by Shifra Horn
And when they retired to their room, David would seat his wife on the edge of the bed, press his face against her flat belly, and cup her burgeoning breasts in his hands, until her heavy breaths united with his. The next morning Sara would look long at her daughter’s face and discover on it the traces of the night before.
When a year passed and Pnina-Mazal’s womb still refused to open and absorb new life, Sara took her to the doctors. And when they could find no cure she took her to the rabbis. After that they made the rounds of the magical healers and kabbalists. After every such visit the pillow at David’s head would bulge with the new additions to the stock of parchment scrolls bearing spells and invocations, bits of blue glass to banish the evil eye, and amulets inscribed with the names of the angels of fertility hidden beneath it. When the potions and spells did not work, Sara would lie on her bed at night, making promises and taking vows. And when yet another year passed and Pnina-Mazal’s belly still refused to swell, the suspicion crept into her heart that her daughter was being punished for Sara’s own sins.
* * *
The rumor about the end of the world was brought to Sara by her neighbor Esther. More than anything Esther loved spreading hair-raising stories that sent shivers down the spines of her terrified audience. Nothing happened that day to hint at the doom awaiting Esther, Sara, the neighborhood, Jerusalem, the country, and the world at large.
“Next week, on Wednesday,” said Esther to Sara in the garden, under the mulberry trees with their intertwining branches, all her double chins quivering with the importance of her doom-laden news. “A star is going to fall on us, the star with a tail—la istaria con cola. It will come from the east, and bring trouble to the whole world: wars, plagues, and unnatural deaths. A terrible, fiery star—if it falls on a tree, the tree will burn, if it falls on your house, its effect will be worse than lightning. And if we’re lucky and it falls into a pool of water, it will be extinguished and turn into a smouldering ember.”
“How do you know?” asked Sara, accustomed to her neighbor’s tales of gloom and doom and the way in which she invented calamities and catastrophes on a daily basis.
“Benyamin the watchmaker told me he had read it in the newspaper, and if it’s in the newspaper it must be true,” she said decisively. “And in the newspaper it’s called ‘Halley’ and people all over the world are throwing themselves off high buildings for fear of burning in its fire.”
“And what must we do?” asked Sara, a note of apprehension creeping into her voice.
“Shut ourselves up in our houses and pray to God Almighty to save us. And sinners are the first in line to burn in its fire,” she replied, drawing her loose dress tightly around her body, as if in preparation for what was to come.
With the rumor of the fire giving her no peace, Sara drew great quantities of water from the public well and surrounded the house with jugs, jars, basins, and buckets of water. She prepared the interior of the house for disaster, too, filling every vessel she could lay hands on with water. Then she went to the market and laid in supplies of rice, lentils, beans, flour, and oil and several loaves of bread in preparation for the seige. When Esther came to visit her she praised her foresight, and mobilized the other women of the neighborhood to join forces and prepare for the worst.
All that week the gurgling of the pump at the mouth of the well was heard without a pause. When one woman tired another took her place and filled jars and bottles, jugs and kettles with water. The women stood side by side in a chain, passing an empty pail from hand to hand until it reached the woman stationed at the pump, who passed it back down the line until it reached its destination in one of the houses of the neighborhood, taking up its place in the ranks of brimming vessels already standing there.
And all that week the husbands complained that there was no hot food in the house and the children were abandoned to their own devices. At night the women bandaged the blisters sprouting on their hands from the pumping and the hauling and waited for the end of the world. On those nights the moans and sighs rising from the innermost chambers of the houses were particularly loud. The men and women clung to each other in their beds, and sank their dread in each other’s bodies. And afterward, when their bodies were calm and satiated, they would raid the pantries and retire to the kitchens, where they ground and kneaded, boiled and fried and roasted, and held midnight feasts, like their Muslim neighbors devouring their one and only meal in the last watch of the night during the month of fasting imposed upon them by their prophet.
During those days the women of the neighborhood looked sleek and satisfied, their cheeks rosy with the fat of the land and the sweet expectations of disaster. The expectations came to an end nine months later, when they gave birth to their children under the sign of the star. These children, so the rumors said, were born with a red mark in the shape of a comet on their backsides. The birthmark faded over the course of the years, changing color from dark red to pale pink, until it disappeared, together with the memory of the comet that passed through the sky and terrified the inhabitants of the town.
* * *
When dawn broke on the morning of the fourth day, the day on which God created the lights in the firmament of the heavens, it was colder than usual, and the icy air cut to the bones of the people huddled in basements and cellars. Sara covered her children and her son-in-law, arranged the vessels of water around them, and went outside. The street was silent, and the people waiting patiently for their end looked at her through the cracks in their shutters, shaking their heads and clucking their tongues at the folly of this woman, who had abandoned her children and was running wild in the streets, mad with grief about the imminent destruction of the world.
But Sara was drawn outside by the sound of singing she heard coming from the direction of Jaffa Road. Wrapping herself tightly in her coat she followed the sound of the voices and gazed at the people swaying like drunks in the streets. Yeshiva students were embracing virgins, and virgins were embracing yeshiva students, touching each other’s flesh and clinging to each other as if they were drowning. Sara joined in the procession of people wandering like sleepwalkers under the sky studded with stars that shone with an unfamiliar brilliance, and her eyes flashed yellow sparks at the threatening heavens. Suddenly silence fell and the people stopped dead in their tracks. One shining star detached itself from its fellows hanging in the cold sky; its head turned bright red and its light flickered. Then it began to fall toward the treetops, shooting fiery sparks in all directions as its tail cleaved the starry sky from west to east and split it apart. At that moment the crowd, like a single body with its eyes raised to the sky, uttered a cry of terror and awe. Then too she felt the hands of the yeshiva student behind her clutching her body and his nose pressing into her hair with the terror of the sight. The warmth spreading through her body thawed her frozen flesh, her legs gave way beneath her, and she collapsed with him onto the ground, showered with the red sparks falling from the sky.
Chapter Twelve
In the morning everyone woke to a clear sky and a new day. Sara, her hair gathered on her nape, boiled the water she had stored up for the catastrophe and washed her sweaty, dusty body. When she was clean, she collected all the water from the vessels scattered round the house in the laundry cauldron and put it on to boil. Even though it was not her laundry day she washed her clothes, and when she saw that there was still plenty of hot water left, she threw in the children’s clean clothes, which she pulled out of the wardrobe, followed by the spotless sheets that she tore off the beds. That evening, when she got into bed, her body rosy and shining from the scrubbing she had given it, she examined her red hands in the light of the oil lamp. They were wrinkled and swollen, as if the water had seeped right into them, covered with transparent blisters as full and quivering as little pools of purifying waters, and painful to the touch.
Before she could lay her head on the pillow, Esther burst into the house and announced that although the comet had spared Jerusalem, it had bur
ned the lands of Ethiopia and Persia to the ground with its tail. Jerusalem had been spared this time, but a great evil would soon fall on the town and devour its inhabitants.
“Wait and see, the curse will weed out the wicked and leave only the righteous alive,” she promised, waving her finger at Sara threateningly.
And some say that the great and terrible war that set one nation against the other broke out as a result of the comet. Four years after the tail of the comet disappeared from the sky and the inhabitants of the town stopped talking about it, the news of the Great War arrived.
Troubles and disasters fell thick and fast on Sara’s head. First came the rumor of war, and it emptied the shops of flour, oil, sugar, beans, and lentils. People bought everything up and hoarded it in their homes until the houses themselves looked like grocery shops. When Sara saw the stores of food laid in by her neighbors for the hard times ahead, she realized that the war raging in distant lands would last a long time, and she roamed the streets of the town with David in search of a shop that would sell her food. When they finally found a shop that had a little stock left, the owners took a long look at Sara’s fine clothes and doubled and tripled their prices. Sara took out her dwindling bundle of money, undid the string, and bought food for her family. Then they made their way slowly home, David bowed beneath the weight of the sacks of flour and sugar on his back, clutching tins of olive oil under his arms.
A few months later the rumor swept through the street that all the foreign post offices were closing down. Sara, who received her monthly allowance through the Austrian postal service, hurried to the Austrian Post Office. The clerk with his butterfly bow tie, together with two other clerks she had never noticed before, were busy tying up bundles of dusty papers and loading them onto donkeys. That same month the post office closed down and the money stopped arriving.
And throughout the town rumors were rife of a cruel war that would rage for years, while the stocks in the pantry dwindled. They were forced to lock Yitzhak up in his room so that he would not stuff himself with their diminishing supplies, and Sara allocated every member of the household a daily ration of one pita, a handful of rice, and a bowl of lentils. One day Yitzhak broke down the door to his room, and while she was busy hanging out the washing in the yard he stole into the pantry, tore a hole in a sack of sugar, set his mouth to the hole, and emptied the sweet stuff into his belly. The next day he did the same with a sack of lentils. They found him crouching by the sack, grinding with his strong teeth the hard green lentils that were supposed to provide a month’s supply for the entire family.
The pantry emptied rapidly and Yitzhak grew thinner and thinner, as all the reserves of fat accumulated by his body dwindled away. And the skinny Pnina-Mazal, too weak to continue teaching the English class which in any case had been deserted by almost all its pupils, spent most of the day lying in bed and staring at the ceiling. Ben-Ami suffered more than anyone. He was used to dainty food and refused to eat the hard pita bread Sara baked from millet in the clay oven she fired with twigs of wood, since coal too was unobtainable. Sara would soften the bread with the tea she brewed from herbs, and try to coax him to eat it, and Ben-Ami, who had lost his gentle, placid nature, cried enough to make up for all the years when he never cried, and his belly grew bloated with hunger, his navel sticking out in the middle.
For fear of the Turks patrolling the streets and picking up the young men for forced labor in the army, Sara decided that David would spend the days hiding in the attic. And only at night, after she had locked the iron door of the house, did she allow him to come down and unite with his wife in their room. And the town of Jerusalem starved and its population dwindled. Some died of hunger, others of epidemics, many fled the dreaded conscription into the Turkish army, and others hid in attics and in the hills surrounding the town. The only people remaining in the neighborhood were the old, the women, and the children.
And the mornings brought surprises. One morning Sara woke to the sound of an axe hitting wood. A number of ragged Turkish soldiers with unkempt beards were hard at work trying to chop down the mulberry tree in her garden. The hard tree trunk submitted meekly to the blows, and the wound gaping in its side grew bigger. When it seemed to them to be hanging on by a thread, they began hurling their emaciated bodies against it, trying to fell it to the ground. But the tree clung stubbornly to life and refused to be parted from its trunk. They attacked it again with the axe, but only succeeded in blunting the blade. The defeated soldiers glared angrily at the tree, spat on the ground, and turned their attention to the vegetable beds. Sara stared at them numbly as they trampled her cherished garden, uprooting the still-green cauliflowers and devouring them voraciously together with bunches of parsley and mint.
After wiping their mouths with their filthy khaki sleeves, they went into the yard next door. Respectfully they examined the broad trunk of Esther’s mulberry trunk, whose uppermost branches were tangled with those of Sara’s tree, and evidently decided to leave it alone. Having failed in their efforts to lay the first mulberry tree low, they saw little chance they would succeed in overcoming its bigger brother. As soon as Esther heard them in her garden she came running out, yelling at the top of her voice and shooing them out of her vegetable beds. The shadow of a smile crossed their haggard faces as the fat woman began to chase them round her garden, brandishing a rolling pin in her hand.
Still busy chewing Esther’s vegetables, two of the soldiers set about trying to catch the pair of chickens she kept in her yard. After gaining a grip on the legs of the chickens, whose screeching outdid the by now hoarse cries of their mistress, the soldiers swung their victims round their heads and then brought them down hard on the screaming Esther’s head. The desperate shrieks of the chickens grew louder, and Esther’s hair filled with brown and orange feathers as they flapped their wings hysterically. The terrified Esther strained her throat to renew her screams, but her voice grew weaker, and the soldiers slapped her fat buttocks, pinched her sagging breasts, and promised to return.
The next day they came back to the neighborhood, where all the doors were locked and all the windows shuttered. They kicked the door of Sara’s house with their nailed boots and ordered her to open it. Sara hurried to lock the children in her room and made sure that Yitzhak was hidden in the attic. She put on her most ragged dress, smeared her face with coal dust, and poured the little oil left in the pantry over her hair. The soldiers recoiled at the sight of the dirty woman with the rat-tailed hair who opened the door to them. They pushed her aside and roared “Akmak” (“bread” in Turkish), charged into the kitchen, and began devouring everything in sight. When they had finished their work and left the house, the kitchen floor was covered with a thin layer of sugar ground to dust by their nailed boots. Only one tin of beans, which she had hidden under the stove, had escaped them.
* * *
That week Sara went to Yisseschar, the haberdasher, with a tin box in her hands. There she emptied the contents of the tin into the pillow cover he held out to her. Dozens of amulets, silver jewels, and parchment spells came spilling out. She left the shop without even bothering to count the bishliks he had thrust into her hands. She succeeded in purchasing a little rice and lentils and a small jar of milk and went home. A few days later the food she had bought ran out, and the smell of cooking was absent from her house for many a day.
One morning an elegantly dressed man with smooth black hair combed back and anointed with oil knocked at her door. As he stood on the doorstep it seemed to Sara that it must have been his thin, hooked nose that had led him to her. With flaring, transparent nostrils he breathed in the odorless air of the kitchen, and he looked with satisfaction at the empty stove and bare kitchen. He sighed greedily, looked into Sara’s eyes, and his eyes glittered with lust.
“Your reputation for being the most beautiful of the daughters of Jerusalem is a just one,” he commenced.
“And who are you, sir?” she asked, full of foreboding.
“Samuel.”
He introduced himself with a flourish and peered over her shoulder into the dark house as if seeking something there.
“What do you want?” she asked coldly.
“Your son-in-law—David is his name if I am not mistaken—is shirking military service. If you wish, I can save his skin.”
“State your price,” she said shortly.
He looked into her eyes, lowered his eyes to her lips, let them slide down to her bursting breasts and massaged them with his look, fawned on her stomach, slithered down to her private parts, and concluded with her feet. Then he gazed deep into her eyes again and licked his fleshy lips crowned with a long, thin mustache, and his sinewy out-thrust neck contracted in a swallowing movement.
“Woman, you know the price.”
Blushing furiously she locked the door behind him and sat down, gasping for breath. Pnina-Mazal came hurrying toward her.
“What did he want?”
“To sell me food at black-market prices,” she lied.
Esther, who had witnessed the scene from her window, ran to Sara’s house with her hair standing on end. “The destroyer of homes has visited you,” she panted. “Be careful. He pries into people’s homes and informs the authorities about men evading military service. If you didn’t give him what he wanted he’ll come back again.”
The next day he returned with a wicker basket full of fresh pitas, bags of lentils, and vegetables.
“Your son-in-law will be saved and every day fresh supplies of food will be delivered to your house. I heard that your son is dying of starvation,” he said, staring rudely at her private parts and feeling her breasts with his eyes under the flimsy material of her dress.