A Tale in Itself....

 "Caesar's still dead but the Jews won't leave."

ET: Almanac

 One of Anna's objects in coming back to Russia had been to see her son. From the day she left Italy the thought of it had never ceased to agitate her. And as she got nearer to Petersburg, the delight and importance of this meeting grew ever greater in her imagination. She did not even put to herself the question of how to arrange it. It seemed to her natural and simple to see her son when she should be in the same town with him. But on her arrival in Petersburg she was suddenly made distinctly aware of her present position in society, and she grasped the fact that to arrange this meeting was no easy matter.

She had now been two days in Petersburg. The thought of her son never left her for a single instant, but she had not yet seen him. To go straight to the house, where she might meet Alexey Alexandrovitch, that she felt she had no right to do. She might be refused admittance and insulted. To write and so enter relations with her husband--that it made her miserable to think of doing; she could only be at peace when she did not think of her husband. To get a glimpse of her son out walking, finding out where and when he went out, was not enough for her; she had so looked forward to this meeting, she had so much she must say to him, she longed to embrace him, to kiss him. Seryozha's old nurse might be a help to her and show her what to do. But the nurse was now living in Alexei Alexandrovich's house. In this uncertainty, and in efforts to find the nurse, two days had slipped by. 

Hearing of the close intimacy betwen Alexey Alexandrovitch and Countess Lidia Ivanovna, Anna decided on the third day to write her husband a letter, which caused her great pains, in which she intentionally said that permission to see her son must depend on her husband's generosity. She knew that if the letter were shown to her husband, he would keep up his character of magnanimity, and not refuse her request. 

The commissionaire who took the letter had brought back the most cruel and unexpected answer, that there was no answer. She had never felt so humiliated as the moment when, sending for the commissionaire, she heard from him the exact account of how he had waited, and how afterwards he had been told there was no answer. Anna felt humiliated, insulted, but she saw from her point of view Countess Lidia Ivanovna was right. Her suffering was the more poignant that she had to bear it in solitude. She could not and would not share it with Vronsky. She knew that to him, although he was the primary cause of her distress, the question of seeing her son would seem a matter of very little consequence. She knew that he would never be able to understand the depth of her suffering, that for his cool tone at any illusion to it she would begin to hate him. And she dreaded that more than anything in the world, so she hid from him everything that related to her son. Spending the whole day at home she considered ways of seeing her son, and reached a decision to write to her husband. She was just composing this letter when she was handed the letter from Lidia Ivanovna. The countess's silence had subdued and depressed her, but the letter, all that she had read between the lines in it, so exasparated her, this malice was so revolting beside her passionate, legitimate tenderness for her son, that she turned against other people and left off blaming herself.

"This coldness--this pretense of feeling!" she said to herself. "They must needs insult me and torture the child, and I am to submit to it! Not on any consideration! She is worse than I am. I don't lie, anyway." And she decided on the spot that next day, Seryozha's birthday, she would go straight to her husband's house, bribe or deceive the servants, but at any cost see her son and overturn the hideous deception with which they were encompassing the unhappy child.

She went to a toy shop, bought toys and thought over a plan of action. She would go early in the morning at eight o'clock, when Alexey Alexandrovitch would be certain not to be up. She would have money in her hand to give the hall-porter and the footman, so that they should let her in, and not raising her veil, she would say that she had come from Seryozha's godfather to congratulate him, and that she had been charged to leave the toys at his bedside. She had prepared everything but the words she should say to her son. Often as she had dreamed of it, she could never think of anything. 

The next day, at eight o'clock in the morning, Anna got out of a hired sledge and rang at the front entrance of her former home. 

"Run and see what's wanted. Some lady," said Kapitonitch, who, not yet dressed, in his overcoat and galoshes, had peeped out of the window and seen a lady in a veil standing close up to the door. his assistant, a lad Anna did not know, had no sooner opened the door to her than she came in, and pulling a three-rouble note out of her muff put it hurriedly into his hand.

"Seryozha--Sergey Alexeitch," she said, and was going on. Scrutinizing the note, the porter's assistant stopped her at the second glass door.

"Whom do you want?" he asked. 

She did not hear his words and made no answer.

Noticing the embarrassment of the unknown lady, Kapitonitch went out to her, opened the second door for her, and asked her what she was plased to want. 

"From Prince Skorodumov for Sergey Alexeitch," she said.

"His honor's not up yet," said the porter, looking at her attentively. 

Anna had not anticipated that the absolutely unchanged hall of the house where she had lived for nine years would so greatly affect her. Memories sweet and painful rose one after another in her heart, and for a moment she forgot what she was here for.

"Would you kindly wait?" said Kapitonitch, taking off her fur cloak. 

As he took off the cloak, Kapitonitch glanced at her face, recognized her, and made her a low bow in silence.

"Please walk in, your excellency," he said to her.

She tried to say something, but her voice refused to utter any sound; with a guilty and imploring glance at the old man she went with light, swift steps up the stairs. Bent double, and his galoshes catching in the steps, Kapitonitch ran after her, trying to overtake her. 

"The tutor's there; maybe he's not dressed. I'll let him know.

Anna still mounted the familiar staircase, not understanding what the old man was saying.  

"This way, to the left, if you please. Excuse its not being tidy. His honor's in the old parlor now," the hall-porter said, panting. "Excuse me, wait a little, your excellency; I'll just see," he said, and overtaking her, he opened the high door and disappeared behind it. Anna stood still waiting. "He's only just awake," said the hall-porter, coming out. And at the very instant the porter said this, Anna caught the sound of a childish yawn. From the sound of this yawn alone she knew her son and seemed to see him living before her eyes.

"Let me in; go away!" she said, and went in through the high doorway. On the right of the door stood a bed, and sitting up in the bed was the boy. His little body bent forward with his nightshirt unbuttoned, he was stretching and still yawning. The instant his lips came together they curved into a blissfully sleepy smile, and with that smile he slowly and deliciously rolled back again.

"Seryozha!" she whispered, going noiselessly up to him. 

When she was parted from him, and all this latter time when she had been feeling a fresh rush of love for him, she had pictured him as he was at four years old, when she had loved him most of all. Now he was not even the same as when she had left him, he was still furtehr from the four-year-old baby, more grown and thinner. How thin his face was, how short his hair was! What long hands! How he had changed since she left him! But it was he with his head, his lips, his soft neck and broad little shoulders.

"Seryozha!" she repeated just in the child's ear.

He raised himself again on his elbow, turned his tangled head from side to side as though looking for something, and opened his eyes. Slowly and inquiringly he looked for several seconds at his mother standing motionless before him, then all at once he smiled a blissful smile, and shutting his eyes, rolled not backwards but towards her into his arms. 

"Seryozha! my darling boy!" she said, breathing hard and putting her arms around his plump little body. "Mother!" he said, wriggling about hin her arms so as to touch her hands with different parts of him.

Smiling sleepily still with closed eyes, he flung fat little arms round her shoulders, rolled towards her, with the delicious sleepy warmth and fragrance that is only found in children, and began rubbing his face against her neck and shoulders. 

"I know," he said, opening his eyes; "it's my birthday today. I knew you'd come. I'll get up directly."

And saying that he dropped asleep. 

Anna looked at him hungrily; she saw how he had grown and changed in her absence. She knew, and did not know, the bare legs so long now, that were thrust out below the quilt, those short-cropped curls on his neck in which she had so often kissed him. She touched all this and could say nothing; tears choked her. 

"What are you crying for, mother?" he said, waking completely up. "Mother, what are you crying for?" he cried in a tearful voice.

"I won't cry ... I'm crying for joy. It's so long since I've seen you. I won't, I won't," she said, gulping down her tears and turning away. "Come, it's time for you to dress now," she added, after a pause, and, never letting go his hands, she sat down by his bedside on the chair, where his clothes were put ready for him.

"How do you dress without me? How...." she tried to begin talking simply and cheerfully, but she could not, and again she turned away.

"I don't have a cold bath, papa didn't order it. And you've not seen Vassily Lukitch? He'll come in soon. Why, you're sitting on my clothes!"

And Seryozha went off into a peal of laughter. She looked at him and smiled. 

"Mother, darling, sweetone!" he shouted, flinging himself on her again and hugging her. I was as though only now, on seeing her smile, he fully grasped what had happened.

"I don't want that on," he said, taking off her hat. And as it were, seeing her afresh without her hat, he fell to kissing her again.

"But what did you think about me? You didn't think I was dead?"

"I never believed it." 

"You didn't believe it, my sweet?"

"I knew, I knew!" he repeated his favorite phrase, and snatching the hand that was stroking his hair, he pressed the open palm to his mouth and kissed it.

----------------------------------------------------------------

Meanwhile Vassily Lukitch had not at first understood who this lady was, and had learned from their conversation that it was no other person than the mother who had left her husband, and whom he had not seen, as he had entered the house after her departure. He was in doubt whether to go in or not, or whether to communicate with Alexey Alexandrovitch. Reflecting finally that his duty was to get Seryozha up at the hour fixed, and that it was therefore not his business to consider who was there, the mother or anyone else, but simply to do his duty, he finished dressing, went to the door and opened it. 

But the embraces of the mother and child, the sound of their voices, and what they wer saying, made him change his mind. 

He shook his head, and with a sigh he closed the door. "I'll wait another ten minutes," he said to himself, clearing his throat and wiping away tears. 

Among the servants of the household there was intense excitement all this time. All had heard that their mistress had come, and that Kapitonitch had let her in, and that she was even now in the nursery, and that their master always went in person to the nursery at nine o'clock, and everyone fully comprehended that it was impossible for the husband and wife to meet, and that they must prevent it. Korney, the valet, going down to the hall-porter's room, asked who had let her in, and how it was he had done so, and ascertaining that Kapitonitch had admitted her and shown her up, he gave the old man a talking-to. The hall-porter was doggedly silent, but when Korney told him he ought to be sent away, Kapitonitch darted up to him, and waving his hands in Korney's face, began: 

"Oh yes, to be sure you'd not have let her in! After ten years' service, and never a word but of kindness,a nd there you'd up and say, 'Be off, go along, get away with you!' Oh yes, you're a shrewd one at politics, I dare say! You don't need to be taught how to swindle the master, and how to filch fur coats!"

"Soldier!" said Korney contemptuously, and he turned to the nurse who was coming in. "Here, what do you think, Marya Efimovna: he let her in without a word to anyone." Korney said addressing her. "Alexey Alexandrovitch will be down immediately--and go into the nursery!"

"A pretty business, a pretty business!" said the nurse. "You, Korney Vassilievitch, you'd best keep him some way or other, the master, while I'll run and get her away somehow. A pretty business!" 

"When the nurse went into the nursery, Seryozha was telling his mother how he and Nadinka had had a fall in a sledging downhill, and had turned over three times. She was listening to the sound of his voice, watching his face and the play of expression on it, touching his hand, but she did not follow what he was saying. She must go, she must leave him--this was the only thing she was thinking and feeling. She heard the steps of Vassily Lukitch coming up to the door and coughing; she heard, too, the steps of the nurse as she came near; but she sat like one turned to stone, incapable of beginning to speak or to get up. 

"Mistress, darling!" began the nurse, going up to Anna and kissing her hands and shoulders. "God has brought joy indeed to our boy on his birthday. You aren't changed one bit."

"Oh, nurse dear, I didn't know you were in the house," said Anna, rousing herself for a moment. 

"I'm not living here, I'm living with my daughter. I came for the birthday, Anna Arkadyevna, darling!" 

The nurse suddenly burst into tears, and began kissing her hand again.

Seryozha, with radiant eyes and smiles, holding his mother by one hand and his nurse by the other, pattered on the rug with his fat little bare feet. The tenderness shown by his beloved nurse to his mother threw him into an ecstasy. 

"Mother! She often comes to see me, and when she comes...." he was beginning, but he stopped, noticing that the nurse was saying something in a whisper to his mother, and that in his mother's face there was a look of dread and something like shame, which was so strangely unbecoming to her. 

She went up to him. 

"My sweet!" she said. 

She could not say good-bye, but the expression on her face said it, and he understood. "Darling, darling Kootik!" she used the name by which she had called him when he was little, "you won't forget me? You...." but she could not say more. 

How often afterwards she thought of words she might have said. But now she did not know how to say it, and could say nothing. But Seryozha knew all she wanted to say to him. He understood that she was unhappy and loved him. He understood even what the nurse had whispered. He had caught the words "always at nine o'clock," and he knew that this was said of his father, and that his father and mother could not meet. That he understood, but one thing he could not understand--why there should be a look of dread and shame in her face?... She was not in fault, but she was afraid of him and ashamed of something. He would have liked to put a question that would have set at rest this doubt, but he did not dare; he saw that she was miserable, and he felt for her. Silently he pressed close to her and whispered, "Don't go yet. He won't come just yet." 

The mother held him away from her to see what he was thinking, what to say to him, and in his frightened face she read not only that he was speaking of his father, but, as it were, asking what he ought to think about his father. 

"Seryozha, my darling," she said, "love him; he's better and kinder than I am and I have done him wrong. When you grow up you will judge." 

"There's no one better than you!..." he cried in despair through his tears, and, clutching her by the shoulders, he began squeezing her with all his force to him, his arms trembling with the strain. 

"My sweet, my little one!" said Anna, and she cried as weakly and childishly as he. 

At that moment the door opened. Vassily Lukitch came in. 

At the other door there was the sound of steps, and the nurse in a scared whisper said, "He's coming," and gave Anna her hat. 

Seryozha sank onto the bed and sobbed, hiding his face in his hands. Anna removed his hands, once more kissed his wet face, and with rapid steps went to the door. Alexey Alexandrovitch walked in, meeting her. Seeing her, he stopped short and bowed his head. 

Although she had just said he was better and kinder than she, in the rapid glance she flung at him, talking his whole figure in all its details, feelings of repulsion and hatred for him and jealousy over her son took possession of her. With a swift gesture she put down her veil, and, quickening her pace, almost ran out of the room. 

She had not time to undo, and so carried back with her, the parcel of toys she had chosen the day before in a toy shop with such love and sorrow. 

Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina

Tales of Classical Perversion: Of a Type - Very Rough Draft

 

After Papa's death, I had no reason to remain in Yavneh. My father studied Torah with me as though I were his son, and a son to him is what I felt.  I didn't want to get married, and inside me a voice repeated over and over "No! You are not cut out for a woman's life." 

Finally, on the Shabbos before Rosh Hashana, I girded my lions and told him: 

"Papa, I have the soul of a man." 

"So why then were you born a woman?"

"Can heaven make mistakes?"

"No." 

"But I know I'm a man." 

"I've made a mistake in teaching you Torah." 

"But the Lord said to Shmuel: 'For the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.'"

"The Tanakh says a thousand things about the duty of women for every one about His mercy for those who sin." 

"Well, maybe one in every thousand women is supposed to be a man." 

"You are a woman, and shall learn no more Torah." 

On the shabbos after Yom Kippur, the Holy One struck him dead. Whether my father was punished for his judgement, I knew that from the next world, Papa would look on me with mercy. He was buried by Monday and Shiva continued until Sukkot. 

Alone on the first night of Sukkot, seventeen days after my confession, I took Papa's dagger and shore my hair. I dressed myself in Papa's trousers, his fringed garment, his silk coat, his skullcap, his velvet hat, his gardel and the dagger he carried within it, then studied my reflection in the mirror. I was very nearly the young man I knew within myself. All of Yavneh was asleep; and after I packed clothes, mine along with his, I lit my father's pipe and left his house forever as I smoked. 

 It would be a terrible sin to abide assistance from fellow Jews without telling them of intentions they'd regard as mortally sinful; but requiring food for my journey, I sold my body so any sin of this journey would only be on me and those who sought sin: once a day for six days in Ashdod, six in Ashkelon, six in Gaza. After eighten days fornication, I walked into the Sinai Desert where once trod Moses and Miriam. So many mountains and any among them could be where Moses met God. 

 I was tall and thin, possessing narrow hips and a deep voice. There was but one feature that made me seem womanly. My chest was outsize and cumbersome. Older men of Yavneh would repugnantly joke about my irrepressible endowment and the hands of no few would cheapen them with immodesty. 

Having heard only my footsteps and breath for three days, I stripped down to nakedness under the Sinai's night cover. As I shivered in the wind I grabbed hold of Papa's dagger and chopped those breasts from my body; and as I howled blessings to the Gates of Heaven I attempted to stop my bleeding with sand. Even as I wailed I passed out, certain I was dead; yet I awoke midday more man than woman. I searched the ground for remains but my breasts were gone, disappeared into wind and sand. 

It takes 30 days for a beginner to cross the Sinai alone that a bedouin can cross in ten. I had but eighteen days' rations upon leaving, but could not abide another day's harlottry. As a woman, there was no reliable travel partner to join, nor could I travel by caravan as fellow passengers would know my secret after my wrongly placed casabas were excised. Only alone in the desert that could I annoint my identity, and therefore I determined to sojourn with alacrity, perform the amputation at my first encounter of three days' silence, recover swiftly from the excision, abstain from all but the smallest rations, journey with infinite haste, and pray to the Holy One BBH for assistance. 

Yet after eighteen days silence I was nauseous from lack of water and food. I walked bare chested because every day it bled anew and demanded shirts used to stop my bloodflow and half my water ]to clean my wounds. It seemed the CBH was without mercy as Papa said, yet on the nineteenth day I thought of using the dagger on the rest of me, and there appeared a small caravan. A traveler saw the blood upon my chest, told me I was near death, and invited me to abide with them to rest and heal. 

"A pregnant man..."

"What?"

"I've heard such things but never thought I'd minister to one." 

"I'm pregnant?" 

"Yes, and you're not dying." 

"I'm pregnant?" 

"Surely a man won't recognize the symptoms." 

"So I'm a man?" 

"No less than I..." 

"Are you a man?" 

"Of a type..." 

"What type?" 

"The type that bleeds, same as you." 

"You bleed?"

"I did." 

"Has your monthly cycle ended?" 

"No, but just like you I bled from what was severed." 

"What was severed?"

The old healer pointed to their loins.

"Is it any different than your people, who sever the foreskin of babes?"

"The babe is eight days old." 

"It's still barbaric." 

"But why would parents permit yours to be severed so late?"

"So the child might be educated in the Pharaoh's service." 

"The price of education is to relinquish manhood?" 

"Of a type. It's said that the attractions of the palace are such that only eunuchs may survive civil service temptations without defiling women at court." 

"Do you desire to defile women?" 

"Less than most men, but yes."

The eunuch administered to me an herb called silphium, and told me thrice daily imbibement would flush the fetus out. At the very moment of our arrival in Alexandria his medicine took root, and the healer threw the entire company out of the caravan so they would not witness its effect. 

And for the second activity of my time in Alexandria, the eunuch did lead into an underground passage that brought me by candlelight to a hall directly beneath the palace of Cleopatra - I was face to face with a synagogue minyan, and all its members were eunuchs in Egypt's public service. 

"And who is this Reb Moshe?" 

"We've just crossed the desert together but I actually never learned his...." 

"...My name is Yanai-ben-Yokhanan of Yavneh." I had to think quickly what my name would be. 

Reb Moshe the healer immediately responded: "Reb Yanai, I don't think that's your real name." 

"What?"

"You are now Yanai-ben-Yokhanan of Alexandria. He came here to work." 

"Peace be unto you Reb Yanai. Can you do a drasha?"

"Right now?... I guess..."

"So you're a khakham."

"Of a type..."

"And you are... one of us?... nu?" 

Again Reb Moshe: "What gave it away?" The whole minyan laughed at a high pitch. 

"And you can lain Torah?"

"Hen vaHen." 

"So you're a Rabbi?"

"Of a type." 

"Alright Rav, well, let's hear a drasha from you. We'll pick an easy one. Simchat Torah wasn't that long ago, so let's hear a drasha on B'reishit." 

B'reishit. "In the beginning," the first part of the Torah telling when CBH created the world, put Adam and Eve in the Garden then threw them out, watched passively as Cain slew Abel, then destroyed the world with flood. 

I quoted them the passage on how Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge and realized their nakedness. "We should not presume to question God but God created our class of eunuchs and brought us to power. Perhaps He means to demonstrate through us that man can return to the Garden of Eden, where they are unaware of base desire, and therefore untainted by evil or shame." 

I did not know men could applaud so lustily as they. 

"Well Rav Yanai, did you learn any other skills across the desert?" 

"Of a type." (everyone laughed again)

"Well even if you have no skills like all the other Israeli rabbis, we can put you to work here in the palace. My name is Rav Yosef-ben-Ephraim and I'm chief of medical research to Pharaoh Cleopatra, blessed be her name, and in case you don't already know, you were riding through the Sinai with Rav Moshe-ben-Menashe, Cleopatra's chief physician - sent to Jerusalem to look at King Herod's arm. What's it look like?"

"It works but it keeps getting infected. The Mamzer's in serious trouble..." 

"Then all Judea's in serious trouble. You did the right thing in coming here Rav Yanai." 

----------------------------------------

Rav Yosef taught me Greek as devotedly as Papa taught me Torah. I learned just as quickly and received as much praise. I recited passages of Hesiod and Homer as though they were the Song of D'vorah. He checked out scrolls of Aristotle from the Library and I read from beginning to end his animal writings and worked my way through the densest passages of Physics and Nicomachean Ethics with the concentration Papa forced me pay to Leviticus. I learned Euclid's geometry and Pythagorus's holy ratios, I was examined weekly on how well I retained my reading on Hippocrates and aced every examination; we studied oration and rhetoric, logic and deductive reasoning, and most exhaustively, gardening and botany and potion making. Rav Yosef even taught me rudiments of playing the lyre, because every civil servant was called upon occasion to play music for Pharaoh in moments of her distress, even Jews on Sabbath. 

Rav Moshe would inevitably come to us during his many visits to our laboratory. 

"How's he coming along?" 

"He's an illui," Rav Yosef would say to Rav Moshe almost constantly. "Once we're ready to go he can take both our positions and write his own papyrus for anything he wants besides." 

"Well, as it turns out, it's time for him to take one of them. I'm retiring; taking my golden sun dial and buying a beach house in Aqaba."

"Why not Eilat?"

"Too many Jews." 

"Oy. There are more in Egypt."

"You see the problem. What's our melamed working on?" 

"It's an experiment to see if there are more than nine geometric shapes."

"Mazel Tov, but aren't you worried he'll be punished for heresy?" 

"Feh. The priests are too busy plotting against Miss Cleo to get beyz about what a stupid rabbi's doing - slicha Yanai."

"Shayn fargessen." 

And so Rav Moshe retired, got a ceremonial Friday night dinner (kosher) at which Cleopatra and Rav Yosef spoke, along with a bunch of other palace functionaries I'd never met, then Rav Moshe accepted a small obelisk from Cleopatra that had his name and position inscribed in carving, but most of the speeches were used to pay tribute to Marc Anthony, who wasn't even there, but protocol was protocol. 

That was Friday, that Monday I went to an interview with the Pharaoh in her apartment. (description of her apartment here). 

But the Pharaoh was not in the royal revelations to which we eunuchs were accustomed, she was dressed like a male pharaoh going to war; wearing a blue cap that went up an entire cubit, wearing two satchels of bronze fastened over each arm, a blue shield on her upper body and a black tunic underneath, completing the ensemble with a golden satchel that began between her legs and went near to the floor. 

"You're Rav Yanai of Yavneh?"

"I am, your majesty." 

"Strip." 

"What?"

"Strip." 

"Why?" 

"It's not for subjects to question their Pharaoh why. Is is your ruler's pleasure to see you strip, and you shall strip." 

"I fear to do so." 

"I know what you are, now do as I say." 

And in terror I exposed myself to Cleopatra in all my truth. 

"Why did you do it?"

"Because I believe I am a man."

"Many women wish they were men, some men even wish they were women." 

"But I am a man." 

"And you were a woman before you did this?" 

"No, I was a man in a woman's body." 

"All Jewish women are men in women's bodies." 

"I don't understand." 

"What matters it that you have breasts if your people go to such lengths to cover them up?" 

"But Your Majesty, I know I have them." 

"How many Jewish women do you think would rather be men?" 

"Probably most of them." 

"How many of them want to be men so badly that they could convince themselves they are men?" 

"Probably a few." 

"So how then are they men?" 

"What matters it if they convince themselves? If they want to be men, shouldn't they be men?" 

"A-ha, you are as smart as they say. Yes they should, and we in Egypt have many ways of letting them indulge their masculine side, if only Jews got rid of all that farshtunkener repression."

"Repression, Majesty?" 

"What matters it whether Jewish women are women or men if your people don't look on women as women?" 

"We don't?" 

"Your women are wives, they're mothers, eventually daughters, unfortunate children of an unfortunate god. But if it weren't for the beards there'd be no meaningful difference between Jewish men and women. You'd all be these sexless creatures; for all we in Egypt know you reproduce by hatching out of an egg." 

"Your Majesty I assure y..." 

"I know I know, you do it on your sabbath night in the dark"

"We make love to the soul, not the body." 

"Yes, you feel everything but lust after nothing." 

"Has lust been a blessing for your people?" 

"Lack of it hasn't been a blessing for you if it makes you chop off your own breasts, which, judging by your incisions were quite a sight." 

"I did not like them." 

"Mister Yanai, I will relate you a saying we have here in Egypt. 'That which the Gods have joined together, let not man tear them asunder.' I think that has different meaning now." 

"I'm not sure I follow." 

"In Egypt, you could have been a man with breasts." 

"I could... I don't understand." 

"If you could be a man with a womb, you can be a man with breasts." 

"I... I can?" 

"Do you desire to know women? You can tell me." 

"Majesty..."

"Do you desire to copulate with women?"

"I honestly have never considered the question." 

"That's a falsehood if ever I've heard one. Do you desire to lie with women?" 

"I... well... Sometimes."

"Do you desire women and men?" 

"Yes, yes I suppose I do." 

"Well... unlike Judea, here in Egypt you can copulate with men, fornicate with women, and marry a eunuch if that is what you so desire, and you may fuck all three at the same time if that is your wish. So long as Cleopatra is Pharaoh, no law prevents you and the majority of the population agrees with me. They will let you live as you like so long as you make a home in a liberal alley, and those who disagree can live in conservative alleys." 

"Well... I suppose I owe you thanks Majesty." 

"Don't thank me, thank the eunuchs. They run this country, not me, and many of them are Jews." 

"Your majesty is not powerful?"

"I don't need power, I AM power, but a great leader only steers the chariot while the horsespull it, and they know how to drive far better than we do. And that's why you will be my personal doctor." 

"Thank you, Majesty." 

"I am also promoting you above Rav Yosef to be Chief of Medical Research for Egypt."

"Majesty..."

"Don't worry, he'll have so much to do after what I tell you that he will thank his Yahweh he doesn't have your job. Both Yosef and Moshe said you were smarter than them both, and judging by this interview I agree." 

"You flatter me Majesty." 

"You won't be flattered when you learn what you have to do." 

"If Your Majesty orders i....." 

"She does and there is much to explain. Are you listening?"

"Certainly." 

"You've studied Aristotle yes?" 

"Yes." 

"Hippocrates?"

"Yes." 

"Euclid? Archimedes? Pythagoras?"

"Yes, yes, and yes." 

"Useless, useless, useless, useless and useless." 

"Majesty?" 

"Experiments are not an activity to prove theories. Theories are activities to prove experiments."

"I'm afraid I don't...

"...Until now, the accumulation of knowledge has been its own reward." 

"Isn't it?" 

"What reward is there if people are starving and diseased but we cannot feed them?"

"Majesty, knowledge is the greatest of all vir..." 

"Spare me androgyne. Virtue is the greatest of all virtues, and the second greatest virtue is to save lives. The accumulation of knowledge is the only way we can learn to save them, and you, supposedly the brightest mind in Egypt, with unique knowledge of what it means to be all men, are to lead us there." 

"Your majesty this is an awesome..."

"...I know it is. Furthermore, what science there is is entirely too devoted to questions only a man would pose. Everything in war has axiom and a measurement, meanwhile, all women have wondered if their cosmetics are poisoning them for two-thousand years and no thinker has thought enough of us to answer the question. All women but Jewish women that is..."

"Majesty." 

"It's alright if you take offense but just keep listening. For as long as history's been recorded on tablet, there are proposed cures for baldness and impotence, yet an astonishing common number of women suffer from headaches that alter their sense of vision and sound, yet no man has thought to ask why that is. You must solve this in addition to finding manners that increase our food supply and prevent drought on our farms, how to best build aqueducts so we can maximize the distance of water transfer from the Nile. Do you understand?

"Yes, Majesty." 

"You will have still further responsibilities. You will supervise the building of lead pipes through Alexandria so that sewage and sepsis can be deposited in the desert."

"Yes, Majesty." 

"But among all these questions I wish for you to answer, I have one chief desire above them all. Are you listening?"

"Yes, Majesty." 

"Show me you're listening by something other than yes majesty." 

"Your Majesty I am listening as intently as a man with knowledge of all men can." 

"Childbirth is the death of a plurality of Egyptian women. It would be magnificent if you found means of contraception more reliable than an animal intestine but I will be forgiving if you can't. However, there is one thing we must determine above all. All other questions you may delegate to Rav Yosef if you have not enough time. Please, I must know if you're listening." 

"Majesty, I am praying to the Lord Most High to listen with even more intention than I already am." 

"I would like very much to make abortion a right for all Egyptian women to pursue without questions or conditions, and make all abortions state-funded. However, there are priests in the Temple of Osiris, many of them and powerful, who believe that women who abort their fetuses are committing murder because a fetus is a human life from the moment it is conceived. Your job is to discover at exactly what point during human pregnancy life begins, so that I may present the proof to the High Priest. This is the most important task of your research and administration, all the Pharaoh's treasury is at your disposal. Everything else we can cover in our meetings, but I want weekly reports sent to me on papyrus with every detail of your experiments and their findings. Do you understand everything I have said?"

"Your Majesty, I must be honest, I don't know if I..."

"...It's not your job to say what is impossible. It's your job to discover what is possible. Now go forth and spread the legs of knowledge." 

-----------------------------------------------

And so we began work, but I knew Pharaoh's priority. On the one hand, there were the projects to benefit all people: those which Rav Yosef was already working on for years, and for the moment, those would still be 'delegated' to him until all the other projects were completed. Then there were the projects unique to women. 

One of the first things Rav Moses told me was 'a good civil servant always knows a boss's true intention by what they don't say.' What Pharaoh didn't say was that the real priority was the women's issues - if the general issues were solved first, men would use the greater resources to sit atop them and make women beg for a share as ever through history as recorded on the tablets. But the more progress women made, the more they could share in general progress, and the more evenly men must share their spoils. It's not like men wouldn't still get the majority of it. 

So I tried first to locate the source of women's headaches. One of Pharaoh's great innovations was a specific prison where only women were kept: the prisoners were women, the guards were women, even the warden was a woman. There were one thousand prisoners, and of the 1000, a full 200 complained of headaches. The name of the prison was Sabinia. 

I could immediately dismiss at least one solution. The good father of medicine, Hippocrates, believed headaches were induced by digestive problems and could be cured by the instigation of vomit. However, at least fifteen of the prisoners chronically induced vomiting in themselves. Of those fifteen, five suffered from chronic headaches. None of the five reported any change in their head pain by their induction of vomit. 

As a control for our experiment, we tried the four traditional methods on four separate patients: cupping, leeching, bloodletting, and burning the head. None of them seemed to work, but truth be told, we already knew that.  

Our first true experiment was to try the ancient Egyptian method of tying a clay mini-crocodile to the head, stuffing the crocodile's mouth with grain and a piece of linen containing the names of the god we think is responsible for headaches, though nobody seemed to agree which god it was. We took the ten women with the severest headaches as test subjects, we began the experiment by writing the name of a different deity among the ten major gods in each separate crocodile. Secretly, I also included an eleventh subject in whom I placed the name 'Yahweh.' Inconclusive results. We then used all 200 test subjects to write the names of all ten major gods in every possible combination and tied bigger mini-crocodiles to the test subjects whose mouth could hold a bigger piece of linen with more writing. There are 1400 minor Egyptian gods, realizing that there was no way to include each minor god in every possible combination on our test subjects, we limited it to the thirty minor gods we thought would be most relevant to headaches, and tried them all in combination. After three months, the results were inconclusive. 

Our second experiment was with potions. We tried boiling 22 separate herbs alone, some of which seemed promising: giving a few hours of relief, until the potion was administered to a second subject for whom the solution was nowhere near so effective. We then attempted combinations of herbs. Some potions showed promise, but results were still inconclusive by the time they were administered to the third or fourth subject. 

I did not want to do the last two experiments because they seemed so drastic. One was to bathe the subject in hot water filled with electrostatic eels. Even one eel struck me as potentially lethal, but clearly it would take more than one to result in a level of electrostatic that could cure a severe headache. This seemed incredibly inhumane. 

So instead we made incisions into the skull and prodded the brain with tools. We enlisted sixteen particularly brave prisoners and made an incision in a different part of the brain for each subject. The results were fascinating, they were also at times quite mystifying. Subjects whose previous behavior was relatively lucid began to speak words that were completely unrelated to what they tried to express. Other subjects, previously quite docile, began to exhibit violent behaviors. Still others exhibited slurred speech. Still others lost memories which were previously quite vivid. We could only conclude that, unprotected by skulls, various spirits had invaded their brains and stolen their neurofunctions. 

It had been nine months since we began these experiments, and it was always with great trepidation that I reported these findings to the Pharaoh at our weekly audience. At every meeting, she was extremely solicitous, understanding, and cordial, but after nine months I found her patience worn. 

"Rav Yanai, you've now exhausted all the potential solutions you listed to me at our second meeting. I have given you the full term of a pregnancy to find the source of women's headaches and you have not produced results. Is my confidence in you misplaced?

"No Majesty, but I do need time to pursue other remedies."

"While you're thinking of those remedies, it's time you conducted experiments on the question of when a fetus comes to life. Women who were not pregnant at our first meeting have now died in childbirth." 

"Yes Majesty, I understand." 

"I'm not sure you do..." 

"Well then I'd be happy for Majesty to explain it to me." 

"I don't like your tone." 

"Majesty, all I want to do is serve you." 

"I'm sure, and I'm sure your fear of me affects your work, so I am taking you into the palace." 

And the Pharaoh did take me underground, and lo, it was the very same place where our weekly Jewish minyan was held, yet it was transformed to a brothel. Never had it occured to me to use the torch to look at the walls, yet when Cleopatra held torch to wall I saw iconography of Zeus transformed to a bull to rape Europa and into eagle to kidnap Ganymede, Apollo chasing Daphne then making love to her trunk, Circe pining after Glaucon as he attempted to kiss a rock, while Pyramis and Thisby did more than kiss through the glory of a wall. 

And against the wall opened a door, where came out a man and woman unconcealed. 

"Have you been with men or women?" 

"Neither of course." 

"Don't lie." 

"Men for money to get to Egypt." 

"Then you will know women, then men with joy, and then...."  

And right on the lectern where Rav Yosef and I read every week from the Sefer Torah, I spent three whole days on my back amid orgiastic factoral groupings from every conceivable sexual taxonomy in every geometric permutation. To be sure, Cleopatra was among the many lovers I encountered, so, I think, was Marc Anthony, and so even were a few of my prisoners. Lights were always lit. I did not know most names of my collaborators, yet as exhilarating as it was, it was still more exhausting. The climaxes themselves ceased to be joyful, they felt merely like compulsive mechanics - each of their own type, more to be understood than experienced. I was neither man nor woman, merely a machine of gears and wheels in a laboratory far more elaborate than any provided for me. In experiencing her many satisfactions, I felt as though Cleopatra raised me to the height of her service so that I could bring an eye as clinical to science as she brought to sex. 

And so we began upon abortion. 

-----------------------------------------

Well, first we had to get the women pregnant. Not a single one among the prisoners didn't want to be part of the experiment; even women who vastly preferred women, even the few women who thought themselves men. It was easy enough for the prisoners who have sexual contact with each other, it happened all the time and vaginal disease could be rampant; but the contact of men was the closest any prisoner would get to the freedom they'd once known, even if, like most every sexual congressum, a moment's freedom could result in eternal slavery. Since every palace guard who could defend himself against a prisoner was a eunich, and every male prisoner could not be trusted in the private company, we brought in Roman soldiers on the proviso that their coitus must be watched by myself, a prison guard, and a eunuch palace guard to ensure that the woman was in no way mishandled. 

We started with a group of thirty to whom we'd permit three sessions of coitus with a male prisoner at days corresponding with their cycle's greatest fertility. We waited a month after conception and administered silphium in doses strong enough that there would be no chance that the baby would remain alive. We explained to them that many of these potions were so strong that they could damage the health of the mother as well as the baby, they didn't care. One of the patients died immediately, one died after a few days of searing pain, two lived on with irreparable bodily damage. Twenty-three of the thirty women expunged fetuses which were roughly the size of a grain of rice. Of those who did not expunge, only two remained pregnant. All fetuses too small to read whether the test subject had any signs of life. 

We then asked for a second group of thirty, there were no fewer volunteers. We waited two months and administered silphium at twice the dose. Two of the patients died immediately, two died after a few days of searing pain, still two more died a month after expunging while exhibiting no distressed symptoms until three days before death. Five lived on with irreparable damage. Twenty-two of the thirty women expunged fetuses which were roughly the size of a finger's breath - one-third of it was head. There was no sign of life. 

We asked for a third group of thirty, there were slightly fewer volunteers. We waited three months after conception and administered silphium at three times the initial dose. Five of the patients died immediately, five died after a few days of searing pain, eight died a month after expunging while exhibiting no distressed symptoms until three days before death. All other seven lived on with irreparable damage. All thirty women expunged fetuses, all the size two fingers' breath. All fetuses exhibited signs of normal development with fully developed extremities: arms, hands, legs, feet, and nails. Yet none were in a living state. 

It was at this moment when I had to report more than just another written report to Cleopatra and had to see her immediately, for I knew what had to be done to observe a live fetus, and dreaded it as a horror greater than any Pharaoh could visit upon me; a horror greater than any visited upon me on my journey to Egypt, horror so far greater than that performed on myself. 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"What do you mean horror?"

"Your Majesty, it is an abomination to cut women open merely to see the living fetus inside."

"Women die in childbirth all the time and must be cut into alive to save the fetus. By killing thirty women you can save an eternity of them." 

"These women needn't die!" 

"Then you will send entire eras of women to their deaths." 

"Why is it on me to save people the world disposes of so casually?" 

"Because you can." 

"I have no idea if I can save so many women." 

"Alright, then because I can save them. These are the subjects I value, and if you do not impregnante thirty women again and cut them open, I will liquidate the subjects you value. I won't just execute you, I will liquidate the entire servant class of eunuchs will die in lieu of these women."

"I still refuse." 

"Then I will kill every Jew in Egypt and march on Judea to do the same there." 

"Your Majesty, I don't believ Pharaoh Cleopatra, world renowned for her humanity, could ever do something so unspeakable." 

"Every humane leader must do terrible things to serve humanity." 

"How does killing a race of people serve humanity?" 

"I have held out to you the possibility a race of people might die, but surely you know, the possibility of every woman's death is held out every day." 

------------------------------------------------------------

None of the women knew they would be cut up, but all knew themselves likely to die on the next round. 

There was only one incentive we could offer women they would value more than life: their freedom. If they survived, they could live as free women anywhere they liked in Egypt. We got three volunteers. We then increased the offer: if they survived, they could get a pension from the palace equivalent to lifelong service. Another three volunteered. We increased again: should they volunteer and survive the procedure, they could even work in the palace as though they were eunuchs. We got another four volunteers. We then made the ultimate offer: they would live their pregnancy in luxury at Cleopatra's own palace. We got our thirty volunteers. 

And for ten whole weeks, the Pharaoh herself showed them luxury's lap as though they were foreign dignitaries. "You are the most valued soldiers of my army." Every day she brought them the finest food, the finest wine, the finest music, and the finest companions. She listened eagerly to their woeful tales of life before the law's interference, and affected still more eager attention to their dull tales of prison life. She bought each of them a green bee-eater bird in a cage, each wearing a tag of gold with the gifted's name, with the implication that those who died would live on in Pharaoh's palace. She promised that the soldiers would be extremely careful, and those those who died would die as though they went to sleep. 

And so came the day, and in the same underground hall where the Pharaoh had me pray and play, Cleopatra had them all lain on sheets of saffron silk and instead of administering to them a silphium, she administered them an opiate potion for sleep. All of them, if not completely asleep, would be numb to pain.

But when came time to take the opium, no one slept. Not one woman fell asleep, they did not even close their eyes. They simply lay there as court musicians played soothing lyre chords.

Finally one enjoined "Pharaoh, are we supposed to be this awake when you give us the silphium?"

"My dearest women would you excuse a Pharaoh a moment who always has urgent business? I promise when I return it will be with a solution."

Five hours later, Cleopatra returned. All the prisoners were simply talking, each seemed to convey a note of surprise as though they were amazed even to be having conversations at such a moment. 

Cleopatra returned to the applause of her beloved prisoners. She immediately effaced their applaise and asked if she might speak to me outside. I exited to find 90 soldiers, palace and Roman, all fully armed and shielded as if for battle. 

"If we can't put them to sleep you're going to have to open them alive."

"How can you ask me to do this?"

"I'm not asking you, I order it."

"I refuse."

"I have ninety soldiers here who can carry out your execution then open the women themselves, but they will be a lot sloppier than you, so if you want any chance at all.for the women to survive or recording the fetal results, you will carry out my order."

"The women won't survive the procedure. You've known that the whole time."

"If you replaced the opium with a placebo to move me to compassion, you understand neither Cleopatra nor what women have endured."

"I have never and would never disobey my queen. I understand only that this is murder worthy of Herod."

"Herod murders for his future. It's not murder when done for... this is all kibbitzing. Soldiers, on my command, the lowest ranked Roman among you is to open Rav Yanai from his bottom to his top."

"Gemacht nafkeh! I'll do it!"

And so entered the soldiers along with the Pharaoh and I, who grabbed every woman in the room and pinned her to the ground. One to hold the right arm, one to hold the left, one to hold the legs. 

All thirty prisoners emitted cries, howls, whimpers, vomits; they spat, they shook, they prayed, they tried to bite.

Yet each had no control before the knife, and the manifold reactions of each turned to the familiar shrieks of tortured animals. And once split open we saw that within each woman was a fetus who either was not alive yet, dead along with the mother, or never  would have lived. 

"NO PHARAOH MAY BAR ME!" 

"PREPARE YOURSELF MAJESTY!"

"Osiris himself heard the screams of importunate women from above and...."

High Priest Ramfis stood at the hall's back entrance in the company of Rav Yosef, along with Marc Anthony's friend and leftainant Enobarbus, and the hall was fallen with the  silence of tombs.

"Gaze Enobarbus on Rome's greatest ally. The Pharaohesss, Cleopatra herself, champion of woman's cause, is woman's most revolting murderer."

"Your Holiness it was I who performed these procedures." I held the knife, it was only right to throw myself upon it.

Rav Yosef stepped in at the ready. "Your Holiness it could not have been Rav Yanai. Surely no eunuch has the passion for so visceral an act."

"No Rav Yosef, it was you."

"What was me Your Majesty?"

"You knew of the plan from office gossip, you told the high priest of it, you switched our opium supply with placebos, you did it knowing of our projects, you did it knowing how the high priest might reward you."

"Majesty I..."

"Not that your type has any problem with knives! To you the screams of severed flesh are music!"

 "Your majesty please...

"Or maybe you're not doing the high priest's bidding. Maybe the high priest is doing your bidding."

"MAJESTY!"

"I see it now, Ramfis is just a mouth through which these spadones whisper their perverted contortions." 

"Your Majesty, I realize the eunuchs are not Rome's concern but I don't need to tell you that the Consuls will not look kindly upon any turbulence in Egyptian leadership."

"Rome could be complicit in this plot too. How many eunuchs are Jews and how many could write to their financier bretheren in Rome?" 

"I'm afraid I must write to Marc Anthony immediately and tell him that Cleopatra is no longer capable of being Pharaoh on her own and he muat come back to Egypt to comfort his love. 

"Oh no Isis help me! Rome is complicit in it too! The whole world conspires to keep women in slavery!"

And Cleopatra burst into tears. Enobarbus immediately locked her in an embrace and walked her out of the hall. Followed by Rav Yosef and high priest Ramfis and all the soldiers. Only I was left with the dead women and their remains. 

And yet in that moment after everyone living left, I thought I saw a fetus come to life. 

TCP Of a Type A Little More

 

After Papa's death, I had no reason to remain in Yavneh. My father studied Torah with me as though I were his son, and a son to him is what I felt.  I didn't want to get married, and inside me a voice repeated over and over "No! You are not cut out for a woman's life." 

Finally, on the Shabbos before Rosh Hashana, I girded my lions and told him: 

"Papa, I have the soul of a man." 

"So why then were you born a woman?"

"Can heaven make mistakes?"

"No." 

"But I know I'm a man." 

"I've made a mistake in teaching you Torah." 

"But the Lord said to Shmuel: 'For the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.'"

"The Tanakh says a thousand things about the duty of women for every one about His mercy for those who sin." 

"Well, maybe one in every thousand women is supposed to be a man." 

"You are a woman, and shall learn no more Torah." 

On the shabbos after Yom Kippur, the Holy One struck him dead. Whether my father was punished for his judgement, I knew that from the next world, Papa would look on me with mercy. He was buried by Monday and Shiva continued until Sukkot. 

Alone on the first night of Sukkot, seventeen days after my confession, I took Papa's dagger and shore my hair. I dressed myself in Papa's trousers, his fringed garment, his silk coat, his skullcap, his velvet hat, his gardel and the dagger he carried within it, then studied my reflection in the mirror. I was very nearly the young man I knew within myself. All of Yavneh was asleep; and after I packed clothes, mine along with his, I lit my father's pipe and left his house forever as I smoked. 

 It would be a terrible sin to abide assistance from fellow Jews without telling them of intentions they'd regard as mortally sinful; but requiring food for my journey, I sold my body so any sin of this journey would only be on me and those who sought sin: once a day for six days in Ashdod, six in Ashkelon, six in Gaza. After eighten days fornication, I walked into the Sinai Desert where once trod Moses and Miriam. So many mountains and any among them could be where Moses met God. 

 I was tall and thin, possessing narrow hips and a deep voice. There was but one feature that made me seem womanly. My chest was outsize and cumbersome. Older men of Yavneh would repugnantly joke about my irrepressible endowment and the hands of no few would cheapen them with immodesty. 

Having heard only my footsteps and breath for three days, I stripped down to nakedness under the Sinai's night cover. As I shivered in the wind I grabbed hold of Papa's dagger and chopped those breasts from my body; and as I howled blessings to the Gates of Heaven I attempted to stop my bleeding with sand. Even as I wailed I passed out, certain I was dead; yet I awoke midday more man than woman. I searched the ground for remains but my breasts were gone, disappeared into wind and sand. 

It takes 30 days for a beginner to cross the Sinai alone that a bedouin can cross in ten. I had but eighteen days' rations upon leaving, but could not abide another day's harlottry. As a woman, there was no reliable travel partner to join, nor could I travel by caravan as fellow passengers would know my secret after my wrongly placed casabas were excised. Only alone in the desert that could I annoint my identity, and therefore I determined to sojourn with alacrity, perform the amputation at my first encounter of three days' silence, recover swiftly from the excision, abstain from all but the smallest rations, journey with infinite haste, and pray to the Holy One BBH for assistance. 

Yet after eighteen days silence I was nauseous from lack of water and food. I walked bare chested because every day it bled anew and demanded shirts used to stop my bloodflow and half my water ]to clean my wounds. It seemed the CBH was without mercy as Papa said, yet on the nineteenth day I thought of using the dagger on the rest of me, and there appeared a small caravan. A traveler saw the blood upon my chest, told me I was near death, and invited me to abide with them to rest and heal. 

"A pregnant man..."

"What?"

"I've heard such things but never thought I'd minister to one." 

"I'm pregnant?" 

"Yes, and you're not dying." 

"I'm pregnant?" 

"Surely a man won't recognize the symptoms." 

"So I'm a man?" 

"No less than I..." 

"Are you a man?" 

"Of a type..." 

"What type?" 

"The type that bleeds, same as you." 

"You bleed?"

"I did." 

"Has your monthly cycle ended?" 

"No, but just like you I bled from what was severed." 

"What was severed?"

The old healer pointed to his loins.

"Is it any different than your people, who sever the foreskin of babes?"

"The babe is eight days old." 

"It's still barbaric." 

"But why would parents permit yours to be severed so late?"

"So the child might be educated in the Pharaoh's service." 

"The price of education is to relinquish manhood?" 

"Of a type. It's said that the attractions of the palace are such that only eunuchs may survive civil service temptations without defiling women at court." 

"Do you desire to defile women?" 

"Less than most men, but yes."

The eunuch administered to me an herb called silphium, and told me thrice daily imbibement would flush the fetus out. At the very moment of our arrival in Alexandria his medicine took root, and the healer threw the entire company out of the caravan so they would not witness its effect. 

And for the second activity of my time in Alexandria, the eunuch did lead into an underground passage that brought me by candlelight directly beneath the palace of Cleopatra - I was face to face with a synagogue minyan, and all its members were eunuchs in Egypt's public service. 

"And who is this Reb Moshe?" 

"We've just crossed the desert together but I actually never learned his...." 

"...My name is Yanai-ben-Yokhanan of Yavneh." 

I had to think quickly what my name would be. 

Reb Moshe the healer immediately responded: "Reb Yanai, I don't think that's your real name." 

"What?"

"You are now Yanai-ben-Yokhanan of Alexandria. He came here to work." 

"Peace be unto you Reb Yanai. Can you do a drasha?"

"Right now?... I guess..."

"So you're a khakham."

"Of a type..."

"And you are... one of us?... nu?" 

Again Reb Moshe: "What gave it away?" The whole minyan laughed at a high pitch. 

"And you can lain Torah?"

"Hen vaHen." 

"So you're a Rabbi?"

"Of a type." 

"Alright Rav, well, let's hear a drasha from you. We'll pick an easy one. Simchat Torah wasn't that long ago, so let's hear a drasha on B'reishit." 

B'reishit. "In the beginning," the first part of the Torah telling when CBH created the world, put Adam and Eve in the Garden then threw them out, watched passively as Cain slew Abel, then destroyed the world with flood. 

I quoted them the passage on how Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge and realized their nakedness. "We should not presume to question God but God created our class of eunuchs and brought us to power. Perhaps He means to demonstrate through us that man can return to the Garden of Eden, where they are unaware of base desire, and therefore untainted by evil or shame." 

I did not know men could applaud so lustily as they. 

"Well Rav Yanai, did you learn any other skills across the desert?" 

"Of a type." (everyone laughed again)

"Well even if you have no skills like all the other Israeli rabbis, we can put you to work here in the palace. My name is Rav Yosef-ben-Ephraim and I'm chief of medical research to Pharaoh Cleopatra, blessed be her name, and in case you don't already know, you were riding through the Sinai with Rav Moshe-ben-Menashe, Cleopatra's chief physician - sent to Jerusalem to look at King Herod's arm. What's it look like?"

"It works but it keeps getting infected. The Mamzer's in serious trouble..." 

"Then all Judea's in serious trouble. You did the right thing in coming here Rav Yanai." 

----------------------------------------

Rav Yosef taught me Greek as devotedly as Papa taught me Torah. I learned just as quickly and received as much praise. I recited passages of Hesiod and Homer as though they were the Song of D'vorah. He checked out scrolls of Aristotle from the Library and I read from beginning to end his animal writings and worked my way through the densest passages of Physics and Nicomachean Ethics with the concentration Papa forced me pay to Leviticus. I learned Euclid's geometry and Pythagorus's holy ratios, I was examined weekly on how well I retained my reading on Hippocrates and aced every examination; we studied oration and rhetoric, logic and deductive reasoning, and most exhaustively, gardening and botany and potion making. Rav Yosef even taught me rudiments of playing the lyre, because every civil servant was called upon occasion to play music for Pharaoh in moments of her distress, even Jews on Sabbath. 

Rav Moshe would inevitably come to us during his many visits to our laboratory. 

"How's he coming along?" 

"He's an illui," Rav Yosef would say to Rav Moshe almost constantly. "Once we're ready to go he can take both our positions and write his own papyrus for anything he wants besides." 

"Well, as it turns out, it's time for him to take one of them. I'm retiring; taking my golden sun dial and buying a beach house in Aqaba."

"Why not Eilat?"

"Too many Jews." 

"Oy. There are more in Egypt."

"You see the problem. What's our melamed working on?" 

"It's an experiment to see if there are more than nine geometric shapes."

"Mazel Tov, but aren't you worried he'll be punished for heresy?" 

"Feh. The priests are too busy plotting against Miss Cleo to get beyz about what a stupid rabbi's doing - slicha Yanai."

"Shayn fargessen." 

And so Rav Moshe retired, got a ceremonial Friday night dinner (kosher) at which Cleopatra and Rav Yosef spoke, along with a bunch of other palace functionaries I'd never met, then Rav Moshe accepted a small obelisk from Cleopatra that had his name and position inscribed in carving, but most of the speeches were used to pay tribute to Marc Anthony, who wasn't even there, but protocol was protocol. 

That was Friday, that Monday I went to an interview with the Pharaoh in her apartment. (description of her apartment here). 

But the Pharaoh was not in the royal revelations to which we eunuchs were accustomed, she was dressed like a male pharaoh going to war; wearing a blue cap that went up an entire cubit, wearing two satchels of bronze fastened over each arm, a blue shield on her upper body and a black tunic underneath, completing the ensemble with a golden satchel that began between her legs and went near to the floor. 

"You're Rav Yanai of Yavneh?"

"I am, your majesty." 

"Strip." 

"What?"

"Strip." 

"Why?" 

"It's not for subjects to question their Pharaoh why. Is is your ruler's pleasure to see you strip, and you shall strip." 

"I fear to do so." 

"I know what you are, now do as I say." 

And in terror I exposed myself to Cleopatra in all my truth. 

"Why did you do it?"

"Because I believe I am a man."

"Many women wish they were men, some men even wish they were women." 

"But I am a man." 

"And you were a woman before you did this?" 

"No, I was a man in a woman's body." 

"All Jewish women are men in women's bodies." 

"I don't understand." 

"What matters it that you have breasts if your people go to such lengths to cover them up?" 

"But Your Majesty, I know I have them." 

"How many Jewish women do you think would rather be men?" 

"Probably most of them." 

"How many of them want to be men so badly that they could convince themselves they are men?" 

"Probably a few." 

"So how then are they men?" 

"What matters it if they convince themselves? If they want to be men, shouldn't they be men?" 

"A-ha, you are as smart as they say. Yes they should, and we in Egypt have many ways of letting them indulge their masculine side, if only Jews got rid of all that farshtunkener repression."

"Repression, Majesty?" 

"What matters it whether Jewish women are women or men if your people don't look on women as women?" 

"We don't?" 

"Your women are wives, they're mothers, eventually daughters, unfortunate children of an unfortunate god. But if it weren't for the beards there'd be no meaningful difference between Jewish men and women. You'd all be these sexless creatures; for all we in Egypt know you reproduce by hatching out of an egg." 

"Your Majesty I assure y..." 

"I know I know, you do it on your sabbath night in the dark"

"We make love to the soul, not the body." 

"Yes, you feel everything but lust after nothing." 

"Has lust been a blessing for your people?" 

"Lack of it hasn't been a blessing for you if it makes you chop off your own breasts, which, judging by your incisions were quite a sight." 

"I did not like them." 

"Mister Yanai, I will relate you a saying we have here in Egypt. 'That which the Gods have joined together, let not man tear them asunder.' I think that has different meaning now." 

"I'm not sure I follow." 

"In Egypt, you could have been a man with breasts." 

"I could... I don't understand." 

"If you could be a man with a womb, you can be a man with breasts." 

"I... I can?" 

"Do you desire to know women? You can tell me." 

"Majesty..."

"Do you desire to copulate with women?"

"I honestly have never considered the question." 

"That's a falsehood if ever I've heard one. Do you desire to lie with women?" 

"I... well... Sometimes." 

"Do you desire women and men?" 

"Yes, yes I suppose I do." 

"Well... unlike Judea, here in Egypt you can copulate with men, fornicate with women, and marry a eunuch if that is what you so desire, and you may fuck all three at the same time if that is your wish. So long as Cleopatra is Pharaoh, no law prevents you and the majority of the population agrees with me. They will let you live as you like so long as you make a home in a liberal alley, and those who disagree can live in conservative alleys." 

"Well... I suppose I owe you thanks Majesty." 

"Don't thank me, thank the eunuchs. They run this country, not me, and many of them are Jews." 

"Your majesty is not powerful?"

"I don't need power, I AM power, but a great leader only steers the chariot while the horsespull it, and they know how to drive far better than we do. And that's why you will be my personal doctor." 

"Thank you, Majesty." 

"I am also promoting you above Rav Yosef to be Chief of Medical Research for Egypt."

"Majesty..."

"Don't worry, he'll have so much to do after what I tell you that he will thank his Yahweh he doesn't have your job. Both Yosef and Moshe said you were smarter than them both, and judging by this interview I agree." 

"You flatter me Majesty." 

"You won't be flattered when you learn what you have to do." 

"If Your Majesty orders i....." 

"She does and there is much to explain. Are you listening?"

"Certainly." 

"You've studied Aristotle yes?" 

"Yes." 

"Hippocrates?"

"Yes." 

"Euclid? Archimedes? Pythagoras?"

"Yes, yes, and yes." 

"Useless, useless, useless, useless and useless." 

"Majesty?" 

"Experiments are not an activity to prove theories. Theories are activities to prove experiments."

"I'm afraid I don't...

"...Until now, the accumulation of knowledge has been its own reward." 

"Isn't it?" 

"What reward is there if people are starving and diseased but we cannot feed them?"

"Majesty, knowledge is the greatest of all vir..." 

"Spare me androgyne. Virtue is the greatest of all virtues, and the greatest of all virtues is to save lives. The accumulation of knowledge is the only way we can learn to save them, and you, supposedly the brightest mind in Egypt, with unique knowledge of what it means to be all men, are to lead us there." 

"Your majesty this is an awesome..."

"...I know it is. Furthermore, what science there is is entirely too devoted to questions only a man would pose. Everything in war has axiom and a measurement, meanwhile, all women have wondered if their cosmetics are poisoning them for two-thousand years and no thinker has thought enough of us to answer the question. All women but Jewish women that is..."

"Majesty." 

"It's alright if you take offense but just keep listening. For as long as history's been recorded on tablet, there are proposed cures for baldness and impotence, yet an astonishing common number of women suffer from headaches that alter their sense of vision and sound, yet no man has thought to ask why that is. You must solve this in addition to finding manners that increase our food supply and prevent drought on our farms, how to best build aqueducts so we can maximize the distance of water transfer from the Nile. Do you understand?

"Yes, Majesty." 

"You will have still further responsibilities. You will supervise the building of lead pipes through Alexandria so that sewage and sepsis can be deposited in the desert."

"Yes, Majesty." 

"But among all these questions I wish for you to answer, I have one chief desire above them all. Are you listening?"

"Yes, Majesty." 

"Show me you're listening by something other than yes majesty." 

"Your Majesty I am listening as intently as a man with knowledge of all men can." 

"Childbirth is the death of a plurality of Egyptian women. It would be magnificent if you found means of contraception more reliable than an animal intestine but I will be forgiving if you can't. However, there is one thing we must determine above all. All other questions you may delegate to Rav Yosef if you have not enough time. Please, I must know if you're listening." 

"Majesty, I am praying to the Lord Most High to listen with even more intention than I already am." 

"I would like very much to make abortion a right for all Egyptian women to pursue without questions or conditions, and make all abortions state-funded. However, there are priests in the Temple of Osiris, many of them and powerful, who believe that women who abort their fetuses are committing murder because a fetus is a human life from the moment it is conceived. Your job is to discover at exactly what point during human pregnancy life begins, so that I may present the proof to the High Priest. This is the most important task of your research and administration, all the Pharaoh's treasury is at your disposal. Everything else we can cover in our meetings, but I want weekly reports sent to me on papyrus with every detail of your experiments and their findings. Do you understand everything I have said?"

"Your Majesty, I must be honest, I don't know if I..."

"...It's not your job to say what is impossible. It's your job to discover what is possible. Now go forth and spread the legs of knowledge." 

-----------------------------------------------

And so we began work, but I knew Pharaoh's priority. On the one hand, there were the projects to benefit all people: those which Rav Yosef was already working on for years, and for the moment, those would still be 'delegated' to him until all the other projects were completed. Then there were the projects unique to women. 

One of the first things Rav Moses told me was 'a good civil servant always knows a boss's true intention by what they don't say.' What Pharaoh didn't say was that the real priority was the women's issues - if the general issues were solved first, men would use the greater resources to sit atop them and make women beg for a share as ever through history as recorded on the tablets. But the more progress women made, the more they could share in general progress, and the more evenly men must share their spoils. It's not like men wouldn't still get the majority of it. 

So I tried first to locate the source of women's headaches. One of Pharaoh's great innovations was a specific prison where only women were kept: the prisoners were women, the guards were women, even the warden was a woman. There were one thousand prisoners, and of the 1000, a full 200 complained of headaches. The name of the prison was Sabinia. 

I could immediately dismiss at least one solution. The good father of medicine, Hippocrates, believed headaches were induced by digestive problems and could be cured by the instigation of vomit. However, at least fifteen of the prisoners chronically induced vomiting in themselves. Of those fifteen, five suffered from chronic headaches. None of the five reported any change in their head pain by their induction of vomit. 

As a control for our experiment, we tried the four traditional methods on four separate patients: cupping, leeching, bloodletting, and burning the head. None of them seemed to work, but truth be told, we already knew that.  

Our first true experiment was to try the ancient Egyptian method of tying a clay mini-crocodile to the head, stuffing the crocodile's mouth with grain and a piece of linen containing the names of the god we think is responsible for headaches, though nobody seemed to agree which god it was. We took the ten women with the severest headaches as test subjects, we began the experiment by writing the name of a different deity among the ten major gods in each separate crocodile. Secretly, I also included an eleventh subject in whom I placed the name 'Yahweh.' Inconclusive results. We then used all 200 test subjects to write the names of all ten major gods in every possible combination and tied bigger mini-crocodiles to the test subjects whose mouth could hold a bigger piece of linen with more writing. There are 1400 minor Egyptian gods, realizing that there was no way to include each minor god in every possible combination on our test subjects, we limited it to the thirty minor gods we thought would be most relevant to headaches, and tried them all in combination. After three months, the results were inconclusive. 

Our second experiment was with potions. We tried boiling 22 separate herbs alone, some of which seemed promising: giving a few hours of relief, until the potion was administered to a second subject for whom the solution was nowhere near so effective. We then attempted combinations of herbs. Some potions showed promise, but results were still inconclusive by the time they were administered to the third or fourth subject. 

I did not want to do the last two experiments because they seemed so drastic. One was to bathe the subject in hot water filled with electrostatic eels. Even one eel struck me as potentially lethal, but clearly it would take more than one to result in a level of electrostatic that could cure a severe headache. This seemed incredibly inhumane. 

So instead we made incisions into the skull and prodded the brain with tools. We enlisted sixteen particularly brave prisoners and made an incision in a different part of the brain for each subject. The results were fascinating, they were also at times quite mystifying. Subjects whose previous behavior was relatively lucid began to speak words that were completely unrelated to what they tried to express. Other subjects, previously quite docile, began to exhibit violent behaviors. Still others exhibited slurred speech. Still others lost memories which were previously quite vivid. We could only conclude that, unprotected by skulls, various spirits had invaded their brains and stolen their neurofunctions. 

It had been nine months since we began these experiments, and it was always with great trepidation that I reported these findings to the Pharaoh at our weekly audience. At every meeting, she was extremely solicitous, understanding, and cordial, but after nine months I found her patience worn. 

"Rav Yanai, you've now exhausted all the potential solutions you listed to me at our second meeting. I have given you the full term of a pregnancy to find the source of women's headaches and you have not produced results. Is my confidence in you misplaced?

"No Majesty, but I do need time to pursue other remedies."

"While you're thinking of those remedies, it's time you conducted experiments on the question of when a fetus comes to life. Women who were not pregnant at our first meeting have now died in childbirth." 

"Yes Majesty, I understand." 

"I'm not sure you do..." 

"Well then I'd be happy for Majesty to explain it to me." 

"I don't like your tone." 

"Majesty, all I want to do is serve you." 

"I'm sure, and I'm sure your fear of me affects your work, so I am taking you into the palace." 

And the Pharaoh did take me underground, and lo, it was the very same place where our weekly Jewish minyan was held, yet it was transformed to a brothel. Never had it occured to me to use the torch to look at the walls, yet when Cleopatra held torch to wall I saw iconography of Zeus transformed to a bull to rape Europa and into eagle to kidnap Ganymede, Apollo chasing Daphne then making love to her trunk, Circe pining after Glaucon as he attempted to kiss a rock, while Pyramis and Thisby did more than kiss through the glory of a wall. 

And against the wall opened a door, where came out a man and woman unconcealed. 

"Have you been with men or women?" 

"Neither of course." 

"Don't lie." 

"Men for money to get to Egypt." 

"Then will know women, then men, and then...."  

And right on the lectern where Rav Yosef and I read every week from the Sefer Torah, I spent three whole days on my back amid orgiastic factoral groupings from every conceivable sexual taxonomy in every geometric permutation. To be sure, Cleopatra was among the many lovers I encountered, so, I think, was Marc Anthony, and so even were a few of my prisoners. Lights were always lit. I did not know most names of my collaborators, yet as exhilarating as it was, it was still more exhausting. The climaxes themselves ceased to be joyful, they felt merely like compulsive mechanics - each of their own type, more to be understood than experienced. I was neither man nor woman, merely a machine of gears and wheels in a laboratory far more elaborate than any provided for me. In experiencing her many satisfactions, I felt as though Cleopatra raised me to the height of her service so that I could bring an eye as clinical to science as she brought to sex. 

And so we began upon abortion. 

-----------------------------------------

Well, first we had to get the women pregnant. Not a single one among the prisoners didn't want to be part of the experiment; even women who vastly preferred women, even the few women who thought themselves men. It was easy enough for the prisoners who have sexual contact with each other, it happened all the time and vaginal disease could be rampant; but the contact of men was the closest any prisoner would get to the freedom they'd once known, even if, like most every sexual congressum, a moment's freedom could result in eternal slavery. Since every palace guard who could defend himself against a prisoner was a eunich, and every male prisoner could not be trusted in the private company, we brought in Roman soldiers on the proviso that their coitus must be watched by myself, a prison guard, and a eunuch palace guard to ensure that the woman was in no way mishandled. 

We started with a group of thirty to whom we'd permit three sessions of coitus with a male prisoner at days corresponding with their cycle's greatest fertility. We waited a month after conception and administered silphium in doses strong enough that there would be no chance that the baby would remain alive. We explained to them that many of these potions were so strong that they could damage the health of the mother as well as the baby, they didn't care. One of the patients died immediately, one died after a few days of searing pain, two lived on with irreparable bodily damage. Twenty-three of the thirty women expunged fetuses which were roughly the size of a grain of rice. Of those who did not expunge, only two remained pregnant. All fetuses too small to read whether the test subject had any signs of life. 

We then asked for a second group of thirty, there were no fewer volunteers. We waited two months and administered silphium at twice the dose. Two of the patients died immediately, two died after a few days of searing pain, still two more died a month after expunging while exhibiting no distressed symptoms until three days before death. Five lived on with irreparable damage. Twenty-two of the thirty women expunged fetuses which were roughly the size of a finger's breath - one-third of it was head. There was no sign of life. 

We asked for a third group of thirty, there were slightly fewer volunteers. We waited three months after conception and administered silphium at three times the initial dose. Five of the patients died immediately, five died after a few days of searing pain, eight died a month after expunging while exhibiting no distressed symptoms until three days before death. All other seven lived on with irreparable damage. All thirty women expunged fetuses, all the size two fingers' breath. All fetuses exhibited signs of normal development with fully developed extremities: arms, hands, legs, feet, and nails. Yet none were in a living state. 

It was at this moment when I had to report more than just another written report to Cleopatra and had to see her immediately, for I knew what had to be done to observe a live fetus, and dreaded it as a horror greater than any Pharaoh could visit upon me; a horror greater than any visited upon me on my journey to Egypt, horror so far greater than that performed on myself. 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"What do you mean horror?"

"Your Majesty, it is an abomination to cut women open merely to see the living fetus inside."

"Women die in childbirth all the time and must be cut into alive to save the fetus. By killing thirty women you can save an eternity of them." 

"These women needn't die!" 

"Then you will send entire eras of women to their deaths." 

"Why is it on me to save people the world disposes of so casually?" 

"Because you can." 

"I have no idea if I can save so many women." 

"Alright, then because I can save them. These are the subjects I value, and if you do not impregnante thirty women again and cut them open, I will liquidate the subjects you value. I won't just execute you, I will liquidate the entire servant class of eunuchs will die in lieu of these women."

"I still refuse." 

"Then I will kill every Jew in Egypt and march on Judea to do the same there." 

"Your Majesty, I don't believe Pharaoh Cleopatra, world renowned for her humanity, could ever do something so unspeakable." 

"Every humane leader must do terrible things to serve humanity." 

"How does killing a race of people serve humanity?" 

"I have held out to you the possibility a race of people might die, but surely you know, the possibility of every woman's death is held out every day." 

------------------------------------------------------------

None of the women knew they would be cut up, but all knew themselves likely to die on the next round. 

There was only one incentive we could offer women they would value more than life: their freedom. If they survived, they could live as free women anywhere they liked in Egypt. We got three volunteers. We then increased the offer: if they survived, they could get a pension from the palace equivalent to lifelong service. Another three volunteered. We increased again: should they volunteer and survive the procedure, they could even work in the palace as though they were eunuchs. We got another four volunteers. We then made the ultimate offer: they would live their pregnancy in luxury at Cleopatra's own palace. We got our thirty volunteers. 

And for ten whole weeks, the Pharaoh herself showed them luxury's lap as though they were foreign dignitaries. "You are the most valued soldiers of my army." Every day she brought them the finest food, the finest wine, the finest music, and the finest companions. She listened eagerly to their woeful tales of life before the law's interference, and affected still more eager attention to their dull tales of prison life. She bought each of them a green bee-eater bird in a cage, each wearing a tag of gold with the gifted's name, with the implication that those who died would live on in Pharaoh's palace. She promised that the soldiers would be extremely careful, and those those who died would die as though they went to sleep. 

Before their journey to the next world, Cleopatra banqueted a twenty-four hour last meal worthy of Caesar. Whole fish, mussels, oysters, whole pigs roasted on spit including the sweetmeats, along with sausages made that morning; beef, poultry, lamb and veal; all cooked in wine and honey; lentils, mushrooms and artichokes, dressed in a sauce of crushed anchovies; fruits and vegetables from Cleopatra's personal garden, entire tables' worth of wine from her own vineyard. Many of them would go to sleep, get up, then dine again; music, dance, poetry recitation, balls for sport, board games, laughter everywhere.  

And so came the day, and Cleopatra had them all lain on sheets of saffron silk and instead of administering to them a silphium, she would administer them an opiate potion for sleep. Even if not completely asleep, all thirty would be numb to pain. 

And Cleopatra said to them: 

"My dearest soldiers. You are the most valued members of my kingdom. Every one among you is sister to a Pharaoh and I along with Isis will see to it that should you not wake up, you will be buried with no...."

"EXECRATION AND ASTONISHMENT!" 

Tales of Classical Perversion: Of a Type - Beginning of Part 6

 

After Papa's death, I had no reason to remain in Yavneh. My father studied Torah with me as though I were his son, and a son to him is what I felt.  I didn't want to get married, and inside me a voice repeated over and over "No! You are not cut out for a woman's life." 

Finally, on the Shabbos before Rosh Hashana, I girded my lions and told him: 

"Papa, I have the soul of a man." 

"So why then were you born a woman?"

"Can heaven make mistakes?"

"No." 

"But I know I'm a man." 

"I've made a mistake in teaching you Torah." 

"But the Lord said to Shmuel: 'For the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.'"

"The Tanakh says a thousand things about the duty of women for every one about His mercy for those who sin." 

"Well, maybe one in every thousand women is supposed to be a man." 

"You are a woman, and shall learn no more Torah." 

On the shabbos after Yom Kippur, the Holy One struck him dead. Whether my father was punished for his judgement, I knew that from the next world, Papa would look on me with mercy. He was buried by Monday and Shiva continued until Sukkot. 

Alone on the first night of Sukkot, seventeen days after my confession, I took Papa's dagger and shore my hair. I dressed myself in Papa's trousers, his fringed garment, his silk coat, his skullcap, his velvet hat, his gardel and the dagger he carried within it, then studied my reflection in the mirror. I was very nearly the young man I knew within myself. All of Yavneh was asleep; and after I packed clothes, mine along with his, I lit my father's pipe and left his house forever as I smoked. 

 It would be a terrible sin to abide assistance from fellow Jews without telling them of intentions they'd regard as mortally sinful; but requiring food for my journey, I sold my body so any sin of this journey would only be on me and those who sought sin: once a day for six days in Ashdod, six in Ashkelon, six in Gaza. After eighten days fornication, I walked into the Sinai Desert where once trod Moses and Miriam. So many mountains and any among them could be where Moses met God. 

 I was tall and thin, possessing narrow hips and a deep voice. There was but one feature that made me seem womanly. My chest was outsize and cumbersome. Older men of Yavneh would repugnantly joke about my irrepressible endowment and the hands of no few would cheapen them with immodesty. 

Having heard only my footsteps and breath for three days, I stripped down to nakedness under the Sinai's night cover. As I shivered in the wind I grabbed hold of Papa's dagger and chopped those breasts from my body; and as I howled blessings to the Gates of Heaven I attempted to stop my bleeding with sand. Even as I wailed I passed out, certain I was dead; yet I awoke midday more man than woman. I searched the ground for remains but my breasts were gone, disappeared into wind and sand. 

It takes 30 days for a beginner to cross the Sinai alone that a bedouin can cross in ten. I had but eighteen days' rations upon leaving, but could not abide another day's harlottry. As a woman, there was no reliable travel partner to join, nor could I travel by caravan as fellow passengers would know my secret after my wrongly placed casabas were excised. Only alone in the desert that could I annoint my identity, and therefore I determined to sojourn with alacrity, perform the amputation at my first encounter of three days' silence, recover swiftly from the excision, abstain from all but the smallest rations, journey with infinite haste, and pray to the Holy One BBH for assistance. 

Yet after eighteen days silence I was nauseous from lack of water and food. I walked bare chested because every day it bled anew and demanded shirts used to stop my bloodflow and half my water ]to clean my wounds. It seemed the CBH was without mercy as Papa said, yet on the nineteenth day I thought of using the dagger on the rest of me, and there appeared a small caravan. A traveler saw the blood upon my chest, told me I was near death, and invited me to abide with them to rest and heal. 

"A pregnant man..."

"What?"

"I've heard such things but never thought I'd minister to one." 

"I'm pregnant?" 

"Yes, and you're not dying." 

"I'm pregnant?" 

"Surely a man won't recognize the symptoms." 

"So I'm a man?" 

"No less than I..." 

"Are you a man?" 

"Of a type..." 

"What type?" 

"The type that bleeds, same as you." 

"You bleed?"

"I did." 

"Has your monthly cycle ended?" 

"No, but just like you I bled from what was severed." 

"What was severed?"

The old healer pointed to his loins.

"Is it any different than your people, who sever the foreskin of babes?"

"The babe is eight days old." 

"It's still barbaric." 

"But why would parents permit yours to be severed so late?"

"So the child might be educated in the Pharaoh's service." 

"The price of education is to relinquish manhood?" 

"Of a type. It's said that the attractions of the palace are such that only eunuchs may survive civil service temptations without defiling women at court." 

"Do you desire to defile women?" 

"Less than most men, but yes."

The eunuch administered to me an herb called silphium, and told me thrice daily imbibement would flush the fetus out. At the very moment of our arrival in Alexandria his medicine took root, and the healer threw the entire company out of the caravan so they would not witness its effect. 

And for the second activity of my time in Alexandria, the eunuch did lead into an underground passage that brought me by candlelight directly beneath the palace of Cleopatra - I was face to face with a synagogue minyan, and all its members were eunuchs in Egypt's public service. 

"And who is this Reb Moshe?" 

"We've just crossed the desert together but I actually never learned his...." 

"...My name is Yanai-ben-Yokhanan of Yavneh." 

I had to think quickly what my name would be. 

Reb Moshe the healer immediately responded: "Reb Yanai, I don't think that's your real name." 

"What?"

"You are now Yanai-ben-Yokhanan of Alexandria. He came here to work." 

"Peace be unto you Reb Yanai. Can you do a drasha?"

"Right now?... I guess..."

"So you're a khakham."

"Of a type..."

"And you are... one of us?... nu?" 

Again Reb Moshe: "What gave it away?" The whole minyan laughed at a high pitch. 

"And you can lain Torah?"

"Hen vaHen." 

"So you're a Rabbi?"

"Of a type." 

"Alright Rav, well, let's hear a drasha from you. We'll pick an easy one. Simchat Torah wasn't that long ago, so let's hear a drasha on B'reishit." 

B'reishit. "In the beginning," the first part of the Torah telling when CBH created the world, put Adam and Eve in the Garden then threw them out, watched passively as Cain slew Abel, then destroyed the world with flood. 

I quoted them the passage on how Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge and realized their nakedness. "We should not presume to question God but God created our class of eunuchs and brought us to power. Perhaps He means to demonstrate through us that man can return to the Garden of Eden, where they are unaware of base desire, and therefore untainted by evil or shame." 

I did not know men could applaud so lustily as they. 

"Well Rav Yanai, did you learn any other skills across the desert?" 

"Of a type." (everyone laughed again)

"Well even if you have no skills like all the other Israeli rabbis, we can put you to work here in the palace. My name is Rav Yosef-ben-Ephraim and I'm chief of medical research to Pharaoh Cleopatra, blessed be her name, and in case you don't already know, you were riding through the Sinai with Rav Moshe-ben-Menashe, Cleopatra's chief physician - sent to Jerusalem to look at King Herod's arm. What's it look like?"

"It works but it keeps getting infected. The Mamzer's in serious trouble..." 

"Then all Judea's in serious trouble. You did the right thing in coming here Rav Yanai." 

----------------------------------------

Rav Yosef taught me Greek as devotedly as Papa taught me Torah. I learned just as quickly and received as much praise. I recited passages of Hesiod and Homer as though they were the Song of D'vorah. He checked out scrolls of Aristotle from the Library and I read from beginning to end his animal writings and worked my way through the densest passages of Physics and Nicomachean Ethics with the concentration Papa forced me pay to Leviticus. I learned Euclid's geometry and Pythagorus's holy ratios, I was examined weekly on how well I retained my reading on Hippocrates and aced every examination; we studied oration and rhetoric, logic and deductive reasoning, and most exhaustively, gardening and botany and potion making. Rav Yosef even taught me rudiments of playing the lyre, because every civil servant was called upon occasion to play music for Pharaoh in moments of her distress, even Jews on Sabbath. 

Rav Moshe would inevitably come to us during his many visits to our laboratory. 

"How's he coming along?" 

"He's an illui," Rav Yosef would say to Rav Moshe almost constantly. "Once we're ready to go he can take both our positions and write his own papyrus for anything he wants besides." 

"Well, as it turns out, it's time for him to take one of them. I'm retiring; taking my golden sun dial and buying a beach house in Aqaba."

"Why not Eilat?"

"Too many Jews." 

"Oy. There are more in Egypt."

"You see the problem. What's our melamed working on?" 

"It's an experiment to see if there are more than nine geometric shapes."

"Mazel Tov, but aren't you worried he'll be punished for heresy?" 

"Feh. The priests are too busy plotting against Miss Cleo to get beyz about what a stupid rabbi's doing - slicha Yanai."

"Shayn fargessen." 

And so Rav Moshe retired, got a ceremonial Friday night dinner (kosher) at which Cleopatra and Rav Yosef spoke, along with a bunch of other palace functionaries I'd never met, then Rav Moshe accepted a small obelisk from Cleopatra that had his name and position inscribed in carving, but most of the speeches were used to pay tribute to Marc Anthony, who wasn't even there, but protocol was protocol. 

That was Friday, that Monday I went to an interview with the Pharaoh in her apartment. (description of her apartment here). 

But the Pharaoh was not in the royal revelations to which we eunuchs were accustomed, she was dressed like a male pharaoh going to war; wearing a blue cap that went up an entire cubit, wearing two satchels of bronze fastened over each arm, a blue shield on her upper body and a black tunic underneath, completing the ensemble with a golden satchel that began between her legs and went near to the floor. 

"You're Rav Yanai of Yavneh?"

"I am, your majesty." 

"Strip." 

"What?"

"Strip." 

"Why?" 

"It's not for subjects to question their Pharaoh why. Is is your ruler's pleasure to see you strip, and you shall strip." 

"I fear to do so." 

"I know what you are, now do as I say." 

And in terror I exposed myself to Cleopatra in all my truth. 

"Why did you do it?"

"Because I believe I am a man."

"Many women wish they were men, some men even wish they were women." 

"But I am a man." 

"And you were a woman before you did this?" 

"No, I was a man in a woman's body." 

"All Jewish women are men in women's bodies." 

"I don't understand." 

"What matters it that you have breasts if your people go to such lengths to cover them up?" 

"But Your Majesty, I know I have them." 

"How many Jewish women do you think would rather be men?" 

"Probably most of them." 

"How many of them want to be men so badly that they could convince themselves they are men?" 

"Probably a few." 

"So how then are they men?" 

"What matters it if they convince themselves? If they want to be men, shouldn't they be men?" 

"A-ha, you are as smart as they say. Yes they should, and we in Egypt have many ways of letting them indulge their masculine side, if only Jews got rid of all that farshtunkener repression."

"Repression, Majesty?" 

"What matters it whether Jewish women are women or men if your people don't look on women as women?" 

"We don't?" 

"Your women are wives, they're mothers, eventually daughters, unfortunate children of an unfortunate god. But if it weren't for the beards there'd be no meaningful difference between Jewish men and women. You'd all be these sexless creatures; for all we in Egypt know you reproduce by hatching out of an egg." 

"Your Majesty I assure y..." 

"I know I know, you do it on your sabbath night in the dark"

"We make love to the soul, not the body." 

"Yes, you feel everything but lust after nothing." 

"Has lust been a blessing for your people?" 

"Lack of it hasn't been a blessing for you if it makes you chop off your own breasts, which, judging by your incisions were quite a sight." 

"I did not like them." 

"Mister Yanai, I will relate you a saying we have here in Egypt. 'That which the Gods have joined together, let not man tear them asunder.' I think that has different meaning now." 

"I'm not sure I follow." 

"In Egypt, you could have been a man with breasts." 

"I could... I don't understand." 

"If you could be a man with a womb, you can be a man with breasts." 

"I... I can?" 

"Do you desire to know women? You can tell me." 

"Majesty..."

"Do you desire to copulate with women?"

"I honestly have never considered the question." 

"That's a falsehood if ever I've heard one. Do you desire to lie with women?" 

"I... well... Sometimes." 

"Do you desire women and men?" 

"Yes, yes I suppose I do." 

"Well... unlike Judea, here in Egypt you can copulate with men, fornicate with women, and marry a eunuch if that is what you so desire, and you may fuck all three at the same time if that is your wish. So long as Cleopatra is Pharaoh, no law prevents you and the majority of the population agrees with me. They will let you live as you like so long as you make a home in a liberal alley, and those who disagree can live in conservative alleys." 

"Well... I suppose I owe you thanks Majesty." 

"Don't thank me, thank the eunuchs. They run this country, not me, and many of them are Jews." 

"Your majesty is not powerful?"

"I don't need power, I AM power, but a great leader only steers the chariot while the horsespull it, and they know how to drive far better than we do. And that's why you will be my personal doctor." 

"Thank you, Majesty." 

"I am also promoting you above Rav Yosef to be Chief of Medical Research for Egypt."

"Majesty..."

"Don't worry, he'll have so much to do after what I tell you that he will thank his Yahweh he doesn't have your job. Both Yosef and Moshe said you were smarter than them both, and judging by this interview I agree." 

"You flatter me Majesty." 

"You won't be flattered when you learn what you have to do." 

"If Your Majesty orders i....." 

"She does and there is much to explain. Are you listening?"

"Certainly." 

"You've studied Aristotle yes?" 

"Yes." 

"Hippocrates?"

"Yes." 

"Euclid? Archimedes? Pythagoras?"

"Yes, yes, and yes." 

"Useless, useless, useless, useless and useless." 

"Majesty?" 

"Experiments are not an activity to prove theories. Theories are activities to prove experiments."

"I'm afraid I don't...

"...Until now, the accumulation of knowledge has been its own reward." 

"Isn't it?" 

"What reward is there if people are starving and diseased but we cannot feed them?"

"Majesty, knowledge is the greatest of all vir..." 

"Spare me androgyne. Virtue is the greatest of all virtues, and the greatest of all virtues is to save lives. The accumulation of knowledge is the only way we can learn to save them, and you, supposedly the brightest mind in Egypt, with unique knowledge of what it means to be all men, are to lead us there." 

"Your majesty this is an awesome..."

"...I know it is. Furthermore, what science there is is entirely too devoted to questions only a man would pose. Everything in war has axiom and a measurement, meanwhile, all women have wondered if their cosmetics are poisoning them for two-thousand years and no thinker has thought enough of us to answer the question. All women but Jewish women that is..."

"Majesty." 

"It's alright if you take offense but just keep listening. For as long as history's been recorded on tablet, there are proposed cures for baldness and impotence, yet an astonishing common number of women suffer from headaches that alter their sense of vision and sound, yet no man has thought to ask why that is. You must solve this in addition to finding manners that increase our food supply and prevent drought on our farms, how to best build aqueducts so we can maximize the distance of water transfer from the Nile. Do you understand?

"Yes, Majesty." 

"You will have still further responsibilities. You will supervise the building of lead pipes through Alexandria so that sewage and sepsis can be deposited in the desert."

"Yes, Majesty." 

"But among all these questions I wish for you to answer, I have one chief desire above them all. Are you listening?"

"Yes, Majesty." 

"Show me you're listening by something other than yes majesty." 

"Your Majesty I am listening as intently as a man with knowledge of all men can." 

"Childbirth is the death of a plurality of Egyptian women. It would be magnificent if you found means of contraception more reliable than an animal intestine but I will be forgiving if you can't. However, there is one thing we must determine above all. All other questions you may delegate to Rav Yosef if you have not enough time. Please, I must know if you're listening." 

"Majesty, I am praying to the Lord Most High to listen with even more intention than I already am." 

"I would like very much to make abortion a right for all Egyptian women to pursue without questions or conditions, and make all abortions state-funded. However, there are priests in the Temple of Osiris, many of them and powerful, who believe that women who abort their fetuses are committing murder because a fetus is a human life from the moment it is conceived. Your job is to discover at exactly what point during human pregnancy life begins, so that I may present the proof to the High Priest. This is the most important task of your research and administration, all the Pharaoh's treasury is at your disposal. Everything else we can cover in our meetings, but I want weekly reports sent to me on papyrus with every detail of your experiments and their findings. Do you understand everything I have said?"

"Your Majesty, I must be honest, I don't know if I..."

"...It's not your job to say what is impossible. It's your job to discover what is possible. Now go forth and spread the legs of knowledge." 

-----------------------------------------------

And so we began work, but I knew Pharaoh's priority. On the one hand, there were the projects to benefit all people: those which Rav Yosef was already working on for years, and for the moment, those would still be 'delegated' to him until all the other projects were completed. Then there were the projects unique to women. 

One of the first things Rav Moses told me was 'a good civil servant always knows a boss's true intention by what they don't say.' What Pharaoh didn't say was that the real priority was the women's issues - if the general issues were solved first, men would use the greater resources to sit atop them and make women beg for a share as ever through history as recorded on the tablets. But the more progress women made, the more they could share in general progress, and the more evenly men must share their spoils. It's not like men wouldn't still get the majority of it. 

So I tried first to locate the source of women's headaches. One of Pharaoh's great innovations was a specific prison where only women were kept: the prisoners were women, the guards were women, even the warden was a woman. There were one thousand prisoners, and of the 1000, a full 200 complained of headaches. The name of the prison was Sabinia. 

I could immediately dismiss at least one solution. The good father of medicine, Hippocrates, believed headaches were induced by digestive problems and could be cured by the instigation of vomit. However, at least fifteen of the prisoners chronically induced vomiting in themselves. Of those fifteen, five suffered from chronic headaches. None of the five reported any change in their head pain by their induction of vomit. 

As a control for our experiment, we tried the four traditional methods on four separate patients: cupping, leeching, bloodletting, and burning the head. None of them seemed to work, but truth be told, we already knew that.  

Our first true experiment was to try the ancient Egyptian method of tying a clay mini-crocodile to the head, stuffing the crocodile's mouth with grain and a piece of linen containing the names of the god we think is responsible for headaches, though nobody seemed to agree which god it was. We took the ten women with the severest headaches as test subjects, we began the experiment by writing the name of a different deity among the ten major gods in each separate crocodile. Secretly, I also included an eleventh subject in whom I placed the name 'Yahweh.' Inconclusive results. We then used all 200 test subjects to write the names of all ten major gods in every possible combination and tied bigger mini-crocodiles to the test subjects whose mouth could hold a bigger piece of linen with more writing. There are 1400 minor Egyptian gods, realizing that there was no way to include each minor god in every possible combination on our test subjects, we limited it to the thirty minor gods we thought would be most relevant to headaches, and tried them all in combination. After three months, the results were inconclusive. 

Our second experiment was with potions. We tried boiling 22 separate herbs alone, some of which seemed promising: giving a few hours of relief, until the potion was administered to a second subject for whom the solution was nowhere near so effective. We then attempted combinations of herbs. Some potions showed promise, but results were still inconclusive by the time they were administered to the third or fourth subject. 

I did not want to do the last two experiments because they seemed so drastic. One was to bathe the subject in hot water filled with electrostatic eels. Even one eel struck me as potentially lethal, but clearly it would take more than one to result in a level of electrostatic that could cure a severe headache. This seemed incredibly inhumane. 

So instead we made incisions into the skull and prodded the brain with tools. We enlisted sixteen particularly brave prisoners and made an incision in a different part of the brain for each subject. The results were fascinating, they were also at times quite mystifying. Subjects whose previous behavior was relatively lucid began to speak words that were completely unrelated to what they tried to express. Other subjects, previously quite docile, began to exhibit violent behaviors. Still others exhibited slurred speech. Still others lost memories which were previously quite vivid. We could only conclude that, unprotected by skulls, various spirits had invaded their brains and stolen their neurofunctions. 

It had been nine months since we began these experiments, and it was always with great trepidation that I reported these findings to the Pharaoh at our weekly audience. At every meeting, she was extremely solicitous, understanding, and cordial, but after nine months I found her patience worn. 

"Rav Yanai, you've now exhausted all the potential solutions you listed to me at our second meeting. I have given you the full term of a pregnancy to find the source of women's headaches and you have not produced results. Is my confidence in you misplaced?

"No Majesty, but I do need time to pursue other remedies."

"While you're thinking of those remedies, it's time you conducted experiments on the question of when a fetus comes to life. Women who were not pregnant at our first meeting have now died in childbirth." 

"Yes Majesty, I understand." 

"I'm not sure you do..." 

"Well then I'd be happy for Majesty to explain it to me." 

"I don't like your tone." 

"Majesty, all I want to do is serve you." 

"I'm sure, and I'm sure your fear of me affects your work, so I am taking you into the palace." 

And the Pharaoh did take me underground, and lo, it was the very same place where our weekly Jewish minyan was held, yet it was transformed to a brothel. Never had it occured to me to use the torch to look at the walls, yet when Cleopatra held torch to wall I saw iconography of Zeus transformed to a bull to rape Europa and into eagle to kidnap Ganymede, Apollo chasing Daphne then making love to her trunk, Circe pining after Glaucon as he attempted to kiss a rock, while Pyramis and Thisby did more than kiss through the glory of a wall. 

And against the wall opened a door, where came out a man and woman unconcealed. 

"Have you been with men or women?" 

"Neither of course." 

"Don't lie." 

"Men for money to get to Egypt." 

"Then will know women, then men, and then...."  

And right on the lectern where Rav Yosef and I read every week from the Sefer Torah, I spent three whole days on my back amid orgiastic factoral groupings from every conceivable sexual taxonomy in every geometric permutation. To be sure, Cleopatra was among the many lovers I encountered, so, I think, was Marc Anthony, and so even were a few of my prisoners. Lights were always lit. I did not know most names of my collaborators, yet as exhilarating as it was, it was still more exhausting. The climaxes themselves ceased to be joyful, they felt merely like compulsive mechanics - each of their own type, more to be understood than experienced. I was neither man nor woman, merely a machine of gears and wheels in a laboratory far more elaborate than any provided for me. In experiencing her many satisfactions, I felt as though Cleopatra raised me to the height of her service so that I could bring an eye as clinical to science as she brought to sex. 

And so we began upon abortion. 

-----------------------------------------

Well, first we had to get the women pregnant. Not a single one among the prisoners didn't want to be part of the experiment; even women who vastly preferred women, even the few women who thought themselves men. It was easy enough for the prisoners who have sexual contact with each other, it happened all the time and vaginal disease could be rampant; but the contact of men was the closest any prisoner would get to the freedom they'd once known, even if, like most every sexual congressum, a moment's freedom could result in eternal slavery. Since every palace guard who could defend himself against a prisoner was a eunich, and every male prisoner could not be trusted in the private company, we brought in Roman soldiers on the proviso that their coitus must be watched by myself, a prison guard, and a eunuch palace guard to ensure that the woman was in no way mishandled. 

We started with a group of thirty to whom we'd permit three sessions of coitus with a male prisoner at days corresponding with their cycle's greatest fertility. We waited a month after conception and administered silphium in doses strong enough that there would be no chance that the baby would remain alive. We explained to them that many of these potions were so strong that they could damage the health of the mother as well as the baby, they didn't care. One of the patients died immediately, one died after a few days of searing pain, two lived on with irreparable bodily damage. Twenty-three of the thirty women expunged fetuses which were roughly the size of a grain of rice. Of those who did not expunge, only two remained pregnant. All fetuses too small to read whether the test subject had any signs of life. 

We then asked for a second group of thirty, there were no fewer volunteers. We waited two months and administered silphium at twice the dose. Two of the patients died immediately, two died after a few days of searing pain, still two more died a month after expunging while exhibiting no distressed symptoms until three days before death. Five lived on with irreparable damage. Twenty-two of the thirty women expunged fetuses which were roughly the size of a finger's breath - one-third of it was head. There was no sign of life. 

We asked for a third group of thirty, there were slightly fewer volunteers. We waited three months after conception and administered silphium at three times the initial dose. Five of the patients died immediately, five died after a few days of searing pain, eight died a month after expunging while exhibiting no distressed symptoms until three days before death. All other seven lived on with irreparable damage. All thirty women expunged fetuses, all the size two fingers' breath. All fetuses exhibited signs of normal development with fully developed extremities: arms, hands, legs, feet, and nails. Yet none were in a living state. 

It was at this moment when I had to report more than just another written report to Cleopatra and had to see her immediately, for I knew what had to be done to observe a live fetus, and dreaded it as a horror greater than any Pharaoh could visit upon me; a horror greater than any visited upon me on my journey to Egypt, horror so far greater than that performed on myself. 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"What do you mean horror?"

"Your Majesty, it is an abomination to cut women open merely to see the living fetus inside."

"Women die in childbirth all the time and must be cut into alive to save the fetus. By killing thirty women you can save an eternity of them." 

"These women needn't die!" 

"Then you will send entire eras of women to their deaths." 

"Why is it on me to save people the world disposes of so casually?" 

"Because you can." 

"I have no id

ea if I can save so many women." 

"Alright, then because I can save them. These are the subjects I value, and if you do not impregnante thirty women again and cut them open, I will liquidate the subjects you value. I won't just execute you, I will liquidate the entire servant class of eunuchs will die in lieu of these women."

"I still refuse." 

"Then I will kill every Jew in Egypt and march on Judea to do the same there." 

"Your Majesty, I don't believ Pharaoh Cleopatra, world renowned for her humanity, could ever do something so unspeakable." 

"Every humane leader must do terrible things to serve humanity." 

"How does killing a race of people serve humanity?" 

"I have held out to you the possibility a race of people might die, but surely you know, the possibility of every woman's death is held out every day." 

------------------------------------------------------------

None of the women knew they would be cut up, but all knew themselves likely to die on the next round. 

There was only one incentive we could offer women they would value more than life: their freedom. If they survived, they could live as free women anywhere they liked in Egypt. We got three volunteers. We then increased the offer: if they survived, they could get a pension from the palace equivalent to lifelong service. Another three volunteered. We increased again: should they volunteer and survive the procedure, they could even work in the palace as though they were eunuchs. We got another four volunteers. We then made the ultimate offer: they would live their pregnancy in luxury at Cleopatra's own palace. We got our thirty volunteers. 

And for ten whole weeks, the Pharaoh herself showed them luxury's lap as though they were foreign dignitaries. "You are the most valued soldiers of my army." Every day she brought them the finest food, the finest wine, the finest music, and the finest companions. She listened eagerly to their woeful tales of life before the law's interference, and affected still more eager attention to their dull tales of prison life. She bought each of them a green bee-eater bird in a cage, each wearing a tag of gold with the gifted's name, with the implication that those who died would live on in Pharaoh's palace. She promised that the soldiers would be extremely careful, and those those who died would die as though they went to sleep. 

And so came the day, and Cleopatra had them all lain on sheets of saffron silk and instead of administering to them a silphium, she administered them an opiate potion for sleep. All of them, if not completely asleep, would be numb to pain.