Four Mothers

by Shifra Horn

  “Mother, Geula is no longer with us,” said Sara gently to her mother who was busy in the kitchen.

  Mazal did not react, as if she were deaf. She went on cooling the tea she had brewed for the sick woman by stirring it briskly with a spoon, and when she put the cup to her lips and found that it was still hot, she poured the tea from one cup to another and from time to time she tested the temperature of the liquid. When it had cooled down she went up to the bed. First, with an expression of hatred, she chased away the fly, which ignored the energetic waving of her hand and returned to the band of spittle that had dribbled out of Geula’s mouth. Defeated, she stared at the winged creature that clung with all six hairy legs, and stubbornly she began to pour the tea into the gaping mouth, wiping away the drops of spit and tea with a white handkerchief.

  “Mother,” Sara repeated loudly, “Geula’s dead. Leave the tea alone.”

  Mazal took no notice and went on pouring the tea into the dead woman’s mouth and trying to chase away the fly.

  “Today she drank a whole cup,” she said proudly when she had finished.

  “Mother, touch her, she’s cold. She’s dead. What are you doing?” Sara cried in horror.

  “It’s time to wash her,” Mazal said. “Come and help me. I’ll get the water ready and you watch her in the meantime, so that the Angel of Death won’t come and take her soul behind my back.”

  Mazal hurried to the kitchen and put the big kettle on to boil. Afterward she poured the hot water into the tub and threw in a few heads of camomile flowers and a bunch of sage leaves, which floated like green boats on the water. She breathed in the scented vapors with satisfaction. The strong smells seared her lungs, her head spun enjoyably, and she felt her strength coming back to her. On her return to the room she began to undress Geula with brisk movements. A naked arm dangled from its sleeve like a branch in the wind, and Geula’s flesh, which had begun to turn cold, was stiff to her touch. Mazal stepped back in horror and examined the body lying limply on the bed like a rag doll.

  “What have you done?” she shrieked. “I turned my back and you let Geula die.” She sat down on the floor, exposed her breasts, and beat them with her hands. Then she let down her hair, pulled out clumps of it, and scratched her face.

  Sara tried to stop her, but her mother’s madness grew.

  Sara ran screaming out of the house and summoned the neighbors. They covered Geula with a sheet and gave Mazal sugar water and smelling salts to revive her. Dissolving in tears and leaning on her neighbor Rivka, Mazal swayed from side to side and mumbled unintelligibly. When they came to take the body away to wash it she refused to part from it. With her hands she clung to the slowly cooling body, digging her nails into the dead flesh and refusing to let the women take it away.

  Itzik, the massive, stammering attendant at the men’s ritual baths, was summoned to the dead woman’s house. Gently he loosened Mazal’s grip, bending her fingers back and drawing her nails out of Geula’s body. No sooner had he succeeded in freeing one hand than the other dug its nails into the shriveled body, leaving deep crescent moons imprinted in the stiff dead flesh.

  Only after Haim the grocer and Moussa the carter had been summoned, too, and with their strong arms restrained the screaming and kicking woman, did the undertakers succeed in removing the body and taking it away for purification.

  * * *

  Bowed under Geula’s weight and struggling to lift their feet from the mire of brown mud clutching at their ankles and threatening to suck them and their silent burden with greedy squelching noises into the bowels of the earth, the stretcher bearers made their way to the cemetery. Puffing and panting, their heads covered with heavy, soaking gray sacks, beneath a barrage of hail the size of cannonballs raining down from the sky, they advanced to the hastily dug grave. They found it as full of water as a small ritual bath. As fast as they bailed it out with pails and pots, the water kept rising in the open grave, brimming over and flooding the surrounding ground and the mounds of smooth, shining mud that covered the fresh graves around it. Exhausted, they stood at the graveside, and as one man they tipped their burden into it. The body of the redheaded Geula, wrapped in a shroud of icicles, slid rapidly into the dark, foaming water, sinking and disappearing into the pit and giving rise to a trail of air bubbles in its wake. When the grave diggers began throwing lumps of mud and stones into the little pool, a cry of alarm went up from the handful of people standing round the grave. Geula was floating on the surface of the water like a cork, refusing to sink to the depths and leave the land of the living.

  “Sink, sink,” the rabbi implored, flinging clods of earth and stones at the body floating in the pit, which gaped like a wound in the ground. The body refused to sink. Mazal let out a grievous cry and ripped the collar of her coat. At that very moment, as if the dead woman had taken fright at her friend’s scream, Geula sank, making a little wave in the water, which rose above the pit and splashed the shoes of the people standing round the grave. Then the mourners began to pelt the grave with lumps of wet earth and stones. Sara refused to watch the stoning, and Mazal looked at the open grave with ravaged eyes.

  “You must say Kaddish,” Mazal ordered her daughter. “She was like a father to you.”

  In order not to upset her mother, who seemed to have gone out of her mind, Sara whispered the Aramaic words with the young yeshiva student who had been hired to say the Kaddish. After the grave had been covered with heavy red mud and the people had withdrawn, Mazal began digging with her nails in the sodden covering of soil.

  “Leave me here. I want to be buried with her,” she screamed at Sara, who tried to pry her fingers away from the blanket of ground covering her friend, and her wet hair, heavy with the mud sticking to it, slapped at Sara’s face. But Sara would not let go, tightening her grip until she dragged her mother off the grave.

  For the first time in her life Mazal raised her hand to her daughter, scratching and furrowing her face with grooves of mud smeared with blood. Sara screamed for help, startling the people walking away from the grave, and Itzik the bath attendant hurried up in response to her cry. With practiced hands he gently bent her arms and hoisted her swooning onto his back like an empty sack of grain. He opened the door of the house with a light kick from his boot, soiled with the mud of the graveyard, and threw the trembling Mazal on the bed, whose sheets were still soaked with Geula’s sweat and still bore her smell.

  From the moment Mazal was thrown onto her bed she never got off it again. At first she burned with fever and her eyes rolled up to the mold-blackened ceiling until the eyeballs were revealed, yellow as the yoke of an egg. She cried out for Yitzhak, whose name Sara heard in the house for the first time, and demanded that she hurry up and bring him to her bedside. None of the doctors’ medicines helped. Her flesh dwindled away and her skin hung on her fragile bones in folds as yellow as old Torah scrolls. Her honey-colored hair turned white and her teeth began to wobble and fall out. She was confused and tossed and turned in her bed, which was wet and stinking with salty sweat.

  All this time Sara did not leave her side. When she had to go to the market to buy food she asked a neighbor to look after her mother, making her swear not to leave her for a moment, lest the Angel of Death steal into the room and take the sick woman’s soul in her absence. She tried to sweeten her mother’s restless sleep with the lullabies Mazal had sung to her when she was a baby. She cooked her gruel from semolina, and Mazal vomited it up again, mixed with black bile.

  All that winter Mazal faded away, growing thinner and thinner, until Sara was afraid that one morning she would look at her bed and find her embroidered nightgown empty of her body and her bed-socks bereft of her skeletal feet with their crooked toenails.

  On the eve of Passover, when the spring sun came out to illuminate the world long deprived of its light, Sara scoured the house, trying to rid it of the pervasive smell of death. A ray of light filtered through the curtains and danced on the walls, flickered on the ceiling, and played betw
een the flagstones, emphasizing their colors and the lines between them. When it had finished playing with the flagstones the sunbeam stole silently and stealthily toward the sick woman’s bed. First it touched her long-nailed toes, then it warmed the wilted flesh of her feet, lingered on her decrepit vulva, latched onto her flabby breasts, tickled her nipples, and climbed slowly up the creases of her neck. When it had finished roaming over her body it leaped into her gaping, toothless, wheezing mouth, penetrated the darkness of her nostrils, and inspected her nasal passages, illuminating them from within and making delicate, transparent threads of blood stand out on her nose. Then it leaped out again, straight into her dull, lifeless eyes.

  Mazal woke up at once, calling out Yitzhak’s name in a voice so terrible that her startled neighbors came running, under the impression that her long-lost husband had come home at last. With the cry of “Yitzhak” on her lips the sick woman sat up in bed and ordered Sara to bring her the mirror hanging on the kitchen wall.

  “He’s coming,” she whispered. “I must make myself beautiful in his honor. Give me the kohl and the rouge, quickly,” she demanded.

  Sara stared at the sunbeam playing on the ceiling and opened the windows and the curtains wide. The sunbeam disappeared. For the first time in her life Sara refused to obey her mother, supported by the neighbors’ opinion that there was no point in upsetting the sick woman with her moribund appearance. When she failed to obtain her wish, Mazal began to scream and curse her daughter in front of everybody for all the troubles that had descended on her head. Sara fled the house, sat down on the doorstep, and stopped her ears with her fingers against her mother’s dreadful screams.

  “Yitzhak’s coming, and I want a mirror. I want a mirror, a mirror,” her mother wailed. “And that wicked girl won’t bring me one. All my troubles are her fault. I wish she had never been born. She’s the devil’s daughter, a Lilith come to steal my soul. It’s a pity she never died at birth, the accursed girl.”

  Sara went back into the house, tore the burnished copper mirror from the wall together with the nail, covered her eyes so as not to see the horrified expression on her mother’s face, and took it to her bed. With her yellow-skinned, skeletal hands her mother took the mirror, but immediately dropped it again.

  “The mirror is too heavy for me,” she whispered to Sara. “Hold it in your hands, Lilith, and bring it close to my face.”

  Sara did as her mother bade her.

  “I can’t see. Bring it closer,” repeated Mazal, and Sara brought the mirror closer until the dying woman’s beaky nose touched it and her breath condensed into tiny drops on its surface.

  Mazal strained her purblind eyes in vain. “Open the curtains. It’s dark in the house and I can’t see,” she scolded her daughter.

  Sara pretended to open the already open curtains.

  The mirror reflected a toothless, shriveled skull with wild white hair and rolling, upturned eyes whose whites had turned a murky brown.

  “Lilith,” moaned Mazal. “Lilith has bewitched me,” she whispered and breathed her last.

  Even when they lowered her mother’s body into the grave, a bag of skin covering a pile of hollow bones, her screams and the name she had given her, Lilith, went on ringing in Sara’s ears and distressing her mind. And she did not know what she had done to make her mother hate her in her dying days.

  Chapter Six

  Throughout the seven days of mourning for her mother Sara sat in the house and with her fingers felt the gold half coin hanging round her neck. The women who had purified her mother’s body gave it to her, baffled as to what it might mean. Neighbors offering condolence came and went, bearing various foodstuffs and murmuring words of consolation. But Sara paid no attention. Her eyes roamed the room and discovered dirt and neglect. Dust covered the floor, the walls were black and peeling, and the smell of her dead mother’s soiled sheets still lingered in her nostrils. While they murmured condolences in her ears she was busy planning and scheming: When the last of the visitors left she would clean and polish the house, wash every flagstone till it gleamed, launder the filthy curtains and give them back their original color, throw out her mother’s stinking sheets and spread new ones on the brass bed, which was now hers. She would paint the walls white and plant herbs in the yard. In this way she would wipe out her mother’s memory and banish the shadows of death, and only then would she be able to fill the house with a man’s voice and the sounds of childish laughter.

  When the last of the people left she set to work. With clenched teeth and full of fury she scrubbed the walls of the room, tore down the curtains and sewed new ones in their place, plastered the peeling walls and painted them white, burned the sheets with the smell of death clinging to them in the yard and spread new ones on the bed. Then she went out into the little garden in front of the house, pulled out the weeds with hatred in her heart and planted a little bed of herbs, with mint, parsley, hyssop, and rue, and jasmine for its sweet scent. Day and night she worked at cleaning the house, and when she was done she returned the few pieces of furniture she had put out in the street, boiled a kettleful of water, and poured the boiling water into the tub. With slow movements she began to wash herself, scrubbing away the memories of death and bringing calm and consolation to her body. Her hair, which reached her ankles, she shampooed in rainwater, and wound it wet and shining several times around her head.

  When she had finished washing herself her eye fell on the rusty sandouk, her mother’s dowry chest. Wondering why she had never noticed it before, she went up to the iron trunk and tried to imagine what she would find inside it when she opened the lid. She lifted it cautiously, as if afraid her mother’s ghost might pop out of the chest, white-haired and toothless in her stinking nightgown, and seize her by the neck.

  A flock of fleeing moths and a cloud of suffocating dust greeted her and covered her shampooed hair in a layer of white swarming with silver-winged moths. At the top of the chest, neatly folded, she found a silken wedding dress, moth-eaten and yellow with age. When she tried to spread it out the dress disintegrated at her touch and turned into a pile of yellow dust dotted with rusty little hooks. Underneath it she found a pair of shabby leather boots, and utensils such as she had never seen in her mother’s house. As she removed the objects, her fingers encountered a roll of stiff paper wrapped up like a mummy in several layers of crumbling, yellowing tulle. Carefully she unwrapped the tulle, feeling as if she were removing the moldy winding sheet from a corpse in its grave. Inside the paper shroud she found a tattered brown photograph, spotted with wormholes the size of a pinhead. In the photograph she saw the image of herself in a bridal gown, and next to her a young man in an oversized wedding suit whose face was covered with a rash of pimples. Sara strained her memory. She was sure that she herself had never been photographed in a bridal gown, or with a strange man at her side.

  All that night Sara hardly slept a wink and she wore her brain out with thoughts. That night, and all the nights that followed, the image of the blue-eyed stranger who had taken her photograph rose before her eyes. His fair hair and blue eyes overshadowed the image of the pimply youth in the picture. In the morning, when she woke from her troubled sleep to the sound of the cock’s crow, she looked at the picture again. It’s a prophecy about my future husband, she thought. If I’m photographed in a bridal gown with a young man by my side, it means that he is to be my husband and I his wife. This is a picture of the future.

  From that day on she would open the sandouk stealthily, as if she were afraid of her mother’s ghost hovering in the air and catching her in a forbidden act. With the curtains drawn she would take out the picture and in a long, slow ritual she would remove its shroudlike wrappings. After the picture was exposed she would commune at length with pimply-faced youth, her future mate, and think loving thoughts about him. She imagined the children she would have with him, the Sabbath evenings in her new house, and the kitchen where she would cook his meals. Sara prayed that he would bring his books with him, so
that she could read until it was time for the morning prayers while her husband lay sleeping in his bed. The more she looked at the picture, the more the face of the blue-eyed stranger faded, until he disappeared from her life and the picture of her future husband was so clearly engraved in her heart that she could draw his likeness in her head and she no longer needed to look at the photograph.

  Thirty days after her mother’s death Sara returned to the shop. Never had the pokey little shop been frequented by such an abundance of yeshiva students—all of them set on buying silk ribbons and buttons, mumbling their requests in blushing embarrassment, and explaining that they were buying these feminine articles for their mothers or their sisters. Her hands were full of work and money, and she began to think of buying a new shop in a new quarter of the town, a sunny shop with big windows and flowery curtains. That year she was also sought out by many matchmakers in the wake of the youths, but she rejected them all.

  “You’re no longer a girl. You’re a grown woman, and if you don’t hurry up and get married you’ll go to your grave a virgin with no one to say Kaddish for you,” the matchmakers would threaten when their hopes of a commission were dashed by her stubbornness.

  But Sara stood her ground. She was sure that the bridegroom fate had chosen for her, the man in the photograph, would knock on her door one day and ask to come in. Gradually the stream of young men stopped coming to the shop and the matchmakers stopped visiting her house, and she remained alone, clasping the picture of her bridegroom, blurred by her tears, to her bosom.

  And perhaps he’ll never come, the heretical thought stole into her heart. But she shook it off like a scarecrow banishing the pesky birds pecking at its garden.

  When the matchmakers despaired of Sara, the pregnant women came to feast their eyes on her beauty. For hours they would bargain with her about the price of a velvet ribbon that cost no more than a penny, sucking in her beauty and assimilating it into themselves, swallowing the gold of her hair and the sparkle of her eyes and storing their magic properties in the dark chambers of their wombs. And indeed it was said that the girls born to these women came into the world endowed with a measure of Sara’s beauty.