A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [81]
*I heard this and other tales, which I tell on the following pages, from my mother when I was young and partly also from my grandparents and my mother's cousins Shimshon and Michael Mussman. In 1979 I wrote down some of my Aunt Haya's childhood memories, and between 1997 and 20011 occasionally noted down some of the many things that Aunt Sonia told me. I have also been helped by my mother's cousin Shimshon Mussman's book Escape from Horror, published in Hebrew in Tel Aviv, 1996.
But the young bridegroom had other ideas: the child Ephraim stood in the middle of the courtyard, all puffed up suddenly like a young cockerel, stamped his foot, and obstinately demanded his wife. Not in three years' time, not even in three months' time, but right here and now. This very evening.
When the remaining guests burst out laughing, he turned his back on them angrily and strode across the road, thumped on the rabbi's door, stood in the doorway face to face with the grinning rabbi, and started quoting texts from the Bible, the Mishnah, the law codes, and the commentators. The boy had clearly prepared his ammunition and done his homework well. He demanded that the rabbi judge immediately between him and the whole world, and give a ruling one way or the other. What was written in the Torah? What did the Talmud and the jurists say? Was it or was it not his right? Was she or was she not his wife? Had he or had he not married her according to the law? And so, which was it to be: either let him take his bride or he must have his ketubba, his marriage contract, back, and let the marriage be null and void.
The rabbi, so the story goes, hemmed and hawed and cleared his throat, fingered his mustache and scratched his head a few times, tugged his sidelocks and pulled at his beard, and eventually he heaved a sigh and ruled that there was nothing for it, the boy was not only skillful at marshaling his texts and his arguments, he was also perfectly right: the youthful bride had no alternative but to follow him and no other course but to obey him.
And so the little bride was woken and, at midnight, when all the deliberations were concluded, they had to accompany the bridal pair to his parents' home. The bride wept for fear all the way. Her mother held her tight and wept with her. The bridegroom, too, wept all the way, because of the guests' jeers and sneers. As for his mother and the rest of his family, they too wept all the way, from shame.
The nocturnal procession lasted an hour and a half. It was a cross between a tearful funeral procession and a raucous party, because some of the participants, delighted by the scandal, insisted on recounting at the tops of their voices the well-known joke about the male chick and the female chick, or the one about how to thread a needle, treating themselves to schnapps to the accompaniment of obscene snorts and neighs and shouts.
Meanwhile the youthful bridegroom's courage abandoned him, and he began to regret his victory. And so the young couple were led, bewildered, tearful, and deprived of sleep, like sheep to the slaughter, to the improvised bridal chamber, into which, in the early hours of the morning, they had to be pushed almost by force. The door, it is said, was locked from the outside. Then the wedding party retreated on tiptoe and spent the rest of the night sitting up in another room, drinking tea