The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem

by Sarit Yishai-Levi

  She got up and Moise gave her his place. “My pleasure, Senora Rosa, my pleasure.”

  She liked Moise. He was like the son she never had, and in her heart he filled the place left by Ephraim. Ephraim, she’d almost forgotten what he looked like. Her yearning and concern for him had given way to ire. She was angry at his lack of consideration, that he didn’t even send a sign of life. After all, he knew how much she worried about him, and he—nada—he behaved like he had no family, so he could go to hell. If that’s what he wants then so be it. He has no family.

  Every now and then Rosa was alarmed when she heard about underground operations and arrests. She didn’t even know the difference between Lehi and Etzel. They were one and the same for her. Her heart almost stopped beating when she’d heard that twelve members of Lehi disguised as Arab prisoners and British policemen had attacked the Ramat Gan police station, blowing open the armory door, taking the weapons, and loading them onto a waiting vehicle. She was sure that Ephraim was one of them, and it was only when the names of the casualties and captives were announced that she heaved a sigh of relief. Who knew how many times she and Gabriel had argued after he quoted Ben-Gurion, who’d said he wouldn’t lift a finger to help free Dov Gruner, the commander of the operation who had been captured.

  “He didn’t take the weapons for himself,” Rosa insisted. “He took them to liberate us from the Ingelish.”

  “And killed innocent people along the way,” Gabriel retorted angrily. “If Ben-Gurion doesn’t want to help a Jew, then things have reached a low point.”

  “Dio santo, Gabriel, that Ben-Gurion has addled your brain. He’s made you blind.”

  “Silence, woman! I don’t talk from emotion like you. I read the papers before I talk. I understand the situation. And you, without reading, without knowing, without understanding, talk nonsense. Do you think I don’t know it’s because of your brother the borracho who’s with them?” And with that he put an end to the conversation.

  Now the Days of the Messiah were here, and God be praised, her husband was showing her respect in front of the whole family.

  “I’ve given this a lot of thought,” Gabriel began. “Rachelika and Moise are right. There’s no point in holding on to the shop, which, as that dog Mordoch said, is a bottomless pit. We’re spending money we don’t have to pay taxes to the municipality that cheats us shamelessly, and we’re not bringing in a single grush. But I don’t want to sell to the Kurd. I thought that if we advertise in the market that we’re selling the shop, then perhaps we’ll find other buyers.”

  “Senor Ermosa,” Moise said, “please don’t be angry, but I’ve already spoken to some people about the shop, and believe me, at a time like this nobody has the money to buy property. They all want to sell and there aren’t any buyers.”

  “So if everybody wants to sell, why doesn’t the Kurd buy somebody else’s shop? Why does he want ours?” Luna burst out.

  “A good question,” Gabriel replied. “Why is he so insistent on buying our shop?”

  “Forgive me, Senor Ermosa,” Eli Cohen interjected, “I don’t want to contradict my future brother-in-law, but although times are hard, nobody’s selling their shop. People are holding on to their property as if their life depends on it.”

  “I was talking about the few who do want to sell,” Moise persisted.

  “Where are their shops located in the market?” Handsome Eli Cohen asked.

  “One’s on Agrippas Street near Rachmo, another’s in the alley by the Iraqi market.”

  “And where is Senor Ermosa’s shop?” Eli said. “On Etz Ha’Haim Street, the market’s main street, the best location with the largest number of customers passing by. That’s why the Kurd wants this particular shop.”

  “There’s a lot of sense in what Eli’s saying,” Gabriel said.

  “So what do you suggest we do, Papo?” Rachelika asked.

  “I suggest we listen to Eli. What do you say, habibi?” he asked the young man, and Becky felt herself blush as her heart swelled with pride.

  “The best thing,” Eli said, “is to hear what Mordoch’s offering and go from there.”

  But when they heard the Kurd’s offer, it was so low that they rejected it on the spot.

  * * *

  The sound of a huge explosion catapulted Luna from her place behind the counter at Zacks & Son. The shop was empty, and only a few minutes earlier Mr. Zacks had walked across Jaffa Road to deposit the morning’s takings in the bank.

  Within minutes the street was filled with the wail of sirens from British police vehicles driving by the shop at high speed, passing Zion Square and on toward Princess Mary Street. Thick smoke rose into the sky from the direction of Mamilla and the entire area seemed engulfed in chaos. Soon enough the street had emptied. Alone in the shop, Luna was scared to death. A sense of foreboding gripped her. She wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible and run to her parents’ house, but how could she? She couldn’t leave the shop open and unattended. The keys were with Mr. Zacks, who hadn’t yet returned from the bank. But before she could decide what to do Mr. Zacks came running in, out of breath. “There’s been an explosion at the King David,” he said. “Run home before the curfew starts.”

  “God help us. David, what about David? The carpentry shop’s right next to the Rex Cinema. It’s only five minutes from the King David.”

  “David’s a man, he’ll look after himself. Run home before the English put up concertina wire all over the city and you can’t get anywhere.”

  Luna hurried toward Agrippas Street, her high heels catching in the cobblestones and making her stumble. In the end she took them off and ran barefoot. When she got to her parents’ home, her father was already sitting at the radio surrounded by neighbors who’d come to listen to the news. “Thank God you’re here,” he said to his daughter. “And David, where is he?”

  “He probably can’t get over here.”

  Panting, Moise and Rachelika arrived a few minutes after Luna.

  “We closed the shop,” Moise said. “The whole market’s closed. They’re saying the Etzel blew up the British offices in the King David.”

  “Where’s Becky?” Rachelika asked.

  All of them were anxious about Becky. Rosa restlessly paced from one room to another. Not only was she worried about Becky, but whenever a disaster happened that evidently involved members of the Lehi or Etzel, despite her anger she was scared half to death that something had happened to Ephraim, God forbid.

  Gabriel turned up the volume on the radio. The Voice of Jerusalem newsreader announced that at 12:37 an explosion in Jerusalem shook the city. An entire wing of the King David Hotel had been destroyed, leaving shattered masonry and clouds of dust behind. “The number of dead is still unknown, and whether there are Jews among them,” the newsreader reported.

  Gabriel turned off the radio and the arguments for and against the action began in loud voices. Luna blocked her ears, went into the other room, lay down on her childhood bed, and buried her face in the pillow.

  The door opened and Rachelika stood in the doorway. “What’s the matter, Luna?”

  “Enough, enough, I’ve had enough! I can’t take anymore! I can’t take this tension! Every day there’s shooting. Every day there’s explosions. Every day there are people killed. And who knows where Becky and David are? Who knows where they’re stuck with all this danger out there?”

  “David probably went to look for you at Zacks & Son,” Rachelika tried to calm her sister. “And when he sees that the shop’s closed he’ll come here, and Becky will be here soon. Calm down, Lunika, now’s not the time for hysterics.”

  “What do you want me to do? I’m dead scared that something will happen to me, dead scared that a building will collapse on me when I’m walking down the street, dead scared I’ll be shot by mistake. I’m living in fear all the time!”

  “Tell me, hermanita, what’s really frightening you? Is it the situation out there or your personal one?”

&n
bsp; “What are you talking about?”

  “Luna, I’m your sister. I look at you and I see that your lovely eyes are sad. What’s the matter, Lunika?”

  “Nothing’s the matter. You’re talking nonsense.”

  “Lunika querida, please talk to me. I don’t want to interfere in your business, but if there’s something you want to tell me, if there’s something troubling you, talk to me.”

  “The only thing that’s troubling me right now is you. Just leave me alone!”

  “All right, if that’s what you want, but I know that something not good is going on. You can’t hide it from me. You can put on a show for Papo and Mother, but not for me.”

  “Mother doesn’t even look at me, so I don’t have to hide anything from her.”

  “So it’s true? There’s something you’re hiding?”

  “I’m not hiding anything. Just get out of here!” she screamed as if possessed by a dybbuk and threw a pillow at her sister. “Get out of here! If you weren’t pregnant I’d throw a shoe at you!”

  The shouts brought Moise rushing in. “What happened?”

  “Nothing happened,” Rachelika replied. “Let’s go.”

  Luna buried her face in the pillow and began weeping uncontrollably. She cried for a long time, her sobs turning into gasps. She wept for her life that had lost its meaning, for her youth lost forever, for her husband who she now knew for sure she shouldn’t have married. How had it happened that she of all people, to whom so many men were prepared to give the moon, had married a man who didn’t love her?

  She suddenly felt that she wasn’t alone. She opened her eyes and saw Rachelika sitting silently on the bed beside her. Rachelika stroked her head and brushed her tears away.

  “Why are you crying, Lunika, why are you crying?”

  She felt she could no longer go on living the lie. She had to tell her sister.

  “I’m crying over my life, hermanita, my wasted life. I waited for my knight on a white horse for so long and he came, but he’s not a knight or anything like it.”

  “What are you saying? What’s happening with you and David?”

  “Tell me, Rachelika, how often do you and Moise do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “You know, do it.”

  “Luna, what kind of a question is that?”

  “All right, it’s clear that you do. Otherwise your belly wouldn’t be swelling, and it’s clear that David and I don’t do it,” she said and lifted her blouse to expose her flat belly.

  “Luna, what do you mean, you don’t do it?”

  “How often do you and Moise do it?”

  “Every night.”

  “Every night since you got married?”

  “Every night, and sometimes in the morning before he goes to work.”

  “Even now that you’re pregnant?”

  Rachelika blushed to the roots of her hair and nodded embarrassedly. “And you, Luna, how often do you do it?”

  Luna lowered her eyes and said dejectedly, “Once on our wedding night, and after that, sometimes, but not all the time, not every night.”

  “Are you serious, Luna? You haven’t been married a year yet. You’re still on your honeymoon.”

  “It’s not David’s fault. It’s me that doesn’t like it.”

  “How can you not like it? Don’t you want children? Where do you think children come from, the stork brings them?”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Sometimes I don’t like it either, but I never say no. Even if I don’t like it at first, I do afterward, and when my husband tells me he loves me, that I’m the love of his life, that he can’t live without me, I like it a lot.”

  “But David never says things like that to me.”

  “He doesn’t tell you he loves you?”

  “He doesn’t love me.”

  “God help us, Luna, what are you saying?”

  “He doesn’t love me. Instead of coming home after work, he goes to the Rex Cinema. He goes to the Rex on purpose because he knows I don’t like it there because of the Arabs from the Old City. He plays cards with his friends twice a week, and once a week they go for a drink at the bar over the Edison where only men go and no decent woman would step inside.”

  “And you’re at home on your own? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “What would I have said, that my husband leaves his wife alone in their first year of marriage?”

  “But you don’t like being on your own.”

  “I hate being on my own. I’m scared of being on my own, and in Mekor Baruch too, so far away from everything I know.”

  “What about your neighbors?”

  “I told you, I don’t want the neighbors knowing that I’m on my own. If I don’t talk about it, then nobody else will know.”

  How naive she is, Rachelika thought to herself. The nosy neighbors must notice the unusual times that David gets home. Luna is surely the subject of malicious gossip.

  “Once,” Luna said, “our next-door neighbor asked me why my husband comes home so late at night, and I told her that there are things you don’t talk about, so she probably thinks he’s in the Haganah.”

  “Miskenica.” Rachelika hugged her sister. How dare that bastard David treat her sister like this. She’d show him, her stupid brother-in-law. She’d open his eyes for him.

  “Eli, God be praised, Eli,” they heard Rosa burst out from the other room. Luna quickly dried her tears and the two sisters ran to greet Becky.

  “When I heard the explosion at the King David I got on my motorbike and raced to Becky’s school,” Eli explained.

  “Eli drove like a lunatic,” said the excited Becky. “Even if the English had wanted to, they wouldn’t have caught him. He drove like the wind.”

  “May you be healthy,” Rosa said. “May you be healthy, Eli. I won’t forget that you brought our Becky home safely.”

  “All my life I’ll bring Becky safely to anywhere,” he promised Rosa, who knew that he would keep that promise.

  Gabriel nodded and beckoned Eli over to him.

  “Well done,” he told him. “I’m liking you more and more. With God’s help, when Becky turns seventeen we’ll announce your engagement, but in the meantime I want you to know that I consider you one of the family, that you’re my son-in-law no less than David and Moise.”

  “I’m honored, Senor Ermosa, greatly honored. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

  “Don’t thank me, may you be healthy, just look after my daughter. Now she’s home safely at last, it’s time to eat. Heideh, Rosa, some food on the table.”

  Gabriel noticed that Luna and Rachelika had shut themselves in the other room for some time. Luna’s behavior had worried him recently. She had lost a lot of weight and the radiance she always displayed seemed to have dimmed. He didn’t know why his daughter was sad, but he was glad she had Rachelika. That she didn’t have to endure whatever it was alone.

  * * *

  The number of dead in the King David bombing reached ninety-one: forty-one Arabs, twenty-eight British, five foreign nationals, and seventeen Jews. That night David stayed in the carpentry shop and slept on the sawdust together with the owner and the other workers. It was impossible to leave the shop. Had there been a telephone in his father-in-law’s house he would have called from the public phone in the adjacent post office and assured them he was all right. He recalled Luna telling him that when they lived in the big apartment on King George Street, their neighbor who was a doctor had a phone, but that didn’t help now.

  Much water had flowed in the streams around Jerusalem since the Ermosa family left King George Street, mainly muddy water. His father-in-law’s health was bad, his business situation even worse. The question of selling the shop was still in the air, and he himself had no opinion. With all due respect to his marriage to Luna, David didn’t feel close to his father-in-law, nor did he feel close to his wife. How had he thought that everything would work out if he got married? How had he thought that ano
ther woman, even a stunning beauty like Luna, could replace Isabella in his heart?

  He missed her. There hadn’t been a night since he’d left her weeping on the Mestre pier that he hadn’t thought about her, recalling over and over the first time he saw her riding her bike in shorts that showed off her long tanned legs. Her white shirt tied at the waist revealed a tanned, rounded belly, and her large breasts seemed like they were about to burst from the buttoned shirt. David remembered her striking, dark-skinned face and almond eyes, her long hair that she secured with a ribbon.

  “Ciao, bella,” he’d called to her. She’d stopped and gotten off her bike, and from that moment his life had changed. He, whose friends dubbed “Solomon” because he had a thousand wives, he, who spent every night with a different woman, had fallen head over heels with the gorgeous Italian woman who introduced herself as Isabella. How could he have thought that he would be able to forget her? He hadn’t forgotten her even when he was courting Luna. Back then he’d repressed his feelings, determined to marry, have children, a family. But how could he have children when he hardly made love to his wife? Moise and Rachelika married after them and were already expecting. And for he and Luna, where would children come from, the milkman? He had to make love to his wife, he had to give her a child; otherwise there’d be talk. Luna didn’t deserve to be talked about. She was a good girl. He had to change. On my life, just let us get through this night, and starting tomorrow things will be different.

  * * *

  “We have to talk,” Rachelika said to Moise.

  “We talk all the time, my love,” he replied and kissed her belly.

  “It’s serious. It’s about Luna and David.”

  Moise tensed. “What about Luna and David? What’s happened now?”

  “Do you know that they don’t have marital relations?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “What you’re hearing. That ‘Solomon’ of yours who’s had a thousand women, the famous lover, doesn’t have intercourse with his wife.”

  “Rachelika, that’s none of our business.”

  “It most certainly is. We got married after them and I’m already pregnant. I feel terrible for my sister. Soon people will start talking.”