Four Mothers

by Shifra Horn

  Beside myself with happiness on the night of my wedding, I buried my face in the bouquet of white gladiola in my hands, and while everyone was admiring my beauty, which could almost compare with that of my great-grandmother, or so they said to flatter me, I averted my face and spat discreetly into the dusty dwarf palm standing in the corner of the hall. But even this precaution against the evil eye was powerless to prevent the failure.

  And perhaps a premonition of failure could also be found in the wedding pictures that were taken and didn’t come out. The photographer hired by Ya’akov was the cheapest in town, and after exhausting negotiations he agreed to photograph the wedding for “the cost of the materials,” as he explained through clenched teeth. A week later we arrived at his shop with an empty photograph album, which was just as empty when we left. It turned out that the film he had used dated from the previous decade. “Sorry, the pictures didn’t come out,” he informed us with barely disguised satisfaction. We left the shop empty-handed, and the sentence pronounced by my ex-husband still rings in my ears whenever I open the desolate album and think of the pictures that never came out: “At least we didn’t have to pay him for the materials.”

  * * *

  And if only I’d had eyes in my head, I might have been able to see the signs on the eve of the wedding when I went with my grandmother Pnina-Mazal to the mikvah for the prescribed ritual bath. Not with my mother, who despised all those “black-coated idol-worshipers” and who greeted the news of my coming marriage with the announcement: “As far as I’m concerned you can live in sin for the rest of your life and you needn’t get married at all.”

  I set out with my grandmother to look for the mikvah at the address given me by the woman at the rabbinate offices, who had taken me aside when we went to register our marriage and tried to explain the menstrual cycle and the way of a man with a maid. We arrived at the building but were unable to find the door. An ultra-Orthodox woman with a shaved head and a fresh face saved us from circling the sealed building for the seventh time by pointing out a half-hidden door with “Women” written on it, where she left us with a little smile and a whispered “Mazal tov.”

  In the waiting room a handful of women with kerchiefs bound tightly round their shaved heads were sitting and leafing through prayer books and psalms, avoiding each other’s eyes. The place looked like a gynecologist’s waiting room. When my turn came I was received by the bath attendant, who was wearing a loose, gaudy cotton rag that looked like a dressing gown or else a shapeless dress. Her genial expression did not change even after she had shamelessly examined my bare arms and the length of my miniskirt. She led me down a dark, narrow corridor, which smelled strongly of dankness and mold, into a huge hall. And there they were. Women, more women, and only women, wearing ragged, faded dressing gowns and, on their swollen feet, colored plastic clogs. They milled about like sleepwalkers with shaved heads and stern expressions in the weak light afforded by the single naked bulb. Some of them rummaged between their toes, others poked little sticks covered with cotton wool into their ears, while others openly picked their noses, in order to remove any speck of dirt that might separate them from the holy water, as the bath attendant explained. She asked me to take off my clothes and pushed up one of the peeling, painted wooden chairs that in the course of the years had accommodated the bare backsides of hundreds of women coming to purify themselves.

  At her request I too cleaned my ears, picked my nose, combed my hair, and used dental floss to remove any leftover food from the spaces between my teeth. When I was finished, she sat down opposite me on an identical chair, asked me to give her my feet, took my right foot, and grounded it firmly in her lap. Then she began to examine my toes, whose nails I had cut the evening before, as if she were studying a complicated road map. At the sight of my toes she clucked her tongue and drew a large, rusty nail-clipper from her pocket. My toenails were cut again, until the pink skin was exposed and sharp, thin half-moons of nail fell onto the horny snippets that already covered the floor, piercing my bare feet, in the area she jokingly referred to as the “pedicure salon.” When she had completed her handiwork she surveyed my body and smoothly combed hair with satisfaction, and stealthily pressed a little piece of white gauze into my hand.

  “And now you must go behind the screen and examine yourself,” she whispered into my ear, as if confiding a state secret.

  “What am I supposed to examine?” I asked.

  “Yourself,” she repeated.

  I retired behind the screen she opened for me, examined my arms, my legs, and my groin, and returned to the attendant.

  “And now give it to me,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The cloth I gave you, of course.”

  I handed her the little piece of gauze, which I had been holding in my fist.

  She examined it with her shortsighted eyes, and it seemed to me that she was trying to inhale its smell.

  “You didn’t do it,” she said in a tone of rebuke. “You’re supposed to push it inside you and check to see if it comes out stained. And if you want your husband never to leave you and to give you beautiful children, you must do it every month,” she explained to me, and added: “It’s like a chicken; just as you don’t cook a chicken with blood on it and you have to clean it before putting it into the pot, in the same way there must be no sign of blood before intercourse.”

  She went on to explain that after the first intercourse, with the letting of the virgin blood, I had to keep away from my husband and go on examining myself every day until the gauze came out clean, and then return to her at the mikvah.

  Obediently I retired behind the screen and pushed the bit of cloth deep up inside me. A dark red stain appeared reproachfully on the white cloth when I pulled it out. I approached her anxiously, but she was already busy with another woman, whose thick-soled feet lay in her broad lap waiting for the nail-clipper. I tried to tell her what had happened, but she was busy talking and waved me away dismissively, with instructions to proceed in the direction of the bath, from which a skinny woman with flabby breasts had just emerged under the vigilant eyes of the rabbi’s wife.

  “Have you been taken care of?” the latter inquired, inspecting me sternly through her water-spattered spectacles.

  I nodded.

  “Have you examined yourself and did the cloth emerge from inside you as white as snow?” she asked, and before I had time to reply she pushed me lightly toward the steps that led deep down into the black water, which gave off a smell of acid rain and had bits of frothy green slime floating on its surface. My feet fumbled on the slimy, slippery floor and I did everything she told me to.

  With wet hair I joined Pnina-Mazal, who was waiting for me in the waiting room.

  “How was it? I see you survived.” She smiled at me.

  “I’m not sure that I should get married today,” I said, thinking of the crimson stain I had discovered on the white gauze and the possibility that my husband would leave me because of it.

  * * *

  Even if I ignore the ring bought with my money and the matter of the mikvah, with the help of hindsight I can try to explain the reasons why my husband left home only one day after the birth of our son. His work might provide a clue. Ya’akov was a zoologist who specialized in the ibex, or to be more precise in the reproduction of these animals or their love life, if their coupling could be defined as an act of love. For days at a time during the mating season of the ibex, he would be away from home, busy with his work in the wilderness round the Dead Sea. During the period when he courted me he gave in to my pleas and took me there in his noisy, smoky Volkswagen, affording me a glimpse of the mating rituals of the male ibex. I witnessed this spectacle through field glasses, and felt a sensation of déjà vu as events similar to those that had happened in the past and would happen in the future unfolded before my eyes.

  In the evenings we returned to Ya’akov’s steamy caravan, where even the air conditioner that had been on all day during this bla
zing season had not succeeded in cooling the air. We lay down naked on the bed, lacking all desire to touch each other because of the heat, and then my husband would hold forth on the wisdom of the ibex. The male ibex, he informed me, like many other animals, had an erotic strategy that was suitable for us humans too, even though for thousands of years religion, culture, and morality had tried to suppress it. He had formulated a personal creed, observing the laws of reproduction in nature and applying them to ourselves, which he was in the habit of reciting at every possible opportunity. “As a student of the ibex,” he opened his speech, “I take my cue from them. I, as a strong and healthy male, am duty bound to fertilize females, a lot of females, as many females as possible. Every female I fertilize will bear one healthy child, to whom she will be able to devote the maximum attention. Since I will not be by her side, the mother will be able to invest all her resources of energy in her only child. When I have accomplished my purpose with one I shall go on to the next, and when she gives birth I’ll continue my search for new females to fertilize. And if everyone follows my example the world will be full of the offspring of the strongest and most fertile men and single mothers devoting themselves to the care of healthy, robust only children.”

  At the time, lying naked and exhausted on the joined iron beds, listening to the desperate sawing of the cicadas searching for a mate, I didn’t take his words too seriously. Nor did I pay attention to the warning signals when he stroked my body conciliatorily and said that I had to understand that the phrase “till death do us part” contradicted the laws of nature in general and of human nature in particular, and that it should be eradicated from the collective memory of the race.

  No red lights went on in me even when I discovered that before meeting me Ya’akov had already been diligently putting his beliefs into practice. He had been married twice before, and he had two children, one each from these two wives. One of the women lived in New York, and from time to time she would phone and upbraid him angrily for his steady refusal to pay alimony for his son. His relationship with his son was confined to the sending of one cheap greeting card on the boy’s birthday. His other son grew up on the kibbutz Givat Regavim. The mother was a girl from the kibbutz who had knocked on the door of his caravan, told him that she was interested in the sex life of the ibex, and landed up in the middle of his bed with his penis deep inside her.

  Ya’akov lived with me for ten months. The first quarrel to disturb the tranquillity of our life took place when I came home with the results of a pregnancy test, which were positive in spite of the precautions we had taken. He accused me of tricking him, cheating him, and stealing his sperm. Today, looking back on his angry reaction, I would like to believe that he loved me so much that he was unwilling to leave me, but knew that he would be obliged to do so after fulfilling his genetic role in my life, an outcome that he wanted to postpone for as long as possible.

  * * *

  The bill of divorcement he dropped into my lap was awarded with a speed uncharacteristic of the rabbinical courts, thanks to his confession that the ring he had placed on my finger had been purchased not with his money but with mine. Two weeks later he found another woman, married her in a posh wedding at a Jerusalem hotel, and took her down to his caravan in the wilderness. In spite of the weekly visitation rights to which he was entitled by the terms of our divorce, my ex-husband remained loyal to the child-rearing practices of the ibex and refrained from any contact with his son. And while the father was busy pursuing his sacred vocation of reproduction, the son grew up without a father figure.

  Every evening, in a ritual whose rules he had dictated to me, and from which I was forbidden to deviate in the slightest degree, my little son would ask me to tell him the story of Bambi. Then I would tell him about the tender little Bambi who grew up with his mother in the parched desert and on the rocky hills, and about the father busy locking horns with other ibexes, and looking for a new female ibex who would give birth to a new little Bambi. And I told him, too, about the female ibexes who lived together in big herds and brought up their little Bambis alone. “And this is the way all the ibexes live,” he would say, repeating the concluding sentence with me, as proud and happy as a little hawker advertising his wares. Afterward we would recite together: “Great-great-great-grandmother Mazal brought up Great-great-grandmother Sara by herself. Sara brought up Great-grandmother Pnina-Mazal by herself. Pnina-Mazal brought up Grandmother Geula by herself. Geula brought up Mother Amal by herself, and now Amal is bringing up her little Bambi all by herself.” I would conclude the procedure with a goodnight kiss by rubbing noses like the mother ibexes with my own fawn. And then my son would blow a kiss to the picture of the Walt Disney Bambi on the wall above his bed, and ask me to kiss it with my lips. At the end of the kissing ritual he would repeat the unchanging formula: “And that’s why Bambi has such sad eyes.” And when he went to make weewee before getting into bed, he would go up to the bathroom mirror in order to contemplate and reappraise the depth of sadness in his eyes.

  Chapter Four

  My son’s birth established new rules in the game of fate and broke a link in the chain of the family dynasty, which up to then had been exclusively female. The game began with Mazal, Sara’s mother, the head of the dynasty and the earliest woman to surface in my great-grandmother’s memory. I know of no other woman before her. The only fact that Sara was able to tell me about the period preceding her mother’s existence was that her grandmother, Mazal’s mother, had been called Sara, and she had been named after her. When I pressed her to tell me more about her grandmother, she insisted that she knew nothing about her, since she had departed this world before she herself was born, when her mother was still a child of tender years. This leaves Mazal as the original matriarch who began the chain of divinely ordained events that ended in my ex-husband slamming the door behind him forever the day after the birth of our son.

  In the moments of grace I had with Sara she claimed that it had all started about a hundred years ago, perhaps because of the brown stains that appeared on her mother’s panties on her thirteenth birthday. Like a dog scenting blood the matchmaker Shulamith turned up in her Aunt Miriam’s house as soon as the first drops of blood appeared.

  When she arrived Mazal was busy washing the stone floors, a bloodstained rag pushed between her legs and fastened with pins. With her bare feet she felt the grains of dust that had collected on the flagstones and in the cracks between them. With her eyes she searched out the long fair hairs covered in fluffy gray dust, waiting to be swept out of their hiding places under the furniture and in the dark corners of the room. She polished each stone separately, as if it were the only one, rubbing the surface devotedly with a wet cloth and trying not to step on the cracks between the stones. In five years of polishing she had come to know every flagstone in the vaulted room intimately. She could tell her charges apart with her eyes closed, by their setting, their size, and their degree of coolness. Mazal even knew where each stone had come from, and where it had been dressed. When she walked through the ruined houses of the old Jewish quarter she could point to the naked skeletons of the hovels, their walls as full of gaps as an old lady’s gums, and recount the history of each and every stone on the floor of her aunt’s house—which building it had been taken from and where it had been laid. Some of them were pink, like the house itself; some were white and flat and gave rise when they were polished to powdery drifts of chalk. There were also three lemon-yellow flagstones, and one dark brown one. The latter she loathed. The more she scoured and polished it, the darker it became, and when it came into contact with water it gleamed blackly and stood out horribly among all the other paving stones. Most of the stones were smooth from years of rubbing, polishing, and the tread of feet. Others, under the table, were rough, and one stone, hidden under the sideboard, boasted a carved hump, as if it had once been part of a fortified wall.

  While the two women whispered in the sooty alcove of the kitchen, Mazal was absorbed in polishing the pin
k stone embedded with white veins crossing and recrossing its surface with endless slanting lines. When she had finished with this stone and turned her attention to the porous yellow stone that was covered with tiny indentations that dammed the murky water like miniature puddles of black rain, she was summoned to the kitchen. With lowered eyes she walked toward the smoky little room.

  Her honey-colored hair, which had escaped from its braids, curled wildly round her head in a thousand glints of radiance, and as she stood in the doorway it was touched by a ray of twilight coming through the window, and she looked as if she were surrounded by a halo of light, like one of the saints in a Christian church.

  The women conferring confidentially as they bent over the black kettle streaked with soot and grease instantly fell silent. Mazal approached them, wiping her wet hands, which were red with the cold mopping water, on her soiled apron. As she stood before them the halo of light stopped playing with her hair. Her amber eyes, speckled with pinpoints of brown, rounded in a question. Her Aunt Miriam asked her to come and stand beside her. Without any preamble she rolled up the sleeve of Mazal’s gray dress with her shriveled, rheumatic hands and exposed her white arm to Shulamith’s inquiring eyes.