The Fairest Among Women

by Dalya Bilu

  Shmuel tried to efface himself and said in a meek voice: “Once you called my hands cheerful and you loved them. Tell me, what’s the matter with you?”

  Rosa didn’t reply, because she didn’t know the answer. For the last month she had been racking her brains in the attempt to understand what was making her hate and detest everything she had once loved about her husband. When she thought about the great love between them, which had disappeared overnight and given way to hatred, misery, helplessness and despair, she couldn’t understand what had happened to ruin their marriage.

  People in the neighborhood said that Rosa had been given the evil eye. Her undisguised happiness with her third husband must have brought the troubles on her head. Those who favored this theory argued that unhappy people couldn’t stand the sight of other people’s happiness, and they must have given her the evil eye, even if they didn’t mean to. If Angela had been alive, she would no doubt have told her that it was all because of her former husbands, who were expressing their dissatisfaction with her marriage from the grave. Angela had always drummed it into her that a widow should never remarry, or she would feel the punishment of her dead husband’s jealousy. And Rosa knew that if she were alive to see her present plight her mother would undoubtedly repeat the sentence she hated so much: “You see, I told you so.”

  Rachelle and Ruhama both said that her marriage had been doomed to fail, and summed up their diagnosis with the words: “You’re not suited, and we never understood in the first place what you saw in him or what he saw in you.”

  During the long days of their estrangement Rosa refused to sit for him, and Shmuel painted her body from his memories, which were still vivid and loving. When he went out for a breath of air Rosa slipped into the boys’ room, which was now his, examined the new paintings, and felt a new and terrible rage when she saw that he had not spared her. Shmuel had emphasized her double chin, sprinkled her hair with gray, etched in the delicate lines that had begun to appear around her eyes, made her breasts sag, and traced the veins that netted the translucent skin of her legs. And when he came home she received him with a sour face and refrained from asking why he had chosen to paint her thus. In the evening, when she examined her naked body in the mirror on the closet door and compared it to the paintings, she knew that Shmuel was right. He had scrupulously recorded the changes wrought by time in her face and body, without concealing anything.

  On the day she found herself staring at a new painting draped in a sheet like a corpse wrapped in a winding sheet, she knew that the end prophesied on their wedding night had come. Like an unseen monument waiting to be unveiled, the painting confronted her ominously. With one swift movement she whipped away the white sheet and stood there staring at the mouth torn open in a scream that went on echoing soundlessly in her ears for days to come.

  The painted eyes bulged out of their sockets, staring in terror, as if at a spectacle of nightmarish horror. Paralyzed with fear, Rosa looked at the sunken cheeks covered with hard, white bristles. At that moment it seemed to her that the toothless mouth was eating away at the inside of the cheeks and sucking the marrow out of the bones. With a sense of terrible foreboding, she suddenly saw Mischa’s face rising before her eyes and covering Shmuel’s face painted on the canvas. Panic-stricken, she stared at the painting, and before her astonished eyes she saw the faces of the two men struggling with each other on the canvas, first Mischa and then Shmuel gaining the upper hand.

  When the vision faded, she looked at the painting again and she couldn’t tell if the face was that of a man or a woman. At that moment, as time froze and began to go backwards, she knew that she had seen this face before, many years ago, in the extermination camp she had never been in, only imagined from Shmuel’s descriptions. And when she closed her eyes in an attempt to banish the image from her mind, it flickered in front of her like a pale square on a black background impressed on the optic nerve to remind the closed eyes of what they had witnessed when they were open.

  Suddenly Rosa knew that Shmuel had been trying in this painting to memorialize the faces of all the victims, all the murdered millions. And she saw them all superimposed, one on top of another, six million times. As she sat there and looked at the picture, as if she were performing a forbidden act, she saw Shmuel’s death mask in front of her, and she was sure that he had painted the moment of his own death. And when she heard his footsteps on the stairs, she quickly covered the painting with the sheet, and all that evening she avoided looking her husband in the eye.

  And the next day, when words returned to her, she broke her silence and asked him to keep the painting covered all the time, since it was liable to frighten Angel. Afterward she thought that perhaps she should have taken advantage of the opportunity to ask him what the subject of the painting was. But she immediately dismissed the thought, on the grounds that a question of this nature would have been sure to lead to a serious discussion, and Rosa felt unable to talk to her husband about anything on earth, and certainly not about the six million dead.

  * * *

  On the day she felt that she had come to the end of her rope, that she could no longer bear Shmuel’s presence—his smell, his appearance, and his paintbrushes filling the rooms and leaving her no room in her own house—she escaped to Rachelle’s apartment, where her friend told her again to throw them out.

  “What can happen, already?” She brushed Rosa’s objections aside. “I’ve never heard of anyone who killed himself because of paintbrushes.”

  The next morning, when Shmuel went out to do his chores, the perfect opportunity to act presented itself. Rosa looked out of the window and saw groups of children collecting firewood in the neglected yards for Lag b’Omer bonfires. “Come upstairs, I’ve got lots of wood for you,” she called down to them quickly, before she could regret it. Like a swarm of famished locusts the urchins descended on the house and emptied all the receptacles of their brushes. A few hours later all the paintbrushes, large and small, were piled up in the core of the huge bonfire erected on an empty lot on the outskirts of the neighborhood. The biggest paintbrush of all, whose hairy head was stuck on top of a broomstick like a red, bristly, punk coxcomb, they dressed in old clothes, stuffed with newspapers and rags, and added a scary mask. After the effigy was complete, they settled down to argue over whether to call it Haman the Wicked, Hitler, or Saddam Hussein.

  About what happened when Shmuel came home, many stories were told in the neighborhood. The moment he opened the door and encountered the emptiness, he uttered a shriek that brought all the neighbors running to see who was being slaughtered there. Like a balloon with all the air expelled from it, his body collapsed, leaving his clothes hanging loose as if they were three sizes too big for him. Rosa was afraid that if he went on shrinking, all that would be left was a pile of shabby clothes and a pair of orphaned shoes standing in the middle of the floor. When he was finished shrinking he flopped down on his meager behind and sat on the floor, buried his face in his hands, and wailed like a banshee.

  Rosa couldn’t bear the sight of his suffering. Bitterly regretting what she had done and furious with Rachelle for egging her on, she burst outside and hurried as fast as her fat would allow her to make the rounds of the bonfires about to go up in flames all over the neighborhood, searching for her husband’s paintbrushes. At last the familiar red coxcomb rising high above all the rest caught her eye and led her to the bonfire of the paintbrushes.

  With the help of an exceptionally long paintbrush, she penetrated to the depths of the bonfire and raked out the brushes waiting for the last rites of their cremation. And when she grabbed hold of the broomstick paintbrush and began to undress it, its stiff red crest bristled wickedly and brought the children running to rescue their effigy. They stood around her and, with the bows in their hands, began to shoot the paintbrushes at her like arrows that pierced her soft flesh.

  While Shmuel’s paintbrushes were revenging themselves on Rosa for taking them away from him, he opened all the windows o
f the house and like a man demented began flinging all his paintings to the ground. First he threw out all the Rosas. Rosa in her clothes, Rosa as a gypsy, Rosa naked, and Rosa in red all crashed noisily down on the brambles of the yard below. The wooden frames splintered on the stones, the stretched canvases slackened, and the thorns and nettles joined in the work of destruction, scratching and slashing and tearing Rosa’s painted flesh to tatters. After the Rosas, the new biblical women came crashing down, from Eve to the seductive Bathsheba, until Shmuel’s whole harem was empty. After he had finished with his fat women, he took his tattered cardboard portfolios and shook all the shriveled, skeletal women he had painted in the camp out of the window. Torn notices, scraps of paper, pieces of striped pajamas covered with charcoal drawings, rags, and strips of bark spotted the paintings of the fat women with black and brown. In conclusion he threw out the painting of Angel as cupid, and after it the painting of the six million.

  A pile of torn, crushed, slashed, and bruised paintings covered the nettles and brambles in a patchwork quilt of color. Then the children of the neighborhood descended in a horde and fell on the loot, grabbing everything they could lay their hands on and breaking up the frames as the vicious thorns scratched their little fingers till they bled. On limping, stolen supermarket carts they pushed their booty to the bonfires, and threw the skeletons of the frames, the pieces of paper, the rags and tatters, and the torn canvases bearing the vestiges of Shmuel’s paintings, onto the flames.

  And when Rosa returned home there wasn’t a single painting left. Stabbed and hurting, her arms laden with paintbrushes, she found Shmuel sitting on the floor. Full of remorse, she threw the brushes into Shmuel’s lap, but he only looked at her blankly with unseeing eyes.

  In order to gain his attention she picked up one of the brushes and tickled him with its thick, thorny hairs. Starting with the soles of his bare feet she climbed up his thighs, roamed over his arms, invaded his armpits, tickled his chest, and concluded by lightly brushing his face, taking care to insert the hairs into his nostrils and ears. And when he failed to respond to the tickling, she turned the paintbrush around and stabbed him angrily in the backside with its pointed end. But Shmuel didn’t even blink. In despair she began to shake his shoulders, and with the force of her shaking his head swayed to and fro like the head of her old doll, Belle. His expressionless eyes looked right through her to an invisible point on the wall.

  When he failed to react to her cries and refused to eat the soup she prepared for him, she decided to resort to a measure “guaranteed to wake the dead from their graves,” as she described the steps she took later to Rachelle, who said that she had always suspected her friend was crazy, but now she was absolutely sure.

  Heavily she seated herself on a chair in front of him, trying to take up his whole field of vision with her body and examining him like a hunter surveying her prey. She began with her slippers, which were made of velvet and decorated with red parrot feathers. She shook her feet lightly in the air, and the slippers dropped off, revealing long, narrow white feet and manicured toenails painted dark brown. She dragged her chair up closer to him, waved her feet in front of his dead eyes, and offered her toes to his mouth. But Shmuel didn’t part his lips to seize her toes in his mouth and suck them one by one as was his wont in days gone by. Disappointed, she turned her back to him and slowly unbuttoned her dress, let it fall to the floor, and kicked it in his direction. Dressed only in her panties she began dancing round the room in the steps of the waltz taught her by Shraga, her breasts bouncing up and down like pale balloons. Shmuel’s eyes, which were still fixed on the invisible point on the wall, now stared unseeingly at the dancing nipples that had once aroused his passionate desire, and a shining trickle of saliva drooled from his half-open mouth. In a final act of despair she slowly slithered out of her panties, wriggling her thighs and rear as she did so. Naked as the day she was born, she bent over her comatose husband to check the effects of her performance on his groin. His member was limp and droopy, slipped out of her grasp, and failed to respond to her ministrations.

  Put to shame, she got dressed again and waited for Angel to come home from her day care. And when she went to bed Shmuel went on sitting on the floor, deaf to her pleas to come and join her.

  All that night the bonfires blazed, consuming the effigies looming over them like scarecrows in their flames, and snapping and crackling merrily as they devoured Shmuel’s contribution to the conflagration. Scraps of half-burned paper and material and smoldering cinders and particles of sooty black dust floated through the open windows of the house and circled through the rooms like sad, ashen butterflies, soiling the hands of all who touched them. More and more gray butterflies fluttered around the rooms, and when they grew tired they fell to the floor, covering the tiles with their dark wings and scattering black butterfly dust on all who crossed their path.

  With no one to stop it, the ash covered Shmuel’s bright hands, spotted his clothes, and settled into the many wrinkles on his tired face, filling them with a dark, aging greasepaint and emphasizing the lines of suffering etched on his cheeks and brow.

  The next day Rosa swept up the layer of ash that had accumulated everywhere, scolding herself for not having remembered to close the windows, as she did every Lag b’Omer. When she wanted to wash the living room floor and was unable to make Shmuel move from his place, she summoned her sons to help her. They raised his frozen body from the floor, removed his filthy, sooty clothes, and forced him into the shower. The clear water covered his body, wet his hair, penetrated his wrinkles, washed the black color from his pores, and ran down his legs in dark, dirty streams that disappeared down the drain. When he was clean and dry they dressed him in striped pajamas and carried him to bed. Shmuel turned his face to the wall, and the tears streaming from his eyes soaked through the pillowcase and wet the feathers inside the pillow.

  When the situation continued unchanged for three days, and Shmuel stayed in bed, refused to eat, and didn’t answer when she spoke to him, she called the doctor.

  “How did it happen?” he asked her.

  “I have no idea. I hid his paintbrushes, and he went mad and threw out all his paintings. But now he’s quiet. I wish he would yell. His silence is driving the whole house crazy.”

  The doctor passed his hand before Shmuel’s eyes and called his name. Shmuel did not react.

  “He’s in a catatonic state,” he said at last, after testing Shmuel’s reflexes and measuring his blood pressure. “He doesn’t react,” he added in explanation, as if Rosa didn’t know this for herself. “He has to be hospitalized.”

  Rosa, who was sick of the inanimate object surrounded by paintbrushes, consented, on condition that they didn’t hurt him too much. “He’s a good man, taken all in all,” she said to Rachelle later when she told her what had happened.

  That same evening, when the sky was painted purple and the smell of frying eggs and fresh vegetable salads dressed with lemon juice and olive oil rose from all the houses, men dressed in white suits arrived at the house, strapped Shmuel onto a stretcher with strong canvas straps, and carried him down to the ambulance waiting outside.

  “Well, and what have you got to say for yourself now?” Joseph bared his teeth in a spiteful grin as soon as she walked back into the house after laboriously climbing upstairs. “I’d rather kill myself like poor Madame Butterfly than live a single minute without you.” He mimicked her voice. “I’d rather kill myself like poor Madame Butterfly than live a single minute without you,” he repeated mockingly. Rosa stopped her ears to the voices echoing inside her head. But all that night and all the next day the sentence went on ringing in her ears. She tried to ignore the voices and do the housework, endeavoring not to think about her husband tied up like a calf, and what they were doing to him there in the hospital.

  When she was overcome with longings for Shmuel, she gathered up the paintbrushes she had managed to save from destruction, fastened them together with a strong rubber band, and put
them in her best crystal vase. If Shmuel came back from the hospital, he would be greeted by a bouquet of paintbrushes. The thickest, tallest paintbrush, which the children had dressed up as Haman or Hitler or perhaps Saddam Hussein, she decided to exploit for her own private use, and she set its stiff red crest to work on clearing the cobwebs from the dustiest corners of the ceiling. The paintbrush performed its menial task meekly and faithfully. And the more worn and gray its splendid quiff coxcomb became, the more Rosa succeeded in overcoming the pain and insult it had caused her when it betrayed her into the hands of the children who shot at her with their paintbrush-arrows.

  * * *

  Once a week she went to visit Shmuel. In a thunderous silence and with an expression that said plainer than words “We told you and you wouldn’t listen” Leslie-Shimon would drive her to the entrance to the hospital, which looked like a detention camp because of all its prefabricated huts. There they stored the tortured souls of the survivors of hell, imprisoned in their inner worlds and detached from reality. Laden with food she would walk down the path in the glade of ancient, rustling pine trees, which welcomed her with an excited waving of their arms that shook the soft hairy caterpillars cradled in its boughs. The pines that accompanied her to the door of hut number three sprinkled her with yellow pollen and pelted her with ripe cones.

  Gasping for breath, Rosa would reach the hut and bump into a patient named Feiga, who would bawl her out at the top of her voice for treading on the wet floor and try to hit her with the mop. Feiga never parted from her sole possessions on earth—the pail and mop that were welded to her hands like extensions of her arms, and which by some accounts she even took to bed with her at night. In the camps, the nurses said, after they bayoneted her baby before her and her husband’s eyes, raped her in front of her husband, and then shot him while she watched, they had forced her to clean the blood turning the gravel in the yard red. And after she had performed the task with distinction they put her in charge of cleaning the officers’ quarters, with special emphasis on the lavatories. For which they rewarded her by putting out their cigarettes on her flesh. Ever since then she cleaned. She scrubbed when the Russians arrived and liberated the camp. When she refused to evacuate the camp with the other survivors before making everything shine, they dragged her away with the cleaning agents in her hands. She went on cleaning on the ship, she disinfected the detention camp in Cyprus, and if they hadn’t stopped her she would have cleaned the huts of the guards and the quarters of the British officers too. As soon as she arrived on the kibbutz she set to work energetically scouring and scrubbing, and she was still cleaning to this day. Even lying in bed at night, the nurses told Rosa, her hands went on compulsively performing their task. Her hands were crooked and swollen with rheumatism, their skin was red, rough, and chapped and full of burns from the disinfectants. But Feiga felt nothing. Her pain-saturated body blocked the distress signals sent to her brain.