Four Mothers

by Shifra Horn

  But the rejected yeshiva students would cover their eyes at the sight of her dazzling hair, lest she steal into their fantasies at night and rob them of their moonstruck souls. Then they would struggle with her on their stinking mattresses and sheets soaked with sweat and stained with the sperm they ejected in their dreams, sperm that was collected and hoarded drop by drop in the womb of the demon- and devil-spawning Lilith. And they would be ashamed to tell their dreams the next day when she visited them again as they pored over the pages of the Gemara and caused their members to stiffen oppressively on their loins. Even when they tried to banish her with oaths and excommunications, with execrations and curses, she would come back to haunt them, clinging to the pages of the Gemara, swaying before their eyes red with hallucinatory nights, and her dazzling smile would whisper to them in words of flattery and seduction.

  And when they could not overcome her, they went to the rabbi and asked him to speak to her and request her not to walk in the lane leading to the beth-midrash. And when she complied with the rabbi’s request and even covered her hair lest any of them be led into temptation, even then her image continued to dance before their eyes made bleary by nights that shook both body and soul, and some say that in those days the study of a single tractate took months to complete, because of the phantasmagoric sights whirling giddily before the eyes of the students.

  Those unable to banish the sights would fan the flames of the hunger inside them and follow her wherever she went. The bolder among them would lurk outside her door, and at night, when the light went off in the window, they would pounce with trembling fingers on the washing lines, where bodiless garments swayed like ghosts waiting for their victims. Their palms clammy with lust, they would tear the flapping garments from the line. Then they would bundle their treasure under their coats, where it burned like the embers of an alien fire whispering words of temptation, and carry it off to a hiding place. There, far from prying eyes, they would feast their eyes on the curves conjured up by the clothes, grope with trembling fingers to feel the smoothness of her body, and dazzled by the gleam of her skin they would sniff with flaring nostrils the scents of her naked limbs as their hands pawed the stiffly laundered fabric. When the clothes on the washing lines dwindled, the boldest of them penetrated the secrets of the house itself, and returned with rare and precious loot, a pair of panties gray with washing, redolent of her smell and the memory of her private parts.

  And in the neighborhood they told of all the stoop-shouldered and hollow-chested youths who lined up to pay the robber for a sniff of his booty. The same student, they added, abandoned his studies, and with the money he collected from the sniffers and pawers he opened a small lingerie, brassiere, and corset shop in the new quarter of the town.

  * * *

  Sara knew that her waiting was over on the day she saw her bridegroom enter the shop and walk down the stairs toward her. His foreign clothes were torn and dusty, his sparse beard was dry and stiff with sweat mixed with red desert dust. Without a word she welcomed the wayfarer with whose picture she spent her sleepless nights. After giving him hot water to wash his face and setting a dish of lentils before him she asked him his name.

  “Avraham,” he replied.

  Playfully she whispered his name and tried out a variety of nicknames in her heart: Avraham, Avram, Avreimele, Avroom, Avi. Avraham our Father and Sara our Mother.

  Apart from his name she asked him nothing, but he told her about his family abroad. He was the only son of his father, a wealthy carpet merchant.

  “My father sent me to the Holy Land to seek fortune. So he said and that is why I have come.”

  “Let us set a date for the betrothal,” she said suddenly. “I have no relatives and your parents are far away. We have no need of consultations. It has been determined by heaven. Your fortune is right here with me,” she added as she saw the pallor spreading over his face.

  When he recovered his spirits his happiness knew no bounds. His father had been right. Fortune had smiled on him. He, Avraham, with his meager body and sparse beard, would marry the most beautiful of women.

  A month later they were married.

  * * *

  On the eve of her wedding Sara went for the first time to the neighborhood mikvah. The rumor that the beautiful Sara was going to the mikvah spread from house to house and brought all the women of the neighborhood to the dank, moldy building. That day was recorded in the annals of the mikvah as “the great day of the bathing of the beautiful Sara.” The brawny, red--calved bath attendants said there never had been and never would be such a day in the entire history of the mikvah, and that the place had never been visited by so many women at once.

  To the mikvah streamed women whose menstrual period was not yet over, and women who had been there only a day or two before and did not need to come again for another month. Sara stepped between the women clustering and buzzing with excitement as if oblivious to their presence. A circle of half-naked women formed unconsciously around her, some of them in shabby petticoats, others hiding their thick legs mottled black and blue in brown stockings, and others whose fleshy thighs were encased in wide, faded bloomers while the nipples of their immense, wobbling breasts ploughed into their groins. And the circle of half-naked women expanded and swelled.

  And order reigned in the mikvah. The short or shortsighted women took up their positions in the front row of the circle, with the tall and sharp-sighted standing behind them. Sara stood in the middle of the circle closing in around her, under the air vent in the vaulted roof. In normal times the vent let the light from outside into the dark room, where it poured down in a narrow golden shaft speckled with dust motes. The radiant motes whirled upward in an endless dance. Each speck of dust shone and glittered as it spiraled eternally upward in its predetermined dance, carrying the sights of the place with it into the streets of the town: bare female feet, flabby breasts with empty nipples, bellies shrunken as an empty gourd, cropped and shaved heads, hands laced with green rivers, knotted thighs, and crooked nails on fleshy toes.

  The sunbeam dancing round her touched her hair. Thunderstruck the women gazed at the resulting radiance and stifled a cry. Flashes of golden light spun round her head, shooting out sparks of alien fire that threatened to burn anyone who touched her. The phantasmagoric dance of radiance igniting her hair was sucked up through the vent, taking with it the fiery golden sparks that burned as quick and hot as flames in a field of thorns.

  Shooting sparks of fire around her, Sara stood on the wet spot of light, splashing sparkling drops of rainwater onto the concrete floor. Two long hands lit by the silvery light rose slowly and dreamily to the golden head. Long, transparent fingers groped in the cascades of hair and emerged from the tangle bearing the hard metal clips that fastened the roll of braids around her head. A pair of braids thick as a ship’s rope, freed from the grip of the clips, fell down her back. Sara took one of them and slowly unplaited it. Three snakes of wavy hair plunged down her back and lapped her ankles. With her eyes fixed on a secret point somewhere on the wall, piercing the bodies of the women surrounding her and passing through them, Sara unraveled the second braid. Covered by a thick, wavy cloak of hair she began to take off her clothes. First, standing in the pool of light, she removed her shoes. When she felt the wetness of the illuminated water lapping at her stockinged feet, she slowly and meticulously peeled off the thick black stockings, exposing a pair of vulnerable, white, slender-ankled feet. Then she turned her attention to her dress. Carefully she undid the buttons. The women, breathing heavily as they watched her, counted them one by one. In days to come they would say that the dress had twenty buttons. When the days turned to years, they would say that the dress had exactly one hundred buttons. The eyewitnesses added that Sara’s long white fingers undid the buttons, twenty in number, or if you will exactly one hundred, with irritating slowness. They dawdled provocatively between one button and the next, lingering, feeling and caressing each button and buttonhole as if uncertain whether t
o undo them all.

  Like the curtain of the Ark of the Law the dress parted and with a shake of her shoulders Sara shed it like a snake shedding its skin. Barefoot she stood on the cold gray concrete floor, dressed only in her hair and her underwear, shivering all over. The women devouring her with their eyes let out a sigh as her smooth white arms were revealed. Slowly she pulled her woolen undershirt over her shoulders, exposing a pair of doelike breasts threaded with delicate blue veins. Her pink nipples stiffened in the cold room, stabbing the eyes of the beholders and drawing a sudden uncontrollable cry of admiration from their lips.

  As if her audience did not exist, she took off her panties with her back to them and revealed her ripe, firm buttocks to their eyes. When she turned around in order to make her way to the ritual bath she noticed the scores of prying eyes fixed on her pubic hair. At that moment a cry of dismay broke from the lips of the spectators. On the smooth white flesh of the most beautiful of women they saw the black curls of her nether hair, coiling and glistening, covering and revealing.

  “Her hair is black.” The whispers rose on every side, piercing the thick gray walls and penetrating the innermost rooms of the men’s mikvah. “She’s a fraud.” The whispers echoed through the rooms, broke through the walls, burst out of the heavy stone domes and rolled down the alleys of the marketplace. The voices went to war with the flashes of golden light rising from the vent, climbed up the fiery sparks and escaped into the air bearing the tidings of Sara’s black hair to the world.

  And Sara herself, as if none of it had anything to do with her, stepped out of the pool of light, walked slowly toward the place of purification, and dipped her body into the murky rainwater, where her golden hair floated on the surface like a tangle of swamp lilies and refused to sink.

  * * *

  Like a pair of orphans, without mother or father, Avraham and Sara were married with only a minyan of beggars for an audience. In the town they said that the moment the groom lifted the veil from the face of the bride in order to give her the Kiddush wine to drink, his face was bathed in a luminous light and all his pimples were exposed. The only one of Sara’s acquaintances invited to the wedding was the photographer Rahamim, whose lips never ceased praising the bride’s beauty and extolling the good fortune of the groom. After the ceremony was over he took the couple to his shop and immortalized them against a backdrop of rocky mountains and waterfalls. This time Sara asked him not to embellish the picture with the colors of his paintbrush. The picture of the couple on their wedding day remained hanging in Rahamim’s shop even after his demise. His sons refused to take it down, and even when years passed and color photographs crowded the old pictures off the walls, it remained in its place, brown with age, and people would come into the shop to ask about the bride and her fate.

  The night after the wedding her husband never left her side. Even after performing his conjugal duty he went on holding her in his arms until dawn, and her golden hair covered both their bodies like a thick warm blanket of silk. The next morning she lifted the blanket covering her beloved to see his nakedness. On his chest, which was still as smooth as a boy’s, glittered half a gold napoleon threaded onto a slender golden chain. Sara removed her own half from her neck, where it had been hidden all this time under her clothes, and pieced the two halves together. Before her startled eyes the pieces united into one perfectly matched whole. Her cry of astonishment woke her husband. Without a word she showed him the united napoleon.

  “Our match was made in heaven,” he said with a radiant smile. “It was no coincidence, but determined from on high.”

  Nine months later she gave birth to her son. The pregnancy was easy and so was the birth. When the midwife gave her the baby, he opened his great blue eyes wide, as if he didn’t want to miss a single ray of sun. The baby was as beautiful as his mother and his head was crowned with silky golden hair.

  “We’ll call him Yitzhak,” said her husband, “after my father, may he live long.”

  Because of the baby’s beauty, which was the talk of the town, Sara tied an amulet to his clothes. She took the two halves of the gold coin to Zion, the Yemenite goldsmith, and he joined them artfully together, as if they had never been split. Only an eye assisted by a magnifying glass could make out the join between the two halves. Sara would take Yitzhak, dressed like a prince, protected by the coin, and armed against the envious by the amulet, for walks in the parks and the marketplace so that passersby could feast their eyes on his beauty and sing his praises. The baby’s eyes devoured the scenes, his ears absorbed the sounds, and all who saw him marveled at the sight.

  * * *

  When the child was six months old Sara noticed that he was late in developing. When she approached his cradle in the morning he never smiled at her, and when she sang to him he did not seem to hear. And when the other babies began to take their first steps he went on lying in his cradle, his blue eyes staring at the ceiling as if he saw something there that was hidden from her eyes. Then she began to take him to the sages and the kabbalists, to collect amulets, charms, hamsas to ward of the evil eye, bits of blue glass, bells, and parchment scrolls bearing magic spells. All these she sewed onto the serious baby’s white coat, until it was completely covered and not a trace of its original color was left. When the child waved his hands the amulets tinkled and rattled with a loud, alarming noise. Then his face would fall, his nose would wrinkle, and a piercing wail would erupt from the little body encased in its motley armor of metallic objects glittering in the sun.

  As the child grew so the charms and amulets multiplied, and when she bought him a new coat she would sit up at night to undo the amulets attached to the old garment and sew them onto the new one. And as the coats grew bigger and heavier the child grew stiller, lest his movements rattle his armor and terrify him with the noise. And he looked like the statues of the Virgin’s plump son in the churches, with his body covered in coins, charms, and amulets offered up by the faithful. All this time the baby did not utter a word or direct a glance at his mother, and she was sure that he had a mission to perform on earth. One day he would open his mouth and utter words of wisdom, and Jews and gentiles alike would flock to him, for he was the King Messiah. In order to prepare him for his pure messianic life Sara would wash her hands whenever she breast-fed him, and wash his hands before his mouth clamped round her nipple and after he did his business in his diaper.

  Sara did not dare to share her thoughts with her husband. Even when the child refused to look her in the eye, never uttered a word or smiled at what he saw, even then she did not abandon hope. When he grew older and went outside in his heavy, amulet-covered coat, he looked like a battle-weary warrior wearing his medals on his chest, with his head poking out like that of an old tortoise and his yellow crest of hair glittering in the sun.

  The children teased him, poked sticks between his legs to make him stumble and fall flat on his face, and mimicked the grunting noises he made. “Here comes the amulet” would pass from courtyard to courtyard, mustering and uniting rival camps of neighborhood children. Ashkenazim joined forces with Sephardim, Yemenites with Kurds, Jews with Arabs, Armenians with Muslims. They all surrounded Yitzhak, wrapped like a mummy in his amulet-armored coat, plucking at the amulets, hitting him, pulling out fistfuls of his fair hair, and pinching his fat flesh until it bled. And the child did not cry. The more they tormented him the tighter he closed his mouth, and only strangled grunts escaped his lips.

  The noise brought Sara running, armed with a thick stick. She waved it over the heads of his tormentors, yelling at them, her eyes wet, her face flushed with anger. Like a swarm of bees fleeing from a cloud of smoke the bullies ran from her dark rage, peeping pitilessly through the cracks in the fence at the weeping mother leading the “King Messiah” back home.

  All the visits to the kabbalists, sages, and seers were in vain. Every visit emptied Sara’s purse and burdened her son’s coat, with more and more charms and amulets sewn on to “banish the evil eye afflicting him b
ecause of his beauty.” When the amulets did no good, the fear crept into her heart that all was not as it should be. She sat with the child for hours, gripping his waist between her legs to stop him escaping, and holding his head straight between her hands. Then she would try to look directly into his eyes, blue as bottomless pools, and make them meet hers. But the child gazed ahead as if through a glass wall. After failing to catch his eye, she tried to catch his tongue between her fingers and manipulate it in the cavity of his mouth to make him say something. And the boy would mumble unintelligible syllables, grunt at her, and bite her fingers thrust into his throat. He gnawed the paintbrush she placed in his hand for him to copy the letters she drew, and tore to pieces the little picture book she gave him, cramming the pages into his mouth without even looking at them.

  When she lost patience and slapped him, he didn’t blink an eye or shed a tear. He was absorbed in a world of his own. At meals he polished off his food, devouring it straight from the plate like a wild animal and stretching out his hands to snatch more from his parents’ plates. In bed at night he would roll his head and bang it ceaselessly against the wall. Anyone passing by late at night would hear a rhythmic thudding as if someone were beating a drum. After first stopping their ears, Sara and Avraham grew accustomed to the noise in the end, and could not fall asleep without it. As soon as Yitzhak started his drumming Sara’s eyes would grow heavy and she would fall asleep, worn out by the labors of the day, and when the banging stopped she would wake up and hurry to his room to see what was wrong.

  When all the boys his age were going to heder to study the Torah, Yitzhak roamed the house like a wounded animal, beat his head on the walls, defecated in the corners of the rooms, and stained his amulet coat with the spittle dribbling from his mouth. And Sara stayed at home with him instead of working in the shop with her husband. From the day she left the shop Avraham failed to prosper. New businesses were opened in the town and the customers stopped coming to their shop.