by Dalya Bilu
In the middle of the night they summoned Daoud, and in the faint light of the stairwell he enlarged the doorway with a few hefty blows of his hammer. But by the time he was finished Rosa’s condition had deteriorated, and she lay on the kitchen floor with an oxygen mask attached to her nose, while her neighbors wiped her face with a wet cloth, her chest rising and falling as she struggled for every breath.
In the meantime the ambulance men had contacted the fire department and asked for a crane, and when it arrived they joined forces to dismantle the fence so that it could gain access to the apartment. Slowly the crane trundled up to the wall of the bedroom balcony, and with the press of a button the carrier rose into the air until it was level with the balcony floor. With a couple of blows Daoud knocked out the iron balustrade, and, supported by her neighbors, Rosa stumbled onto the carrier and lay flat on her back with her legs parted in front of her and her hands fearfully gripping the railings. In the light of the breaking day, to the cheers of the spectators gathered down below, the crane set off, groaning under its heavy burden, and trundled down the streets until it set her down at the entrance to the emergency room of the hospital.
With the joint efforts of the doctors and the bevy of nurses who gathered around the mountainous patient, Rosa’s breath was restored, and she was warned of the dire consequences that would follow if she didn’t lose weight immediately. The doctors also recommended that she sleep on her side, in order not to bury her heart and lungs under the intolerable weight of her fat. Armed with good advice, medication, and diet recipes, Rosa waited for the crane with Shraga at her side. Sailing through the air she waved weakly to the citizens of the town who lined the streets and applauded the gigantic woman they had all read about in the newspaper and seen on television, until the arm of the crane swung her through the balcony door and deposited her on her bed.
That night the worried Shraga decided to keep watch over his wife and listen to her breathing as she slept. He dragged Leslie-Shimon’s youth bed into their bedroom, pulled it up to the double bed, and prepared to stay awake all night and save his wife from suffocating herself to death. Delighted to have her husband at her side and obedient to the instructions of the doctors, Rosa turned to face him, lying on her side in the recommended position, and breathing in the smell of oranges wafting from him as she stroked him tenderly until he fell asleep.
The next morning she found him blue and lifeless, crushed beneath the weight of her body.
And again the ambulance drove up to their house, waking the neighbors with its wailing sirens. Afterward they said that Rosa refused to let them take the body away. For a long time she lay next to Shraga, warming his cold body with her hands, putting her lips to his, and breathing into his gaping mouth until his crushed chest rose, only to sink again immediately. She stroked the body whose wide-open eyes looked at her in mute reproach and whose mouth gaped in a scream that would never be heard, whispered words of love in his ear, washed his face, and combed his hair.
And when they took the body away at last, she insisted on putting his favorite Sabbath shoes on his feet. But his swollen feet refused to slip into the shoes, and the weeping Rosa watched them putting him barefoot into the black plastic body bag. The metallic sound of the zipper closing went on echoing in her ears for days. Together with Shraga, the smell of oranges, which she loved, disappeared from the house, and a smell of rotten fruit settled in the rooms.
HUSBAND SUFFOCATED BY WIFE’S BREASTS, the headlines screamed in the next day’s paper. The report dwelled at length on the tragic story of Rosa, the fattest woman in Israel, who had killed her husband by mistake. It also said that the postmortem operation had revealed a number of broken ribs, one of which had pierced the right lung and contributed to the causes of death. The medical examiner reported dryly that the wife of the deceased had rolled onto her husband’s bed while they were sleeping and crushed him to death.
The next day the fire department crane arrived at the house, hoisted the sorrow-stunned Rosa off the bedroom balcony, and drove at the head of the convoy of cars with their lights on that accompanied Shraga on his final journey. At the funeral parlor she asked them to take her to the purification chamber and leave her there. Exploiting her connections with the ritual purifiers, whom she knew from their devoted attentions to her previous husband, she pushed a handsome sum of money into their hands and asked them for one last favor.
“Before you wrap him in the winding sheet, put these shoes on him,” she whispered, and removed from the plastic bag she was carrying an elegant box covered with shiny gold-lettered black paper. In the suspenseful silence that had descended on the little room she raised the lid and like a conjurer pulling a rabbit out of a hat removed Shraga’s best shoes, gleaming in the light of the naked bulb. The purifiers held their breath at the sight of the alligator leather shoes the dead man had purchased for three months’ wages at the fancy Italian boutique in Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, and worn only once, on the happiest day of his life.
“In these shoes he danced the tango with me at our wedding reception,” she told them, wiping the tears streaming down her round cheeks. And when she remembered what those shoes had done to the train of her wedding gown, she smiled sadly.
“I’d like him to go on dancing up there in heaven,” she wept, her body shaking. “Never to stop dancing and to make all the widows buried next to him happy,” she added, with new tears of inappropriate mirth rolling down her face.
When she entrusted his most precious possession to the hands of the purifiers, Rosa had no idea that her dead husband would not be buried in his wedding shoes.
Hanna the Purifier, whose blind husband was unemployed and who had five hungry mouths to feed, coveted the shoes and betrayed her trust. She hid the shoes under her stained gown and smuggled them out of the purification room, and sold them for a few shekels to Menahem, the rag and bone seller from the marketplace, who displayed his wares on an old sheet in the alley opposite Rahmou’s hummus shop on Wednesdays. Menahem, who insisted that there wasn’t a man on earth with feet small enough to fit into the shoes, succeeded beating her down to a ridiculously low price. For a long time he debated with himself as to the best place to display his new acquisition, and in the end he placed them in a chipped enamel plate from the People’s Republic of China, with cracked flowers decorating its rim. Opposite Shraga’s shoes, for the sake of symmetry, he placed a pair of ladies’ white kidskin pumps that boasted particularly high heels.
On the same day he succeeded in selling the shoes for twice what he paid for them to a worn-out cleaning woman who was looking for a secondhand bar mitzvah suit for her son. Stubbornly she rummaged in the piles of cast-off clothes smelling of the body odors of their previous owners, until she found what she was looking for. And when she held the suit out to him in her thin hands, Menahem waved the alligator shoes in front of her yearning eyes and told her that without a pair of splendid shoes like these her son would have nothing to celebrate. The woman bowed her head, and with fingers whose skin was flayed and peeling from detergents, she fingered the shoe size embossed on the shining leather soles, and informed Menahem with a sigh that her son, praise God, already took size thirty-seven.
“So let him curl up his toes,” he barked. “You won’t find shoes like this anywhere else. It’s a bargain. Why should somebody else enjoy it?”
The woman sighed, plunged her hand into the depths of her bra, pulled out a tattered plastic bag, undid the knot, argued halfheartedly with Menahem, and paid him what he asked.
And thus it came about that the bar mitzvah boy stood in the synagogue in an old bridegroom’s suit and new shoes made of fine alligator leather that pinched his toes, while Shraga, according to the cemetery director, Yochai, turned from side to side in his grave, barefoot, searching for his stolen wedding shoes and waking the dead with his complaints. In order to spare Rosa’s feelings, the neighbors kept the story a secret from her. And Shraga too, who sometimes crept into her dreams, never complained to
Rosa that in the end, despite all her efforts, he arrived in heaven barefoot.
Throughout the week of mourning, Rosa would beat her left breast and mutter to herself: “I murdered my husband. I murdered Shraga.” And she told the condolence callers: “For forty years I waited for him, and when he came I killed him. I’m sorry I met him. We should never have met. We should never have married. I murdered my husband, I murdered my Shraga.” So she sobbed, telling the tale of the crushing to anyone willing to listen, sniffing her fingertips and trying to bring back his vanished smell.
“I kill my husbands. Anyone who marries me will die,” she cried to Peretz the Cabalist when he came to call.
“I should be locked up in jail,” she cried to the reporter who came to report on the incident, and felt once more the old “Shraga pain” that had haunted her body ever since he had suddenly disappeared from her life so many years ago, only to reappear with the same suddenness and take her in his arms with an elegant dancer’s step.
Every day she waited impatiently for the last mourner to leave, and until late at night, sobbing and beating her breast, she would occupy herself with his shoes. With the tears streaming down her cheeks and staining her dress, she would polish his leather shoes until she could see her face, swollen with crying, reflected on their gleaming surface; brush his ballet shoes and wash his sport shoes, trying to ignore Joseph’s mocking laughter from the storage space under the roof. Then she would sit on the stool in the kitchen and arrange all the plates and trays with the food brought by the condolence callers on the Formica table. Only after everything was arranged to her satisfaction would she sigh and remember her bitter fate, and the tears would roll down her cheeks and wet the piquant fish, salt the vegetables in the couscous, and dilute the soup. Then she would begin greedily devouring the food, looking over her shoulder guiltily as she did so. But she soon discovered that the lump in her throat prevented the food from sliding down and that her stomach, contracted in pain, shrank from absorbing it.
In envious despair she watched the endless column of black-clad ants approaching to join in the funeral feast. No sooner had the news of Shraga’s disappearance reached their anthills than they set out to take advantage of the fortuitous absence of their old enemy, the infamous insect hater who ground every creepy-crawly thing ruthlessly under his heel and sprayed them with lethal pesticides. Like an army of termites they advanced on Rosa’s third-floor kitchen, and when they got there, famished and exhausted by the long, dangerous journey, they demolished every scrap of food left over from shiva. Sometimes Rosa found herself staring mesmerized at a perfect circle of gleaming black ants gathered around an invisible stain of sweetness. For what seemed to her like hours and to them like eternity, they stood on their jointed legs, their feelers quivering with the excitement of the discovery of food, and their stomachs filling with a delicacy invisible to the human eye.
After concluding her observations of the ants and sympathetically sensing their joy at the discovery of food, she vowed that she would never kill an ant again, even if they bothered her and demanded to share her food, for how could she kill something so small, so vulnerable, whose life was so short anyway? And she decided to take care not to tread on the tiny creatures by mistake either. And when she got into bed she went on thinking about them, and she came to the conclusion that God had created the ant in order to test the compassion of human beings. For the life of an ant was equal to the life of a human being. Death awaited them both at the end of the road, and who was she to cause the death of a fellow creature before God decided that its time had come? And with an aching stomach, a lump in her throat, and her head swarming with thoughts of ants, she covered herself with her thick quilt, summoned Shraga to join her, and told him apologetically about all the dishes she had been unable to get down that day, promising him that she would try to do better tomorrow.
Early in the morning, before the guests began to arrive, her body still aching with the “Shraga pain,” she would wake Angel, open the window for her so that she could greet the crows, and with every spoon of food she fed her she repeated that her Daddy Shraga had gone and left them forever. Angel would open her blue eyes wide and look at her mother as if she understood, with a sad expression on her face. Rosa would stroke her golden hair and ask her to stay small, innocent, and loving forever.
Then Ruthie would arrive and take the little girl downstairs to wait for the transportation to day care, and when she returned she would find Rosa in the middle of the ritual she observed strictly throughout the week of mourning. Ruthie would help her to roll up the carpets, lift the chairs onto the tables, fill a pail with water, and begin to scrub the house. Again and again they washed the floors, cleaned the windows till they shone, and rearranged the closets. After the guests arrived she would wait impatiently for the last one to leave, so that she could sweep up the crumbs and wipe the greasy fingerprints from the gleaming furniture.
For seven days she sat in her armchair in the living room and received the condolence callers arriving with their offerings of patties, couscous, fish, cakes and candies, encountering their hard looks and overhearing their venomous whispers as they covered their mouths with their hands.
And after the week of mourning came the jokes, and the caricatures, and Rosa’s house turned into a place of pilgrimage for curiosity seekers, until Ruhama, her old enemy, took it upon herself to stand guard in the entrance to the stairwell and chase away with her sharp tongue and the broomstick in her hands anyone who had no legitimate business in the building. And when she had banished the last of the nuisances, she would return to Rosa, sigh, and with a hint of envy in her voice she would say: “There are still two husbands waiting for you who probably have no idea that they’re going to marry you.” And Rosa would look at her through her tears and ask: “Don’t you think I’ve done enough? Anyone who marries me is sure to die.” But in her heart of hearts she prayed that Ruhama’s butterfly prophecy would come true.
* * *
When the hubbub in the house died down and she was left alone, she finally realized the full significance of what had happened, and she fell exhausted onto her bed, turned her face to the wall, and refused to get up. She stopped eating altogether, and since she was incapable of taking care of Angel, Ruthie and Dror came to her rescue again. Rosa would look at the child when they brought her to her bed in the morning, kiss her on the forehead, and turn her face to the wall again. And she would only wake up in the evening when she heard Ruthie coming into her room with Angel in her arms.
A month later, with the unveiling of the tombstone, her daughters came to get her out of bed. They clucked their tongues approvingly when they saw how much weight she had lost. Like an infant taking its first steps, Rosa tottered to the grave, and there, in front of the large crowd that had come to pay their respects, she asked Shraga to forgive her. At the exit from the cemetery she sipped the glass of cold water offered her on a purple plastic tray by Yochai the Undertaker, who accompanied her to the car and with a theatrical flourish settled her skirts about her and closed the door behind her.
When she came home she asked them to bring Angel to her. With the silent child on her lap she paged through the photograph albums until she found what she was looking for. She removed her wedding photograph with Shraga and carefully cut it down the middle. Then she asked Ruhama to take the half with Shraga to the photography studio and have it enlarged. And when she came back with the poster-size picture rolled up in her hand, she asked her family to have the pictures of both her husbands, Joseph and Shraga, framed in identical frames and hung side by side opposite her bed. “Because that’s the only way I can stop them from fighting at night,” she said.
In the empty evenings after the visit to the cemetery for the unveiling of the tombstone, after her daily telephone conversations with her seven children, she would seat Angel on her lap and tell her about her fathers, first Joseph and then Shraga, and Angel would listen silently and shrink into her little body as if she blamed her
mother for their deaths.
* * *
About two months after Shraga’s death the miracle happened. When she went into Angel’s room to get her ready for nursery school, she found her sitting up in bed and pointing at a crow flying outside the window and pecking at the glass with his hooked beak.
“Bird!” The little girl piped the first word she had ever pronounced in her life.
Rosa stood frozen in astonishment.
“Bird?” she asked.
“Bird!” she repeated firmly and smiled at her mother.
“Bird, crow,” Rosa succeeded in saying, with the tears pouring down her cheeks.
An hour later, after sending Angel off to her day care, Rosa got busy on the telephone, calling all her children one after the other to tell them about the miracle.
“You’ll see,” she repeated seven times, “that child will still surprise us all, and the doctors and their theories can all go to hell.”
After the child had uttered the first word of her life, Rosa began paying special attention to her. She watched television programs for children with her, read her stories, repeated words to her, supplied her with paper and crayons, and collected her drawings in books. It soon transpired that the only things Angel knew how to draw were birds and butterflies. And when Rosa tried to teach her to draw houses with red roofs and chimneys sending up smoke, the child would rebel, throw temper tantrums, and when she calmed down she would fill the pages with birds and butterflies again.
At this time Rosa was certain that Angel had stopped growing. Even though Angel was nearly four years old, she looked like a child of two.
“And that’s how she’ll stay,” the doctors she ran to consult pronounced. “Your child won’t grow anymore; she’ll remain the same height, and there’s nothing to be done about it.”