The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem
Page 26
The policemen swigged the cognac, and as soon as their glasses were empty, Gabriel refilled them. Rosa fluttered around the guests, who seemed to have forgotten they were on duty and were enjoying a lively conversation with Gabriel as if they were all old friends.
“Dio santo, they don’t want to go,” Rosa said to the girls when they were alone in the kitchen.
“Why should they go? Three beautiful girls, fine cognac, why would they leave?” said Rachelika contemptuously.
“Shut up, calabasa, you pumpkin, they’ll hear you,” Luna whispered.
“If we don’t do something to get rid of them,” Rachelika went on, “they’ll end up sleeping here.”
“Better they sleep here than you sleeping in prison,” Luna retorted.
“Quiet, both of you! I don’t want the Ingelish hearing you. Go and serve them some more borekitas,” Rosa ordered.
The girls went back into the living room and served the policemen the oven-fresh borekitas.
“Do you have just the three girls?” one of the policemen asked.
“Three that are like thirty,” Gabriel chuckled, doing his best to make his laugh sound genuine.
“That’s quite rare,” said the English policeman. “I know that Sephardi families have lots of children.”
“We had more once,” Gabriel replied. “But they died. What can you do, The Lord gives and the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Much to his surprise, Gabriel found that he was quite enjoying his chat with the English policemen, who admitted they were homesick and missed their families. But it was getting late, and he needed them to leave so he could settle accounts with Rachelika.
Luna took advantage of their presence and asked their permission to use the privy in the yard. During a curfew they usually relieved themselves in tin chamber pots they kept under the bed. In the morning they’d empty them in the privy, wash them out, and hang them by their handles on the wall of the house, next to the iron laundry bath they also used for bathing.
God, Luna thought, where have the happy days in the King George Street apartment gone, when we had an inside toilet and tiled bathroom and brass faucets? How happy those King George days had been, and how brief. She still was in awe of the modern amenities by the time they had to return to the old neighborhood with the old neighbors and the gossiping women who to this day were still talking about Tio Ephraim and how he’d shot Matilda Franco.
The policemen allowed Luna to use the privy and Becky and Rachelika after her. “But one at a time, not all together,” one said, suddenly transformed from the nice man drinking cognac with their father back into an intimidating English policeman.
When the girls came back inside, the two policemen stood up, thanked Gabriel and Rosa for their hospitality, warned Rachelika about being out after curfew, and left.
“At long last, thank God,” said Gabriel with a sigh of relief. He thought the nightmare would never end and that the damned Englishmen were going to move in. They must have enjoyed the idea of three lovely girls and fine cognac. And Rosa, may she be healthy, hadn’t shut her mouth the entire time. His silent wife’s mouth had opened and refused to close as if her lips were stuck that way. He didn’t know if she hadn’t stopped talking because she was scared that something terrible would happen the moment she shut up, or because she was just proud of her good English. Thank God she hadn’t said a word about having been a housemaid for the English. And lucky the damned Englishmen hadn’t asked where her good English came from.
After they left, he sat down in his chair and with a shaking hand lit a cigarette and drew the smoke into his lungs. He glanced at his daughters, who seemed to be purposely zealous with the tidying up. His wife, who since the Englishmen’s departure had fallen silent again, was now sitting at the far side of the room embroidering one of her tapestries, which she hung on the walls as if they were works of art, as if their house was the Louvre and not a wretched dwelling in Ohel Moshe.
Gabriel sighed and a sharp pain lanced through his chest. How? How had it happened that after living in the splendid King George Street apartment right next to Rehavia he’d had to bring his family back to Ohel Moshe, and in condition far worse than they’d left it? How had it happened that from being a wealthy, respected man who owned a car and a flourishing delicatessen, he now didn’t have a grush to his name? The Ermosa family had never been very rich, but they’d never been poor either. Why had he been sentenced by the Almighty to be the one to lead his family to the edge of the cliff? It couldn’t be his mother’s curse. She had removed it the day she did the livianos for him, cleansed him of his sins, forgiven him, and ordered him to start afresh. So who had put the evil eye on him now? And what terrible sin had he committed that he and his daughters deserved such a punishment, to fall from so high to so low? How much longer could he carry this burden before he collapsed under its weight? And if he did collapse, what would become of his daughters? They were still unmarried and didn’t have homes of their own. He had to see them married and know that they were well provided for before he raised his hands and surrendered to his fate. Until then he had no choice. He had to go on shouldering the burden.
The girls had finished cleaning up and were about to go to their room. “You,” Gabriel told Rachelika, “you stay here.” Rachelika looked at Luna, but not only did her sister not soothe her, she made a throat-cutting gesture with the flat of her hand as if to say, Papo’s going to slaughter you.
Rosa fixed her eyes on her embroidery. If she could, she would have disappeared. She couldn’t bear the thought of Gabriel being angry with Rachelika. Rachelika was pure gold, hija de oro. She worked like an ox in the shop all day, she did everything for her father, and he, he saw only that spoiled Luna. Rachelika did all the hard work. Even now, who washed the dishes? Rachelika, who else? Would Luna dirty her polished nails? Whatever the flaca did, he forgave her, but Rachelika miskenica, was it her fault she got stuck in the curfew? Now he’d shout at her and punish her. What kind of father had he turned into?
“Draw up a chair and sit by me,” Gabriel told Rachelika, and she complied. She sat, head bowed, and waited. To her disbelief, he said softly, “Rachelika querida, hija mia, of all my daughters you are the only one I can depend on. You’re a serious girl, querida, you’re responsible. I know I did you an injustice when I took you out of school and put you in the shop, but you can see for yourself how much I need you. What would I do without you there? How can I rely on Tio Matzliach, may God forgive me, who is just the opposite of his name, ‘successful’? How can I rely on Avramino who’s not only a troncho de Tveria but also not family? I rely only on you, querida. Only you with your intelligence can save the shop, and you’re the only one who won’t rob me. And that’s why I’m putting you in charge of the shop from now on. I’m sick, querida. My legs don’t carry me to Mahane Yehuda anymore, they don’t carry me anywhere, so you have to look after the shop for me, for your mother, your sisters, for our family.”
Rachelika was silent, trying to absorb the magnitude of the responsibility that her father had just placed on her shoulders, and wondering why he wasn’t angry with her for being caught after curfew. Her mind raced like crazy. How can I look after the shop if I’m working and studying? And as if her father had read her mind, he said, “You’ll have to stop going to your classes.”
She could hardly breathe. She was only a few months away from graduation. She had to graduate so she could go on to teacher training. For the first time when facing her father she dug her heels in. “I’m sorry, Papo, but I don’t want to stop.”
“You don’t want to stop?” he repeated as if he had misheard. “Is that because the studies are so important to you, or perhaps there’s another reason?”
Here it comes, she thought to herself. My father must know about Etzel. But he didn’t say a word about the Etzel. “Do you think I was born yesterday? That I really believed that you go to study for exams with your friend every day? Your school is close to Zion
Square where Café Europa is, where Café Vienna is, where the English bastards hang out.”
“God forbid, Papo, I swear I never go to cafés, certainly not the ones the English go to.”
“All right,” he said, mollified. “But still there’s no choice. You have to look after the shop, and if you can’t do that and study at the same time, there’s no choice, querida. You’ll have to stop studying.”
“I’ll do anything you say,” Rachelika plead. “Just don’t make me stop studying.”
“We have no choice. If you don’t, the shop will go to hell and I won’t have food to put on the table.”
“What am I going to do?” Rachelika asked Luna, who was waiting for her in their bedroom.
“You have no choice,” Luna replied gently and stroked her hair. She knew how determined Rachelika was to complete her studies and become a teacher, but she also understood her father and knew that if Rachelika didn’t take charge of the shop, then Mordoch the Kurd would take it over the way he did with the halvah factory, and their family would be finished. She wanted her sister to stop endangering herself with escapades that brought English policemen to their house. She wanted Rachelika to have ordinary dreams, to find a husband and have a family, not big dreams like driving out the British and establishing a state. Anyway, she should leave the big dreams to men, Luna thought.
“You have to do what Papo tells you,” she said to Rachelika softly. “There’s too much at stake. What do you think, that I don’t understand what’s going on here? You’ve got the luck of the devil that Papo doesn’t suspect you. After he forbade you to be in the Haganah, you join the Etzel?”
“I’m not doing it to spite him. I want to be part of the national struggle.”
“You have to be part of the family struggle. If Papo heard you’re in the Etzel, he’d throw you out of the family! You’re the good girl in the family. It would break his heart.”
“He won’t hear about it if you don’t tell him, so swear you won’t.”
“Of course I won’t tell him, but you have to stop. They’ll catch you one day and you’ll end up in prison. And especially now Papo needs you to manage the shop.”
“Luna, what am I going to do? I don’t want to run the shop. I can’t stand that dumb Tio Matzliach and that stammering Avramino, and as for the Kurd, I hate him.”
“I hate the Kurd too, Rachelika. I felt that from the moment Papo went into partnership with him that he put a hex on us.”
“That dog Mordoch,” Rachelika said, “he comes into the shop as if he owns it, looks around as if it’s going to be his soon, touches things, moves them, asks questions.”
“It’ll be his over my dead body!” Luna’s blood rushed straight to her head. “I’ll stand in the shop myself and block him from coming in.”
“That Kurd is Amalek, Luna. He’s just waiting for the right moment to take over the shop and get rid of Papo and bring in his thousands of children to our place.”
“And that’s precisely why, hermanita querida,” Luna said as if she’d won the argument, “you have to do what Papo asks!”
“But why me?”
“Because you have a good head on your shoulders like Papo. You’re the cleverest of all of us, that’s why.”
Deep down Rachelika understood that she had no choice, but how could a sixteen-year-old girl stand up to Amalek Mordoch? And how could she give orders to her Tio Matzliach and Avramino, who’s old enough to be her father?
The next evening at school, she didn’t even ask Moshe Alalouf if he knew what happened to her partner the previous night. And when he came over to her with fresh orders for the night’s activities, she ignored him and went straight home, preparing herself for another hard talk with her father. She had no idea what she was going to say to him. Her father had always told her that an education was the most important thing of all. How angry he’d been with Luna when she wanted to drop out of school and work in the dress shop! And now what? If her father was asking her to stop studying, then things must be really bad.
Although it was only eight o’clock, she found her father asleep in his bed. Well, at least she could put off the difficult conversation another day.
“He’s not feeling well,” Rosa told her. “He didn’t touch his food. He said he was tired and went to bed.”
“And Luna?”
“She went out with David.”
“And Becky?”
“Out and about.”
Rachelika, who’d gotten used to being busy every evening, didn’t know what to do with herself.
“Come and sit here next to me,” Rosa said, and she drew up a stool next to her mother in the yard. “Rachelika, hija mia, I heard what your father asked of you. Do what he tells you. Your father isn’t the same. He’s sick. Today he sat in his chair all day and didn’t move. It’s as if his whole body is broken.”
“Why doesn’t he go to the Kupat Holim clinic?”
“He did, querida. He went, and the doctor told him the same thing as Dr. Sabo—rheumatism. Didn’t we go to the Tiberias hot springs? We did. Nothing helps. It’s not rheumatism, Rachelika. His hand trembles, haven’t you seen? He can hardly lift a spoon to put food into his mouth. He tries to hide it, but he can’t. When he gets up from his chair, if he doesn’t hold on to the table, he’ll fall over. Sometimes he starts speaking to me and then he loses his train of thought and doesn’t remember what he wanted to say. His moods, Dio mio, one minute he’s happy and the next minute he’s sad, one minute he’s calm and the next he’s irritable. He’s sick, your father. If he wasn’t, would he be left without a grush to his name? If he wasn’t sick, would we have come back to Ohel Moshe?”
Rachelika looked at her mother, surprised. “I thought you were happy that we came back to Ohel Moshe. You didn’t like King George. You missed the neighborhood, your neighbors.”
“Mashallah, querida, what neighbors? Do you see any neighbors here? Even Tamar who was like a sister to me doesn’t come here. Ever since Matilda died, it seems I don’t have any neighbors.”
“So you’re not happy that we came back to Ohel Moshe? That was my small consolation, that at least you’d be glad.”
“I am, I won’t say I’m not. I didn’t like living on King George. The neighbors shut the door so nobody could come in without calling ahead, God forbid. I was so shy I didn’t even ask for a glass of water from any of them. I won’t tell you I didn’t suffer when I couldn’t go and sit outside like we’re sitting here now, and that the noise of the cars didn’t give me a headache and that the elevator didn’t scare me half to death. But seeing my girls and your father so unhappy because we’ve come back to Ohel Moshe? It breaks my heart.”
“Don’t let your heart break, we’ll manage.”
“We’ll manage, of course we’ll manage. But it’s been long enough since they killed Matilda, may she rest in peace, and to this day not one neighbor has treated us like before. There was a time when they only had to see me outside and right away they’d come, we’d sit and talk, eat and laugh. Now if I go outside and there’s a neighbor in the yard, she goes right back into her house, slams the door. No, querida, I haven’t got anyone in Ohel Moshe. I’m alone.”
Although Rosa didn’t actually mention Ephraim, Rachelika heard what her mother left unspoken.
“Have you heard anything?” she asked Rosa. “Have you heard anything from Tio Ephraim?”
“Ah,” Rosa released a pain-filled sigh. “Nada, I haven’t heard a thing. I wish I had. There’s nobody to tell me, and Sara Laniado, whose son is there with him, once I’d talk to her about him, but since Matilda’s death, may she rest in peace, she doesn’t let me come to her house. God help me, how much I think about Ephraim, how I worry about my little troncho. Who knows if he’s alive or dead.”
“Maybe he’s in the prison in Acre?” Rachelika said. “Maybe the English have caught him?”
“God forbid, tfu, don’t say things like that so los de avashos don’t put the evil eye on him.”
“He cares, of course he cares, but he knows I’m not alone, that I have my daughters, and I have your father, may he be healthy. But he, who does he have? Miskenico, who does he have to care for him?”
“Maybe he got married? Maybe he has children?” said Rachelika, trying to calm her mother.
“I hope so, from your mouth, mi alma, to God’s ears, I hope he did stand under the wedding canopy even though I wasn’t there to see him break the wineglass. I hope he has a wife who cares for him. I hope so.”
“You know, Mother,” Rachelika said, deciding to ease her mother’s heartache, “there are rumors that he’s a big commander in the Lehi, that he’s well-respected.”
“Where did you hear that, querida? How do you know what the Lehi is doing or isn’t doing?”
“There are boys and girls in my school who know, and they told me that he’s doing important things for the Jewish people.”
“Hija de oro!” Rosa wrung her hands emotionally. “How is it that you always know how to calm me! What a heart you’ve got, may you be healthy, and it’s because of that heart of yours, querida, that you must do what your father asks, so that we don’t find ourselves like the poor people from the market, collecting scraps of food from the floor, and so that, God forbid, we don’t get to a state where your father, pishcado y limon, won’t get out of bed for shame. Listen to me, hija, what your father asked of you is a call for help, so don’t disappoint him. Don’t let us down.”
* * *
“Why so unhappy, my lovely?” David asked Luna and hugged her. “Why so downhearted? You haven’t smiled at me even once today, not even a little.”
“I’m worried about Rachelika. That’s why I didn’t enjoy the film at all.”
As they did every evening, they’d gone to see a film, this one starring Hedy Lamarr, and now they were on their way to have coffee at Café Atara before he took her home.
“What’s the matter with Rachelika?” David said indifferently.