The Fairest Among Women

by Dalya Bilu

  And when the children slid off the bed and ran out of the room with screams of pretended fear, he would whisper into her ear with a melancholy face and tearful eyes that he loved her, and that he didn’t know what to do with all this happiness, which was too much for him and enough for four men like him. And Rosa would shut his mouth with her hand and tell him not to tempt the devil and bring troubles on their heads.

  In days to come, when she thought of his tears and what he had said about happiness, she couldn’t understand what had made him so happy, and why a happy man should cry.

  In spite of his confusion and the havoc it wrought in his life, Joseph continued scrupulously to wind the cuckoo clocks. Every evening, when the cuckoos announced the hour of seven with one voice, he would pass from one to another, confiding his sorrows to them, stroking their wooden wings, winding their springs, and preparing them for another day. When he was done he would search for a bed, and the next morning Rosa would find him with his left thumb stuck in his mouth and his right hand firmly gripping his member and squeezing it until his knuckles turned white. In those days Rosa’s washing machine worked without stopping, boiling Angel’s diapers and the sheets stained with Joseph’s urine and semen.

  And when they found him shuffling through the narrow neighborhood streets on an icy winter day, naked as the day he was born, with a gang of shouting children chasing him and throwing handfuls of gravel at him, the neighbors were unable to recognize the naked, incoherent creature as Rosa’s husband—the tall, proud Joseph. Kind people took him to a shelter for the homeless, and since he went berserk and hit his benefactors, they strapped him to the iron bed with leather straps. In the file they opened for him there they described the circumstances in which he had been found and filed him under the heading “Anonymous.”

  In the few days he spent at the shelter, the cuckoos stayed inside their houses and the hours went by unmarked by their calls. For three days Rosa made the rounds of the police stations, the shelters, and the hospitals with a photograph of Joseph in better days, until Leslie-Shimon saw a current photograph of his father on the back page of the newspaper, with the caption: “Vagrant old man found. His family is requested to present themselves at the nearest police station.” Joseph’s eyes stared out of the photograph with a confused expression, and his mouth, with his thumb in it, drooped at the corners. Accompanied by her children and carrying Angel in her arms, Rosa found him in a vast hall full of iron beds, where the reek of unwashed bodies overcame the strong smell of disinfectant. His clothes were saturated with undistinguishable bodily fluids and his body was covered with bleeding insect bites. On every side she saw creatures resembling him, shapeless and lost: homeless new immigrants and foreign workers whose livers were eaten away and whose minds were blank and who had forgotten their names and whose breath stank of cheap industrial alcohol and rotting teeth. And next to them muddled old men with bewildered eyes in whom nobody took any interest and whose children ignored the weekly reminders sent them on the back pages of the newspapers.

  Rosa took him home in Leslie-Shimon’s car, lovingly bathed his body, dressed the wounds and cracks opening up in his fragile yellow skin, and put him to sleep in their big double bed. When she covered him with the blanket a glint of comprehension flashed in his eyes, and an expression of deathly terror appeared on his face. Like a young man he leaped out of bed and began to wander through the house with the familiar shuffling sound, winding the clocks and stroking the outstretched necks of the wooden cuckoos with his vein-knotted hands.

  Already bowed beneath the burden of caring for Angel, Rosa now had to cope with another helpless creature who disturbed her rest and demanded her attention. When she fed Angel mashed vegetables, Joseph would appear in the kitchen and try to snatch the food from his baby daughter’s mouth. Because of his teeth, which were falling out one by one, he was unable to eat solid food, and Rosa began to prepare exactly the same food for her daughter and her husband. For hours she would stand in front of the stove, stirring huge pots of boneless chicken, carrots, potatoes, baby zucchinis, and celery leaves. When everything was soft, she would empty the contents of the pot into the blender and purée it into a nourishing broth. After feeding the baby she would sit patiently with Joseph, spooning the purée into his mouth and wiping his chin with the kitchen towel tied around his neck until he notified her with a belch that he had had enough. Then he would look at her with a baffled expression, trying to identify his benefactor. Sometimes he would call her by her name, but more often he would call her by the name of their daughter Ruthie. And as his mind grew more and more muddled, he would also address her as Ruhama, her childhood friend, now a good-looking widow who lived in the building next door. In the days when Joseph was still a virile man, Rachelle had told her with a sour expression of commiseration that the neighbors said that he was having an affair with Ruhama. Rosa refused to listen, and to herself she said that it was all spiteful, jealous gossip, because her husband desired her every day and he couldn’t possibly have the strength for another woman as well. Now, when she heard him pronounce her name, she remembered Ruhama’s shifty looks and how she would turn on her heel and go into her house whenever she saw Rosa in the street. Suddenly there rose in her nostrils the cheap smell of jasmine perfume that would invade the house and brazenly usurp the delicate scent of his favorite lavender soap when Joseph opened the door. Again she saw the black, red, and blue marks on his shirt collars, and she understood that they came from makeup that didn’t belong to her.

  She began to suspect that those malicious rumors were true, and the anger seething venomously inside her constricted her throat in sudden hatred for her husband. And when he continued to call her by the name of her rival, she would slap his face and deprive him of his food until the whole house echoed with his despairing cries as he searched the rooms for his bowl. When he began to call for Ruhama one Friday in the presence of the children, Rosa asked them what he meant by it. As if in obedience to a plan agreed on in advance, they all held their tongues and ignored her question, and when she asked again, they made fun of her and said that she had always been suspicious, and asked her what she wanted of their poor old father now, when he wasn’t capable of harming a fly. And when she remained alone in the kitchen, Dror, the most faithful and closest to her of them all, came up and whispered in her ear that he had heard his parents at home talking about Grandpa Joseph’s love for a woman called Ruhama. Rosa clasped Dror to her ample bosom and rocked him as she wept tears of anger and jealousy for the minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months of love Joseph had stolen from her and given to another. And more than the betrayal itself, she was angry with him for not telling her, for he had always told her everything, because she was his best friend.

  And when all her children went home the dam of her tears burst out again. In those moments of weeping, which added up to hours, she forgot all the good things they had shared and remembered only the bad: how he had seduced her that night and gone to bed with her when she was a frightened child of fourteen, how he had taken advantage of his influence over her and persuaded her to marry him. In her anger she blamed him for the fact that she had barely graduated from high school, and because of the children coming one after the other she had never acquired a profession. The tears turned to screams when she remembered all those nights when he told her he was at the cinema or Mousa’s hut, but which he must have spent in bed with Ruhama.

  At those moments Rosa was sure that he hadn’t been satisfied with Ruhama and that he had had other women too. While she was left alone at night to look after the children, he had been out enjoying himself. But most of all Rosa cried for her present situation. Just when she needed him more than ever, her husband had vanished from her life, shirking his duties with the help of a senile disease he had succumbed to on purpose, and leaving her alone with a defective child. Full of self-pity, she thought of her wasted life and of the different life she could have had if only he hadn’t seduced her that night when the war broke o
ut. She wept until she had no tears left, and when Angel began to cry with hunger she wiped her eyes and dragged herself to the baby’s crib, attentive to her every need.

  And while she fixed her eyes on her husband with hard, accusing stares, his condition deteriorated. As dazed as if he had received a terrible blow to the head, he wandered round the house in his outsize diapers and refused to let her wash his body, which reeked of excrement and urine. He spat out the food she pushed into his mouth and looked at her in bewilderment, as if seeing her for the first time in his life, shouting in Italian, which had suddenly come back to him, and calling for Ruhama. And when she summoned the geriatric doctor to the house, he told her that there was nothing to be done, that Joseph’s brain now resembled nothing so much as a piece of Swiss cheese, and that he had to be hospitalized before he harmed her or the baby. But Rosa refused and insisted that Joseph would leave her house only to be buried. And every night, before she put him to bed, she would change his soiled diapers, wipe his wrinkled skin with cotton soaked in olive oil, powder his slack behind bristling with the hairs that were once black and were now white, and look pityingly at his penis with its useless erections. After she tucked the diaper firmly round him she would say good-night and take her leave of him, thinking that this night might be his last with her. Then she would go and take care of Angel in exactly the same way.

  * * *

  On the last night of his life, when Rosa said good-night and took her leave of him as she did every night, he refused to go to sleep. He loosened the diaper round his loins and began to hobble round the house, dragging his emaciated legs from room to room with the diaper flapping between his legs like a dirty tail. Remembering what had happened before, Rosa locked and barred the door to prevent him from slipping out and wandering the streets of the town, and tried to guide him back to bed. But he eluded her grasp, and when she despaired of getting him back to his own bed, she put a mattress on the floor in her bedroom, coaxed him to lie down on it, and covered him with a blanket. He curled up and fell asleep immediately.

  Rosa didn’t get a wink of sleep all night, kept awake by the constant rubbing of his fingers, the snores escaping from his blocked nose, and the noisy sucking of his toothless mouth on his thumb. In the morning, when she saw that he was sleeping peacefully, she took pity on him and didn’t wake him up for coffee.

  It was only later, at midday, that she heard the silence. When she concentrated on the strange silence she realized that the cogwheels of the clocks had stopped turning, the pendulums had ceased their eternal swinging, and the cuckoos had forgotten to announce the hour. Alarmed, she hurried into the bedroom. With the blanket pulled up to his nose Joseph lay on his back while a swarm of buzzing, glittering, green flies hovered over his head like predatory birds. Rosa moved the blanket and saw his mouth. Around the thumb thrust between his lips, Joseph’s mouth was open in a broad, frozen smile of bliss, as if he had been waiting for this moment all his life. She shook his shoulders and his body responded in cold, stiff obedience. She pulled down the blanket and found the fingers of his right hand firmly grasping the rigid member sticking out of his pajama pants like an autonomous being. His whole body was soaked in a pool of fresh semen, the biggest Rosa had ever seen, as if he had ejaculated for the last time in his life all the sperm that he might have produced if he had lived for many years to come.

  “And in his death he permitted himself to laugh for all those years when he never laughed,” she told her children when she informed them tearfully of his death.

  After the undertakers took his body away, the women who worked in the purification chamber told her that at first they couldn’t get his thumb out of his mouth, but when they succeeded in doing so the mouth stayed fixed in a broad smile, as if the dead man had been given wonderful news just before he gave up the ghost. And when they tried to pry his hand from his nether parts they were unable to do so, even when one of them gripped the hand and the other gripped the member and they pulled in opposite directions, until they were afraid of ripping his maleness off his body. Even the doctor they summoned to the purification chamber to free the hand from its grip said it was beyond his powers, for the hand and member were welded together into one inseparable flesh.

  The women told her too that Joseph’s smiling mouth and joviality had infected all those engaged in the sacred task of preparing the body for burial. Thanks to him the purification chamber had been pervaded by such a jolly atmosphere that they had even gone so far as to switch on the radio and listen to the famous cantor Melawski and his children’s choir. And to the rhythm of the cantorial songs the undertakers scrubbed the dead man’s body from top to toe and shot water into its orifices to clean it from the inside too, kicking up such a racket as they did so that the rabbis came in to scold them for their disrespect to the dead. But when they saw the blissful smile on Joseph’s face and gazed appreciatively at the upright member gripped in his hand, they left the room with smiles as broad as his plastered on their faces. And when the water gushed out of his orifices and it was pure and clean and faintly scented with lavender soap, they plugged his rectum with cotton, stood him on his feet, poured nine cubits of water over him, and declared: “He is pure, he is pure, he is pure.”

  They laid him out on a stretcher in the funeral parlor with his scented body wrapped in winding clothes that had no pockets, for the dead take no property with them to the grave, and his private parts rose shamelessly in the air, lifting the sheet like a proud, defiant mast and causing astonishment and confusion in the mourners coming to pay him their last respects. Stifled giggles broke from the half-covered mouths of the young women as they pointed with trembling fingers at the object of their secret lusts. The young men joined in with admiring and appreciative exclamations, while the old men sighed in self-pity, recalling more virile days.

  Struggling to overcome the noise of the crowd pressing up to the body to see the miracle of the erection, the rabbi read the prayers in a nasal voice, rushing through them with untoward haste and doing his best to avert his eyes from the miracle. After he was finished he sat down and asked in a weak voice for a glass of water to be brought to him before he fainted.

  Although she was sunk in her grief, out of the corner of her eye Rosa saw her rival, Ruhama, with a scarf tied around her hair and dark glasses covering her eyes, only her eyebrows peeping over the frames in a black-penciled arch of perpetual surprise. Ruhama stood sobbing next to the stretcher, her thin fingers caressing the air above the erect member. Rosa wanted to pounce on her and beat her up in revenge for all those minutes, hours, and days of the great love that had been denied her and bestowed on her rival, but the strong hands of her sons held her down and prevented her from disgracing the family. Her eldest daughter, Ruthie, who couldn’t bear to see Rosa’s suffering, went up to Ruhama and whispered something in her ear, and she lowered her eyes and beat a hasty retreat, leaving behind her a cloying cloud of the cheap jasmine scent that was painfully familiar to Rosa.

  The undertakers rushed him to his grave, trying to elude the crowds of demons that had materialized from the seed spilled in vain, been gathered into the womb of Lilith, and ejected from it in their present form. And when they cast him into the pit the erection towered up from the ground like an impudent plant wrapped in a winding sheet, mocking the gravediggers’ attempts to cover it with earth. When all their attempts failed, they addressed the dead man, begged his pardon, turned him over with their strong hands, and buried him with his bottom up and his smiling face to the earth, and his penis digging into the ground as if he wanted to fertilize it.

  With trembling knees, supported by her children, Rosa emerged from the cemetery gates, where a tall thin man dressed in a black suit waited for her, holding a glass of cold water on a purple plastic tray. Wordlessly he handed her the glass, watching her with expressionless fish eyes, as the Adam’s apple sticking out of his skinny, pitted neck bobbed excitedly up and down in time to her sips. When she thanked him weakly he introduced himself as
Yochai the Undertaker or, to be more precise, the director of the cemetery, offered her his condolences in his quiet voice, and blushingly added that if she ever required his assistance he would be happy to be of service to her. Rosa breathed in the smell of the fresh clods of earth mingled with that of crushed roots that rose from his clothes, and looked at the two deep furrows running down his cheeks on either side of his drooping mouth, giving him an expression appropriate to his calling. She nodded faintly to convey her thanks, promised to remember his offer, and got into Leslie-Shimon’s car. Yochai hurried after her, tucked her black dress around her legs, and gently slammed the door behind her.

  When she got home she asked her children to leave her to her grief, and with nobody to see, she changed the last sheet bearing the traces of her husband’s semen. After a moment’s hesitation, she folded the sheet into a little bundle, tied it up with a white silk ribbon, and buried it deep in the linen closet.

  When she heard the baby’s reedy cries, she went into Angel’s room and told Ruthie that she would look after her. With a heavy heart she looked at the baby who was responsible for everything. Angel’s birth, unintended and unexpected as it was, had upset her life and interfered with its smooth and blessed routine. Because of her one change had led to another and another until it had all ended in Joseph’s death. With dry eyes and hard hands she fished the baby out of her crib, quickly and silently changed her diaper, fed her the food Ruthie had prepared for her in advance, and put her down to sleep. She did not make cooing noises as usual or stroke her body or kiss her hair. And as she handled her with fixed, practiced movements, the doll, Belle, who was sitting on the chest with her back to the wall, fixed her with her glassy blue eyes in a cold, hard stare that missed nothing. With an ominous shiver running down her spine Rosa decided to get rid of the doll, which was never really hers and which reminded her of the past. But when she was about to throw her into the trash can in the kitchen, Ruthie snatched her from her hands and scolded her: “Are you crazy? You want to throw such a beautiful doll into the trash? Wait till the baby grows up, and she can play with it.” And without asking Rosa she put her on top of the wardrobe.