by Shifra Horn
“How do you know I’m going to have a boy?” I would ask her repeatedly, and receive the reply, “Because of your stomach, which comes to a point in the front.”
Later on I dared to ask her about the curse hinted at by crazy Dvora and about my husband who would leave me after the birth; Sara would shrink at the question, pretend to be deaf, survey my belly with eager eyes, and ask me to leave the room because she was tired.
I became afraid of her, as if my beloved great-grandmother had turned into the Lilith who kills fetuses in the womb and steals babies from their cradles, and I would try to hold my swollen belly in and make it smaller whenever I visited her.
The day I left the hospital with my son in my arms I went straight to Sara. She looked at my sleeping baby, whose pursed lips were busy reconstructing the taste of my milk, whose mind was busy dreaming about the protective walls of my womb, and whose ears were full of the sounds of the warm, soothing waters in which he had been swimming for nine long months, and asked me to give her the diapered bundle.
With weak, gnarled hands whose taut skin revealed a network of pulsing blue veins she received her great-great-grandson, and immediately dropped him again. The baby fell softly onto the starched bedcovers.
“Is it a boy or a girl?” she asked, as if she needed to hear the answer from my own lips, even though she had already heard the news from her daughter and granddaughter.
“A boy,” I replied.
“Undo the swaddling clothes!” she commanded in her flowery Hebrew. “I want to behold him with my own eyes.”
With the clumsy fingers of a new mother I undid the urine-soaked diaper and waved the lower half of the baby’s body in front of her.
Her myopic eyes armed with spectacles whose thick lenses looked like the bottoms of transparent wine bottles focused on the foreskin-covered little protuberance sticking up before her.
“A son,” she said as if to herself. “The curse is over.” And she closed her eyes and asked me to leave the room, as she was tired.
If I had expected to be asked to call the child after his grandfather or great-grandfather, I was wrong. Sara made no such request.
I left her on her smooth, spotless white bed with her eyes closed and her hair shining radiantly around her head.
* * *
Dvora accompanied me to the door and told me that my grandmother was very happy now. “A son has been born and the chain has been broken.”
When I asked her what she meant, she said that if I investigated my family history I would understand, and the first fact I should take into account was that my husband had left me the day after I gave birth, never to return.
When I looked deeply into her demented eyes she suddenly seemed completely sane, and the seriousness of her words made my skin prickle in fear.
“You’re lucky, a son at the first birth, and you have no husband now to force you to give birth to a daughter who will bear the curse,” she said.
The next day she called me and told me in tears that when she got up in the morning and went into the old lady’s room to make her bed and wake her up for her morning coffee, she found that she had died in her sleep. “But she had the same smile on her face as when she saw your baby,” she added as if to console me.
When I reached my great-grandmother’s house that morning I was greeted by a strong smell of dying roses. I found her on the brass bed—more beautiful than ever. She was lying on her back, her face radiant as if she had just received glad tidings, and her hair, which Dvora had combed, covering her entire body like a white silk sheet. When I went home after making the funeral arrangements I was accompanied all the way there by the smell of wilted roses, which clung to my body, my clothes, and the baby at my breast, and refused to go away for many days afterward. The smell would steal into my nostrils at unexpected hours and inappropriate moments, squeezing jets of tears from my eyes and convulsing my body with sobs whose meaning I did not always understand. Sometimes I felt in them the grief at the death of my great-grandmother, sometimes I was sure that they stemmed from the postpartum crisis against which I had been warned, and sometimes I wept for my husband’s desertion.
* * *
My great-grandmother Sara left me three things: her brass bed, in whose softness I had been born and on which I loved to jump, as if on a trampoline, when I was small; the gold napoleon that she always wore round her neck on a black velvet ribbon, even in the bath; and the sandouk—the hooped dowry chest made of rusted metal that looked like a pirate’s treasure chest, which stood at the foot of her bed and upon which she would grandly lay her dressing gown. The enormous brass bed and the sandouk, which was heavy and full of treasures I could as yet only imagine, were transported by Haleb, the porter I hired next to the Damascus Gate. The bed and the sandouk swayed on the ramshackle van bearing the blue license plate of the occupied territories and attracted curious looks from the passersby.
I sold the napoleon the same month, being short of cash, to Zion, the goldsmith from Geula. He was glad to buy it from me for two thousand shekels, its value by weight. At the same time he was honest enough to tell me that his price did not include its value as a two-hundred-year-old coin, and that if I wanted to get more money for it, I should look for a coin collector, who would undoubtedly pay me more, while he could pay me only its weight in gold. But upon closer examination he told me that I would not find a collector who would pay me more, since the coin had been cut in two and joined later by the hand of a master craftsman. He pointed to an almost invisible scratch on the gold coin, which he had been able to discern only with the help of a magnifying glass. After a long and thorough examination he added that only his grandfather Yihiye, once the neighborhood goldsmith, would have been capable of making the join.
He called his mother from the upstairs apartment, and she glanced at the coin through the magnifying glass and told us about the beautiful woman holding two halves of a coin in her hand who had illuminated her father’s dark little shop with her golden hair. “My father, a very pious man, refused to look at her. All the time she was talking to him he sat opposite her with his eyes closed. As a child I thought that he was dazzled by the radiance of her hair and afraid of being blinded and rendered incapable of pursuing his profession. Today I’m convinced that he was afraid to look at her lest she bewitch him by her beauty, cause him to lose his wits and bring down trouble on his head.”
Thus I heard the first story about my great-grandmother Sara. In the course of time, as I collected more and more stories about my family, I came to realize that within the radius of the neighborhoods of Zichron Moshe, Ohel Moshe, and Geula there was hardly a single soul who had not known her, seen her, met her, or heard about her.
As for the sandouk, it remained locked and unopened for an entire month. Whenever I approached it I shrank from opening the lid, afraid of confronting the dark and terrible secret that I both longed and feared to know.
Until one evening when I put my baby to bed after the ritual of the bath and the broken television set transmitted nothing but hypnotic flickering lines and shining stars to my tired eyes. That evening I went apprehensively up to the chest and lifted the heavy lid quickly, before I could have second thoughts. The lid rose with difficulty, with the discordant creak of rusty iron, and a silvery flock of pale, soft-bodied, short-winged moths rose in its wake, sprinkling me with dust, like stardust from a fairy’s wand. I watched the moths as they sailed suicidally toward the swaying naked bulb, and then changed their minds and settled haphazardly on the walls of the room. With a sense of doom I peeped inside the chest, expecting the worst.
The chest was full of tin boxes of different sizes, some of them round English shortbread tins with a picture of a sentry in a bearskin hat on their lids. There were also coffee tins with Arabic writing on them, tins for cocoa imported from Holland, and many other, unidentifiable tins, piled one on top of the other. All the tins I opened contained pictures, masses of pictures, which rose into a great, yellowing pile on the bed.
Some of them were brown, some crudely colored, and nearly all of them were eaten into by tiny insects whose like I had never seen before and whose name I did not know. Judging by the inroads they had made in the apparel of the figures in the photographs, their gastronomic preference appeared to be for clothing. When they wanted to vary the menu, they devoured the hand-painted snowy mountains appearing on the backdrop of the photographs, and the long hair crowning the heads of the women. Occasionally they enjoyed nibbling the eyes, leaving an expression of hollow-eyed panic in the wake of their jaws.
On the backs of those photographs in which steep mountains rose behind photographed figures whose cheeks had been reddened, whose hair had been yellowed, and whose eyes had been painted bright blue by the hand of the photographer was a round purple stamp bearing the legend “Photographic Studio of Rahamim Cohen—Ohel Moshe.” And underneath the words in the circle was a picture of a delicate gazelle.
Other photographs looked like the pathetic attempts of an amateur journalist who had carefully posed battalions of soldiers in front of him and ordered them to hold their stomachs in and their heads up and clean the specks of dust off their breeches or their tartan kilts. And others documented gleaming, heavy cannons loaded with the help of a long rod, squares, horses, foreign landscapes, and portraits of men and women who had departed this world long ago. These photographs were stamped in red with the initials “EG.” The stamp looked new, as if it had been impressed only a few hours before. The letters were surrounded by an oval frame and decorated with curlicues, like Gothic letters.
At the bottom of the chest the last box waited to be opened. It was wrapped in tulle, which disintegrated at my touch and left a little heap of yellow dust behind it. The edges of the box, which had become stuck together during the course of the years, refused to open and reveal their secret. I pulled a hairpin out of my hair, inserted it beneath the rim of the lid, and loosened the thin tin a little. The lid opened timidly and reluctantly.
A pile of pictures spilled onto the bed. At the sight of them I felt my heart literally skip a beat. And when I recovered I looked to see what was written on the backs of the photographs. They too bore the red stamp with the initials “EG.” From the subjects of the photographs it was clear that the photographer had been very close to my great-grandmother Sara.
Her glowing eyes, which gazed at me from the moment immortalized by the photograph, glittered with the look of a woman in the afterglow of the act of love. Her naked body was shamelessly arched, her breasts defiant and her chin held high. With my skin prickling into gooseflesh I knew that this photographer, whose name had never been mentioned at home, had been closer to her than any other man.
And thus, cradled in her brass bed that sucked me into its lap with the gentle insistence of silent, discreet old mattresses, which have suffocated the sighs of people long gone, and swallowed the passionate cries of those who drowned in their softness, I dived into the mountain of photographs. During those sleepless nights, between changing diapers and breast-feeding, I made up my mind to embark on a journey in search of my family.
Chapter Two
When I was born, so I was told, my mother decided to call me Amal (which means “labor” or “travail” in Hebrew and “hope” in Arabic), a pure socialist name with profound class symbolism, one that sounds good in both Hebrew and Arabic. Not everyone applauded her decision. I remember incidents in which my mother would encounter raised eyebrows in reaction to my name, which in those days was considered unusual and strange. Gleefully she would pounce on the eyebrow-raiser and wither him with one of her harder looks, scornfully remarking that it was “disgraceful to expose such ignorance.” She would ask: “How could you fail to recognize that my daughter is called by a pure biblical name?” And when she saw the puzzled look on her interlocutor’s face she would quote chapter and verse from the Book of Job: “For man is born unto travail.”
At the Lady Meyuhas School for Girls, too, which I attended in my early years, my name proved controversial. The headmistress claimed that it was unbecoming for a pretty little girl to be called by such a charged, portentous, and foreign-sounding name. So they decided to add the letters “y” and “a” to my name and called me Amalya. In the first term of my studies in grade one I was called Amalya at school and Amal at home. This custom came to an end when my quick-tempered mother discovered the appending of the holy letters “y” and “a” to my name on my end-of-term report; the very next day, after shouts and protests clearly audible from the headmistress’s room, she was promised that from then on I would be called by my original name.
Since I was only too well aware of my mother’s belligerent nature, I never told her that at school they continued to call me Amalya and only used my original name, Amal, on official documents and end-of-term reports, as if for form’s sake, to mollify and appease her. My close friends were allowed to call me Mali for short, but with one reservation: when they were at my house they had to address me by my official name as it appeared on my ID card—Amal.
The problem of my name became particularly difficult from the moment I was discovered by boys, worsened when the boys grew into youths, and caused irrevocable damage when men appeared in my life. The name Amal was ground like gravel in their mouths, and led them all, as if they had agreed in advance, to call me Mali for short, a noncommittal, amiable name with a romantic sound. For how could anyone love a girl called Amal, however attractive she might be, how could anyone groaning in the heat of passion call out this name, whose very sound was enough to cause the stiffest member to dwindle? Accordingly, all the youths and men who came into my life called me Mali, and all my attempts to explain to them that in my house I had to be called Amal fell on deaf ears. When they phoned me at home and asked to speak to Mali, my mother would slam the phone down, though not before announcing in her hard, official voice that no one by that name lived in her house.
To this day, when I have to introduce myself, I become confused. Sometimes I introduce myself as Amal and sometimes as Amalya. And sometimes, when I’m particularly flustered, I introduce myself as Amalya-Amal, and they’re all sure that Amal is my surname and they admire the originality of the combination.
* * *
Questions about my father became particularly important to me during my school days, when I had to fill in forms from the Education Ministry at the beginning of every year. I had no trouble filling in my mother’s name and occupation—Geula, lawyer—but when I came to my father’s name I hesitated between Moshe and Ya’akov. I decided on Moshe, and as his occupation I chose policeman. All the children in my class wanted their father to be a policeman, but only I could permit myself to proudly write it down. I would boast of my policeman father and talk about his peaked cap and pistol and handcuffs, and how all the crooks in town trembled at the mention of his name. I explained his absence by saying that he was busy chasing burglars all day and only came home late at night. Only my two best friends, Dafna and Na’ama, knew that I didn’t have a father—or, more precisely, that I once had a father and now I didn’t.
My father the policeman played a starring role in my life until the third grade, until the moment when the homeroom teacher asked me to bring him to class so that he could tell us about his work. When I evaded the issue with all kinds of excuses, she phoned my mother. That evening, sitting across from me at the kitchen table, over our omelettes and salad, she told me that from now on, when I had to give my father’s name, I should write “Unknown.”
“He’s known to you,” I retorted, “and I’m his daughter, and I deserve to know his name and occupation too.”
“It’s none of my business and none of yours,” she replied, shrugging her shoulders and waving her hand in the familiar gesture of dismissal.
“And if I haven’t got a father, why don’t you get married so I can have a new father?” I insisted.
Her reaction astonished me. She burst into wild laughter, wiping the tears bursting from her eyes with her sleeve.
&nb
sp; “What for?” she asked. “What do we need someone hanging around the house and dishing out orders for? For me to have to wash his socks and listen to him snoring at night? We’re better off alone,” she added, and uncharacteristically put her arm round my shoulders and hugged me affectionately. The smell of naphthalene clinging to her pinched my nose and made me sneeze.
* * *
The hug she gave me then was rare. Strain my memory as I will, no pictures of tenderness and closeness between me and my mother come to mind. My mother was an advocate of strictness in education. In body language and without words she expressed the feeling that this was not the child she had wished for, and that she would have gotten along just fine if I had never been born.
In general, whatever I did in my life I felt that I was disappointing my mother.
The first bone of contention between us was my hair. She wanted me cropped and I wanted to grow my hair long. My mother had an inexplicable objection to long hair; to be more precise, she hated long hair. Whenever my hair passed the ear line she would seat me on the tall stool in the kitchen and chop it off with hatred, her teeth clenched in rage. For years I went about with a boy’s cropped haircut, until the day I stood my ground and prevented her by force from shearing my locks. After that she would try to persuade me to do her will with the legal tactics she had adopted in daily life as well as in court. For hours she would prove to me with cold logic that short hair was both healthier and more beautiful. When her words had no effect, she would draw my attention to the plumbing, and threaten that my long hair would clog up the pipes and cause a flood. When logic failed, she would raise her voice. Despite the psychological warfare she waged against me I clung to my long hair and prevented her from wreaking vengeance on it with her ruthless scissors.
I shall never forget her satisfaction upon discovering lice eggs in my hair. Resolutely she seized hold of my arm, led me to the kitchen stool, and with hands reeking of naphthalene ruthlessly chopped off my locks, repeating through pursed lips: “I told you so, long hair brings nothing but trouble.”