The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem

by Sarit Yishai-Levi

  Luna held his arm and they walked from Zion Square up Ben-Yehuda Street, stopping to look in shop windows until they reached the café. Tziona the waitress welcomed Luna as if she were greeting a regular patron. David was amazed that the elderly waitress showed no surprise at Luna’s return after such a long absence. He had absolutely no idea that Luna visited the café every day to meet her friends from the hospital who had recovered and gone back to their lives, many working as taxi drivers out of the station on nearby Lunz Street. Like Gidi the redhead, who’d been discharged a few months after her and right away had become a dispatcher at the station, a stronghold of disabled war veterans. Luna had never told David that when she went on her daily visit to the wounded, she went to the taxi station and at the end of his shift pushed Gidi’s wheelchair to Café Atara, staying there for a long time with him and the others before coming home.

  She and David sat at one of the tables on the second floor and ordered tea. He wanted to order her a hot sandwich he remembered she’d liked, but he didn’t have the money.

  The café was almost empty at this late afternoon hour, but David couldn’t ignore the fact that even the few people sitting there were staring shamelessly at his wife. Luna’s famed beauty had been restored as if it had never left, her angelic face as white as snow, her lips plumped with scarlet lipstick. On any other woman it might have looked cheap, but on his wife it was wonderful. He studied her long fingers holding the cup of tea to her lips, the perfectly manicured nails, the tweed suit that set off her waist. From beneath the jacket peeped a white blouse, and around her neck glowed the string of pearls he’d given her as an engagement present.

  He was married to the most beautiful woman in Jerusalem, so why the hell wasn’t he happy with her?

  “Aren’t you going to drink your tea?” She roused him from his thoughts.

  He sipped the tea and placed the cup down on the table.

  “Luna,” he said, finally mustering courage to broach the subject, “I’ve received a wonderful job offer.”

  “Really? Where?”

  “In Ein Karem.”

  “The Arab village?”

  “There aren’t any Arabs there anymore. They fled and the village is abandoned. Now there’s an agricultural school there. My friend Yisrael Schwartz works there, and he set up the interview for me.”

  “What kind of job?”

  “A carpenter, in the school’s carpentry shop.”

  “And how will you get to Ein Karem?”

  “They’ve offered me a house there too.”

  “A house in Ein Karem?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Great!”

  “Great?” he asked, astonished by her reaction.

  “I’m happy for you,” she said. “It really is a wonderful opportunity.”

  “And you don’t mind leaving Jerusalem to live far away from your sisters, your parents?”

  “Who said anything about leaving Jerusalem? You’re leaving Jerusalem, me and Gabriela are staying with my parents, and you can come and be with us on Shabbat.”

  He felt anger stirring inside him. Once again his dear wife had managed to humiliate him.

  “Luna, don’t you think it’s time we had a home of our own, just you and me and the child?”

  “In Ein Karem?”

  “In a big house, a palace.”

  “Not in a palace or anything else! Ein Karem’s the end of the world. What would I do there on my own with Gabriela, without my father, without my sisters? You can go to Ein Karem and work there. I’m staying in Jerusalem.”

  He barely swallowed the insult. “You were in the hospital for such a long time,” he said quietly. “At long last you’re out and I want us to live in a house of our own like any normal couple, and you want me to live in Ein Karem alone while you stay at your parents’? It’d be better if we got divorced and ended it!”

  “Are you crazy, David, who’s talking about divorce? What, do I look like a slut to you? Why get divorced? Today lots of men work a long way from home to make a living. There’s no work in Jerusalem. It’s no secret.”

  “Why not come along and see the place for yourself?” he said. “And then decide. Yisrael Schwartz and his wife live there in a mansion with a huge yard. There are a lot of houses like that there—we can pick and choose. They promised me that a jeep goes with the job, so we could drive to Jerusalem whenever you’d want.”

  “It’s out of the question! You want to hide me away in some abandoned Arab village? You want to cut me off from my family? I know exactly what will happen. You’ll be working and I’ll be on my own with the child all day. If I haven’t already gone crazy, you want me to go crazy now? How can you even think about something like this? Why do you think only of yourself?”

  “I’m thinking about our future. I’m thinking that if we don’t take this offer, we’ll never have a home of our own.”

  “What kind of a man are you who can’t give me a home?” she asked tauntingly.

  David was silent. What kind of a man was he? A man whose wife repeatedly humiliated him, a man who submitted to his wife’s every whim? He had to force her to come with him. A wife must follow her husband. Why was he even asking her? He should be stating a fact. Ras bin anaq, she’d go with him to Ein Karem come hell or high water!

  “In the morning,” he told her, “I’ll go and see the school’s manager and tell him, ‘Thank you for your generous offer, but my wife’s not interested.’”

  “Exactly,” she replied, ignoring his sarcastic tone. “Now let’s stop talking about it. It’s been so long since we went out and you had to go and spoil my good mood.”

  * * *

  As with everything else, my mother eventually got her way. Father bent to her will and declined the job offer, but not a day went by in my mother’s life when he didn’t remind her that he’d missed the chance of a lifetime because of her. As the years went by Ein Karem became an artists’ village and house prices there soared. The distance between the village and Jerusalem was shortened, and the village was annexed to the city as a northern neighborhood.

  “Why, why did I listen to your mother like an idiot?” he’d say again and again. “Why didn’t I accept Yisrael Schwartz’s offer? His house is worth millions today and I have zilch.”

  Living in Nono and Nona Ermosa’s house became unbearable for my father. He’d had enough of sleeping on the living room couch, seeing my grandfather sink ever deeper into his illness depressed him, and he was sick of hearing the nitpicking of his mother-in-law, who’d become more irritable from day to day and whose arguments with Luna were exhausting.

  I was two and a half when they enrolled me in the prestigious Rehavia school. My mother simply wouldn’t stand for enrolling me in the one in Ohel Moshe.

  “I want the best there is for my daughter,” she told my father.

  What a strange woman, my father thought. She hardly takes care of the child, barely pays her any attention, but she wants the best there is for her.

  And my mother got her way again. The only time I spent with her during those years was when she took me to school and when she picked me up. Every morning we’d go in through the iron gate, and Mother would say good-bye by the big ficus tree. In a desperate attempt to gain a little attention from her, I’d create heartrending parting scenes. I cried, threw myself on the ground, and held on to her legs and didn’t let go, and my mother would be helpless.

  “Stop it,” she’d say angrily. “Stop making a scene.” The angrier she became, the more I’d scream, embarrassing her in front of the other mothers.

  “You take your daughter to school,” she finally said to my father. “I don’t have the strength for her scenes. She humiliates me in front of all the mothers in Rehavia. The children from the Kurdish Quarter are better behaved than her.”

  Whenever my mother associated something with the Kurdish Quarter, it was a sign that all hope was lost, her way of saying that she’d had it up to here! How my mother hate
d the Kurdish Quarter, which before the Kurds came with their thousands of children, so she’d say time and again, was called the Zichron Yaakov Quarter and was a Spaniol neighborhood. And as much as my father told her again and again that she was talking nonsense and the Kurds had always lived in the Kurdish Quarter, it made no difference. As far as she was concerned, the Kurds had taken over a neighborhood that once belonged to the Spaniols, just as Mordoch had stolen my grandfather’s shop.

  Soon the hard times forced Nono and Nona to leave the house in Ohel Moshe and rent it out. With the money, they rented two rooms in the Barazani family’s house in the Kurdish Quarter, and we lived on whatever was left over.

  How my mother wept when we moved to the Kurdish Quarter. “Only poor people live here,” she told my father.

  “That’s not true,” David replied. “The Kurds that live here aren’t poor at all, only the Spaniols are, and we’re poor now.”

  Even more than she hated the Kurdish Quarter, my mother hated their landlords, the Barazani family. Ever since Mordoch the Kurd had robbed Nono Gabriel and got his hands on the shop for a miserable five hundred lirot, all Kurds were the same for her. She held Mordoch to blame for all the bad things that had happened to the family since he’d become Nono Gabriel’s partner.

  Almost from the day the Ermosa family moved into the Barazani family’s house, the feuding began. Rosa in particular suffered, for except at the time of Matilda Franco’s murder, she’d always been on friendly terms with her neighbors. And now with the Barazanis every little thing sparked a tiff. She’d wash the cobblestone yard, and they’d complain that she threw out the dirty water on their side. Mrs. Barazani would hang out her washing, and Rosa would complain that she was hanging her rags on her clotheslines. Mrs. Barazani would light a fire under her tabun and make the traditional kada, cheese and spinach pockets, and Rosa would shout at her that the smoke was coming into the house through the windows. Not a day went by without the neighbors arguing about something.

  “Dio santo,” Rosa cried out one time, “I can’t even quarrel with her like a normal person. She doesn’t speak Ladino and I don’t speak Kurdish.” On more than one occasion her throat became sore from shouting, and she had to call for Luna’s help. And she, mashallah, what a mouth she’d run. Then they’d scramble back inside and shut the windows.

  The Barazanis loved Gabriela, and as if to spite her family, the child loved them back. At every opportunity she’d ride into their yard in the little green pedal car David bought her.

  “If I hear that you’ve gone to the Kurds with your car again,” Luna once shouted at Gabriela, “I’ll break your arms and legs.”

  “What do you want from her,” David had intervened. “What does she have to do with a neighbors’ dispute? She’s only a child.”

  “Child or not, my daughter will not go to the Kurds’ side. I want you to put up a fence between their yard and ours.”

  The next day David brought some barbed wire and separated the two yards.

  Mr. Barazani threatened to throw the Ermosas out, but in the end he too realized that the right solution was the fence that now separated the two families.

  “If it wasn’t for the little girl I’d throw you all into the street,” he said, making sure he had the last word.

  “That’s how it is, he who pays the piper calls the tune,” said Becky dejectedly. “And there’s nothing to be done. The Kurds pay the piper.”

  “They pay the piper?” my mother retorted angrily. “Why, they were rich when they came from Kurdistan? They didn’t have a shirt on their back or shoes on their feet!”

  “So how did they get rich?” Becky asked.

  “They found money in Sheikh Badr,” Luna said and laughed.

  “Before the Arabs fled,” said David, joining the conversation, “they hid their gold in tins, dug holes in the ground, and buried the tins. They were sure they’d win the war, and when it was over they’d throw all the Jews into the sea and return to their village. But we won the war, and they, thank God, didn’t come back. And the Kurds, who were new immigrants, took over the abandoned property in Sheikh Badr, found the tins with the gold, and became rich. They opened businesses, butcheries, kiosks.”

  It was lucky that Uncle Moise was a policeman. If it hadn’t been for him, the dispute between the Ermosas and the Barazanis would never have come to an end. One day he put on his uniform, ironed the sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve, polished the badge on his cap, and knocked on the Barazanis’ door. Despite my mother’s pleadings he refused to say a word about what went on behind the door, but from that day on the fighting stopped.

  And yet I continued to sneak into the Barazanis’ yard. I liked sitting on Mrs. Barazani’s knee, laying my head on her large bosom, and falling asleep.

  “You’re not your mother’s daughter,” she’d tell me over and over. “How did a woman with a guttermouth have a sweet child like you?” My mother, who’d be out measuring the streets all day, as my father called it, didn’t know about my daily visits to the Barazanis, and Nona Rosa, if she knew, chose to turn a blind eye. She was busy with her household chores and looking after my nono, who became more dependent on her from day to day. Inside she was probably happy there was someone to take looking after me off her hands. When I’d come back home as usual with the toffee that Mr. Barazani had given me in my mouth, she’d say, “Just be careful you don’t tell your mother you were at the Kurds’ house so a third world war doesn’t start.”

  Father finally found work at a bank on Jaffa Road. Handsome Eli Cohen had told him that the bank was looking for clerks, so he went for an interview, received an offer, and started work as a teller. His brother Yitzhak begged his forgiveness and offered him his old job, but as my father said to Moise, even if he’d offered him the garage for free, he wouldn’t go back to working for him.

  For a long time after Mother was discharged from the hospital and had recovered, and after Father started work at the bank, we lived with Nono and Nona in the Kurdish Quarter.

  “It’s not normal that you and Becky sleep in the same bed and your husband sleeps on the couch,” Rachelika said to Luna one afternoon.

  “Well, what do you want, that I sleep with him and she sleeps next to us? It’s shameful!”

  “You have to get out of Father and Mother’s house. You need to have a life of your own.”

  “Becky will be getting married to Eli Cohen soon and then there won’t be a problem,” Luna replied.

  “What, you’re waiting for Becky to get married so you can sleep with your husband?” Rachelika yelled. “How long do you think David’s patience will last? In the end he’ll throw you out and find another woman.”

  The condition that Mother stipulated to Father was unequivocal. If they left her parents’ house, then they’d need to move close to Rachelika’s. She was incapable of moving away from her family and was connected to her sister with every fiber of her being. Rachelika was her confidante, the only one privy to the secret life she’d been living behind David’s back.

  * * *

  On the day Gidi was discharged from the hospital, Luna began leading two lives, dividing her time between him and her husband without anyone—except for their small group of wounded friends—knowing about it. And their friends kept the relationship between Gidi and my mother a closely guarded secret, as if it were their own, not even talking about it among themselves.

  Every day Luna would go to the taxi station and sit inside the dispatcher’s booth with Gidi. Even if she was a distraction at work, none of the drivers dared say anything, so in the end it was Gidi who said to Luna, “I don’t think it’s entirely appropriate for you to sit here with me in the booth all day.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “You’re a married woman and people will talk.”

  “Why, can’t I visit my friends from the hospital?”

  “We’re in the middle of Jerusalem, people are passing all the time, they’ll see you. It’s not smart.”

&n
bsp; She, of course, continued going and sitting with Gidi until his shift ended. Afterward, she’d push his wheelchair to Café Atara, where they’d be joined by their driver friends who’d also just come off their shifts. These were her most beautiful hours. Every day she waited for the time she could spend with Gidi and her friends. She couldn’t imagine life without those hours far from her family, her husband, her child, and in the company of the people who’d become her second family, people with whom she felt a profound connection. Nobody could understand, not even Rachelika, whom she’d bound with a thousand oaths never to tell a soul about her secret meetings.

  “You’re playing with fire,” Rachelika warned her.

  “But we’re not doing anything,” Luna said, feigning innocence. “We just sit and laugh with the guys.”

  “If David doesn’t know you’re meeting Gidi and your friends at Atara, it’s a secret, but secrets come out in the end.”

  “I can’t tell him. He won’t let it continue.”

  “If all you’re doing is sitting with the guys and talking, why wouldn’t he? Do you know what cheating is, Luna? It’s when you betray someone’s trust.”

  “Cheating’s if somebody touches you,” Luna replied. “And Gidi’s never touched me and I’ve never touched him.”

  “Don’t worry, that’ll come too. It’s only a matter of time, and then that’ll be the end of you. Remember what I’m telling you—you’ll ruin your life. David will never forgive you for the shame you’ll bring down on him. He waited for you to come out of the hospital, he sat at your bedside, he prayed for you to stay alive, he provided for Father, Mother, and Becky, he took care of Gabriela on his own, and this is how you repay him?”