Four Mothers

by Shifra Horn

  And there were quarrels about clothes too. Even though I asked her to buy me dresses and skirts, she would return from the shops with a pair of short gathered bloomers in summer and long flannel trousers in winter.

  My grandmother Pnina-Mazal, who saw my suffering, would surprise me from time to time with the gift of a dress. I couldn’t take the dress home with me, and I would wear it clandestinely, far from my mother’s watchful eyes, when I went to visit my friends and on the days I spent at my grandmother’s house because of my mother’s long working hours.

  On account of the gnarled mulberry tree growing in my great-grandmother’s yard too I aroused my mother’s wrath. I refused adamantly to climb it despite my mother’s announcements that the best mulberries grew at the top of the tree. When I wanted to enjoy its fruit, I would set a stool below a low branch, stretch my body, and pluck the juicy fruit carefully so as not to stain myself.

  My mother would watch my efforts scornfully, twist her mouth in contempt, and retire to the house in order to avoid witnessing the shameful spectacle.

  The summer I turned eight our relations reached a severe crisis, and all because of the tree. That year thousands of cardboard boxes swarmed with life in houses all over the country, boxes that once had held shoes and were now home to soft-bodied silkworms, whose thin gray skins were grooved and marked with delicate folds. I hid my box under the gas stove in Sara’s kitchen. It had made its way from my house to my great-grandmother’s because of my mother’s hysterical reaction to the sight of the tiny, delicate, touchingly innocent-looking and completely harmless caterpillars. Screaming with a shrillness that was utterly at odds with her cool, reserved image, she threw me and my silkworms out of the house. My scientific explanations about the fine silk blouse she wore to court, which owed its existence to these same little caterpillars, fell on deaf ears.

  The permanent heat in Sara’s kitchen and the freshness of the mulberry leaves, which I took care to pick every day from the tree in the courtyard for the soft-bodied little guzzlers, accelerated their growth. They swelled and thickened, and the steady rustling of their jaws as they munched the crisp leaves was music to my ears.

  My silkworms might have spun their cocoons in peace and turned into glorious moths if not for the constant rustling noise they made with their jaws, and it was this that caused my mother to bend down by the stove, holding a dustpan in one hand and a rolling pin in the other, an expression of brave determination on her face, ready and willing to wage war to the bitter end against the mouse she knew lurked underneath. Her screams when her groping hands encountered my box of silkworms and crushed a few, squirting green worm juice in all directions, brought crazy Dvora running with a pail full of dirty water, which she proceeded to pour over my fainting mother. Anticipating the trouble about to descend on my head, I jumped over my mother, who was lying on the floor with an expression of disgust on her face, and crawled under the cooker.

  I picked up the box of plump silkworms and hurried to the mulberry tree. I pulled up the stool, placed the box on a broad bough above my head, and hung suspended from the bough. For the first time in my life I found myself climbing the tree, ascending from branch to branch with the swarming shoebox squashed under my arm. At a height that made me giddy I removed my plump, well-fed protégés one by one from the box and set them down carefully on the dusty leaves. The silkworms swayed on the broad leaves, slipped, strengthened their grip with the help of their slimy secretions, and began to eat with dedication. Only after making sure that they were acclimatized on the leaves did I climb down, ignoring the astonished looks of my mother, sitting under the mulberry tree to recover in the fresh air.

  “Where are they?” she asked, the expression of disgust still on her face.

  “They’re all on the tree,” I replied, the toe of my left shoe tracing semicircles on the ground. The picture was spoiled when her hand landed on my cheek in the first slap I had ever received from her in my life.

  “And what do you think will happen on the tree?” she asked, a threatening note in her voice. “They’ll be fruitful and multiply there and we’ll never be able to get rid of them, and you can say good-bye to Grandmother’s tree.”

  I didn’t really understand why I had to say good-bye to the tree, but since she was so angry I did as she bade me and waved good-bye to the crest of the tree.

  A second slap, more painful than the first, landed on my cheek. “Don’t you dare be smart with me,” she snapped through her jagged teeth, but she stopped when she saw Sara standing in the door, staring at her furiously.

  “Don’t touch the child,” Sara said in a voice whose softness was in shocking contrast to the fury on her face.

  All that summer my mother refrained from sitting under the mulberry tree lest one of the loathsome creatures, as she called them, should fall on her and be impaled on her bristling hair. If she was obliged to cross the yard, she would make a wide detour round the tree swarming with caterpillars and inspect the ground carefully before she put her foot down, lest she squash a fat silkworm with her shoe.

  At the end of summer the tree was decorated with scores of shiny, rough, yellow cocoons, as if long, ripe, silken fruit had grown on it. A few days later there were already pairs of clumsy white moths fluttering heavily on its branches, stuck to each other by their tails, in an endless dance of love that brought them closer to their deaths.

  The summer after that my mother’s prophecy was not fulfilled: The mulberry tree was not covered with caterpillars, and when shoeboxes full of silkworms were distributed at school I refused to accept one.

  * * *

  As a rule my mother was very busy. As an advocate she defended the underdogs, especially the Arabs, who she told me had been robbed of their land by the state to build railways and roads that bisected their villages and cut through their fields, and whom she helped even when the authorities suspected them of nefarious deeds. She took no money from them, and was compensated for her work when they arrived at our door with heavy wicker baskets full of grapes, peaches, or broody hens, which she would make haste to transfer in disgust to my great-grandmother’s house. Sara knew exactly what to do with the hens, and how to make chicken soup with delicate beads of fat floating on its surface.

  When I was a child I thought that my mother was the most elegant woman in Jerusalem. She was apparently very different in her childhood and youth. Then, according to my grandmother Pnina-Mazal, my mother dressed exclusively in boys’ clothes, and if she bought her a dress as a present, my mother would cut it to pieces with scissors. Now that she was a lawyer, she would leave the house dressed in a tight black skirt and a white silk blouse.

  For her appearances in court she would remove from the wardrobe—without taking into account the season of the year or the opinion of the judge—her fox fur. Smelling strongly of naphthalene, the fox would slumber on her shoulders, its tail stuck in its mouth and fastened with a rusty metal clip, and its fur decorated with round bald spots produced by the jaws of generations of moths. The circle of fur would dig its claws into her shoulders as if afraid of falling, look straight into the judge’s face with its amber eyes, and prick up its cardboard-stiffened ears, as if determined not to miss a word of the proceedings.

  When my mother was angry in court her hard red hair would bristle, and her upper lip would rise in a snarl, exposing a row of pointed teeth. Afterward the accused would say that the fox’s fur bristled too, and that they had heard it growl threateningly at the judge. Under these circumstances the toughest and strictest judge would quail, and she always won her cases. “Vixen” they called her in the courthouse corridors, because of her red hair, because of the malevolent expression on her face, because of her teeth, or perhaps because of the fox that had been cruelly slaughtered in order to provide a faithful companion for her neck. Both of them, the fox and the neck, grew shabbier in the course of the years, but they never deserted each other.

  * * *

  During these years of my childhood, when
my mother was busy with endless litigation in the courts of the town, I was lovingly brought up by my grandmother Pnina-Mazal. Every day after school I would walk to her house, which was close to the school, a spacious house in the neighborhood of Rehavia purchased with the compensation she had received from the British army.

  Together with me dozens of cats in all the colors of the rainbow grew up in that house. It all began with a pampered English cat my grandmother received from her commanding officer in the British staff headquarters. Before he left the country he begged her to give it a home, because it was forbidden to bring animals into England, and if he had insisted on gaining entry for his pet, it would have had to spend six months in the solitary confinement of quarantine. My grandmother, who had never touched the fur of a cat in her life and whose sole verbal contact with hairy quadrupeds consisted of the word “scat,” could not withstand his pleading eyes and agreed to give the aristocratic cat a home.

  A month later the cat began to utter deep throaty sounds, to arch its back, to lie on the floor and wriggle from side to side, and altogether to behave in a suspicious manner. My grandmother, inexperienced in the rearing of cats, could not understand why all the mangy cats of the neighborhood, to which she referred slightingly as “catos vulgaris,” were besieging her front door, scratching themselves nervously and giving off a sharp smell that made people keep their distance from her.

  At the end of two and a half months there were already six varicolored little balls of fur growing up in her house, fighting with dainty claws for every teat. Pnina-Mazal, a kindhearted woman, loved them all. She gave them names and decided to keep them at home. Thus it happened that a year after she had been presented with the English cat there were thirteen cats in her house, and they too were fruitful and multiplied. During the course of the years her house filled with cats of every hue. Sometimes, when she served me my lunch on a chipped tin plate, I was obliged to fight off impertinent cats climbing onto my lap and from there to the table and straight to my plate, where they tried to compare the food I had been given with that dished up to them.

  * * *

  On weekends my grandmother was visited by Yiftah, who lived on kibbutz Givat Hagefanim, not far from Jerusalem. Yiftah, who was my own age, was the son of Avraham, whose father, Yitzhak, had been planted motionless in the armchair in Pnina-Mazal’s house from the day I first met him.

  Yiftah and I had a lot in common. I had no father and Yiftah had no mother. Actually he had a mother, but she left him when she found herself an American millionaire who came to plant a tree in Israel. Pnina-Mazal told me that Flora, Yiftah’s mother, met the millionaire when she served him supper in the kibbutz dining room, and won his heart with the tanned legs covered in soft golden fuzz exposed by her short pants. He took her with him to America, and from there she would send Yiftah colored postcards, Crayola crayons, and jeans, which were then hard to come by in Israel. In spite of all this, Yiftah used to say that for him she didn’t exist, she wasn’t with him here, and as far as he was concerned he didn’t have a mother.

  His father Avraham remarried, a young girl from the kibbutz, who gave him four children in six years. But she too could not be a mother to Yiftah, and he called her a “phony mother.” The kibbutz children called Yiftah a “son of a whore” and I could never work out if they called him this because of his American mother or because of the one on the kibbutz.

  When Yiftah arrived to visit Pnina-Mazal and his motionless grandfather Yitzhak, we would shut ourselves up in one of the rooms of the house—not before emptying it of all the cats, which hissed and spat disapprovingly in our faces and threatened us with their claws. There, in the room smelling of cats in heat, we would play at mothers and fathers. Since we had never actually seen a mother and father in action, the game took on a character all its own, and it would always end with desertion by the father or abandonment by the mother.

  The game went something like this:

  Yiftah: “Perhaps you’ll do my kitchen duty tonight. I’ve been working all day in the cowshed and my back’s broken.”

  Me: “I’ve been in court all day and I’m just as tired as you are.”

  Yiftah: “And where did you put my Sabbath trousers?”

  Me: “I don’t know. Look for them yourself.”

  Yiftah: “I’m fed up. I’m going to look for another wife.”

  And so the game was over in a flash. Then we played the version where the mother leaves, and this time it was over even more quickly.

  In those days we both felt very special and different from all the other children. I often envied my friends, whose fathers came home from work, gave them presents, swung them in the air, and took an interest in how they were getting on at school. With me there was nobody to take an interest. My mother was busy with her work, Pnina-Mazal with her cats, and my great-grandmother Sara with the women coming to petition her from all over the country. My feeling of deprivation disappeared when I discovered that things could have been far worse. This happened when my mother traveled out of town to attend a course, and Pnina-Mazal informed her that she was expecting three births over the weekend, and she would therefore not be able to look after me or have Yiftah to stay. It was decided that I should go to Givat Hagefanim and spend the Sabbath with Yiftah there.

  Excited and spick and span, his Sabbath shirt gleaming with whiteness and his fair hair wet and precisely parted, Yiftah met me at the kibbutz gate and led me proudly along the narrow paths, pointing out the one-storied little houses surrounded by flower beds and green lawns. At that moment Yiftah looked to me like a king showing off his private kingdom to his queen. In the evening he took me to a building whose rooms were crowded with beds covered with brightly colored bedspreads and showed me my bed.

  “And where are you going to sleep?” I asked.

  “Right here, next to you.”

  “And who’s going to sleep in the other beds?”

  “The kibbutz children.”

  “Don’t they have a mother or a father either?” I asked, pleased that we all shared a common fate.

  “They do, but their parents sleep in their own houses and they sleep here.”

  I tried to take in this new information. There were fathers and mothers, but the children didn’t stay at home and they slept together far from their parents. In other words, their parents weren’t interested in them, and this meant that the children of kibbutz Givat Hagefanim were abandoned children. I considered the pros and cons, and came to the conclusion that my situation could have been a lot worse. I had been abandoned by my father, and Yiftah had been abandoned by his mother, but here on the kibbutz the children had been abandoned by both their parents. I fell asleep with a feeling of relief, knowing that fate had been kind to me.

  Chapter Three

  As mentioned above, my mother did not believe in the institution of marriage and took every opportunity to denounce it as fossilized and obsolete. At the same time, she failed to understand why I took an interest in boys, or what all the excitement was about. Apparently she assumed that if she herself took no interest in men, it was a foregone conclusion that her daughter, flesh of her flesh and bone of her bone, would follow in her footsteps.

  The tension at home reached a climax when boys began to show an interest in me. They would hang around outside our house, closed and barred to them, dense with the smell of naphthalene, and my mother would go out and chase them away with her bristling hair and the noises she made though her clenched teeth. When they grew a little older, they would wait for me on the corner on my way to school, far from my mother’s watchful eye, and cast lots to decide who would have the good fortune to carry my heavy cowhide bag to the gates of the Lady Meyuhas School for Girls. The bolder ones would wait for me after school and try to kiss me under the purple bougainvillea that covered the walls of the school. When these boys became youths they would interrupt my mother’s afternoon nap with their telephone calls, asking to speak to Mali. The taller they grew, the more their voices dee
pened and their muscles swelled, the more self-confident they became, and they mounted a frontal assault on my heart. The bolder among them would advance right to the threshold of the house and wait for me to come out, and the moment the door opened grudgingly they would insert the toe of their shoe between it and the doorpost, to prevent my mother from slamming it in their faces.

  When the youths grew into men the situation worsened. At this stage my mother installed a security chain on the door and declared war on them, obliging them to mount a counterattack. The more belligerent among them adopted the tactics of a blitzkrieg. They took no notice of the chain on the half-open door and broke through it with a force that almost tore the door from its hinges, slamming my mother against the wall, crushing her, and pushing their way roughly into my room. Others developed more sophisticated tactics. They went in for a war of words, using their tongues as weapons. They would address her politely, ask after her health, sniff the smell of naphthalene she exuded as if they enjoyed it, admire her mangy fox fur, and show a sincere interest in her latest appeal to the High Court of Justice. The more imaginative warriors adopted guerilla tactics. They would invade the house disguised as tradesmen, florists’ delivery boys, or mailmen with a registered letter to be handed over to the addressee in person, and would finally reach my room after various demands, cross-examinations, and other delays thought up by my mother. Others, who went in for a war of nerves, would disturb her afternoon nap with dozens of phone calls, slamming the phone down as soon as she picked up the receiver and snapped “Hello” in a loud and threatening tone. The more argumentative suitors would engage her in polemics and try to make her tell them what she had against them and why she was placing obstacles in the way of her daughter’s happiness.