The Fairest Among Women

by Dalya Bilu

  When his work was done, he came into the living room, said good-night to his sister, and extracted his niece from the wrapping paper, the saucepans, the kettles, the trays, the bowls, the plates and the glasses that covered the sofa and chairs and floor. Ceremoniously he carried the bride over the threshold of the room in his arms and put her down gently on the joined mattresses, which enveloped her in the smell of the sea.

  * * *

  From that night on the sound of bouncing springs and the thud of the bed against the wall of the next room ceased, as if Angela had renounced her private life for the good of the new couple. And when her longings for Amatzia pierced her body, she would bury her head deep in her pillow and call out his name in muffled cries of pain that reached Joseph and Rosa’s room and froze their bodies for a few seconds in the position of their lovemaking. Then Angela would sink into her bed and tell Amatzia in a whisper of the events of the day. And Rosa and her husband would detach themselves from each other and lie calm and satisfied, listening to the movement of Angela’s lips until they fell asleep and woke up to the smell of strong coffee and almond cookies she had baked for them in the early hours of the morning, when they were still fast asleep, clinging together like a pair of abandoned kittens.

  In the morning, about two hours before the school janitor rang the big bronze bell, Angela strode resolutely into the married couple’s room and shook Rosa awake as she always did. While she went on sleeping sitting up, her mother curled her ringlets, gave her a cup of strong coffee to drink, and sent her off with a sandwich to another day of schooling, of which she remembered nothing, sunk as she was in dreamy reveries about the enjoyable events of the night before. It was only after weeks of battling Rosa and the school administration, which had no desire to see among its pupils a girl whose swelling stomach was a sign of her disgraceful behavior, that Angela gave up and sent the girl to evening classes. There she stood out among the day laborers and artisans intent on getting an education in their blue overalls stained with grease and whitewash. The sharp smell of sweat exuded by their bodies after their day’s work would assail her nostrils when she entered the classroom and make her sick to her sensitive stomach.

  At night she would come home, her hand supporting her belly and announce that she was never going back to school again. If Angela hadn’t insisted on continuing to treat her like a schoolgirl, it is doubtful that Rosa would have graduated from high school, since she had plenty of excuses for shirking her lessons: She was a married woman now, and it was her duty to look after her husband, and now she was pregnant, and now she was breast-feeding the baby, and now she was pregnant again, and how could anyone expect her to concentrate on her studies. But every morning Angela would wake her up two hours before school began, fix her ringlets as if she were still a regular schoolgirl, and force her to sit at the table and do her homework. And in the afternoon she would drag her, almost by force, to the classroom. Uncomplainingly she cooked for Rosa and her husband, washed the baby’s diapers, and at the graduation ceremony, four years after her marriage, Rosa stepped up to the platform with her belly about to burst and a three-year-old bowlegged toddler clinging to her skirt, and received a certificate to say that she had graduated from high school with distinction.

  When Angela looked at her pregnant daughter, memories of her own pregnancy came back to her. When she lay in bed at night, discussing the events of the day with Amatzia, she would feel the heaviness of her belly and Rosa kicking inside it. The more Rosa’s belly grew, the more Angela felt the heaviness in her own body, and the pains she had once felt came back to torment her emaciated body and weary soul. That was when she began to go downhill, the irreversible cycle of life leading to its inevitable end. As Rosa’s breasts filled out and stood up, Angela’s breasts emptied and shriveled and surrendered to the force of gravity. As Rosa’s hair thickened and curled in snakelike waves down her back, Angela’s hair grew thin and gray. And when Rosa’s eyes began to shine and flash, Angela’s tired eyes, embedded in a network of fine wrinkles, sank deep into their sockets. Above all Angela suffered from wobbly teeth, which began to fall out one by one. Nothing helped, not even the eggshells she ground up with her few remaining teeth, or the sardines she swallowed whole, or the chicken bones she chewed or the marrow she sucked out of the hollows of soup bones. The doctors said she suffered from a lack of calcium, and that if she had taken proper care of herself in time, the condition might have been prevented. On the day her last tooth fell out and she found her gums naked and riddled with holes where her teeth had once been, she took action and ordered a magnificent set of shiny white porcelain dentures, and from then on she dazzled the clients who came to her to have their fortunes told with an artificial, borrowed smile.

  In the morning, when Rosa did her homework and Joseph went out to sell encyclopedias, Angela would sit down to drink her coffee, overturn the empty cup on its saucer, and examine the configurations foretelling the events of her day. Then she would collect Rosa’s and Joseph’s cups and ponder what fate held in store for them, until a soft knock at the door announced the first customer of the morning. Then Angela would shake off her thoughts, open the door, and greet the customer like a welcome guest, usher her into the kitchen, seat her at the scarred wooden table, hurry to the stove, put the kettle on to boil, and open a new packet of aromatic coffee. And by the time the couple came home at the end of the day, the sink in Angela’s kitchen was full of dozens of cups and glasses, the muddy dregs of a black fate covering their bottoms and climbing up their sides. Late in the evening they would sit down in the kitchen, steeped in the smell of cooking and the dark aroma of fresh coffee, and while the young couple was busy eating their meal, Angela would tell them about her day.

  The poor woman who had no idea that her husband was cheating on her, the one who was carrying a dead baby in her womb, the one who would never get married and many others—their troubles haunted the kitchen like autonomous beings, banishing with their sour breath and the sweaty smell of their fear the subtle aromas of Angela’s cooking and filling Rosa’s heart with dread. And when Rosa told her mother of her fear that the troubles of others would stick to them, Angela would dismiss it with a contemptuous wave of her hand and explain that what was written in heaven was final, and that no power on earth that could change the sentence. All you could do was predict it, expect it, and prepare for it in order to soften the blow. When she saw the expression of disbelief on Rosa’s face, she would explain that she had no choice in the matter, that her destiny as a reader of coffee grounds had been determined even before she had been born, that her uncle had owned a coffee shop in the town, and that she and her aunt Lise had been put to work washing the hundreds and thousands of coffee cups left behind them by the men. Then she and Lise had peered into the cups, examined the configurations of the dregs, and followed their path across the china. She had always felt strange sensations that she couldn’t explain and known in advance about the catastrophes about to befall, and joyful events about to overtake, the people who left her the muddy dregs of their coffee as souvenirs. “As if the spirits were talking to me from the cups and telling me stories about the person before me. And I was always right,” she told Rosa for the umpteenth time. “If I saw that somebody was going to have an accident, he slipped and broke both his legs in the Turkish bath; and if I saw that somebody was going to win a lot of money, he really did; and when I saw that somebody’s husband was cheating on her, he was.” And then she would tell Rosa again that for her looking into the dark bottom of the cup was like watching a tearjerking movie: “I see the life of the person opposite me passing before my eyes just like a movie.” But when Rosa tried to see what her mother saw and stared intently at the muddy black dregs, all she saw was wet coffee grounds lying in a meaningless shape in the bottom of the cup.

  She would often argue with her mother and ask her to stop poking her nose into other people’s troubles. It was beneath her dignity, Rosa lectured her, to earn her living from catastrophes, and i
t was high time she retired and stopped fishing in the troubled waters of these poor unfortunates’ lives. And Angela, whose bank balance was swelling like yeast dough and who had bought them a large apartment with its help, right opposite her own, would tell her resentfully to mind her own business and stop interfering in her life. Then Rosa would shrug her shoulders and resign herself to listening, for the umpteenth time, to the horror stories about her unfortunate customers with which her mother regularly regaled them at supper.

  * * *

  Six months after the wedding, when Rosa’s stomach was swollen to bursting and everybody said it would happen any day, Rachelle told her tearfully how the class had suddenly been assembled in the school hall and the principal had come and told them sadly that their beloved classmate Ruth had died in the night, and nobody knew how it had come about, since she had been a picture of health and never visited a doctor in her life. Rachelle told her that as soon as all the girls began to sob in terror and dismay in each other’s arms, she had heard a loud whisper from Ruhama behind her, overshadowing everything in a black cloud of doom-laden prophecy: “I knew it would happen. Not even one butterfly landed on Ruthie.”

  Because of her pregnancy, her mother and Joseph forbade her to go to the funeral, but Rosa stole out of the house and followed close behind the stretcher bearing the little body. With her eyes flooded by Ruthie’s glittering emerald eyes and her ears ringing with Ruhama’s spiteful song, “Once upon a time I went to Yemen,” she leaned heavily on Rachelle and felt her stomach pulling her down to the earth. Screaming Ruthie’s name, she pushed her way to the very verge of the grave. The moment the little body, still innocent of any marks of womanhood, was cast into the dark pit, she felt the kicking of her baby, desperate to get out. When she stumbled home she decided that if the baby was a girl she would call her Ruthie, in spite of the objections of her mother, who had always held that it was bad luck to name the living after the dead.

  six

  CINEMA ROSA

  A few weeks after Ruthie, a placid, bonny baby, was born, Joseph’s great dream was realized and he opened the Cinema Rosa, his own private movie theater, where he could screen the movies he loved, sad movies about lost people. Even though he was happy in his marriage and loved his newborn baby, he would tell Rosa that there was something missing in his life. When she asked him to tell her what it was, he couldn’t explain—for fear of hurting her—that he felt a need to cry until his breath ran out and his eyes were sore.

  This need for a good cry, which was so strong and incomprehensible, could not be satisfied by his new family, which brought him many moments of bubbling joy as sweet as honey. And so, when he saw the advertisement that would change his life in the newspaper, he immediately abandoned his job as a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman and the women who opened their purses and their hearts to him and persuaded Angela to lend him the money he needed. The person from whom he acquired the means to make his dream come true was a certain Alfredo, a new immigrant from Italy who had brought with him a large wooden crate containing a shiny black projector carefully wrapped in straw on which was engraved the number 6325 and the imposing name “Parvoset Milano.” And when Joseph repeated the words “Parvoset Milano, Parvoset Milano” to himself in a whisper, as if to engrave them on his memory, he would feel a new taste in his mouth, the taste of men and women dressed in elegant clothes talking a language that sounded like music.

  It took five stalwart Kurdish porters, gritting their teeth, to carry the machine carefully from the truck to the second story of the building he had rented in Katamon G, which had once been used as a youth club. And when they got their breath back, they took the container apart, plank by plank, pulled out the nails with rusty pliers, and at Joseph’s behest made them into long, narrow benches that endangered the backsides of the boys and girls sitting on them, in short pants or thin cotton dresses, with the sharp, nasty splinters that penetrated their tender flesh and refused to come out.

  And when the machine was finally fixed to the second-story floor, it squatted there like a monster with two round heads and filled the room with its still, black, oppressive presence until Joseph learned to bring it to life, throwing beams of light onto the screen below and projecting the pictures from the celluloid tape rolled around the little wheels that shone opposite him like gleaming teeth fixed in an eternal smile. He sat for days with Alfredo listening to him patiently explain how to wind the film around the many little wheels revolving one beneath another without order or method. Lovingly he showed Joseph which wheel came first and which last; how to raise the heavy rolls of film without losing his balance and without, God forbid, breaking his back; how to cool the film with the aid of the water circulating in the belly of the machine; what to do with the carbons that focused the pictures; what to do if, God forbid, the film burned in the middle of a screening; and how to mend it with acetone and clear nail polish. Joseph asked him to teach him Italian so that he could read the instructions and acquire a better understanding of the workings of the machine so that he could fix it if it broke down. He learned the language quickly—the language of his first wet nurse, who had disappeared from his life and been forgotten over the course of the years. And the language came back to him like an abandoned lover, reminding him of her presence in the sounds of the sentences that were like music to his ears and the words that tasted as sweet as honey in his mouth.

  When the language came back to him he understood that he was ready, and he hired the first movie. Posters went up all over the neighborhood inviting one and all to a free screening of the famous Italian movie Bicycle Thieves. Joseph handed out the tickets, sold the refreshments, and projected the film. His knees trembling with excitement, he succeeded in throwing a beam of flickering light onto the silver screen and projecting the moving pictures that wrung the first sobs from the spectators. And when the audience filed out of the hall with tears streaming from their eyes, he knew he had succeeded.

  In those days Joseph said that people came to his Cinema Rosa in order to cry, and he explained that there were a lot of people in Jerusalem who wanted to cry but were unable to get the tears out. Some of them were afraid of crying alone in the secret of their houses; others were ashamed of their weakness, preferring to swallow their tears rather than allowing them to roll down their cheeks in public. And when they were at the end of their tether and the tears welled up in their throats, making their hearts heavy and choking their breath, they would come to Cinema Rosa to save their lives. News of the movie theater and the wonders it worked and the relief it afforded to its patrons spread throughout the neighborhood. Satisfied customers told their friends about it on Friday nights around a bowl of salted watermelon seeds, and friends followed them, wiped their eyes on their shirtsleeves, and brought their friends, and soon there was a long line of people who wanted to cry waiting to buy tickets. The place grew so famous that the name “Cinema Rosa” became a synonym for crying. And to this day, years after the place closed down, when the old people of Katamon feel ill treated by life and mutter the words “Cinema Rosa” under their breath, everybody knows that they want to cry.

  In Cinema Rosa you never saw lovers who came to hold hands or feel each other’s bodies under the cover of darkness. And if any couples did come to the cinema, it was clear as daylight that they were in the middle of breaking up, and that they had come together only to weep for their dashed hopes, for their unrealized dreams, and for the children who would never be born to them. Nobody came to Cinema Rosa to see comedies, musicals, or westerns. Gangster movies were of no interest to its patrons, and war movies, action movies, and thrillers were acceptable only if the protagonists shared their tears with the audience.

  Some people tried to explain the source of Joseph’s unique talent for finding the films that made the entire audience break into a chorus of tears. The ones who were well acquainted with the family history, as recounted by Angela, said that it was nothing to wonder at, since the milk he drank as a baby had been flavor
ed by the tears of his wet nurse grieving for her dead infant. This fact also went far to explain the glum face of the cinema owner, whom nobody had ever seen smile or laugh. Others added that his gloomy countenance was nothing to be surprised about, since both his parents had died on the same day, when their ship sank at sea, and only he survived, swimming in the saffron yellow waves until a merchant ship rescued him, and ever since then his face had been fixed in a grave, sad expression.

  In any event the movies opened the sluice gates and released a flood of tears in everyone who watched them. Those who were ashamed to cry received encouragement and reinforcement from the actors sobbing loudly on the screen in Greek, Hindi, Arabic, Italian, French, and English. And the audience imitated them in Hebrew. But the Turkish movies were the ones in which the actors and the spectators wept the most. Then the lines in front of the ticket booth stretched as far as Tzadok’s grocery store. The speculators soon heard about the long lines at Cinema Rosa and the difficulty of obtaining tickets, and they would arrive long before anybody else, buy up large supplies of tickets, and when the window of the ticket booth closed and the sign saying SOLD OUT was hung up in front of the disappointed crowds, they would call the unfortunates left without tickets aside and sell them seats on the rough plank benches for three and sometimes four times as much as they were worth.

  And not only the denizens of Katamon came to see the movies. When the rumor that you could have a good cry at Cinema Rosa spread, people came streaming from all over town—refugees who had survived the hell of the war in Europe with tattoos on their arms, battered wives, abandoned husbands, broken hearts that refused to heal, breadwinners who had been fired from their jobs, people with malignant diseases, women suffering from premenstrual nerves, and lost, lonely souls who had exhausted all their reasons for crying and were looking for new pretexts. They all came to Joseph’s movie theater, sat on the hard wooden benches, and with the splinters sticking in their flesh, got ready for the ritual weeping. The sticklers would begin to cry even before the lights went out and the curtain went up. Others would begin to sniff when darkness descended on the hall. The more restrained would only start to let go when the slides advertising Bavly’s kiosk and Fruma’s brassiere and corset salon were shown. When Joseph screened the cartoons before the main feature, the entire audience pulled out their handkerchiefs as if in obedience to a silent command. During the Carmel newsreels the first sobs were heard, and when the subtitles announcing TRANSLATION BY JERUSALEM SEGAL TEL AVIV came on, loud bellows of lamentation rose from the hall of the accompaniment of trumpeting from noses stopped up by the overflow of tears draining into them. And by the time the film began, their eyes were so bleared and blinded by tears, that many of the spectators only heard the voices without seeing the pictures. When the lights went on in the hall as a sign that the movie was over, the red-eyed audience would slip out with bowed heads, dripping noses, and a weight off their hearts.