The Fairest Among Women

by Dalya Bilu

  Angel looked up at her mother and, in her chirping voice, asked for breakfast. Rosa’s happiness was almost complete. Angel wasn’t growing like a normal child, but in defiance of the doctors’ gloomy predictions she was changing in front of her eyes. She talked, she laughed, she walked, and she was the most beautiful creature Rosa had ever seen, exactly like an angel in a painting.

  That night Rosa couldn’t contain herself, and after the seven phone calls to her seven children, she told her three dead husbands in excitement about the miracle. As if by common consent, all three had decided to come back to her, and the silence of her bedroom was broken by three male voices. Again Joseph began to shower her with the cursing and teasing, the complaints and obscenities, she had so sorely missed; again she heard Shraga’s kindly chirping and the drumming of his bare feet as he danced. This time they were joined by Shmuel, and she could hear the two senior husbands harassing the newcomer, tormenting and insulting him. Joseph mocked his nudes, called them cheap pornography, and spoke slightingly of his paintbrushes. And Shraga, noticing Shmuel’s shabby shoes, pounced on them and kept at him all evening, saying that they were a disgrace and demanding to know why he couldn’t buy himself a new pair of shoes. After that, as if by common consent, they both began to make fun of his paint-spattered hands and shabby clothes. Then Joseph turned his attention to Shraga, reminding him of his poor performance in bed and the embarrassing circumstances of his death, and Shraga retaliated with the story of Joseph’s last days on earth, and the grotesque position in which he had been buried, which they were still talking about in heaven, and which made even the angels laugh. And so it went until Rosa’s patience snapped; she scolded them as if they were naughty children, and warned them that if they went on quarreling none of them would be allowed into her bed.

  During the nights when she conversed with her husbands, separately and together, all three of them tried to get into her bed. With a heavy heart she would decide which of them to spend the night with and kick the other two out. Since it was hard for her to choose, she would flip a coin until it transpired that Joseph, the strongest of the three, would shoulder the other two aside and turn the coin to suit himself when he picked it off the floor. When she discovered this piece of trickery, she decided to make a roster and allow each of them in turn into her bed. Sundays and Wednesdays were devoted to Joseph. Monday and Thursday it was Shraga’s turn, and Tuesdays and Fridays were set aside for Shmuel. In order to avoid superfluous arguments she decided to spend the Sabbath alone in self-examination, until Joseph demanded it for himself, since he was the senior husband and had lived with her the longest.

  “That’s it; I’ve had enough. I’ll never get married again,” she announced to Ruhama after paying another visit to Shmuel’s grave and taking the opportunity to visit the other two as well.

  “It doesn’t depend on you,” Ruhama replied dryly, in an ominous tone of voice.

  “I haven’t got the strength left to marry and bury, marry and bury, marry and bury,” Rosa pleaded, as if Ruhama, who had invented the butterfly game and sealed her fate, had the power to change her destiny. “And it’s lucky for me that the three of them are buried in the same place,” she added. “Imagine if I had to run to three cemeteries all over the country! This way it’s easy. Whenever I visit one grave I visit the others too, and none of them can complain of being left out. But a fourth grave—the very thought of it gives me the shivers. Who’s got the strength for it at our age?”

  “But who says you’ll have to bury the fourth one too? Maybe he’ll bury you—don’t forget he’ll be the last,” Ruhama said spitefully.

  Rosa, who felt the words burning her flesh, laughed apologetically. “Look at me, fat, old, a mother of eight with a disabled child to look after. Who would want me?”

  Ruhama didn’t answer and looked enviously at her friend’s perfect face, sucking up her beauty as if to absorb it into the darkness of her body. And before they parted she told her that she should consider herself lucky, since she had already had three husbands and it wasn’t over yet, whereas the only man she, Ruhama, had been close to in recent years, after Joseph’s death, was the faceless man burdened with shopping baskets who sat next to her on the number eighteen bus on the way home from the market, and who was so tired that he fell asleep and let his head fall onto her shoulder. And she was so happy to have a man sleeping at her side at last that she didn’t shake him off, not even in order to get off the bus at her stop. And when he woke up and got off the bus in Katamon H, she got off with him. “And he didn’t even turn his head to see who had been acting as his pillow,” she said bitterly. “He got off the bus and walked away as if I didn’t exist, as if he hadn’t been sleeping on my shoulder. As if he was something to write home about! A tired middle-aged man in stinking old clothes, with unshaved cheeks and red eyes. And to think that I got off the bus and followed him just because he did me the favor of sleeping on my shoulder,” she said painfully, and as if she regretted her confession, she quickly left the house.

  During this time Rosa ignored the living and concentrated on the dead. Angel’s beautiful face smiling at her in the morning no longer thrilled her, nor did her grandchildren succeed in bringing a smile to her face when they came to visit. The warm weight and good smell of the babies in her lap, which usually filled her with intense feelings of love, did not warm her heart. Rosa’s life centered round the anniversaries of her husbands’ deaths. She visited their graves, cherished their mementos, and kept three memorial candles burning in the living room.

  Before she could recover from the anniversary of Shmuel’s death, it was followed by Shraga’s, which was followed by Joseph’s, and then came Shmuel’s turn again. She began to wonder if her mother had been right never to remarry, and if satisfying the demands of one dead husband was difficult, taking care of three was almost impossible.

  “It’s impossible to share your attention among three dead husbands without depriving any of them,” Rosa would complain to Rachelle, with whom she had made friends again in the meantime, and to Ruhama, who always liked hearing about her troubles. And at night too they gave her no peace, keeping her awake with their incessant quarreling, their whims, and their complaints.

  The days passed so quickly that she complained to Rachelle that her years were growing shorter, that before she could turn around she had already observed three anniversaries and the year was already over, and with the years getting so short she would die before her time. Rachelle pondered what she had said and then remarked that she felt the same way, that her years too were getting shorter, and every year was shorter than the one before, and the year to come would probably be shorter still, and the one after that would be over before it began.

  And Rosa, who felt time racing and her days disappearing, began to mark the passing days in little lines on the wall behind her bed. At the end of the year, when she counted the lines she had drawn, she saw that she had not missed a single day, but nevertheless the year had passed more quickly than the one before it.

  “I’m afraid,” she said to Rachelle, “that I’ll go to sleep one night and when I wake up in the morning I’ll discover that another year has passed.” And when they invited Ruhama for a joint consultation, they revived memories of bygone days, when a year was a year, and with longing filming their eyes they recalled how slowly time had passed then, and how they had counted the days before summer vacation, and how they had almost died of anticipation until it arrived, and how the time between one birthday and the next when they were children had seemed like an eternity.

  And again they spoke gravely and at length about how their days were getting shorter, until Rosa put an end to the barren discussion and announced that she was going to see Peretz the Cabalist. “He’s the wisest man I know,” she said, “and I’m sure he’ll come up with an answer. And besides, I haven’t seen him for ages and he’s probably got a lot to tell me,” she added apologetically.

  This time Rosa did not have to wait her turn wi
th the dozens of women assembled outside his door. As soon as he heard that she was there he sent his assistant to bring her to him. He looked into her eyes, peeked down the neck of her dress, weighed her breasts in his imagination, and listened to the problem of the shortening days. Although she asked him, he refused point-blank to tell her when she would be reunited with her husbands, but he was prepared to explain why her days were growing shorter, and reassured her by saying that many people of her age felt the same.

  “The reason is simple,” he said. “When we’re children the years pass slowly, that’s a fact. Because your year and a child’s year are the same from the point of view of the number of days they contain, but his is very long and yours is very short. Don’t forget, for a four-year-old a year is a quarter of his life, and for a five-year-old a year is a fifth of his life. Whereas we, who would love to make time go slower, one year at the age of fifty is a fiftieth of our lives, and one year at the age of sixty is a sixtieth of our lives—so you see, everything is relative, and time really does fly. And besides”—he suddenly changed his tone and began to speak like a university professor, and Rosa felt that he really was the cleverest man she knew—“if we look at the scientific study of the time mechanism in humans, we’re talking about a physiological process taking place in the brain. The longer we live, the more this process wears down, and so the sense of time in an old man is different from that in a young man.”

  Before she left he asked her how Angel was doing and when she told him about her he nodded his head in satisfaction and asked her to look out for anything unusual in her behavior, because he saw something for which he had no explanation at the moment. And when she asked him what he meant, he said that he couldn’t say for sure, and asked her again to watch the child carefully.

  Rosa went home, called her friends, and told them what the cabalist had said.

  * * *

  After this Rosa began to watch Angel like a hawk, trying to make up for all those years when she had been too busy getting married, taking care of her new husbands, burying them, mourning them, and appeasing their spirits to pay her the proper attention. Now she began to look after her like a mother again, rejecting the attempts of her daughter Ruthie, who had grown accustomed to her role of surrogate mother, to take the child under her wing. And in the evenings, when she put her to bed, she would gaze intently at this different child to whom she had given birth, who had smashed to smithereens the ordinary, uneventful life to which she had once aspired.

  Sometimes, when she thought about Angel and worried about what would happen to her when she, Rosa, departed this world, she would suffer agonies of conscience that kept her awake at night, and she would blame herself for arresting the child’s growth, since an old wish of hers had come true in Angel. Painfully she remembered Angela’s strictures: “When you wish for something, you don’t always know what the results will be if your wish comes true. The realization of a wish can cost a heavy price.” Once Angela had caught her in the middle of performing her secret nightly ritual over baby Ruthie, and when she heard Rosa asking her daughter not to grow up, she was furious. “Did you ever think about what would happen if your wish came true and Ruthie really didn’t grow?” she scolded her. Rosa didn’t bother to reply, and she didn’t think of the consequences, and at night, behind her mother’s back, she continued to ask her children not to grow up.

  And in her last child the wish had come true, as if all the previous wishes had come together and materialized in her. And even after the doctors told her that Angel wouldn’t grow, she couldn’t stop herself from repeating the words she had repeated every night over all her other children: “Don’t grow.” Rosa hoped that thanks to the arrested growth of her last child time would stop for her and she wouldn’t grow old, as if Angel’s refusal to grow would stop the years from encroaching and keep the end at bay. And when she listened to the neighborhood women talking about the “goslings that had grown wings and flown away” and even read in the women’s magazines about “empty nest syndrome,” she knew that she would always have Angel at her side; her nest would never be empty, and she would not grow old.

  When she looked at the results of her wish that had come true—at Angel’s tiny feet, like those of the Chinese girls whose mothers had bound their feet to arrest their growth, sticking out of her baby dresses—she would almost swoon with joy.

  The neighborhood women would exclaim loudly over Angel’s beauty and tell Rosa that her baby was a doll. And Rosa knew that this was not far from the truth. When she looked at Angel playing with the doll, Belle, she could see the resemblance between them. Both had golden curls, small straight noses, pink cheeks as perfect as if painted by a master painter’s hand, and blue eyes fringed with long dark lashes. Belle’s eyes were glassy and expressionless and never closed, and Angel’s eyes were always smiling.

  When she went out for walks with Angel now, she would dress her in wide blouses to hide the little humps on her back. With maternal pride she would see how the passersby stopped to look at the child. Enchanted, they would bend over the tiny little girl, cooing and gurgling in the usual way that adults consider suitable for talking to babies. This was the moment both of them were waiting for. After her admirers had run out of baby talk, Angel would open her mouth and talk sense, leaving her audience speechless. A look of astonishment would cross their faces as they stared at the exquisite baby who could talk like a big girl. Sometimes Rosa would take fright at her own great pride in her daughter, and suspect the people looking at her curiously of wanting to give her the evil eye, and she would spread her five fingers wide and raise her right hand to her forehead, as if to wipe away invisible beads of sweat, and whisper five times to herself the magic charm against the evil eye: “Hamsa, hamsa, hamsa, hamsa, hamsa.”

  At night, after bathing Angel in the baby tub, shampooing her hair, kissing every dimple and soft fold of flesh, nuzzling her toes, and breathing on her pink cheeks, she would put her to sleep and stand by her bed, counting her rhythmic breaths. For a long time she would stand there and listen attentively, trying to discern the familiar sound of children growing in the night. Then she would bend over her bed and whisper in her ear: “Don’t grow, don’t grow, don’t grow.”

  And the child did not fail her. Obediently she would wake up after a long night during which all the children grew, and her height would be exactly the same as the day before.

  “It’s not that she’s a dwarf, God forbid,” Rosa would say to her friends. “All her proportions are right; it’s just that she hasn’t grown, and at least one of the doctors’ predictions has come true.”

  Behind Rosa’s back Rachelle would say to anyone who asked her: “Rosa is to blame for everything. It’s because she asked all her other seven children not to grow up. And now her wish has come true in her eighth child to punish her. The child doesn’t grow, and if you ask me it’s not normal for a child of her age to look like a child of two.” And then she would add: “In my opinion Rosa neglects that child. Instead of behaving like a responsible mother and running to doctors with her, she’s proud of her abnormality and does nothing to stop it.” And, lowering her voice to a confidential whisper, she would continue: “How come she lets her play with those crows? Crows bring bad luck. How come she doesn’t understand that anyone who plays with bad luck is putting his life at stake?” And Rosa would hear from her neighbors the things that were never said to her face, and push another clove of garlic against the evil eye under Angel’s pillow.

  * * *

  In time to come, after Angel was gone, when the elders of the neighborhood would debate the matter and try to pinpoint the moment of her disappearance, violent disagreements would break out. One would say that she had reached the age of five, another would argue heatedly that she was seven, while a third would claim that she was no more or less than ten years old—but since her body refused to grow with the years, she looked like a baby.

  twenty-two

  THE BELOVED OF THE CROWS

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p; As Rosa grew closer to Angel she became more sharply aware of the “phenomenon,” as the neighbors referred to the unique relationship between her daughter and the birds in general, and the crows in particular. After Angel was born, when a great flock of crows began to circle the house, Rosa at first refused to see it as a “phenomenon,” and claimed that it was simply coincidence. But when the “phenomenon” repeated itself, and the whole neighborhood started to talk about it, she began to look for explanations, hints, and signs.

  Rosa thought that it all began when she first brought Angel home, because of the vociferous welcome accorded her by Joseph’s cuckoo clocks. She liked to tell the story of how she came home from the hospital with the baby in her arms, and the minute she walked in the door all the wooden birds chorused, “Cuckoo! Cuckoo!” ten times to mark the hour of ten o’clock in the morning. And the cuckoo cries continued to resound in the baby’s ears every hour on the hour until her father, Joseph, died.

  The neighbors told a different story. They described a motley crew of gray crows massing on the wires of the telephone poles opposite the house and cawing curiously, ignored by Rosa who was too excited to notice them. The fourth-floor neighbors, looking down from their balconies, liked to describe how the crows screwed their necks around at an angle that made their feathers bristle and enabled them to fix their beady eyes on the tiny flawed baby in its mother’s arms. And when their curiosity was satisfied, they began to fly around and around the house and utter their agitated cries. The cacophony went on for hours, the neighbors said, and ever since the crows had flown past the baby’s window in formation every morning, taking turns tapping on the windowpane with their strong beaks and showing a keen interest in her development. And the child, who the doctors predicted would never grow and would spend her life lying on her hunchback, would turn her head in the direction of the tapping, stretch out her tiny arms, and coo with delight.