I Am Not an Adulteress Anymore

Chapter Four

Towards Midnight:

I sit up from my mattress, my feet touching the cool earth and my heart suddenly feeling light.

Just then, there is a movement from the door.

I tense and lay back down.

The movement comes again.

I try to make my breathing even and smooth.

My mind flits to the first time I had seen Ephraim, him standing a head taller than the other men, sweating in the afternoon sun and looking strangely lost in the throng of people in the crowded Jerusalem streets. I had been rushing to get home before Shabbat sundown, but when I had seen him, I had stopped.

He was so beautiful and unsure of himself, so unlike anyone I had seen before.

And just then, at my moment of least discretion, he had looked straight at me, and from behind, I had felt the push of something against my hip just as a rough baaa sounded behind me. I was knocked forward, jostling the portly woman in front of me who had immediately turned around and throttled off a string of curses to me.

The tall stranger had laughed. A smile - friendly or mocking, I could not tell - broke across his face, completely transforming him from the scared-looking foreigner I had imagined him to be. My face got red and I turned away quickly. I could feel his eyes on me as I hurried along the crowded street.

The next day, he came to see Mother, and in one week, he had taken me to Samaria where we were immediately wed.

"Are you awake?" comes a voice then.

I tense.

It is him. Why is he here?

My heart leaps, then plunges.

The curtain over the door moves, and suddenly, I am filled with fear. The last time he came: the blood on my stomach, and then the terrible wrenching pain as my child came out in pieces.

I steady my breath. If he believes I am asleep, then maybe...

Although nothing had stopped him before.

I sense him looking at me, with a strange amount of intensity, perhaps that same intensity from the market that first day.

But then I can sense his gaze dropping, and I wonder if he will go.

"I'm sorry."

The words are low, barely audible, like a wisp of wind on an otherwise still, humid, day.

I try not to let my breath catch, for fear he will hear me, but I need not have : the curtain moves and his footsteps fade. He is gone.