by Shifra Horn
* * *
Thousands of women acompanied my great-grandmother Sara on her last journey. Young and old, barren and fertile, women in long, dark dresses with scarves bound tightly round their shining bald heads, others in tight-fitting jeans and platform heels, their eyes outlined in black. There were women of every community there: Jewesses, Arabs, Christians, Armenians, and even Druse in long white veils, who had come from the distant north to pay their last respects to their benefactress. They all walked in silence behind the stretcher, which gave off a scent of dying roses. In spite of the thousands of women gathered there in a medley of colors and tongues, there were no sounds of weeping or cries of grief, as if they were all resigned to her death and understood with the secret knowledge of the faithful that even after her death they would continue to receive her blessings.
When her light body was laid in its last resting place, and the undertakers asked her forgiveness and covered the pit gaping like a wound in the ground, the mourners were enveloped by a heavy scent of wilted roses. Not even the ritual washing of hands at the exit from the cemetery succeeded in ridding them of the flowery smell of death clinging to their bodies. And the smell stole up the steps of the buses waiting outside the cemetery, settled onto the padded seats, penetrated the air-conditioning systems, and traveled the length and breadth of the country in air-conditioned comfort, announcing the arrival of the mourning women.
* * *
About a year after her death I dared to enter her house. Actually I had no option, with both my mother and Pnina-Mazal pushing me to sell the house for them with the help of the Gates of Jerusalem real estate agency. At the office they warned me that it would be no easy job to sell the property, and that I would have to compromise on the price. The first to apply were a young couple who were looking for a house with a red-tiled roof, patterned floor tiles, and a small garden. Neither the general dilapidation of the neighborhood nor the increasingly ultra-Orthodox population deterred them from their determination to buy a house there. I led them through the narrow, winding lanes, which were inaccessible to motorcars. The narrower and more inaccessible to traffic the alleys became, the more their faces glowed with happiness. In a burst of uncontrollable enthusiasm the young woman whispered to her husband, loudly enough for me to hear, that when they had children they would never have to worry about them playing in the street and getting run over by motorcars. As soon as they saw the house and garden their eyes widened in delight, and with the frankness of people unpracticed in the art of commerce and bargaining, they enthusiastically informed me that this was the house of which they had always dreamed.
The iron door opened obediently to the turn of the key, releasing the strong smell of wilted roses that had been trapped inside the rooms for the past year. I walked round the house, opening the iron shutters with their little bars whose knobs were shaped like soldiers’ heads adorned with fezzes. The house was flooded with sunlight. The rays of light breaking through the windows danced on the carpetlike floor tiles with their geometric patterns, touched the high whitewashed ceiling, and proudly displayed the rooms, which were gleaming with cleanliness, as if during all this time some hidden hand had been diligently cleaning the deserted house.
The young man took his wife by the waist and they began waltzing round the floor, humming a tune to themselves in unison. After they had danced through all the rooms they stood before me with flushed faces, tidying their hair and clothes, and announced that they were going to buy the house.
“It was built especially for us,” they said to me.
I tried to show them the kitchen, to explain how to use the antiquated water pump and how to clean the water cistern underneath the house. They stubbornly refused to listen.
“There’s no need,” the young man said, dismissing my explanations. “I told you that the house is ours, and we’ll find everything out ourselves.”
I soon found myself leaning against the wall of the empty entrance hall, watching them arranging furniture in their imaginations, each in his or her chosen room. At those moments I felt like a voyeur spying on a scene not meant for my eyes. When they caught me looking they approached me in embarrassment and asked when they could sign the contract.
I led them, quivering with excitement, outside and showed them the garden and the mulberry tree sheltering the house with its branches. I looked up at the leafy crest and told them about the owner of the house, my great-grandmother Sara, who had planted the tree as soon as she moved in. They examined the tree from every side and saw the deep scar on its trunk. Then they heard the tale of the Turkish soldiers who had broken into my great-grandmother’s garden and tried to chop the tree down for firewood. Once I had touched on the war, I told them about the other war and the siege of Jerusalem, the hunger and the scarcity, and how when the mallow leaves in the fields shriveled up in the summer my great-grandmother knew how to make delicacies from mulberry leaves stuffed with rice she bought on the black market, and how I could still taste their sour-sweet taste on my tongue.
I gladly offered them the recipe, explaining that the secret of success lay in picking the leaves at the right time. They had to be plucked from the tree before sunrise, when they were still drenched with the morning dew. Then you had to put them in a pot with a little water and steam them until they were soft. When they were soft enough they were stuffed with rice flavored with coriander and olive oil.
And then I told them about my mother, who liked to hide in the luxuriant foliage of the tree when she was a child, and, to the anxiety of those watching from below, to pluck the mulberries growing on the uppermost branches.
I told them about myself too, and what a coward I was, and how I would stand on a stool to pick the mulberries from the lowest branches, popping the juicy fruit carefully into my mouth lest the white blouse of my school uniform be stained with purple.
Nor did I forget to mention the flocks of sparrows twittering on the branches during the feasts they held there, or the swarms of black bats stealthily descending at night, and departing when the first rays of the sun appeared above the treetop, with their hairy bellies full of mulberries.
Carried away by my stories of the silkworm moths hovering over the tree, I failed to notice the clouds gathering on the faces of the young couple as they raised their eyes to the top of the tree. I followed their gaze with my eyes and I understood. In spite of the summer heat there was not a single mulberry on the tree.
“The neighborhood children must have picked the fruit and the birds and the bats must have finished the job,” I said, trying to defend the tree without being asked.
“The tree doesn’t bear fruit,” the man said. “Look at the ground. There isn’t a single stain and there are no birds in the branches.”
“That’s impossible,” I said, and immediately realized the justice of his words. The mulberry tree, whose branches had always been full of cheeky sparrows greedily pecking at its fruit in the summer months, stood erect and bare of both fruit and birds, like an aristocrat stripped of his assets.
“Perhaps we should bring a gardener to explain the phenomenon?” I tried to reassure them. “Such a thing has never happened before. The tree has borne fruit every summer, it’s never missed a single season.”
The worried eyes of the husband strayed to the neighboring yard, where Esther had recently departed this world, and came to rest on the huge mulberry tree that was dying as it stood, its dry, leafless branches dwarfing the house at its feet.
“That’s the cause,” he said triumphantly. “The tree in that yard is dry.”
“What’s the connection?” his wife and I asked at once.
“Very simple,” he said with a smile. “The mulberry tree is dioecious. They’re divided like us into male and female. The pollen from the male blossoms is carried by the wind or various insects to the female blossoms, and it pollinates them. The dying tree in the yard next door is a male tree, and until we plant a new male tree our tree won’t have any fruit. As you know”—he p
ut his arm round his wife’s waist and turned to me—“there can be no fertilization or reproduction without a male.”
Silently I handed him the key, and named a date for the signing of the contract.
I left them standing arm in arm under the shade of the mulberry tree and went away with a heavy heart. That same day I went to the plant nursery of Avraham Farchi and Sons in the suburb of Talpiot and bought a fresh sapling of a male mulberry tree in an old pickle tin.
* * *
Once a month I would go up to the Mount of Olives with my son to visit my great-grandmother’s grave. I began these visits straight after her death and I am still paying them today, by myself. In those early days I would park my little Fiat at the foot of the hill, unstrap my son from the baby seat in the car, take him in my arms, and make my way up a crooked path between the thousands of crowded gravestones covering the bare, rocky hill in an endless labyrinth.
Many times, as I made my way confidently toward her grave, I would encounter people with giddy, confused expressions on their faces, as if they had just stepped onto solid ground after a terrifying ride on a roller coaster. They would seize my arm and beg me to help them find the graves of their loved ones. I was never able to help them and I would meet them again on my way down, after my visit was over, wandering round the rocky graves in endless circles, with sad resignation on their faces.
Unlike these hidden graves, concealing themselves among the thousands of flat tombstones as if they were determined not to be visited, the way to Sara’s grave was distinct, familiar, and easy. A narrow path beaten by the thousands of small, hopeful steps of women pleading for their wombs to be visited, and retrodden by those coming to give thanks for their bellies that had been filled and emptied again. People said that you could also find Sara’s grave by the smell, and that a scent of wilted roses wafted into the air like a cloud from her grave and led the supplicants to it by their noses.
The source of the smell was the mound of plucked roses slowly wilting next to her grave in the sun, which dried them and preserved their scent. The blooms were brought by the women seeking her blessing, every supplicant laying a single rose on her grave as if they had agreed among themselves beforehand to propitiate their benefactress with roses.
In the course of time the smell was enhanced from an unexpected quarter. Mussa, a quick-witted Arab boy whose nose was tickled by the scent of the roses, smelled a chance to make a profit, and set up shop at the foot of the stony hill, offering red roses for sale to the women who had come without an offering. Underneath the umbrella that sheltered his dark skin from the sun he would smell out the supplicants, bar their way to the grave, and like a stubborn suitor he would offer them a single rose, holding the stem carefully by the tips of his fingers, as if afraid the thorns would punish him for his exorbitant prices. With expressionless faces they would take out their purses and without batting an eyelid they would pay him what he asked, even though they could have bought a magnificent bunch of perfect roses in a fancy florist shop for the price he demanded for a single rose.
And the smell was enhanced from another quarter too. Early one morning, when I was sure that I would be alone with Sara and would not have to share her attention with the waiting women, I found crazy Dvora there. She was absorbed in her activities and did not hear the gravel crunching under my shoes. Muttering crazily to herself, she was intent on sprinkling the gravel with scented water from a bottle bearing a pink label on which was written in Hebrew and Arabic: “The Abu-Ali Distillery, Ramalla Rose Water.” When I came up and stood next to her, she started violently, as if she had been somewhere else entirely, and told me without being asked, with an innocent look on her face, that she had come to freshen up the grave and quite by chance she had brought this old bottle, without noticing that it contained rose water.
Today the place can be recognized by the huge mulberry tree with its mighty boughs that shelter the grave in their shade. This tree, the only one growing on the bald hill, I planted myself on the first anniversary of her death. At first, the cemetery guards did not notice it. When it grew they tried to uproot it on the grounds that its strong roots were liable to penetrate the graves, crack the gravestones, raise them up, and disturb the dead. And even worse, the roots would latch onto the bodies of the departed seeking eternal rest, suck the marrow of their bones, and interfere with the work of the worms.