The Fairest Among Women

by Dalya Bilu

  “But why did the way Joseph grew worry Grandpa?”

  “Because the bigger and stronger a child grows, the weaker his parents grow, because the growth of the child brings old age to his parents.

  “And then,” Angela continued her story, “a wise woman in the village told them that children only grow in their sleep. Not in the daytime when they’re running around and playing. And in order to slow down the tempo of Joseph’s growth, they decided to wake him up at night every hour on the hour.”

  To help him achieve this end, Janah bought a wooden clock with a red, pointed roof and a porthole closed with a green shutter set in its center. When they opened the shutter they found cogs and wheels and a little painted wooden bird. “A cuckoo bird,” explained Angela, and added that after they had all peered inside the clock, listened to the sound of the pendulum and the ticking noises made by the innards of the clock, Janah hung it over Joseph’s bed, where the cuckoo faithfully performed its function. Every hour on the hour, day and night, it would pop out and stick its beak right into Joseph’s ear. In the beginning Joseph would wake with a start at the bird’s shrill cries, sit up in bed in a panic, and refuse to go to sleep again for fear of the bird’s cruel beak and ear-piercing cries. But after a month he grew used to it and slept soundly through the hourly racket. And so Joseph went on growing, and the neighbors went on complaining, protesting at the cuckoo cries too, and Janah discovered new white hairs in his beard. Then he went and bought a bigger clock and hung it up next to the first one. Two birds now popped out at once, and like a pair of old friends who hadn’t seen each other for years, they would stand on the little balconies of their houses and call out the time to each other every hour on the hour. And since by their combined efforts they failed to wake Joseph, Janah decided that if two were better than one, three would certainly be better than two, and he bought a third cuckoo clock. But Joseph was so used to their calls by now that even this reinforcement failed to disturb him, and the sound of his growing, accompanied by the cries of the cuckoos, went on waking the neighbors from their sleep. That year, when he turned six and began to go to school, he was as big as a bar mitzvah boy.

  At this point in the story Angela’s voice would break, and she would fill up with an ancient bitterness, the poisoned fruit of an anger that had never been resolved.

  The same bitterness welling from Angela’s throat would return many years later to prove to Rosa that her mother had never recovered from the incident that had upset her nights, wrought havoc with her sleep, emaciated her body, and ruined her youth.

  “In their wisdom,” she would resume, in a voice hoarse with resentment, “they decided that I had passed the age of growth. And since I was nearly a woman, I didn’t need to grow anymore, and I didn’t need to sleep. And so they made me responsible for stopping Joseph’s growth and hung the cuckoo clocks over my bed, right next to my ears. Every night for two years I would wake up in alarm on the hour, since I had never grown used to the noise of the cuckoo calls. Then I would have to go to Joseph’s bed and shake him violently until he woke up, so that he would stop growing for an hour. Since I was an obedient child who always did what her mother and father told her, I never got a decent night’s sleep. I went to school with black circles round my eyes, and if you asked me what they studied there I wouldn’t know what to tell you, because I was fast asleep.”

  “And Joseph? Did he stop growing?”

  “Because of my shaking Joseph would wake up for a few seconds every hour, complain that I was disturbing his rest, sometimes hit me in his sleep, turn his face to the wall, and go straight back to sleep. In the morning he would get up taller and as fresh as if he hadn’t been woken up at least ten times during the night. Until I couldn’t take it anymore and asked my father’s permission to emigrate to Israel. And he, of course, refused. And when I tried to rebel against him, he locked me up and hid my shoes and clothes. My mother found the key, let me out, gave me her shoes, and helped me to escape. And when I reached Kibbutz Givat-Rimonim, where I met your father, I put my head down on the pillow, and they told me afterward that I slept for a week.”

  “And who woke Joseph when you left?”

  “Janah brought Moustafa. Moustafa was an orphan who was glad of the warm bed and good meals they gave him, and in exchange he did your grandmother’s shopping for her in the market and woke Joseph up at night. Joseph went on growing during Moustafa’s time too, because, or so I heard, he wasn’t too strict about his work and sometimes slept the whole night through.”

  “And who woke Joseph when he arrived in Israel?”

  Angela smiled at the question: “When Joseph arrived in the country and came to live with me, you’d just been born, and you woke him up with your screaming. It was then that I bought him his first cuckoo clock, because he’d grown so accustomed to the ticking of the clock and the cries of the cuckoo every hour that he couldn’t fall asleep without them.”

  With a complaint that sounded as bitter as if the whole thing had happened yesterday, Angela would conclude her story by saying that while Joseph grew up to be a tall, broad-shouldered man, she herself had remained small and shriveled, as if her brother had grown at her expense. Then Rosa would ask to see the family portrait, and Angela would take the picture, covered by a strip of white sheet, out of the drawer next to her bed. Four people stared out at her from the photograph, two of whom she knew very well. Rosa would move her index finger over the picture, traveling from one to the other, and even though she knew the answer, she liked asking in a babyish voice: “And who’s this?”

  “That’s Grandpa Janah with Grandma Fortuna next to him.” And Rosa would gaze for the umpteenth time at the tall, strong man with the hard, cruel face. His wiry hair stuck up on his head like the black bristles of a brush, and a thin waxed mustache shaded his upper lip. Her grandmother stood next to him, apologetic and self-effacing, looking the picture of misery. Her lips turned down at the corners, with deep lines on either side of her mouth; her downcast eyes evaded the camera and stared at the floor of the photographer’s studio.

  “And here’s Joseph.” Rosa gently stroked the hulking boy, a head taller than his sister, stretching his lips in a pathetic attempt at a smile in order to please the photographer.

  “And here you are,” she pointed to Angela, who looked like a little girl even though she was already a young woman about to set sail for Palestine. She was sloppily dressed in a loose garment that blurred the womanly contours of her body and made her look even thinner and more wretched than she was. Her coarse washerwoman’s hands, too clumsy to pick the saffron flowers, hung lifelessly at her sides.

  And when Angela again covered the photograph with the strip of sheet, she remembered the first time Rosa had seen it. She had gazed intently at them all and suddenly burst into peals of bell-like laughter.

  “Joseph was the son of a nanny goat, but you’ve got horns,” she said and pointed to the pair of fleshy horns her brother’s upraised fingers had caused to sprout from her head. And Angela, who had seen the picture hundreds of times, couldn’t understand how she had failed to notice the horns before. And after that, whenever she showed the picture to Rosa, she would look for the horns and wonder how he had made them grow without her sensing it, and how she had failed to notice them after the photograph was developed and sent to her in Palestine.

  In time to come, when Joseph perpetrated the terrible deed that devastated their lives, Angela would think about what he had done to her right under her nose and the horns he had given her behind her back, and wonder why she had ignored the ill omen immortalized in the photograph and engraved on her fate many years later. For if she had known what Joseph was going to do to her, she would have taken steps to stop him, and no doubt everything would have been different.

  And before she went to sleep Rosa would make her regular request to her mother, that if she heard her growing during the night she would wake her up, several times if necessary. Pouting and defiant, she would repeat that she d
idn’t want to grow. If she grew up Angela would grow old, and old people always died in the end, and she didn’t want to lose her mother ever. Angela, whose heart contracted every evening anew, would kiss Rosa’s heavy eyelids as they drooped and closed of their own accord, and promise to wake her up.

  * * *

  And when Rosa was sound asleep and Joseph went out as usual to the movies, more memories would be patiently waiting their turn to surface. Then the memories would hover before Angela’s eyes, flickering in orange and yellow, blinding her with a sudden flash that made her stomach turn over, and covering her head, her arms, and her legs and clothes with foul-smelling yellow scales. Together with the scales her first memory of her father would rise to the surface. The memory was of his gigantic hands, whose palms were yellow, as if he were permanently ill with jaundice, and the bittersweet smell coming from his clothes, his hair, and his breath. And when she remembered her father a bad taste would rise to her mouth, reminding her of the taste of the food she had eaten throughout her childhood and girlhood, and a slight sensation of nausea would overcome her, filling her mouth and making her stomach contract.

  Almost all the dishes served at her father’s table were liberally flavored with the king of spices, threads of saffron, even though they were worth their weight in gold. Her father owned the biggest saffron fields in the area, and only he could afford a diet of exclusively orange dishes. He would always say that they were good for a man’s virility and a woman’s fertility. Janah, who liked to impress people, refused to call the flowers he grew in his fields saffron. His flowers, of all the saffron flowers grown in the purple fields of the village of Za’afrana were called by their Latin name, which sounded more important to him, as befit the king of spices. And when he spoke of his flowers to his friends in the synagogue or his drinking companions, he would begin with the words, “My Crocus sativus,” knowing that he was making a mighty impression on his audience. He used this Latin name so often that the villagers who called him, to his face, “Señor Janah,” and in the synagogue by his Hebrew name, “Señor Wings,” began calling him “Señor Crocus” behind his back. After his son was born he would proudly pepper his speech with the words “my son, Joseph,” and so the honorary title “Abou Joseph” was added to his name.

  A few months before the picking season began Fortuna would grow nervous and restless. She would pinch Angela for no reason, raise her voice to her, secretly shake Joseph, Janah’s pet, and make the servants’ lives a misery. “She acts as if her periods last for months instead of days,” the kitchen maids would whisper behind her back. And while Fortuna turned into a nervous wreck, Janah grew relaxed and happy.

  And in the autumn months, when the stigmas were picked in the early hours of the morning, after the dew had dried on the petals of the flowers and before they opened to soak up the sun, the fields would be invaded by young girls whose hands were white and transparent, whose fingers were long and supple, and who moved as gracefully as dancers. Like delicate butterflies the maidens danced among the lilac-colored flowers, and plucked the corollas gently from the calyxes. After the purple flowers had been removed from the green stems, the saffron pickers would carefully break off the stigmas with their fingertips, taking care to count three stigmas for every flower. Then Janah would take one of the threads in his fingers and crush it, checking to see if it left the sweet-smelling crimson stain that did not come off easily even when scrubbed with soap and water. And the deeper the color of the stain and the longer it lingered on his hands, the more satisfied he was and the higher his prices soared. When the hands of all the pickers turned orange, Janah would collect the stigmas and dry them on soft sieves made of horsehair set over smoldering coals, until the right smell wafted into his nostrils. Then he packed the orange gold in little cotton bags, which together with the threads of saffron inside them each weighed no more than a gram.

  And as Angela remembered, the smell of saffron would rise in her nostrils and she would be filled with nausea. The orange color that danced before her eyes throughout her childhood became hateful to her, and when she grew up she refused to eat anything in shades of orange. Carrots, pumpkins, oranges, and tangerines were never to be seen on her table during her marriage to Amatzia, and she never used mustard to flavor meat. And when Rosa asked her to cook pumpkin for her, to peel her a carrot, or to squeeze the juice of an orange for her, she would do as her daughter asked with revulsion, as if she had asked her to take a life, and she would try to avert her eyes from the sight of the loathsome color. Then she would hurry to wash her hands and scrub them with soap and disinfectant as if they had been branded with an indelible stain.

  three

  THE GREATEST LOVE IN THE WORLD

  Although she was still a young woman when she was widowed, Angela made up her mind never to get married again. When people brought up the subject she would purse her lips and refuse to answer. Spiteful tongues said that for lack of a man in her bed she concentrated all her energies on Rosa and her ringlets, and she would end up with a spoiled, ungrateful little monster on her hands. And behind her back the neighbors claimed that it was for the very same reason that she had it in for the Cohens, who had shared her room in Ali Hamouda’s villa and noisily celebrated their conjugal bliss behind their curtain every night. The sanctimonious lectured her that it was unhealthy to bring up a child without a father figure, and those well-versed in the Talmud quoted: “The sages ordained that a woman should not be without a man.”

  Shoshana Zilka and Mrs. Warshavsky would ask her in confidence how she could stand being without a man for such a long time, and try to introduce her to widowers and divorced men. When she turned their offers down in disgust, they patiently explained that she had no call to be so choosy, since she herself was far from being the fairest among women: She was short and skinny, her breasts were shriveled, her hair was thin and mousy, her eyes were as dull as if she hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in her life, her hands were coarse as a washerwoman’s, and her teeth were loose. For the matchmakers who came knocking at the door and the many others who tried their luck she had one answer: “In spite of my appearance I had one great love, a love so great that even if you put all the romantic movies in the world together you wouldn’t find anything like it. I’ll never have a love like I had with Amatzia again, and I’m not prepared to settle for less.”

  In years to come, when Rosa grew up and asked her why she never remarried, Angela would explain to her that a widow, especially if she had lost her husband in tragic circumstances, should never betray the memory of her beloved husband by marrying again. After Rosa got married Angela would confess that she remained single for fear of upsetting Amatzia in his grave. “A new man in my life,” she said, “would have made him jealous, and he had already suffered enough. And this jealousy would have endangered my new husband’s life, and very likely your life and my life too, because a jealous, wounded man will always seek revenge, even if he has to climb out of the dungeons of hell or interrupt his feasting on the Leviathan with the righteous in heaven to do so.” Only when Rosa had children of her own would Angela tell her of Amatzia’s great love for her: “There is no greater love in the whole world, not even in those movies Joseph screens in his movie theaters that make everyone cry.”

  In his passion Amatzia would tell her that he loved all of her, and even though she knew the answer she would ask him to explain in detail what he meant. Then he would tell her patiently, for the umpteenth time, that he loved not only her external, visible organs, but also her internal, invisible ones. If he could, he would have kissed her heart, stroked her slippery liver, listened to the whispering of her lungs, peeped into her intestines, and worshiped the darkness of her womb from within. “And there isn’t a man in the world who loves your outside and inside equally, and it was my luck to find the only one of his generation capable of it. And since his love was so concentrated and intense that it would have been enough for a thousand women, they took him away from me quickly, because what
he gave me in his short life others could never have given me if they lived to be a hundred. And what he gave me then was so much that I’m still using it today, drawing on that great bank of love day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute.” At the same time Angela knew, and she told Rosa so, that she had to be thrifty in her use of the great fund of love he had showered upon her, for if she was too extravagant she would use up everything in the reserves he had left behind him. When this happened she would know that it was time for her to join him and take up her life with him at the point where it had been cut off.

  Nobody could understand the story of the love between Angela and Amatzia, a sturdy, good-looking kibbutznik who excelled at folk dancing and playing the harmonica. Years after he was murdered, the members of Kibbutz Givat-Rimonim were still bringing the matter up at their meetings and blaming themselves for not preventing his marriage to the girl who had brought catastrophe down on his head. They would discuss it for hours, trying to understand once and for all what Amatzia had seen in Angela to make him want to marry her, and how they had failed to see the writing on the wall. They had all seen him helping her to carry the baskets of oranges she had picked to the collection point, but none of them had realized that he was motivated by love. The romantics among them thought that the big, strong Amatzia had fallen in love with her because she looked so fragile that she had aroused his protective instincts. The more sophisticated argued that perhaps it was precisely because Angela, who was well aware of her limited attractions, was the only girl on the kibbutz who didn’t try to ingratiate herself with him that he was drawn to her and fell under her spell. Some claimed that Amatzia’s marriage to Angela was a rebellion against his parents and the kibbutz members, who had expected great things of him, the fine, firstborn son of the kibbutz. The compassionate and soft-hearted were of the opinion that he had decided to marry her because he felt sorry for her. Her parents, on their way to rescue her from his clutches, had both died on the same day, and since he was a youth with principles and a highly developed conscience, he had taken the responsibility for their deaths on himself.