"Ruthie, you know you aren't planning on having a lot of children," said Esther. At once she softened the remark with a more general observation. "American girls don't want so many children these days."
"You only had the one," said Ruthie, still smiling, but definitely on the defensive, with a remark like that.
Esther let her own ancient sorrow rise to the surface a little; her eyes watered. "Not for lack of desire," she said. The emotion was real enough; choosing to show it at this moment, however, was entirely artificial. And it worked.
"Of course you wanted to fulfill your traditional role as a Jewish wife and mother," said Ruthie. "That's the religion of scarcity. You feel the obligation to produce sons to become rabbis, and daughters to give birth to more sons in the next generation."
"Oh, is that all it is?" asked Esther.
"Of course there's the biological imperative toward reproduction," said Ruthie.
"Such big words," murmured Esther. Piotr wasn't entirely unobservant. He caught the irony in Esther's voice and grew more alert to what Ruthie was saying.
"But in the feminine Judaism, in the loving Bible, you have only as many children as you need. Like Eve, with only two sons, and bearing a third only when one of the first two died. She was free, not cursed at all—the curse was from the other Bible."
"Other Bible?" asked Piotr.
"Two Bibles, conflated, one hidden inside the other," said Ruthie. "The Bible of scarcity is the book with the curses in it. Adam earns his living by the sweat of his face; Eve bears children in sorrow and is ruled over by her husband. A zero-sum game where it's all right to drive the original inhabitants out of Canaan and keep their land, where if a man can't pronounce the word shibboleth it's all right to kill him because he's an outsider. That's the Bible of killing and hatred and a jealous God who wants all idol-worshipers killed—struck by lightning at Elijah's bidding or slaughtered by the swords of the Levites when Moses gave the command."
"You're quite the scholar," said Piotr.
"Not me," said Ruthie. "But my class in Feminist Judaism this semester really opened my eyes."
"Ah," said Piotr.
"A woman's value doesn't come from childbearing and obedience. It comes from her boldly making decisions—like Eve's decision to eat the fruit and know something. It was Adam who followed her, she was the rebel, he was the follower. And yet what is it called, 'the Fall of Adam'!"
"That's what the Christians call it, anyway," said Piotr. His bemusement was growing.
"It's the Bible of scarcity that makes Jews think they have the right to displace the Palestinians. In the feminine Bible, the lamb lies down with the lion."
"Lions are always glad when lambs act like that," said Piotr. "Saves all that energy wasted in hunting and chasing."
"Now you're teasing me," said Ruthie, reverting from feminist lecturer to sweet little thing when the latter seemed like the best way to win. And sure enough, Piotr at once began to backpedal.
"Of course, I know you didn't mean it that way, I was joking," he said.
"You must think I'm some kind of radical or apostate or something," said Ruthie.
No, thought Esther. I just think you're a girl who has seized upon the philosophy that will allow you not to bear children to my son, whom you're not supposed to marry.
"Of course not," said Piotr.
"But Esther does," said Ruthie.
There it was, the gauntlet thrown down.
"I'm sure it was an interesting class," said Esther. "But you know how hard it is for me to follow English."
Ruthie got the faintest smirk on her face. "Ivan says you understand English fine except when you don't want to."
So the boy was more observant than she had thought. "Is that what Vanya says?" Esther answered, letting herself sound a little hurt. "Maybe he's right. When I'm upset, it's harder to concentrate on listening to English."
"So I did say something to upset you," said Ruthie.
"I'm upset that my boy should be so heartless as to postpone coming home to his fiancée. It must be breaking your poor heart. Not having your young man, now that's scarcity, nu?"
The conversation returned to safer ground, and after a few more minutes Ruthie announced she must head home to see her parents.
"You mean you came here first, before you saw your own mother?" asked Esther. "You're so sweet."
"She was hoping for word from our son the nonwriter of letters," said Piotr.
With a laugh and kisses all around, Ruthie left.
" 'Nu'? " asked Piotr as soon as Ruthie was gone. "Are you suddenly taking up Yiddish?"
"I hear it from women in the synagogue, I pick it up," said Esther.
Piotr switched to Russian. "And here I believed you when you told me your family had been Jews living in Russia even before the Goths came through, long before Yiddish was invented in Germany."
"You never believed that," said Esther mildly. "You read it in a history somewhere that Russian Jews all migrated in from Germany and so you know my family tradition can't be true."
"Why not?" he said. "Does it matter? What it means is that you keep your own set of rules. Jews so ancient that they don't think the Talmud deserves all the authority it gets. Jews who can make a sandwich of beef and cheese."
"But not ham and cheese," she said, smiling.
"That Ruthie," said Piotr. "Do you think she really believes that feminist nonsense about the nice feminine Bible hidden inside the nasty masculine Bible?"
"She does for now," said Esther. "But like most college feminists, she's not going to let the theory stop her from marrying."
"And you're an expert on this?"
"I hear the women at synagogue talking about their daughters." She imitated them in English. " 'Oy! The younger generation always knows more than the older! Two thousand years Jewish women have more rights than Christian women ever had, but suddenly we're oppressed, and it takes my daughter to tell me?' "
Piotr laughed at her take on the matrons of the synagogue. "You know what I was thinking? She got so excited when she was spouting this ahistorical countertextual nonsense, and I caught myself thinking, 'What an idiot her teacher must be,' and thinking about her teacher made me realize—the kind of excitement she was showing as she mindlessly spouted back the nonsense she learned in college, that's just like the excitement some of my own students show. And it occurred to me that what we professors think of as a 'brilliant student' is nothing but a student who is enthusiastically converted to whatever idiotic ideas we've been teaching them."
"Self-knowledge is a painful thing," said Esther. "To learn that your best students are parrots after all."
"Ah, but students who fill their heads with my ideas and spew them back on command, they are at least saying intelligent things, even if they all come from me."
"Especially if they all come from you."
"It's my mission in life." He kissed her. "Filling empty heads."
"And mine is filling empty stomachs," she said. "Now that she's gone, we can have supper. I only had two pork chops, I couldn't have shared with her."
He looked at her sharply for a moment, then realized she was joking. "Really, what's for dinner?"
"Soup," she said. "Can't you smell it?"
"The house always smells like good food," said Piotr. "It's the perfume of love."
Over supper, they talked of many things and, sometimes, talked not at all, enjoying the comfortable silence that comes from long friendship, from shared life. Only when she was rising from the table to carry dishes to the sink did Esther broach the subject that was most on her mind.