The Sacrifice of Tamar Read Online Free PDF

schvartze . A schvartze rapist. The living incarnation of every religious Jewish woman’s worst nightmare.
    He took a paper bag out of his pocket and pulled it down over her head. It smelled of murky uncleanness, of grease and the sweat of palms.
    She felt him push her back, and she lost her balance and fell onto her sister’s bed, the bridal bed bought with her parents’ money as a wedding gift. She could see unclear amber shadows as the paper pressed her long lashes back into her eyes. Sharp, cold metal touched her throat, and then she heard the long swift rip as he sliced through her clothes. She felt the warm damp air touch her skin where he had slit open her lovely new blouse, her Sabbath skirt, her underthings.
    He’s going to rape me, she thought, only now fully believing it, fully understanding it. He is going to force himself inside me, inside my most personal and private space. Her mind raced frantically. She thought of advice she’d once read in a woman’s magazine.
    “Don’t do this,” she pleaded. “I have cancer, I’m going to die. You might catch it if you do this. It’ll make you sick…”
    She could hear his breathing growing thicker and faster as he pushed her clothes to her sides, exposing her body completely.
    She felt the icy cold sharpness of metal circle her nipples. And then the brutal warmth of cupping hands take its place.
    Now!!
    She lashed out at him, but her nailless fingers made little impression.
    “Now you stop that fooling, hear? Or I’ll smash your face in and break your arms and make sure you don’t ever have to worry about no birth control,” he whispered with chilling calm, in a way that a woman who did not know him, a woman who was pinned beneath him helplessly in amber shadows, would have no reason to doubt.
    She stopped struggling. Never to have children, she thought, almost willing now for it to begin, so that it would begin and then be over. Never, she thought, never to have children.
    He was speaking to her, she realized. Terrible things, terrible, disgusting words. Wave after wave of feeling went throughher. She felt a strange energy, a desire, both new and potentially useful, to destroy. So much, so much she wanted to smash, to avenge. But it was stopped up, like a dammed river. Stopped up… She screamed silently as the private pain like no other ripped through her most secret, private self, trampling everything she held sacred, everything she had ever been or ever wanted to be. Desecrating her very core of self, her separate, private oneness of being, that G-d-given self without which we are no longer human. That core was invaded, humiliated, destroyed. She felt his hand over her mouth suffocating her.
    When would it be over? Be over, be over… she chanted to herself. Just be over. And then: Die, die, die, she told herself in a rising crescendo of silent disintegration, her whole core of being flowing out like afterbirth. She had no core, no private self. Anymore.
    Ugly, she thought, willing herself not to feel, not to understand the things he did to her simply to humiliate her, for no one surely could get pleasure from such ugliness. Cold, strange, penetrating her sacred singleness, going where no one had a right, no one!! Her mind screamed with impotent rage. No one, she repeated, already feeling too tired to imagine a shout. She felt the hot tears, like blood, stream down her face.
    She had not known there was such ugliness in the world. That one human soul should brutalize another simply for its own amusement. Even animals had no such malice as they tore each other apart. Their instinct was a pure one: survival. But the human predators? Their motives and dark pleasure had nothing to do with survival.
    Survival. Her mind drifted to her mother’s tales of concentration camps: “A man is as strong as iron, and as weak as a fly.” To survive. To live.
    He pulled the bag off her face. And the smell of him—dusky and unfamiliar—the breath of him, intrusive