The Fairest Among Women

by Dalya Bilu

  After three months of flowers, gifts, cafés, and slow dancing in the basement studio, as they sat down to rest on a wooden bench in the gardens of Elisheva House, he asked her to marry him.

  “And you should know,” he added after the proposal that made Rosa’s knees turn to water, “that you owe me. First because we promised each other, and second, because of you I never learned a thing in all those years that I sat next to you in school.”

  Rosa opened her eyes wide in astonishment.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “I couldn’t concentrate,” he said with lowered eyes. “Don’t you remember? I couldn’t stop stroking your legs under the desk. Four hours a day, six days a week, twenty-six days a month, ten months a year, for eight whole years.”

  “I don’t remember,” she replied, wondering how such an important memory had escaped her.

  “How’s that possible? For eight years I stroked your legs under your skirt and you don’t remember? When I took a rest because my hand was tired, you would kick me under the desk. In the first grade you kicked me with those boots you had, the red ones with the laces, and in the end, in the eighth grade, with the patent leather pumps with the pointed toes. My legs were black and blue from all those kicks. And apart from that, a minute ago I proposed marriage to you and you haven’t answered me yet.”

  Full of excitement, Rosa went home, trying without success to remember the shoes Shraga had mentioned. In the evening she called all her children, and they hurried to her house for an emergency meeting. The girls were in favor of the marriage, and the boys were opposed to it. And when she saw that they were incapable of coming to an agreement, she asked them to leave her.

  That night she informed her dead husband of her intended marriage. Joseph’s eyes narrowed in alarm and his grimace of a smile froze on his lips in astonishment. Ignoring his knocks on the glass imprisoning him, Rosa switched off the bedside light, said good-night to him, curled up in bed, and dreamed of Shraga.

  The next morning she avoided Joseph’s betrayed, offended looks, and after sending Angel to her special day care, she put on her best dress and set off for the basement studio to reply in the affirmative to Shraga’s marriage proposal. She found him sitting erect on a chair that had been upholstered in green velvet about twenty years before. When her eyes grew accustomed to the dim light they discovered gilded paper chains hanging from the ceiling and fluttering lightly and festively above her head.

  “I was waiting for you,” said Shraga. With regal stateliness he rose to his feet and put his arm around her waist.

  There was no need for Rosa to put her answer into words. With a dancer’s grace Shraga rose to the tips of his toes, bent her neck a little, and pressed an intrusive kiss on her lips, a kiss that was surprisingly similar to that first kiss in the school gymnasium, where the air was full of the smell of sweaty adolescent bodies and the faint, rubbery smell of new gym shoes. And as if Joseph had never existed, Rosa parted her lips, rolled her tongue round inside his mouth, sucked his lips as if they had always been hers, and smelled the sweet scent of oranges that she had dreamed of all her life, even though Joseph’s smell of nicotine mingled with lavender had tried to banish it from her memory.

  twelve

  LOVE TO THE STEPS OF A DANCE

  On the night before her wedding Rosa had an unexpected visit. Her mother came to her for the first time since she had departed for a better world. Rosa woke to the painfully familiar sounds of rubbing, sighs, and stifled cries rising from her pillow, and she sat up heavily in bed to find her mother next to her in a gleaming white nightgown. And as if she had not gone to her rest so many years ago, she opened her toothless mouth and unburdened her heart: “You must cancel this wedding. What do you need it for? Take an example from me. When your father died and I was left alone, it never occurred to me to look for someone else, even though I was far younger than you and I only had one child. And besides, it will upset Joseph. He’s already told me that he intends to avenge himself and make your life a misery. You can still change your mind. What do you need trouble for? And think of Angel. Instead of concentrating on her and looking after her, you’ll have to look after a strange man. And what if he doesn’t love the child and makes you both unhappy?” Angela had her say, and when she realized that her words were falling on deaf ears, she vanished into thin air.

  In the morning Rosa looked at her mother’s white porcelain teeth, parted in a dazzling smile in the glass jar, and she wasn’t sure if she had really seen her or if it had been a dream. In order to be on the safe side, she took the glass jar, and instead of brushing the dentures as she did religiously every morning, she threw out the water and hid the jar together with the teeth under the sink in the cupboard where she kept the cleaning agents. Her mother’s warnings came back to echo in her ears when she removed the diamond-studded wedding ring she had received from Joseph in honor of their silver anniversary, hid it away in her bedside cupboard, and looked for a long time at her naked finger, where a band of white skin remained as a souvenir of her first husband. Then she tried on the ring Shraga had bought her and thought happily of the promise of the new life awaiting her, and when she took it off again and put it away in its box, the band of white skin looked at her accusingly, reminding her of forgotten things and rebuking her for the happiness she was demanding for herself.

  Shraga, who was getting married for the first time, insisted on a big wedding with a lot of guests. And when Rosa hesitated as to what to wear, thinking it inappropriate for a woman in the prime of life marrying her second husband to wear white like a young bride, he overrode her objections and demanded that she wear a white wedding dress.

  Reveling in the opportunity to deck herself out in a bridal gown for the second time in her life, Rosa got into Leslie-Shimon’s car, squeezing in next to Ruthie, who was holding Angel on her lap. Rosa stroked the little girl’s hair, straightened her tiny ruffled dress, made to match her mother’s, and rubbed an invisible spot on her white doll’s shoes. Excited by her new shoes Angel waved her little legs and kicked lightly at her mother’s knees. Afraid of dirtying her dress, Rosa asked her to stop, and when she failed to obey her, she gripped her feet firmly in her hands. Shrieking and kicking, the little girl tried to free her legs, but Rosa refused to relax her grip. And thus she arrived exhausted and flustered at the wedding hall, her lacy knees covered with tiny gray footprints and Angel’s screams echoing in her ears.

  Large, solid, and determined, she stood next to Shraga under the wedding canopy, with Dror holding the train of her wedding dress, which was made of layers of gleaming ivory silk. With a sweet swooning sensation making her feel giddy and sending shivers of pleasure through her flesh, she imagined what was waiting for her at home in bed, in Shraga’s eager arms.

  From the heights of her tall body she looked down lovingly at her little bridegroom, encased in a suit whose size would have been more suitable for a bar mitzvah boy. Shraga stood on tiptoe and stretched up his arms in order to reach her veil and lift it from her face. Rosa lowered her eyes and looked at her husband leaping up in front of her. Then she opened her arms, embraced him tightly, and lifted him up until his eyes were on a level with hers. With difficulty he extricated his hands from her embrace, lifted the wedding veil from her face, and planted a quick, moist kiss on her lips, smeared with a thick layer of bright red lipstick. Blushing, she lowered her bridegroom gently to the floor, peeked down at his red lips, and recoiled as she suddenly found herself looking at Joseph, standing beside her in his wedding suit and pushing Shraga aside with his big hands and feet, his penis sticking up defiantly in front of him. With all her might she tried to banish the images of the past from her mind and to concentrate on the present and the words of the rabbi, which sounded like the nervous spluttering of a half-closed tap. But the images of her first wedding refused to go away, all but obliterating the little figure of her new husband.

  Suddenly she saw the faces of her three young friends standing round her—Rac
helle, Ruhama, and Ruthie—their bodies writhing, tears streaming from their eyes, and peals of stifled laughter breaking out of the hands covering their mouths. Shraga stole a look at his wife, standing smiling at his side, and stepped delicately on her foot, shod in the white silk shoe she had ordered specially from Grisha, the Russian shoemaker, in the commercial center of the city. As if waking from a distant dream she turned her attention to Rabbi Meir standing in front of them and mumbling unintelligibly, but to her dismay encountered instead the eyes of Rabbi Elbaz from her first wedding, staring at her with undisguised lust. Then his eyes had devoured her fleshy mouth, descended to her chest, weighed her heavy breasts swelling like rising dough in her pregnancy, and finally come to rest on her crotch. Rosa blushed in embarrassment and giggled when she saw Rabbi Elbaz’s eyes moving from her to Joseph and focusing on the swelling in his trousers. Her giggles turned to peals of laughter when the rabbi let out a shriek, covered his eyes with the corner of his prayer shawl, and asked faintly for a glass of water.

  The guests in the reception hall looked in astonishment at the giggling bride with her double chins quivering like jelly, and put it down to the fact that she was overcome with joy at her good fortune in having found this second husband. At a second nudge from Shraga’s foot, Rosa recovered her gravity and made an effort to listen to Rabbi Meir, who was singing her praises as an excellent housekeeper and cook, while her ears rang with Rabbi Elbaz’s stammering attempts to read the marriage contract with the forbidden sights piercing his eyes like spears.

  “Mazel tov!” cried the guests surrounding Rosa and Shraga in a sticky, suffocating circle. Rosa didn’t see them. She was absorbed in the past and the sight of Rabbi Elbaz fleeing the wedding canopy as if his pants were on fire. At the same moment Shraga took her hand in his and led her to the dance floor, where the Five Jokers band was playing a passionate Argentine tango. Shraga wound his arm round her waist, pressed her body to his, and found his head buried deep in the cleavage between her breasts, and his feet tangled in the long train of her dress. The guests sitting at the tables looked down in embarrassment at the plates of hummus, cauliflower salad in mayonnaise, and pickles, and stifled their laughter. As giddy as a drunk Rosa spun around with her husband in the stylish steps he had taught her in their private lessons in the shelter and the interminable rehearsals before the wedding, ignoring his feet stamping on the train of her dress and counting the steps silently to herself: One-two-three, One-two-three. When the guests joined them on the floor at the request of the emcee, Shraga led her to the family table, where her seven children were waiting for her with their spouses and their children, and with little Angel sitting on Ruthie’s lap, admiring her new shoes.

  All evening long Shraga kept refilling her glass and piling mountains of food on her plate, and Rosa ate until she felt the seams of her dress were about to burst. Gasping for breath as the wedding dress grew ever tighter around her waist, she pressed her offspring to eat and looked round the table with a satisfied air, congratulating herself at having produced all these happy, laughing people.

  Laden with gifts and envelopes, tipsy and giggling, like a pair of youngsters intent on mischief, Rosa and her new husband arrived home. When she slid the key into the lock, she looked at her beloved and played with the idea of asking him to carry her over the bedroom threshold, in the gesture Joseph had copied from romantic Hollywood movies. But then she inspected his skinny body, his thin arms, and unsteady stance, and decided that their wedding night would be romantic enough even if the groom didn’t carry the bride over the threshold.

  With stylish little dancing steps, humming a Strauss waltz to himself, Shraga took Rosa by the hand and spun her into the bedroom. Then he began to warble a song by the Egyptian Umm Kaltoum, and took off his bar mitzvah suit, wiggling his hips in a belly dance as he did so. In the tiny tiger-striped bikinis he had bought for the occasion, he gyrated and twisted until the skin-tight shorts slid off his solid buttocks and down his skinny legs until they reached the floor.

  A little pool of smooth, shiny black hair adorned his chest and flowed in a straight narrow line to his belly, where it separated into the many estuaries of a broad delta until it merged with the triangular black ocean below. A pointed pink member peeped out of the luxuriant hair, trembling in excitement.

  Rosa gazed entranced at his mating dance, and, as shy as a virginal young bride who had never seen a naked man before, tried not to look at her husband’s loins. Like an animal surveying its prey before devouring it, he advanced toward her, circling the bed to the left and the right, and keeping his eyes fixed on her as she watched him admiringly. With an agile, acrobatic leap he jumped onto the bed, slid under the quilt, and urged his wife in a coddled voice to hurry up and join him there. Blushing like a virgin Rosa slowly extricated herself from the confines of her wedding dress, clucking her tongue as she noted the black footprints of her groom all over the train. Then she pulled the tortoiseshell comb out of her elaborate hairdo, shook out her blond tresses, and let them fall softly down her back. Bashfully she turned her back to her bridegroom, who was watching her every movement with noisy pants and groans of lust, then twisted her arms around her back and undid the hooks of her giant-cupped bra, revealing deep red lines on the white flesh freed of its restraints. In her wide silk panties, with her cascading flesh trembling in desire, she joined the man waiting for her under the quilt. And when her body touched his, he kicked the quilt to the floor and gently cupped her left breast in his hands, groaning slightly beneath its weight, and began to stroke it, round and round in ever diminishing circles until he reached the pink nipple, which pricked up as soon as he touched it. Then he addressed himself to her second breast.

  Rosa, who was becoming impatient, kicked off her panties and sent them flying over her head. The vast silk panties rose into the air, hit the ceiling, and floated lightly down again, swelling like a silver parachute, until they landed on the golden frame of Joseph’s portrait. Watching the flight of her panties with riveted interest, Rosa found herself looking straight into the eyes of her first husband, peeping in astonishment at the sight revealed to them through the hole for her leg.

  Rosa let out a shriek of laughter, looked at her new husband shrinking at her side, clasped him in her hands, and laid him tenderly on top of her body. Shraga was sucked into her flesh, his face sank into the deep cleavage between her breasts, and his modest erection vanished abruptly. With the terror of a drowning man he extricated himself from the depths of her body, floated to the surface, and then rolled down to her side.

  “I can’t concentrate with him looking at me like that through your panties,” he mumbled apologetically.

  “There’s nothing to fear from the dead,” she said, looking at the picture out of the corner of her eye. “Only from the living.”

  “Rosa, I can’t. Please take the picture away,” he begged.

  “Tomorrow, my love,” she replied, and rolled him on top of her again, burying his head between her breasts and rocking him on the folds of flesh that sucked him in like quivering quicksand.

  With her breasts blocking his nose he gasped desperately for breath, raised his head with a mighty effort to her stalklike neck, took a deep breath, and freed himself from her embrace. Then he asked her to turn over on her stomach and tried his luck from behind. But his eager body was repulsed by her immense buttocks, and he asked her to turn over onto her back again, seated himself on her crotch and tried to thrust himself inside her, only to be prevented from doing so by a thick fold of shivering, jellylike fat covering her nether parts like an apron. When his attempts to shift this apron of fat aside failed, Rosa lost her patience and began energetically wriggling her hips underneath him, bouncing up and down and doing everything in her power to open up the way to him, but he remained inaccessible and remote.

  For a long time they struggled together in a tangled melee of limbs, while Joseph, swathed in Rosa’s panties, contemplated his rival’s performance with a supercilious smile.
Rosa could have sworn that she heard a nervous drumming on the glass, and she was afraid that her hotheaded dead husband was about to smash the glass, break out of the magnificent carved frame, and jump straight onto the bed to teach Shraga his job.

  “I can’t,” Shraga said desperately, like a man begging for his life. “First get him out of the way.” But Rosa was already busy energetically massaging his penis, which responded with a slight, promising tremor. When his erection met with her satisfaction and his penis throbbed in her hand, she parted her legs, hoisted Shraga onto her body, and guided him inside her. The member trembled weakly, knocked against her nether lips, and with a brief cough spewed out its contents and went limp.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said as if to console herself. “We’ll try again in the morning, and now go to sleep.” She turned him on his side and wrapped herself around him, swallowing him up in the mountains of her flesh. Protected, swaddled, and embraced in the warmth of her body Shraga fell asleep conciliated, and Rosa, with a tempest still raging in her nether parts, looked at Joseph’s serious face peeping out of her panties, and when she looked away his eyes followed her. Then she looked down at her skinny bridegroom snoring in her bosom as if worn out by his efforts, and promised him that she would not allow Joseph to get in their way, to criticize their lovemaking, and to interfere in their lives.