The Fairest Among Women

by Dalya Bilu

  And when the snow melted two days later, the bit of ground where the little girl and her doll had been smashed was revealed. The bed of death that had crushed the little bodies was lined with sharp stones, broken bottles, dirty diapers, torn newspapers, and dog excrement.

  Many months later, so the neighbors said, the crows were still searching for the little girl standing in the window, until they lost hope, folded their wings, abandoned their nests, and left, never to return.

  * * *

  In time to come, on the dreamy summer nights that covered the town in a steamy blanket of heat that made everybody forget the harsh winter, the neighbors would hear Rosa’s lament again.

  The lament, which was repeated as if in her sleep, always ended with the scream of dismay: “My little angel has fallen!” which she repeated in the middle of the night with her nightgown soaked in sweat and clinging to her body. And when the children of the neighborhood woke up at the sound of the terrible scream breaking into their sweet childish dreams, they would go like sleepwalkers to their parents’ rooms, cuddle up with them in their big beds, and ask their mothers fearfully why Angel had fallen. Sleepy eyed, their mothers would wrap the children in their arms and explain to them that Angel had fallen because she had played with her life and not taken care, and when people played with their lives the wind blew them away or they were run over by a car, and that was what happened to children when they weren’t careful.

  * * *

  And a year after Angel’s death, Rachelle could say to Rosa what she had thought and not dared to say before: “Angel fell because she had no grip on reality, and anyone who has no grip on reality ends up by disappearing and turning into a legend.”

  twenty-four

  THE PUNISHMENT OF TIME

  At the end of the week of mourning, when the condolence callers went away and Rosa remained alone at home for the first time in her life, she summoned her three dead husbands for a hard talk.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” she demanded.

  The three men exchanged embarrassed looks and said nothing.

  “At least you could have warned me against the fall. Where are your hearts?” she reproached them and listened to their silence.

  When the silence dragged on she stood in front of them and shouted at the top of her voice, mobilizing all her sorrow and all her anger and all the resonance of her mighty chest: “Answer me!”

  Shraga and Shmuel looked desperately at Joseph, the senior husband and Angel’s father. Joseph avoided their eyes, smiled the same fatuous smile that had appeared on his face at the moment of his death, shrugged his shoulders, and said: “We couldn’t have known. And even if we had warned you and Leslie-Shimon had nailed down all the windows, our destiny is written in advance and nobody can change it. She would have fallen anyway.” And he added hesitantly: “And if you want to know my opinion, it was all because of Dror. If he hadn’t kept on telling her that she had wings, and telling her that silly story about Jacob’s dream, I doubt if she would have tried to fly.”

  Shraga nodded in agreement, picked absentmindedly at his bare toes, and since he had always detested animals of every shape and form, added: “It’s true that it’s all Dror’s fault, but the crows are to blame too. They enticed her to fly with them.”

  Then they looked at each other and with the silent complicity of old friends they both turned on the last husband, Shmuel, who sat between them like a schoolboy in disgrace, with his eyes fixed on the tips of his shabby shoes, spattered with paint in all the colors of the rainbow.

  “It’s Shmuel’s fault too. He painted her with wings and filled her room with angels. Is it any wonder that she thought she was one of them?” they chorused. Then all three of them looked at one another, nodded their heads in agreement, and turned on Rosa, raising their voices and rebuking her with words that went on ringing in her ears long after they had left.

  “And it’s all your fault too,” they said. “If you hadn’t called her Angel to begin with, she might never have tried the wings she didn’t possess and the story might have ended differently.”

  Rosa raged against them as she had never raged against anyone before. Yelling furiously she chased them out of her room, declaring that this time she really never wanted to see them again, and for many nights afterward she refused to allow any of them into her bed. Even when they sent her their sweetest smiles from behind the glass of their pictures and coaxed her with tender words, reminding her of the happy days they had spent together and holding out the promise of future delights, she hardened her heart against them.

  As a last resort they recruited Angela to their cause, calling her up from the depths of the underworld. One evening she appeared among them, her shriveled body draped in a black lace mourning dress full of tears that exposed her sickly white skin. The roses blooming on her faded cheeks and the unfamiliar glitter in her eyes led Rosa to the happy conclusion that her parents had finally been reunited, and that her father was apparently showering her mother with love again. And when she tried to ask her how her father was, Angela wagged her finger at her and admonished her as in days gone by, speaking in a hoarse, dull whisper from her toothless mouth. “I told you that it was forbidden to name the living after the dead. Who asked you to give her my name?” she demanded in a voice that sounded as if it had been conjured up from the bowels of the earth. Then she gave the three men one of her withering looks and continued in a rebuking voice: “I told you that it was forbidden for a widow to marry. You set the dead against you, and you didn’t ask their permission, and here’s the result. You are a lethal woman.”

  Rosa forgot that her mother had long been dead and gone, and old, unresolved resentments that always began with the words “I told you so” began rising in her throat. She stopped her ears with her fingers and told them all to get out of her room or she wouldn’t be responsible for the consequences. All four vanished in an instant, and she felt cold shivers running down her spine, from the back of her neck to the tips of her toes. With her whole body shaken by sobs and the word “lethal” ringing in her ears, she got into bed, where she spent a sleepless night, knowing that she never wanted to see her dead husbands again and that she would never miss them as long as she lived.

  * * *

  Try as she might, Rosa was unable to conjure up the figure of her dead daughter in her memory. Even when she pressed the new patent leather shoes to her bosom, sniffed her clothes, gathered up the golden hairs that had become entangled in her hairbrush, and looked again and again at her drawings, she could not sense Angel’s presence. Nor did the huge portrait she had made and hung on her bedroom wall help, a picture in which Angel looked out at her with her a bright, clear, pensive gaze, so different from the looks of her three husbands with the wrinkles round their eyes. And when she tried to conjure up her memory with the aid of the doll, Belle, who looked so much like Angel, she would scold herself afterward, for how could you compare a little girl full of life to an inanimate doll with a smashed skull and beady blue glass eyes? Belle’s white dress, which reminded her of the bride’s costume Angel had not lived to wear, was bloodstained, and whenever she touched it she felt the pain in her heart and the wounds gaping open again, and for the umpteenth time she wondered why she didn’t throw the doll away.

  But Belle reminded her of her first friend, Rina, too, in whose bed she had slept in the villa in Old Katamon, and she was afraid that if she threw the doll away all her memories would be wiped out. And Rosa would hug the doll and think about her secret bedfellow, about her life in the House of Notes, about her mother, Angela, and about her little daughter who had smashed against the frozen ground with the doll clasped in her arms and its golden hair tangled with hers. For hours she would sit in the dark on the flowery chair in the cheerful kitchen, pressing the doll to her bosom, shaking it up and down and listening in wonder to the word it had begun to repeat again after the fall: “Mama, mama, mama.” And Rosa would interrupt the doll and repeat in time to its cry: “My little an
gel has fallen, my little angel had fallen, my little angel has fallen,” until the first rays of the morning sun filtered through the slats of the shutters in long narrow stripes of faint light and crept stealthily toward her. First they licked at her feet, cold from the night chill, then they climbed to her calves and thighs, lingered between the tops of her legs to warm and tickle her there before climbing to her belly, invading her breasts, and penetrating her tear-blinded eyes with their merciless glare.

  Then Rosa would rise from her chair, go to Angel’s bedroom, and lay the doll with its broken head on her rumpled bed, which was still just as she had left it, with the bridal gown and veil waiting for her in vain. Gently, so as not to hurt it, she would shake the doll a little, listen with a gratified expression to its cry of “Mama,” tuck it into Angel’s blanket so it wouldn’t catch cold, and go exhausted to her room, lie down in the deep dent in her mattress, close her eyes, and try without success to recall the last time she saw her daughter lying on her icy bed.

  * * *

  On the thirtieth day after Angel’s death she came home from the cemetery, and this time she did not call on her three husbands, not even to say good-bye to them. And when she mounted the stairs on her feet swollen from standing next to the grave, she knew that her life had frozen at a single point in time. When her consolers told her that “Time heals everything,” Rosa already knew the truth. She knew that her time, the time that had gone past so swiftly in her life and that she had often complained of to her friends, had decided to punish her. The time that was supposed to pass quickly and heal her, according to her comforters, had begun to deceive her, mock her, and play tricks on her in dark corners and in secret. Just now, when she wanted it to pass quickly, it stretched out endlessly as if its feet were grounded in the earth. When she tried to describe the phenomenon to her friends, she explained to them that her time had changed. Now she had a different time, not at all like theirs, because on the day that Angel had died a little stone had entered the hourglass of her life, got stuck in the transition between one period and the next, and stopped the grains of sand allotted to her from flowing.

  Every night she would wait for the morning light to come and make her forget her troubles, rid her of the painful memories and disturbing thoughts floating about in the darkness of her head like hairy, malevolent bats uttering their hateful squeaks before swooping down on their prey. And in the morning she would drink her coffee anxiously, afraid that the day would never end, evening would never come, and night would not fall on the town. She would spend her hallucinatory days and nights prowling endlessly around the rooms and stealing glances at the clock. At those moments, which stretched into hours, she could have sworn that time was tormenting her, the time that didn’t want to pass had maliciously stuck the hands to the face of the clock to prevent them from moving. Exhausted, she would find herself imploring it to pass quickly, for the seconds, the minutes, the hours, the days, the weeks, the months, and the years to pass until her allotted span was over, her sufferings would come to an end, and calm and happy she could at long last be reunited with her loved ones.

  One particularly hard night, when bad thoughts pierced her body like raptors tearing at her flesh with iron beaks and hooked claws, she stole a look at her watch and saw that time had stopped. At that moment, which lasted an eternity, she decided not to give in to the tyrannical dictates of time. She got out of bed and filled the sink with a strong cleaning acid, ran around the house collecting all the clocks, and plunged them into the sink. She didn’t forget the kitchen clock, the alarm clock next to her bed, the elegant gold wristwatch Joseph had bought her as a present, and the wristwatches that had belonged to Joseph, Shraga, and Shmuel. In order not to leave a single breach for time to slip through, she threw in all the metal insides of the cuckoo clocks too, even though they had stopped working long ago and the little wooden houses had been eaten by woodworms. Tired out, she sat in the kitchen, looking with satisfaction at the clocks dissolving in the acid and listening to the fermenting of the water, which was like music to her ears. In the morning she removed the remains of the clocks and watches from the sink, crammed them into a black plastic bag, went downstairs, and threw the allies of time into the garbage bin. Then she went back home as triumphantly as if she had won a great battle.

  But after a few minutes, which seemed like an eternity in the clockless house, she felt time breathing down her neck again. She looked around in alarm and her eyes fell on the flickering green digits winking at her maliciously from the timer on the oven and confidently announcing the hour, the minutes, and the seconds. Furiously she pulled the plug out of the wall and sank defeated into her armchair in the living room.

  And again she heard it mocking her from the darkness of the house. She looked around and to her horror she saw the flickering, phosphorescent figures changing on the VCR. In a rage she disconnected the instrument and decided to give it to Dror as a gift, since she had never liked watching movies and never used it anyway.

  Even when all the allies of time had been destroyed, she did not feel the joy of victory, and she knew that in this battle too her opponent had gained the upper hand. A new time, not measured by clocks, had dug itself into its battle stations and refused to be budged. At the moment of recognition, which lasted forever, she was overcome by weakness and by a terrible fear. She broke out in a cold sweat, her body ached, and a feeling of suffocation gripped her throat. Rosa knew with frightening certainty that her body, her loyal ally throughout her life, was beginning to betray her. In an unexpected move that took her completely by surprise, it had rebelled against her, broken through her fortifications, entered into an alliance with her enemies, and invited them in.

  Taking advantage of the opportunity time rushed into the breach, penetrated the depths of her body, settled down inside her, and proceeded to dictate the measurements of a new meter to her, that of the beating of her heart. Defeated, she went to bed and all night long she lay awake counting her heartbeats, and every time she reached sixty she knew that another minute had passed. Beaten down by the cruel games of time, she knew with certainty that from now on it would dictate the rhythm of her life to her, and only it would decide when to run out and when the last grain of sand would drop through the waist of the hourglass of her life.

  After making this discovery she lay in bed with her eyes open and saw the pictures of her life flashing past her. Like the Technicolor images of a riveting movie they unrolled before her, husbands, children, friends, landscapes, smells, and tastes. And by the time she had counted sixty heartbeats the movie was over, and she went on counting the time planted inside her body that ached with a pain she had never known before. The grief, the sadness—the pangs of conscience and remorse that she tried in vain to banish—settled heavily on her heart measuring out its beats, and refused to go away.

  * * *

  And when she found herself at the dawn of a new morning, she knew that she had lost the taste for life. “Not only because she had lost three husbands and daughter and her time had stopped,” the neighbors would say, “but because of a new punishment that she couldn’t bear.”

  The punishment delivered a fatal blow to the center of her pleasures. In the privacy of their homes, in stairwells and shops, people whispered that Rosa had lost her sense of smell, and in the wake of her sense of smell her sense of taste too had disappeared, never to return.

  The first warning came when she went into the kitchen and failed to smell the flowers. When it happened she thought that since she had grown accustomed to her painted kitchen, and since she was sunk deep in her sorrow, it was only natural that she should fail to smell flowers that weren’t real in the first place. But later on Rachelle dropped in for her daily visit, and when she flared her nostrils and expanded her lungs as usual to breathe in the medley of colorful, flowery scents filling the kitchen, Rosa pretended that nothing had changed in her life.

  After Rachelle left Rosa hurried to her vanity, took out the heavy perfume that Shra
ga had once bought her, and with trembling fingers removed the cap and breathed in the bubble of air sealed inside the elegant glass bottle. Not a single particle of scent invaded her nostrils and engraved the word “perfume” on the smell center in her brain. Frantically she tore the cellophane off a new bottle of perfume, and when her shaking hands had finally succeeded in removing the stopper, she fell on the bottle, thrust the slender neck into her nostril, and took a deep breath. When she failed to smell the scent in the new bottle too, she let it drop from her hand with a loud crash. Sharp splinters of glass, dotting the oily yellow liquid, spotted the floor. Too tired to sweep up the broken glass, she collapsed onto her bed, insensible to the heavy smell aggressively invading the room.

  That night her sleep was restless and disturbed by frightening dreams. She saw herself moving about her herb garden, which had died long ago due to the murderous treatment it had received from Shmuel, from which it had never recovered. A magnificent basil bush fixed her with a challenging green stare. Laboriously she bent down and plucked a few leaves and green blooms from the bush, crushing the delicate leaves in eager anticipation of their pungent aroma. But the leaves refused to delight her with their smell. In alarm she raised them to her mouth and ground them between her teeth. Something dull and lifeless filled her mouth. Rosa spat out the chewed leaves and discovered to her horror that they were made of plastic. As if bitten by a snake, she let them fall from her hand and they floated slowly and silently, like real leaves, to the ground. Panic-stricken, she stumbled to the pickle barrel with the medicinal sage, pulled up an entire bush in her alarm, crushed a few stalks and raised them to her nose. This plant too was made of plastic, and so were all the other herbs on her balcony garden.