Free One Hundred Philistine Foreskins by Tova Reich

face is blotched, puffy, bags under her eyes, hair in curlers, wearing onlya lacy bra. She’s screaming, “I can’t take it anymore, I can’t take it!” She’s sobbing. People are coming out of the house behind her, moving toward her very slowly. She’s climbed over the parapet now. She’s sitting on the ledge with her legs dangling down—fresh pedicure, pink panties—crying, shoulders heaving. Now she’s screaming again, “I’m jumping, I’m going to jump!” A bunch of kids are standing outside the gate. They’re yelling, “Jump, lady—go on, your majesty, jump!” The people behind her are getting closer, very carefully it looks like, creeping up, no sudden movements, don’t want to alarm her. They’re talking to her. She’s turned around now, maybe to hear what they’re saying, her back is to us. Now she’s sliding down from the parapet, holding on with both hands, she’s hanging there from the ledge over the ground below, the lower half of her body is swinging, rolls of fat between bra and panties, significant cellulite. She’s let go with one hand now. Now she’s let go the other. She’s dropping, she’s falling, can’t tell how many meters to the ground. They’re waiting for her down there—it looks like almost the whole staff is gathered there, holding out plastic trash bins. Thank God, they’ve caught her—she’s saved. She’s in a dumpster, she’ll be recycled. They’ve put on the lid.
    A garbage truck was maneuvering past them toward the president’s house as the procession now wended its way up Jabotinsky Street headed by Temima in her aperion borne aloft by her four Bnei Zeruya with the four armored policemen mounted on their horses riding two on each side. Kol-Isha-Erva thought she recognized the driver. She thought she had also seen him earlier that day—in the shuk of Mea Shearim, sweeping up the stale human refuse with a brush broom, and then later on again in French Square, among the squad of salvagers scooping up the carcass of the dead dog. But she dismissed her ruminations as unworthy. She was stereotyping menials, she admonished herself, they all looked alike to her, she couldn’t tell them apart, and even if an injunction against stereotyping did not exist so far as Kol-Isha-Erva knew in either the Written or the Oral Law, as a woman who had started in a secular place and who could not quite purge herself of the common naive values that had formed her, Kol-Isha-Erva was overcome with shame by the baseness of her private associations and prejudices, she shook her head hard now as if to knock them out of her mind like foul water in her ears.
    From Jabotinsky the procession swung right, in accordance with Temima’s instructions, into David Marcus Street, continuing unimpeded and without further incident past the Jerusalem Theater that was featuring an adaptation of S.Y. Agnon’s unfinished novel, Shira , moving onward alongside a descending stone wall with strange sealed doors set flush in the masonry evoking Temima’s nightmare, following the wall down the hill as they turned left and very soon after came to an abrupt stop on Temima’s clipped command to the head of her Bnei Zeruya— Poh! —at an iron gate. The huskiest of the policemen accompanying them now alit from his horse, proceeded to the gate, unlocked it with a key he drew flamboyantly out of his pocket, threw the gate wide open, mounted his horse again, and nodded to his companions, at which signal all four swiveled the tails and the great defecating rumps of their beasts toward Temima’s congregation and trotted off. Not a soul was surprised by this fanfare of special protection. It merely confirmed yet again how Temima was set apart by an extraordinary endowment of divine personal providence.
    There are eight entrances in the stone walls that surround the