The Fairest Among Women

by Dalya Bilu

  Rosa looked pityingly at the range of disabilities surrounding her and parted tearfully from Angel, who sat among them like a budding flower whose petals had not yet opened. When she got home she went into the bathroom and in order to calm herself and fill the empty hours stretching ahead of her, she ran a hot bath, poured in oil of rosemary, took the lavender soap, and lay there for a long time with the oily water lapping her body and smoothing her skin. She paid special attention to her private parts, viciously uprooting the white hairs growing in her bush with a tweezer, scrubbing herself thoroughly down there with the lavender soap, and washing inside too. She inspected the scar of the operation running down her stomach, puckering the flesh and cutting deeply into it. She rubbed body lotion into the scar, selected her best dress, put it on, and went down to visit her friend Rachelle.

  eleven

  THE DANCING SCHOOL

  “Blessed be he who revives the dead.” Rachelle greeted Rosa warmly, made her coffee, offered her almond cookies, and tried to talk to her about the future. “And in order to get ready for life, you’re coming with me now to a course in sixties’ dancing,” she said, and told her about the fantastic teacher whose fame had spread throughout the city and with whom all the women were in love, who had opened a studio in the shelter of a building nearby, where he taught women of their age to dance, bringing the color back to their cheeks and giving them a new appetite for life. “The time has come for you to enjoy yourself,” she said. “While the whole country was having fun, dancing, eating, and drinking, you were bearing babies, washing diapers, cooking, and waiting for your husband to come home.”

  “But I’ve never danced in my life.” With the stab of an old insult, Rosa remembered all the times she had stood leaning against the walls of the school gymnasium watching the folk dances, while all her slender classmates twirled with enviable lightness in the arms of the boys. But nobody volunteered to lift her up and spin her round. Once there was a boy who loved her, who was brave and determined and wanted to prove his strength in front of everyone and impress her, and he invited her to dance with him. But when all the boys swung their partners lightly in the air, his legs buckled beneath her weight and she found herself lying on top of him on the floor, to shrieks of laughter from all those present in the hall.

  “The situation has changed,” snapped Rachelle, as if she had read her thoughts. “We don’t dance folk dances, and nobody has to lift you up in the air.” And so saying she dragged her off to the studio in the air raid shelter.

  With sounds of joy the teacher welcomed them at the door, but as soon as his eyes fell on Rosa he opened them wide and fell silent.

  “You?” he whispered when he recovered his breath.

  “You?” she asked, with a blush rising to her cheeks and the intoxicating, tangy smell of freshly picked oranges rising in her nose.

  “Me,” he went on whispering, as if the two of them were alone in the room.

  Rosa recovered first, and looked down at him. He was very short, as if he had stopped growing since she had seen him last, his body was slender, and his thin hair was dyed black and carefully combed and plastered to his head with liberally applied gel, exposing strips of pink scalp and tied back in a pony tail. He couldn’t take his beady black eyes off her, and he stretched his lips in a broad smile that raised his narrow black mustache above his even white teeth. As he came closer his body, clad in a purple velvet suit and a red bow tie, gave off a strong smell of sweet orange-blossom scent. In her embarrassment Rosa lowered her eyes to the concrete floor, where they were greeted by the sight of little patent leather shoes that would have fit her ten-year-old grandson Dror.

  At that moment Rosa felt a weight on her chest and a weakness in her legs, and a wave of heat engulfed her body and broke out in beads of sweat on her face. She was sure that everyone could see how she longed to free herself of her clothes, rip off his velvet suit, and roll naked with him on the shabby carpet adorning the concrete floor. She closed her eyes and leaned against the wall, praying that nobody would sense what was happening inside her.

  “And where have you been hiding your beautiful friend all this time?” he said to Rachelle when he recovered, and slapped her lightly on her butt in pretended rebuke.

  “This month she concluded the year of mourning for her husband,” replied Rachelle, giving her friend a questioning, reproachful look out of the corner of her eye. “She loved him very much—” she lowered her voice— “and refused to be comforted, and that’s why I brought her here.”

  “Wonderful, you did the right thing!” he crowed, and immediately restrained himself and said to Rosa: “I’m sorry for your loss.” But he couldn’t keep the happiness out of his voice as he repeated his condolences and went on to promise that he was going to bring some joy into her life.

  Wet with perspiration Rosa stepped beside Shraga with a train of women following her every movement through narrowed eyes, inspecting the damp stains spreading under her armpits, and whispering spitefully, loud enough for them both to hear: “Poor thing, she’s having a hot flush.” Proudly Shraga showed her his kingdom, decorated with vases full of plastic roses in glaring shades of red and yellow, and posters of cool green hills with red-roofed wooden cabins clinging to their sides. He laughed a lot and demonstrated for her benefit his most graceful steps, the ones he kept for special occasions such as competitions and performances under the patronage of the mayor.

  Rachelle stuck close to her side, watching her eyes as they looked at Shraga, and counting her smiles in response to his. And when she could no longer bear her suffering she hissed in her ear: “All the women here are crazy about him; try not to monopolize his attention or you’ll have them all up in arms against you and nobody in the neighborhood will talk to you.” And Rosa replied with a forced smile: “Don’t be silly. Look how small he is next to me.” And she hoped with all her heart that he would choose her as his partner when they danced.

  The worn-out women with their sagging breasts and heavy thighs, dressed in their best and brightest clothes, their swollen feet crammed into their narrowest and pointiest shoes, arranged themselves in pairs. Rosa found herself looking shyly at the tips of her gigantic shoes as Shraga approached her with light, dancing steps and invited her to partner him. “But I’ve just started,” she stammered as the blush spread over her face, climbed to the roots of her hair, and made her ears blaze. “I don’t know how to dance,” she whispered. “Don’t you remember?”

  “With Shraga you’ll know,” he promised her. Resolutely he clasped her around her thick waist, and under the languishing looks of the women he demonstrated with her the stylish steps on Slow to the strains of Frank Sinatra’s crooning voice pouring in soft, sweet waves into the air raid shelter. Rosa’s feet, unpracticed in the art of dance, stumbled and tripped, but he held her with a strength surprising in someone of his size, and guided her through the steps with his eyes staring straight into the cleavage of her bosom.

  When she felt the heat spreading through her body again and the familiar throbbing in her nether parts, Rosa knew that she was betraying Joseph. She hurried to banish the vain thought from her mind and tried to dwell on all her old resentments against him. She thought of the way he had chased Shraga out of town and of how, but for him, she might have married the love of her youth and changed her destiny. And when she had exhausted her anger against Joseph she felt calmer. Surrendering herself to Shraga’s arms and the warmth of his body penetrating her dress, she flared her nostrils and basked without guilt in the scent of orange blossom wafting from him.

  On the way home Rachelle didn’t say a word. With a stony face she said good-bye, went into her apartment, and slammed the door behind her. Rosa climbed to the next floor and as she mounted the stairs she sniffed her fingertips and luxuriated again in the intoxicating scent of her childhood love.

  The next day Hannah, Rachelle’s former sister-in-law, dropped in to visit Rosa as if by chance, and told her that all the women of the dancing class
were furious with her for robbing them of their heartthrob after all the loving attentions they had showered on him from the day he opened his studio in the neighborhood.

  Bracha, Baruch the Barber’s wife, Hannah told her, was in charge of polishing his shoes. Drora, the greengrocer’s wife, ironed his shirts and every evening made him a salad of the freshest vegetables she could spirit away from the shop, chopped into the tiniest pieces. Rachelle, she told her with a sneer, washed his underclothes for him, and before she washed them she sniffed his underpants and socks and almost fainted with the pleasure of it. Yardena, the thirty-year-old spinster, would wake him up in the morning with coffee, bourekas, and haminos, and strip the blanket off the bed to air, no doubt because he slept in the nude. Nehama would go straight to the bathroom to scrub his back for him, so that it wouldn’t be blemished with pimples, and droves of women would call him up dozens of times a day to whisper lewd words of seduction in his ear.

  “Do you wonder that they all hate you now?” she asked after concluding the graphic descriptions that brought a deep blush to Rosa’s face.

  Later that day Rosa knocked on Rachelle’s door with a plate of the stuffed cookies she had learned to bake from the late Shoshana Zilka. Her friend took the conciliatory offering from her with a frozen face.

  “What did he want of you? Why was he all over you like that?” she asked, her strong teeth chewing the filling of peanuts and pistachio nuts inside the cookies.

  “Don’t you remember Shraga?” Rosa replied with a question.

  “Where am I supposed to remember him from?”

  “He was in our class at school. I can’t believe that you don’t remember him. You heard the story about me and him from Ruthie, and you told your mother, and she told my mother, until in the end it got to Joseph,” said Rosa, trying to refresh the memory of her friend who had caused their separation so many years ago. And when her friend insisted that she didn’t remember, Rosa repeated that he had been he had been in their class throughout primary school, and said that ever since first grade they had loved each other and asked to sit on the same bench, and if the teacher refused Shraga would organize the whole class to go on strike. “Because even though he was so small”— she demonstrated his size between her forefinger and thumb— “he had a lot of power over the teachers and the pupils.” Then she told her about the love letters he wrote her on the backs of his exercise books, and how he would wait every night under her window until she closed the shutter and switched off the light. And when she saw Rachelle’s eyes widening, she added quickly, before she could regret it, that once he had kissed her on the lips, pushed his tongue between her teeth, and vowed that he would marry her and only her. With the taste of oranges on her lips, she told Rachelle that although she had kissed Joseph thousands of times, she had never forgotten that first kiss and the sweetness of its taste.

  Rosa was sure that Rachelle remembered the story, but was pretending to have forgotten it because she was indirectly responsible for their separation. So she added that ever since they had been so cruelly torn apart she had thought of him every night with an aching body, until she married Joseph. And even after her marriage, the pain would sometimes return to remind her of Shraga, especially at the beginning of winter, when the first fresh oranges arrived at the greengrocers’, and their scent overpowered every other smell.

  Rachelle listened to her with glassy eyes, poured her another cup of coffee, and as if the story had made no impression on her, said in a rebuking tone: “You should know that Shraga has never danced with one partner for the whole lesson before. He always changes partners so that we all have a turn to dance with him. We didn’t like the way he tried to come on to you, especially in view of the fact that you were recently widowed. We didn’t understand why he picked you, of all people, and perhaps it would be better if you didn’t come back to the class, because it isn’t fair to the other women who want to dance with him too.”

  But Rosa did go back to the dancing lessons. After a few imploring telephone calls from Shraga, she shampooed her hair and set it in elaborate curls, put on the green dress with the purple sequins she had worn to Scarlett-Mazel’s wedding, and the patent leather shoes she had bought for the Passover before Joseph’s death, and set out for Shraga’s studio. But this time, as he had promised, she was the only student there.

  “Couple dancing is something you have to learn, because you’re not dancing alone, you’re dependent on your partner and you need to be in perfect coordination with him,” he explained.

  Then he taught her how to take the floor with her partner in as stately a manner as if she were a bride dancing with her groom, alone on the floor under the critical eyes of all the wedding guests. As the lessons progressed, he told her that since she looked like a princess, he recommended the waltz. And then he explained to her that for dramatic dancers he recommended the tango, which had been born in flames more than a hundred years ago in Argentina. To the sensuous he taught the rumba; to the romantic, whose natural rhythm was quick, the salsa; and with the naughty ones he danced rock and roll and the cha-cha.

  She soon learned to spin and twirl with him in all the different dances. She was a princess in the waltz, dramatic in the tango, naughty in the cha-cha, romantic in the salsa, and sensuous in the rumba. And when she attained the status of an advanced student, he told her that the way you danced with your partner reflected your relationship with him: “When I see a couple dancing I know who rules the roost at home.” Therefore he advised her always to allow the man to lead, because it was up to the man to determine the rhythm and the tone. And when the lesson was over and he accompanied her home, he would tell her about his life on the way, how he had gone to France, studied dancing, and returned to Israel with a teacher’s diploma. And he told her too about the women who came to the studio in the shelter, and how the classes with him served them as a refuge from their hard lives and their boring daily chores, and how he paid each of them special, personal attention, and treated her like a fairy-tale princess and the one and only woman in his life. “I give them a romantic illusion and an hour’s escape from their husbands and their boring lives, and it’s no wonder that they’re all in love with me and willing to do anything for me.” Rosa listened and she knew in her heart that she was the princess; she was his one and only.

  * * *

  After a month he asked her to go out for coffee with him. Rosa would never forget that first date with Shraga. For a long time he debated which café they should go to, Café Nava or Café Atara in the city center, or perhaps they should choose one of the new, modern cafés that had opened in Emek-Refaim Street in the German Colony. In her ignorance and wish to please him she made the mistake of saying generously that it made no difference to her where they went, and that he should decide. Shraga’s face fell, his already short stature shrank, and he looked like a man forced at gunpoint to dance an unfamiliar dance in front of a rowdy, hostile audience. At that moment she realized that it was only in his basement studio that Shraga took the lead, and only there that he determined the rhythm and the tone. When he emerged into the outside world, she had to take charge.

  With feelings of pity that grew so intense they almost choked her, she saved him from his sufferings and announced decisively that they would go to the new café in the German Colony. Shraga’s face lit up immediately, as if her decision had removed a heavy weight from his heart. In order to avoid any further embarrassments that might ruin the evening she had been looking forward to so much, she informed him that they would walk to the café. As soon as he emerged from his safe shelter, Shraga, so eloquent and entertaining in his studio, seemed to lose his powers of speech. They walked to the café in silence.

  When she told Rachelle about it later, she said that although they were both looking forward to sitting in the café, they advanced toward it at a tired snail’s pace.

  “I’m not surprised,” Rachelle said stiffly. “You walked slowly because you wanted to make it last longer.” Then she e
xplained to her that couples in love try to make their moments together last as long as possible, so that they can chew them over and savor them afterward. And when she pressed Rosa to tell her more, Rosa hesitated for a moment before saying: “You won’t believe what he talked about when he finally opened his mouth, next to the Greek Colony.”

  “What?”

  “Politics and the state of the economy. And when we reached the café at last, he stayed on the same subject and talked about inflation, unemployment, interest rates, and the foreign exchange rate.”

  “Are you joking?” exclaimed Rachelle and burst out laughing.

  “Believe me, politics and economics.”

  After hours of solitary brooding about the topic of conversation between Rosa and Shraga on their first date, Rachelle came to a conclusion and ran triumphantly upstairs to Rosa.

  “I understand!” she cried with the enthusiasm of discovery. “Shraga wanted to talk to you about some significant and serious subject. And politics and economics was all he could come up with. Otherwise he would probably have sat opposite you eating cake and not saying a word.”

  “But I wanted him to talk to me about other things,” said Rosa in a spoiled voice. “About life, love, about the future,” she added and blushed, as if wishing she could take the words back. “And what did he talk to me about? Politics and economics. The things that should have been said went unsaid.”

  “Be patient,” said Rachelle. “Shraga will still say the things you want to hear.”

  And as if Rachelle had been granted the gift of prophecy, Shraga proved her words and made her prediction come true. A week later he took Rosa to a restaurant, and even though she didn’t enjoy the food, finding the stuffed vegetables tasteless and the lamb dry, she liked the idea that somebody else would wash the dishes and loved talking to Shraga, whose tongue had been loosened by an excess of red wine. He wanted to hear about her life. He asked about each of her children, wept when she told him about Angel, and expressed sympathy and amusement when he heard the manner of Joseph’s death. When she fell silent, he looked deep into her eyes, caressed her face with his eyes, and said: “I have nothing to tell. I never got married, and I never had children. I sat and waited for you to come back to me.”