The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem

by Sarit Yishai-Levi

  All this time Luna was hiding her face in Matilda’s shoulder, not looking in her mother’s direction.

  “So what did happen? Why did the child come to the station to complain about her mother?”

  Rosa glanced from Matilda to Matilda’s officer. “What can I say, Mr. Officer?” she replied. “The child is very close to her father, and every time he goes away on business she makes a scene. I thought I’d leave her in the yard for a while until she calmed down. I was sure that in a few minutes the chill and the dark would drive her inside. When I realized she wasn’t coming in, I went out to the yard, and when I couldn’t find her I turned the whole neighborhood upside down. Do I, Mr. Officer, look like a mother who’d throw her daughter out of the house?”

  “Definitely not,” said Matilda’s officer as he got to his feet. “So that’s the end of it. I’ll report that there was no need for police intervention, that you came to the station looking for your daughter, and now that you’ve found her, you can take her home. And you”—pinching Luna’s cheek—“naughty, naughty, naughty girl. Behave nicely to your mother.”

  Rosa clutched Luna’s hand tightly. Even now, when it was clear that they must leave the police station together, she could feel the child’s resistance. Nothing frightens this one, God help me. She goes to the Ingelish police to tell lies about her mother. Wai de mi sola, what’s she going to do next?

  When they got back to Ohel Moshe and passed through the gate, Rosa turned to Matilda and said, “May you be healthy, Matti. I thank you with all my heart. God will help you. You’re a good girl, you don’t deserve to be with Ingelish. You deserve someone better, one of ours.”

  Tears welled in Matilda’s eyes. “Excuse me, Senora Rosa. It’s getting late and I’m very tired. Have a good night,” she said and walked toward her house, her skinny heels tapping on the cobblestones.

  Rosa was gripping Luna’s arm so tightly she was almost ripping it off.

  “Ay!” Luna yelped. “Just wait till Papo comes home from Beirut. I’ll tell him everything! You’ll see what he’ll do to you.”

  Rosa thought she wasn’t hearing properly. The child was threatening to snitch on her to Gabriel? Her hand rose in the air and came down on Luna’s cheek. “Never! Do you hear me, you bad girl, never ever dare to come between your father and me! Wait till I tell your father that you ran away from home, and of all the places in the world you went to tell lies about your mother to the Ingelish police. We’ll see what your father has to say about that.”

  The threat apparently worked. When Gabriel returned from Beirut, Luna didn’t tell him anything about what had transpired that night, and Rosa kept her mouth shut too. The secret remained between them until the day Matilda Franco was murdered.

  * * *

  Gabriel leaned his head against the carriage window, closed his eyes, and listened to the sound of the train’s wheels clacking slowly. His forehead banged lightly against the glass, but the sensation was pleasant. He breathed deeply and for the first time in months let himself relax. An old tune started playing in his mind, a children’s song his mother sang to him. He began humming it, amazed that he still remembered. After all, he hadn’t heard it for almost thirty years.

  He always traveled first class. Sitting in his compartment were two men wearing tailored suits and straw hats. Their behavior was foreign and distant like that of the new immigrants from the big European cities whose style flooded Gabriel with a yearning he couldn’t comprehend, a yearning for something he had never experienced. He felt a sort of affection for these people who had come from Europe, the immigrants from Germany in particular. Sometimes one of these yekkes would come into his shop in the Mahane Yehuda Market by mistake and only rarely leave with a purchase. Among the abundance of goods in the shop, the yekkes never found anything that took their fancy. They didn’t speak Hebrew, and unlike the immigrants from Eastern Europe, they made no effort to learn the language. They expected, in a way that awed Gabriel, that he, who was born here, should try and understand them, the newcomers. And yet there was something in the way they dressed, their distant politeness, that he appreciated. He would get angry when his brother Leito called them yekke potz, and made sure he knew it.

  The two men sitting opposite him were yekkes, he suspected. They didn’t exchange a word, nor did they speak to him. When he entered the compartment, they were both immersed in The Palestine Post and courteous enough to look up from their papers and nod a greeting, but no more.

  He preferred to just lean his head against the window, even though he had a newspaper in his bag. He’d been reading Haaretz for years now. When he was younger he’d read HaZvi, which his father Raphael used to bring home. But one day his father came home angry and agitated, brandishing a copy of HaZvi and quoting from an article by Dov Lifschitz against the Sephardi community. “Starting today, Ben-Yehuda’s newspaper will not cross the threshold of our house! We will not buy the paper and we will not mention its name!” Raphael had shouted. The Sephardic rabbis joined the boycott and forbade people to read it. There were also rumors, which were never proven, that the leaders of the community, fuming with rage over the racist article, had even informed the Turks that the paper was preaching revolt. From that day forward the Ermosa family had read Haaretz.

  But this time, for the journey, Gabriel decided to break his habit and buy Davar, the newspaper of the workers of Palestine. His father wouldn’t have allowed a socialist paper into the house, and he himself had once called it a “Bolshevik newspaper” and had forbidden Leito to read it in the shop. Now it was Gabriel’s way of feeling freedom: first, buying a paper it’s forbidden to read, then engaging in other forbidden activities before returning home to Ohel Moshe and the stifling routine of life with Rosa.

  He could already envisage how he would spend his time in Beirut: how he’d take a carriage from the railway station directly to his hotel on the seafront. How he would be greeted at the reception desk: “Salaam aleikum ya hawwaja, Ermosa, it’s good to have you with us again.” And how the clerk would hand him the key to his favorite room, the one with a balcony overlooking the sea. He imagined opening the room door, a cool breeze blowing in and ruffling the heavy drapes, and inhaling the air from the balcony. Then he would take off his suit and put on a pair of thin trousers and a light cotton shirt, and his heavy shoes would be replaced by a pair of comfortable moccasins. After sipping the Zachlawi arak that awaited him in a clear crystal decanter in the sitting area, he would leave the hotel in his straw hat, feeling as light as a feather, as free as a bird, and hire a taxi to take him directly to Aisha in the Marfaa Quarter in Beirut Port.

  Ach, ya Aisha. He didn’t know how he could carry on living with Rosa if he didn’t have Aisha. Thinking of her and what she would do to him and he to her when they met made his little bird raise its head, and he shifted uncomfortably on the seat, took the paper from his bag, and started reading. His attention was drawn to an advertisement for Ford cars. “Cut your costs! Buy a Ford!” trumpeted the advertisement, at the center of which was a picture of the car. It’s time to spoil myself with a car, to fulfill an old dream, he thought.

  He looked out the window again. At the foot of the Arab village of Batir, a shepherd was grazing his flock by the railway line. Alongside the line was a forest of almond trees in full bloom. Tu Bishvat, the New Year for Trees, had just passed. Business boomed at this time of year. The shop had been filled with customers buying goods for the holiday, and now the sacks of dried fruit, almonds, and raisins needed to be replenished with fresh stock. Times were good, thank God. He had turned the shop back around.

  “In America, the golden country, there are twenty million people on welfare,” he read in the paper. “And despite all of President Roosevelt’s efforts, this is the sixth winter since the Wall Street Crash that all these millions of people will be in need of food and money, for if not they will die of hunger and cold.” The land of opportunity, he thought to himself, there too people are starving. Who knew how his good fri
end Moshe was? It’d been a long time since he’d had news of him or a letter. It had been very fortunate that Gabriel had been clever enough to return to Palestine. But on second thought, was he fortunate? Perhaps if he hadn’t come back, he wouldn’t have met Rochel, and if he hadn’t met her, his father wouldn’t have died, and if his father hadn’t died, his mother wouldn’t have married him to Rosa, and maybe today he’d be married to a woman he loved, a woman he wouldn’t run away from every few months to seek love with another.

  When he arrived, Tel Aviv’s Jaffa Port thronged with people. Gabriel liked the atmosphere, the chaos, the acrid smells that seared his nostrils, the Arabs’ exotic apparel, the voices speaking a mélange of languages—Arabic, English, Hebrew. A ship anchored outside the port, and barefoot Arab boatmen wearing sharwals rowed their big boats to the ship and ferried passengers close to the shore. From there they had to make their own way through the waves, carrying their baggage to dry land. Arab policemen vainly tried to keep order and with sweeping gestures and whistles directed the passengers to the port buildings.

  Gabriel laughed. The passengers seemed stunned, their fine travel clothes becoming completely soaked. What caught his eye in particular was an older woman fighting the waves. In one hand she held an umbrella and in the other a big brown suitcase, and at the same time she was fighting to keep her wide-brimmed hat from falling into the water.

  Ach, Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv. He always felt like a tourist whenever he came to the White City. Tel Aviv is like our own Sodom and Gomorrah, he thought. In Tel Aviv there isn’t just one tavern, there are fifty, but not for the Jews, for the British, may their name and memory be erased. He’d read in the paper that five people had been fined for drunkenness, all of them British. The Jews don’t know how to drink, it’s not in our nature, he thought. He’d once read an article by an English journalist who wrote derisively that in Tel Aviv’s taverns they serve whiskey and soda in a wineglass. He’d give those English kerosene to drink if he could. Not whiskey and soda, kerosene—and served in teacups.

  After wandering around the port, he looked for a taxi to take him to his usual hotel, the Eshbal on Herbert Samuel Promenade, three blocks from San Remo, his favorite café. A hundred lirot a night and worth every penny. Just outside the port gates he came upon a splendid car. A stunning young blonde exited and asked if he needed a taxi.

  “This is a taxi?” he asked, astonished.

  The young woman indicated the green license plate, and he got in and made himself comfortable in the backseat. On the way to his hotel, the young woman told him she was a new immigrant from Berlin. She’d come with her parents who’d brought the Austin family car with them, and since she couldn’t find a job, she’d been working as a taxi driver.

  “What did you do in Berlin?” he asked.

  “My father owned a big clothing store, and I studied accounting at the commercial high school so I could help my father manage the store. I’m a senior accountant, but here in Palestine you work at what you can get. I have no complaints.”

  “Good for you!” Gabriel said. She wasn’t the only one. Among the new immigrants he’d already come across girls who worked at tiling floors, doctors working in factories, and lawyers working as foremen on construction sites. Once a sausage salesman had come into the shop in Mahane Yehuda and told him that he used to be a judge in Heidelberg. There’s no shame in it, he thought. When he was in New York, he himself had worked as a butcher’s apprentice, soiling his hands with animal blood.

  The taxi driver pulled up outside the seafront hotel. He always preferred to stay in a hotel than with his sister Allegra. Being under the same roof as his mother had become unbearable. When he went to visit her with Rosa and the girls, he had no choice, but on his own he couldn’t stand being with her for even a minute. Every such visit took years off his life. The anger he suppressed most of the time threatened to erupt, and his mother’s lack of interest, which she didn’t even attempt to conceal, didn’t help either.

  He went into the hotel, checked in at reception, and went up to his room. After unpacking his suitcase he started walking along the promenade, observing the suntanned people who seemed to be on permanent vacation. When did these people work? He was a Jerusalemite who loved his city, but there was something in easygoing Tel Aviv that captivated him: the women in their summery dresses that revealed alluring necks, the men in their white suits and straw hats, the young mothers pushing white prams along the promenade, the crowded cafés and the casino that actually stood in the sea. Mashallah, Tel Aviv will soon be Beirut, he thought.

  Ach, Beirut, Beirut, how he loved the Lebanese capital, how he loved going to that vibrant city on the sea. He knew that he no longer needed to travel as far as Beirut to buy stock. Chaim Saragusti in Tel Aviv’s Levinsky Market stocked everything he needed for his shop. Mr. Saragusti was a big merchant, much bigger than him, and he went to Beirut several times a year to buy stock that was sufficient for all the shops in the Levinsky Market and certainly for Raphael Ermosa’s in the Mahane Yehuda Market too. He could buy spices at Chaim Saragusti’s, sweets, Turkish delight, and arak that would last all year. But he, so long as he had the strength, would not give up going to Beirut. Only there was he able to remove the burden of life from his shoulders and felt like a young man just beginning to live. And Aisha, only she gave him the air he needed to go on pretending, to not explode. Ach, ya Aisha, his life had been changed since that stormy night two years ago when she’d taken him into her bed.

  He had never been a ladies’ man. He had only ever loved one woman, but she had been driven out of his life with unbearable cruelty. He had never needed more than one woman and one love and never sought sexual escapades. All the years he lived in New York were without a woman.

  But with Aisha it was different. For the first time in his life he, a married man with three daughters, felt the way a man feels when he’s with a woman. Until that night with Aisha, he’d felt like a virgin. He had loved Rochel with every fiber of his being, and although they had both wanted it, he had never been with her in the way a man is with a woman, despite sometimes feeling he could no longer hold back when she urged him. He had convinced her and himself to abstain until their wedding night that never came. He went to Rosa’s bed, but he had never lost himself in the act of love. He came to her to observe the biblical precept of “be fruitful and multiply,” not to feel his body shudder, not to soar on indescribably sublime pleasure, the way he’d felt that first time with Aisha.

  That night would be engraved in his mind forever. A strong wind was blowing in from the sea and the heavens opened and sheets of rain lashed the streets. Gabriel returned to his hotel room from a routine day’s work buying stock for the shop. Although it was early, the merchants in the Beirut market had hurried to shut down their stalls because the stormy weather deterred customers from shopping.

  Normally he would bathe to wash away the day, change into light clothes, sip a glass of arak, and go down to the seafront. He’d sit in one of the cafés, smoke a narghile, and have a demitasse of the strong black coffee that only Beirutis knew how to make. He’d sometimes visit his sweetmeat merchant friend Marouane at his house in the al-Ashrafieh Quarter, and there, after dining on the splendid dishes Marouane’s wife made, they’d go out onto the spacious balcony that circled the house, smoke a narghile, sip Zachlawi arak, and inhale the cool air of Beirut. On Friday evenings he’d go to the Magen Avraham Synagogue in the Jewish quarter in Wadi Abu Jamil, and if he was lucky, he’d be able to hear the bell-like sound of the synagogue’s children’s choir.

  But it was too cold and wet to visit friends that night, and too late for the evening service at the synagogue, so he got into bed and stared at the ceiling. He was wide awake and tossed and turned restlessly. Gabriel didn’t like lying idly in bed, nor did he like the thoughts stealing into his mind. He didn’t want to recall Rochel. He was no longer able to bear the ache that lodged in his chest each time he thought of her. He didn’t want to think about his
life with Rosa. She was a good wife and the mother of his daughters, and for that he was grateful, but he couldn’t feel anything for her apart from obligation. Sometimes he would notice her pleading look and he’d feel her pain, but his feet wouldn’t carry him to her.

  He didn’t want to think about the life he might have had if he’d been able to marry his beloved, if his father hadn’t died and his mother hadn’t treated him as if he were a scorpion. True, he had the girls, but was being a father enough to make a man feel alive? He also had respect, the respect of the community, the market merchants, the neighbors, the mukhtar, and his family. They all gave him the utmost respect, all except his mother. His sisters and brother had long since forgiven him, but she hadn’t and never would. And the truth? He didn’t forgive her either. No, he didn’t forgive her for burdening him with such heavy guilt. Was it really him who had killed his father? Were he and Rochel to blame for his father succumbing to a heart attack in the middle of the night? After all, Raphael, may he rest in peace, was not a young man. He was old, over fifty, and it was even inscribed on his gravestone in the Mount of Olives cemetery: “Here lies the wise old man Raphael Ermosa.” And Rochel, what had become of her? He hadn’t dared to ask Clara what happened the night his father died. Had Rochel returned in shame to her father’s house in Mea Shearim? Had her parents married her off like his mother had married him off, in haste to a man who wasn’t a groise metzieh, a bargain, as the Ashkenazim say sarcastically? Did a flawed groom who nobody wanted win the most enchanting of them all?

  Ach, how much more pain could fill his heart, God help him. There was no more room in him for pain, no more room in his head for these thoughts. Gabriel got out of bed and began pacing. Through the window he saw it was raining heavily and as dark as the grave, but there, in the distance, in the Marfaa Quarter by the port, lights were flickering. There, he knew, life went on, even when the rain was coming down hard, even when chilly winds threatened the treetops, even when there wasn’t a dog to be seen in the streets.