The Fairest Among Women

by Dalya Bilu

  Late at night, when an oppressive silence lay over the house and black shadows lurked with malevolent expressions, she looked at the peaceful face of the child lying next to her, and came to the conclusion that all her troubles had begun with the birth of her daughter. She pushed these cruel thoughts away in alarm, and with her whole body aching and her eyes blinded by tears, she lay and waited for morning, afraid to fall asleep lest she smother the child who had ruined her life. And when morning came, sending hesitant rays through the slats of the blinds, painting the dust motes gold as they danced before her eyes and lay in stripes and squares on the floor, she woke Angel to a new day.

  That same day she returned to the hospital to inquire about what had happened to Shmuel and to collect his few possessions. With her back and buttocks bruised by Feiga’s mop, whose blows were harder than usual, she reached Shmuel’s room, panting for breath. The bed was made, and a strange old man was sitting beside it in a wheelchair with his back to her, staring at the cloudy sky. She looked at the nape of his neck and felt a new pain pinching her chest. Hesitantly she took hold of the handles of the wheelchair and turned it toward her. Eyes full of ashes looked at her curiously and a toothless, narrow-lipped mouth gaped at her. Rosa looked at the old man, and slowly, as if trying to gain time, she rolled up his pajama sleeve. Five blue numbers leaped up at her. Rosa read the numbers aloud, and they immediately began to play before her eyes as if in a game of chance on television, adding and multiplying, subtracting and dividing themselves.

  When all the sums were done, and she arrived at the final result, the final figure, she collapsed onto the bed, looked at the old man, and called him by his name. Mischa blinked his eyes and began to mumble all the horrors about human beings turned into soap, babies whose skulls were smashed, crematoria that emitted red dust, into her ears. But Rosa didn’t want to hear. With shaking hands she crammed the last months of her dead husband’s life into two black plastic garbage bags, and left the room knowing that she could help no more, that however much she tried to atone for everything that had been done to them in the camps, even if she tried to help only one individual survivor, she would never succeed. Because the horror that had happened there was too great and too heavy, and even if she mobilized all the resources of her body and her soul, it would not help.

  Defeated, she went to look for Muhammad. And when she found him and asked him what had happened, he told her that Shmuel had climbed the tree because he wanted to achieve greatness, and a man who wants to achieve greatness and climbs high sometimes succeeds and sometimes falls. Rosa didn’t agree with this theory; she thought that Shmuel had climbed up a tall tree because he wanted to find a good vantage point to search for his wife who had vanished in the chimney smoke among the scraps of cloud. Whatever the truth may have been, many different explanations of Shmuel’s final act were put forward by the patients and the staff, and the next day the newspapers reported dryly that Shmuel Evron, the painter who loved fat women, had died a solitary death in a hospital for the mentally ill.

  On trembling legs, her face wet with tears, and her eyes dazzled by the glare of the sun that had emerged from the clouds, Rosa made her way heavily to the gate, where her son’s car stood waiting. Two frayed shirts, a pair of shabby shoes, a pair of new pajamas she had bought for him, which he had never worn, long johns, warm undershirts, and a watch with a cracked face—weighed accusingly on her arms in a vengeful burden. Wet pine trunks, sawed off by the gardener for fear they might uproot themselves like Shmuel’s tree, barred her path. She zigzagged among the amputated trunks with the pungent smell of the oozing resin pinching her nostrils, and the sticky amber tears gluing the pine needles to the soles of her shoes. She looked at every trunk blocking her way with hatred and hostility, in case it was the one that had killed Shmuel. At the end of the path she tripped over a trunk oozing congealed teardrops. She lay on top of it, her belly crushing dry pine cones and her face sticky with resin. When she opened her eyes she found her head buried in a hole gaping like a wound, padded by thick, torn roots like a warm eagle’s nest dug in the ground.

  “This is Shmuel’s tree,” whispered a tall, very thin man with beautiful light eyes who had been following her without her noticing him. Gently he bent over her, took hold of her wrists with his strong hands, and lifted her up as easily as if she were a weightless rag doll. Rosa stood on her feet, shook the dirt off her clothes, picked the pine needles from her hair, and tried to scrape the resin off her nose with her nails. When she had completed her preparations and felt better about herself she looked curiously at her savior, knitting her brow in the attempt to remember if she had ever seen him before. When she failed in the attempt, she suddenly noticed that he was carrying an accordion on his back. The man bent down gracefully, put the accordion on the ground, and carefully gathered up the imaginary canvases and paintbrushes that had existed in Shmuel’s madness and had scattered around him when he fell.

  “You forgot to take his paintings and brushes,” he said in a kindly tone of voice. He led her gently to the car, as if she were a fragile object, and when she sat down heavily in the backseat he laid the pile of airy brushes and canvases on her lap. Rosa refused to cooperate and tried to evade the burden of Shmuel’s imagination, but when she felt the stab of a nonexistent paintbrush she took fright and held out her arms to take the bundle.

  “If you don’t mind,” said the stranger delicately, holding a roll of air. “I’ll keep this one for myself.” With a flourish he unrolled the painting before her. “This is the last portrait of you he painted from memory.” He went on to describe the empty, resinous air he was holding spread out in his long hands. “It’s his finest painting,” he said as he rolled up the nonexistent canvas. “I hope you don’t think it’s cheek on my part to ask for it. I think Shmuel would have agreed to let me have it.”

  Rosa looked in embarrassment into the stranger’s beautiful eyes and said that every painting Shmuel had ever painted was his finest painting, and with her lap full of imaginary paintbrushes and nonexistent paintings she asked Leslie-Shimon to drive her home. All the way there she looked at the back of her silent son’s neck and suddenly she saw that it bore an astonishing resemblance to the nape of Joseph’s neck, and she remembered her sons’ solemn warnings, and thought that parents should sometimes listen to what their children told them.

  When she came home she pushed the imaginary paintbrushes into the red pottery vase standing in the corner and put the crystal vase with the real paintbrushes next to it. After that the pottery vase always stood empty, and when visitors suggested that she fill it with dry branches bearing fluffy cotton blossoms, purple nettles, or even flowers, she would smile and say that she kept this vase for Shmuel’s paintbrushes. And when they asked her where the paintbrushes were, she would explain: “We may not be able to see them, but Shmuel can see them from where he is, in heaven.”

  The imaginary canvases, which the man whose name she didn’t know had placed in her lap, she rolled up tightly and stored away carefully in the closet. To keep the moths away from her dead husband’s last paintings she strewed mothballs among them. Perhaps these paintings were not the kind that could be seen or felt, but Rosa knew that if they existed for two people, they must be real.

  twenty-one

  ONE CHILD AND THREE FATHERS

  Rosa sat paralyzed among the dozens of people who came to comfort her during the week of mourning, her face empty and expressionless. Most of their visits were prompted by sincere sympathy, but some came out of curiosity to see the woman who had buried three husbands, and a few came to gloat. Bombarded with dozens of roast chickens, kilos of boiled potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, fresh salads, and baked goods, Rosa sat motionless next to the laden table, her eyes dull, her hair greasy, her face fallen, holding the crystal vase with Shmuel’s paintbrushes on her lap, waiting for him to come and paint with them to his heart’s content.

  Since she had broken off relations with Rachelle because of the poor advice she had given
her, she told no one but Ruhama that as she sat with the crystal vase between her thighs and listened to the paintbrushes whispering inside it, she felt as if Shmuel were choosing a paintbrush to paint a new picture. Every evening during the week of mourning she would put the vase down next to her bed, count the paintbrushes, learn their colors, and the order in which they were arranged, and pray that he would smell them from afar and be tempted by the bait to visit her bed in the night.

  In the morning, before she washed her face, she would count them again and check the order in which they were arranged, and she was prepared to swear that he had used them during the night. On the seventh morning, feeling the dampness on one of the brushes with her fingertips and seeing the dark color on another, she knew that Shmuel hadn’t gone, that he was there with her just like Joseph and Shraga.

  This time she felt uneasy about framing his picture, and she discussed her doubts with Ruhama, who told her that she had no right to discriminate against any of her husbands, and that Shmuel deserved a memorial too. Again she found herself sorting through the photographs of her dead husbands until she finally chose the best one, a studio portrait taken on their wedding night showing the beaming bridegroom with his arm around his bride. She cut herself carefully out of the photograph and left Shmuel with one broad, brightly colored hand dangling uncomfortably in the air. She set off for the photographer’s studio and came home with a poster-size enlargement rolled up in a cardboard cylinder. Then she went to the framer’s, and a week later she took delivery of her last husband’s beaming face and half his body in a frame identical to those imprisoning the portraits of Joseph and Shraga.

  Impatient as a little girl she summoned Leslie-Shimon to come over the same evening and hang the picture. Muttering to himself in protest, her son reluctantly drilled a hole in the wall and hung the new picture in a straight line with the portraits of Joseph and Shraga. Through their glass the old husbands looked disdainfully at the newcomer swelling their ranks, and even though they had never been on the best of terms, it seemed to Rosa that they were joining forces to conspire against the latest addition. Shmuel, who was shy and aware of the hostile atmosphere surrounding him, did his best to be as unobtrusive as possible.

  The next day Angel woke up and joined her in bed, in the new regime she had instituted since Shmuel had left, and peeked over the blanket at the three male heads hanging on the wall like the trophies of a scalp hunter. Pointing at them with her slender finger she announced: “That’s Daddy Joseph, and that’s Daddy Shraga, and that’s Daddy Shmuel.” She repeated this announcement several times, as if to make sure that she remembered all their names and didn’t deprive one of them of his rights.

  And when Rosa helped her to get dressed, the little girl chanted a chilling refrain: “First Daddy Joseph went away, and then Daddy Shraga went away, and then Daddy Shmuel went away, and now they’re all in the sky.” And when she came to “all in the sky” she raised her hands above her head, and Rosa slid her sweater on. Angel went on singing her song as she hopped downstairs and got into the minibus coming to collect her, and with the horrifying refrain ringing in her ears, Rosa climbed laboriously back up to her apartment.

  All that day she was unable to concentrate on her housework, and she wandered around restlessly, humming the song that refused to go away, angry at herself for not being able to banish it from her mind and deal with more important things. In the end she switched on the radio and listened to the cheerful tunes, hoping that they would drown out the infectious song and make it go away. But the terrible song rose mockingly above the music from the radio, repeating itself over and over again, until she couldn’t stand the sound of it. Suddenly she felt worried about Angel, and she called Dvora, the kindergarten teacher, to ask her if she was all right.

  “With her everything’s weird,” said Dvora, as if she had finally received permission to say what was in her heart. “Never mind those crows that wait for her every day outside, and the way she talks to them; never mind that story about Jacob’s ladder she tells us all the time and how she claims that she’s a fallen angel. But now, for a change, she’s made up some song about her dead fathers, and she won’t stop singing it. During the games, during the quiet time, at lunch, and even now, after I’ve put them all down to sleep, she’s still singing it and disturbing the other children. And worst of all, that song’s stuck to us all like glue, and now we’re all singing it, the teachers, the assistants, and the children who’re capable of talking. It just won’t leave us alone.”

  And that evening, when Rosa hummed the song in bed, Joseph disappeared from her life in a silent protest, taking the easygoing and weak-charactered Shraga with him. Rosa, who was so used to his jibes and curses that she couldn’t do without them, lay awake in bed, concentrating on Joseph’s picture and trying to summon him. When he refused to come, she humiliated herself and begged him to return, promising him all kinds of things if he would only come back to her. And when he persisted in his refusal, she threatened to stay away from his grave, to burn his portrait, and to wipe his memory from her heart. But Joseph took no notice of her threats and stubbornly refused to appear.

  When she despaired of Joseph, she began to negotiate with Shraga, concentrating on his picture and coaxing him sweetly to come to her. And when he too failed to respond, she called Shmuel, rattling the paintbrushes with her hand. When this had no effect, she peeled a few plump cloves of garlic, slashed them with her long fingernails, and squeezed their juice over the paintbrushes. But Shmuel refused to come to her, to eat the garlic, or to pick up the paintbrushes.

  She felt utterly abandoned. And when she looked at the pictures of her three husbands she knew that they had joined forces against her. They ignored her existence, surveyed her with cold, glassy, distant looks, and ostracized her in the most hurtful way. But in spite of all these ominous signs, Rosa knew that they would come back one day. After all, they needed her no less than she needed them.

  * * *

  In anticipation of the unveiling of the tombstone thirty days after Shmuel’s death, she went into town and bought a bunch of new paintbrushes at an art supply shop. She crammed the slender paintbrushes with their soft, shining tufts of hair into a bag and drove to the cemetery. After the ceremony she waited impatiently for everyone to leave. When she was alone, with only the dark looks of Yochai the Undertaker following her from afar, she took the new paintbrushes out of her bag. Then she stood doubtfully in front of the grave, at a loss as to what to do with them. In the end she bunched them all together into one, thick brush and used it to sweep the dust and the little stones that had accumulated on the new marble tombstone. Finding no further use for the paintbrushes, she planted them in the loose soil around the grave with their wooden stems buried in the ground and their tufts sticking up.

  Surrounded by a little forest of soft, rustling coxcombs, she turned to Shmuel and told him that now that she had provided him with a fresh supply of paintbrushes she expected him to paint a lot of angels and beautiful women in his new heavenly home. Then she asked him to keep the paintings for her, so that she could see them when she joined him in the fullness of time.

  After concluding her conversation with Shmuel, she turned to Shraga. She sat down heavily on his tombstone, and although she was certain that he already knew, she told him about the death of her new husband, and in order to gladden his heart she danced his favorite waltz for him, with the very same steps as on their wedding night. She skipped and capered in the space between the tombstones, feeling his tender feet treading on her toes and getting entangled in her train. When she ran out of breath she sat down on the stone to rest, and after taking her leave of Shraga she set out to find Joseph.

  Joseph’s grave was covered with lavender bushes, their long stems crowned with purple blooms. Rosa plucked the scented flowers and crushed them between her fingers. The sharp, piercing smell, strong enough to wake the dead, spread through the cemetery. When the scent invaded her nostrils and reminded her of the touch o
f Joseph’s hands, she pulled up her skirts and sat down on the chilly tombstone. Her smell, merging with the heavy scent of the lavender, was sucked in greedily by the rich clods of earth and penetrated to the depths of the underworld.

  In a whisper she implored the eldest of her husbands to collect the other two and come home. Joseph, who was busy breathing in the incomparable scents that had momentarily vanquished the rot of death, did not reply, but Rosa knew that her offering had been accepted.

  Wearing a grave, solemn expression, like the mask of an actor in a Greek tragedy, Yochai the Undertaker was waiting for her at the gate with a glass of cold water to restore her. Ceremoniously he opened the door of the taxi for her, took her hand, and with a theatrical gesture helped her in, thrust her trailing skirt in after her, tucked it around her lap, and closed the door with a soft slam. Then he watched with lifeless eyes as the taxi drove away, and after it disappeared from view he returned to the cemetery at a light run, unbecoming to his somber calling.

  First he visited Joseph’s grave, where he filled his lungs with the smell she had left behind her, and stroked with his lean fingers the smooth stone storing the warmth of her body. Then he turned to Shraga’s grave and gently swept his outspread hands over the footprints she had left in the ground as a souvenir of her dance. After stepping in all her footsteps, he turned to Shmuel’s fresh grave with its shiny new tombstone, wrinkled his thin nose, and stroked the heads of the delicate paintbrushes waving at him in the light breeze.

  * * *

  The next day, when she went to wake Angel from her sleep, the little girl woke up with a beaming smile. Her eyes blinded by tears, Rosa immediately noticed the change that had taken place in her. The long fair hair curling down to her knees parted like a curtain, and her face shone through. It was the most beautiful face that Rosa had ever seen in her life. And when she looked again, as if she couldn’t believe her eyes, she saw that it bore an astonishing resemblance to the face Shmuel had given her when he painted her as a cupid. Her light eyes were open wide with a dreamy expression, her ripe rosy lips were parted in an angelic smile, and it seemed to Rosa that her nose had straightened overnight and taken on the classical shape beloved of painters. Alarmed, she examined the child’s back to see if her little humps had turned into the downy wings that Shmuel had given her in his painting. To her relief she saw that the humps were unchanged.