SZ, her old false Messiah, wanted in: Jewish people know better, something must be done.
KZ: What is to be done?
SZ: Start from zero again.
§
I did not think that Barbra would ever let Joel near her again after the time with ghb in the basement, but I just stood there and watched a second dog spray take place. He was rutting her in a ski mask in our fucking basement. It took me a second to piece it all together. This was a rape scene. A break-in. The sexual criminal broke into the foreign student’s basement apartment and in this scene they have sex as if she is terrified. I could tell she was half-heartedly pushing him away. From her fake moans of terror, she was directing him.
‘Call me a slut,’ Barbra said under Joel’s grimy, beige hand. ‘International slut.’
Before Sabbatai Zevi was imprisoned, he encouraged women to ‘release their libidos’ from the ‘shackles of shame.’ In the new world to come, everything was game.
‘Slut. Jewish slut?’ Joel laughed. ‘That’s what he calls you? I seriously don’t get what you like about him.’
Me? Why the fuck was he talking about me?
‘He’s my friend,’ Barbra slurred as Joel kept on bucking. ‘I can say anything to him.’
Barbra had told me that she got suspended from school when she was thirteen years old because she punched a girl in the face who called her kushi. The principal of the school told Barbra it was her fault. The girl lost a tooth. Blood spurted from her mouth. The principal said that Barbra had to work harder to be ‘good.’
‘What about high school? Was it different?’
‘Yeah,’ Barbra said. ‘Because I had tits and ass then!’
‘But what about the other Ethiopian kids?’ I continued. ‘Why didn’t you guys band together? Challenge things?’
‘You can’t intellectualize your childhood,’ she said.
By the end of the summer, I realized that Barbra was not ever an actress-in-training. She directed things.
And I realized that Sabbatai Zevi’s recognition of female power had been completely paved over in Judaism for me. Until I met the Ethiopian-Israeli orphan, Judaism was all stodgy, male-led, rule-abiding.
Joel had his hands around Barbra’s neck. He kept trying to kiss her and she kept spitting at him. He fucked like a sprinter. Barbra started hyperventilating.
My teeth touched each other in my mouth like sheet metal. I stomped my feet in the army boots.
‘Motherfucker. You said he wasn’t here.’
Barbra looked at me, flushed. Joel yanked up his shorts.
It occurred to me that Sabbatai Zevi’s upside-down behaviour in Judaism was, in fact, just egalitarianism.
Barbra stayed on her back on her bed in the basement.
I went up to the kitchen and made myself ramen.
I heard Joel leave a few minutes later through our side door.
I burned my tongue. Female prophets. She put blood in the broth.
§
Our taxi stopped in front of a row of massive, grillewindowed buildings. Bedsheets and pyjamas flapped from balcony bars. This was what I imagined buildings looked like in Poland – communist, endless, grey cement blocks.
One stunted, fungal palm tree grew on a mound of dry grass.
Schmuck paid the driver. I got our bags from the trunk. The wet wind engulfed me as I watched her walk toward one building, holding down her skirt. To a building with seven gold Hebrew letters etched in the door glass.