One Hundred Philistine Foreskins Read Online Free Page B

single room upstairs where she was now sitting at the window, preparing to shed even this paltry four cubits for her final and most instructive stop before the grave.
    And while we’re on the subject of women at windows and all the troubles this position has brought down upon them, let us also not neglect to mention King Saul’s daughter, the princess Mikhal, for whom that extravagant show-off David had actually overtipped with two hundred Philistine foreskins though the asking brideprice for her, true, had been the bargain rate of the mere one hundred at which her value had been assessed. Two hundred Philistines for a yield of two hundred foreskins, think about it, maybe circumcised after they were killed, maybe while they were still alive like Dina’s rapist Shekhem and all the men of his town, a major bloodletting, a wild scalping, but David liked to do things big, he liked to make a splash, and Mikhal, after all, was a princess, a Jewish princess, worth every foreskin.
    Mikhal, whose loins must have once throbbed for that irresistible bad boy David so that she even betrayed her father to save him, letting him down out of the window of their bedchamber to escape the assassins the old man had sent after him and tucking idols (What? Another Tanakhi lady, like Rachel Our Mother, who could not bring herself to part with her teraphim ?) in the bed with an absurd tuft of goat hair sticking up on top to trick the pursuers in another of the Bible’s great comic interludes. How much bitterness and loathing and alienation must have encrusted the heart of this degraded woman as she stood years later at the window,a prisoner of the harem, staring down at David in his triumph, observing him as he whirled and leaped half-naked in the street like a lunatic in front of all the riffraff and lowlife, despising him in her heart as he led the processional bearing the Ark of God back to Jerusalem.
    Temima let out a sharp, caustic laugh, like a bark, the first sound she had emitted all morning not counting her prayers, which launched Cozbi and Rizpa straight to the window. There below, turning into the Bukharim Quarter and propelling himself toward them, was a small man girded only in a loincloth and a fringed garment threaded with azure strings and a snug-fitting white crocheted openwork skullcap drawn low over his head, spinning ecstatically like a Sufi or a dervish and singing with such fervor that rills of drool snaked down from his mouth, matting his beard, chanting more than singing, over and over again, the refrain, “Te-Tem-Ima-Temima-from-Brooklyn.”
    â€œIt is Paltiel,” Cozbi said. “They are coming. We better get ready.”
    Forgive me, Paltiel, Temima beseeched him in her heart—not denying, as had Mother Sarah, her indiscretion of laughing at some masculine absurdity. Inwardly she begged him to pardon her. Her laugh that to some ears might have sounded contemptuous had just burst out of her in an unforgiving flash before she had recognized him as her own son, in the fraction of a second when she had seen him coldly through a stranger’s eyes.
    At the head of the great throng that began streaming into the Bukharim Quarter behind Paltiel, heavy with women and girls, but also including multiple kosher prayer quorums of tens of men, surging forward to the front of her shul, dancing, stamping their feet, twirling, clapping their hands, swaying, many bearing musical instruments, drums, tambourines, rattles, bells, roaring, ululating, whooping, chanting the Te-Tem-Ima-Temima-from-Brooklyn mantra, she now also easily spotted her eighth and last child, the daughter Zippi she had with Abba Kadosh. Temima’s eyes even in the dimness of age were instantly snagged by the bright yellows and reds of the African kente cloth turban that wrapped the mass of Zippi’s dreadlocks and the coordinated robe that cloaked her matronly form, the solid protruding bolsters of breasts and buttocks. In each of