The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem

by Sarit Yishai-Levi

  “I love you,” she repeated more forcefully.

  He tried to hide the tears welling in his eyes. “Never,” he told her, “I beg you, never again tell me you love me. I won’t be able to survive in this place when you’re not here. If you truly love me, then please forget what you told me and I’ll forget it too.”

  But they both knew it was impossible to forget. It was impossible to loosen the bond that had tightened between them. He had breathed life into her wounded body. Her soul was bound to his. It had been many long months since more than her own pain had preoccupied her. She was so worried about him. Most of the time he was happy and humorous, the life of the ward, but there were days, especially when he came back from an examination, when he was depressed and silent. And she, who had been silent for such a long time, imprisoned in her pain and agony, grieving over her ruined body and beauty that would never be what it had been, now that a spark of life had been reignited in her, it suddenly went out in him.

  One time when he came back from an appointment with the doctor he climbed onto his bed and closed the curtain between their beds. He refused to eat, refused to talk to anyone. All her efforts to break through were rebuffed. Even his parents, who had come all the way from Nahariya, he sent away. Luna was beside herself. His suffering made her forget her own. Except for her father, she had never been so worried about anybody in her life.

  And then one morning he was his usual self again as if nothing had happened. The jokes returned, the laughter and pranks that made him the nurses’ favorite and her pride and joy.

  She would never forget the first time they’d gone to their place on the balcony. One evening after doctors’ rounds, when their wardmates were in bed asleep, a moment before they closed the curtain between their beds, he whispered, “Do you feel like taking a walk?”

  “Sure,” she replied and quickly brought his wheelchair and helped him out of bed.

  “Where to?” she asked.

  “The balcony.”

  When they reached the end of the corridor, she carefully opened the door and they went out onto the spacious balcony. It was a warm summer night, a pleasant breeze caressed their faces, and a robust moon hung in the sky, casting a serene glow on the balcony. Luna felt as if she were in a film.

  “You know,” she said, “it was on a moonlit night like this, on the fifteenth of Adar, that I was born. My father called me Luna, which is moon in Ladino.”

  “Luna,” he whispered, turning his face to her, “how that name suits you.”

  Luna didn’t take her eyes from his. She knelt beside him, resting her head on his knees, and he stroked the red curls that had grown back. For a long while they stayed like that in silence.

  Then he lifted her chin with a finger, raised her head above his knees, and said, “I want to tell you something.”

  Her eyes sparkled.

  “I made the doctor and the nurses swear they wouldn’t tell a soul, not even my parents, but I want you to know. It’s important to me that you know.”

  “What?” she asked excitedly.

  “You know that the Arab sniper’s bullets hit my spinal cord?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m paralyzed from the waist down, and I’ll never walk again.”

  “The main thing is that you’re alive,” she said, telling him what she herself had been told so many times. “You’re alive and you’ll be able to do everything, just not walk.”

  “I won’t be able to do everything, Luna. I won’t be able to father children.”

  “No,” she blurted painfully and quickly covered her mouth with her hand as if trying to push the word back in. “Is that final?” she asked, trembling. “It won’t pass?”

  “No, it won’t pass.”

  “Is that why you’ve been sad for such a long time?”

  “When they told me I’d be paralyzed, I accepted it. I thought, I’m lucky I didn’t lose my eyes, it would have been far worse if I’d been blinded. But when the doctor told me I wouldn’t be able to have children, it broke me completely. Do you understand what it means, Luna?”

  She nodded. “But you can always marry a woman who has children.”

  “Unfortunately that apparently isn’t going to happen.”

  “Why not? There are lots of war widows who’ve been left with children.”

  “Ah, that.” He smiled for the first time. “I thought you meant I could marry you.”

  “I wish,” she said sadly. “I wish you could marry me.”

  From then on Luna wheeled Gidi to the balcony every evening.

  None of their friends joined them on their nightly walks to the balcony. They all knew that something was going on between the two, but nobody spoke of it. It became one of the best-kept secrets of the band of patients and nurses. Even if there were those who took a dim view of the closeness between the married woman and the wounded young man, they didn’t say a word. That closeness, they noticed, was like a wonder drug for both of them, and it accelerated their recovery.

  Luna gradually fell in love with Gidi. Her heart fluttered each time she saw him, and she felt her youth being restored and her will to live rekindled. She asked Rachelika to bring her lipstick and face powder and began wearing makeup as she had before she was wounded. With a headscarf she hid the stubble of what hair had begun growing back and the remaining bald spots. And Rachelika, who was overjoyed by the change in her sister, brought the cosmetics to the hospital, including a file for Luna’s nails.

  “Thank God,” she said to Moise. “My sister’s getting back to her old self. Lipstick, face powder, manicure, pedicure. She’ll soon be walking around the ward in an evening gown and heels.”

  The change didn’t escape David either. Now when he came to visit her, she wasn’t lying in bed like a mummy. He’d sometimes find her on the balcony with her friends, wearing her silk robe instead of the ugly hospital gown. Luna’s back to being Luna, he thought to himself. It won’t be long before she comes home, and what will happen then? He couldn’t ignore the fears that rose in him. They’d been growing apart even before she’d been wounded. They hadn’t had intercourse since the day she told him she was pregnant, and when he’d tried to come to her after Gabriela was born, she’d rejected his advances with the excuse that she was embarrassed about doing it when her parents were in the next room. And he hadn’t pressed her. It had been over a year since she was brought to the hospital, and since then he’d had to satisfy his drives in secret, with women he met for an evening or two, widows or divorcées, heaven help him, and when neither of the two was available, he did it with women for whose services he paid with money he couldn’t afford to spend.

  * * *

  On the day Mother came home from the hospital, Becky dressed me in a lovely white muslin dress that had arrived in a package from America. Every day she made me practice saying, “Welcome home, Ima,” but I, who at age one couldn’t stop talking, stubbornly refused to repeat the greeting until Becky despaired and said, “All right, just say ‘Hello, Ima.’”

  And as if out of spite I said, “Hello, Abba,” and Becky said, “All right, so don’t say anything. Just give your mother a hug and kiss.”

  Mother came home after the war had ended and after Moise and Handsome Eli Cohen had already returned. My father turned in his Sten gun and was released from his duties defending our Jerusalem and went to work as a mechanic at his brother Yitzhak’s garage in Talpiot. When she stepped through the door of Nono and Nona’s house, holding on to Father’s arm and measuring her steps as if afraid of stumbling, she went first to her father. Nono Gabriel, who was sitting more or less paralyzed in his usual chair, his body not obeying his commands to stand up to greet his beloved daughter, wept oceans of tears and for a long time laid his hand on the head of his daughter kneeling before him.

  “God be praised, God be praised,” he said, murmuring the words like a mantra. Only after she embraced her father, kissed his sunken cheeks and trembling hand, did she embrace—seemingly against her w
ill—Nona Rosa too. Then she sat down in the armchair next to my grandfather, exhausted by the effort. Becky, who was holding me in her arms, came over to her and told me, “Say hello to Ima, say welcome home.” But I shook my head vigorously.

  “How she’s grown,” my mother said tiredly.

  “Come, sweetie, come, bonica,” my father said, taking me from Becky. “Come to Ima.” My mother held out her arms, but as always I refused her.

  She drew her hands back into her lap and said, “I’m tired. I need to lie down.”

  And since then my mother lay down at every opportunity. She’d get up only infrequently, mostly when people would come to visit her, and as soon as they’d leave she’d go back to bed. My grandmother, my aunts, and my father continued looking after me, leaving my mother to recover at her own pace.

  * * *

  Every morning David would go off to his job at the garage. He didn’t like the work, he didn’t like dirtying himself with engine oil, he didn’t like working with his hands. He wasn’t born to be a laborer. The moment an opportunity came his way he’d get the hell out of this stinking garage and away from his brother, who treated him and the other workers like slaves. A little tin god, David thought to himself, a pompous schmendrick. Only yesterday Yitzhak was a snot-nosed kid and now he was the big shot. David had to get out of this stinking place, he had to find a job that suited his talents, like Moise who joined the police force. Even Handsome Eli Cohen had found a job at Haft & Haft, Accountants, on Ben-Yehuda Street. So why couldn’t he find his niche? Why, wasn’t he as good as them? When Moise joined the police and he and Rachelika had moved out, he’d urged him to join too, but David didn’t want to be a policeman.

  “Yuck,” Becky always said and made a face when David walked in. “You stink!” Of course he stunk, he worked in a stinking job. What, she expected him to be like her Don Juan de la Shmatte, who went to work in a white shirt and came home from work in a white shirt? He was a laborer! He’d hoped that when Luna returned from the hospital she’d make a quick recovery, get back to functioning like a mother, and life would resume its normal course, but Luna, since she’d come home from the hospital, had only sunk even deeper into herself. She hardly spoke and scarcely ate. He’d plead with her, “Luna, if you don’t eat, you won’t get your strength back, and if you don’t get stronger, they’ll put you back in the hospital,” and she’d just look at him with that sad expression of hers. His wife wouldn’t put a thing into her mouth, and soon there would be nothing left of the beauty he’d married her for.

  In the hospital her mood had been pretty good. Redheaded Gidi in the next bed, despite his condition, spread good cheer, told jokes. On more than one occasion he saw with his own eyes how Gidi was able to coax a smile, even a laugh, out of Luna. Almost every time David visited her in the ward, all the wounded guys would be sitting around her bed, like they once did at Café Atara. They had their own life at the hospital, and he sometimes felt as if he was trespassing. One had lost an arm, another a leg, and they’d laugh, and Luna Queen of England would be sitting in her bed, all of them trying to make her laugh, but she—nada. And there were some, Allah yustur, God save us, who died of their wounds, and others who lost their sight, they’d never see their wives again or their unborn children, and some who were bandaged from head to foot, but she, his wife, was the saddest of them all, as if all the suffering in the ward rested on her shoulders.

  Then at least she’d been somewhat present. He’d sit by her bed, holding her hand, working to carry on a conversation with her. But now her mood was worse than ever and she wasn’t speaking. Luna, who always had something to say about everything, was silent. Only with Rachelika did she sometimes exchange confidences. Being in his in-laws’ house was becoming more and more oppressive. David needed to get out of there too. As he rose from his place in the garage, he realized he had nowhere to go. Moise spent every moment not at work with Rachelika and their children, happy in his marriage. If there was one good thing that came out of his relationship with Luna, it was the match they’d made between Moise and Rachelika. That and Gabriela, may she be healthy, what a child, what joy, the spitting image of her mother and as different from her as the moon is from the sun. The child was all light. How she laughed with him, hugged him. How he loved to take her in his arms, sing songs to her, and how she talked. There wasn’t a word she didn’t know how to say. She knew all the names, even the neighbors’ names. Only Ima she stubbornly wouldn’t say. It didn’t matter how many times he asked her, she refused. But whatever, it’d pass. She’d say Ima. Was there a child who didn’t?

  That evening Luna got into bed, covered her head with the blankets, and pretended to be asleep. The last thing in the world she wanted right now, David knew for certain, was to be with him. He sat in the yard and smoked a cigarette, watching the smoke drift upward in rings. As a half-moon tried to make its way through the clouds, he got up and walked through the Ohel Moshe gate. The streets were deserted; Jerusalem went to bed early. He still hadn’t gotten used to the fact that there weren’t any British soldiers, that there was no curfew, no concertina wire, that you could go anywhere at any time without some bastard of an English policeman stopping and questioning you. He walked down Jaffa Road toward Nahalat Shiva. There, in one of the alleys, not far from where the burnt-out Rex Cinema still stood, was Rosenblatt’s Bar. He knew he wouldn’t encounter neighbors or acquaintances there, only men like himself who went there to dispel their loneliness in the company of strange women and a bottle of cheap brandy.

  From the street he heard a warm Italian voice singing “Ti Parlerò D’Amor,” and a sharp pain lanced through his heart. Isabella. He made his way down the dark steps, pulled the red curtain aside, and entered. Heavily made-up women wearing dresses that left nothing to the imagination lined the bar with tired-looking men. He sat down and ordered a Carmel 100 cognac and downed it in one. The liquor seared his throat, and he ordered another, hoping the cognac would put out the fire raging in his heart and erase the lie he’d been living. Cursed be the day he’d decided to leave Isabella on the Mestre pier; cursed be the day he’d married Luna out of cold, wrongful consideration. Why hadn’t he listened to his heart? Why hadn’t he heard Isabella’s pleadings? Maybe if he had, today he’d be happily married to a woman he loved. Perhaps he wouldn’t be bogged down in a life he didn’t want. He ordered another cognac, trying to dull the thoughts pounding in his head.

  “Gimme one for the road,” he eventually said to the bartender as he gulped another shot and staggered out the door. When he got home, he collapsed fully dressed onto the living room couch, his bed ever since Luna had come home from the hospital.

  * * *

  Instead of growing stronger and recovering, my mother had been steadily getting weaker. She could hardly stand, and when she spoke her voice was barely audible. Every time she had to walk from her bed to the privy in the yard she felt like she was climbing Everest.

  “I’ll fetch you a chamber pot,” Becky had told her, but Luna had vehemently refused. She had to reclaim a little of the dignity that had been taken from her. She was home at long last, but she wasn’t prepared for anybody to see her naked, not her sisters, not her mother, and especially not her husband. Although every step she took cost her great pain, she insisted on going to the privy. She had agreed to let Becky help change her clothes but wouldn’t let her bathe her. She preferred not to wash rather than have Becky see her scarred body.

  Becky became my second mother, taking me everywhere, even when she went for a walk with Handsome Eli Cohen or sat on the steps and chatted with her girlfriends. The only one Luna had patience for was Nono Gabriel. She’d sit beside him for hours on end, feed him with a teaspoon, wipe away the bits of food from the corners of his mouth, plump the cushions behind him, read to him from the newspaper, tune the radio stations for him. Nobody could understand his addiction to the programs about the search for missing relatives, but Gabriel would put his ear to the radio as if he were afraid he might mis
s a name, as if some relative was hiding inside it. Where will he find a relative among the Ishkenazim who were in the Holocaust? Rosa wondered. She couldn’t understand her husband, but then again, she didn’t understand much in those hard times.

  For instance, when she gave Becky their new ration card to fetch eggs, she brought back three Turkish eggs for each of them, and three for Gabriela.

  “Why Turkish eggs?” Rosa asked. “Why not eggs from Tnuva?”

  “How would I know,” Becky replied irritably. “That’s what they were giving out. I had to stand in line for an hour and fight the whole world for them.”

  “And what about sugar?” Rosa asked her. “Did they say when there’d be sugar?”

  “There was a notice from the food controller that they’d be giving out sugar only next month, so until next month only Luna, Gabriela, and Papo will have sugar in their tea, and you, David, and I will go without. There’s nothing to be done.”

  Luna was sitting at the table, all skin and bones, trying to bring a cup of tea to her cracked lips, when suddenly it slipped from her fingers and smashed onto the floor. Her head dropped to her chest, and she lost consciousness. Nona Rosa started screaming, Nono Gabriel sat helplessly bound to his chair, and I, who was crawling on the floor at the time, crawled over the shards of glass and was badly cut. Blood poured from my knees and hands and I screamed with pain. My poor grandmother didn’t know who to help first, and she ran madly from me to my mother until my grandfather banged on the floor with his cane and shouted, “Basta, Rosa! Stop running around like a headless chicken and get the neighbors to call Magen David Adom to take Luna to the hospital!”

  Nona Rosa went out into the yard shouting, “Magen David Adom! Magen David Adom! Somebody call Magen David Adom!”

  “Dio santo, what’s happened?” Tamar asked from the doorway of her house. And my grandmother was so choked by her tears that she couldn’t reply and simply pointed at the door of her own house. As Tamar ran outside, she ordered one of her children to run to the Assouta Pharmacy and tell them to call Magen David Adom right way. She entered our house and tried to rouse my mother, and my grandmother tried to extract the splinters of glass from my body.