The Fairest Among Women

by Dalya Bilu

  And Rosa would go home, kiss her little girl, who would always stay small, and know that the requests she had made of all her seven previous children in turn had accumulated until they had come true in this last child.

  * * *

  In the first year after Shraga’s death, when the old pangs of longing made her body ache, she would open the drawers of shoes, breathe in the familiar smell assailing her nostrils, stunning her heart with memories, and moving her body to feel old passions. Then she would commune with the shoes for hours at a time, arranging and rearranging them in their drawers and on their shelves. She kept this up until the day she opened the drawer of his ballet shoes and a sour, unfamiliar smell greeted her nose. In dismay she pulled the drawer out and discovered right at the back a pair of tattered shoes full of the clear marks of tiny teeth. The next day another pair of shoes was gnawed, and after a week, when the shoes were completely eaten up, she discovered at the back of the drawer containing the leather shoes, a nest padded with bits of silk, threads of gray woolen army socks, and scraps of Shraga’s warm winter undershirts.

  Alarmed, she asked Ruhama to bring her some mousetraps from the market, and every morning she examined them without discovering so much as the tip of a mouse’s tail. The professional rat catcher she called in announced, as if he were giving her particularly good news, that she had a subtenant in the house, described to her the domestic mouse, also known as the common mouse, who had chosen her home above all others in the vicinity and decided to do her the honor of sharing his life with her. He told her that the mouse was especially active at night, that it ate everything, and that Rosa would have to resign herself to the fact that in order to build its nest and bring up its young, it would use any soft and available material it came across. And when Rosa asked him in horror about mouse offspring, he explained in a congratulatory tone that her mouse was apparently a pregnant female, since she had built a nest in which to give birth to her litter. The exterminator explained admiringly, as if he were speaking about his own children, that at the age of three months the babies turned into parents in their own right and built new nests for the next generation. Judging by the tone of his voice, she suspected that he was a mouse lover, and since it made no sense for a mouse lover to be a mouse exterminator, he had no doubt come to her house in order to rescue the creatures and not to destroy them.

  Since she was a polite woman, Rosa thanked him for his informative lecture and decided that she would have to get along with them as best she could. After a few months of sharing the house with her unwanted lodgers, she went to check on Shraga’s shoes and found nothing in the drawers but leather soles, plastic soles, and rubber soles. She gathered up the orphaned soles and put them away in a box that she relegated to the storage space under the roof, together with the magnificent gilt frame wrapped in the stained sheet, which had once held the portrait of Joseph. From the day that they finished chewing up Shraga’s shoes, the rodents disappeared, never to visit her house again.

  fifteen

  JACOB’S DREAM

  Ever since Shraga had departed this world and Rosa had hung his picture up next to Joseph’s, it seemed to her that her first husband had calmed down. He no longer harassed her and hurled accusations at her, and at night as she lay alone in bed in the sideways position recommended by the doctors, lest her body with its internal organs collapse and suffocate her to death, she would think about both her husbands and try not to sell either of them short. In order to maintain strict equality between them, she would check her watch and allocate the same time to her reflections and memories of both Joseph and Shraga in turn. But try as she might, she failed in her endeavors, and Joseph always succeeded in stealing precious memory time at Shraga’s expense. In the time allocated to Shraga, Joseph’s face would invade her thoughts, and when she tried to remember Shraga’s soft hands touching her, she would feel Joseph’s big callused hands stroking her face. She would close her eyes and concentrate with all her might on Shraga and his tiny feet, and again Joseph’s face would squeeze in through a split second of distraction, and again she would smell the nicotine on his breath and the lavender soap on his body rudely pushing aside Shraga’s scent of oranges. Then she would surrender to her memories, ask Shraga to forgive her for sending him to his untimely death, and to take into account the fact that she had spent some fifty years more with Joseph than she had with him.

  In the days when she was sunk in grief she found herself unthinkingly skipping meals, and suddenly she became aware that her dresses were loose on her body. After a few months of losing weight, “at a satisfactory rate,” as her doctor told her, she succeeded too in ridding herself of the permanent pressure on her chest, which she did not always know whether to ascribe to her excess weight or to the pangs of conscience she had felt since Shraga’s tragic death.

  Every morning she would weigh herself and find that she had lost a little more weight. Then she would stand naked in front of the mirror and look for the pink stretch marks left on the bodies of fat women when they lose weight. First she would examine her thighs. Then her eyes would climb to her stomach, and finally she would swing her breasts from side to side and peek underneath them. Satisfied with the results of her examination so far, she would turn around, look over her shoulder, and check on her backside. To her gratification, she discovered that her skin was taut and shiny, her breasts were full, and her buttocks as firm as ever.

  After examining herself in the mirror Rosa would turn her attention to Angel. With every spoonful she fed her she would repeat new words and recite old nursery rhymes to her. When the child imitated her and answered her questions correctly she would hug her and admire her rapid progress.

  Every day after school her grandson Dror would come and teach Angel everything he had learned that day. With a protective canopy of black crows accompanying them to the sound of excited caws, he would take her out into the fields that surrounded the neighborhood and reached the houses of the Arab village of Beit Safafa. Round and round the crows would circle over the children’s heads, chasing away rival birds, sparrows and wild pigeons, which were obliged to worship Angel from afar. When she sat down with Dror in the field, the crows would fly down, cluster around them, and chatter loudly and excitedly in their throaty language. Angel would throw them crumbs of the bread Rosa had spread with chocolate for their expedition, and the birds would hop up and receive the gracious gifts of their adored queen with bowed heads and drooping wings.

  Then Dror would show her the flowers and teach her their names. And he would tell her about the butterflies and the bees, and tell her to stand still next to a flower and watch to see how the butterfly sucked up its nectar. With spots of color from flowers and butterflies dancing before their eyes, he would tell her about the world below the ground, too, Hades, that black place that nobody knew and where all the bad souls were destined to go. In order to illustrate his words he would walk round the fields with her until he found what he was looking for, a little rock sunk in the ground. Laboriously he would dig it up, and together they would stare at the wound revealed in the earth, exposing to every eye what the rock had been trying to conceal. Dozens of tiny creatures, silvery and albino white, which had never seen the light of the sun, groping their way blindly in the sudden glare, searching for a crack through which they could be swallowed up in the darkness again. Gray insects with scaly chain-mailed backs curled up in panic, turning themselves in a second into tiny armored balls against harm from any quarter. Transparent snails sent out their feelers, trying at their slow pace to escape the sun that melted soft unprotected tissues, leaving shiny trails of slime behind them. Among the commotion of fleeing insects were the tangled white roots of invisible plants, some delicate and feathery and others thick, rough, and woody.

  And when the sun went down, turning Angel’s head to gold and painting the fields red, and all around the air echoed with the din of chirping crickets and cicadas desperately searching for their mates, he would tell her in a whisper the s
tory of Jacob’s dream, a story he took care not to repeat in the presence of his grandmother. Because when she once heard him tell the tale to Angel, she asked him to stop and not to fill the little girl’s head with nonsense, since it wasn’t too strong to begin with. There in the abandoned fields surrounding the neighborhood like a hangman’s noose, far from Rosa’s vigilant ears, in an unchanging ritual, he would put his head next to Angel’s, and with his curly hair touching her golden tresses, he would whisper the story into her ear.

  He told her about the ancient patriarch Jacob, who, weary with the long journey, lay down and fell asleep on a stone. In his dream he saw a tall ladder with its top in the heavens and angels going up and down it. All the angels wore long robes of silk, their hair was long and shining, and their little feet went up and down the ladder made of solid gold. “And in that band of angels there was one special angel,” Dror would say and bring his head closer to hers. “It was the smallest and most beautiful angel of all. Its eyes were azure blue, just like yours, and its hair was long and gold and wavy and reached all the way to the ground. Because this angel was so small, it was afraid of heights. All the time it was climbing, on the advice of its friends, the little angel tried not to look down at the ground. But since it was very curious and wanted to know exactly what the people down there in the fields looked like, it looked down, got giddy, and boom!—it fell off the ladder. Because of the noise it made Jacob woke up, and as soon as he woke up the dream vanished and the golden ladder with all its angels disappeared into the sky. And the fallen angel couldn’t go back to heaven, because it didn’t have a ladder to climb up on. For years it wandered the world looking for a way back to its fellow angels. Every night it would visit people in their dreams, but none of them ever dreamed Jacob’s dream. Some people dreamed of ladders and some people dreamed of angels, but nobody dreamed of a golden ladder with its top in heaven and angels going up and down it. And since it never found the ladder, it looked for a new body to live in until it could return to heaven. For years it searched among the children of the world, but it never found the right one. With every new child born the angel hurried to its side to see if it suited its needs, and so it examined all the children in the world, but all the children grew too fast to fit the little angel. Until you were born. The day you were born it saw you even before your mother saw you, and it rejoiced and decided to enter into your body, because it knew that you wouldn’t grow and that with your help it would succeed in getting back to heaven. And in order to return to heaven it made you a pair of wings.”

  Dror would conclude his story, stroking the little humps on her back, and repeating the last sentence like a soothing mantra in her ears: “And one day, you’ll spread your wings and fly straight up into the clouds, and you’ll go back to heaven and play with all the other angels there.” Then he would look deep into Angel’s eyes and she would repeat after him: “Angel will fly up to heaven and play with the angels.” And Dror would hug her little body, kiss her forehead, and say: “Yes, Angel will fly up to heaven and play with the angels.”

  And when the song of the insects subsided in the fields, black shadows crept into Angel’s hair and darkened its color, and a cold wind penetrated their clothes and chilled their flesh, they would go home and the crows would return to their nests.

  And when Dror brought Angel home, Rosa would see that her cheeks were red with the sun, her hair was full of bits of grass and crumbling dry leaves, and her eyes were shining as if she had discovered new worlds in the fields that she couldn’t tell her mother about. She would press her to her bosom and feel the warmth of the sun seeping into her and penetrating her bones. And when she undressed her and combed her hair the fresh scent of the fields would rise in her nostrils, and her eyes would cloud over with memories as a thick shower of bright butterflies rained down before them.

  sixteen

  CHEERFUL HANDS

  The morning after a particularly hard night, most of which she had spent in painful memories, bitter regrets, and repeated pleas for forgiveness for having killed Shraga by mistake, Rosa woke with difficulty to the sound of knocking on the door.

  She dragged herself heavily to the door and looked through the peephole. A tall thin man in the prime of his life, holding a large cardboard folder in his hands, stood there, shifting his weight nervously from foot to foot. Since he appeared harmless enough, she opened the door.

  The strange man drew back slightly and looked at her with an admiration he did nothing to hide. Rosa examined the brown beret flattening black hair streaked with white, and the shabby white shirt on which reposed a limp pink bow tie. Then her eyes traveled down to the trousers, faded in the wash, and the cracked shoes under innumerable layers of shoe polish. To her surprise she saw that his hands were large, strong, and cheerful.

  Later on, when she tried to understand what she could have meant by thinking his hands were cheerful, she remembered that they were dotted with bright spots in all the colors of the rainbow, and seemed to her when she first set sight on them like the giant wings of an exotic butterfly of incomparable beauty.

  The stranger’s gray eyes, which were surrounded by a fan of fine wrinkles, twinkled at her warmly, and his narrow lips parted in a tentative smile, revealing a row of gleaming white teeth. Rosa gazed into his eyes, examined his strong teeth, appraised his lean body, and decided that he was rather a handsome man.

  “You’re Rosa!” he cried joyfully in a deep baritone voice, as if he had discovered a long-lost relative. “You’re as beautiful as I imagined you,” he went on, gasping for breath, either from excitement or the tiring climb up three flights of stairs. When he saw her questioning look, he held out his right hand. Hesitantly Rosa put her hand in his, and as he grasped it eagerly she felt his palm rubbing against hers and the lines of their fate merging in perfect harmony. The stranger hurried to introduce himself.

  “Shmuel. Shmuel Evron. You might have heard of me.” And when he realized that his name wasn’t making the desired impression, he added, on a note of disappointment: “I’m a painter.”

  With her hand in his she looked at him in silence and discovered the little tic that made his upper lip twitch and tremble in a way that aroused her compassion and melted her heart.

  “May I come in?” asked the painter, his self-confidence eroding and the tremor in his lip growing more severe.

  “Yes, of course, forgive me,” she said and moved aside to let him in.

  His eyes opened wide, as if reluctant to lose even a fraction of the crown of creation preceding him, gazed admiringly at the vast backside swaying in front of him with the rise and fall of great ocean breakers. The magnificent posterior, attached to the broadest back he had ever seen, led him into the depths of the living room. From one of the doors in the passage a curly little head peeked out. A minute fair-haired child, built with perfect symmetry, resembling in every respect a cupid in a classical painting, stood in the doorway and looked at him curiously. In spite of her charming appearance, Shmuel felt a cold shiver running down his spine and contracting his heart with an inexplicable pain. Ignoring the ominous foreboding, he turned to look at Rosa again, his eyes dazzled by the whiteness of her skin, drowning in her eyes, and riveted by the vast bosom bouncing freely before him in perfect coordination with the movements of her body. Rosa asked him to excuse her, bent down to the child, picked her up in her arms, and murmured soothingly in her ear. The child closed her eyes and nestled against her mother’s bosom. Shmuel contemplated this maternal scene, and to his horror saw the two little humps sticking out of the miniature creature’s back and spoiling the harmonious lines of her body.

  “Who’s he?” the child asked in a whisper.

  “A friend,” replied Rosa, with her eyes fixed on his.

  “I’m a painter,” he repeated, as he sat down on the armchair after Rosa had cleared away the pile of linen waiting to be ironed, staring at the gigantic mother and her tiny child. He immediately remembered that he had already introduced himself t
o her, and he blushed hotly, feeling like a fool.

  Rosa looked at him pityingly, well aware of the effect of her appearance, which was capable of paralyzing stronger men. Experience had taught her that her dimensions always gave rise, even in large-bodied and well-built men, to a passing feeling of weakness, puniness, and physical inferiority. Their faces turned red, their speech faltered, they talked nonsense and made themselves look ridiculous to her.

  “I’d like to paint you.” Shmuel overcame the obstruction in his throat at last, and succeeded in saying the sentence he had been rehearsing with every step as he climbed the three flights of stairs to Rosa’s apartment. With the twitch wreaking havoc on his lip, he examined the effect of his words on her. It seemed to him that Rosa had not taken in his request, and so he repeated it, this time more loudly, as if he were speaking to a woman who was hard of hearing or feebleminded.

  “I want to paint you.”

  “What does the man want?” asked Angel in a piping voice.

  “The man wants to paint me,” she said, and as she took in the meaning of what she had just said her chin began to tremble. The tremor spread to her double chins and made them quiver, crept to the unconfined breasts bouncing up and down in front of her like a couple of giant balls, took hold of her belly that shook like a vast mound of jelly, slid down her thighs, and eventually reached her feet, which kicked gaily in the air. A couple of seconds later the laughter broke out in a roar that sounded to the furiously blushing Shmuel like the bellowing of a calf about to be slaughtered. Angel’s little body shook in her mother’s heaving arms as she joined in with tinkling chimes of mirth.

  “Paint me?!” she roared. And when she recovered she apologized for her outburst and asked him: “Why?”