The Fairest Among Women

by Dalya Bilu

  * * *

  And when she came home with the baby in her arms, she was welcomed by a salute from all the cuckoo clocks in the house, repeated ten times, while the gray neighborhood crows flew around the house and cawed excitedly in their cold, metallic voices. That evening when she bathed the baby, Joseph refused to help her as usual, and little Dror volunteered to do it instead.

  “I told you,” he exulted when she removed the baby’s clothes. “My wife is an angel!”

  “How do you know that she’s an angel?” asked Rosa hoarsely.

  “Look, here,” the little boy pointed at the tiny projecting shoulder blades of his bride-to-be, stroking them in the air. “This is where her wings are folded.” Rosa looked at the two little lumps of flesh projecting from the fragile back, and her hot tears flowed into the bath and salted the water where the mite was splashing.

  “Why does she need wings?” she asked.

  Dror looked at his grandmother pityingly. “To fly with,” he said confidently.

  “And when will she fly?” asked Rosa, the tears choking her.

  “When the time comes and she wants to, she’ll spread her wings and fly,” said Dror, and added hesitantly: “And when she flies, I’ll fly with her.”

  After a long silence, he asked: “What are you going to call her?”

  “I haven’t thought of a name yet,” she said, looking down at the bathwater with her eyes full of tears. “Do you have any ideas?”

  “I want you to call her Angel,” he said in a pampered voice.

  Rosa whispered the name absentmindedly, like a soothing mantra: “Angel, angel of God, ministering angel, angel from heaven, my little Angel,” forgetting the angel of Death, the evil angel, and the fiendish angels of destruction who torture the dead in hell. When she became accustomed to the name, she realized with a shock that it was the Hebrew version of her mother’s name, Angela, and it was bad luck to call the living after the dead. But when she thought about it, she found reasons in favor of the idea. Since this child was different, since she had given birth to her against all the odds, and since her mother had died so soon before the birth, it was a sign that she was permitted to ignore the instructions her mother had given when she was still alive. To these well-considered reasons, she added the fact that the name had been requested by Dror, her first grandchild, and she couldn’t refuse him.

  And the name “Angel” in Hebrew, together with the non-Hebrew name “Angela,” the date of birth, and identity number were written down by the clerk in the Interior Ministry on a clean new page with seven compartments bearing the title “Children,” and added to Rosa’s ID booklet. And Rosa stapled the new page onto the old, shabby one bearing the names of her seven previous children, written in different handwritings and tightly filling all seven compartments.

  In days to come, when the troubles arrived one on top of the other, her friend Rachelle would say that it was all the fault of the name she had chosen. “If you wanted to call her an angel’s name, you could have called her Ariela, Gabriela, Rafaela, Michaela, but Angel? Why Angel? You wanted an angel and came up with something satanic instead.”

  * * *

  From the moment Rosa came home from the hospital with the baby in her arms, the change she had so feared happened. Afraid of what lay in store, she ignored the ominous signs hovering in the air and tried as hard as she could to maintain the routine of her life.

  Some people said that the crows had been sent to announce the change, because the first time Rosa stepped out of the house pushing the baby’s carriage in front of her, they all stopped what they were doing. Every single crow in the neighborhood crowded onto the telegraph wires over her head, perching there like a celestial honor guard of angels of destruction, balancing themselves by flapping their wings and following the baby with their beady eyes. Rosa looked at Angel and thought she saw her raising her eyes to look at the birds and waving her arms as if she wanted to fly with them.

  Proof of the honor guard, so the neighbors said in years to come, when people didn’t believe their story, were the droppings shed by the crows in their excitement, striping the pavement in straight lines parallel to the telegraph wires they were sitting on. These lines remained there for a long time, in defiance of all the efforts of the street sweepers to get rid of them. And it was also said that the paint on the roofs and the hoods of the cars, which got in the way of the excrement falling from above as they drove past, bubbled and seethed as if they had been splashed by drops of corrosive acid, and a couple of days later it peeled away, leaving an ugly rash of bald spots, as if the cars had been afflicted with smallpox.

  And Joseph changed too. The father who had always loved babies and children so much avoided his new daughter and ignored her existence, as if she had never been born. When he came home from his nights in the cinema, he never went into her room to tuck her in. He never shook her gently awake in the mornings or lifted her up in front of his eyes as he had done with his other children; he never held her in his arms or breathed in her fresh smell. And when he came across her by chance, bundled up in Rosa’s arms, he would avert his eyes from her and pretend that she didn’t exist. And at the same time he avoided contact with Rosa, in case she should abuse his sperm and bring another crooked creature into the world.

  The day the doctors informed her that she was permitted to sleep with her husband again, she bathed and asked Aliza the Hairdresser to come by. Aliza set her hair in elaborate curls and fixed them in place with spray. Then she prepared Joseph’s favorite dish, the Sunday almond soup, and sat opposite him beaming with happiness, watching every spoonful he emptied into his mouth. Unwillingly Joseph dunked a piece of bread in the white soup, soaked up the liquid, and swallowed reluctantly, refusing to look his wife in the eye. And when Rosa removed the bedspread and signaled that the time had come, he put her off with vain excuses, roamed around the house, and rewound all the cuckoo clocks covering the walls of the living room, the kitchen, the passage, and the bedroom. And when all the cuckoos announced at once that the hour nine had struck, he walked out of the apartment, slamming the door behind him, and went to see what was happening in Cinema Rosa, and from there he went to drink arak at Mousa Zilka’s hut. When he came home with a sharp smell of anise issuing from his mouth, he made the rounds of the children’s rooms, where seven empty beds awaited their owners who had flown the nest, huddled up in Ruthie’s bed, and fell asleep under a ragged poster of two kittens playing with a ball of wool.

  When Rosa met him in the kitchen the next morning, he told her that he hadn’t joined her in bed because he didn’t want to wake her. And he did the same thing the next night too, and every night that week. In those days it seemed to Rosa that her husband had grown old overnight. Her body burgeoning before his eyes and her full breasts failed to stiffen his member as in days gone by. Stubbornly he refused to get into their conjugal bed and avoided all physical contact with her. Like a zombie he wandered round the house in his faded flannel pajamas, fraying in the front and tied around his thick waist with an old silk curtain cord. In the evenings, after Rosa put Angel to sleep in her crib, on her back in order to flatten her humps, she would call Joseph in her most seductive voice, and he would pretend to be deaf, wander into the children’s room, and fall asleep curled up like a fetus in one of the seven empty beds.

  This soon became a habit, and every night, after winding the cuckoo clocks, he would go to sleep in one of the children’s beds. Since he was an orderly, methodical man, he decided that on Sundays he would sleep in Ruthie’s bed, on Mondays in Leslie-Shimon’s bed, on Tuesdays in Jackie-Ya’akov’s bed, on Wednesdays in Scarlett-Mazel’s bed, on Thursdays in Lana-Ilana’s bed, on Fridays in James-Gad’s bed, and on Saturdays he would round off the week in Laura-Liora’s bed. On the weekends when the seven children with their wives and husbands and offspring filled the rooms of the house, Joseph would make up his bed on the floor in what had once been his and Rosa’s room, curl up like an abandoned kitten, and fall asleep. Th
en his whistling snores would penetrate Rosa’s ears and keep her from falling asleep. And as she lay awake she would think of the distant days when he would stampede inside her every night and then go to sleep with his arms around her, his nose pressed against her head trumpeting into her left ear, keeping her worst nightmares at bay.

  nine

  A DEAD MAN’S SMILE

  Cinema Rosa closed down immediately after Angel was born. Not that Joseph wanted to close it—on the contrary, he wanted to cry then more than at any other time of his life—but the customers simply stopped coming. Joseph claimed that it was all because his ancient projector was growing weak, the light was faint, and the pictures on the screen were losing their focus and sometimes disappearing altogether. He also said that the sound was coming out cracked and dull and it was impossible to hear the heroes clearly as they bemoaned their bitter fate on the screen. The loyal customers of Cinema Rosa, who started avoiding the place, said that Joseph was choosing bad movies, and the latest films he showed failed to make them cry.

  In fairness to the deserters it must be said that the rival cinemas had a lot to offer the denizens of the neighborhood, who understandably preferred to sit on soft seats upholstered in velvet, to see sharp-edged pictures on the wide screen, and listen to clear voices coming over up-to-date stereo systems. The big crisis that began that year may also have been due to the hard winter in Jerusalem, which led many loyal customers to abandon the icy hall of Cinema Rosa for the heated auditoriums of the new movie theaters.

  Only Rosa knew the truth. When she visited him one day in the freezing, half-empty cinema with Angel bundled up in her arms, she realized that Joseph had begun to muddle up the reels, showing the first last and the last first, and sometimes skipping the middle reel entirely, so that nobody could understand what was going on. At first nobody blamed him, thinking that the films were experimental and avant-garde. But as the plots grew increasingly incoherent, the spectators became increasingly frustrated, especially the movie buffs and self-appointed experts among them, who were embarrassed at their inability to explain the films to the uninitiated. And the audiences began to disappear, taking their tears to new places. The day Rosa found the weeping Joseph alone in the cinema watching a movie without a beginning, middle, or end, she decided on her own initiative to close the place down, and hung up a big sign saying: FOR SALE.

  * * *

  After the cinema closed down, Joseph would vanish right after supper, grunting that he was going to Mousa Zilka’s hut, and come home late at night, a smell of cigarettes rising from his hair, lowering his alcohol-bloated body onto one of the children’s beds. He spent every evening there, drinking, smoking, and lamenting his sufferings to the men crowding the rough wooden benches, staring dully in front of them in a miasma of smoke and sorrow. Their slack lips, clinging obstinately to wet cigarettes sticking to their teeth, exchanged sad stories of unrequited loves and wasted lives. Shoulder to shoulder, night after night, the men crowded into the little wooden hut covered with a gray, corrugated asbestos roof, out of which burst the mighty boughs of a gnarled fig tree.

  How the tree got there nobody knew. One day, Mousa explained to the curious, a sharp little shoot broke through the thick concrete floor. Boldly and impudently the tree pushed aside the concrete weighing down on it and began to thrust its way upward, nourished by the drops of strong red wine sprayed on it by the drunks. As it grew and flourished and put out branches, it began to look down on the people moaning and groaning below. Then it gathered up its courage and, swaying like a drunk, it burst through the asbestos ceiling barring its way to the sun. In those days Mousa would swear to his customers suffering from the raindrops showering down on their heads and the winter winds whistling through their clothes that he had not planted the tree, and perhaps it had been seeded from the leftovers of the dried figs spat out by the workers when they laid the concrete floor. But the old men of the neighborhood told one another on those cold nights, as they warmed their bony hands over olive-oil cans filled with smoldering charcoal, that it was Rosa who had brought the sapling to Mousa, “because Rosa and Mousa had grown up together in the same house in Old Katamon, and when they were children they used to hide away from the grown-ups and fondle each other’s bodies, until Joseph caught them at it and beat them soundly. And the beating they had suffered in common bound them together forever.” And in proof of their words they pointed to the perfect circle cutting through the concrete and surrounding the trunk of the fig tree, which showed that the tree had been planted deliberately, and not by accident. Others liked adding interpretations to the facts, explaining that “if Rosa had brought Mousa a sapling of a fig tree, it proves that they were in love, but they didn’t dare give this love any expression because of Joseph’s fanatical jealousy of his beautiful wife.” In any event, everyone agreed that Mousa, who received the tree from his childhood love, began to develop strong feelings of affection for it. They said that at night he would water it in secret with the leftover wine in his customers’ glasses. And when the spirit took him he would hug the tree and kiss it, and on frosty nights he would wrap a thick woolen blanket around it, whisper his deepest secrets into the knots in the wood that opened up to him like eyes, and share with it his secret love for Rosa.

  And when the first fruits of the tree ripened in the summer, the people of the neighborhood would form a long line outside the hut with the hole in the roof, and ask to buy the soft, juicy figs that tasted of wine. The best figs Mousa would put into a brown paper bag and give Joseph for Rosa. And when she received the gift she refused to share the figs with her children. “Because they’re full of alcohol and smell as if they’re been soaked in wine, and they’re not good for children,” she would justify herself, and then she would take them with her to bed. Since she knew that they were free of worms, for worms could not survive in wine, she would never split them open and peer inside them suspiciously, but greedily stick her white teeth straight into the soft pink flesh. Then the sweetness would spread through her body, making her limbs heavy and her head spin giddily.

  For six months after Angel’s birth Joseph spoke neither good nor ill to Rosa, and when she tried to engage him in conversation he turned a deaf ear. And one night, when he came back from Mousa’s hut, his mouth reeking of cheap arak and his coat and hair saturated with cigarette smoke, Rosa opened the door and received him with arms outstretched, ready to embrace him, but the embrace never took place, because Joseph bowed his head and evaded her arms. Sadly she followed him to the children’s room, where he tried to settle down in Jackie-Ya’akov’s bed, and announced firmly that they had to talk. Joseph stared at her, and she felt as if he was looking right through her to the wall behind her. And when she tried to force him to talk to her, and spoke about their lives together, about Angel, and about everything that was happening in the house, he didn’t react and behaved as if he hadn’t heard a word. When he took off his coat and remained in the filthy pajamas that he refused to remove, not even to be washed, a sharp pain pierced her body at the sight of what he had been hiding from her so successfully. The tall, sturdy body of her children’s father was stooped and shrunken. With a serious expression on his face he got up and began wandering round the house, looking for a bed on which to pass his delirious night. Tucked into the bed they had once shared, Rosa listened to the shuffling of his slippers as he trailed through the rooms. She wanted to get up and tell him that today was Sunday, and therefore he should sleep on Ruthie’s bed, but she fell asleep before she could do so. And when she found him the next morning in Leslie-Shimon’s bed, sucking his thumb while his other hand was busy squeezing his penis, she realized that something had happened and Joseph had begun to mix up the days of the week.

  When he finally got out of bed she saw that it was wet and sticky with semen. She put clean sheets on the bed and tried to persuade him to take off his pajamas so she could wash them. But Joseph clung to the frayed pajamas as obstinately as an infant, his thumb stuck in his mouth, mumbl
ing unintelligibly, and she knew that the battle was lost. “We’ll wait until Saturday, and when everybody comes for lunch we’ll force him to undress and wash the pajamas,” she said on the phone to Leslie-Shimon, who from the day his father had begun to decline had inherited his position and taken charge of family affairs.

  On Monday night the same thing happened again. Joseph shuffled round the house, holding the top of his pajama pants and looking for a bed on which to lay his stinking, sweaty body. “Today’s Monday, and tonight it’s Leslie-Shimon’s turn,” she reminded him. Joseph took no notice of her, upset the sacrosanct order, and curled up in Jackie-Ya’akov’s bed, with the reek of his long-unwashed body rising in her nostrils.

  And in the coming weeks, as his confusion increased, Rosa knew that there was no more hope. On the nights of the last year of his life he would wander round the house like a man lost in the wilderness, searching for a place to lay down his head. Since he had always been a methodical and order-loving man, Rosa tried to discover a method behind his new sleeping arrangements, but was unable to find any logic or order in it. Joseph had lost count of the days, and even Friday nights, when the whole clan gathered in the house, failed to penetrate the fog in his mind and bring him to his sixth child’s bed.

  In those days, when her husband shuffled through the rooms seeking refuge in one of his children’s beds, she would think painfully of that other Joseph, who would wake the children up on Saturday mornings, fish them out of bed, hold them in a viselike grip, and, as they wriggled in his arms like fish out of water, would rub his bristly chin on their soft cheeks. The children’s faces would turn red with the rubbing, and with shrieks of pain and glee they would beg him for mercy. And she would remember how on Saturday afternoons he would put on his thick winter hat with its furry earflaps, lurch around on all fours, swaying like a drunk, and squat in a threatening position in the middle of the living room rug. And when the children gathered around with timid giggles, he would shake his head and swing the earflaps to and fro, and then he would make a very fierce face, growl angrily, and lie down on his back waving his hands and feet in the air. According to the well-known rules of the game, the children would tease him, raise his hat to reveal his always-sad face, and shriek delightedly as he bared his teeth in predatory growls. With shrill cries they would scatter and hide all over the house, and Joseph would lumber after them on all fours. Grinding his teeth menacingly, he would find them one by one, huddling in the corners or hiding under the beds, gather them all in his arms, and throw them in a squirming heap of heads, arms, and legs onto the double bed where Rosa was trying to take a nap. With a leap that shook the bedsprings he would join the pile of wriggling bodies, stealthily fondling his wife as he did so.