by Shifra Horn
* * *
“We’re going home, to my father,” Avraham announced one day. “Over there, in the big city, we’ll find a cure for the child.” For a week they packed their belongings, sold the house and the shop, and prepared themselves for the journey. Early in the morning, under cover of darkness, and far from the prying eyes of their neighbors, they set out for the port.
The journey over sea and land lasted many days. Sara thought it would never end. Yitzhak with his amulets was a favorite of the sailors on the ship and the stevedores at the ports. They would throw him from hand to hand like a ball, play with his amulets, knead his flesh, and comb his hair. Sara, laid low by the swaying of the waves, watched the sailors amusing themselves with her grunting son, and believed with all her heart that in the foreign city the miracle would take place and her son would become the King Messiah.
During the journey her bleeding stopped, and she was sure that it was because of her excitement about meeting her husband’s parents. To this same excitement she attributed her lack of appetite, since in any case she had never liked the herrings and potatoes that were the staple diet on the ship. When the nausea and vomiting began, she told her husband that they were due to the motion of the waves and the storms at sea.
The gleaming white Salonika, city of her husband’s birth, they saw from the deck of the ship. Carrying their bundles they descended the swaying ramp to the dock, searching for Avraham’s family. The docks were deserted.
“Perhaps they never received my telegram,” Avraham said in disappointment.
When they entered the strange streets Sara found herself in the heart of a bustling city, surrounded by carriages, horses, and tall buildings. Worn out by the journey, dragging Yitzhak, stunned by the noise of the crowds and the traffic behind them, they set out for Avraham’s parents’ home. The house that greeted her eyes was large and spacious, surrounded by a garden of fruit trees. All the windows were draped with white crocheted curtains, and smoke rose from the broad chimney on the red roof, together with subtle smells of cooking.
“Don’t worry,” Avraham said to his pale wife, “my parents will love you for your beauty too,” and he knocked softly on the big wooden door. An elderly maid in a starched apron opened the door and fell upon Avraham’s neck with loud shouts of joy. When she saw Sara and the child clasped in her arms, she recoiled and hurried off to summon her masters. A thin woman with her hair rolled into a silken snood dangling down her back, and several rows of little pearls around her neck, came hurrying to greet them. She pecked Avraham lightly on the cheek, and the huge bunch of keys attached to the broad leather belt round her waist made a loud rattling noise. When her eyes fell on Sara they rounded in surprise at the sight of the beautiful woman clasping the fat child to her breast.
“This is my mother, Pnina,” Avraham said, introducing his mother to his wife.
Suddenly a heartbreaking cry rose from inside the house: “Mazal!”
A stooped, gray-haired old man burst out of the door and gathered his daughter-in-law into his arms without noticing his son standing by her side as if nailed to the spot.
“This is my wife, Sara,” Avraham tried to explain to his father, who was clinging to Sara like a drowning man, feasting his eyes on her beauty and seeking her lips with his.
The father let go at once, his eyes rolling in their sockets.
“Who are you and what is your name, my daughter?” he asked as if he didn’t believe the words of his son.
“I’m Sara, your daughter-in-law, and this is my son Yitzhak,” she said faintly, trembling all over.
“And where is the half medallion I gave you?” The father turned to Avraham.
Avraham took hold of Yitzhak’s lapel and groped for the coin among all the amulets and bits of glass sewn to his coat. “Here it is, whole again, sewn to your grandson’s coat,” he replied in a weak voice, holding the coin between his fingers.
At that moment the father’s eyes bulged out of their sockets; he turned red and his face contorted. White foam dripped from his mouth, and the words that came out of it were as slurred and broken as the words of a baby trying to speak for the first time in its life. Only when his father fell fainting on the doorstep did Avraham overcome his paralysis and burst into the house, shouting for help.
The joy of the meeting turned into grieving. Dr. Ben-Maior, the Jewish doctor summoned to the house, examined the paralyzed patient with all kinds of instruments and then took Avraham into a corner, where he conferred with him at length. His face downcast, Avraham returned and announced that his father would not recover. He would be paralyzed in half his body and dependent on other people for the rest of his life.
“You should never have come without informing us in advance,” hissed Pnina, the elder Yitzhak’s wife, after they had put the paralyzed father to bed. “All you’ve brought me is trouble. And who’s going to work in the shop now that your father is sick?” she demanded, and looked with hard eyes at her beautiful daughter-in-law and her grandson.
The next morning Avraham went with his mother to the shop, and Sara soon found herself alone in the big house, looking after Yitzhak her son and Yitzhak her husband’s father. When she fed Yitzhak senior the dishes she cooked for him and wiped the spilled soup from his chin, the sick man did his best to avoid looking into her speckled eyes. And when he could not resist the temptation, he asked her in his slurred speech questions she could not understand. When her belly swelled, he would stretch out his good hand covered with dark liver spots and stroke it lingeringly. Sara did not scold him. Sometimes, when he had a nightmare, she would hurry to his room as he called out “Mazal!”
“Mazal,” he addressed her when he woke bathed in sweat from such a dream.
“I’m Sara,” she said gently.
“Mazal,” he repeated like a stubborn child.
Chapter Seven
From the day he arrived at his father’s house Avraham stopped visiting Sara’s bed. Even when she was aroused and tried to stroke his face and whisper words of love in his ear, he pushed her away with both hands, as if she were polluted and it was forbidden to touch her. At night she would creep into his bed, reach for his groin, and grope in the darkness. His member, which in normal times would leap up and shoot out to meet her, was now limp and still, a useless appendage of flabby, excess flesh. He would push her massaging hands away, and she would retire to her own bed, her body burning with desire. On those nights she would secretly rub herself under the blanket until her body convulsed and she relaxed.
There was no one so beautiful as Sara in her pregnancy. The rumor of her beauty spread through Salonika, and people came to the house to peep through the slits in the blinds, to feast their eyes on her abundant yellow hair and try to catch her honey-colored eye. Even when her body thickened and swelled, she was more beautiful than all the girls of the town. Her mother-in-law Pnina hated her for her beauty and for the excitement that seized her husband whenever Sara came near him. Not only did she make her take care of her crippled husband, she also ordered her to work with the maid. Thus Sara found herself drawing water from the kitchen pump, cleaning the floors, cooking the family’s meals, and washing their clothes in the tub. Even when her stomach swelled and dragged her body down, her mother-in-law kept her busy from morning to night. And little Yitzhak roamed the rooms of the house, banged his head on the walls, and soiled the floors his mother had just cleaned with the excrement trickling down his legs.
One day Dr. Ben-Maior, who paid frequent visits to Yitzhak senior and prescribed medicines for him, looked at the child.
“What ails him?” he asked Avraham.
“He’s been like this since the day he was born,” Avraham replied. “He doesn’t understand, he doesn’t talk, he doesn’t smile.”
The doctor seized the child with both hands and held the little body in a firm grip. Yitzhak averted his eyes from the doctor’s penetrating gaze.
“This boy of yours will grow up like a wild animal,” he said stern
ly to Avraham after examining the child. “He’ll never communicate with you. All his life he’ll be absorbed in a world of his own. He won’t be able to talk or to understand what’s said to him.” Then he prescribed a drug to make him sleep quietly at night without disturbing them by his head-banging.
As soon as Sara heard the news about her son Yitzhak, she was seized by severe pains. Although the fetus in her womb was not yet ready, she found herself in a pool of warm, clear water, which ran down her legs, wet her dress, and stained the carpet where she stood.
“You must take her to the hospital at once,” Pnina said. “The baby isn’t ready.”
They had to take her to the hospital almost by force. “All the modern women give birth here,” her husband told her. “They’ll know how to take care of you here,” he added and went to the shop to help his mother.
Sara lay on the white iron bed, wrapped in starched sheets and surrounded by doctors in white coats whose language she didn’t understand. When the pain grew more severe and she felt a pressure in her loins, she didn’t know how to tell them what was happening. And the doctors made their rounds of the women writhing and screaming in a foreign language, armed with wooden ear trumpets through which they listened to the sounds made by the babies imprisoned in their mountainous bellies.
After a few hours they laid Sara on a narrow bed, put her legs in stirrups, and pressed her stomach. The baby slid out, weak and tiny. When the doctor separated her from her body Sara noticed her blue color and miniature fists. She waited for the baby’s cry, and instead she heard a wheeze like an old man struggling for breath.
* * *
The next morning Avraham came to visit her. “The doctors said that the baby will probably die tonight, and if not tonight, then in a few days’ time,” he said, looking at the floor.
Through the veil of her tears Sara saw that her husband didn’t look sorrowful or grieving.
“It’s better this way,” he said impatiently when he noticed her tears. “Imagine if you had to look after another cripple, in addition to the two you’ve already got at home,” he added and walked out of the room.
A few days later she came home, with a baby the size of two fists joined together nestled in the cleavage between her bursting breasts, bundled inside her dress. Pnina looked scornfully at the tiny head poking out of the top of Sara’s dress and whispered, “She won’t last the night. Put her in the attic and don’t go to her even if she cries. It’s better this way. Otherwise we’ll have another defective child on our hands.”
Sara sought Avraham’s eyes, but they remained directed at the floor as if searching for a lost coin. She looked at her mother-in-law, who pointed to the attic. Slowly Sara climbed the wooden stairs in the direction shown by the index finger, which went on pointing firmly at the sky, and in the silence that had fallen on the house the creaking of her footsteps on the stairs echoed in her ears like thunder. With every step she took she felt the fluttering of the unripe baby on her breasts, like a weak little fish drawn up from the depths. She looked sorrowfully at the perfect little face and stroked the bald head in farewell. At that moment it seemed to her that she saw a shadow of a smile flitting over her baby’s face.
She ran down the stairs and declared: “I won’t let her die. My baby will live.”
Pnina and Avraham tried to bar her way, but she hurried to the kitchen, where Victoria the cook, as if she had been expecting her, bustled up and removed the whimpering bundle from between her breasts. She laid it on the chipped wooden table and looked compassionately at the face crumpled in soundless weeping in front of her.
Victoria lit the little oil burner used for the slow heating of the Sabbath cholent. A faint smell of kerosene spread through the kitchen. She lowered the flame to the minimum, took a big tin of olive oil, emptied it, made a hole in the side, washed out the dregs of the olive oil, and padded it with cotton wool. Then she took the baby and laid her carefully in the tin, wrapping her snugly in a new woolen cloth. The tin with the baby inside it she placed on the burner over the little flame. When she was finished she turned to Sara and asked her to expose her breasts. Sara’s milk-swollen breasts, freed from the constraint of her dress, began to secrete white drops, which collected on the kitchen floor. With light milking movements Victoria squeezed a little milk from the swollen breast into a glass cup. She held the cup up to the light as if to inspect its color, stuck her finger into the liquid, stirred it round, and then put it in her mouth. With a satisfied smack of her lips she dipped a little piece of cotton wool into the white liquid and pushed it into the baby’s tiny mouth. The baby latched onto the cotton wool and with greedy gums and lips began to suck the milk.
That night Sara moved her bedding into the kitchen. Smells of kerosene, fried onions, crushed garlic, and milk mixed with the sweet scents of a new baby filled the air. During all the days and nights that the baby cooked on the little flame she did not leave her side. She checked the heat of the tin lest the baby be roasted, God forbid, and turned up the flame in the cold nights. Whenever the baby whimpered she pushed a piece of cotton wool dipped in milk into her mouth, and cleaned her red, crumpled skin with a soft cotton cloth soaked in olive oil. All that month Avraham did not come down to the kitchen, and Pnina too kept away and gave the cook her instructions in the sitting room. All that month no cholent graced the family table on the Sabbath day, and during all that time they refrained from mentioning Sara and the flawed, unripe baby to which she had given birth. So the days passed, until Sara emerged from the kitchen with a rosy-faced, plump-cheeked baby clasped to her breast.
At the sight of the tiny baby the mother-in-law’s face softened. She fussed round her daughter-in-law and danced attendance on her, urging her to go to bed and forbidding her to do even the easiest housework. The vacant eyes of the paralyzed Yitzhak widened at the sight of the baby. With his good hand he tried to stroke her bald head, and he made obscure sounds of joy. And Sara was happy and contented, embracing the baby, who never budged from her breast. Even when the baby was finished feeding and her mother tried to detach her, she refused to let go of the nipple, as if she were afraid that she would not find her food when she grew hungry again. At night too, when Sara fell asleep, the baby went on sucking at her nipple, and even when she needed to relieve herself she was unable to detach the mite from her breast.
The firm grip of the toothless mouth on the mother’s breast did not relax even to burp after feeding. As soon as she had drunk her fill she would fall asleep, with the nipple clamped between her naked gums. Since all her needs were met, and the supply of milk was plentiful, and her mouth was gagged by the nipple, the baby never cried, and she was quiet, placid, and good-natured. The doctors whom Sara consulted tried to squeeze the baby’s cheeks, to pinch her legs, and to shake her head, but to no avail. The baby’s mouth gripped her mother’s breast as tightly as a drowning man hanging on for dear life to his rescuer.
When she grew bigger she weighed heavily on Sara’s breast, pulling it down until the pink nipple between her gums grew as long as a cow’s teat. In order to make things easier for Sara and her baby, Pnina sewed her a kind of pouch, tied it round her body, and slung the baby’s bottom in it; the little legs, which had already put on flesh stuck out on either side of the mother’s body.
When the baby was three months old they realized that they had forgotten to give her a name. The name Mazal, Sara’s late mother’s name, Pnina forbade to be spoken in the house. “It’s bad luck for a baby to be called after a dead person,” she argued. In order to please his mother, Avraham decided to call the child Pnina. But Sara, in her heart, called her Mazal.
One day, when Sara was wondering how long the baby would remain stuck to her body, she felt a sharp pain, like the stab of a dagger. With a scream of pain she shook the baby off her body and dislodged her from her breast. The constant stream of milk trickling into the baby’s mouth was suddenly cut off, and the soothing sound of her mother’s heart stopped beating in her ears. The baby open
ed her mouth wide, displaying a small, sharp tooth, and for the first time in her life she began to cry. Everyone laughed at the sound of her crying, which was as soft and gentle as the bleating of a lost lamb.
* * *
At night Sara fell asleep, with a feeling of relief, on her stomach. The baby lay in a cradle next to her bed, trying out her voice in the new sounds she was learning to produce. Ever since the nipple had been dislodged from her mouth, leaving it wide open, she was in no hurry to close it. By the time she turned one she was already wearing out the members of the household with her never-ending chatter in the language of her parents, of her grandparents, and of Victoria in the kitchen. She soon learned to compose sentences, and was able to explain herself and make her wishes known in three languages.
In the evening, when the family gathered for dinner, little Pnina-Mazal would sit between Yitzhak senior, whose head lay slumped on his chest, and Yitzhak junior, encased in his amulets, and speak for them.
“Big Yitzhak wants you to wipe his chin,” she would say to Sara. And when Sara looked at him she saw that his chin was indeed festooned with the remains of the meal.
“Little Yitzhak wants more soup,” she would say to Pnina. And when Pnina gave him another plate of soup he would quickly polish it off.
“Little Yitzhak says he’s cold and he wants you to light the stove,” she would report.
As soon as Sara became aware of her daughter’s gifts, she began to use her as an intermediary between herself and her son. “Ask little Yitzhak if he needs to go to the lavatory,” she would say to her daughter, and indeed, the little girl knew exactly when her brother had to go. Soon he no longer needed diapers, and most of the time he was dry. From the moment he found himself a mouth, little Yitzhak stuck to Pnina-Mazal, following her around, sitting next to her, looking deep into her eyes, reading her lips, and expressing his wishes without the need for words.
