The Fairest Among Women

by Dalya Bilu

  After hopping over the obstacle of the wet floor, Rosa entered Shmuel’s room. She always found him sitting on a chair with his back to her, facing the window, his hands, which had grown white in the meantime, sketching her portrait in the air with the help of a paintbrush only he could see. When she stood in front of him he would blink admiringly, open his mouth, and fail to utter a single world.

  And when she left him and walked down the path to her son’s waiting car, her long hair sprinkled with yellow pollen and her feet treading on the hairy caterpillars that had come down from the trees to greet her, she thought of his bright hands that had turned white, felt their touch pleasuring her body, and dozed off on the backseat of the car until Leslie-Shimon woke her and announced that they were home. Heavily she mounted the stairs and fell fully clothed into bed, where she spent a sleepless night, full of memories.

  Once, when she succeeded at last in falling asleep in the wee hours, she found herself dressed in a black uniform and high black boots. With a vigorous kick of her boot she broke down the door of hut number three. Scores of prisoners in ragged striped pajamas, with Shmuel among them, lay crowded on wooden bunks and looked at her in terror. With a terrible anger Rosa cracked the long whip in her hand, which resembled the whip of the animal trainer she had once seen in the circus. The prisoners climbed down from their bunks obediently and gathered around her in a circle, waiting expectantly. But Shmuel remained sitting on his bunk, his eyes looking right through her and his hands stubbornly drawing an invisible picture in the air. She felt her anger rising and cracked the whip again. The pointed tip of the whip, armed with a heavy pellet of lead, hit Shmuel in the face, and he fell onto the floor. There he lay, bent over in pain, with his hands etching the endless lines of his paintings in the air.

  Rosa woke in tears with a bitter taste in her mouth. She sat up in bed in alarm, trying in vain to calm her racing heart and escape the sights of the dream. But the sights surrounded her and attacked her from every side, poking obscenely pointing fingers into her eyes, pinching her flesh, sawing her bones, tearing out her heart, and stopping her breath. At that moment she understood that she had failed and knew that she was to blame for everything that had happened. Shmuel had been entrusted to her in order for her to atone by her love for all the suffering he had experienced in his life, and she had failed to keep this trust. And even worse, she was responsible for his deterioration and his present condition; she was to blame for causing him new suffering, which may have been even worse than everything he had endured before, because this suffering had finished him off.

  Appalled, she went into the kitchen, drank water from the tap, and tried to get rid of the terrible taste in her mouth. But the taste only grew stronger, entrenching itself in her taste buds and refusing to go away. To her horror she suddenly smelled a stench coming from an undefined source, which accompanied the taste like an inseparable twin. She brushed her teeth, gargled with Shmuel’s mint-flavored mouthwash, and drank strong coffee. But the ghastly taste and smell remained, settling inside her, becoming a part of her and refusing to go away.

  With a terrible feeling of failure she went into Angel’s room and looked indifferently at the old crow tapping its beak on the windowpane as if asking to be let in. When she averted her eyes from the crow, she felt the stab of the beady black eyes of the painted crows looking at her with hatred from every corner of the room, and she woke Angel up to a new day.

  twenty

  THE MIRACLE WORKER

  “One day Shmuel will open his mouth and talk to me.” Rosa repeated this sentence firmly to herself, convinced that if she only repeated it enough it would come true. She would sometimes confide her belief in Ruhama and Rachelle and the nurses at the hospital. “In my opinion,” she told them, “Shmuel is still angry, and that’s why he doesn’t want to talk to me. But since our love was strong, it will overcome everything. I’m sure that one day when I look deep into his eyes and whisper into his ear that I love him and ask him to forgive me, he’ll wake up from this strange sleep that he’s imposed on himself, open his mouth, and talk to me.”

  They would look at her pityingly, and wonder behind her back how she could fail to read the writing on the wall. Everyone knew that after each of her visits his condition deteriorated, and the hospital director was even thinking of forbidding her visits.

  In spite of the optimism she radiated, she realized that the disease that had wrought havoc with his mind had ravaged his body too. His back began to curve, his hands grew swollen and puffy and his face bloated, black circles were smudged as if by crude brushstrokes under his eyes, and a deathlike stench rose from his body.

  Muhammad, the male nurse who looked after him every day, was prepared to tell her, in exchange for a few shekels slipped into his hand, what the doctors and nurses refrained from telling her.

  “Shmuel,” he whispered into her ear for fear of being overheard by the head nurse, “goes to bed every night in his clothes and shoes. When I try to undress him, he yells at me and hits me.” He told her too how her husband took with him to bed the plastic bag containing all his possessions, the bag with which he wandered round like a zombie all day and into which he threw whatever he could lay his hands on. And here Muhammad listed the contents of the bag, as if taking an inventory: stinking wet floor rags he stole from Feiga, pine cones he collected from the yard, used toilet paper, empty toothpaste tubes, shampoo bottles, black pawns from the chessboard, moldy slices of bread, a porridge bowl, a half-eaten apple, and a crooked soupspoon. Muhammad admitted that the bag undoubtedly contained a lot of other things that Shmuel added daily to his hoard, and that he, Muhammad, had not yet succeeded in examining, since Shmuel clung to his bag and it was impossible to pry it from his fingers. “And he takes it all to bed with him every night and goes to sleep in his shoes and clothes. So what’s the wonder if he gets up crooked and stinking?”

  “Have you tried to get rid of the bag?” asked Rosa in a conspiratorial whisper.

  “Of course we’ve tried. I took it away from him in his sleep, and he woke up and screamed and woke all the lunatics, and there was a terrible racket, and in the end I got it in the neck. So now there’s nothing we can do, and he takes that bag with him everywhere and keeps putting more things into it.”

  And when Rosa consulted the doctors and asked them to tell her when her husband would be coming home, they lowered their eyes and told her that in their opinion Shmuel was a lost case. He would never return to himself. He would never talk and respond. He had taken flight from reality and sunk into the madness that was his refuge.

  Hope came from Tzila, the head nurse of hut number three.

  “Shmuel’s talking,” she announced one day on the telephone in a voice choked with excitement.

  “I’m coming,” said Rosa, and the lump that had been blocking her throat for so long dissolved in tears. Immediately she called Leslie-Shimon and told him to come and pick her up, never mind how many customers were waiting. “Shmuel’s started to talk, and I’m going to him right now,” she informed him in a tone that brooked no arguments.

  Breathlessly she made her way down the path under a persistent drizzle to hut number three. She submitted to the blows of Feiga’s mop and her screams that she was ruining her nice clean floor and messing everything up with her mud, and breathed in the reek of fermenting garbage mingled with a faint smell of garlic that greeted her when she entered Shmuel’s room. She found him in his usual frozen position—his back to her, his face reflected in the windowpane bringing low gray rainclouds into the room, and his hand sketching her portrait endlessly in the air.

  “Shmuel!” she cried as she hurried into the room. He hesitated for a moment and his hand trembled as it sketched the contours of her breasts in a movement painfully familiar to her, leaving a broken, crooked line in the air. Then he recovered and went on drawing briskly, as if to make up for lost time.

  “Shmuel, it’s me, Rosa. I’ve come to visit you!” she cried.

  Shm
uel went on drawing the endless line of her breasts.

  “Shmuel, talk to me!” she shouted in his ear as if he were deaf.

  Despairingly, his white hand dotted in the halo around her nipples. “Shmuel, I’m sorry, forgive me, I shouldn’t have thrown out your paintbrushes. I’ve bought you a lot of new ones,” she said in a sweet, coaxing voice.

  Shmuel didn’t blink an eye, as if she were speaking a language he didn’t understand, and his hand slid down to draw her stomach.

  Rosa burst out of the room in tears. “He isn’t talking,” she complained to Tzila, who was waiting for her at the nurses’ station, and shook her shoulders violently as if she were to blame for Shmuel’s silence.

  “Now he isn’t, but before he talked,” the nurse replied, and told her about the strange fellow who had showed up at the hospital in order to cheer up the inmates.

  “You should have seen him,” she said. “A tall, thin man with beautiful eyes carrying an ancient accordion. No sooner had he arrived than the miracles began to happen in our ward.”

  “You see Zalman?” She pointed to the skeletal old man huddled up in a wheelchair. “What he went through and witnessed in the camps is impossible to describe. Ever since he arrived in the country forty years ago he hasn’t walked or talked. Every year he folds up further in his wheelchair, and in another few years, if he isn’t dead by then, I’m sure we’ll find him as flat and folded as an old sheet, and we won’t be able to straighten him out again. He’s so old and ancient that we’ve almost despaired of him. But then this odd fellow with the accordion and the heart of gold arrived, looked compassionately at Zalman, and asked me where he was from. I looked at his file, which is the oldest file we have here, and it turned out that he was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and actually fought in the First World War. And what does this fellow do? He opens his dilapidated old accordion and plays an Austro-Hungarian march, something jolly and springy. And guess what happened? Zalman’s head began to rise, little by little, like a movie in slow motion; his back straightened, he got carefully off his chair on those skinny, shriveled legs that forgot how to walk decades ago, and began marching around the room, left-right, left-right, left-right. After he had marched for an hour and driven everyone crazy, he collapsed on the floor like a clockwork doll that had run out of steam. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I would never have believed it.”

  “And Itzik.” Tzila pointed at a young man sitting in the corner, his watery eyes fixed on an invisible point on the wall and his swollen penis sprouting through the open zipper of his pants. With a stiff, distorted hand Itzik gently stroked its fleshy pink head as if it were a rare, exquisite flower. “Itzik wasn’t there himself, but his parents were, they named him after their baby son who starved to death in the ghetto and told him horror stories until he went mad. Ever since then all he does is fondle himself, day and night. And then along comes this guy with his accordion, plays him a few tunes, and he forgets about the thing burning in his pants, and for the first time since he arrived here I saw him taking his hand away to clap.

  “And after he was finished with Itzik he played for the whole ward, and you should have seen them dance. Even Feiga forgot her cleaning and danced. Everyone danced. In slippers, in clogs, barefoot, with clumsy movements and with bodies full of joy.”

  “But Shmuel, what did he do to Shmuel?” asked Rosa impatiently.

  “With Shmuel it was a lot harder. He sat down next to him and played him songs, and Shmuel didn’t react. Until this man, this angel, saw that Shmuel was drawing in the air. Then he stood in front of him, as if he were holding the painting in his hands, and told him it was the most beautiful painting he had ever seen, and asked him who the beautiful woman in the painting was.”

  “And Shmuel talked?” demanded Rosa.

  “You bet he talked. The first word he said was ‘Rosa.’”

  “I don’t believe it,” said Rosa breathlessly.

  “Wait till you hear the rest. And then the man asked him: ‘Who’s Rosa?’”

  “And what did he say?” interrupted Rosa.

  “He talked about you. He described you with a lot of love and warmth. He said that you were the biggest and most beautiful woman in the world. How he had waited for you all his life. How he had followed your career and cut out every newspaper article published about you until he got up the courage to knock on your door. And how when he saw you in real life for the first time he was so excited that he couldn’t breathe or talk and he felt as if he were paralyzed.”

  The tears began to stream down Rosa’s cheeks, and she buried her head in her hands and asked Tzila in a whisper to go on.

  “And then he began to cry,” Tzila continued. “He said that he couldn’t see you. And when the man asked him why, he said that you’d been burned in the crematorium. And when the man asked him how it had happened, he told him that it was his fault because he had burned you; with his own hands he had thrust your body into the crematorium and seen the fire burning your hair and melting your flesh, until all that was left was a little heap of ash. Then Shmuel called himself a murderer, and started crying so loudly that everyone came to see what had happened. When he calmed down he told the man that ever since he had burned you he was painting you from memory. And you should have heard how he cried over you. Poor man. He mourned you as if you were really dead and kept saying that he was to blame.”

  “And why is he silent now?” asked Rosa, her body heaving with sobs. “Why won’t he talk to me?”

  “Because the man’s gone. The minute he left Shmuel shut his mouth and resumed his position in front of the window. If he comes back I’ll call you,” the nurse promised.

  * * *

  The day after her visit to the hospital, early in the morning, there was a soft knock at the door. Rosa peeped through the peephole and saw Rachelle standing there. She opened the door in alarm. This time Rachelle didn’t burst noisily into the apartment and wake Angel, as usual. She stood silently on the threshold with an embarrassed, pitying look in her eyes. And when Rosa saw them standing behind her in their white coats, she knew that even though Rachelle was her best friend, she enjoyed being the bringer of bad news. Tzila, the head nurse of hut number three, and Dr. Cohen, the medical director of the hospital, looked at her nervously. They asked her to sit down on the kitchen chair, which Shmuel had covered with painted anemones, and as Rachelle gave her a glass of water, the doctor told her that the night before, a gray, rainy night, Shmuel had disappeared from the ward. “We searched for him everywhere, and we couldn’t find a trace,” they told her, in a confidential whisper. In the morning, when the rain stopped, they found him lying under an ancient pine tree, buried beneath a pile of dry cones. His hands were still gripping the plastic bag, which by some miracle hadn’t been torn in the fall. “It seems,” they told her, “that he tried to climb to the top of the pine tree, but the tree was old and dry and hollow and couldn’t bear his weight, and it fell to the ground together with him. It was almost like a suicide pact between the tree and the man.”

  When they left, with their heads hanging and their eyes on the ground, Rachelle remained by her side. Rosa looked at her curiously, suddenly discovering the hard black bristles growing on her upper lip; the scanty, orange-hennaed hair exposing bald spots on her scalp; the brown blotches that had appeared on her cheeks between the pockmarks; the fingers crooked with rheumatism ending in hooked nails like a vulture’s claws. She shook her head angrily, trying to get rid of the ugly sight, and then she remembered the terrible news, and lifted her voice in a howl that woke Angel, who crawled out of bed and curled up in her mother’s lap, trembling with fear.

  “It’s all your fault!” she shrieked at Rachelle. “You made him die, you and your advice. ‘Nobody commits suicide over paintbrushes.’” She mimicked her voice mockingly. “I should never have listened to you. I always knew that you were jealous of me, and here’s the proof. You wanted me to be alone, as lonely as you are. Well, you got what you wanted.” An
d boiling tears of pain streamed down her fleshy cheeks, collected in the deep cleavage between her breasts, and wet Angel’s fair head pressing fearfully against her.

  When Rachelle left and she remained alone in the painted kitchen with Angel, she told her that Daddy Shmuel had gone and he was never coming back.

  “Like Daddy Joseph and Daddy Shraga?” the little girl asked sadly.

  “Yes, just like Daddy Joseph and Daddy Shraga.” She found herself echoing the child’s words.

  That evening she asked her children and neighbors not to come, because she wanted to be alone. And when she lay on her bed, with Angel holding her hands in her tiny ones as if trying to comfort her, she felt the anger welling up and seething inside her. This time she was angry at herself for listening to Rachelle and throwing out Shmuel’s paintbrushes. When she had exhausted her anger at herself she began to direct her rage at Shraga for leaving her a widow and free to marry Shmuel. And as she continued to examine her life she came up at last with the main culprit—Joseph, for if he hadn’t died none of these terrible troubles would have descended on her.