“Basha Leah”

By Brenda Miller

...You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid...
-T.S. Eliot

I

In Portugal I walk slowly, like the old Portuguese men: hands crossed behind my back, head tilted forward, lips moving soundlessly around a few simple words. This posture comes naturally in a country wedded to patience, where the bark of the cork oak takes seven years to mature, and olives swell imperceptibly within their leaves. Food simmers a long time -- kid stew, bread soup, roast lamb. Celtic dolmens rise slab-layered in fields hazy with lupine and poppies.

It's very late. I've drunk a lot of wine. I don't sense the cords that keep my body synchronized, only the sockets of my shoulders, my fingers hooked on my wrist, the many bones of my feet articulating each step. I'm flimsy as a walking skeleton; a strong breeze might scatter me through the eucalyptus.

A few days ago, in a sixteenth-century church in Évora, I entered the "Chapel of the Bones." Skulls and ribs and femurs mortared the walls, the bones of 5,000 monks arranged in tangled, overlapping tiers. A yellow light bulb burned in the dank ceiling. Two mummified corpses flanked the altar. A placard above the lintel read: Nos ossos que aqui estamos, Pelos vossos esperamos. "We bones here are waiting for yours..." Visitors murmured all around me, but not in prayer; none of us knelt in front of that dark shrine. What kind of prayer, I wondered, does a person say in the presence of so many bodies, jumbled into mosaic, with no prospect of an orderly resurrection? A prayer of terror, I imagined, or an exclamation of baffled apology.

II

On Shabbat, the observant Jew is given an extra soul, a Neshama Yeterah that descends from the tree of life. This ancillary soul enables a person to "celebrate with great joy, and even to eat more than he is capable of during the week." The Shabbat candles represent this spirit, and the woman of the house draws the flame toward her eyes three times to absorb the light.

In California, one rarely heard about such things. We grilled cheeseburgers on the barbecue, and bought thinly sliced ham at the deli, ate bacon with our eggs before going to Hebrew School. Occasionally we visited my grandparents in New York; they lived in a Brooklyn brownstone, descendants of Russian immigrants, and they murmured to each other in Yiddish in their tiny kitchen. They reflexively touched the mezuzah as they came and went from their house. When I watched my grandmother cooking knishes or stuffed cabbage, I imagined her in babushka and shawl, bending over the sacred flames while her husband and daughters gazed at her in admiration. So I assumed my mother must have, at some time, lit the Shabbat candles and waited for the Neshama Yeterah to flutter into her body like a white, flapping bird.

But when I ask my mother about this, she says no, she never did light the candles. "I didn't really understand," she says. "I thought the candles were lit only in memory of your parents, after they died." She remembers her mother performed a private ceremony at the kitchen counter every Friday evening, but didn't call for her daughters to join in the prayers. My grandfather worked nights as a typesetter; he might have worked on Shabbat, doing whatever-was necessary to feed his family in Brooklyn during the Depression, and so my grandmother stood there alone, in her apron, practicing those gestures that took just a few moments: the rasp of the match, the kindle of the wick, the sweep of the arms. She did this after the chicken had roasted, the potatoes had boiled, and the cooking flames were extinguished. But my mother, this American girl with red lips and cropped hair, was never tutored in the physical acts of this womanly ritual.

The Neshama Yeterah departs with great commotion on Saturday night. To revive from the Shabbat visitation, a person must sniff a bouquet of spices "meant to comfort and stimulate the ordinary, weekday soul which remains." The ordinary, weekday soul? Does he pace through the arteries and lungs, hands behind his back, finding fault with the liver, the imperfect workings of the heart? "Some cinnamon is all I get?" he mutters. "Some cloves?" In my family, the word soul was rarely mentioned, but my mother and my grandmother chanted the Jewish hymn, "eat, eat," as if they knew our ordinary, everyday souls were always hungry. As if they knew we had within us these little mouths constantly open, sharp beaks ravenous for chicken liver and brisket, latkes and pickles and rolls.

III

Outside the spa town of Luso, in the Buçaco woods, in a monastery built by the Carmelite Monks, the shrine to Mary's breast flickers inside a tiny room. I open the cork door, sidle in sideways, and face a portrait of the sorrowful Mary who holds her naked breast between outstretched fingers, one drop of milk lingering on her nipple. The baby Jesus lies faceless in her arms, almost outside the frame, the lines of focus drawn to the exposed breast and the milk about to be spilled. Hundreds of wax breasts burn on a high table, and tucked among these candles are hundreds of children -- faded Polaroids of infants in diapers, formal portraits of children with slicked-back hair, stiff ruffles, and bow ties. The children's eyes, moist in the candlelight, peer out from among the breasts and the bowls of silver coins.

The tour guide describes the shrine in Portuguese, using his hands to make the universal symbol for breast. I catch the word leite; of course the milk is worshipped here, not the breast itself, that soft chalice of pleasure and duty. I want to ask: what are the words of the prayer? Is the prayer a prophylactic or a cure? But my language here is halting and ridiculous. Whispers linger in the alcove, Por favor, Maria, Obrigada, Por favor.

I want to kindle the wick on Mary's breast, but I don't know the proper way -- how much money to drop in the bowl, or the posture and volume of prayer.

At home, in Seattle, I volunteer once a week on the infant's ward at Children's Hospital. I hold babies for three hours, and during that time become nothing but a pair of arms, a beating heart, a core of heat. I'm not mindful of any prayer rising in me as we rock, only a wordless, off-key hum. Most of these children eat through a tube slid gently under the skin on the backs of their hands; pacifiers lie gummy on their small pillows as they sleep. I'm sure there's a chapel in the hospital where candles stutter, and a font of holy water drawn from the tap and blessed. Maybe a crucifix, but more likely secular stained glass illuminated by a wan bulb. Mary's breast will not be displayed, of course -- the distance between these two places is measured in more than miles -- but the succor of Mary's milk might be sought nonetheless.

It will be quiet. The quiet is what's necessary, I suppose, and an opportunity to face the direction where God might reside. I imagine there are always a few people in the chapel, their lips moving in various languages of prayer, including the tongue of grief.

IV

Our synagogue was near the freeway in Van Nuys, California, and it looked like a single-story elementary school, with several cluttered bulletin boards, heavy plate-glass doors, gray carpet thin as felt. White candles flickered in the temple; the Torah was sheathed in purple velvet; gold tassels dangled from the pointed rollers. Black letters, glossy and smooth as scars, rose from the surface of the violet mantle. When the rabbi, or a bar-mitzvah boy, brought the Torah through the congregation, cradling it in his arms, I kissed my fingers and darted out my hand to touch it, like the rest of the women.

In Hebrew School, we learned the greatest sin was to worship a false idol. "God is not a person," my teacher said, "but God is everywhere." The Torah, though we respected it, was not God. The alphabet, though it was a powerful tool, was not God. Abraham and Isaac and Moses were great men, not God. "God is everywhere," my teacher said. "Like the air." I learned about Exodus. I learned about Noah's ark. I learned about the Burning Bush. These miracles were played out by faceless figures smoothed onto the felt board. The twenty-two letters of the alphabet paraded like amiable cartoons across the top of the classroom wall, and I was called by my Hebrew name -- Basha Leah, which over time was shortened to Batya. I preferred the elegance of Basha Leah, enfolded by lacy veils, while Batya turned me into a lumpy dullard, dressed in burlap, switching after the mules.

In the temple, the drone of the prayers rose in a voice close to anger from the men, nearer to anguish from the women, then ebbed into a muttered garble of tongues. I tried not to look too hard at the rabbi, lest I should worship him. I averted my eyes from the face of the cantor. I ended up staring at my feet, squished and aching in their snub-nosed shoes. My mother's hand fell like a feathery apology on the back of my neck, and I swayed uncomfortably in place. The ache in my feet rose through my body until it reached my eye sockets.

"I've had it to up here," my mother sometimes cried, her hand chopping the air like a salute at eye level, grief and frustration rising in her visible as water. In the synagogue, waters of boredom lapped through my body, pouring into every cavity, like a chase scene from "Get Smart." I imagined my soul as a miniature Max, scrambling away, climbing hand over hand up my spine to perch on the occipital ridge until the waters began to recede.

V

There's another kind of soul that enters the body -- a dybbuk, "one who cleaves." A dybbuk speaks in tongues, commits slander, possibly murder, using the body of a weak person as a convenient vehicle. If roused and defeated, this soul will drain out through the person's little toe.

The word dybbuk is in me, part of my innate vocabulary, though I don't know how. Perhaps from the murmured conversations of my relatives in Brooklyn and their neighbors, the women with the billowing housedresses and the fleshy upper arms. I was only an occasional visitor to these boroughs saturated with odors of mothballs and boiled chicken, soot and melted snow. I may have heard the Yiddish words in the exchanges between my paternal grandmother and the customers in her knitting shop; I blended into a wall of yam, camouflaged by the many shades of brown, in a trance of boredom, as the women clustered near the cash register. "That one's a golem," they might say, nodding in the direction of a simple-minded man in the street. A golem meaning a zombie, a creature shaped from soil into human form, animated by the name of God slipped under the tongue. Or, "He's possessed of a dybbuk," they might whisper of a neighbor's child gone bad. They gossiped about nebiches and schlemeils, the bumbling fools who never quite got anything right, swindled from their money or parted from their families through ignorance or bad luck.

Sometimes I sat next to my grandfather after he woke in the afternoons, and he explained the transformation of hot lead into letters, the letters into words, the words into stories. I held my name, printed upside down and backwards on a strip of heavy metal. My grandmothers pinched my cheek and called me bubbula -- little mother. They cried "God Forbid!" to ward off any harm. On Passover I opened the front door and hollered for Elijah to come in; I watched the wineglass shake as the angel touched his lips to the Manishevitz. I closed my eyes in front of the Hanukkah candles and prayed, fervently, for roller skates.

VI

In the central chapel of the Carmelite monastery in the Buçaco woods, dusty porcelain saints enact their deaths inside scratched glass cases. Above each case the haloed saint, calm and benedictory, gazes down on the lurid scene below: a small single bed, a man's legs twisting the bedclothes, his thin arms reaching out in desperation. The witnesses (a doctor called in the middle of the night? A maid, nauseated by the bloody cough of her master? A scribe, summoned to write the last words?) recoil from the bed in a scattered arc.

And the saint? Somehow he's beamed up and transformed into the overhanging portrait, the eyes half-closed, the halo pressing into place the immaculately combed hair. One finger touches his lips as if to hush the tormented figure below. His arms have flesh; the lips are moist; the background is lush and green.

We have our heaven, too, though I don't remember the mention of Paradise at Temple Ner Tamid. Paradise, I thought, was for the Gentiles; when my Christian friends asked me if I would go to heaven, I sorrowfully shook my head no. They looked at each other, and then at me, touching my shoulder in sweet-natured commiseration. "We don't believe in Jesus," I said, my voice trailing off. I thought our religion was about food. It was about study, hard work, persecution, and grief. But I've since learned there is a Paradise for the Jews; it is, in fact, the Garden of Eden, where the Tree of Life grows dead center. "So huge is this tree that it would take five hundred years to pass from one side of its trunk to the other." We even have a hell: Gehinnom, where "malicious gossip is punished by hanging from one's tongue, and Balaam, who enticed the Israelites into sexual immorality, spends his time immersed in boiling semen." Of course, such things weren't mentioned when I was a child.

But my mother covered the mirrors with black cloth when her father died. She sat in mourning, with her mother, for seven days. She may have even spoken the Kaddish for twelve months, since my grandfather had no sons. Certainly she lit the Kaddish candle on Yom Kippur. But I was a child. I didn't listen, or I didn't understand, that the soul remains attached to the dead body for seven days, and takes twelve arduous months -- ascending upward, flopping downward, cleaning itself in a river of fire -- to enter Paradise. I didn't realize the soul needs our help, in the form of many and repeated prayers.

Before me now, a saint is dying in his rectangular case, on a narrow bed covered with a single woolen blanket. I surreptitiously cross myself, the way I've seen people do. The gesture, so delicate, touching the directional points of my body -- my head, my heart, my two arms -- seems far removed from the passion of Christ. It doesn't feel like a crucifix I inscribe on my body, but the points of a geometrically perfect circle. I curl one fist inside the other, and I kiss my knuckles, I bow my head. I don't know if I'm praying. It feels more like I'm talking to myself.

VII

Swaying in prayer is "a reflection of the flickering light of the Jewish soul, ... or it provides much-needed exercise for scholars who spend most of their day sitting and studying." I get out my yoga mat; I sway down into a forward bend and stay there a long time, breathing, and then roll up, one vertebra on top of the other until I stand perfectly straight, aligned. I think about moving a little, and I do, like the oracle's pendulum that swings to and fro in answer to an unspoken question.

VIII

When I was sixteen, I became president of my Jewish Youth group, and we set out to create meaningful Shabbat ceremonies, feeding each other challah on Friday night, reading passages from Rod McKuen, holding hands in a circle and rapping about our relationships. We petitioned for and received permission for a slumber party, properly chaperoned by our counselors -- college students in their early twenties. The minutes from the planning meetings illustrate our real concerns: "It was decided no one under the age of twenty can sleep on the couches." "Challah will be split equally before anyone begins to eat." "Ronnie says no wine. So Mike's in charge of the grape juice." We rented spin-art machines. We got a ping-pong table. We decided to give Ronnie a bar mitzvah.

Ronnie had a black mustache and dreamy brown eyes. He wore tight jeans and read Dylan Thomas. When he confessed that he'd never been bar mitzvahed, we clucked over him like a gaggle of grandmothers. We made plans in the bathroom. We took out every prayerbook we could find. We found him a yarmulke and a dingy tallis to drape across his shoulders. "Baruch Atah Adonai," we chanted in unison, "elohanu, melach ha'olum..." We closed our eyes, and the prayers trailed off when we didn't know the words; we moved our lips in the parched, desperate way of the old people in synagogue. We swayed back and forth; we felt mature, and very wise. Someone gave a speech enumerating all of Ronnie's strong points. Ronnie gave a speech telling us how he expected to improve in the coming years. We improvised a Torah with pillows, and we made him walk among us, beneath an arch made of our intertwined hands.

I think he cried then, his lips scrunched tight together, a Kleenex in his hand. I remember his thanks, and I remember us sitting in a circle around him, our eager hands damp with sweat, our satisfied faces aglow.

IX

I call home from a post office in Lisbon. My booth, number four, is hot and dusty, my hands already clumsy with sweat, and I dial the many numbers I need to connect me with home. Like the Kabbalists, manipulating the letters of the alphabet, I work this dreary magic. Travel has not agreed with me. I have a fever, and I want to lie down, but my pension has a dark, steep staircase and soggy newspapers in the windows holding back the rain.

My mother answers the phone. I picture her at the kitchen counter: the long wall of photographs tacked together on a bulletin board -- all the children, my two brothers and I, peering out at my mother from our many ages. She sits in the green vinyl chair, reflexively picking up her ballpoint to doodle. The lace shalom hangs motionless in the entry. A red clay menorah sits on the mantel, the candle holders shaped like chubby monks, their hands uplifted.

"How's everything?" I ask. We talk in a rush. "How are you?" she asks again and again. Not until I'm almost ready to hang up does she mention: "Well there is a little problem."

"What?"

"Everything's a little meshuga," she says, and her voice gets that catch; I can see her biting her lower lip, pushing her hand up into the hair at her forehead. "I'll put your father on," she says, and I hear the phone change hands.

"Your mother," he says.

"What?"

"Your mother had to have a hysterectomy. They found some cancer."

"What?"

"She's okay," my father says. "Everything's okay."

"A hysterectomy?"

"They got it all, the cancer. They found it early enough. Don't worry."

I'm breaking out in a damp sweat across my face, under my arms. I can't think of anything to say but, "Why didn't she tell me herself?"

"Don't worry," my father says. "Everything's fine."

I decide to believe him. After a few more distance-filled exchanges, our voices overlapping with the delay, I hang up. I push my way past the people waiting for my booth, I pay my escuedos, I walk out on the Avenida Da Liberdade among the taxis and the buses. I start walking to the north, but I don't know where I'm going, so I turn around and head to the south along the busy, tree-lined boulevard. I stumble past the National Theater, past a vendor selling brass doorknockers the shape of a hand. What am I looking for? A synagogue? Or another shrine, this one to Mary's womb?

"In the womb a candle burns," the Kabbalah tells us, "the light of which enables the embryo to see from one end of the world to the other. One of the angels teaches it the Torah, but just before birth the angel touches the embryo on the top lip, so it forgets all it has learnt, hence the cleavage on a person's upper lip."

I want to light a candle, the flame sputtering in a bed of salt water and blood. If I had the lace scarf my grandmother gave me when she died, I might slip into a stone synagogue, cover my head and follow the words of the Torah. But I don't know how. I don't know to whom I'd be praying; I thought we weren't allowed to worship a human God, so I eradicated the concept of God entirely. It was all a mistake, I want to say now. I wasn't listening. I don't know how to take the alphabet and assemble the letters into a prayer.

There is a Kabbalah tale about an illiterate man who merely uttered the Hebrew alphabet, trusting that God would turn the letters into the necessary words. His prayers, the story goes, were quite potent. But I can hardly remember the alphabet. Alef, Gimmel, Chai... I don't remember the Hebrew word for please. I remember the words Aba, Ima. Father, Mother. I remember the letters tripping across the ceiling, the letters minus their vowels, invisible sounds we needed to learn by heart.

X

A touch of the angel's finger, and knowledge ceases. I touch my lip, the cleavage. Do you remember? I ask myself. Do you? Something glimmers, like a stone worn an odd color under the stream, but my vision is clouded by a froth of rushing water. Perhaps knowledge exists in the amnion; the fluid is knowledge itself, and the angel's fingernail is sharp; his touch splits the sac, and drains us dumb.

The mikveh is a gathering of living waters -- pure water from rain or a natural spring. This public bath was the center of any Jewish village; the water refined the body, washed off any unclean souls residing there. A woman stepping into these baths purified herself before marital relations with her husband; on emergence the first object she spied determined the kind of child she might conceive. If she saw a horse, this meant a happy child. A bird might equal spiritual beauty. If she saw an inauspicious omen -- a dog, say, with its ugly tongue, or a swine -- she could return to the bath and start again.

"The Talmud tells how Rabbi Yochanan, a Palestinian sage of handsome appearance, used to sit at the entrance to the mikveh, so that women would see him and have beautiful children like him. To those who questioned his behavior, he answered that he was not troubled by unchaste thoughts on seeing the women emerge, for to him they were like white swans."

What do I see when I step from my tub? My own body, lean and young in the mirror, kneeling to pull the plug and scrub the white porcelain. What do I see when I step from the baths of the Luso spa? Water arcing from the fountain, and all the Portuguese women gathered round its many spouts: bending forward, kneeling, holding out cups and jugs to be filled. A grandmother -- in black scarf, wool skirt, and thick stockings -- turns to me and smiles.

XI

At my cousin Murray's house, brisket and matzoh balls and potato kugel lay heavy on the oak table. The curtains were drawn; I think of them as black, but they couldn't have been. They were probably maroon, and faintly ribbed like corduroy. I remember an easy chair; and my cousin in the easy chair looking too tense to be reclined; he should have been ramrod straight, the murmur of relatives lapping against him. My memory is hazy with the self-centered fog of childhood, the deep boredom, my eyes at table height, scanning the food.

"If only she'd gotten the dog," someone murmured, not to anyone in particular. This must have been a funeral. I remember my cousin Anita being "found." I didn't understand what that meant, but my cousins were sitting in the living room, covering their faces with their hands. Their yarmulkes slipped sideways off the crowns of their head. I remember the gesture, that's all -- three grown men, slumped in chairs, their hands covering their eyes as if they couldn't bear to see any longer. As if they had already seen too much.

I don't think I went to the service. All I remember clearly is the food on the table: platters of chicken, congealing; baskets of knotted rolls; tureens of yellowish soup. And the men in the living room, so contorted in their grief. When I think of my cousins, I see them framed between the legs of adults, in a triangle of light, frozen. No one ate. All that food: for the extra souls, the one extra soul who wouldn't leave the room, even though the burial must have taken place according to Jewish Law, as soon as possible. Someone must have washed the body, anointed her with oil, wrapped her in a shroud. But a soul hovered in the corner of the room, a darkness smudging the comers of my vision. Eat, someone said, it is good to eat, and a plate was brought into my hands.

XII

"One who cleaves." The definition of the word "cleave" is twofold and contradictory: to cleave means both to split apart and to adhere. Perhaps one is not possible without the other. Perhaps we need to break open before anything can enter us. Or maybe we have to split apart that to which we cling fast.

In yoga class, my teacher tells us to "move from the inner body." We glide our arms and our legs through a substance "thicker than air, like deep water." We swim through the postures. The Sphinx pose. Sun Salute. Tree. I generate intent before the muscles follow. I breathe deeply, I stretch sideways, I reach up, I bring my hands together at my heart. Namasté, I whisper. Namasté. I know my access to composure is through attention to the pathways and cavities of my body, so I sit cross-legged, my forehead bent to the ground in a posture of deep humility. Sometimes, then, I feel whatever dybbuks cling inside me loosen their hold; they begin the long slide down my skeleton to drain out through my little toe.

XIII

I have a snapshot taken of me when I was eighteen. I've got long straight hair, and I'm wearing a Saint Christopher medal around my neck. It falls between my breasts. On another, shorter chain, I wear a gold chai, the Hebrew letter for "life." It clings to the bare skin between my collarbones.

The medal was given to me by my first boyfriend -- a boy I cleaved to, a boy by whom I was cleaved, split apart. I was crazy for him. I wanted the medal because I had seen it on his chest; I had gripped it in my fingers as we made love. He draped the pendant over my head, and kissed me between the eyes.

Eighteen years later, I still have Saint Christopher -- a gnarled old man carrying a child on his shoulder, a knotted staff clutched in one hand. He dangles off the edge of my windowsill, next to a yad amulet inset with a stone from the Dead Sea. I have candles on the windowsill, their flames swaying to and fro, like little people in prayer.

A Catholic friend tells me that Saint Christopher is no longer a saint; the Vatican has declared him a non-entity. His life is now mere fable about the Christ child crossing a river on the ferryman's shoulders, growing so heavy he became the weight of every bird and tree and animal, the combined tonnage of mankind's suffering. But the ferryman, being a good man, kept at his task, his knees buckling, his back breaking, until he had safely ferried the small child to shore. "It's just a story," my friend says, but I don't understand how this tale differs from the other biblical accounts: the walking on water, the bread into body, the wine into blood. "It is different," my friend assures me. "Saint Christopher never existed."

But I know people still pray to him. They believe he intervenes in emergency landings, rough storms at sea, close calls on the freeway. Words of terror and belief form a presence too strong to be revoked. I still take him on the road; it couldn't hurt, as my grandmother used to say, with that small Jewish shrug, an arch of her plucked eyebrows. All this, whatever you call it -- superstition, religion, mysticism -- do what makes you happy, bubbala.

XIV

Alef, Gimmel, Chai... I recite the letters I know, and they grow steady as an incantation, a continual flame. The Kabbalists manipulated the letters into the bodies of living animals and men. They know an alphabet behind the alphabet, a whisper that travels up the Tree of Life like water.

White swans. I dream I am wrapped only in a white sheet, and the Chasidic men turn their square shoulders against me; they will not touch me, they will not talk to me, because I am a woman. I am unclean and dangerous. If I do not follow the law -- if I do not light the Sabbath lamp, if I touch the parchment of the Torah, if I look at a man while I'm menstruating -- I will be punished by death in childbirth. Punished when I'm most vulnerable, during the act that makes me most a woman. But what about Miriam? I plead. What about Rachel, and Leah, and Ruth? They were women. They saved us. It is a woman who brings the Sabbath light into the home. It is a woman who resides as a divine spirit in the Wailing Wall. But the men, in their black coats, their black hats -- the men turn away. They ignore me. I grip the white sheet tighter against me as the men file into the synagogue, muttering.

XV

I'm staying in a pink mansion on a hill overlooking Luso. It used to be the residence of a countess, and the breakfast waitress makes fun of my halting Portuguese. "Pequeno Leite," I say in my submissive voice as she raises the pot of warm milk. I only want a little, but she drenches my coffee anyway, laughing.

In the evening I stroll down a winding street, past two women waiting at their windows, their wrinkled elbows resting on the sill. I don't know what they're waiting for: children to come home, or perhaps the pork to grow tender in the stew. They wave to me, amused. Another woman splashes bleach outside her doorway and kneels to scrub the already whitened stone. Bougain-villea, bright as blood, clings to her windowsill. Men are nowhere in sight; this appears to be a province maintained entirely by women. I make my way to a stone bridge and watch the sun sink beyond fields of flowering potatoes.

In the distance, women harvest vegetables in a field. I think they are women, but I can't be sure; all I see are the silhouettes of their bodies bending, and lifting, and bending again. These women -- are they the ones who walk to the monastery and tuck pictures of their children between Mary's breasts? Do they pray before that altar? I don't know; they seem always to be working, or resting from their work.

Back in the square, the Portuguese men emerge to sit in clusters, wearing hats and wool vests; they walk down the lanes, their hands behind their backs, or they stand together, leaning on wooden canes. I sit on a bench facing the fountain, and the men converse around me, all inflection and vowels, grunts and assents. I'm silent as a hub, turned by words without meaning, without sense.

XVI

The luz bone is a hub, unyielding. "An indestructible bone, shaped like an almond, at the base of the spine, around which a new body will be formed at the Resurrection of the Dead." The luz bone feeds only off the Melaveh Malkah, the meal eaten on Saturday night to break the Sabbath. It's a bone without sin, taking no part in Adam's gluttony in the garden; so our new bodies on the day of judgment will be sweet and pure.

For proof of its durability, three men in a Jewish village tested a luz bone. (Like magpies, did they pluck the bone out of the rubble of an old man? or of a woman dead in childbirth? or of a child?) They smuggled the luz bone to the outskirts of their village, to a blacksmith's shop, the fires glowing red in the stove. They thrust the vertebra in the coals; they plunged it under water; they beat upon it with sledgehammers. I can see them, these men dressed in ripe wool, sweating, their black hats tilted back on their heads. They hold it up to the light of the moon, the bone glossy from its trials, but intact. It's smooth as an egg, oval and warm.

XVII

"... those who bow to God in prayer are thought to guarantee themselves a resurrected body, because they stimulate the luz bone when they bend their spine."

Downward-Facing Dog: the sit-bones lifted upward. Forward bend. Triangle. Warrior I, II, III. Sphinx. Cobra. Cow. These words come to me like directives, and my body twists and bends and turns, gyrating in a circle around the luz bone.

The Tree. I balance on one foot, the other pressed into my thigh. I put my hands together in front of my chest. I breathe. I look past my reflection in the window; I focus my gaze on the trunk of a holly. I grow steady and invisible. The alphabet hangs from my branches like oddly-shaped fruit.

Child's pose. I curl into a fetal position on the mat.

Nu? I hear my mother's voice across a great distance. Nu, Faygalleh? She pats one hand on her swollen abdomen, and holds it there. I want to answer, but from my mouth comes a watery language no one can understand.