The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem

by Sarit Yishai-Levi

  Trafalgar Square was crowded with pigeons but empty of people. We sat on a bench and Rachelika didn’t stop talking. “Here.” I gave her a handful of the birdseed I’d bought. “Feed the pigeons.”

  “Don’t change the subject, Gabriela.”

  “Did you come to London to preach to me or enjoy yourself?”

  “I didn’t come to London to enjoy myself. I came to bring you home.”

  “I don’t want to go home,” I said.

  “Of course you don’t. If it was up to you, then perhaps we wouldn’t see each other for another ten years. What is family for you, Gabriela? Nothing?”

  “I’m not coming back. I have a life here!”

  “What kind of a life is that? With a hooligan who looks like a scarecrow, God help you? Cleaning houses for the English?”

  “Nona Rosa herself told me there’s no shame in it.”

  “Nona Rosa’s turning in her grave just from the thought of you doing work she was forced to do because she was a poor orphan.”

  “I’m an orphan too.”

  “Pishcado y limon, Gabriela. Your father’s still alive and you’re breaking his heart. Come back to Jerusalem, enroll in university, find a good boy who’s one of ours instead of this hippie you have. If you were happy with him I could maybe ignore the fact that he’s a goy, but you’re not happy!”

  “Enough, Rachelika,” I told my aunt impatiently. “How many times do I have to tell you, I’m not marrying him. I’m just passing the time with him.”

  “You’re as stubborn as your mother. I look at you and I can see Luna.”

  “Oh, come on, Rachelika.”

  “I don’t only see Luna,” she persisted, “I can hear her too. You don’t just look the same, you talk the same.”

  That was something I wasn’t prepared to hear. I hadn’t abandoned my previous life to escape everything that reminded me of my mother so my aunt could come and tell me I resembled her.

  “I don’t look like my mother, I don’t talk like my mother, and I don’t resemble my mother,” I said angrily. “I resemble myself.”

  “Not only talk, you behave like your mother too,” she went on as if she hadn’t heard me. “You’re a carbon copy of her.”

  I was losing my patience. “I am nothing like my mother. If I didn’t look like her, nobody would believe we’re mother and daughter.”

  “How wrong you are, Gabriela, how much you don’t know your mother, and yourself even less. Just like you, your mother was as stubborn as a mule. When she wanted something, she wouldn’t listen to anybody. Just like you, she looked for trouble, and when that wasn’t enough, she’d charge forward with full force, especially when it was related to one thing.”

  “What?”

  “A man. In anything to do with a man, your mother wouldn’t listen to anybody. She did what she wanted to the bitter end.”

  “What man, what bitter end, what are you talking about?”

  “Your mother suffered a lot in her life, and I’m not just talking about the two years she was ill. She suffered from the day she married your father.”

  “Suffered? They didn’t get along all that well, they argued, fought, but suffered? I didn’t see she was suffering.”

  “You were a little girl, what did you know? What did you know about what happened behind closed doors?”

  * * *

  Over the next few days my mother was ever-present in my thoughts, her image appearing relentlessly before my eyes. I remembered her beautiful and tall in her tailored suits, her red hair meticulously coiffed, slipping on her high-heeled shoes, giving me and Ronny a perfunctory kiss, leaving us with either Nona Rosa or Becky. She was always hurrying off, always had something to attend to. Things that Ronny and I knew nothing about.

  I remembered that my mother suffered from her wound even after she’d recovered. She complained frequently about pains in her stomach. There were days when she shut herself in the bedroom and Ronny and I walked on tiptoe because making noise was forbidden. We were sent outside to the roof to play so we wouldn’t disturb her.

  One day when she went to rest, I discovered a more exciting game than playing on the roof. I poked around in Father’s cabinet in the living room and found what I was looking for: a brown wooden box that had always piqued my curiosity. What treasures was my father hiding in it? After opening the box, he always made sure to lock it and put the key into his pocket. But to my surprise, this time it wasn’t locked, and I eagerly raised the lid. Inside were Father’s British army medals and the badge he’d received for taking part in the War of Independence, as well as various documents and letters and lots of photographs. I sat down on the floor and began going through them. My father looked so young in his British army uniform. There was a photograph of him with a young woman holding a bike, my father’s arms snaking around her waist. This beautiful woman—black-haired, big eyes adorned with long lashes, lips full, teeth white, smiling happily at the camera—appeared in almost all the photographs.

  Before I could ask myself who the woman was and why she was smiling so happily, my mother was standing over me, shouting, “Nosy girl! You and your little hands are everywhere!” Then she took a photograph and turned it over, trying to read the handwriting on the back. Ignoring me, she sat down on the couch and began feverishly going through the contents of Father’s box, looking at all the photographs. I stood beside her trying not to breathe so she’d forget I was there. Suddenly she stood up.

  “Son of a bitch!” she said. “The lying son of a bitch! And you,” she screamed when she noticed me, “go straight to your room, you nosy little thing, you pack of trouble. Get out before I beat you to death!”

  My mother never beat me to death, but when she threatened, her green eyes would flash and I’d be paralyzed with fear.

  “Get out!” she screamed again, and I fled for my life to my room and sat on the bed until Father got home.

  Usually when he came home from work we’d all have dinner together. An omelet and salad, sour cream, cream cheese, and fresh white bread. But today wasn’t an ordinary day. As soon as Father walked through the door, Mother started yelling at him and crying. She repeatedly called him a liar and asked why he had married her at all. I heard her ask about the black-haired woman in the photographs. Multiple times she said the word amore, shouting that the word was written on the back of all the photographs, and even she who didn’t speak Italian knew full well what it meant because it was the same in Ladino. He couldn’t tell her stories, feed her lies.

  Father spoke quietly. I heard him say that he wasn’t telling her stories and that he’d met the black-haired woman during the war, long before he’d met Mother, so what was the point of her getting upset now about something that had happened before they’d even met, before the children had been born?

  “Then why did you hide the photographs from me? Why lock them away in a box? Why haven’t you ever told me about the woman who called you amore?” she said.

  “I told you when we met,” Father replied in the same quiet, chilly tone, “you don’t have to share everything. There are things that you should keep to yourself, and things I should keep to myself.”

  “Is that what you want?” my mother asked in her threatening voice. “That you keep things to yourself and I to myself?”

  “Yes,” my father said calmly, “that’s what I want.”

  “Fine,” Mother said. “Just don’t be surprised down the road. Don’t come complaining to me.”

  * * *

  My mother never forgave me for opening my father’s secret box. She didn’t forgive me for discovering the secret of his love for a woman who called him amore. I actually heard her telling Rachelika that if I hadn’t been such a nosy child she wouldn’t have known about the Italian woman at all and her heart wouldn’t have been broken.

  “What does your heart have to be broken about?” Rachelika asked. “It was a long time ago before you met. What does it have to do with you?”

  “And how it ha
s everything to do with me!” my mother replied. “David has never stopped loving that woman. This explains everything!”

  “Don’t talk nonsense,” Rachelika said. “You’re looking for trouble where there isn’t any. That one’s in Italy, and you’re here and you have two children.”

  “I was innocent when I married him,” my mother said. “I thought he loved me and all the time he loved another woman.”

  “But he married you. Enough, Luna,” Rachelika said, trying to mollify her. “Halas, it’s over, she’s probably married and has children of her own.”

  “What difference does that make?” my mother asked angrily. “He lied to me. Before we were married he was as sweet as honey, and then after the wedding he suddenly became distant. So it’s no wonder.”

  I didn’t know what wonder my mother was talking about. Rachelika cut her off and stopped her, but after the day I opened my father’s secret box, nothing was the same. Father and Mother argued all the time. I heard them through the wall separating their bedroom from the room Ronny and I shared. I’d scrunch up in bed and cover my head with blankets so I didn’t have to listen to it, hoping that Ronny was fast asleep and not troubled by it like me. I’d stick my little fingers into my ears and dive into a world of silence until my fingers got tired and I’d take them out and again hear the fight on the other side of the wall.

  Having macaroni hamin for Shabbat lunch with the whole family wasn’t fun anymore. It wasn’t fun going to Clara and Jakotel’s house to watch a soccer game at the YMCA stadium, and it certainly wasn’t fun driving in Handsome Eli Cohen’s car for a picnic in the Jerusalem hills. The tension between Father and Mother almost always hung in the air.

  But at some point the arguments stopped, the fights stopped, and instead Father and Mother hardly exchanged a word. The words were replaced by a tense silence. On the face of it, life went on as usual. Father would come home from the bank at noontime every day and the family would eat lunch together. Later in the afternoon he’d go back and either Mother would take us to Rachelika’s or Rachelika and her children would come to our house. We’d play outside while they’d talk in the kitchen, often with Becky or another relative as well. We had dinner either at Rachelika’s or at our house, and Father would join us when he finished work.

  Our house was still a magnet for all our relatives and friends. Anyone passing through the triangular intersection of Jaffa Road, King George, and Ben-Yehuda would pop in for coffee and cake. What can I say, my father and mother were good company. They liked people, they liked entertaining, and most of all, they liked having a good time. Even during the difficult period, they didn’t stop going out. Several times a week Nona Rosa would babysit Ronny and me when they went to a late showing of a film or out dancing with friends at the Menorah Club. As time went by, the anger subsided, and it seemed to me that everything was back to normal.

  Until one time when I got sick and Father volunteered to take me to the clinic, but instead of the clinic he ended up taking me to a colleague’s house. That was the first time I saw Vera. When we arrived at her house, they sent her two children and me to play downstairs, and only after a long while my father called me to go home. Just as we were about to go up the steps to our apartment, he crouched down to my height, cupped my chin, and said, “Gabriela, sweetie, if Mother asks where we’ve been, tell her at the clinic.”

  As soon as we entered my mother said, “What, you went to invent medicines? How long does it take to go to the clinic?”

  And before my father could respond, I said, “We weren’t at the clinic.”

  “So where were you?” my mother asked.

  “At Vera’s from the bank,” I replied.

  Why did I break my promise to my father? I think I was just being rebellious. My mother always said I was a difficult child, and that time too my behavior caused a terrible fight between my parents, and produced the venomous hatred my mother harbored for Vera from that day until she closed her eyes. Vera from the bank, whom my father was now sleeping with in my mother’s bed. Their affair had gone on for years, and now he was flaunting it in public. Just the thought of my father and Vera turned my stomach. I still couldn’t forgive him for his betrayal of my mother, even if it had been me who’d maliciously revealed it.

  * * *

  Rachelika’s trip to London was coming to an end, but she had no intention of going home empty-handed. She wanted to bring me with her as a Rosh Hashanah gift for the family.

  “I went to the El Al office today,” she informed me. “I bought you a ticket.”

  “You wasted your money. I’m staying here.”

  “There’s nothing to discuss,” Rachelika stated. “I’m not asking you if you want to or don’t want to. I’m telling you, you’re coming home with me.”

  I dug my heels in, but in a few days’ time, I would change course. Rachelika was reluctantly in the flat, trying to have a heart-to-heart talk and convince me to go home, when Phillip came out of his room and yelled, “Get the hell back to your own fucking country with your aunt. Piss off already, so we can finally have some peace and quiet around here!”

  Before I could say a word, Rachelika got up, squared up to him, and said, “Show some respect when you speak to my niece. Who do you think you are, you English punk, using foul language like that? Apologize right now!”

  Phillip was speechless and looked ridiculous standing there, an idiotic expression on his face. After a few moments of silence he rudely turned his back on her and left the room.

  “Give me a minute,” I told Rachelika and went into the other room, took my backpack down from the top of the closet, and began stuffing everything I could lay my hands on into it. Most of my clothes and other belongings wouldn’t fit, so I left them there and zipped up the backpack. All that time Phillip lay on the bed, contentedly smoking his joint. He didn’t say a word, didn’t even glance in my direction. I went out and slammed the door behind me.

  * * *

  The El Al plane was far from London and on its way to Tel Aviv. “I need a cigarette,” I told Rachelika, and made my way to the rear of the cabin, where smoking was permitted. I went into the bathroom and reached my hand deep into the pocket of my jeans. In a scrap of aluminum foil I’d hidden a couple of lines of cocaine. I sat on the toilet, trying to arrange the line on a small mirror I took from my purse, and just as I brought my nose to it, the plane suddenly jolted. The mirror fell to the floor and smashed into pieces, and the white powder scattered in all directions. That was a sign, I was sure of it. It was a sign that if I carried on sniffing, I’d never find peace, I’d never find forgiveness. I breathed deeply, took the foil with the remnants of the cocaine, emptied it into the toilet bowl, and flushed. With a foot I swept the small shards of glass behind the toilet, blew away what remained of the cocaine, washed my face and hands, and went back to my seat.

  “I feel a whole lot better now,” I told Rachelika.

  “I can see.” She smiled.

  * * *

  I didn’t even try to pretend I was happy to see the large delegation awaiting my arrival at the airport. All of my close family were there: Father and Ronny, Becky and Handsome Eli Cohen, Moise and all the cousins big and small. They were holding balloons and a sign that said in colored letters: WELCOME HOME, GABRIELA. Ronny was the first to run to me, almost squashing me with a big hug. He’d grown into a handsome young man. “Let me look at you a minute,” I said, holding him away from me. He’d changed so much! I’d left him as a child and now found him a man. His button nose had grown and changed his whole face, which now bore stubble.

  “How can I pinch your cheek now? You’re all prickly,” I said. An army buzz cut was all that remained of his lovely hair. “And how can I pull your hair?”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw my father hesitate momentarily before he came over and hugged me, crushing me against his chest. I lay my head in the nook between his neck and shoulder, like I had when I was little. “I’ve missed you, my little girl,” he sai
d. “I’ve missed you terribly.” But unlike in the past I quickly freed myself from his embrace. My anger hadn’t dissipated.

  I hurried to hug Moise and Handsome Eli Cohen, and then fell into Becky’s arms. She wouldn’t let me go and hugged me and kissed me and then held me at arm’s length and said, “God almighty, what’s this, isn’t there any food in London? I can almost see right through you. You’re almost transparent.”

  Hollow, I thought to myself, is probably a more accurate word.

  “Where am I staying?” I whispered to Becky so my father wouldn’t hear.

  “What do you mean, where? At your house.”

  “I’m not going to Father and Vera’s house.”

  “He got her out of the house,” she whispered back. “He told her to go to her own apartment so you wouldn’t have to see her.”

  “How long will she be staying at her own place? For the next two hours?”

  “Gabriela, your father went crazy missing you. We all did. He’s prepared a welcome for you. Don’t disappoint him.”

  I didn’t disappoint him. I got into his car, declining to sit in the front and instead preferring to crowd into the backseat with Boaz and Ronny. We drove all the way to Jerusalem, Father in front like a chauffeur and me, Ronny, and Boaz squished in the back. The few questions they asked I answered with yes and no, and the three of them quickly realized there was no point in pushing me.

  As Becky had promised, Vera wasn’t in the house, but I found signs of her everywhere, mainly because I was looking for them. There was a bottle of Nina Ricci perfume in the bathroom, and my mother didn’t like Nina Ricci. She called it an old woman’s scent.