by Shifra Horn
“That’s the way I talk to him,” Pnina-Mazal said, and refused to elaborate.
A week before the day of the bar mitzvah, the children took their places at the supper table with gleeful, mischievous faces, looking as if they had something up their sleeves.
“Food,” suddenly cried the deep, cracked voice of an adolescent boy.
Sara, who did not know the voice, went on busying herself at the stove.
“Mother, Yitzhak asked for food,” said Pnina-Mazal with a beaming face, continuing in her role as her brother’s translator.
“Food,” Yitzhak repeated.
The plate fell from Sara’s hand and smashed into a hundred pieces on the floor. The lump that had choked her throat since the day her son was born dissolved at last, flooding her face and clothes in salty streams. Wordlessly, with her back to them and her shoulders shaking, she went on deliberately dishing up the food, placing a double portion on Yitzhak’s plate. And Yitzhak, whose appetite had been increased by the exhausting lessons, polished it off, put his plate down on the table, and repeated, “Food.” And again Sara gave him food, this time from her own plate, and again he polished it off and repeated his cry. While she was busy preparing yet another portion at the stove, she noticed Pnina-Mazal stealthily passing him food from her plate.
Usually Sara forbade her to do this. For the more Yitzhak grew and swelled, the thinner and paler his sister became, and even the freckles on the tip of her tilted nose seemed to shrink and fade. Pnina-Mazal took every opportunity to empty her plate onto her brother’s and relieve herself of the punishment of eating, and her mother watched her with an eagle eye. But today, in honor of Yitzhak’s first word, Sara decided to let her get away with it.
Encouraged by his success Yitzhak would do the rounds of the neighbors’ houses, repeating the word he had learned to say, and go to bed at night with his belly swollen and his pockets full of drumsticks, meatballs, fresh bread, pastries, and sweets. People appeared to have found a new interest in playing with him and talking to him. “Food, food,” the neighbors would cry, and Yitzhak would hurry round to join them at the table, and to the giggles of the children he would stuff himself with food in quantities that just to look at were enough to make a person sick to the stomach. And when he came home, full and satisfied, he sat down at the table and demanded his due, and Sara hurried to place his favorite foods before him.
* * *
In honor of his big day Sara sewed him a white silk coat from quantities of cloth sufficient to cover his immense bulk.
“Yitzhak doesn’t want you to sew on the amulets,” said Pnina-Mazal to her mother as she removed the amulets from the old coat.
Sara nodded her head, went to the corner of the kitchen, emptied the sugar tin with its picture of a fat farmer brandishing his scythe over a field of wheat, and put the amulets away in it, except for one. The gold napoleon she hung round her own neck on a black velvet ribbon.
When Yitzhak tried on his new silk coat he seemed to grow taller—the oppressive burden of the amulets had been lifted from his shoulders. That Saturday, free of amulets, wrapped in a prayer shawl, the beaming boy was taken to the Maoz Hadalim synagogue in the center of the neighborhood. Ezra Ben-Zion, the synagogue rabbi, refused at first to hear of a bar mitzvah for Yitzhak.
“I told you before, the child is exempt. The Lord of the Universe will not be angry if he doesn’t read the Haftarah and if he doesn’t pray to Him every morning.”
Sara insisted. First she begged, then she tried to explain that the ceremony was important not only to her as his mother, but also to the boy himself, and perhaps the Holy One—blessed be He—would perform a miracle and open Yitzhak’s mouth on the pulpit. And when nothing helped, she opened a bag full of money before the rabbi’s eyes and said shortly, “Tell me your fee.”
Anyone visiting the synagogue to this day will find the wooden bench dedicated to Yitzhak son of Sara and Avraham, and the heavy velvet curtain on the Ark of the Law, its color the blue of the sky, embroidered in gold and silver and dedicated to Yitzhak and his parents, who had made a generous donation to the synagogue.
At Pnina-Mazal’s command, Yitzhak mounted the rostrum with a heavy tread, and the rabbi unrolled the Torah scroll before him. Yitzhak stared at the letters and scratched his head, as if trying to make up his mind where he was supposed to begin reading. After long moments went by and no words of wisdom passed his lips, the women crowding the women’s gallery began to giggle and the rabbi began to read the weekly portion himself. Sara sat paralyzed in the gallery. Now their shame would be made public, and perhaps the Greek doctor had been right in the harsh things he had said about Yitzhak.
“Do something,” she hissed at Pnina-Mazal. “Make him talk!”
Pnina-Mazal rose from her place and climbed onto the bench, trying to catch Yitzhak’s eye as it wandered round the hall. When her eyes met his she looked deeply into them. Yitzhak stood up straight, puffed out his chest, pushed his fair hair off his forehead, looked at the scroll, and opened his mouth. There was a tense silence, as if the entire congregation were holding their breath, and the rustle of the ladies’ fans stopped abruptly.
“Food,” cried Yitzhak in his cracked voice.
The members of the congregation turned their faces toward the ground, avoiding each other’s eyes lest they burst out laughing.
The first sound rose from the women’s gallery, a little shriek erupting from clenched lips. The laughter rolled from bench to bench, infecting all the women and sweeping them up in its gales. Some of them bellowed like cows through the hands covering their mouths, others cackled like geese behind the fans hiding their faces. Fat women with double chins brayed like donkeys, tears pouring down their mountainous cheeks. Pregnant women spread their hands over their swollen bellies, as if afraid they might miscarry their babies, and writhed in laughter that shook their stomachs up and down.
And the laughter swept down the stairs to where the men were sitting. First it spread to the youths, who bellowed like calves led to the slaughter; from there it spread to their fathers, who barked as if they had succumbed to a sudden attack of asthma, while tears streamed down the furrows in their faces. After that it took hold of the old men, who wheezed and choked before breaking into short, dry coughs, and in the end it hit the rabbi, who covered his head and shaking body with his prayer shawl, and rocked himself to and fro as if absorbed in praying devoutly to his maker.
Sara, with Ben-Ami on her lap and Pnina-Mazal by her side, sat proudly in her new red velvet dress, trying in vain to suppress the tears of happiness choking her. And the tears gathered in her throat, rose in her nose, and flowed like a fountain from her eyes, falling onto the fair head of Ben-Ami, who chortled and chuckled with the rest of the congregation. Her Yitzhak had not let her down. She was impervious to the gales of laughter assailing her from every side. In days to come, when she remembered the occasion, she saw before her eyes her pale, overgrown son, wrapped in a prayer shawl, standing on the rostrum in all his glory and pronouncing the one and only word he knew how to say: “Food.”
Hoarse and limp with laughter, the congregation arrived at Sara’s house to partake of the festive meal she had laid on in honor of the occasion. The tables groaned under the weight of the sweetmeats and delicacies she had prepared with the help of her neighbors. There were pigeons stuffed with rice and raisins, pastries filled with meat, clear soup with egg noodles, mountains of rice studded with almonds, raisins, prunes, and sweet grated carrots. On the dessert table there awaited the guests almond cakes that melted in the mouth, sugar-coated almonds, sweets made of sesame seeds and honey, bagels smeared with sugar water and sprinkled with sesame seeds, crystallized quinces, hills of marzipan decorated with almonds, and mountains of figs and dates. While the guests shoveled the food into their mouths, groaning and holding their swelling stomachs, Yitzhak circulated among them like a bridegroom on his wedding day. With his eyes and mouth, he devoured the food that had been prepared especially for him,
tirelessly repeating the word he had learned, while his cheeks, swollen with food and fat, grew red from the affectionate pinches of the guests.
* * *
Life returned to normal. Pnina-Mazal played with her friends and conducted conversations in foreign languages with strangers passing through the neighborhood. Ben-Ami began to attend heder, Yitzhak went on guzzling, swelling, and following his sister round like a shadow, and Sara busied herself about the house. Everything could have gone smoothly but for the disaster that began to develop in the fly of Yitzhak’s trousers. The calamity that overtook them began in the hard protuberance that grew and swelled of its own accord when he was playing with his sister. Sara was the first to notice it. When she was washing him one day in the tub she noticed the member sticking out of the fair hair curling on his groin. Her heart contracted in pity at the sight of her son’s great member, which would not bring her grandchildren, and as she washed him with the rough loofah she took care to avoid touching the illomened place and arousing it.
Catastrophe descended soon enough, on a day never to be forgotten in the neighborhood. Sara was working in the garden, hoeing the herb beds, examining the poor harvest of celery, and strewing salt to kill the worms that nibbled the cabbage leaves. She had a splendid vegetable garden. Every morning she visited her neighbor Esther and raked up the droppings of her plump chickens. She spread the still-warm manure on her cherished beds, and then picked the fruit of her labors. In those days Sara turned a blind eye to the fat, clucking chickens that invaded her garden to vary their diet with the leaves of parsley and celery she lovingly grew on their excrement.
That afternoon, while she was busy in the garden, Pnina-Mazal was playing outside with her friends and Yitzhak was with her. The voices of the little girls interspersed with Yitzhak’s hoarse grunts rang in Sara’s ears like a sweet melody. Suddenly the voices stopped and an ill-omened silence filled the air. And then the shrill shrieks of frightened little girls scattering in all directions broke the silence. Sara stood up and strained her eyes to see what had happened. Before she could make anything out, Pnina-Mazal burst into the yard, pale and wild-haired, trampling the vegetable beds and crushing them mercilessly. With one foot treading on the wormy cabbage leaves and the other crushing the parsley, she buried her head in Sara’s apron. Yitzhak waddled behind her, his arms strenuously rowing the air, and the swelling in his trousers sticking out in front of him, as if to announce the arrival of its master.
Sara stared numbly at her flushed, agitated son. His lolling tongue dribbled transparent saliva onto his bar mitzvah coat, which he had refused to take off after the ceremony. Yitzhak approached Pnina-Mazal with a hurried step, his eyes fixed on her face, and she began to scream, burying her face in her mother’s apron and banishing the sight of her brother from her eyes.
While she was skipping rope with her friends, Pnina-Mazal tearfully told her mother later, Yitzhak suddenly seized hold of her, pressed the front of his body to her back, and moved his loins backward and forward straight into her buttocks. “I told him to stop, but suddenly he didn’t understand me. He tried to do the same thing to Rivka and Shula and Rachel, but they ran away,” she added.
Sara washed her daughter’s face and revived her with sugar water. Before an hour had passed a deputation of anxious mothers arrived. With grave faces they secluded themselves with Sara in the kitchen. Pnina-Mazal tried to eavesdrop on their conversation but all she succeeded in hearing was the agitated voice of Rachel’s mother, Esther, repeating, “It’s forbidden, it’s forbidden,” over and over again. Her own mother’s voice sounded quiet and conciliatory, soft and apologetic, but the agitated women interrupted her and refused to listen to her words. When they were finished they left the house with pursed lips, united and determined, and Sara dissolved in tears. During the entire discussion Yitzhak had shut himself up in the children’s room and refrained from banging his head on the wall, as if waiting for his sentence to be pronounced.
From the moment the deputation left the house Sara began to watch Yitzhak with an eagle eye.
“He’s forbidden to leave the house,” she instructed Pnina-Mazal, “and you must stop talking to him.”
“And what if he starts talking to me?” asked the child.
“You must explain to him that what he did was wrong and he must never do it again.”
When Pnina-Mazal went out to play with her friends Sara struggled with Yitzhak at the door and prevented him by force from leaving the house. In spite of his great bulk and the fact that he was a head taller than she was, she succeeded in slamming the door against him and locking it. Furiously Yitzhak banged his head against the door, like a battering ram trying to breach the defenses of a besieged city. When he failed to break down the door, he pressed himself against the bars of the window overlooking the yard and roared unintelligibly at the little girls playing outside. That evening, Sara took Pnina-Mazal’s bed out of the children’s room and put it in her own room. When they retired for the night, she barricaded the door with the heavy linen chest. Yitzhak pounded on it with his thick fists and banged his head on the doorposts, and when he tired he sat down opposite the door and waited quietly for them to come out.
The next day, when Pnina-Mazal went out into the yard, he struggled with his mother again next to the open door, and Sara barred his way with her hand. Yitzhak grabbed hold of her outstretched hand and bent her arm backward, to the dull crack of breaking bones. With a cry of pain Sara clasped her dangling arm with her other hand. Yitzhak broke out of the open door and like a stumbling bull charged into the yard. The little girls skipping rope scattered with shrieks of fear. Pnina-Mazal was left alone, the skipping-rope in her hands, staring with paralyzing fear at her advancing brother.
“Go home,” she screamed at him as he drew nearer, the bulge in his trousers growing apace.
Yitzhak took no notice and went on advancing with a heavy tread. At that moment Sara burst into the yard, holding her hurt arm with one hand and screaming for help. The men were at work and only the women and children peeped at her through the shutters. As soon as Yitzhak caught hold of his sister’s waist and began rubbing his loins against her body Sara cried in a terrible voice: “Food!” Instantly Yitzhak froze, the bulge in his trousers disappeared, and he began walking clumsily toward the house. Sara hurried after him and piled the food she had prepared for the whole week in front of him, and while he was busy polishing it off, she slipped out of the house with Pnina-Mazal and Ben-Ami and locked the door behind her.
All the way to the Tomech Dalim hospital Pnina-Mazal supported her mother and tried to calm her. A scream of pain escaped Sara’s lips when the doctor took hold of her red, swollen arm to try to assess the damage. After setting the broken bones and wrapping her arm in a thick bandage, he asked her gently, “How did it happen?”
“I fell in the yard,” she lied.
“That’s not true.” Pnina-Mazal quickly intervened to set the record straight. “My brother Yitzhak broke her arm.”
The doctor bent over the little girl and asked her kindly to tell him how it happened.
Pnina-Mazal began to tell the whole story from the beginning, despite Sara’s vigorous protests.
“You have to send him away from home,” the doctor pronounced. “He’s dangerous to himself and others and the sooner you remove him from harm’s way the better, or I won’t be responsible for the consequences.”
“But where will I send him?” whispered Sara faintly. “Who will agree to have him?”
The doctor gave her the address of Pesiah-Leah, who kept a special home for children like Yitzhak. “It’s the only place in Jerusalem that accepts children like him. You could also send him to the monastery in Ein Karem, but it’s far, the roads are in poor condition, and it’s better for him to be taken care of by Jews.”
* * *
The next day two burly men arrived at Sara’s house to take Yitzhak to the home.
“Go with them,” said Pnina-Mazal gently to her brother
. “You’ll be happy there. Go with them.”
Yitzhak, with the look of a trapped animal in his eyes, dragged his feet helplessly and unresistingly between the two toughs in white coats so filthy that they looked as if they belonged behind a butcher’s counter. Sara opened the door for them and embraced her son with her good arm. At the sight of the open door the overgrown boy broke into a lurching run, dragging the two toughs behind him.
“Tell him that we’ll come to visit him every day and bring him food,” Sara said to Pnina-Mazal. At the sound of the word “food” Yitzhak pricked up his ears, dug in his heels, and refused to move. Sara took a few biscuits, sweets, and sugar cubes and gave him some of the treats with every step he took, until there were none left. The toughs hurried him up and he lumbered heavily between them until they put him onto the cart. When he tried to jump off, they tied his hands and feet with rope. Bound and bellowing Yitzhak lay on the wooden floor of the cart and rode through the neighborhood, while the neighbor women and the children sheltered under their aprons accompanied him with stares and clucking behind the half-open shutters of their houses.
The next day Sara baked his favorite sugar cookies and roasted chicken legs, bundled them all into a cloth bag, and set out. Pesiah-Leah’s children’s home lay outside the town between the ruins of the Arab village and the broad fields surrounding the town. When she reached the environs of the home she heard the grunts and growls of the inmates. The children were locked up in abandoned old chicken runs, clinging to the fences dotted with brown chicken feathers. A strong smell of chicken droppings, rotting vegetables, and sour urine assailed her nostrils as she approached Yitzhak’s cage. Pesiah-Leah’s charges shared their cages in pairs. As she hurried past she saw squat children with straight hair, lolling tongues, and slanting eyes. They lumbered back and forth in their narrow cages, waving long arms with stubby fingers and making strangled sounds. Some of the children lay on mattresses reeking of urine, their bodies convulsed and twitching in an endless dance. In one of the cages was a boy with a gray face, a flat nose, and a dwarfish body. Compared to these children her Yitzhak looked like a prince. He was handsome, his blue eyes sparkled in his white face, and he was as tall as a nobleman. In return for a few coins she had previously slipped into Pesiah-Leah’s hand he had received a cage to himself and a moldy kapok mattress covered with a prickly blanket.