The Fairest Among Women

by Dalya Bilu

  It was then that Rosa began to notice the patches of lighter color on the walls, hinting at pictures that had been torn from their place by an anonymous hand; the marks left by the scraping of heavy furniture on the tiles, furniture that had disappeared together with the rolled-up carpets; and the piles of books in fine covers that had been pushed into a corner and served the refugee families as fuel or as toilet paper. At night she would hear the screams of Mischa, whose arm was tattooed with a row of five blue numbers; the shrill cries of the many babies crowded into the rooms; and the groans coming from the writhing bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Cohen, whose little cubbyhole was separated from Angela’s room by a gray army blanket.

  There were five families living in the house. The Cohens had received the dressing room, a little cubbyhole leading off Angela’s room, which was the best bedroom in the house.

  In days to come, when strife and contention increased in the house, Rosa would hear her mother explaining to the other residents that she was entitled to the best room because her husband had been killed by an Arab murderer and she had a fatherless child to look after, as well as a brother who was also an orphan.

  Mischa occupied the kitchen, and whenever anybody needed a drink of water in the middle of the night he would wake from his troubled sleep, sit up in his rumpled bed clad in striped pajamas sour with sweat, and rub his eyes with his ruined hands. At the sight of a ghostly figure wandering round the kitchen he would break into a series of screams in Polish. Until they took pity on him and requested all the residents to keep a supply of drinking water in their rooms in order not to disturb his rest, because his penetrating screams in the dead of night woke not only the inhabitants of their own house but also the people living in the villas next door to it.

  The entrance hall, previously the grand salon of the house, was occupied by the Warshavsky family from the conquered Jewish Quarter. A black-clad and long-bearded father, a mother so brittle and angular that it seemed her body would snap in half at a touch, and six small children crowded into the room, sleeping on mattresses on the floor. At night the mattresses covered the floor, and by day they were stacked in the corner in a colorful heap the children liked to clamber up and dive off, straight onto the hard floor. The oldest child was Ruhama, who was Rosa’s age, as skinny as her mother, pale and fair-haired. Ruhama, whom everyone called “the shrew,” would secretly pinch the bottoms of her one-year-old twin brothers whenever her mother asked her to change their diapers, and she would tell Rosa forbidden things about husbands and wives and what they did to each other at night. The spacious, windowless room smelled permanently of wet diapers.

  The Zilka family, consisting of five people, lived in the room opposite Angela’s. The father of the family, who in Iraq had been a man of means, an accountant who always dressed in suits, now had a job as a construction worker. Every evening he would sit in the entrance to the house next to the lavender bushes, rolling amber worry beads between his fingers, drowning his misery in arak, and cursing the day he had decided to emigrate to Israel with his family. After that he would try to approach his wife, and she would yell at him that his breath stank and that she would only allow him to touch her when he got rid of the disgusting smell.

  Their daughter, Rachelle, boasted long, thick black hair that looked as smooth and shiny as if she ironed it every morning with a coal iron. Her flat nose and pitted skin, humped and cratered by the ravages of smallpox, detracted only slightly from the glory of her hair. Her brown, almond-shaped eyes turned purple when she was angry, and she was never short of reasons for anger. Rachelle was known for her hard character, her forthright common sense, and her need always to be right. Nobody in the house would ever forget her endless arguments with the sharp-tongued Ruhama, with one saying, “That isn’t so,” and the other saying, “It is so,” and continuing ad infinitum with, “No, it isn’t,” and, “Yes, it is.” This bickering would only stop when the irate residents screamed at them both to shut up.

  The Sharabis—father, mother, grandmother, and the little girl, Ruthie—were the last family to move into the villa, and they received the little room at the end of the hall. Ruthie, whose complexion was café au lait and whose glittering emerald eyes shone at night like a cat’s, joined Rosa, Ruhama, and Rachelle in their games. When they jumped rope the serious, responsible Ruthie would keep watch on her tiny grandmother, who sat on a low stool at the entrance to the house, a pointed black hood tied over her head and her fragile legs wrapped in shiny trousers trimmed at the edges with a strip of embroidery. People said that she was a hundred years old, and attributed her longevity to her diet, which consisted morning, noon, and evening of fenugreek and ghat. With the obstinacy of the old she would use her gums to chew the intoxicating leaves she crammed into her toothless mouth. When she had drained the gum-darkening juice to the last drop, she would spit out the blood-colored dregs in an energetic sideways spit that would have put a far younger person to shame.

  And when the children were bored, Joseph, the oldest child, would gather them around him and keep them occupied. Once they stole, at his command, a ladder made of rough whitewash-spattered planks, and with its help invaded the wide storage space over the kitchen ceiling, which was high enough to walk upright in. Quietly, so as not to wake the snoring Mischa napping in his fortified kitchen, they took out china plates and dishes with lacy edges, of whose existence nobody was aware but them, and ran with their booty to the open field. There they formed a line and, one after another, in exemplary order, at Joseph’s command, they hurled the china at the gray rocks, gold-rimmed plates, soup bowls, heavy crystal glasses, coffee cups decorated with flowers, gravy boats, and delicate vases made of colored glass. And when they went away they left behind them a pile of broken china mixed with shards of glass and crystal sparkling like diamonds in the sunshine.

  When the stock of china and glass ran out, Joseph discovered the movie theaters in the town. He took advantage of his sister Angela’s preoccupation with her daily worries, played hooky from school, and made the rounds of the movie theaters. He would go in in the middle of the movie and pay the price of half a ticket. At the end of the movie, before the lights went on in the hall, he would run to the toilet and hide there, standing on the seat so that his feet wouldn’t give him away. And when the lights went out he would sneak back in and see the first half of the movie he had missed.

  Later on he found himself jobs. At the Edison Cinema he sold waffles, at the Ron he pasted up posters, at the Zion he acted as an usher, and at the Orion he swept the hall. In this way he was able to see a number of movies a day and all the movies showing in town. And when he came home to change his clothes and eat, Rosa would sit beside him, and he would tell her the plots of the movies he’d seen and hum the tunes to her. Angela would pretend to be busy with the housework and listen in secret; and her memories would ferment in her body, her longings for Amatzia would make her heart contract, and her eyes would fill with tears.

  After about a year, Angela began repeating to anyone willing to listen that the house was falling apart. The creeping disintegration started in the garden, lapping with its dry tongue at the green plants. When it had finished with the plants it climbed up the downspout and ravaged the roof, after which it slid straight through the windows, invaded the rooms, and finally seeped into the walls themselves, crumbling them and destroying the water pipes and electric wiring. The first one to notice the changes in the garden was Rosa. The lavender bushes and jasmine that had previously surrounded the villa disappeared into thin air, taking with them in silent protest the scent of their flowers. Soon the garden was taken over by hostile nettles, stubborn couch grass, and thorns. Tall prickly brambles provided shelter for snakes and black scorpions that emerged on the hot summer nights and invaded the rooms in quest of the coolness provided by the thick walls of the house.

  Responsibility for the drainpipe, which had come loose from the wall, was taken by Mousa Zilka, Rachelle’s brother, who liked climbing up it to the roof. In
the summer its dry beak gaped with the helplessness of a dying man, and the painful gurgles it made in winter, when whistling winds banged it cruelly against the wall, made the residents’ flesh creep. The iron shutters, attached to the walls by little metal soldiers wearing fezzes on their heads, got stuck, and the stones around them grew rusty. When the shutters were removed, the windows were shattered one after another by the wild ball games of the Warshavsky and Zilka children. After that the tiles began falling from the roof; the water came out of the taps muddy and rusty, making loud, spluttering noises as it did so; the toilet overflowed, wetting their shoes and overpowering the medley of smells in the house with its pungent odor; and at exactly the same time the musical gate at the front of the house was torn from its hinges, leaving a mute, gaping hole behind it, like an open wound exposed to the ravages of the wind. The high ceilings of the house began to sprout black rosebeds of mold, and mossy green growths spread their spores through the air and gave Mischa asthma attacks that sounded like the barking of hungry dogs and kept the other residents awake at night.

  At the same time the invasions from outside increased. Long columns of black ants with menacing pincers carried away the herring tails left over by the Warshavsky family and the pita crumbs the Zilka children dropped on the floor. Due to the large amounts of food consumed in the crowded house, gangs of famished gray field mice appeared and built their nests of gnawed rags deep in the recesses of the closets. In their wake came mangy, flea-bitten cats, who stalked the rooms in search of the rodents as if the house belonged to them. Quite independently bands of little pink geckos joined the pilgrimage to this Mecca of houses, the rapid beating of their hearts exposed to view behind the transparent skin of their bellies. Making shrill little chirping noises, the geckos would set out on nocturnal hunts for the glittering green flies swarming round the ceilings and leaving tiny black droppings behind them. Skinny spiders with long, trembling legs arrived on the heels of the flies and began diligently weaving their beautiful, sinister webs in the corners of the rooms, waiting patiently to trap the flies and methodically covering the ceilings and walls with the artistry of their delicate, closely woven nets.

  Rosa would often hear her mother lamenting her bitter fate and complaining of the crowded living conditions that made her life so difficult. One day she heard from Mousa Zilka, with whom she cuddled and kissed in hidden corners of the house until Joseph caught them at it and beat them soundly, about a family who lived in a building not far away and who had had a great stroke of luck. The father of the family had simply wanted to hammer a nail into the wall, and to his astonishment he had discovered a treasure trove of gold coins and jewels. They had sold the lot and bought a new apartment in the nice Jewish neighborhood of Rehavia, where they now lived all by themselves.

  While everyone was discussing the treasure trove with glittering eyes, Rosa equipped herself with a long, rusty nail, and late at night, after her mother’s sighs turned to light snores, she called Rina and consulted her. Rina joined her in their bed in her ruffled dress and her patent leather shoes, which she never took off and which never wore out. She listened gravely to the story and admitted that there was a treasure trove in the house, but she refused to reveal where it was hidden. “I don’t need your favors,” said Rosa, and began gently tapping on the wall next to the bed and listening intently to the sounds it made. After choosing a place that sounded particularly dull and hollow and was well hidden behind the pink frame of the angel bed, she began digging into it with the nail. When she had done for the night she stuck the nail deep into the kapok mattress, until only its flat head showed. The next night she groped for the cold tip of the nail, pulled it out, tapped it on the wall, listened to the dull noises it made, and continued her digging. She did this every night, searching for the treasure hidden by the previous occupants of the house before they fled. Angela, who cleaned the room every day, was at a loss to understand where the little heaps of plaster and whitewash under Rosa’s bed came from.

  “This house is falling apart,” Rosa heard her complaining to Mrs. Zilka. “Wherever I go I find sand and whitewash and bits of plaster.”

  “I have the same problem. The house is full of sand, and I can’t understand where it comes from.”

  “However much you clean it keeps on coming back.” The women concluded their conversation with a sigh and went on energetically hanging up their washing.

  At the end of their first year in the house the hole Rosa had dug in the wall broke through into the Warshavskys’ room. Through it she could see what was happening in the room and hear the noises made by the family at night, and at last she was able to understand what Ruhama had meant when she told her what her father did to her mother at night.

  When the icy winter winds whistled through the rags with which they tried to seal the broken windowpanes, and the dozens of holes and tunnels drilled in the walls by the children in search of the treasure were discovered by their parents—the tension in the house reached a breaking point. Angela argued that the crisis was precipitated by the walls, which were as riddled with holes as Swiss cheese and which conducted the sights and sounds from room to room and family to family. It was enough to open your ears next to the wall in order to hear what the Zilkas thought and what the Warshavskys got up to in the secrecy of their room—and the mystery of the Zilkas’ disappearing pitas too was finally solved when an accidental look through the hole in the kitchen wall revealed Mischa, his bony hands trembling with greed, breaking off a piece of the hot pita baked by Mrs. Zilka in the clay taboun, beneath which merrily burned two thick volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

  The signal for the outbreak of hostilities was given when Angela asked the Cohens to try to get through the night without their usual moans and groans, since she had two children in her room and it wasn’t nice for them to hear the kind of sounds that should only be uttered in private. The next day Shoshana Zilka told Angela that Mrs. Cohen had spread a rumor through the neighborhood that she was harassing her because she was jealous of her conjugal life with her husband.

  That evening Angela lay in wait to catch the Cohens at it, and when in the silence of the night they began to make their nauseatingly familiar noises, she flung aside the gray woolen blanket dividing their rooms and screamed at the top of her voice.

  “Quiet! I’m sick of the pair of you! And if I wanted a man like you, I could get a million for a mille,” she yelled at Mr. Cohen, who sat up in bed, naked and confused. His face went red, and he tried desperately to cover his damp, drooping member, which had gone limp in shame. It burrowed under his body like the head of an ancient tortoise, trying to disappear into the depths of his groin, which was covered with frizzy black hair. The corner of the sheet he had enlisted to cover his shame was torn violently from his hands by his wife in order to cover her own nakedness.

  A terrible commotion broke out in the house, with everyone hurling insults at everyone else. The first target was the Warshavsky family. Everybody complained of the dirt they left behind them, of the stinking diapers, of the leftover herring that made the whole house reek, and of their sleepless nights because of the incessant crying of the Warshavskys’ new baby.

  Shlomo Zilka was called a drunk and his children, gangsters. Rosa was accused of bringing all the ants and mice with the slices of bread she hid under her mattress. Even the quiet Sharabi family was not exempt; they were rudely informed that their bodies stank of fenugreek and that people were fed up with their spitting on the floor and the stains it left all over the house. The height of the uproar was reached when in sudden solidarity they all turned on Mischa and told him that he frightened the children with his shrunken skull, his bloodshot eyes, the number tattooed on his arm, and the horror tales he told them of starvation and human beings turned into soap. And when everyone was yelling at Mischa, Angela added that it was because of these stories that her Rosa had started stealing bread at night and hiding it under her mattress.

  The first to break was Mischa, wh
ose nerves were shot anyway. Stiff as a sentry at his post he stood in the middle of his accusers, stopped his ears with his skeletal hands, their swollen veins pulsing with anger, and in a terrible voice he cried like a wounded animal: “Quiet!” Then he went to town, bought a big lock, fixed it onto the kitchen door, and prevented the other residents from entering his territory and using the sink and the stove. And they all had to buy primuses and oil rings and wash their dishes and their vegetables under the garden tap.

  It was then, as Angela told her friends, that Rosa’s ravenous hunger, which was never to leave her, took hold. As if a hole had opened in her stomach, she would eat everything she could lay her hands on without any discrimination. Angela blamed the poor wretch. “It’s all because of Mischa.” After he barricaded himself in the kitchen, Rosa was the only one who found a way to his aching heart and assuaged his loneliness. She would speak to him sweetly from the other side of the locked kitchen door and ask him to tell her about the camps. She was the prettiest little girl in the neighborhood, and he would open the door a crack. Her golden curls, her slanting sapphire eyes set in a round face with a translucent skin, and the organdy frocks in which her mother dressed her with the help of the parcels from distant relatives in America made her look like a doll, and she was Mischa’s favorite. As if afraid of being caught red-handed, Rosa would glance quickly to the right and the left, slip through the half-open door, and sit down on Mischa’s bed, always rumpled and soaked with the sweat of his night terrors. Then she would take off her black patent leather shoes, fold her feet in their spotless cotton socks beneath her, and place herself at the disposal of Mischa and his stories.