Four Mothers

by Shifra Horn

  Mazal sat in the middle of the pool of hot water surrounded by low copper walls, her gleaming stomach thrust defiantly in front of her, her swollen breasts upright, marbled with blue veins and armed with dark, prickly nipples. And once more the transparent bubbles of delight invaded her flesh as her friend soaped her, accompanied by sensations that spread through her body giving rise to involuntary shudders and uncontrollable moans of pleasure.

  After getting out of the bath, wrapped in a sheet torn from the bed, Mazal lay on her back, her eyes glittering, while Geula bustled about her noisily and clattered the dishes in the kitchen.

  That night she was possessed by the dybbuk of cleanliness. She lit the lamp and shook Yitzhak till he woke. In a daze he turned toward the door to fetch Fahima the midwife.

  “I’m not ready yet,” Mazal said, laughter gurgling in her throat. “Come and help me to move the bed and the wardrobe, we have to make room for the baby.” Silently and obediently Yitzhak complied with her caprices, and the shadow cast by his body in its long nightgown looked stooped and miserable. When dawn broke and he returned wearily to bed, Mazal decided that it was time to wash the floors. She washed each flagstone separately, just as she had done in her aunt’s house, and her heavy belly pulled her down, splashing in the murky water covering the floor. The coldness of the water seeped into her body, and a dull pain pierced her and felled her to the floor with a scream that sent Yitzhak running to fetch the midwife.

  From then on, so people say, none of the neighbors had a moment’s sleep. The sound of her screams maddened the muezzins reading verses from the Qur’an on the minarets and drowned out their voices. Women went into her room and emerged with their hair on end, covering their faces with their aprons and sticking their fingers in their ears. Even Ibrahim the barber, who was summoned urgently to her bedside, fled from the terrible shrieks that penetrated every crack. Lock their doors and shutter their windows as they might, the voice reached the neighbors besieged in their houses as if erupting from the bowels of the earth. It climbed the stairs to the uppermost stories, rose echoing from the wells, invaded the synagogues, and disturbed the children at their Torah lessons. Even the cotton wool that people stuffed in their ears in the dead of night could not keep out the voice, which was great and terrible and grew louder from minute to minute. Only Fahima the midwife, after pressing the mother’s bursting stomach and dancing on it, fell peacefully asleep by her side, and some of the neighbors were prepared to swear that they heard her snoring between the screams. Women experienced in childbirth told those about to give birth for the first time that Fahima was deaf to the screams of the woman in labor and only heard the cries of the fetus in the womb.

  On the seventh day, when the clock in the Ashkenazim’s houses chimed five times, Mazal’s womb opened and brought forth her daughter, first her buttocks and then her flattened head, which emerged at last to the sound of deafening yells. It was said that Mazal gave birth on her fourteenth birthday, but whether it was the actual day itself or the day before or after it, no one could confirm or deny. Her parents had taken the date of her birth with them to the grave.

  * * *

  When Mazal woke up and received the baby, wrapped in an old sheet, in her arms, a scream escaped her lips. The child was black and ugly as a monkey—like the one she had seen in the book of Bible illustrations she had found in a shop, the monkey standing on the shoulder of the Queen of Sheba when she came to pay her respects to the wisest of men. The baby’s nose was flat, her ears stuck out, as big as pillowcases flapping in the wind, and her face and back were covered with shiny black hair. When Mazal removed the sheet she exposed thin, bandy legs, and above them a gray stomach, swollen and creased as a cracked water gourd. When the baby cried her face turned yellow and her navel stuck out. Her voice was loud and screeching and her fists punched the air as if she wanted to hit out at the world and everything in it. When she suckled she pinched her mother’s nipple between her strong, toothless gums and made rude, impertinent burping noises. After every feeding Mazal would inspect her nipple with an eagle eye, swearing that she had felt two tiny teeth gnawing at her flesh.

  Her neighbors whispered in the marketplace that even though the baby had no teeth, they had seen tooth marks on the breast with their own eyes. Some even swore that they had seen two drops of blood, one drop for each tooth, glistening on the pink of Mazal’s nipple. The stained and ragged nightgowns covering the baby’s skinny nakedness added nothing to her charms, but rather underlined her ugliness in the sight of God and man. Thus she lay, bundled up in her rags, giving voice to loud cries of protest and waving her fists threateningly at invisible enemies.

  After Mazal had kept the baby hidden in her dark house for five months, her husband Yitzhak muttered one steamy summer night that the baby’s legs were growing bandier and her chest more sunken.

  “If you don’t take her out into the sun,” he said, “she’ll shrivel up and fade away, her hair will fall out, her teeth won’t grow, and everyone who sees her will scorn her.”

  Geula, who came every morning to help her bathe the baby and clean the house, repeated Yitzhak’s warnings. “You have to take her out into the sun,” she said, after worriedly inspecting the baby’s bandy legs.

  One morning, after her husband had left for the shop, Mazal took a long look at the screaming, nightmarish lump whose scalp had begun to shed yellow scabs. From her late mother’s sewing basket she removed the thick black thread used by the women of the neighborhood before celebrating weddings and betrothals. She placed one end of the thread between her strong white teeth, and twisted the other end round her thumb and forefinger. Stealthily she plucked the baby from her cradle and placed her frizzy head between her strong thighs. Rolling the thread expertly between her fingers she uprooted the coarse black hair growing on her offspring’s face. The baby screamed and choked, tried to catch her breath, and fainted between her mother’s thighs, but Mazal didn’t stop until she had plucked the last bristle of hair from her ear. Then she took a handful of flour from the glazed clay jar in the pantry and sprinkled it over the baby’s flaming scarlet face. She bundled the horrid, screaming bundle in the torn sheet and went out with her baby into the sun.

  The little mite’s beady black eyes closed in the glare of the light, which she had never seen since the day she was born. Her face wrinkled up in a worried expression and her fists waved in the hot air spiced with the smells of the market. Mazal walked between the stalls with the living bundle clutched to her chest. She sniffed the spices in Mussa’s shop, tasted the ground cinnamon on the tip of her moistened finger, inspected the cabbage leaves and smelled a bunch of mint at the greengrocer’s. In the butchers’ alley she hastened her steps and averted her eyes from the decapitated sheep with their hairless red flesh hanging from the hooks by their tails, while their blood dripped into the square kerosene tins standing beneath them. The head of a ram with a baleful look in its eyes sent her running to the perfume market, where she strolled at her leisure, disregarding the bundle in her arms, devouring with wide, quivering nostrils the perfumed air enveloping her and making her dizzy.

  As Mazal strolled round the alleys of the marketplace the drops of water in the air joined with the flour on the baby’s face to form a sticky, doughy mask. At midday, as the heat increased, little bubbles of salty sweat broke out on the baby’s face and trickled down from her plucked forehead to her chin, leaving furrows of dark skin that had never been touched by the sun. As the flour was washed away in the tide of sweat, little lumps of dough were left behind in the open pores that had recently hosted bristles of hard black hair. The pox spread over the baby’s black face in a sickly white rash. At that moment pious Miriam and black Nehama came strolling toward Mazal in the perfume market, looking for a victim to tease.

  “Show us your little beauty,” said pious Miriam sweetly, and without waiting for a reply she turned down the cover of the sheet. At the sight of the baby’s face she recoiled in alarm.

  “She’
s a leper,” she whispered in horror, and turned on her heel and ran without waiting for black Nehama.

  “A leper, a leper!” The cry rose in the air, passing from stall to stall, reverberating among the hawkers and rolling down to Yitzhak’s haberdashery shop.

  Mazal covered the baby’s face with the gray sheet and ran all the way home, swearing that the sun would never touch her daughter’s face again until her skin grew white and fair. Having been failed by the flour, she consulted her aunt Miriam, of the pale complexion and pure white hands, and heard her secret:

  “There’s nothing like lemon juice for whitening the skin.”

  Geula confirmed the remedial qualities of the lemon. “They told me too to rub my face and hands with a wedge of lemon in order to make the freckles fade,” she said with a smile, exposing her arms covered with freckles to the elbows and examining them affectionately. “As you can imagine I didn’t do it, for if I had they would have hurried to find me a husband, and who needs a nuisance like that in her house.”

  From then on Mazal rubbed the baby’s face regularly with the sour yellow liquid. Bit by bit she worked on the skin, and examined the results. The dark skin grew a little fairer but darkened again the next day. When she saw that the lemon juice was of no use she attacked the baby’s nose. While she breast-fed her she would pinch her flat nose between her thumb and finger, and she didn’t let go even when strange wheezes escaped the baby’s mouth. Every night she tied her loosely flapping ears to her skull with strips of cloth she tore off the old sheet. She bound the baby’s horrifying bandy legs up in a diaper, and every day she increased the pressure, and she wrapped a thick bandage tightly round her swollen stomach, like one of the stiff corsets worn by rich women that she had seen in Fruma’s shop in the Ashkenazic neighborhood.

  * * *

  During this whole period Mazal kept away from her husband’s bed. She laid her bedding next to the baby’s iron cradle, and thrust her husband away when he tried to approach the warmth of her body and the smoothness of her flesh. Nor could the neighbor women who came to the house at her husband’s bidding make her change her mind.

  “Even though I know I can’t get pregnant as long as I’m breastfeeding the baby, I won’t let him touch me, not until I come to him and tell him I’m ready,” she said to her husband’s emissaries.

  Geula welcomed her decision, and came to visit her friend every morning, examined her face, sniffed the sheet, and searched anxiously for signs of her activities during the previous night. When she found nothing, she would press Mazal to her bosom, stroke her cheek and the inside of her arm, and gently kiss her ripe breasts with their milky smell.

  “Don’t let him come near you,” she counseled her for the umpteenth time. “Wait. Let him control himself.”

  To Mazal’s surprise, her husband’s face began to blossom with a radiant new crop of pimples. The pimples spread over his forehead, crept down his cheeks, struck out at his nose, and came to rest on his chin. Mazal knew that if she slid her hand down his back she would find fresh new colonies of pustules there too.

  Soon enough wicked tongues made haste to bring her the news. Her husband had been seen leaping like a calf onto the fat, kohl-painted Arab whore Fatima, whose house, like that of her ancient predecessor Rahab, adjoined the city walls. Mazal answered the slanderers, “I hope he enjoys himself,” and continued her labors with the child. Her husband’s pimples, which had blossomed due to his banishment from her bed, began to shrivel and shrink, and once again his fresh, pink skin was revealed.

  When her daughter turned one, on Mazal’s fifteenth birthday, as she believed, she entered her husband’s bed. He stiffened immediately and without any preliminaries penetrated her body. The moment he was inside her he froze, then withdrew in alarm.

  “There are no walls,” he mumbled fearfully.

  The next day he tried his luck again, and again his member shrank and emerged from her body small, limp, and unsatisfied. The same thing happened a few nights in succession. And again his face was resplendent with pimples, and again Mazal heard of his visits to the prostitute.

  Fahima the midwife, who had stood by her bed and delivered her daughter, was summoned to the house by Mazal’s husband, and was rewarded handsomely for her pains. At her command Mazal removed her underclothes, opened her legs, and allowed her to probe into her private parts in the faint light of the setting sun filtering through the window. Fahima’s filthy, black-nailed hands rummaged inside Mazal at length, leaving an unpleasant burning sensation in her flesh.

  “Your husband says you have no walls and no bottom, and he’s right,” the midwife said after completing her examination. “The baby’s backside, which emerged before the head, made a great tear inside you, and there is no cure,” she informed Mazal. “You will be able to have children,” she added, pronouncing Mazal’s sentence, “but you will never be pleasured by your husband again.” And she went out to Yitzhak, who was waiting outside biting his nails in suspense.

  Yitzhak went back inside dragging his feet heavily. All that night he did not dare look into his wife’s amber eyes. In the morning, when the cock crowed, he mounted her, pressed himself against her naked flesh, beat his member on her belly, and rubbed it on the entrance to her body. At last he gained his satisfaction, but not before drenching Mazal’s body with rivers of sweat, which soaked the sheets and dripped onto the floor through the heavy down mattress. All this time her husband wept in her arms while the baby laughed loudly and refused to go to sleep.

  The next day he took her to the rabbis and presented her with a bill of divorcement. Before parting from her he broke a gold napoleon in two. He gave her one half, and promised to send her the other if he made his fortune in foreign lands. That same night he set out for Jaffa with the caravan of mules, and from there, so she heard, he embarked on a ship and sailed over the sea.

  In the days to come Mazal tried to conjure up the vision of his pimples, which she knew intimately one by one. As time went by the vision faded from her eyes and the pimples disappeared without a trace.

  Chapter Five

  That year, so they said in the neighborhood, the great miracle occurred. One morning the baby woke up from her sleep and she was bald as an eagle. On the little pillow of her bed Mazal found all the dark, hard hair of her head lying like a round halo of black sheep’s fleece. The next day Mazal saw that silky golden hair like a chick’s down was covering the baby’s scalp. Every day the hair thickened and grew. Every morning Mazal would hurry to her daughter’s cradle to witness the wonder, and the hair rapidly grew longer until it reached the baby’s ankles, so that she tripped over it when she took her first steps. Her feet were ensnared in the golden tangle, and she fell flat on her face, crying heartrendingly.

  Everybody praised and extolled the baby’s hair so much that Mazal decided never to cut it, and she let it grow and lengthen, until at night it covered the child’s body like a silken blanket, whose color was like that of the garments of the emperor of faraway China. Mazal never ate the fresh eggs sold her by the Arab peasant women in the market, but kept them in a little wicker basket in the corner of the kitchen. When the basket was full she broke them all very carefully, lifted out the yolks, mixed them with olive oil, and beat the mixture lightly with a wooden spoon until it was airy and pale. Then she took the child, put her in the wooden tub, and shampooed her hair for hours with the mixture she had prepared. To rinse the hair she used the rainwater she collected in the wooden barrel standing outside, and finished off the treatment with an infusion of camomile flowers. Every day she would roam the fields, spying out the tiny flowers and snipping off their yellow heads carefully, so as not to squeeze them between her fingers and crumble them to dust.

  “There’s nothing like camomile tea for lightening the hair,” said the neighbors who came to see the golden-haired little girl. When Mazal finished shampooing the golden hair, she dried it carefully with a big sheet and sat with the child outside, combing her hair, until she succeeded i
n separating each hair. So that the long hair would not sweep up the dust on the floors of the house, Mazal plaited her daughter’s hair into two thick braids and wound them many times around her head.

  When Mazal walked with her at dusk in the streets of the market and the fields of the town, the child looked as if a huge ball of white radiance sat heavily on her head. So heavy was the burden of her hair that it was hard for her to hold the stem of her neck straight and her head high, and she would walk heavily, with her head tilted forward, like a fat goose. As her hair grew lighter, so did her two beady little black eyes, until they took on the golden honey of her mother’s and matched the color of her hair. Later on her eyes became speckled like her mother’s eyes with tiny brown spots, which danced and played hide-and-seek with the sunbeams. The color of her skin, which from the day of her birth was hardly ever exposed to the burning sun, was pure as the ivory imported from India. Her flat nose, tirelessy pinched by her mother’s fingers, grew straight and delicate. Even when her face grew, her nose remained tiny, refusing to keep up with the rate of growth of the rest of her body.

  * * *

  Sara had two mothers, or, if you like, a mother and a father, both women, so they said in the neighborhood. For the day Yitzhak left home Geula occupied his empty bed. One day, the story went, she set out for Mazal’s house, with Yussuf the Kurdish porter striding behind her. Under his arms he carried eiderdowns and pillows, on his head he bore a copper basin, and in his broad sash were stuck household utensils, pots and pans, which made a loud noise and rang out with every step he took. Without a word, as if it were self-evident, Mazal cleared a space in her wardrobe for Geula’s things, and she gave her half her empty bed too. Together they shared the household chores, the task of selling in the shop, and the burden of bringing up Sara. In the evening hours it was possible to see them cooking together, and Mazal never set out for the market alone. Geula would accompany her there, bully the hawkers, and walk away with the fresh produce she had bought for a song. Only the washing of the floors Mazal did not share with Geula. That task was hers alone. When she washed the floors she would close her eyes, feel the stones with her sensitive hands, try to guess which stone she was scrubbing, and delight in the act of washing and the game of hide-and-seek she was playing with the paving stones. While Mazal was washing the floor, Geula, who had studied for a few years at the dressmaking school next to the Siftai Hakhamim synagogue and was considered a learned woman, would play counting games with Sara, improve her writing, and practice thinking games with her.