Free The Sacrifice of Tamar by Naomi Ragen Page B

would be good to think that, and it would please Peter enormously if he knew. But, truthfully, she didn’t have the sense of ease that would give substance to such an assertion. All there was, really, was a blankness, a void of feeling, as if that whole part of her life was encased in a sealed vacuum bag that prevented any smell or taste or living image to emerge and confront her indifference. Her memories were like the dead cremated beyond form, she thought. They’d lost all semblance to truth, evoking only mild wonderment and a slight suspicion and distaste. They’d lost their power to move her.
    It was better not to think about the past at all. Like a walk on a newly tarred roof, it was sticky and unpleasant and potentiallydangerous, filling your lungs with a bad dose of pollution and ruining things with indelible stains. And once you started walking, you never got to the end, you just stayed there bogged down in the middle.
    She lifted the dress over her head and threw it on the floor, lying back on the silk sheets, her arm flung across her eyes. The Past. The streets of Brooklyn. The Hasidim singing at her father’s table, their sidecurls bobbing, their mouths, dark pink against their black beards, swaying and singing until the room rocked with untainted joy.
    Untainted joy. Tainted joy. Very, very tainted joy. Yehoshua, Cliff, Peter. Brooklyn, Maui, Manhattan.
    It was that decorator, she decided. It was cinnabar, she thought furiously. Why else would she have started thinking any of these things? She would not think of them again, she swore, picking up the ringing phone.
    “Hadassah?”
    No one ever called her that anymore. “Who is this?”
    “It’s Tamar.”
    “Tamar?” She shook her head incredulously. The Past. “How did you find me?” she said with no pretense at cordiality. They had not exactly parted on good terms on that dark, dangerous Brooklyn street the summer they were fifteen. In fact, she had promised then and there never to speak to Tamar Gottlieb again as long as she lived.
    There was a pause. What was that sound? Water running? A soap opera? A sob? “Well, how are you, Tamar?”
    “Hadassah, can I come to talk to you?”
    For Pete’s sake! “Well, sure, I’d love to one of these days, but just, you see, right now, everything is sort of crazy…”
    They hadn’t been friends for so long. And even when they were, when they’d gone to the same school and practically lived next door to each other, there had always been thatantagonism… And now, after all this time… What did she want?
    “Did my parents ask you to call me?” she asked sharply.
    “No—nothing like that. It’s me. Please, Hadassah. I’m in terrible trouble, and I don’t know what to do.”
    “Go to your local Orthodox rabbi. Or better yet, go to my father, the great Kovnitzer Rebbe. He knows everything. I thought you knew that,” she said, lighting a cigarette and taking a deep, nervous drag.
    “Please, Hadassah. I know a lot has happened. But I need to talk to someone who won’t judge or preach. Hadassah… I’ve been raped. He was black. I’m pregnant. I don’t know what to…”
    The smoke caught in her lungs, choking her. She gasped for air.
    “Hadassah?”
    “I’m here,” she replied, stunned, appalled, and feeling somehow vindicated. “I can meet you at four, but no later.”
    The Past.

Chapter six
    Orchard Park, Brooklyn, 1955
    In the late 1940s, New York’s Hasidim and the Orthodox middle-class children of devout immigrants trickled, then flooded across the Brooklyn Bridge, relinquishing the keys of Williamsburg, Bedford Stuyvesant and Lower Manhattan to the black and Hispanic families who had come after them. Joined by streams of young Orthodox families from East New York, Crown Heights, and Brownsville, they joined forces to found a new outpost in the wilderness where they could build a private little world governed entirely by their own religious beliefs and practices. The result was Orchard