The Fairest Among Women

by Dalya Bilu

  * * *

  During the seven days of mourning Rosa saw him winding the cuckoo clocks at exactly seven o’clock every evening. But nevertheless the cuckoos failed to utter their cries, and during the whole of the mourning period they stayed shut up in their little houses. When she noticed that the pendulums too were still, she told Peretz the Cabalist, who had heard of Joseph’s death and hurried by to offer his condolences, taking the opportunity to inspect the delights of her body at the same time. Weighing her heavy breasts pressing against the bodice of her mourning dress with caressing eyes, and peeking through the mourner’s tear at the neckline, he was happy to explain that for seven days the soul of the dead man hovered in the air of the house of mourning. He would see his family and the condolence callers and try to perform necessary chores in the house. Only after the mourning period was over did the soul leave the house and turn to its affairs in the next world. Once she had heard this explanation from the lips of the cabalist, Rosa was able to tell him how after he wound the clocks Joseph would sit next to her and mock the mourners, curse his children, especially Angel, and stick his hands into the tear in her dress.

  Peretz’s face grew grave, and he stared into her eyes. “You shouldn’t let him occupy your thoughts all the time,” he said. “It’s only natural for you think about him now, but you should stop it as soon as possible. Constant brooding about the dead harms the living in the end.” And he added that in order to get rid of her thoughts about the dead man she had to write Joseph’s name on a piece of paper and bury it in the ground close to the threshold of the house. Then she had to take a little rainwater, sprinkle it outside the house, and say: “Just as this water is poured out, so all thoughts of Joseph will depart from me.”

  Although she knew that she would never do it, she promised Peretz to obey his instructions after Joseph had been dead for a month. During the week of mourning, when his spirit was wandering round the house, before she went to sleep, Rosa would murmur that she forgave him and invite him to join her in bed. In order not to waste precious time Joseph would jump in next to her at once, making the bed bounce merrily, and clasp her from behind in the familiar embrace. As soon as she felt his hands wandering over her body, his tongue poking into her ear, and his member thrusting inside her, she would forgive him for Ruhama, and wake up with him to a morning of love. And when she was asked the meaning of the black rings round her eyes, she would tell her children with a sigh that she hadn’t slept a wink all night, she missed their father so much. The marks of the love bites on her neck she covered with a scarf, only allowing herself to delight in the sight of these souvenirs of his passion in the privacy of the bathroom when she bathed.

  A month after he left the house she woke from a light sleep early in the morning to the sound of clear and unfamiliar laughter echoing in the room like the delicate chiming of glass bells. She sat up in bed and looked for the source of the sound. She groped her way to Angels crib, and found the baby who had never smiled once since the day she was born, lying on her back looking at a gray crow that was tapping on the windowpane with its beak, as if begging for food, and laughing shrilly. With tears in her eyes Rosa embraced the laughing baby. That morning, long before the alarm clocks went off in her children’s houses, all seven of them woke up to the ringing of their telephones and the sound of their little sister laughing on the other end of the line.

  “Angel’s laughing.” Rosa spread the good news through the neighborhood. “She’s laughing. She’s going to be all right.”

  “We’ll still show those doctors,” she said to Dror when he came that evening to help her give his aunt a bath.

  “I never doubted it for a minute,” he replied. “She’s laughing, and she’ll talk too, and apart from that she’ll be the prettiest girl in the country.”

  ten

  PORTRAIT OF A HUSBAND

  From the day she buried her husband, Rosa abandoned her daily routine and began to neglect her appearance, the house, and Angel. She did only what was strictly necessary. She fed the baby and changed her, watered the plants, bought the groceries, met Rachelle for afternoon chats, and all the time she felt a constriction in her throat that made it difficult for her to breathe. She spent hours doing nothing, her dress stained, her hair greasy, the white roots exposed, and her nail polish chipped. Every evening she passed through the rooms, rummaging in the children’s beds and searching for traces of Joseph, for his smell and the prints of his body. And when the longings grew unbearable, she would go to the linen cupboard, carefully remove the stained sheet, rub the fabric between her fingers, and with quivering nostrils breathe in her husband’s smell.

  She especially missed the calls of the wooden cuckoos popping out of their little houses and punctually announcing the hour, and one day in a fit of longing she tried to get them back on course by winding the steel springs with the tiny iron keys. But, loyal to their original master, the birds stubbornly refused to cooperate, and as if on purpose to confuse her, they began popping out unexpectedly at all hours of the night and day, filling the house with a deafening chorus of rising and falling cries that startled Angel from her sleep and made her burst into nervous tears. In despair Rosa decided to leave them alone, but once in a while, when she couldn’t bear the silence, she would open the little portholes and peek with one eye at the lifeless birds. And they would stretch their drooping necks and greet her with a single weak, hoarse cuckoo cry.

  One long, lonely night she began to hear a nibbling, gnawing sound, and she had no idea what it could be, until a few days later she found a little pile of sawdust at the foot of the oldest clock in the house. One week later she found a similar pile under the clock next to it, and before long her once spotless house was full of yellow sawdust floating through the air, covering the furniture in a layer of pollenlike powder, seeping into the mattresses, and parching her throat. Suspecting the cuckoos, she opened their little portholes and discovered hollow, half-eaten wooden birds too desiccated to greet her with even the weakest of cries. Soon the birds and wooden clocks containing them were completely eaten away by the strong jaws of invisible creatures that Rosa never succeeded in seeing eye to eye, leaving behind them complicated mechanisms of wheels and cogs, pendulums, springs, and clock faces hanging on the walls, to the astonishment of all her visitors.

  Together with the disappearance of the cuckoo clocks, the tradition of family dinners on Friday nights vanished too, and one day she found herself betraying Tzadok in the old corner grocery store and doing her shopping in the neighborhood minimart. Ready-made junk food, frozen pizzas, industrial kebabs, veggieburgers, and baby food packed in little glass jars with huge smiles plastered over plump babies’ faces on their labels began to fill her kitchen. And canned food, dry crackers, and all kinds of sweets that had never made their appearance in her home before began to fill her pantry shelves.

  On the desolate evenings, after the seven daily telephone calls to her seven children, she would sit with Angel, open the family photograph album, show her her father, and stroke the pictures of Joseph looking out at her from his photographs as he bathed in the hot springs of Ein Gedi, stood in front of David’s Citadel, sipped beer in Jaffa port, and played with his grandchildren. Angel would gaze at the strange face looking out at her and try to make her presence unfelt, as if she sensed that he had left them because of her. At those moments Rosa did not spare her daughter, and in a voice mingling love, reproach, and righteousness she would say: “Until you arrived everything ran like clockwork. From the day you came you turned my life upside down.”

  Dror came to visit often, bringing them a few moments of happiness. He would read Angel stories, and she would respond with her merry chiming laugh, he would play horsie with her like Grandpa Joseph used to play with him, try to teach her to clap her hands, bathe her, and put her to bed. When he left and silence descended on the house again, Rosa would go to bed and try to banish harsh thoughts of Angel and how her life had changed from the moment she was born.

>   * * *

  In the first year after Joseph died Rosa went regularly to visit his grave. Once a month, at twilight, in an impressive ceremony she would go up to the cemetery with Leslie-Shimon and drive along the paths winding between the silent, crowded tombstones. And when they arrived Leslie-Shimon would place a little stone on the tomb, and Rosa would ask him to leave her alone to commune with his father and come back for her in an hour’s time. Ignoring Yochai the Undertaker, who followed her with his expressionless eyes, she would look around to make sure that there was nobody else there. Then she would pour the bottle of water she had brought with her over her husband’s tombstone, sweep away the pine needles that had fallen on it, and clean the black lead letters with a toothbrush. After she had finished tending the grave she would prune the lavender bushes planted around it, and arrange the little stones placed on top of it in an order of her own, in a long straight line like a column of soldiers on parade. After inspecting her work she would look around again, and quickly pull down her panties, lift up her dress, sit down with her bare buttocks on the damp tombstone and inform her husband that she had finished cleaning and he could come out now to smell her secret places.

  Trembling with excitement Yochai the Undertaker would be waiting for her at the cemetery exit, fawningly offer her a glass of cold water, and watch her full lips as they swallowed the water, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in time to her sips. Without a word of thanks Rosa would return the empty glass, and he would grip it with his spidery fingers, and with a vigorous sweep of his arm, as if they were in the middle of a bustling city or deep jungle, he would make way for her, conduct her to Leslie-Shimon’s car, and open the door for her. After the car had disappeared from view, he would hurry to Joseph’s grave. He would stand there for a long time stroking the washed stone saturated with her smell and then raise his transparent fingers to his nose to sniff them, his eyes darting around suspiciously for fear that the dead man would lift the gravestone with his skeletal hands, pounce on him, and wring his vein-roped neck. And when the excitement overcame his skinny body and his legs gave way beneath him, he would sit down heavily on Joseph’s tombstone as if to share the charms of his wife’s body with him.

  Month after month she would go up to the cemetery and perform her rites, until her backside froze in the cold wind of the autumn evenings in Jerusalem. In the long hours she spent there she never succeeded in feeling Joseph’s presence. Sometimes she would try to explain this failure by saying to herself that the worms had already eaten his flesh, that his bones had turned to dust, and that he had vanished as if he had never existed. And a body that had vanished, that no longer had any wishes or desires of its own, could not touch her, not even intangibly. Disconsolately she would return home, get into bed earlier than usual, and ignore Angel’s existence, as if she were to blame for ruining her life.

  * * *

  A year had passed since Joseph’s death, and with the blurring of his presence in the house and the weakening of his smell on the sheet, Rosa decided that she had to do something to preserve his memory. After putting Angel to bed, she emptied all the drawers and shoeboxes in which she kept the family photographs and paged through all the albums until she found the best picture of her husband, the wedding photo taken in Nissim’s studio attached to Fruma’s brassiere and corset salon, where her many-layered wedding gown had been made. The photograph, taken against a backdrop of red autumn foliage, showed his melancholy countenance split by a gaping mouth, as if he were trying without success to smile. With a sharp scissors she cut him out of the photo and the next day she went round to the modern photography studio in the new mall next to her house, and asked them to enlarge Joseph’s face to poster size.

  When the enlargement was ready her husband’s face looked at her in faded colors with his mouth wide open as if threatening to swallow her up. Under Rosa’s scrutiny the young assistant rolled the picture up and slipped it into a thick cardboard tube. From there she went to Tzarfati’s picture framers, which was considered the best in town. She looked round at the empty frames hanging on the walls and staring at her with hollow looks, and asked Tzarfati to show her his most expensive frames. A pile of wooden and plastic frames in all shapes and colors rose before her. With a disdainful glance she rejected them all. “My Joseph,” she was heard to say, “deserves the best, the finest, and most expensive frame there is.”

  As she left the shop, cradling the picture in its cardboard tube in her arms, she heard Tzarfati panting behind her. “There’s one more frame,” he said, “a frame that once held an oil painting from the Renaissance. It was stolen from a museum in Florence,” he explained apologetically, as if he had committed the crime himself. “I bought the frame for a lot of money, and I’ve been looking for a suitable picture ever since.” Since Rosa was looking for the most expensive frame on the market, he added, he could offer it to her at the price he had paid for it. Rosa retraced her footsteps, curious to see this prize, and Tzarfati led her into the depths of the shop. With a ceremonious flourish he pulled out the frame, which illuminated the darkness of the shop and dazzled her eyes with its lustrous gold. The frame was made of heavy wood covered with plaster carved in the shapes of flowers and musical instruments and painted shining gold. On the spot she told him that this was the frame she had dreamed of, and in order to reduce the price she pointed out places where the gilt was peeling off, exposing the white plaster underneath it. Eager to close the deal, the framer promised her that he would restore it with all the artistry at his command, cover the white spots, and make it look like new. When she asked him how much it would cost he mentioned the sum in a timid stammer, as if afraid that she would change her mind. But she didn’t blink an eye, even though the sum came close to her entire widow’s pension for a year. “I have seven working children,” she calculated, “and they’ll all join forces to preserve their father’s memory.” She handed over the picture, gave him a deposit in advance, and asked him to let her know when to come and pick it up.

  In the following weeks she visited the framer regularly to inquire how the work was going, and when he called to say that it was ready, she asked Leslie-Shimon to go and pick it up in his car. For a week Rosa worshiped at the shrine of the picture as it leaned against the wall in the living room covered with a white sheet, and then she decided to hold a ceremony in honor of its hanging. She postponed the ceremony for another week, so that it would coincide with Angel’s second birthday.

  In honor of the occasion she worked all day in the kitchen, making a birthday cake, almond cookies, and marzipan balls, and in the evening all the children and grandchildren gathered at the house. After they had raised Angel three times on a chair and wished her health, happiness, and growth, they all turned to the huge picture leaning against the wall. A sigh of admiration broke from their lips as the sheet was removed. Feeling the carved gilt flowers and musical instruments with their fingers and stroking their father’s face behind the protective glass they told Rosa that they had never seen such a beautiful frame in their lives. In a joint effort Leslie-Shimon and Jackie-Ya’akov held the heavy picture up on the bedroom wall, moving it up and down, to the right and left, according to Rosa’s instructions. After lengthy consultations with the rest of the family, she finally decided on a spot directly opposite her bed, enabling her to see her dead husband every night before she fell asleep, wish him good-night, and wake up with him in the morning.

  That night, when she curled up in bed, Rosa looked at Joseph. His teeth bared in a grimace of a smile, his eyes looked back at her lovingly, reflecting the golden light spilling onto him from the frame. “Good-night,” she whispered, blew him a kiss, and switched off the light.

  In the morning she woke up with a feeling that she wasn’t alone. Apprehensively she opened her eyes and encountered Joseph hanging opposite her and looking at her with the warm, familiar expression in his eyes glittering through the glass. It was the same look into which the waking Rosa had been sucked every morning of her m
arried life, when he leaned over her and examined her face framed in her golden hair lying loose on the pillow, until he abandoned their conjugal bed with Angel’s birth.

  That morning was Angel’s first day at the nursery school for children with special needs. Filled with emotion, Rosa waited with Angel in her arms for the van to take her to the day care center. When the door of the minibus slid open, she climbed in and her eyes fell on the handicapped children crowded on the seats and sitting in their wheelchairs. Some of them were as short as Angel, but unlike her beautiful blond child, some of them had flattened faces, gray skins, round eyes protruding from their sockets, dark tongues lolling from their mouths, and spittle dribbling onto the bibs tied round their necks. Children with thin straight hair stared at her with slanting eyes and greeted the new little girl with broken words jumbled together in incoherent sentences. Some of the children were strapped into their wheelchairs, their eyes staring blankly and their arms and legs twitching uncontrollably.