by Dalya Bilu
“When Grandma Fortuna gave birth to Uncle Joseph at home and we all crowded curiously round his cradle, we saw a perfectly ordinary baby: purple, wrinkled, and angry, like any other baby. Nothing about him warned us of the troubles to come.” This, more or less, was the standard formula with which Angela opened the story of Joseph when he was a baby. And Rosa, who had heard the story dozens of times and could quote passages from it by heart, was never satisfied, and would ask to hear it again and again in spite of her uncle’s vociferous protests.
Angela’s stories on those winter nights began with the childhood she never had in the little village of Za’afrana, next to the Libyan capital of Tripoli, and the story of her own birth, which she had heard from her mother in one of their rare moments of intimacy. The story would pass before her eyes like tear-jerking scenes from a movie, and the deep insult it had planted in her would come back to swell her heart and choke her throat.
When Angela was born her father, Jacob Janah, whose friends in the synagogue Hebraicized his name and jokingly called him “Señor Wings,” was very disappointed. Janah demanded of his wife, Fortuna, that she give him a son, and Fortuna, who knew that she was carrying a girl because her sister, Lise, had seen it in her coffee cup, refused to let her daughter out and kept her imprisoned in her body until the end of the tenth month. And every day the baby kicked desperately at the walls of her mother’s stomach and begged to be let out, until one day she butted violently against the sac enclosing her and tore a long slit in it with the long nails of her little fingers, and the waters broke in a strong jet. And when the water flooded the floor, they forced Fortuna onto the bed and sent for Victoria the midwife. Ignoring Fortuna’s despairing screams, Victoria pushed her hand into the gaping hole revealed between her forcibly parted legs, and extracted the baby’s head with ease. With practiced movements she freed the shoulders, and with one little pull the baby’s body slid out. At first the midwife was appalled at the sight of the scowling little face, which was furrowed by deep lines, as if the baby had grown old due to its prolonged stay in the womb. Then she looked at the hands waving in the air, which were swollen with water, rough and lined as those of an old washerwoman, and when she finally lowered her eyes to the bottom of the little body she saw that the male member she had expected to see was missing. And without that member, Janah had warned her, her life wouldn’t be worth living.
In her alarm the midwife dropped the big copper basin full of hot water, which hit the stone floor with a terrible clattering noise, splashing its contents and scalding her thighs as it did so. At that moment Janah burst into the room, so large and frightening in his appearance that the midwife began trembling all over, as if she were to blame for the sex of the child. Under the angry and disappointed eyes of the humiliated father she quickly cut the umbilical cord, pressed down on the mother’s abdomen to eject the afterbirth, and ran away as fast as her legs would carry her.
On the day that Angela was born, a son was born to their neighbors, David and Malka Bokobasa, whose small and meager saffron fields bordered the splendid Janah fields. Jacob Janah suffered terribly at the lavish party thrown by his neighbors for little Solomon’s circumcision. Crushed and humiliated, he sat in the “Jacob’s Ladder” synagogue, to whose building fund he had made a handsome donation, and watched enviously as the worshipers went up to Bokobasa, slapped him on the shoulder, congratulated him on the birth of his son, and respectfully called him “Abou Solomon.” Only a few came up to Jacob, and with pitying looks tried to console him with remarks along the lines of, Don’t take it to heart, A daughter is a sign of sons to come, and Next time you’ll do better. His enemies looked at him with malicious, gloating expressions, and in mocking, insincere voices wished him the same good fortune as his neighbor. Janah fled the synagogue in shame, called David Bokobasa to him, and made a pact with him.
“Since both our children, yours and mine, were born on the same day, it’s a sign from heaven that they were meant for each other, and that they should marry when they come of age,” he said, without looking Bokobasa in the eye.
“And what if they don’t want to?” Bokobasa made bold to ask in a hesitant voice.
“What if they don’t want to?” Jacob scornfully mimicked his neighbor’s trembling voice. “So what if they don’t want to?” he repeated with a shout. “They won’t have any choice in the matter. We’ll betroth them right now, in the cradle. Let’s see them not agreeing. This is a vow we’re making here, and you don’t break a vow, and if anyone does break it he’ll bring trouble on his head.”
And David Bokobasa, slighter and weaker and poorer than Janah, couldn’t oppose him. He shook hands with him and vowed that his son and Janah’s daughter would marry, and woe betide anyone who broke the vow. Janah went home satisfied, shook his wife Fortuna’s shoulders, woke her up, and told her to prepare for the engagement ceremony.
“But the child’s just been born,” she implored.
“Do as I tell you,” he snapped. “You didn’t give me a son, so Bokobasa’s son will be mine,” he added and got into bed. And Fortuna didn’t sleep a wink all night.
After giving birth to Angela, Fortuna’s womb closed. Some say that it was the fear of producing another girl and bringing fresh misfortune to its mother that caused it to close up. For eight years the womb persisted in its rebellion. Every thirty days, with the precision of the appearance of the new moon, it spat out the unfertilized eggs and the bed of mucous membrane it had grown for them, and obstructed the passage of the spermatozoa quivering with their desire to mate. Cunningly it beckoned them and invited them in, only to kill them in the trap it had dug for them in its black depths. But when Angela was eight years old, one determined spermatozoon, with a long, strong tail and a pointed, thrusting head, succeeded in crossing the deathtrap and reaching its goal. Nine months later Joseph was born.
At this point in the story Angela’s face would grow grave, and her eyes would cloud over. Familiar with the phenomenon, Rosa would keep quiet and with uncharacteristic patience allow her mother to commune with her memories. After a few moments of silence, she knew, Angela would take up her story again with renewed vigor.
Her ears still ringing with the yells audible throughout the village, the yells of triumph with which her father greeted the news of the birth of his son, she remembered that at first everybody feared the opposite: that Jacob Janah was reacting with screams of disappointment to the news that his wife had given birth to a daughter. But when they heard the truth from the midwife, who emerged from the house with her head held high, as proud as if she were personally responsible for the birth of a male child, and a big bundle of money together with a few bags of saffron in her apron, all of them, Jews and Muslims, closed their shops in his honor and went to congratulate him. So overjoyed was the father that, together with his guests, he polished off the entire contents of the wine cellar, adding threads of saffron to the bottles to improve the flavor.
Never before had the village seen such celebrations; even the memory made Angela feel weak. For seven days and seven nights, until the day of the brith, the house swarmed with visitors eating delicacies yellow with saffron, drinking, singing, and telling jokes. Women whose hands were painted with saffron instead of the usual cheap and commonplace henna circulated among the guests bearing trays laden with food, while the father, proud as a peacock, led them in convoys to the baby’s room. Ignoring Fortuna, who was still exhausted from the difficult birth, as if she had had nothing to do with bringing his son into the world, he would whip the blanket off baby Joseph and reveal the miracle that had been vouchsafed him and for which he took all the credit. Then he would wait for the flattering and obsequious cries of admiration that were music to his ears, and when the guests murmured words of praise for the baby’s erect penis, he would modestly lower his eyes and with his chest puffed out in pride he would whisper: “Just like his father.”
For seven days and seven nights Janah forbade Joseph to be diapered, and ordered the nur
ses to lay him in his cradle with the lower half of his body exposed, broadcasting the tidings of his maleness to the world. And in order to avert the evil eye from his first born son, Victoria the midwife was summoned to cover the walls of the room with the yellow prints of her splay-fingered, saffron-painted hand. On the day of the brith female relatives and neighbors arrived and with open mouths and rolling tongues uttered joyful ululations that mingled with the wails of the baby as the mohel snipped off his foreskin, while Janah stood by, watching like a hawk to see he didn’t cut off too much.
“And what was Joseph like?” Rosa would ask. And Angela would recover and say: “Joseph was a baby like all other babies, a perfectly ordinary baby, not too big and not too small, not too fat and not too thin, not too beautiful and not too ugly, just an average baby.
“It happened right after the brith. The baby began to eat. He ate voraciously. At first he ate for two babies, and then he began to eat for three, and then for four, and when he began to eat for five babies he finished all Granny’s milk.” Angela remembered how her father yelled at her mother then that because of her little breasts, which he had always mocked, the baby didn’t have enough to eat. He tore the hungry, screaming Joseph from his mother’s arms, wrapped him in one of the white cotton sacks in which he packed the bundles of saffron, and carried him round the village in search of a wet nurse. The moment he was taken from her arms Fortuna knew that her son was lost to her forever. From that day on she was allowed to see him only at night, through the window of the nursery where he slept in the light of the oil lamp, while a strange wet nurse counted his breaths.
His lips pursed with anger against his wife, whose milk had dried up, Janah strode through the village with the hungry, wailing baby bundled in a sack on his back. On the outskirts of the village he found Allegra. They say he found her by following the terrible sound of her weeping, the weeping of a mother who had lost her baby. He found her sobbing on the grave of her baby son who had died suddenly in his sleep. Her black garments were ripped and covered with ashes, her face and chest ravaged by the deep scratches she had inflicted on herself in her grief, the hair she had torn from her head lay around her on the ground, and her naked breasts dripped milk onto the fresh mound of earth. As if she weighed nothing at all, Janah pried her clinging fingers from the little grave, picked her up in his strong arms, and carried both his burdens home, one wailing from hunger and the other with grief for her dead baby. From that moment until the day her milk dried up and she was sent away, she never stopped crying.
“When Joseph finished Allegra’s milk,” Angela continued with her story, “and her tears dried up together with her milk, they gave her a bundle of small change and sent her home.” Angela remembered the scene vividly: Allegra clinging to Joseph, her dry eyes wide open, her gaping mouth screaming as she refused to part from him and wept tearlessly.
“After they dragged her off Joseph by force, they brought him a new wet nurse. When her milk dried up, and they couldn’t find another wet nurse in the village, Janah went to the nearby town and hired three wet nurses for a large sum of money—Georgette, Juliet, and Nazima—and they all lived with us in our house. In order to ensure a steady supply of milk, it was decided that Georgette would feed him in the morning, Juliet in the afternoon, and Nazima in the evening. And each in turn would enter the nursery with laughing faces and bursting breasts and leave it with sad expressions and dry, depleted bosoms. Before Joseph turned one, he had dried up the milk of all the wet nurses in the area, and Janah decided that he had to be weaned.
“During the course of his last breast-feed, the screaming Joseph stuck his milk teeth ferociously into the dry nipple of the evening wet nurse, Nazima. And the sudden silence that fell on the house when he closed his mouth was broken by the agonized shrieks of Nazima, who screamed as if a band of devils had fallen on her and were eating her alive. But Joseph was undeterred by her shrieks, and he clung to her like a leech and refused to let go. For three days and three nights he remained with his mouth clamped around the dry nipple, while Nazima screamed in pain and silent tears of hunger and sorrow poured down his cheeks. Why was he silent? Because his mouth was gagged by Nazima’s milkless nipple. And how was poor Nazima’s nipple finally freed? Grandma Fortuna went to consult the wise women of the village and tried everything they advised. One of them told her to rub pepper mixed with tobacco on his gums, another advised her to pinch his mouth and squeeze it till he choked, and a third recommended massaging and tickling the soles of his feet until he laughed and the nipple slipped out of his mouth. But nothing helped. So Granny sent them all away and boiled goat’s milk on the stove. When the milk boiled over, the smell penetrated the baby’s nostrils, and he opened his mouth, dropped the nipple, and burst out crying so loudly that all the neighbors came running to see what had happened. In the meantime they flooded his open mouth with the goat’s milk, and he swallowed and swallowed and swallowed until he fell asleep.”
At this point in the story the pungent smell of goat’s milk filled Angela’s nostrils, and she saw her little brother tottering on his fat legs into the kitchen, sniffing the milk Fortuna was boiling on the stove, and drinking it in bucketfuls. Before her eyes she saw her father coming into the yard with a herd of black goats following him obediently, little copper bells tinkling on their necks. With glazed eyes she remembered how her mother would milk them into tin buckets and boil the milk, still warm and bubbling from their teats, until it brimmed over in white, airy foam and put out the fire with a whispering sound.
And when she felt Rosa tugging at her sleeve, Angela would rouse herself and continue her story. At the age of two Joseph would no longer wait for the milk to boil. He would steal into the pen, evading the watery eyes of the goats surrounding him, choose the ones that were suckling their young, and while the kids were still clinging to their mothers and butting their stomachs in order to quicken the flow of milk, he would feel their teats to find the fullest. With a hefty kick he would chase away the suckling kid and clamp his lips around the wet, quivering teat freed for his use. The kid robbed of his food would stand next to its mother, looking on helplessly as the milk flowed into Joseph’s stomach, stamping its hooves, bleating, and butting its hornless head into Joseph’s broad back.
In the light of this new development, Janah decided to wean the kids as soon as they were born, and he instituted a new order in the pen. No sooner had a newborn kid fallen onto the straw behind its mother and hurried to attach itself to her teats than Janah would detach the tiny mouth and, ignoring the protests of the mother, bear away the fruit of her womb, its hair still wet with amniotic fluid. He would teach the newborn kid to suck from a rubber nipple attached to the plug of a wooden barrel, which he filled with milk diluted with water. And while the mothers lamented their stolen babies with heartbreaking cries that caused the kitchen maids to stop up their ears, the kids learned to feed themselves from the rubber nipples, butting the wooden barrels with their soft heads as if to quicken the flow of milk. Thus Joseph was at liberty to attach himself to the teats of the mother goats and drink to his heart’s content without any interference from their offspring, and he spent so much time among the goats that sometimes it was difficult to tell them apart.
“So Joseph was really the son of a nanny goat,” Rosa would whisper into her mother’s ear, so that her uncle wouldn’t hear.
“That’s what the children in the neighborhood and at school thought, they called him ‘son of a nanny goat.’ And when he came near they would hold their noses and complain about his smell. They claimed that even though Joseph had been weaned from the goats at the age of five, their smell still clung to him. They said that his blue eyes were as watery as a goat’s, and when he grew up they blamed the goats for the hairy pelt that covered his body and said that he would never find a bride.
“Joseph grew and grew and grew,” Angela went on, and at this point in the story Rosa chimed in and echoed the refrain: “And he grew and grew and grew.”
&n
bsp; “Until the next-door neighbors complained that they could hear him growing in the night,” continued Angela. And she remembered the loud, strong sounds of Joseph growing, mingling with all the other noises that disturbed the neighbors in their sleep—the croaking of the frogs, the whimpering of babies in their dreams, the bleating of the hungry kids and their pining mothers.
“How do you hear a child growing?” Rosa would ask again, even though she had heard the story dozens of times before.
“A child’s body makes a special sound when it grows.”
“And what sound does growing make?”
“There’s a special sound for grass growing, a special sound for trees growing, and a special sound for children growing.” Angela would repeat the categories of sounds that Rosa, in spite of all her efforts, had never succeeded in hearing.
“But what does it sound like?” she persisted.
“It’s impossible to explain, you have to hear it.”
“But when will I hear it?”
“When you have children of your own, if you stay awake all night you’ll be able to hear them growing.”
“Did you hear me growing?”
“You grew quickly, just like Joseph, and we all heard it, Joseph and I and all the people in the house,” Angela replied, and added that at the age of one year Joseph had worn clothes to fit a two-year-old, and when he was five he looked like a boy of ten, and Grandpa Janah, who suddenly began to age rapidly, was afraid that Joseph’s accelerated growth would be the death of him.