The Fairest Among Women

by Dalya Bilu

  She forced herself to wake up and stumbled into the kitchen, put the kettle on to boil, and made her morning coffee. The aromatic steam that usually greeted her nostrils was absent. The worst of all awaited her when she carefully sipped the boiling coffee. There was no taste, as if all the taste buds on her tongue had joined forces with her nose to deny themselves any pleasure. The coffee was as tasteless and muddy as the ersatz coffee she remembered from the days of austerity of her childhood. Rosa poured the coffee into the sink, put her mouth to the nozzle of the tap, and in order to get rid of the tasteless coffee grounds clinging aimlessly and meaninglessly to her tongue and palate, drank until her stomach hurt.

  At that moment she knew for certain that she had been deprived of her sense of smell. Overcome with a feeling of grief, she sat on the little kitchen stool, rocking her body as hot tears poured down her cheeks. She wept for the smell of the first rain, for the smell of the new-mown grass, for the delicious aromas of the dishes she cooked, for the fragrant smell of her freshly bathed grandchildren, and for the smell of a newborn baby, which she would never smell again. And then she remembered that together with the sense of smell she had been deprived of the sense of taste, and she wept for her double loss.

  In a final act of despair she emptied the kitchen cabinets and sniffed and tasted everything she found there: fresh crackers, sesame seeds, finely ground black pepper, olive oil, sharp vinegar, vanilla pudding powder, sugar, bicarbonate of soda, and a big bar of cooking chocolate. When she failed to discern any smell, she tried to discern their taste, cramming everything she could lay her hands on into her mouth. Urgently she stuffed herself with big grains and small grains, crumbly textures and hard textures, dense liquids and thin liquids, and all of them rolled around in her mouth, penetrated her throat, slid down her gullet, and churned around in her stomach, but left no impression at all on the area in her brain responsible for discerning taste.

  In her despair she hung the chain of garlic round her neck and raised the bulbs one after another to her nose. But the pungent smell, which had once reminded her of the reek of Shmuel’s breath, did not greet her nostrils. At this moment, with the braid of garlic adorning her like a necklace, she felt the hand of fate tormenting her with a vengeance. Seized by intense longings for Shmuel and his smell of garlic, she tore the white bulbs from her neck and crushed them savagely in her hands, trying to force them to give up the smell that had disgusted her in the days of her happiness. The dull, odorless liquid slid down her fingers, burning old scratches and invisible wounds with its touch.

  When Rachelle arrived she found Rosa sitting in the middle of her flowery kitchen, half-open packages of groceries scattered on the floor, and tears rolling down her cheeks.

  Rachelle stared at her in alarm, thrust a bunch of tissues into her hand, and tidied her wet, crumpled clothes.

  “What’s wrong with you now? Why does the house smell like a brothel where a pot of garlic soup has exploded? And what are all these groceries lying around for, and what’s the meaning of all this mess?” she scolded, and with a finger crooked with rheumatism tidied Rosa’s rumpled hair.

  “My sense of smell has gone,” sobbed Rosa.

  “To hell with your sense of smell! You can live without it for another hundred years. The worst thing that can happen is that you’ll lose a bit of weight because your food will be tasteless now. If you can’t smell you can’t taste either,” lectured Rachelle, who always knew how to take the right view of life.

  And since she was a practical woman, she added: “Never mind the smell of the flowers and the smell of food. Something else worries me more. What will happen if, God forbid, you leave the gas on? If you don’t smell it, you’ll suffocate to death. And what about food that spoils, something burning on the stove, the smell of smoke? These are the things that worry me.”

  That same day Rosa rushed round to the neighborhood HMO clinic and explained her problem to a blond woman doctor who answered her with demonstrative impatience in a foreign accent. With her breasts sticking out in front of her as if they were independent of the rest of her body, she scribbled something on a slip of paper and instructed Rosa to swallow the drops twice a day.

  And when the drops failed to have any effect, she went to consult a specialist, who tested her sense of smell. He gave her about twenty pieces of paper, each of them saturated with a different smell, and instructed her to tear them one by one and breathe in the odor. Obediently she did as he told her, and when he asked her to describe the smells, she burst into despairing tears and said that she couldn’t smell a thing. “They all smell the same, of nothing.” The doctor clapped his hands, told her that he had no cure for her affliction, and asked her to pay him a few hundred shekels.

  Rosa walked all the way home, trying desperately, until her lungs hurt, to smell the honeysuckle and the jasmine twining around the fences of the houses in Old Katamon, thinking angrily about the doctor who had taken her money without finding a cure for what ailed her. When she got home she put a pot of lentil soup on the stove to heat. In a moment of forgetfulness she raised a steaming spoonful of the hot, rich brown liquid to her mouth. The soup was tasteless. Rosa could not taste the coriander, she could not smell the heavy aroma of the soft lentils, and even the generous handful of chopped onion and garlic she had thrown into the soup the night before turned into bits of tasteless plastic in her mouth. Resolutely Rosa picked up the heavy pot, threw its contents into the lavatory, and flushed. A few solitary lentils that had escaped the drain floated on the surface of the water as a gloomy reminder.

  Rosa went to bed hungry, and she couldn’t sleep all night. Loud noises and terrible sounds whose like she had never heard before joined the beating of her heart as it counted out her time, disturbing her rest and preventing her from sleeping. She heard the water gurgling in the copper pipes set deep in the walls. She listened to the idle conversations of her neighbors, which she could hear as clearly as if they were conducting their lives right there in her bedroom. She heard people breathing in their sleep, she heard their snores and their bodies moving in their beds, she heard the sighing of the mattresses. The moans of pleasure of a couple making love in a distant apartment jolted her body as if they were coupling beside her in bed. When she heard the snapping of the woodworms’ teeth, the whisper of the feelers of the cockroaches burying into the food, the fermenting of the garbage rotting in the bin, and the sound of the blood streaming in her veins—she knew she had received a compensation that had turned into a curse. Now that she had been deprived of her sense of smell and taste, her sense of hearing had been sharpened in return for what she had lost.

  As she lay paralyzed with fear, listening to the sounds of the night with her eyes wide open in the darkness, she was horrified to hear the dull sound that took her back to her earliest memories. With tears streaming down her sagging cheeks, Rosa remembered the sounds of dragging she had once heard as a child, the dragging of bodies, a great many bodies, which she was later told were actually carpets. At that moment she felt Rina’s gloved hand wiping away her tears. She was not surprised to find her old friend here in her house, lying in her bed and covered by her blanket. Rina had not grown; she had remained a child. After overcoming her emotion she raised the blanket and looked at her closely. Her beautiful lace dress was tattered and full of dark stains, the soles of her shoes were worn out, her ringlets were dusty and covered with spiderwebs, her blue eyes were sadder now, and there was an ugly scar on her head. When Rosa told her about Angel and her fall, Rina put her arms around her and whispered in her ear that now Angel was sleeping in another little girl’s bed, for the whole world was full of little girls sleeping in the beds of other little girls, who were sleeping in the beds of other little girls, and there was no end to it.

  * * *

  At the end of the week, when her children came for dinner with their husbands and wives and all the grandchildren, she saw them exchange embarrassed looks, and she couldn’t avoid noticing the frequent use of the s
alt and pepper passing from one end of the table to the other. And when they went home and she was left with pots full of food, she knew that together with the loss of her sense of taste and smell, she had also lost her magic touch as a cook. The next week some of them stayed away. And after the meal, which was eaten in oppressive silence, Ruthie asked her: “Tell me, Mother, what’s happened to your cooking? Why is the food so tasteless?”

  At the end of a month Rosa noticed that her dress was no longer as tight as it used to be, and she knew that she was losing weight. And after two months of the diet that had been imposed on her against her will, when she walked down the street she noticed that the men passing her no longer stared or turned their heads to look at her, as if she had suddenly become invisible. Defeated, she looked at her reflection in the window of the florist shop, and found herself staring at a faded old woman with her dress hanging loosely on her heavy body. Her dry hair showed its white roots and stuck up wildly around her head, her sunken eyes had an expression of obscure hunger, and her mouth was turned down at the corners, like the mouths of women whom life had treated badly. Rosa tried to smooth her unruly hair, but it resisted her efforts and sprang back rebelliously, as if to spite her. She tried to turn the corners of her mouth up in a forced smile, but they immediately drooped again, deepening the expression of bitterness on her face.

  She hurried home in alarm, panting for breath, slowly climbed the three flights of steps, and collapsed onto her bed. And with the doll, Belle, crying, “Mama, mama, mama,” in her arms, she made up her mind that she had to do something to change what was left of her life.

  twenty-five

  A GOLDEN LADDER

  One day, when Rachelle knocked on Rosa’s door as she did every morning, the door failed to open. Nor did it open when she tried her luck in the afternoon, or the next morning. Two days later she pressed her ear to the door, and when she didn’t hear anything she remembered the spare key Rosa had given her, which she had never used, and she fetched it and opened the door. She was greeted by a smell of flowers mixed with heavy perfume and rotting food. Hesitantly she went into the bedroom. The room was empty, the bed made, and Rosa’s three husbands, with Angel in their midst, looked at her sadly from the wall. Apprehensively she inspected the other rooms. Rosa was not at home. Her shopping basket was in its place in the kitchen, and her purse lay on the dressing table in the bedroom. In growing alarm she opened the bedroom closet and found that all Rosa’s dresses were hanging there and nothing was missing. And when she went into Angel’s room she found that the bed was empty. The doll, Belle, which had been lying on the dead girl’s bed ever since the accident, had disappeared.

  Beside herself with worry, she called Ruthie, who informed her calmly that Rosa had gone away. Where she had gone, who she had gone with, and when she was coming back, Ruthie refused to say. When Rachelle brooded about it all night, angry with Rosa for not telling her about her plans and causing her unnecessary worry, Rachelle knew that Rosa had left her house and locked the door behind her with no intention of returning.

  When the neighbors discovered that she had left without saying good-bye to anybody, they began to ask questions accompanied by speculations, rumors, and arguments, and the atmosphere in Katamon G grew heated.

  First they asked where Rosa had disappeared to, and for many days the question stalked the neighborhood like an independent entity with a form and substance of its own. Like the car of a newly married couple with pots and pans tied to its bumper and clattering loudly behind it, the question dragged in its train a host of speculations, guesses, prejudices, suspicions, and fears. After that the question of who Rosa’s fourth husband was came up, and everybody knew that the answers to both questions were connected, and the solution to the first riddle would inevitably lead to the solution of the second.

  At first they thought that the answer lay with her good friend Rachelle, but from the day of Rosa’s disappearance Rachelle sealed her lips and refused to speak about her friend for good or for ill. On a very warm spring evening, when her rheumatic pains let up a little and her usually tense expression relaxed, the women sitting downstairs with her in the yard dared to ask her for her opinion on the matter. Sucking the scorching air into their lungs with little sighing noises, the women sat on the low wicker stools they had placed in a circle on the concrete path leading to the entrance of the building, their backsides spreading in all directions, fanning themselves with their swollen hands, and waiting for the right moment—the split second of grace when it would be possible to ask their question.

  “Why a fourth husband?” replied Rachelle with a question.

  “People said she would have four husbands. You said so yourself. Don’t you remember? Four butterflies, four husbands.”

  Rachelle said nothing. Again she felt the burning insult and the gnawing longings for Rosa, her best friend, who had excluded her from her plans and vanished without even saying good-bye.

  “Come on,” they urged her as if trying to refresh her memory. “Fly down pretty butterfly, don’t be afraid, come sit on my hand, and fly away into the sky.”

  Rachelle was silent.

  “Come on,” they repeated impatiently. “There’s one more butterfly to go. There were three, and now there’s one missing. Who’s Rosa’s fourth husband?”

  “I’ll tell you the truth,” she said frankly, “I have no answer.”

  “So what happened to Rosa after Angel died?” they persevered.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where is she?”

  “God knows,” said Rachelle in resignation, pointing at the sky with her finger, distorted by rheumatism. Those who watched closely saw that she was actually pointing at the graffiti sprayed in huge black letters on the wall: LIFE IS LIKE THE HAIRS ON MY ASS—, SHORT, HARD, BLACK, AND STINKING.

  “A woman disappears and nobody knows where she is?” they demanded angrily. “Especially such a big, well-known woman?”

  “I’m sure they know where she is, but they’re not telling,” said Rachelle reluctantly, apparently in a hurry to change the subject.

  “Who’s they?”

  “Her children, of course.”

  “Is there any point in asking them?”

  “They didn’t tell me, so you think they’ll tell you?”

  The women stretched out their swollen legs, inspected the peeling polish on their toenails, and studied the vegetation growing all around them as if seeing it for the first time in their lives. The brambles, the nettles, the thistles, and the thornbushes running riot in the yard were still green and tender, before putting on the yellow-brown of summer and growing hard, spiky, dry thorns.

  A great wave of guesses and speculations engulfed the neighborhood. Tzadok the Grocer argued that he was the one who knew her best, after Rachelle, of course, since she had been coming to his store every day at nine, regular as clockwork, when she was able, to do her daily shopping. And he was ready to take a solemn oath in public and swear that she was living in a log cabin on an abandoned outpost in the Upper Galilee and growing organic vegetables with her fourth husband, whose identity was unknown, since she had married him in secret, in a quiet, private ceremony, and no doubt she had also opened a vegetarian restaurant there on the hilltop, overlooking the most beautiful scenery in the world. And when they asked him how he knew, he answered simply that he had been told that this was what she wanted to do with her life. And if she had disappeared, she must have gone to make her wish come true.

  Others in the neighborhood claimed that Rosa had married Yochai the Undertaker in secret. All those years when she had been visiting the graves of her dead husbands, he had been following her in secret with his dark looks, they explained. His black garments full of shadows from the world of shades held no terrors for her, and his gaze, which met death face-to-face on a daily basis, was understanding and sympathetic, and held a healing balm for her broken heart. His always-melancholy face; his eyes, which turned down sharply at the corners; and his lips, whic
h drooped toward the ground and never parted in a smile—reminded her of her first husband, Joseph, to whom she was attached by the ties of habit. In proof they pointed to the fact that Yochai had left his house at the cemetery gate, next to the stonemasons’ yard, and disappeared without a trace.

  And when they were on the subject of cemeteries and undertakers, the more pessimistic of the neighbors claimed that Rosa had simply gone to a better world. At last she was united with her nearest and dearest—with her father, whom she had never seen, her mother, her three husbands, her friend Ruthie, and above all with Angel, who had vanished from her life. And if anyone asked why nobody had heard of her death, why no death notices had been posted, where was the funeral, the eulogies, the shiva, they replied that her children might well have buried her in secret, at her request, which they had honored, and with the help of Yochai the Undertaker, who had always loved her from a distance. And since burying the woman he loved had broken his heart, he had abandoned the profession, closed his house, and gone to seek a livelier occupation.

  But the men who used to hang out at Mousa Zilka’s hut argued that Rosa had eloped with Mousa. Now that his wife had died, the two of them were finally able to consummate the love that had been denied for so many years. And for proof they offered the fact that Mousa had locked up his hut at exactly the same time as Rosa had disappeared, gone off without saying good-bye, and had no doubt vanished into the blue together with Rosa.

  Some people were convinced that the answer lay with Ruhama. Rosa’s disappearance had hurt Ruhama just as much as it had hurt Rachelle, since it was inconceivable that she should have gone off without consulting them.

  In the days following the disappearance, Ruhama walked round the neighborhood looking angry and insulted. After hearing the news from Rachelle, she tossed and turned all night, grinding her teeth furiously and disturbing the sleep of her new husband, until the idea came to her. Drawing on the grimmest stories she had heard during the course of her life, she succeeded in putting together an intractable family problem, and after making sure she had the details straight, she went to consult Peretz the cabalist. As they spoke, she thought, she would be able to slip in her question about Rosa, to which there was no doubt he had the answer, since he knew all there was to know about her, and she never did anything without consulting him. Skipping over the overturned garbage bins and shooing away the frightened cats, she reached the dirt path leading to his house, where she was surprised to find that the usual queue of women seeking his succor was absent. The door was locked, and the yellowing note pinned to it announced to all who sought him that the old cabalist had gone away for an unspecified period of time.