The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem

by Sarit Yishai-Levi

  He left for London the next day, not before giving me the key and making me promise to stay in the apartment until I found somewhere else to live.

  His first letter arrived a week later in a flimsy blue airmail envelope and stamps bearing the image of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. The paper was as thin as the envelope. I held it in a trembling hand and read:

  My one and only impossible love,

  It’s so cold in London and I miss you. As much as I try, I can’t get you out of my head. Unfortunately, you touched me in a place no woman has touched before. I don’t understand why it was you, because we both know you’re a fool, such a fool that you can’t differentiate between who really loves you and someone who just wants to have fun. But maybe it’s you who just wants to have fun? Maybe it’s you who doesn’t want to love? And in spite of it all I’d still be happy if you were here with me now.

  Amnon

  * * *

  Three months after Amnon flew to London, I joined him.

  I insisted on going out my first night there. I was curious and wanted to devour the new world I’d entered, taste every last thing in it. Tel Aviv’s Lod airport, my first time there; the flight; the landing; the vast Heathrow Airport, which scared me so much; Amnon, who was waiting for me outside the arrivals gate, and only when I saw him could I relax; the Underground train that took us to Victoria Station; the people crowded into the train without touching each other—it was all new and exciting and I felt I was at the start of the greatest adventure of my life.

  Amnon took me to his local smoke-filled pub, ordered us beers, and led me to an empty table. My eyes roamed all over the place, unable to get their fill of what was happening around me, the music, the noise, the usually restrained English people talking in loud voices, the TV screen showing a soccer game, the young girls, knockouts in miniskirts and thigh-high boots, the boys with their long hair and jeans. I saw hands wandering, I heard rolling laughter. I was high. I’m in London, a thousand light-years away from Jerusalem, swinging London, London of the liberated world, I thought to myself. Everything is so foreign yet familiar. The happy atmosphere of the noisy pub is like the pub at the end of Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv. The men and women are so different, but they’re wearing jeans and minis just like the young people in Tel Aviv.

  “I can’t believe I’m here, it’s crazy! I’m at the biggest party of the seventies, the world of ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,’ Jean Shrimpton, and Twiggy,” I yelled through the haze of alcohol and the loud music. I felt free to dance to the hypnotic sound of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar, free to chug beers, free to be like Julie Christie. The more I drank, the more I brazenly flirted with the guy sitting next to me at the bar, completely ignoring Amnon.

  Over the next few weeks, when I came to him from the beds of strangers and asked him to hold me, Amnon forgave me again and again. And I thanked him silently, for I too was unable to be without him. We consoled each other, and it sometimes seemed to me that a scrap of happiness was suddenly insinuating itself in me and calming my troubled soul. I’d snuggle into his arms and feel they were protecting me from the unease inside me and the noise outside.

  Once, after we’d made love and lay sweating in his water bed, trying to get our breath back, Amnon asked, “What’s my place in your life?”

  “Don’t start with that,” I said. “Leave it.”

  “I won’t leave it,” he persisted. “You don’t tell me how you feel about me, so at least tell me how I fit into your life.”

  “I don’t want to play this game.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “I’m scared of saying you’re important to me. I need to have a way out.”

  “Why do you need a way out?” he asked, caressing my breasts.

  “So I can escape just before you leave me.”

  “Who’s leaving you, my little fool,” he said and held me tight. “If anybody’s leaving it’ll be you. If anybody’s going to get hurt it’ll be me, and we both know it.”

  “There’s something broken in me,” I told him. “I don’t know how to be in a relationship.”

  “You’re breaking my heart,” he said.

  “I don’t mean to.”

  “I don’t understand you. I don’t understand why you won’t let me love you.”

  “Maybe it’s because of the curse,” I said quietly.

  “What curse?”

  “The curse of the Ermosa women. My Grandma Rosa told me that the Ermosa women are cursed with men who don’t want them, and vice versa.”

  “I know that you sleep with other men,” he said.

  “And you still want me?”

  “More than any other woman.”

  “Why?”

  “Look me in the eye,” he whispered, and I drowned in the sea of love I saw in his eyes. “Because of this.”

  But instead of staying in a place where I was loved, I banged my head against the wall and drove him away. Amnon couldn’t take any more and got up and went to India. After this time, I knew, I wouldn’t get another chance.

  * * *

  After Amnon left me in London and flew to India to heal his broken heart, I sat in a smoky London pub crowded with drunks. If people were talking to me, I didn’t hear them. I was drinking one beer after another so I didn’t have to think or feel. A long-haired young man I hadn’t noticed before was sitting next to me. For every glass of beer I drank, he downed two. A short time after we were both sufficiently drunk, he tried to kiss me. I was tipsy when he invited me to go outside and smoke a joint.

  Maybe it was the joint, maybe the beer, but it was mainly because of the loneliness that I later found myself rolling around in bed with him. Not long afterward, I moved into Phillip’s flat on noisy Finchley Road. Its windows were always closed because of the cold and the unbearable racket of the traffic outside. At night we’d turn on the gas heater, inserting a five-penny piece into the meter, and I’d lie on the rug close to the heater and cover myself with an old fur jacket I’d bought at the flea market.

  Phillip was moody and wore a permanent scowl. He drank himself senseless and smoked like a chimney. The gloomier the weather turned, the more my fear of loneliness took over, and I felt I was helplessly becoming dependent on his presence.

  He was a reclusive character, Phillip, a loner. On numerous occasions he’d leave me alone in the apartment and come back wasted in the early hours of the morning. Some nights he’d ask me to go to the pub with him, and when I did I felt like a fifth wheel, that he didn’t actually want me there. He didn’t drink with me, didn’t dance with me. I’d sit at the bar like a wallflower, watching him flirt like crazy with English girls whose skin was pallid and wrinkled.

  But the more he distanced himself from me, the more I hung on to him. The more he rebuffed me, the more I felt like I needed him. Phillip didn’t even notice how desperate I was for his attention. He’d sit in the room chain-smoking and staring at the ceiling, and I’d try to talk to him but he wouldn’t answer. He treated me like I was worthless.

  Desperate, I began following him everywhere. I clung to him like a shadow in the narrow Soho alleys when he went looking for the young boys who sold him hash. I followed him when he went drinking, always beside him, never with him. If he noticed that I was following him, he didn’t let on, and I liked the game. It added drama to my boring life.

  One night when we came home drunk from the pub he began undressing me on the front steps, and we crumpled onto the freezing ground. I couldn’t keep it in any longer and yelled, “God, I want you!” I bent over him and brought my mouth to his and my eyes to his and asked in a seductive voice, “Do you want me?” And when he didn’t answer after what seemed like an eternity, I realized he’d fallen into a drunken stupor and hadn’t heard me at all.

  The next day he didn’t remember anything that had happened, and I, deeply mortified, all I wanted was to go to India and look for Amnon. Restless, I decided to
go out for a walk.

  The cold wind sliced my face and threatened to blow me over. Eventually I gave in and hurried inside a small church. Sitting down in a pew, I was a little girl lost in an unfamiliar place. What was this dependency I’d developed for Phillip? Me, Gabriela Siton? How had it happened that I needed a guy who didn’t want me, who saw me as no more than a flatmate who paid rent? What did I even really know about Phillip? Apart from his muttered yes and no, he’d never told me anything about himself. There I sat in a church, lusting after a man who didn’t even know the color of my eyes.

  I had once asked him, “Why are you like this?”

  “Like what?”

  “You’re either drunk or sleeping.”

  “Why not?” he answered slowly. “Do I have anything better to do?”

  “Talk, for instance. Tell me why you’re always running away to drugs or drink.”

  He laughed in my face. “I’m not running away. I’m in the here and now. It’s where I want to be. I want to smoke and drink and fuck and sleep. That’s me, take me or leave me.” He shrugged. I wished I’d had the strength to leave him, and a wave of yearning swept over me: for our house on Ben-Yehuda Street; for Nono and Nona’s house; for the Shabbat macaroni hamin; for the Seder when they’d open the doors between the rooms in Nono and Nona’s house so there’d be enough space around the table for everybody, and they’d read the Haggadah in both Hebrew and Ladino; for the old pioneering songs they’d sing at the end of the Seder; for Uncle Jakotel, who’d get drunk and climb onto the table and drum with knives and forks. And most of all I longed for my Nona Rosa to hug me and tell me, “The Ingelish, may his name be erased, he should go to hell. He isn’t worth the ground you tread on, mi alma. He’s not worth you being sad for a second.”

  Nona Rosa’s words about the fate of our family’s women passing from generation to generation, her belief that the men they loved didn’t love them back, resonated in my mind as I sat in the church. I’d never thought that my life would be like the unfortunate lives of the Ermosa women who’d come before me. Throughout my short life I’d done everything possible to break the thread binding me to my mother. All my life I’d tried to escape the fate of Rosa and Mercada.

  And suddenly I was tired from that journey, from the winding road I was walking along that seemed to be leading me nowhere, tired of the apathy that gripped me, of the crazy obsession I’d developed for the strange Englishman.

  I thought about Amnon and wondered where he was right now, and if he still thought about me or whether he had healed his heart with a new love. I recalled how he’d eagerly wait for me after work each evening, hugging me so tightly that he almost broke my bones. I missed his eyes, which laughed with his mouth, his big body, so different from Phillip’s skinny frame.

  Amnon wanted me with him all the time, like air. “Let me sniff you,” he’d say. He let me be whomever I wanted, and sometimes he could even make me forget my dead mother and my suffocating aunts and father. How I’d clipped my own wings, and how, instead of continuing to be as free as a bird, I’d become a willing captive in a relationship that existed only in my mind. How could I have replaced Amnon with this impossible character who hadn’t the faintest idea that he was hurting me, this zonked-out, skinny Englishman who muttered words I didn’t understand? And only because he didn’t want me I stuck to him like a sore.

  I hadn’t heard a word from Amnon since he’d left, but a friend of his had told me he was in Goa, living in a commune of hippies, that he had a black-haired American girl who loved him very much. I felt a twinge in my heart, but I was glad for him. If one of us deserved to be happy, it was surely he.

  As I left the church I was greeted by torrential rain. I spread my arms out wide and let the rain wash away the pain of my humiliation and loneliness. When lightning flashed, in an instant I knew what I had to do: I had to go back to being Gabriela Siton, the girl who’d sworn she’d never be like Rosa and Luna, the young woman who’d decided to break the chain of unhappy women in her family. But would it be possible to break away when their blood flowed in my veins?

  London no longer seemed glamorous to me. The cold, rainy weather, the bad economic situation, the trade unions’ strike, the political rallies held every other day, the images of police breaking their batons on demonstrators’ skulls, the hatred of colored immigrants from Jamaica and Asia, the immigration authorities who made their lives a misery—all of this had turned London into an alienated city, light-years away from the London I’d dreamed of when I was saving up to buy a ticket.

  To scrape by, I waitressed at a cheap Greek restaurant in Camden Town and spent most of my time there. One night I came home exhausted after a hard day at the restaurant, my ass red from being pinched and my soul dulled from the insults of strange men. All I wanted was to smoke a joint and collapse into bed. All the lights in the house were on, a Pink Floyd record was playing at full volume, and the acrid smell of hash hung in the air. People were rolling around on the mattresses, men and women, men and men, everyone with everyone, and only I felt like an outsider, like I didn’t belong in my own home. Nobody had noticed that I’d arrived. I could have hanged myself from the rafter and nobody would have given a shit. I went to the record player and lifted the arm, scratching the record as I did.

  “What the fuck d’you think you’re doing?” yelled somebody I’d never seen before.

  “Get the hell out of here!” I started shouting. “All of you, get the hell out!”

  The bedroom door was open, and on my bed was a tangle of naked bodies. I burst in, ranting and raving like a possessed woman. “Get out of here!” I shouted and hit the naked bodies. Phillip raised himself up from under the body of the man on top of him, or maybe it was the woman lying under him, a puzzled expression on his face. I was completely hysterical and fell onto the floor crying and screaming. The man and woman fled for their lives, and I went on crying. I couldn’t stop myself.

  “Mother,” I cried out, “where are you? I need you so much, Mother, just look at what’s become of me.” That was the first time I’d cried for my mother, the first time I’d admitted to myself that I missed her, that I needed her love to protect me from the chaos of my world, from myself.

  “Mother,” I wailed, “come and get me out of here.” I sank into self-pity, curling up like a fetus on my defiled bed, and wept for the little girl I once was and for the wretched woman I’d become, for the dreams my mother had probably had for me, dreams I had surely shattered. How I wanted her to come and take me to our house on Ben-Yehuda Street, to Father and Ronny and her plants on the roof. The tears flowed down my cheeks, and my heart ached. I hugged my body as if my mother’s arms were around me, the perfectly manicured hands that in all my life had never embraced me.

  * * *

  My mother is standing by her dressing table and applying red lipstick with an artist’s hand. And she’s mad at me again, God knows why, and now Father’s home from work and Mother has presented him with the list of problems I caused her that day. Father removes his belt, winks at me, takes me into the other room, and whispers, “Now yell so Mother thinks it’s hurting you.” But instead of hitting me with the belt he holds me close, and I can hear my mother in the other room saying, “Cry, cry. Better you cry now than Ronny cry later.”

  Miskenica, my mother, how she didn’t have the head for me or for Ronny, how she wasn’t suited to be the mother of two children, how she wanted to get rid of us every chance she got and go to God knows where.

  She did everything she could to restore the youth that had been taken from her the day she’d married my father; she did everything to restore the splendid body that had been ruined the day she’d gotten pregnant and brought me into the world, I’d heard her tell Rachelika. How the damned war had ruined her life and health! How nothing had gone back to the way it was before the war, before she was wounded, before the birth, before the wedding. When she was Beauty Queen of Jerusalem. And now not only did she hate her body and her face, she
also had two children on her head and a husband who drove her nuts.

  Rachelika, so she told me later, had tried to silence her, but my mother got angry. “I’ve had enough of this child. She chatters all the time and gives me such a headache.”

  “Really, Luna,” said Rachelika, trying to soothe her sister, “you should thank God that you’re walking on two feet, that you have two children. Who’d have believed when you were lying in Hadassah like a corpse that we’d see you come home healthy and in one piece and have another baby?”

  “I didn’t come home healthy and in one piece! That’s what you, David, and nobody else in this family understand! My body’s ruined. I have a zipper across my belly, and what’s inside my belly, the liver, the kidneys, will never be healthy, and that’s what you call coming home healthy and in one piece!”

  “Lunika, some came home without an arm, without an eye, without a leg. Look at the redhead, that poor miskenico in a wheelchair. You, thank God, came back whole. You’re back to being as beautiful as ever. Why don’t you thank God for that miracle? Why are you always angry with the whole world, especially your daughter, who hasn’t done anything to you!”

  “She doesn’t love me, my daughter,” my mother said sadly. “And she does everything to spite me all the time.”

  “How can your daughter not love you? Give her time. Don’t forget that for two years she didn’t know you. We’d bring her to the hospital and she’d be frightened to go to you. Then when you came home you hardly had time to adjust to each other before you had another child.”

  “Enough, Rachelika, why are you on her side? Why aren’t you on mine?”

  “God almighty, Luna! Can you hear yourself? What, you’re competing with a little girl?

  “I’m competing with her? She competes with me. The moment her father comes through the door she jumps at him right away, kisses him, hugs him. She wants me to be jealous because her father kisses her and doesn’t kiss me!”