by Shifra Horn
“As I told you,” she said after pinches and palpations that reddened Mazal’s skin and printed it with the marks of her crooked nails, “she’s white. There isn’t a superfluous hair on her body and her flesh is soft.”
Shulamith fixed Mazal with her eyes, which were framed in a thick layer of kohl. The girl lowered her eyes, revealing heavy lids fringed with long, thick, shiny black lashes.
“Mazal,” began her aunt with the sigh that always preceded bad news. “You are an orphan without a father or a mother. Your parents, may they rest in peace, left you no property when they perished in the great plague. I cannot support you. You are a grown woman now. Our neighbor Yitzhak, the haberdashery merchant from the market, has singled you out. The engagement is tomorrow. He is an orphan like you, his parents too died in the great plague, and God willing the two of you will found a new family in Israel. You’re a lucky girl.” (Mazal means “lucky” in Hebrew.) “With God’s help Yitzhak will become a great merchant and a wealthy man, and you will wear silk and be waited on by servants.”
Mazal bowed her head, excused herself to the women, and escaped to the outhouse in the yard. There she removed the warm cloth from between her legs and examined the findings that had brought the matchmaker down on her. Then she put it back and ran to Geula, the neighbor’s daughter, to tell her the double news.
“I told you it would come,” whispered the corpulent Geula, whose hair was red and whose face, legs, and arms were dotted with faded spots of rust. She raised her eyes from the black iron pots standing over the fire, tiny drops of sweat making their way between the freckles adorning her flushed face. “And now you have to get married,” she added compassionately. “Couldn’t they have waited a while? You’re a child. What does that Yitzhak want of you?” she asked, nervously prodding and pinching Mazal’s budding breasts.
“He saw me in the shop. I should never have gone there,” Mazal replied, a deathly fear creeping into the pit of her stomach.
No bridegroom had been found for the eighteen-year-old Geula. Nobody wanted her red hair, her freckled white body, and her sharp tongue. Everyone tricked into coming to the house preferred her younger sister, Rachel.
“Until Geula gets married, we won’t give Rachel,” her father, the ritual slaughterer of the neighborhood, would say. And so both sisters remained virgins, content with their lot and secretly thanking their lucky stars and Geula’s bridegroom-repellent red hair.
“Listen carefully to what I have to say to you,” Geula whispered to Mazal, whose body had turned to a lump of ice despite the heat in the kitchen, and she dragged her into the yard. There, in the outhouse, she asked her to show her the brown spots on the cloth.
“If he wants to get inside you, say you have to go to the outhouse, and when you return tell him you found blood. If he insists two weeks later, push a piece of cotton wool dipped in olive oil deep inside you,” she said, and she pushed the cotton wool she had brought with her into the blackness of Mazal’s insides. “Do this whenever he wants to be intimate with you. Otherwise children will start coming, and you’re still a child yourself,” she said, inspecting with undisguised satisfaction the orange spots on her hands that had saved her from a similar fate. “And if nothing helps and you get pregnant against your will, I’ll find a solution for that too. Just don’t tell your aunt,” she warned, making her swear.
The next day the bridegroom’s presents arrived: embroidered sheets, silk ribbons of the kind Mazal had seen and yearned for in his shop, a gold bracelet, and paper cones of sugar crystallized into thick, transparent cubes.
From the day her engagement to Yitzhak was announced, Mazal was careful to keep away from the market. Only when her aunt insisted, scolding her, and raising her voice, did Mazal do as she was told, doing her best to make a wide detour round her fiancé’s shop. She felt as if she were walking down the street naked, with only her long hair covering her nakedness. And as she walked with her head lowered toward the dusty alleys of the marketplace, she felt the men’s eyes stabbing her like knives, and her back, covered in the thin wool of her shabby dress, reddened under their lecherous looks. She blocked her ears, but could not help hearing the whispers of the hawkers, avidly describing the wedding night awaiting her fiancé on her smooth white body.
The obscene cries and male whispers sent her running breathless and flushed to her aunt’s house, and as she ran her virginal breasts shook and brought all the shopkeepers out of their holes. The rumor of Mazal’s running spread through the market like wildfire, from shop to shop and alcove to alcove, and to an observer it might have seemed that a guard of honor of men in fezzes, with ragged clothes and fallen paunches, were lining the pavements, raising their flies in a manly salute to the princess galloping down the street like a noble steed. Only one door was deserted—the door to the haberdashery, where Yitzhak had taken cover in the dark recesses of his shop.
Not only the hawkers and their intrusive looks vexed Mazal then. Her playmates too, pious Miriam and black Nehama, gave her no rest.
“Lie on your back and part your legs,” ordered Miriam, who had been given the epithet “pious” in a spirit of irony. When Mazal obeyed, Miriam threw herself between her friend’s parted legs and began raising and lowering her hips to the shrill, gleeful giggles of the watching girls.
“And tell us what he does to you and what side he mounts you from,” they demanded, rubbing her flat stomach with hands chapped by the cold water with which they washed the floors. And Mazal nodded her head, trying to appease her playmates and make them let her be.
At that moment a warning cry was heard in the distance: “Leave her alone!” Geula came running up like a red, menacing ball of fire. Like a flock of chicks alarmed by the shadow of a hawk in the sky the girls ran off with little cries of glee and fear, leaving the bride sprawled on the ground behind them, her head covered in white dust like the neighborhood keeners.
“What happened? Have you taken leave of your senses? Why do you let them do this to you?” Geula scolded, swallowing the sob that began in her throat and threatened to spread to the rest of her body, shaking her friend’s dusty clothes and dragging the frightened little girl into her house. There she put the big copper kettle on to boil, fanning the fire by blowing fiercely on the coals, and with a face flushed from effort poured the water into the tub. “Get undressed,” she commanded without looking at her, pouring cold water into the hot and testing the temperature with her elbow. Hesitantly Mazal took off her dusty clothes. Before allowing Geula to insert the cotton wool between her legs she had never exposed her nakedness to a stranger’s eyes.
“Hurry up. The water’s getting cold,” the redhead urged.
Naked in the tub, with only her long hair covering her and reaching all the way to her vulva, Mazal surrendered herself to Geula’s hands. The yellow cube of soap roamed and slithered over her silky white body, giving rise in its wake to transparent little bubbles of pleasure. With her eyes closed Mazal yielded to the new sensation making her insides contract. Delightful, ticklish feelings crept up from her feet to her thighs, stiffened her nipples, and concentrated in her vagina. With her head light and free of troublesome thoughts she felt the circles of pleasure spreading all over her body, like the ripples from a stone thrown into a pool. Circle after circle the pleasure spread through her until the great, strong wave that made her vagina contract and her body shudder as groans escaped her lips. Afterward, with a sweet fog filling every cell of her body, she let Geula shampoo her long hair, as the water in the tub turned a murky brown. It was a sunny day, and they went out into the yard. Mazal, her body limp, her thighs weak, her head giddy, felt a joyful sweetness spreading through her limbs as she laid her head in Geula’s lap and let her friend comb her long, clean hair glinting in the light of the sky.
On her wedding day she asked to go to the mikvah with Geula. Perhaps as she bathed in the water there she would experience the same bodily sensations again.
“Today you must go with your aunt,” Ge
ula said gently and kissed her on her forehead. “And I wish you good luck.”
The smell of mold assailed her nose as she took off her clothes and stored them rolled up in a ragged ball in the alcove next to the baths. The walls were covered with black spots of mold, and bits of painted plaster dropped from the ceiling into the stagnant water. With timid steps she descended the slippery steps, which felt as if they were covered with a layer of invisible mucus, into the pool of black water, which gave off gray smells of rain. Batya the daughter of Mushun the Turk, who was in charge of the women’s wing, explained how she was to hold her breath and immerse her whole body in the water. Mazal plunged into the deep pool. Her loose hair refused to sink along with her body, and floated on the surface of the murky pool like water lilies.
“Sink, sink,” Batya scolded.
Mazal rose to the surface, filled her cheeks with air, and sank again until her feet squelched in the soft slime at the bottom of the pool. But this time too her hair, as if it had a will of its own, refused to immerse itself in the dark rainwater.
“Hold your hair in your hands and sink,” Batya screamed.
Mazal tried, she tried with all her might, and her hair, to spite her, rose and floated as if it was full of air bubbles.
“A bad omen,” spat Batya the daughter of Mushun the Turk, and told her to get out.
* * *
Wearing the white silk dress she had received from the charity to help poor brides, as befitted an orphan, and accompanied by the mocking looks of pious Miriam, Mazal peeped at her bridegroom standing by her side. She had seen him a few times before, standing in the entrance to his shop and stealing shy, sidelong looks at her. Occasionally she had bought items of haberdashery from him, with lowered eyes, on her aunt’s orders. But now she could feast her eyes on him to her heart’s content. When she saw his face under the bridal canopy through her veil, she felt a frisson of delight. Until this very moment she had not paid any attention to the skin on his face. And now she saw that it was a patchwork of pimples, a veritable treasure trove of poxlike little pustules. They proliferated on his forehead, spread over his cheeks, spotted his chin, and covered his fleshy nose. Between the lumps grew soft shadowy wisps of sparse, boyish hair.
As the rabbi sanctified their union in a low, unintelligible mutter, she was seized by a passionate desire to take Yitzhak’s head between her hands and squeeze the sticky contents from his pimples. When the groom placed the ring on her finger, she imagined herself examining the results of her labors. And when he stamped on the glass, to cries of “Mazal tov!” and the ululations of the women, she continued in her imagination the work of cleaning the hidden pimples nestling behind his ears, like a stork pecking between the feathers of her mate.
There’s a lot of work in store for me, she thought. I only hope he’ll agree to let me deal with his pimples.
As her pleasure grew more intense she closed her eyes, praying that her bridegroom would not guess the nature of the passionate desire bursting from every pore of her skin.
That night Yitzhak took her to his parents’ house. Before Mazal had a chance to inspect the floor and compare it to the one in her aunt’s house, and before she could imagine herself polishing it, her husband quickly covered the mezuzah on the doorpost and the copper mirror on the wall and blew out the flame in the oil lamp. Then he threw her on the bed, hitched the skirt of her dress up over her head as if he was ashamed to look at her face, and came at her from behind like a rooster. Mazal was surprised to hear the heavy sighs he breathed into her ear. These ceased abruptly. As soon as the deed was done, he got up, washed his hands, tugged at the wisps of his beard, made his bed on the floor, and fell asleep. The creaking of the bed went on echoing in her ears long after he had had his way with her. The next morning, while he was sleeping, she inspected his face in the light of the rising sun. The pimples on his chin had disappeared during the night, and smooth pink skin greeted her eyes in their place.
The first person to arrive at the house in the morning was Geula.
“I knew you wouldn’t do what I told you to,” she whispered in her ear in a corner of the room, far from Yitzhak who was busy saying the morning prayer, inspecting with an eagle eye the stained, crumpled sheet on the bed. “Perhaps you were lucky this time and you didn’t get pregnant. Be careful,” she added with a grave expression on her face, “because what’s done is hard to undo. And now come with me to the market,” she commanded. “You have to organize your household, and whether you like it or not you have to cook for your husband.”
“If I come with you everyone will know what happened to me last night,” Mazal replied with downcast eyes.
“Everyone knows why a bride gets married. And if you come with me they won’t dare to open their mouths,” Geula said confidently. And the two girls, one tall, hefty, and redheaded, the other pale and golden-haired, went out into the alley.
The stares fixed on Mazal were lowered before the fierce look in Geula’s eyes, and the terror of her sharp tongue choked the lecherous cries before they were uttered.
“Will you always come with me to the market?” Mazal asked in a faint voice. “When you’re with me they keep quiet.”
Her new husband Yitzhak was not to be seen in the entrance to his shop, as if he were ashamed of the night of pleasure he had enjoyed.
Ten days after her wounds were healed, he came to her again, and this time he remained with her on the bed. The next day the pimples on his face had disappeared again. The same thing happened each morning after he had visited her bed the night before, until the day when her bleeding stopped. That same month, when he came to her every night with no fear of blood, her husband’s face grew smooth and free of pimples and pustules, which vanished without a trace.
* * *
After Mazal learned that she was with child, she tried to get rid of the fetus in her womb. First, in her nausea, she tried to vomit it up, until she felt as if her insides were hollow and empty. When there was nothing left inside her, she spat out the dregs of her stomach, a black-green bile that splashed in all directions and filled the vaulted room with a sour stench. When her husband was out of the way she put the huge kettle on the coals to boil, immersed herself in the copper tub, and scalded her skin in the boiling water until it turned scarlet. She lifted the heavy sandouk again and again, stood holding it in the middle of the room, closed her eyes, and enjoyed a sense of lightness as her head spun giddily. When nothing helped, she forced herself on her husband night after night and morning after morning. And with the first light of day he would stumble to the synagogue, weak-kneed, bleary-eyed, and with a dryness in his mouth that even his morning tea failed to quench. As her desperation grew, she pummeled her still-flat stomach with the rolling pin and skipped rope secretly with her playmates, pious Miriam and black Nehama, far from inquisitive eyes and gossiping tongues.
“You’re pregnant,” Geula said to her one day, after scrutinizing her face and reading the signs, and she took her to Ibrahim, the Muslim barber, who concocted a mixture of wormwood and the juice and seeds of the squirting cucumber for women who shared her plight.
“When they’re watered by the magic potion the intestines boil over and turn upside down,” the women whispered on their doorsteps.
When the potions failed, Mazal imagined that if she held her breath the fetus would suffocate and vanish without a trace. She would lie for hours on her embroidered sheets, holding her breath and stopping her nose with her thumbs, until her face turned blue and her lips grew cold. And the fetus, to spite her, kicked and screamed in her stomach, beat at the walls of her womb with its little fists, and struggled like a caged bird in the prison of her swollen belly.
And where would the fetus emerge when its time was up? She inspected her navel and rummaged inside it to see if the fetus would come out there. When she failed to find an opening, she began to examine herself in the mirror she removed from the wall. And once, when her husband came home unexpectedly early, he found her sprawled on t
he bed with her legs open and her fingers probing her tangled, golden pubic hair, while the mirror displayed the slit to her eyes and to his. Red-faced, he fled from the room. All that evening he avoided looking into her shining eyes, which were full of the joy of discovery.
As she thickened and swelled, and all her attempts to get rid of the fetus failed, she resigned herself to her fate, and at night she lay awake in bed and consoled herself with thoughts of the pretty doll she would soon have. Mazal would take her for walks in the neighborhood streets, and her skin would gleam in the sunshine and dazzle the sky. She would have hair like silk, and Mazal would braid her silky hair, and all who saw her would smile with joy.
As the fetus ripened inside her the pious neighborhood women came secretly to her house bearing gifts for the baby to be born: little cotton dresses worn ragged with washing, gray gauze diapers that had served dozens of infants, and tiny bootees tied with new white ribbons. She accepted them all and put them away in the sandouk between her mother’s moth-eaten bridal gown and her father’s cracked and travel-weary shoes. The princess who emerged from her womb would be dressed in robes of the finest silk, she promised herself at the sight of the wretched gifts. Bonnets knitted of silken thread would adorn her head, and her feet would be shod in kidskin shoes. The fleece of black lambs slaughtered while still in their mothers’ wombs would pad her bed. As the rumors of the child’s beauty spread far and wide, Mazal would adorn her wrists with golden chains and hang heavy, ancient amulets around her neck. They would banish the baby-murdering Lilith, the evil eye, and all the devils and demons from her presence. Sara, she would call her, like the first Hebrew matriarch and like her own mother, who did not live to hold her granddaughter in her arms.
When her belly grew so big that it was hard for her to walk, Geula came to her aid again.
“Your hair is so greasy and dirty that you can’t see its color anymore. I’ll wash it for you,” she offered, and before Mazal had a chance to reply she had already put the big kettle on to boil and prepared the copper tub.
