by Shifra Horn
The barber closed the door behind her, pulled down the blinds, and like a thief in the night began collecting the shorn hair from the filthy floor of his shop. Strand by golden strand he gathered up the hair covering the floor, tied it up with a white ribbon, and plaited it into a long, thick braid. Weighing the braid in his hands he looked round for a place to hide the unexpected bounty that had fallen to his lot. When he found a loose tile in the floor he dug a deep hollow with his scissors, wrapped the heavy braid in a cotton cloth, coiled it like a snake, and buried it in the ground. Then he replaced the tile, covered up the traces of his work, raised the blinds, and opened the door, rubbing his black-nailed hands together in satisfaction.
* * *
Bald as an egg Sara hurried back to the hotel. As if in anticipation of her arrival, the lobby was full of men with double chins and fezzes, rolling dark amber prayer beads in their fleshy hands in concentrated expectation. Their eyes were fixed on the door, waiting to be dazzled by the radiance of Sara’s hair. The hotel manager who hurried to meet her clapped her hands at the sight of the catastrophe.
“How could you? How could you do such a dreadful thing?” she mumbled in horror. When she recovered from the shocking sight she asked: “And the hair? Where is it?”
“At the barber’s,” replied Sara faintly.
“What barber?” asked the manager in a choked voice.
“The one next to the Turkish baths,” replied Sara.
The men waiting in the lobby twirled the tips of their mustaches, whistled in admiration, and caressed the shining bald head with moist, lustful looks. Sara fled their looks in horror, rushed upstairs, and packed her belongings. A gleeful gleam appeared in the eye of the hotel manager as she contemplated a golden treasure in her imagination. She turned to the boy slouching at the entrance, took out a leather purse full of silver coins, and whispered something in his ear. The lad leaped from his place and hurried off in the direction of the barbershop.
Under the ogling eyes of the men crowding the lobby Sara descended the stairs and walked down the street, accompanied by the porters carrying her luggage and gripping the hands of her children so tightly that she left white pressure marks on their palms. At twelve o’clock the train left Jaffa for Jerusalem. Pnina-Mazal and Yitzhak ran about among the passengers, one learning new languages and the other filling his pockets with candies and nuts. Sara sat on her seat in the coach looking through the window and smoothing her hands over her hairless head, preoccupied by the slight feeling of nausea in her stomach, as if she were still on the ship, and the dull pain piercing her breasts, which had grown heavier overnight.
In the afternoon they reached their destination. Jerusalem welcomed them with a cold rainstorm, which sent shivers down their spines and soaked their light summer clothes. Sara felt as if the hair she didn’t have was standing on end. Now she missed the warm, heavy pelt that had covered her head since the day she remembered herself. Absentmindedly she ran her parted fingers through her imaginary hair, only to realize that she was bald. When the cold sharpened, and entered her exposed ears, she wrapped her naked head in a colored scarf, like Ashkenazic women on the day after they lost their virginity. The carriage that bounced over the pits in the road and jolted the passengers and their luggage took Sara to an inn on the outskirts of town, where she knocked on the door like a travel-weary wayfarer coming home at last.
The hostile gaze of the elderly innkeeper turned quickly from astonishment to undisguised delight.
“Sara’s come home,” announced Rachel, the red-haired Geula’s younger sister, to the deserted parlor. “You can stay with me until you find a house,” she said, clasping Yitzhak and Pnina-Mazal to her bosom. “Where did you go? Where’s Avraham? What happened? Who’s the little girl? And what have you done to your hair?” she asked, her voice turning into a shriek as she suddenly realized the hairless state of Sara’s head under the tightly bound scarf.
“It’s better this way,” Sara replied shortly, ignoring the rest of the questions. She asked to see her room.
The next day she left the children with Rachel and went to look for a house to stay in. Her feet led her to the new neighborhood of Ohel Moshe. The new houses were spacious and had flat ceilings supported on thick iron bars, like the rails for some great train to ride on. The floor tiles were square and smooth, colored and patterned like a carpet that would never wear out, and all the houses boasted red-tiled roofs, as if they had fezzes perched on their heads. Next to each house two sturdy trees were planted, and between them lay beds of flowers, fragrant herbs, and vegetables.
With the money she had brought Sara purchased a house with a red-tiled roof, a spacious veranda, and three big, light rooms. The next day she went to town and bought a big brass bed, iron beds for the children, and a dining table big enough for her to feed a regiment of soldiers, or so the furniture seller promised her with a wink that was not at all to her liking. Within the space of a few days she organized her new household and left the inn.
Chapter Eight
The day Sara moved into her new house she went to the Arab village next to the spring of Shiloh and returned with vegetable seedlings and the shoot of a mulberry tree in a round kerosene tin. The neighor women cast sidelong looks at her as she walked past and as she dug a pit and planted the sapling in it. The next day her neighbor Esther went to the same village and returned with a similar mulberry shoot and planted it in her yard. A year later the fresh young tree in Sara’s yard produced plump purple fruits that filled the mouth with sweet, dense juice. Esther’s tree was bare, a target for the scorn and derision of the neighbors. They would look at it and compare it to a barren woman with an unfruitful womb. Then Esther would go up to her empty tree, fix it with a baleful eye, and curse it for its stubborn barrenness. Every year she would threaten her tree that if it failed to bring her fruit she would chop it down and turn it into firewood. But Esther’s barren tree remained planted in her yard opposite Sara’s abundantly fruitful one, mocking the threats of its planter. The sentence was postponed from year to year, and the tree grew stronger, spreading its boughs and sheltering Sara’s fruitful tree in its shade.
Life in the new house was quiet and good. Pnina-Mazal played with the neighbors’ children and went on learning new languages, and Yitzhak, who spent most of his time eating and drinking, grew and swelled and thickened. His red cheeks rounded and his blue eyes sank deeply into the fat surrounding them until they looked like two slits painted blue. When he wasn’t busy grinding food between his strong teeth he would follow his sister like a shadow, voicelessly expressing his requests for new kinds of food and demanding sweetmeats from passersby and neighbors. Sara did not go out to work, since a sum of money reached her every month, accompanied by a short letter from Avraham. The sum grew larger and the letters grew shorter, until one month the money arrived without a letter, and this happened the next month too and in all the months that followed it.
* * *
Exactly nine months after leaving Salonika, she gave birth to a son. Her neighbor Esther ran to fetch the midwife, and when they returned they found her with a big baby lying by her side, its blue eyes wide open.
“I’ll call him Ben-Ami,” she said to Esther and asked her to send a telegram to Avraham informing him of the birth of her child.
That month the sum of money was doubled and redoubled. Sara turned the envelope upside down and inside out, but there was no note to be found. Tight-lipped she went to Esther and asked her to donate the money to the charity for poor brides, to the fund for the destitute, and to yeshiva scholars. “Give it to whomever you like. I don’t want it.” Esther quickly buried the money in the deep cleavage between her breasts. The envious neighbors told Sara that she had hidden the money behind the stove and given not a penny to charity.
“She too is needy,” said Sara quietly. “Let her enjoy the money. If she took it for herself, it means that she needs it.”
The rabbi performed the brith as if for an orphan and blessed
the big healthy baby.
“The child will grow to be tall and broad-shouldered,” said the doctor who examined him in the hospital. And the baby grew as if of its own accord. It needed nothing but food and for its diapers to be changed. And every morning, when she went up to its cradle, it would look at her with its blue eyes and smile, revealing two tiny teeth growing from its lower gum.
From the day the baby was born Pnina-Mazal neglected her older brother Yitzhak. Now she had a new toy to enjoy and to play with. The baby was quiet, and Pnina-Mazal took the credit. She always knew when to feed it, when to change its diaper, when to turn it on its stomach, when to burp it, and when to put it down to sleep. And most of the time the baby smiled, happy and content and with no need to cry in order to express its wishes.
* * *
A few months after the birth Sara’s neighbor Dina, daughter of pious Miriam, came and told her that while she was shopping in the market a yellow-haired stranger had approached her with a picture in his hand. “And as I live and breathe, the picture was of you. And when he saw that I was on the point of fainting, he asked me where he could find you.”
Sara’s knees turned to water and a deep blush spread over her cheeks. “What did the stranger look like?” she asked in a trembling voice.
“Tall and blue-eyed, and he spoke English,” Dina replied, with her eyes boring into Sara’s.
“And what did you tell him?” Sara asked, trying in vain to hide the tremor in her voice.
“He looked to me like a drowning man, so I brought him to your house and showed him where you live. He looked at the diapers hanging on the line and asked me if you had given birth to a baby,” Dina replied. Then she went home, closed the shutters, and peeped through the slats at Sara, who went on standing rooted to the spot.
After a moment Sara hurried into the house. She pulled the kerchief off her head and examined her hair. Since it had been shaved off the year before it had grown and now reached her ears. The new hair was darker in color, a light brown mingled with strands of white. After putting the children to bed she swept the floor and lit the oil lamp. Then she combed her hair, washed herself, changed her clothes, and waited in the dark, her eyes, smouldering like those of a cat in heat, fixed on the window. She fell asleep sitting on the chair and woke at dawn, her limbs stiff and her bones aching.
The next day she put the children to bed early, put on her best dress, and waited. A thud startled her from her light sleep on the chair, and she ran to open the door. Darkness greeted her and the doorstep was deserted. With her body aching she got into bed and fell into a restless sleep. She dreamed of the boat swaying above the dark water and felt the coarse woolen blanket pricking her naked flesh.
For a number of days she waited for the yellow-haired foreigner, and when he did not come she was afraid that she would never see him again. She began to neglect her appearance, and Pnina-Mazal had to remind her that she hadn’t washed for a week. Her hair was matted and greasy and stuck to her scalp. The festive attire in which she fallen asleep waiting at the window hung on her like a dirty rag. She would lose her temper with the children and scold them for trifles. She was especially impatient with Yitzhak, and she pinched him mercilessly when he stretched out his hands to take food from her plate or Pnina-Mazal’s. She didn’t even have the strength to cook and bake, and she would buy fresh pitas from the Arabs and stuff them with goat cheese and olives for the children to eat. Yitzhak had never been so hungry as he was during this time, and he would visit the neighbors at mealtimes, staring at the food on their tables and waiting for them to feed him.
Departing from her usual habits, Sara stopped sweeping and washing the floor, and there were muddy footprints everywhere. Filth covered the carpets, the colored bedspreads, and the linen. Piles of dirty washing and soiled diapers rose in the sitting room, moldy and stinking. Nor did she take care of the garden, and couch grass and thorns attacked the coriander, the basil, and the parsley she had lovingly cultivated, stole their water and choked them with the offshoots of their hard, murderous roots. Pnina-Mazal and Yitzhak roamed the streets dirty and hungry, and the neighbors could not understand what had happened to Sara, who had always been so scrupulous about her own and her children’s appearance.
During this time she hardly bothered to get out of bed. She lay in her stinking bed shivering with cold, her hair tousled and her eyes dull and red. Esther took the baby Ben-Ami to her bosom and cared for him until his mother should recover, and Pnina-Mazal with Yitzhak sticking to her like a leech spent all day on the street, stealing back at dark and tiptoeing round the house in order not to bring their mother’s wrath down on their heads. Then the little girl would share a supper of hard pitas with her brother and put him to bed. After that she would stand by her mother’s bed, offer a cup of sweet tea and a crumbling biscuit to her dry lips, and tell her to get up, eat, and wash herself. When Sara did not respond, Pnina-Mazal demanded that she get out of bed so that she could change the linen. But her mother clung to the sheets until her knuckles whitened and refused to get up.
* * *
One night there was a knock at the door. Sara, restless in her expectation of the yellow-haired foreigner, was the first to wake. With her hair tousled and her nightgown stinking and sticky with sweat, she opened the door. Edward stood before her, and she fell into his outstretched arms, murmuring his name. He examined her face in the moonlight, wonderingly touched her short, dirty hair, and recoiled at the strong smell her body exuded. Mumbling to himself in his own language he turned away abruptly, and she followed him with her arms stretched out before her like a sleepwalker. Edward picked up his hat, which had fallen off his head, muttered something, and fled. Sara tried to run after him, but her feet caught in the hem of her nightgown, and she was thrown to the ground.
At the sound of the fall Pnina-Mazal woke and found her mother lying weeping in the yard, her body as cold as ice. She helped her up and led her back to bed, and then ran to Esther’s house to call for help.
“First we must change her bedclothes and wash her foul-smelling body,” determined the bleary-eyed neighbors who had been woken from their sleep.
Pnina-Mazal lit the lamp and the neighbors lined up on either side of the bed. Taking hold of Sara’s sobbing, emaciated body they lifted her up in the air to enable Pnina-Mazal to change the bedclothes. Then they carried her to the kitchen, put the kettle on to boil, and washed her weakly resisting body and shampooed her hair. As she sat wrapped in a big sheet, with her clean hair falling on either side of her thin face, the women forced a little soup through her clenched lips, and put her to bed.
The next morning the children woke to smells of baking. Sara, washed and dressed in a clean frock, with Ben-Ami on her hip, was standing smiling in the kitchen and baking the children’s favorite biscuits. When they went out to play she began to scrub the house and remove the layers of dirt clinging to it. Then she put the kettle on to boil and washed the piles of dirty clothes, rubbing and beating them furiously, and when she had finished hanging out the washing she knelt down in the garden and angrily uprooted the couch grass choking her beloved plants.
She tried to wipe Edward’s memory from her heart, and whenever she thought of him and of the rocking boat she would quickly conjure up the sight of his horrified face as he looked at her in the moonlight and his panic-stricken flight from her house, and her composure would return.
* * *
The year that Yitzhak approached his bar mitzvah Sara went with him from one rabbi to another looking for someone who would agree to teach her son.
“If he hasn’t learned his letters till today, he won’t learn them tomorrow either,” they told her, and added another amulet to his already overburdened coat.
“Your son is exempt from becoming a bar mitzvah,” she was told by others.
“Even if he says one word on the day of his celebration it will be enough for me, just tell me your fee and I’ll pay it,” she told the teachers.
Lame Menashe ag
reed to teach him when he saw the bag of coins jangling in Sara’s hands. Night and day he sat with the boy, trying his best to teach him, but in vain. Yitzhak would come home gray-faced and covered in shame. At night he banged his head on the wall so hard that all the neighbors heard the thuds. Soon his head was covered with swollen blue bruises.
“He doesn’t want to go to the melamed,” said Pnina-Mazal one morning. “Lame Menashe hits him on his hands,” she added.
“His bar mitzvah is approaching,” said Sara. “Who will teach him? He has to learn to say at least one word.”
“I’ll teach him,” the little girl volunteered.
“If the melamed has failed, how will you succeed?” Sara said with doubt in her voice.
“I can talk to him. The melamed doesn’t know how to do it,” the child replied.
“Do as you wish,” said Sara in despair.
* * *
From that day on Pnina-Mazal shut herself up with her brother from morning to night. She tempted him with food and sugar lumps and pressed pastries into his mouth for every effort he made. The friends who came to ask her to play with them were turned away.
“After Yitzhak’s bar mitzvah I’ll come out to play,” she promised.
Sara looked at her daughter’s thin face, and her heart ached for the little girl shut up in the dark house instead of playing outside with her friends. Sometimes she tried to listen to what was happening in the closed room, but she couldn’t hear anything. Once, when her curiosity got the better of her, she peeped in at the children. She saw Pnina-Mazal holding her brother’s hands and looking deep into his eyes. Yitzhak, his eyes fixed on hers, sat still, as if hypnotized. For almost an hour the children sat there in silence, until Sara tired of looking at them and left the room.
“Why don’t I hear you teaching him?” Sara asked Pnina-Mazal the next day.
“We’re studying,” the child replied shortly.
“But why in silence?”