The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem

by Sarit Yishai-Levi

  Every day movers would unload new furniture and accessories. Gabriel picked out everything himself and didn’t once ask Rosa to accompany him. Instead of the kerosene stoves and the Primus, he bought the latest trend in kitchen appliances, an electric cooker, and told her, “From now on you’ll cook with electricity.”

  He also bought a Levitt icebox, which had a top section with room for an entire block of ice. When they lived in their old house in Ohel Moshe, the ice seller would come in his horse-drawn cart and shout, “Ice! Ice!” and ring his bell, and all the neighbors would gather on Agrippas Street and carry a quarter or half a block of ice home with special tongs. The ice cart didn’t come to the new apartment; instead, a truck delivered the ice. The driver would stand on the corner of the street outside the Jewish Agency and ring his bell to announce his arrival. But Rosa never went down to buy ice, for how could she go down all those stairs and make it to the ice truck in time? And if she did, how could she carry the heavy block of ice up four flights?

  “Sano que ’stas, Gabriel, what are we going to do about ice?” she asked him after three days without ice in the icebox and all the food going bad.

  “Por Dio, Rosa, what’s the problem with going down in the elevator? Don’t you want to get ahead in life?”

  Nothing could persuade Rosa to use the elevator. She ignored Luna’s mockery and stood firm in her decision not to use the services of the monstrous machine. So Gabriel had no choice but to send Matzliach on his bicycle to fetch ice from the truck and bring it up to their fourth-floor apartment.

  What am I going to do with all these modern gadgets that Gabriel’s brought me? Rosa asked herself, for she didn’t have a single neighbor whose advice she could seek. She didn’t get used to the electric cooker either, and when Gabriel left for work she’d take out the kerosene stove and the Primus from under the sink and cook on them. Only one device in the new apartment truly amazed her: the ventilated larder, whose back wall opened onto the outside of the building and was covered with mesh, enabling a flow of air that kept the food inside fresh.

  Instead of the curtains that covered the shelf under the sink in Ohel Moshe, she now had wooden cupboards; instead of the rugs she hung on the walls for decoration, she now had a carpet on the living room floor. Yet despite the modern amenities, she felt lost in the big King George Street apartment that had so many stairs and so many neighbors who rode up and down in the elevator. And despite their politeness and despite their greeting her and asking after her husband and daughters, she was unable to find anything in common with them.

  “Mother, let’s go to Maayan Stub,” Rachelika, who sympathized with her mother, once suggested.

  “What have I got to do in Maayan Stub, querida? Everything’s expensive there. With what they charge for a pair of underwear, you can buy enough food for a week in the market. No, querida, better to take me to Mahane Yehuda. There’s nothing for me in Maayan Stub. It’s too fancy for me.”

  Rosa desperately missed Ohel Moshe, chatting idly in the yard with her neighbors, the shouted door-to-door conversations, sitting on stools in the afternoon with cold watermelon and salty cheese. She yearned for the warm conversations in Ladino, everyone tasting from each other’s plate, the unspoken competition over who baked the best borekas and who made the tastiest sofrito. And most of all she missed her neighbor Tamar. She loved Tamar like a sister, and she remembered her fondly for all the times she had supported her without question. Now Rosa felt profoundly lonely. Not even the toilet and bathroom with its two faucets, one for cold water and the other for hot, which along with the elevator aroused the greatest excitement among the relatives who came specially to see these marvels, moved her.

  * * *

  One morning the Ermosa family and their neighbors in the big stone building on King George Street were awakened by a loud explosion. A bomb had gone off in the Palestine Post building on Hasolel Street and rocked the heart of the city. The building collapsed and adjacent buildings were badly damaged; people jumped from balconies, some to their death. The wounded were taken to the city’s hospitals and the rest of the street’s residents were taken with their possessions to the nearby Warshavsky and Zion hotels.

  Rosa was scared to death. Afraid of being in the apartment alone, she told Gabriel, “Perhaps it would be better if the girls didn’t leave the house today. It’s dangerous outside. It’s better if they stay here with me.”

  “Por Dio, Rosa,” he replied angrily, “at times like this, it’s dangerous every day. These aren’t easy times, so what, we should shut ourselves up inside our four walls all day?”

  “Querido,” she pleaded, “it’s dangerous outside. I don’t want anything to happen to the girls, God forbid.”

  “Basta, Rosa!” he said. “There’ll be something new all the time now. We can’t stop living. Nothing’s going to happen to the girls.” If he recognized Rosa’s fear of being in the apartment on her own, he didn’t show it.

  From day to day Gabriel had found it increasingly difficult to take the Hamekasher bus from King George all the way to the Mahane Yehuda Market. Very few people could afford a car, but Gabriel’s success—two years earlier he had expanded his business and in partnership with Mordoch Levi had opened a halvah factory—had swelled his bank account at the Jaffa Road branch of the Anglo-Palestine Bank. He bought a used Austin 1933 from an old doctor at bargain price and enrolled in driving lessons.

  On the day he received his license, Gabriel took the whole family for a drive through the streets of Jerusalem. He enjoyed driving and insisted on dropping off Becky and Rachelika at school, even though it was only a short distance from their apartment, and Luna at Zacks & Son. As he gradually gained confidence in his skills, he drove the family to visit his mother and sister in Tel Aviv, and occasionally even as far as Tiberias, where in the morning they would bathe in the Sea of Galilee and toward evening they’d go out on a fishing boat and soak up the ebbing rays of the sun that painted the lake and its surrounding mountains in hues of pink and gold. Sometimes Rachelika would jump into the water, causing Rosa’s heart to skip a beat, and she’d shout at her to get back into the boat. And Luna, who saw how her sister was stealing the limelight, followed, swimming alongside with a breaststroke that kept her head out of the water so as not to spoil her hairdo.

  “Like a swan,” Gabriel would say, and Rosa would think to herself, like someone who doesn’t know how to swim. But why would her father see it? He always sees the best in that girl. And right away she’d rebuke herself, for whenever Rachelika went into the water she’d be so worried she wouldn’t take her eyes off her, but when Luna was in the water she barely glanced in her direction.

  On Saturdays, Gabriel and the girls would drive to Ein Feshkha, where they’d spend the day paddling in the pools and floating in the Dead Sea. Rosa continued to observe the Sabbath and did not go along with them, but as time went by, the loneliness and sense of alienation she felt in her new home—which she would never get used to—led her to bend her principles and join in the Saturday trips. How I miss Ohel Moshe, she’d think to herself. If we lived in Ohel Moshe I’d stay at home with the neighbors and not desecrate Shabbat, but what have I got to do in this big apartment, me and the four walls, except go crazy?

  But the family excursions out of Jerusalem soon ceased due to the turbulent times. One incident came hard on the heels of another. Bombings, shootings, increasing tension between Jews and Arabs, and the frequent curfews imposed by the British police all prevented travel to sparsely populated areas like Ein Feshkha. Even the road between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv was now considered dangerous, as Arab snipers lay in wait and shot at vehicles on the narrow part near the Castel landmark. That put an end to visits to Nona Mercada and Tia Allegra.

  Two months after the first bombing at the Palestine Post building, a second one occurred. A British army vehicle blew up in the middle of Ben-Yehuda Street, two buildings were completely destroyed, and still others collapsed. When Rosa forbade Luna to go to work—s
he had begged Mr. Zacks for her job back once Gabriel had allowed it—and Rachelika and Becky to go to school, Gabriel was forced to agree with her. You could never know where the next bombing would happen, he thought. Better they stay home for a few days until the situation gets better.

  Becky was scared to death by the explosions, and though Luna protested loudly, deep down she too was afraid of going out. But from the moment her father left for the shop, her sisters were occupied, and her mother’s back was turned, Rachelika ran the short distance from their apartment to the Rehavia Gymnasium, where she and Becky attended school. She was already fifteen, and she and her friends from school had joined the Haganah, learning hand-to-hand combat, knots, and even some weapons training. On the day of the second bombing, they ran all the way to the site of the explosion on Ben-Yehuda Street. Their assignment, which they’d drilled more than once, was to form a chain and stop rubberneckers from hampering evacuation of the wounded.

  Rosa and Gabriel knew nothing of Rachelika’s secret life. The only one who did was Luna.

  “You should join the Haganah too,” Rachelika told her. “We have to push out the English so we can have a state of our own.”

  “Speak in a whisper. If Father hears, it’ll be the end of you. You know what he thinks of Tio Ephraim.”

  “It’s not the same,” Rachelika protested. “Tio Ephraim’s with the Lehi and I’m in the Haganah.”

  “Stop with that nonsense! Why do you need to be in the Haganah? There’s a thousand boys who’ve just come back from the British army, and they’re here, right under our noses, and we need to find a boy, you and me, and get married.”

  “Get married? When I finish school I’m joining the Palmach like the boys.”

  “What Palmach have you got in your head? Who’ll let you join the Palmach? You won’t be able to leave home until you get married. That’s how it is in the Ermosa family. You want to leave home, go with a husband.”

  “I want to be part of the struggle. Why can’t you understand that?”

  “What’s to understand? Girls don’t fight. Girls wait for boys who’ve come back from the British army and marry them.”

  “Oof, Luna, I can’t listen to you anymore. The ground is on fire, the entire history of the Jewish people is in the balance, and you’re talking about weddings.”

  “Wai de mi sola, what words! I don’t understand history, but I do understand people, and with people, a woman is a woman and a man is a man, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s wartime or peacetime.”

  “Oof!” Rachelika said, annoyed. “You, all that interests you is having a good time, pretty clothes, and lipstick. You’re a foolish girl.”

  “I’m foolish because I like dressing well? What do you want, for me to be a shmatte like you? Dress like a primitive? You, you’re like a boy. What man will fall in love with you? You carry on wearing khaki pants and a Russian shirt and you won’t find a boy or anything else!”

  “You’re impossible. I’m telling you about my dream and you mock me. I’m not telling you anything ever again!” Rachelika said and left the apartment, slamming the door behind her.

  She was determined to be part of the struggle even though she was afraid of her father. Once it was time to move up and become an instructor of Haganah Youth, Rachelika instead chose to be a leader in the Haganah’s Junior Battalion, the Scouts. She knew that the Haganah Youth instructors’ courses meant leaving Jerusalem, and there was no chance that her father would approve.

  The first day of the Scouts course, Rachelika and her best friend Dina met in the yard outside the wooden hut, both of them dressed in their khaki uniforms. The night before, she had been so excited she hadn’t slept a wink. Rachelika and Dina looked for their friends from school, but they were nowhere to be found. She approached a group of girls in the yard and asked them if they knew where the new instructors’ course was being held.

  One of the girls looked her up and down and replied, “There’s no place in the course for Sephardi girls. Get lost!” The usually calm Rachelika was seized by a terrible rage, and without thinking twice she punched the girl in the nose. “Nobody,” she told the girl’s companions, “nobody throws me out of anywhere. I’m a sixth-generation Jerusalemite and this Ashkenazia just got off the boat, so tell her to show a little respect before she talks to me!”

  The story about Rachelika punching the Ashkenazia took flight, and she became a legend, the outstanding cadet on the instructors’ course. At the end of the course there was to be a trip to Mount Tabor, but she didn’t even bother asking her father for permission to go. She knew he wouldn’t allow it, so at the last minute she told the organizers that she wouldn’t be able to attend because her mother was sick.

  When her friends returned from the trip with their stories, she felt a twinge in her heart, and for the first time in her life she regretted not being the tiniest bit like Luna. Luna, she knew, wouldn’t have given in. If she hadn’t been allowed to go, she’d have taken off and gone anyway. Rachelika could not defy her father or manipulate him the way Luna did.

  On completion of the instructors’ course, she became the leader of the youngest Scouts, who were Becky’s age. One time, as she was teaching the youngsters to tie a clove hitch, another bombing occurred. The sound came from the direction of Gan Ha’ir, close to her home, and a few minutes later the British imposed a curfew over their portable loudspeakers, and she was stuck in the hut on Hahavazelet Street with her young charges.

  “I have to get home. My parents will be sick with worry,” she told the scoutmaster.

  “Nobody’s leaving, there’s a curfew!” he ordered. But Rachelika was very concerned about her family, so when nobody was looking, she slipped through the back gate and ran up Ben-Yehuda Street. Suddenly firing opened up around her. She found her way into a building and banged desperately on the apartment doors, but not one opened. She hid below the staircase on the first floor, shaking with fear. Without warning, British policemen stormed the building, and when they asked what she was doing there, she stammered that she’d been on her way home just as the curfew was implemented. “Where do you live?” one asked, but when she pointed toward Gan Ha’ir, he ordered her to stay where she was. When the police left, she waited a few more minutes before leaving the building. Taking a roundabout route, she reached Halbreich House. From a distance she could see the building surrounded by British police and realized she had no chance of getting through.

  She turned around and started running toward her old neighborhood, Ohel Moshe. When a passing Arab policeman saw her, he started shooting at her, and she fled in panic, panting until she reached Tio Shmuel’s house. She knocked on the door, but no one answered. Only when she shouted, “Tio Shmuel, it’s me, Rachelika!” did the door swing open and Shmuel quickly pulled her inside.

  “What are you doing out in a curfew?” he asked.

  “I was at the Scouts when I heard the boom. It came from the direction of our apartment, and I’m worried.”

  “We heard about it on the radio,” Tio Shmuel said. “And we’re worried too. But if the English catch you, they’ll put you in prison. Stay here with us until they lift the curfew.”

  All through the night they heard shooting and police shouting in English and Arabic, and when the curfew ended in the morning Rachelika hurried home.

  “Sano que ’stes,” Rosa said, taking her into her arms. “You almost killed us. You gave us a heart attack!”

  Gabriel clasped her to him and told her quietly and straight to the point, “No more Scouts. At times like this you don’t leave the house without us knowing where you are.”

  Fear at her father’s reaction paralyzed Rachelika, and although she knew deep down that she’d disobey his orders, she decided not to respond. She didn’t even attempt to deny that she’d been at the Scouts. She imagined that when she hadn’t come home after the explosion, Luna had told her parents where she was. Her eyes scanned the room for Luna but didn’t see her.

  “Where’s L
una?” she asked her mother.

  “She’s gone to Zacks & Son. That one couldn’t miss a minute of work,” Rosa replied.

  “Well,” Gabriel said, “I’m going to the shop. Come on, Becky, I’ll drive you to school. And you,” to Rachelika, “don’t you dare leave the house, not even for school.”

  “But Papo, I’ll miss lessons.”

  “You should have thought of that when you joined the Scouts without asking permission.”

  “I’m sorry, Papo, but I knew you wouldn’t let me go and I just had to take part in the struggle. The whole school’s in either the Scouts or the Haganah. You always said you were for the Haganah.”

  “I’m not saying that I’m not for the Haganah. I’m saying I’m not for my daughter participating in a Haganah activity without my permission, and I’m not for my daughter telling me barefaced lies!”

  “But Papo, I wasn’t at the Haganah. I was at the Scouts.”