by Dalya Bilu
Afterward he sat with her for a long time and told her that at the beginning of the war his father was taken away to a forced-labor camp and never heard of again. He and his mother and his two little brothers were taken to Auschwitz, where they were separated from one another. At first he had dug mass graves and watched the Germans throwing in the bodies of murdered men, women, and children. Then he had been ordered to remove the dead bodies from the gas chambers and burn them in the crematoria. He also told her how the Germans had discovered his talents as an artist and calligrapher and set him to writing illustrated letters to the mistresses of the camp commanders, drawing birds, flowers and angels on their love letters. Worst of all was when the commandant of the women’s camp saw his pictures of angels and forced him to decorate lampshades made of human skin with them.
“When I drew the angels, I always wondered who the skin belonged to, and I was afraid that it might be the skin of my mother or one of my brothers, whom I hadn’t seen since the selection on the railway platform.”
Rosa hugged him tightly and rolled up the sleeve of his shirt, which he never took off, not even when they made love, and exposed the blue number tattooed on his arm. Again Mischa’s face rose before her, obliterating Shmuel. However hard she tried to banish it, it kept on surfacing, bringing with it the touch of his hands on her body. With her mouth full of the taste of the stale cookies he used to feed her, she gazed at the number tattooed on her lover’s arm, repeated the digits to herself, and compared them with the ones on Mischa’s arm. When she was sure that she remembered them by heart, she kissed them one by one, licking, sucking, and nibbling, trying with her tongue and lips to obliterate them and bandage the pain.
With his head clasped in her arms, he told her that he couldn’t look at the number tattooed on his arm and etched into his soul. And in his attempts to forget the accursed numbers branded on his body for the rest of his life, he was unable to deal with any numbers at all. He needed help in making the simplest calculation; the easiest sums confused him. And because of the tattoo branded onto his flesh he never wore short-sleeved shirts on even the hottest summer days, and never exposed his torso in bathing trunks. It always seemed to him that people’s eyes were drawn to the number on his arm, which betrayed him, telling everyone where he came from and what he had suffered there.
And when she asked him to tell her more about his life in the camp, he said that even if she had heard all the stories from the lips of the six million, read all the testimonies, visited all the camps and lived day and night in Yad Vahem, she would still be incapable of imagining the horror. And when she pressed him, he told her in a whisper that the ghastly work he had been forced to do had made him feel disgust for himself. “After the war, when we were liberated by the Russians, and I looked in the mirror, I saw a man with no feelings, sick and repulsive.”
Rosa felt as if a barbed-wire fence had been erected between them. He was standing on one side and she was standing on the other, and they reached out for each other with their hands but could not touch. Then she banished all such thoughts from her mind and listened in pain and pity to his stories. And when the lump in her throat melted, she made up her mind to compensate him for everything he had been through and make him the happiest man alive. She asked him hesitantly about his marital status, and when he told her that he was divorced and childless, she breathed a sigh of relief. She asked him curiously about his ex-wife. Shmuel closed his eyes in pain and told her about the refugee girl, the survivor of the hell of the camps that he had met on the ship to Israel. Since they both felt alone in the world they fell in love and married on board ship, with the captain performing the ceremony. When they arrived in the country and began their lives together they found themselves suffocating in memories of death, unable to break out of the circle of horror, and after a few years they decided to part and try to find happiness with partners who had not been through what they had. “She remarried immediately and had a family,” he told Rosa. “And I painted you and waited for us to meet.”
And when he asked her before he left if she would allow him to hold an exhibition of his paintings of her, she couldn’t refuse him. When she told her children in seven separate phone calls, she closed her ears to the warnings of her daughters and the yells of her sons and decided that she would stand by Shmuel to the end.
* * *
The exhibition Rosa opened in the Artists’ House in Jerusalem and caused a sensation in the town. The evening of the gala opening was charged with tension due to the many anonymous phone calls threatening to burn down the gallery, throw acid on the offending pictures, and cut the abominations to ribbons. The more the threatening calls—which were widely quoted on the radio, in the press, and on the local TV channel—multiplied, the surer Shmuel was that this exhibition would succeed above and beyond anything that had preceded it. And indeed, from the day the Artists’ House had been founded, nobody could remember anything like the crowds who lined up to see it day after day. They came from all over the country. Young people dressed in the latest fashions arrived from Tel Aviv; residents of Haifa and the north, the Negev and the south, farmers with callused hands, waited patiently next to Jerusalemites with loaded plastic shopping baskets who came straight from the market to see “our Rosa.” They all waited for hours in the blazing sun to see the exhibition, and afterward, over bowls of sunflower seeds on Friday night, they told their friends about the splendors of Rosa’s naked flesh.
For the first time in his artistic career there was no question as to the quality of Shmuel Evron’s work. In a long, illustrated article entitled “Mother Earth,” Debbie Jiavon wrote in the local paper:
The exhibition by Shmuel Evron shows only one figure in a number of variations: a woman stripping herself bare. The stripping here is of layers of pretense, of concealment. What distinguishes Rosa from other strippers is the unpolished nature of her nudity, which is far from any conventional definition of beauty. This nakedness is fully revealed in the last, most moving painting. Lying on the sofa, Rosa is painted in great detail in a naturalistic style that hides nothing. She presents herself as she is—a very fat woman, a sagging stomach falling in endless cascades of flesh, two mountains of fat challenging the viewer on her chest, things which have lost their original shape, and at the top—a sad, delicate, haunting face. Uncharacteristically, the eyes in this face are not open in an explicit invitation, promising an earthly paradise to the viewer. On the contrary. All her attention is turned inwards, to the understanding of her body. Beneath the closed lids is an inner attention to her body, her suffering, her past. This is a face that offers itself to us, frankly conveying the life lived by Rosa. It makes no attempt to please or to seduce. It reveals its owner, and makes us feel close to her.
Evron gives us at last an intimate experience of closeness. He touches the flesh of this woman, and allows us to place our hands in his so that through him we too can touch the abundant flesh of Rosa. For us, both men and women, since her femininity is maternal, its invitation inspires trust, for Rosa is the great, the ultimate mother figure.
It is obvious that Evron desires Rosa. The patient treatment he devotes to every inch of her flesh is that of someone who delights in the touch of her skin and is eager to share his pleasure with us. But he also sees who she really is. He penetrates her soul and accepts her as she is, a long-suffering woman who has borne many children and who bears the weight of her body as she bears the weight of her life. For where acceptance exists—there love grows.
Despite the explicit prohibition imposed by her sons, her daughters took no notice and stole into the gala opening of the exhibition. They stared in embarrassment at the huge canvases groaning beneath their mother’s weight. The painted Rosa looked back at them defiantly. From painting to painting they followed the gradual stripping until they reached the end of the hall and the crowd of people clustered round the painting. They elbowed their way through the crowd with their sharp elbows, treading viciously on the feet of the people who s
tood gazing at the big naked woman like worshipers at a shrine. In astonishment they looked at the many men standing there in silence, stretching their necks like turkeys with swollen crops, their eyes fixed unembarrassed on the intimate parts of their love-saturated mother.
Her forehead creased with worry, Ruthie made her way through the crowds surrounding Rosa, who was dressed for the occasion in an elegant new purple silk dress, and whose eyes were sparkling. Furiously she hissed into her ear: “Just don’t dare get married again. We’re sick and tired of your nonsense.”
Rosa, who looked as if she was in the middle of a sweet dream, woke up and looked at her eldest daughter, who at this moment seemed to her to be dreary, gray, and skinny, and surprisingly similar to her grandmother Angela. “How did you know?” she asked in astonishment.
“I know those looks of yours by now,” Ruthie replied. “You’ll make the whole family look ridiculous if you get married for a third time. Apart from that, you’ve already killed two husbands. Do you want to endanger the life of the new one too?”
“I was told that I’d marry four times, and I’ve only managed twice,” said Rosa with ostentatious composure, and looked round for Shmuel, who was circulating among the crowds in a borrowed tuxedo, a black velvet tie choking his neck. She took Ruthie’s hand in hers and went up to him.
“Are you going to marry my mother?” demanded Ruthie, looking disbelievingly at the colors covering the back of his hand.
Shmuel blushed. “I haven’t really thought about it yet, but since you ask—,” he added, and then and there he went down on his knees, took Rosa’s hand in his brightly colored one, and in front of everyone, under Ruthie’s melting eyes, he asked: “Will you marry me, Rosa?”
In reply Rosa pulled him to his feet, planted a kiss on his lips, and said, “Yes,” in a resounding cry loud enough to be heard outside in the street.
* * *
All that night Rosa spent in long conversations with her two previous husbands, telling them about her new love and excusing her decision to get married again. Joseph, who refused to accept the news, gave her his hardest look, the look he saved for those rare occasions when he argued with Rosa and disagreed with her. In days gone by, this look was enough to make her submit, but this time, since she knew that he was buried in the earth, she stood her ground and heroically ignored him when he cursed her as a whore. Shraga received the news with a sour face, and it seemed to her that he accepted it, however reluctantly, since unlike Joseph he had only spent the briefest of times with her, even though he had waited for her all his life.
And before she fell asleep she cast one last glance at the thick wedding ring Shraga had bought her. She turned the ring, made of heavy links of gold, around her finger with a dainty, ladylike gesture, and then whipped it off, leaving her finger bare and free. Without giving it a second glance she dropped it into the drawer of her bedside table, added the gold bracelets and gold collar he had given her for their first anniversary, and as she firmly slammed the drawer shut, she heard the clink of Shraga’s and Joseph’s wedding rings hitting each other.
The night before the wedding both her late husbands appeared to her, and this time they brought Angela with them. Like a couple of bodyguards Joseph and Shraga stationed themselves on either side of her mother, exchanging amused looks and giggling like a pair of naughty children perpetrating a particularly mischievous prank. They didn’t dare look her in the eye and left it to Angela to persuade her. With the ominous expression she saved for her most devastating prophecies of doom, Angela looked at her daughter, theatrically rustling her black silk dress, which was full of holes, dust, and cobwebs.
“Tell me, have you gone mad?” She spat the words at her from her toothless mouth. “Weren’t two husbands enough for you? You need a third? Where will you get the strength to bury another one? Do you want the rabbis to pronounce you a lethal woman? And what about Angel? I can see that he can’t stand the sight of her. You want another catastrophe? Haven’t you had enough? What will the neighbors say?”
Rosa shut her ears and told herself that she was having a very bad dream.
But Angela kept on at her. “Don’t come crying to me afterward and say that you didn’t know,” she warned her. “I see a catastrophe. Beware. Cancel the wedding.” And when she realized that her words were falling on deaf ears, she asked her two escorts to try to dissuade Rosa from her reckless course. Joseph and Shraga shrugged their shoulders helplessly, looked at each other, and snickered like a pair of youngsters telling dirty jokes.
“That’s enough! If you can’t help me at least don’t hinder me!” Angela shouted, waved a crooked finger in Rosa’s face, and repeated her warning a number of times, until her words sounded like a muffled echo rising from the depths of the earth. “Stop and reconsider before catastrophe strikes!”
Rosa woke up in a panic, saw a shining ball of orange light fading before her eyes, and smelled the bittersweet scent of her mother’s ruinous flowers. On trembling legs she went to the bathroom and examined the glass in which she kept her mother’s false teeth. They were there, dry and full of dust, and this morning they didn’t part to greet her in a cheerful grin.
This time Rosa decided on a modest wedding at the rabbinate. Wearing a simple dress, surrounded by her daughters, her grandchildren, and Rachelle and Ruhama, she looked lovingly at Shmuel standing next to her with an aged relative in a shabby suit at his side. At that moment she felt at peace with her decision, she knew that she had done the right thing, and even if her sons were ostracizing her and her new husband, her happiness was more important than their approval.
And when Shmuel slipped the wedding ring on her finger, she promised herself that she would make up to him for the terrible years in the camp, that she would love him to her dying day, and that she would end her life with him at her side, in spite of Ruhama and her butterfly prophecies.
seventeen
ANGELS ON THE CEILING
The night after the wedding the couple secluded themselves in the King David Hotel, which presented them with a day and a night in its royal suite as a wedding gift to the famous painter and his model. There, on the bed whose softness had cradled the high and mighty of the world, presidents and kings, movie stars and billionaires, Rosa sank into the wide mattress and flattened its springs. Groaning heroically under their load, the steel springs divided her weight equally among them and trembled in response as she received her bridegroom with happy sighs and tears of gratitude.
“Would you ever have believed that we would make love on a bed that was warmed by the bodies of princes and princesses, kings and queens?” she asked Shmuel, opening her fingers and pressing the sheet, trying to feel their royal imprints on the mattress with her fingertips. Then she buried her nose deep in the plump pillow, sniffed it, and tried to breathe in the smells of sweat, soap, and shaving lotion left behind them by her aristocratic predecessors.
“You’re my queen,” murmured Shmuel and kissed her on the mouth. And when she pursed her lips and opened her mouth to trap his lips with hers, he pulled away and slid his tongue down her neck. And when she arched her neck in delight, he slid down to her breasts and from there to her belly, went on a foray into her private parts with his nose, and quickly brought in reinforcements in the shape of his lips and tongue. Rosa giggled shyly and then groaned with deep, throaty growls that surprised him with their volume. Encouraged by the warmth of her response he kept at it until the shock waves stiffened her body and shook her limbs in a series of involuntary spasms. And when the wave subsided, she lay on her back exhausted, her limbs outspread, and whispered weakly: “More.”
“You’re my queen,” he told her again, and whispered a string of royal titles into her ear: “My czarina, my duchess, my empress, my countess, my princess.” And thus, with her husband snuggled in her arms and two new wedding rings glittering on their interlaced fingers, Rosa fell asleep. Early in the morning she woke up to a sense of impending catastrophe. A feeling so tangible, threateni
ng, and malevolent that she could actually touch it, hear it approaching with rude steps, smell its stinking breath, and hear its mocking laughter. Desperately she tried to turn her thoughts to the pleasures of the wedding night and looked lovingly at the face of her new husband lying at her side with his hands folded behind his head, his skin pink and healthy, and his breathing quiet and regular.
Suddenly she saw the faces of Joseph and Shraga under his features, and with terror striking at her heart she remembered her mother’s prophecies and the fourth butterfly, and she knew that Shmuel would not be the last. As if comforting a hurt child, she gently stroked his face, kissed his lips, and smoothed his hair. Shmuel turned toward her in his sleep, put his arms around her, and pressed her to his chest as if she were about to slip away from him.
The numbers tattooed on his arm leaped out at her. She read them from left to right and right to left, seeking the hidden number with the new significance in her life. Against her will she found herself comparing Shmuel’s numbers to Mischa’s, trying to crack the message encoded in the living flesh. Unable to decipher the unintelligible code, she stroked the blue numbers gently with her fingertip, as if trying to atone for all the pain he had endured in his life and all the pain he was still to endure in the future. And when he murmured his words of love straight into her mouth, she felt a heavy depression spreading through her body and rudely pushing aside the pleasures of the night before.