The Fairest Among Women

by Dalya Bilu

  Since she had not been given clear answers by the cabalist, Rosa found herself for the first time in her life seeking advice from her mother’s spirits. Angela, whose flesh and bones had been ravaged by the years and who was now a shadow of her former self, pretended not to hear the imploring note in her daughter’s voice. When Rosa repeated her pleas, Angela explained that it was not in her power to intervene. Every day Rosa visited her mother in the opposite apartment, demanded more and more coffee, and casually left the empty cups with their muddy dregs on the table behind her. And when Angela heard her heavy footsteps on the landing and her door opening and shutting, she would hurry to turn the cup over on its saucer with her skeletal, brown-spotted hands, and for a long time afterward she would sit with her bowed head swaying on its stalklike neck, sighing and communing with the fingerprints of fate.

  And when Rosa returned the next day and demanded to know what she had discovered, Angela would say innocently: “But you don’t believe in it. You yourself asked me to stop reading the coffee grounds, so what do you want of me now?”

  And when Rosa pressed her, she would explain again: “What’s written in heaven is sealed and closed, and no one can change his fate.”

  “But I still want to know what’s written there for me?” Rosa would implore her. “What am I going to give birth to? At least I’ll be prepared if I know.”

  And Angela would purse her lips and refuse to tell her daughter what she had seen in her future and of the change about to cast her into the hard, tangled knot of a new era in her life.

  In spite of all her fears, Rosa decided to keep the baby. If this was God’s wish, since she had become pregnant against all the odds, there must be some special significance to the event, which was not to be taken lightly. And as if she had forgotten that she had already done it seven times before, she delighted in this pregnancy and worried about it as if it were her first. In the months when the embryo was developing inside her Rosa concentrated on its movements. These movements were not like those to which she had become accustomed in the sixty-three months, or the five and a quarter years, of pregnancy she had lived through in her life. She felt no kicks, somersaults, or hiccups. The movements in her belly were pleasant and gentle, and their touch as soft as the down on the breast of a songbird. To anyone who asked she would say that she felt as if the child were floating on air inside her, and only to Joseph and the children did she confide the sensation of wings, the flutter of feathers, and the chirping sounds breaking out of her belly. They all agreed that the new baby was sorry for her mother who had become pregnant by accident late in life, and she was consoling her from within by the gentle, fluttering touch of a gosling flapping its wings in its nest.

  These strange sensations received confirmation from her first beloved grandson, Ruth’s son, eight-year-old Dror, who would fix his eyes searchingly on her stomach as if its rounded sides were made of glass and he could look right through them to the fetus swimming in the darkness of her womb. Then he would pass his hands through the air, knit his brow, and announce with the certainty of a seer: “You have an angel in your stomach; she’s a gift for me, and I’m going to marry her.” And when he said these things Rosa would feel a flapping in her womb, as if the tiny creature inside her were fluttering her wings in agitation. Dror would pass the palms of his hands over the tight-drawn fabric of her dress, caressing his wife-to-be, and uttering soft cooing sounds of love. Then the baby would calm down, and the beating at the sides of Rosa’s womb would stop.

  “Now she’s sleeping,” Dror would announce in a gratified tone, put his finger to his lips, and tiptoe out of the room. And in order not to disturb the baby’s sleep he would lower the volume of the television in the next room. And Rosa would think about her eldest grandson’s promise to marry his still unborn aunt and the strange, ironic twist of fate it represented. For she herself had married her uncle, and in spite of all the gloomy predictions of the doctors about the retarded and deformed offspring that this union between relatives would produce, all her children, knock wood, were sound and healthy and successful without a blemish on their bodies, and this last one too would be as perfect as an angel.

  * * *

  Two months before she was due to give birth, all her seven children arrived in the middle of the day, while she and Joseph were hard at it in bed, and told her that Angela was dead. She had slipped in the bathroom and smashed her hollow pelvic bones, which were eaten away and fragile as glass, to smithereens.

  Preoccupied with the life inside her, Rosa accompanied her mother on her last journey, and in spite of the loud wailing of the women around her who had come to Angela to have their fortunes told, she was unable to shed a single tear. And when they went back to the house, she looked dry eyed at Joseph, shedding copious tears outside his cinema for the first time in his life, and bawling at the top of his voice as if deriving immense enjoyment from the act of crying itself. All the seven days of mourning she explained calmly to the condolence callers that she wasn’t going to call the child after her late mother since Angela herself had forbidden it on the grounds that it was bad luck to name children for the dead. She told them, too, that her mother had given up the ghost because the supply of Amatzia’s love for her had run out, after she had used it up so extravagantly, and now she had gone to join him in heaven in order to obtain fresh rations of love. And Joseph looked at her with damp eyes, listened to her words, hugged her body stirring with new life, and rocked with her, mourning for his sister as if he had been orphaned all over again.

  After the week of mourning was over, she went to Angela’s apartment and took her father’s photograph albums and possessions, preserved as he had left them on the morning he died. When she opened the closet doors in order to sort out Angela’s clothes, she found the doll, Belle, wrapped in a shroud and forgotten. A soft white cloud of moths flew out of the doll, leaving little bald patches in her abundant hair and sprinkling her with a silky white powder in their flight. Rosa dressed Belle in the moth-eaten clothes she found at her side, stroked her depleted curls, and rocked her up and down, but the doll failed to produce the expected cry of “Mama, mama, mama.” She looked closely at the pretty painted china face, the pink cheeks, the blue glass eyes fringed with dark lashes, the straight nose, and the swollen lips parted in a generous smile to reveal tiny white teeth, and she wished for a daughter as beautiful as a doll.

  With a heavy heart she took the doll, her father’s belongings, and the glass jar in which Angela kept her false teeth stuck in pink plastic gums. She put the jar on the basin next to the glass with her and Joseph’s toothbrushes. And every morning from then on, before she washed her face, she would turn to the teeth sunk in water and greeting her with a friendly smile, and tell them about the events of the previous day. Then she would fish them out of their jar and brush them thoroughly, just as Angela had done in anticipation of each new day. The teeth would rattle and clatter in her hands in a response only she could understand. Joseph would look at her in concern and whisper to the children, who came to visit more frequently than usual, that in view of their mother’s delicate condition, they had to be considerate of her, show her understanding, never contradict her, and never ask her to explain the meaning of her behavior, however odd it might seem.

  * * *

  Two months later, on a morning when her stomach felt very big and low, she conversed at length with Angela’s teeth, as usual. When she had finished her ablutions she went back to bed, where Joseph bade her good morning and penetrated her as he did every day. At the moment of penetration she heard a snapping sound, and they were both bathed in a stream of clear, warm water. The water seeped into the thick spring mattress and went right through it to the floor, washing away the fluff and gray dust caught in Rosa’s long hairs scattered under the bed. Joseph jumped out of bed in alarm, wiped his loins and Rosa’s, helped her up, dressed her in her best, and summoned Leslie-Shimon to come at once with his car.

  Leaving a trail of little puddles behin
d her, Rosa was taken straight to the delivery room, and when she lay down on the narrow iron bed she knew that this time it would be a difficult birth. And while all the women in the cold, stainless-steel hall were screaming at the tops of their voices and cursing their husbands for their plight, Rosa gritted her teeth and called on Angela to help her.

  Afterward there was a great commotion around her. Rosa remembered only the needle in the bottom of her back and the black pit into which she fell with an enjoyable drifting sensation.

  When she woke up she saw Joseph’s tearful face opposite her. He told her that they had put her to sleep and in his presence cut open her belly, parted the huge womb that was swollen as tight as a crimson balloon, and removed the baby, who refused to come out of her own accord. Only when she was discharged from the hospital did he dare to tell her that the umbilical cord had been coiled around the baby’s neck, as if she had tried to take her own life even before she saw the light of day.

  “Your child will stay small,” the doctors told her a few hours after she gave birth. And Rosa, exhausted by the operation, fell into a deep sleep from which she woke only at the sound of the orange curtain sliding on its rail and presaging the crowding of the doctors round her bed. The obstetrician, her private gynecologist, the pediatrician, and the midwife were all there.

  She looked into their eyes and realized that her premonition had been right and her baby was different. And they looked back at her with a strange combination of sorrow and pity, mingled with professional satisfaction at the rare genetic accident that had come their way like a heaven-sent gift. For a long time they spoke to her about the mutations of DNA caused by marriage between close family relations, and about her good fortune in having given birth to seven healthy children. With gleaming eyes, imagining the many papers they would publish and the lectures they would deliver at medical conferences, they told her that the baby was a hunchback, that her growth would be arrested at about the age of two, and that she might be mentally retarded as well and spend the rest of her life lying on her humped back and opening her mouth only in order to be fed.

  Dry eyed, Rosa looked at the deputation of evil angels—so she called them when she described the occasion in days to come—and she told them to fold their white wings, to leave her in peace, and to bring her baby to her immediately. And they glided away, their starched white coats rustling stiffly as they sped down the corridors on their next mission.

  After they left the curtain opened again with a loud, tearing sound. Rachelle stood in front of her with a bunch of tired-looking roses in her hands, looking at her with the look she kept for special occasions when she wanted to express sorrow or pity.

  “I heard them say that your baby is a hunchback and that she isn’t going to grow,” were the first words she said. In the cold neon light of the recovery room Rosa could clearly see the scars on her friend’s acne-pitted face and the gleeful glitter in her eyes. Even though Rachelle was her best friend, Rosa knew that she was enjoying being the bearer of bad news, and she waited impatiently for her to go.

  After a long time, when her breasts were so swollen they were about to burst and the sound of her screams rang through the corridors, they laid the baby in her lap. The baby’s dark eyes set in a huge skull gazed at her curiously and unblinkingly, and her head swayed slightly on her neck. As soon as she received the baby in her arms she began to undress her, as she had done with all seven of her newborn babies so many years ago. Gently, as if afraid of damaging the fragile body, she undid the soft flannel garments. The faint smell of laundry powder and the fragrance of baby’s skin, mingled with the stench of the black bowel movements passed by newborn babies before they begin to suckle, spread through the room. As if to help her mother undress her, the baby kicked at the white swaddling clothes. With practiced hands that had not forgotten their skill, Rosa loosened the wrappings covering her daughter’s entire body as if she were the mummy of an ancient Egyptian baby who had died in infancy.

  The baby lay naked on the bed, her shame exposed to her mother’s weeping eyes, and with her insides contracting in dread, Rosa saw the humps, or what the doctors referred to as a “genetic mistake.” She took a deep breath and looked to see if all the other limbs were in the right place. With a sigh of relief she saw that the navel protruding from her belly like an end of pink rope was exactly in the middle of her body. Her ears were set close to her head, her nose was in the proper place, and she had the right number of arms and legs. Forgetting the dread in the pit of her stomach for a moment, Rosa delighted, just as she had seven times before, in the tiny nails covering the tips of her baby’s fingers. When she recovered from the miracle of the fingernails she lifted the baby up and, as if she were shortsighted, held her right in front of her eyes. With quivering nostrils she smelled the achingly familiar scent of a newborn baby and welcomed her into the world. As if performing a secret rite known only to mothers she kissed her in a fixed sequence on her cheeks, her forehead, on her half-closed eyes, and on each of her tiny fingers. And before she wrapped her up, she examined her again all over, seeking signs of family resemblance.

  Afterward, when she told Rachelle about it, she admitted that she was looking for signs of her dead mother. When she failed to find any evidence of reincarnation, she cradled the naked baby in her arms and laid her at her breast. The baby’s body was warm and her skin silky smooth, holding out a promise of future beauty. The baby trembled between her breasts, groping like a blind mole for the source of nourishment, and when she found the nipple she gripped it triumphantly between her strong gums. A sharp pain pierced Rosa’s body. She looked at the little face pressed to her breast and felt a frisson of pleasurable pain. The pleasure began at the nipple, shooting thin jets of sweet liquid into the baby’s mouth, and descended in circles of pain and pleasure to her stomach, squeezing and contracting her empty womb. At that moment a powerful love for this baby awoke in her, greater than the love she felt for her healthy children.

  When she tried to explain later how it had happened, she would say that it was as if the humps split her heart apart and left it bleeding.

  The next day Joseph came to visit, and this time he didn’t bring flowers, as he had done with all seven other births. His face, which was always smoothly shaved, was full of hard gray stubble, and a look of pity such as she had never seen before had settled in his eyes. After him the doctors trooped in, shuffling their feet and looking grave, as if they were the bearers of very bad news. Joseph refused to see his newborn baby and sat next to his wife’s bed, holding her hand in his big one and looking into her eyes as the pain deepened in his. Since this time he made no attempt to persuade her to name the new baby after one of his favorite movie stars, and left the choice to her, Rosa knew that this damaged last child would be hers alone. Joseph would have no part of her.

  After he had left without giving her a name, all seven children arrived, with a few of the grandchildren in tow, and demanded vociferously to see their sister. With a sour expression the nurse in charge of the neonates complied with their request. She removed the baby sternly from the transparent plastic box, held her in strong hands, and hoisted her high in the air, averting her eyes as if she had nothing to do with her. And when Ruthie insisted on holding her, she thrust her into her arms as if to say, “There it is, that’s the situation, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.” Then she turned her back on them, wiped the sour expression from her face, and turned her attention smilingly to the other babies, lying side by side like mummified cocoons of pale butterflies.

  Late that evening, when Rosa lay waiting for a visit from her mother, she suddenly remembered that Angela had died two months before the birth of her last grandchild. All of a sudden she became conscious of the bereavement that had passed her by, sat up in bed, and burst into loud wails that brought all the nurses on the night shift running to her bed. They plumped up her pillows, massaged her temples, gave her herbal tea, and when they saw that they had no alternative, they put the deform
ed baby in her arms, in the hope that she would succeed in calming her mother.

  Rosa held her baby and rocked her in her arms, and the dammed-up tears burst out. She wept as she had never wept before, for all the years when her eyes had been dry. She wept for her orphaned state, for Rina the little refugee, for Mischa the Holocaust survivor, for her unfulfilled love for Shraga, for the death of her friend Ruthie, for the youth that had passed her by, for her mother who had left this world, for the different child to whom she had given birth, for Joseph who was keeping himself apart from her, and for the terrible change about to take place in her life. And when the tears splashed onto the baby’s bald head and wet her clothes, the nurses took her away and gave her mother a sedative.

  “It’s because she gave birth to a retarded child,” the empty-bellied women in the adjacent beds whispered. The whispers seeped through the flimsy walls, swept down the corridors, invaded the rooms, and cast terror into the hearts of the women lying on the narrow beds in the cold, sterilized delivery rooms, with their bellies looming in front of them and their legs in stainless steel stirrups raised high in the air for the convenience of their obstetricians. Afterward the nurses on the night shift told the day shift nurses that in spite of the sedative Rosa had wept inconsolably all night long. Early in the morning her tears dried up, and she held out her arms to her baby with a welcoming smile, bared her breast, suckled her, and cooed at her as if nothing had happened. After feeding the baby she held her in her arms and kissed her tenderly all over her body. The baby belched, looked back at her sleepily, and Rosa felt her breath stopping and her tiny limbs stiffening as her body braced itself to receive the pure pleasure of her mother’s kisses and soak up every sign of her love.