Four Mothers

by Shifra Horn

  She found him lying curled up on the floor of trodden earth, his bar mitzvah coat stained with dry chicken droppings, and his hair full of the feathers and dark down of fowls no longer among the living. From the moment he arrived in the home he had refused to eat, and he rejected the food his mother brought him too. He turned his face away from her and huddled up on the ground littered with scraps of food. Sara gave the food she had brought to Yitzhak’s neighbors grunting in the adjacent cages, and they scratched and fought bitterly over every scrap of food thrown to them through the wire fences.

  The next day Sara returned with Pnina-Mazal. “Ask him how he is,” she requested.

  Pnina-Mazal gripped the wire fence and stared at her brother in dismay, but Yitzhak avoided her eyes. When she found an angle at which she could look straight into his eyes, he covered them with a black-nailed hand.

  “He doesn’t want to talk to me,” she said to Sara in a whisper.

  The sweets she threw him through the fence remained untouched on the filthy floor. Yitzhak refused to look at the colored sweets rolling toward him with a merry clatter.

  “Food,” said Pnina-Mazal softly. A spark of life flashed in his eyes and immediately died down again, and he went on lying on the floor with his face buried in the ground.

  A week later Sara removed him from the home and led him outside to the sound of the grunts of the inmates, who stretched their black hands through their cages in a demand for sweets. As he stumbled down the streets with her his stench spread through the air and people recoiled from them as they made their way home. Indifferent to the stares of the neighbors shaking their heads and clapping their hands in dismay, Sara opened the door and led him into the kitchen. There she set the big kettle on the stove, boiled water, and filled the tub. The soiled garments she peeled off the body of her son, which was covered with little bite marks, she asked Pnina-Mazal to burn in the yard. Naked, helpless, and humble, the boy sat in the tub, and Sara soaped his dwindled body and scrubbed it with the loofah, peeling off solid layers of black filth and kneading his flesh until it turned red. She cut his hair, which was swarming with lice, and shaved his scalp, and when he was clean all over she soaked bay leaves in lukewarm water and laid them like little bandages on his oozing sores.

  The next morning Yitzhak woke up in his gleaming room and his white bed. “Food,” he demanded, and began to swallow the delicacies she placed before him.

  At night she locked him in his room and kept him away from his sister, but it appeared that all these preventive measures were superfluous. The bulge in his trousers disappeared and did not return even when Pnina-Mazal was standing next to him, even when she was trying to read his thoughts with her eyes fixed on his. Yitzhak no longer wanted to go outside, and when strangers came to the house he fled to his room and huddled up under the bed, holding his breath and waiting for them to leave.

  * * *

  Since Sara could not leave Yitzhak alone in the house, she hired the services of a young yeshiva student, David, to stay with him when she was busy shopping in the market or doing chores in the town. She also asked him to sleep in the house and watch over Yitzhak at night, and he agreed willingly. David, a penniless scholar, was glad of the opportunity to earn a little money, to enjoy a hot meal every day and a soft bed on which to lay his body after a long day’s study. He was thin and lanky, his clothes were shabby, and his hat was squashed.

  When he arrived at their house at the bidding of the head of the yeshiva, she thought to herself, what good will this creature do us? She took him to the kitchen and gave him a cup of tea and soft sesame cakes fresh from the oven, and he bit into them absentmindedly and looked deep into her eyes, appraising the curves of her body and measuring the weight of the breasts under her dress.

  When David entered the house Yitzhak did not run to his room to hide under the bed as usual. As soon as he heard the stranger’s voice he emerged timidly from his bedroom and came into the kitchen.

  “Food,” he said when he saw the cookies.

  Sara pushed a cookie into his hands and he swallowed it immediately, with his eyes fixed on David’s sparse beard.

  From then on Yitzhak followed David like a shadow wherever he went. Even when the young man had to relieve himself Yitzhak accompanied him and watched him closely. At night, when David spread out his bedding, Yitzhak would remain on his bed, staring at the ceiling and waiting for David to join him. When David read his books in the light of the oil lamp Yitzhak would watch with interest as he turned the pages. Pnina-Mazal swore that once she had seen him pick up a book, open it, and pretend to read.

  David would take him for short walks. At first Yitzhak clung to him fearfully, but later he calmed down and let David lead him through the vineyards and fields. They would pass the Arab villages and walk along the prickly pear hedges. There David would take the tin cup he had borrowed from Sara’s kitchen, put it over the fruit growing on the fleshy thorn-covered leaves, and pluck the fruit with a twist of his hand. With one hand wrapped in a cloth he would slit the thick, prickly skin with a knife, carefully free the sweet, pip-filled fruit, and push it into Yitzhak’s gaping mouth. After that they would pass fig trees, and there he would set a big stone under a tree, climb onto it, and feel the heavy fruit hanging before his eyes with his fingers. The hard fruit he would leave on the tree and the soft fruit he would pick with a jerk of his arm, split it open with his fingers, and examine the juicy contents closely. If he saw no worms stirring in the red flesh, he would drop it into Yitzhak’s mouth opened wide beneath him. Yitzhak’s head would gradually be covered with the white milk dripping from the wounds on the branches bereft of their first fruits. Sometimes the two would come across carob trees on their way and they would gather up the hard brown fruit from the ground, bite into it, and relish the honeyed sweetness trickling down their throats.

  There in the fields, in the shade of a carob tree, David would pore over his books and recite his lessons aloud to himself, and Yitzhak would watch the movement of his lips and move his own lips soundlessly. For these walks Sara would pack a cloth bag with fresh, warm pitas, olives, and a hunk of fine goat cheese. David would break the bread and say a blessing over it, and Yitzhak would fall on it with grunts of hunger.

  “Not like that.” David tried to teach him table manners, and he would eat his pita slowly and delicately, collecting the crumbs and distributing them to the sparrows that gathered round them. Sometimes he would seek and find a nest of busy ants, scatter the remaining crumbs around it, and show Yitzhak how each ant carried a crumb that weighed more than it did. For a long time the two of them would sit and watch until all the crumbs had disappeared into the darkness of the nest. Early in the evening, when the western sky was covered with fiery red clouds, they would walk home across the fields, their eyes shining. Yitzhak fell asleep peacefully at night, and no longer banged his head against the wall.

  On the cold winter evenings, when they could not go out into the fields, they would sit in the warm kitchen, steeped in cooking aromas and the faint smell of kerosene. David would pore over his books, with the two children snuggling up to him, Yitzhak imitating the movement of his lips and Pnina-Mazal sitting on his knee and following his finger as it slid over the words in the book, comparing the sound to the letters on the page. She enjoyed the new game so much that she abandoned her playmates and neglected her household chores.

  One day Sara found her absorbed in a thick book, studiously twisting a curl round her finger and soundlessly forming the words with her lips.

  “What are you doing?” she asked her.

  “Reading,” replied Pnina-Mazal shortly.

  “Who taught you?” Sara asked with a smile.

  “I taught myself,” the little girl replied without raising her eyes from the book.

  “Read it aloud,” requested Sara.

  And Pnina-Mazal read aloud from the Talmud in her hands, explaining the Aramaic words to her mother.

  Sara remembered her own childhood. How sh
e would press herself against the window of the heder and learn the Pentateuch with the infants and the Mishnah and Gemara with the older boys. She had to find books for her daughter, she thought, and began to make inquiries as to where to obtain them. Rumors reached her ears about the lending library at the Ashkenazi orphanage. In exchange for a small deposit it was permitted to borrow one book a day. She took Pnina-Mazal there, and the child stood before the shelves beside herself with excitement, pulling down one book after the other and paging through them avidly. There were books in Hebrew, English, and German—Little Red Riding Hood, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Memoirs of the House of David, The History of the Jews in America, The Love of Zion, and a lot of books about physics and mathematics. Pnina-Mazal stood there overcome with confusion, not knowing what to choose.

  “Why don’t you begin with the bottom shelf and take a new book from it every day. When you finish reading the books on the bottom shelf, you can go up to the next shelf, and so on,” suggested Sara at the sight of her daughter’s confusion.

  Pnina-Mazal did as her mother advised. When she came to the end of the first shelf, she realized that if she read during meals and when she was supposed to be sleeping, she would be able to read two books a day. Since it was only permitted to take out one book a day, she asked her mother to take one out under her name too. When Sara was unable to accompany her, she went to the library with David—and Yitzhak dogging his heels—and took out three books at a time. Her nights grew short. She ate her meals without paying attention to her food and never went out to play with her friends. When Sara saw how thin and pale she was and how red her eyes were, she forbade her to read more than two books a week. Little by little the color returned to her cheeks and she began to go out to play with her friends again.

  One day David looked at Pnina-Mazal devouring a new book. He looked at Sara too, as she busied herself about the kitchen, cleared his throat, and said, “I think you should send her to school; the child has the makings of a great scholar.”

  “What good will it do her?” Sara replied with a question. “The main thing is for her to find a good husband and bear him children. I too went to school, and look where it got me.”

  “Times are changing,” pronounced David.

  Chapter Nine

  Sara pondered his words in her heart, and when she was finished with her housework, she went out to look for a suitable school for her daughter. Her inquiries led her to the Baroness Sarita Cassuto School for Girls. Many girls attended this establishment. Ashkenazic and Sephardic, Persian and Bukharan, girls from the diasporas of Salonika and Turkey, Yemenites and Georgians, all of them with their hair in braids of different colors and all of them wearing blue skirts and white blouses. And most important of all, all the subjects were taught in English, but time was also allocated for the study of the Hebrew language and for prayers. The school was situated outside the walls of the Old City and surrounded by a spacious garden. Pink-cheeked girls were busy planting radishes and harvesting onions, and an old maid by the name of Miss Lizzie Farkash from distant London directed the school with a high hand and a strong arm.

  Sara took Pnina-Mazal, scrubbed and excited, her hair plaited in two braids and tied with red ribbons, to meet Miss Farkash.

  “Do you know how to count?” the headmistress asked Pnina-Mazal in her office, giving her a stern, penetrating look through her glasses.

  “I do.”

  “And do you know how to read?”

  “I do,” Pnina-Mazal replied in a soft, barely audible voice.

  Miss Farkash opened a thick, illustrated book and placed it before the little girl, who read in a voice trembling with excitement.

  “And do you know English?”

  “I do,” she replied.

  Miss Farkash began to talk to her, at first in simple, easy words, about the weather, the neighborhood she lived in, what she did in her spare time, and then in more difficult, complicated language. Her strict, serious expression softened as the conversation proceeded. Pnina-Mazal, her confidence growing, began to list the languages she spoke. Miss Farkash’s eyes rounded in astonishment and she called Miss Laniado to test the child in Spanish, Miss Mansoor to test her in Arabic, and Madame Motzkin to test her in French. Since there were no speakers of German, Russian, or Greek available she was obliged to take Pnina-Mazal’s word for it that she spoke these languages too.

  “We have a problem,” said Miss Farkash to Sara. “The child knows more than girls of her own age, and she will have to study in a class with much older girls.”

  The next morning, accompanied by Miss Farkash, scrubbed and festive, Pnina-Mazal joined the class of the older girls. They looked at her curiously, struggling to suppress their laughter. In the morning assembly Pnina-Mazal was swallowed up in the mass of thick-thighed and heavy-breasted girls, like a skinny child who had landed by mistake among buxom brides preparing for their wedding. Her classmates decided to take her to their collective bosom, included her in their conversations about periods and matchmaking, and invited her to the engagement parties at their houses. Pnina-Mazal, in her childish dress and thin braids, became one of them, and as a sign of her gratitude she helped them with their homework and taught them to chat in English and French.

  She shared a bench with Shulamith Abulaffia, who had black braids circling her head, laughing brown almond-shaped eyes, and dimples in her cheeks. Shulamith was famed for her beauty, and every morning she was followed to school by the boys of the town, who feasted their eyes on her curves and tried in vain to catch her eye.

  One of her suitors, Yonatan Ben-Ari, whose learned father was the editor of the Hebrew newspaper Halevona, was the most persistent of them all. Every morning, her girlfriends would surround her, avidly drinking in her beauty, and Shulamith would tell them of her adventures with Yonatan. One day he paid court to her with a flower, one day he lay in wait for her with a handful of sugar-coated almonds, once he pressed upon her a novel about King David’s love for Batsheva, and when these gifts were favorably received he timidly handed her poems and reflections he had written himself, describing his love for her. His father with his modern views refused to send matchmakers to the home of the girl, who had been promised by her father to her cousin who lived in Turkey. Yonatan suffered the pangs of his love and Shulamith accepted the charming lad’s gifts, and tossed and turned in her bed at night.

  Pnina-Mazal listened to the stories and examined her face in the bathroom mirror. The thin, transparent face of a little girl looked back at her. Her tilted nose was covered with pale freckles, and her pale brown eyes were flecked with little spots of light. She was not beautiful like her mother, and what boy would want a woman like her? So she thought, and buried her nose in her books.

  * * *

  One day she came home unexpectedly at noon. Sara was busy cooking for Yitzhak in the kitchen and the odors rising from the pots were making him jiggle his legs impatiently.

  “Miss Farkash said I can’t come to school for a week,” Pnina-Mazal said.

  “What did you do?” Sara asked, clasping the weeping girl to her bosom.

  “She asked me to tell you to come to the school tomorrow to talk to her.”

  The next morning Sara hurried anxiously to present herself in Miss Farkash’s wood-paneled office.

  “Your daughter is a clever girl who outshines even the girls in the senior class,” Miss Farkash opened immediately, without the customary civilities. “But there is a problem. She refuses to take part in the sewing and cooking classes on the grounds that we are wasting her time, and that she could put those hours to better use in pursuing her studies of languages and geography. She simply refuses to attend those classes; she spends her time in the library instead, and worst of all, her classmates have decided to follow her lead and they too have begun to boycott the sewing and cookery classes. Such a thing has never been heard of in this school before. I told her in so many words to go back to her classes, and she refused. She even had the impudence to remark that in the bo
ys’ schools there are no lessons in sewing and cooking and that we should learn from them.” Upon concluding her speech Miss Farkash gathered up the train of her long dress and made a dignified exit from the room. Outside the door two little girls were waiting, quarreling as to which of them should have the honor of carrying her train.

  “I’m not going back to school,” repeated Pnina-Mazal. “I won’t learn sewing and cooking. I’ll learn what I want to learn,” she said resolutely to her mother, who stood before her in silence.

  From that day forth Pnina-Mazal no longer went to school. A deputation of students headed by Shulamith came to the house. After tasting Sara’s refreshments, they tried to persuade Pnina-Mazal to return to school. “Without you school is boring and tedious. Sit with us in the cookery classes and pretend to be learning, and in the sewing classes you can prick your finger with the needle, stain the cloth, and be excused from the lesson,” they advised her.

  But Pnina-Mazal stood her ground and refused to listen to their advice.

  At that moment David and Yitzhak came into the kitchen. The girls stared at Yitzhak. “This is my brother Yitzhak, and this is his teacher David,” said Pnina-Mazal weakly, praying that David would notice her discomfort and take Yitzhak away.

  “You never told us you had such a big, handsome brother,” the skinny Davida whispered in her ear, lustfully examining Yitzhak’s fair hair and trying to penetrate his blue eyes.

  Sara came into the kitchen and quickly whispered something to David, who left the room with Yitzhak trailing behind him.

  “The fewer people who know about Yitzhak’s condition the better,” she said to Pnina-Mazal when the two of them were alone. “When you grow up he’ll frighten off your suitors, and we have to be careful of him,” she added.