the corner of Allenby Street and HaYarkon. “In this day and age,” as Paltiel explained to his mother, “one-on-one is just no longer cost-effective.” One-on-one had to be reserved only for the clients of MaTov who chose the Diamond Exclusive option, which for an undisclosed fee entitled them to a private audience of maximum thirty-minutes duration with the world-renowned master teacher and guru, the charismatic wise woman and reputed miracle worker, HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, who revealed to them many things about themselves that they both knew and did not know—rendering it all the more imperative, as Paltiel reminded her repeatedly, that she no longer indulge in spontaneous personal ministrations with any single individual, including (and especially since she no longer went out anymore) any of the followers who gathered around her bed to soak in her vibrations night after night. Such simple human encounters were a luxury of the past, Paltiel stressed, they would fatally drive down the market value of the Diamond Exclusive if word got out that the same product could be gotten free of charge if you came to the nightly Torah salon at Ima Temima’s bedside and snatched an unguarded opening to lean over and steal what others paid for, deposit into her ear the burden of your troubles and be healed.
    Now when the purchasers of the Diamond Exclusive option arrivedthey would be ushered up the stairs behind Cozbi in full distracting motion and conducted to one of the benches on the balcony that constituted the rear portion of the second floor of the building beyond the living quarters, and that, in the old days, had served as the men’s prayer section. There they would sit obediently waiting to be summoned into Ima Temima’s bedchamber for their appointment, gazing down at the women’s section below, the long narrow sanctuary and study hall with its rows of dark wooden benches and tables and stacks of worn volumes and its satin-sheathed ark housing the holy scrolls and the podium from which the exalted and universally renowned HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, Ima Temima, may she live on for many good long years, had presided and taught through her veil lest her audience be blinded by her light until she had willingly and deliberately contracted her world to a