Four Mothers

by Shifra Horn

  After a long time David emerged from the room, and with an expression on his face that she had never seen before said accusingly, “You can’t punish the child for your sins.”

  Sara’s face turned white and she swallowed her saliva. “The impudence, I’ll teach her a lesson. And you, who set you up in judgment?” she said, looking at him scornfully through narrowed eyes. “Don’t you dare interfere in my affairs again, or you’ll find yourself outside the door.”

  David went red and tried to efface himself. Pnina-Mazal, who heard them through her sobs, emerged red-eyed from her room and announced defiantly: “I’m going to Mrs. Godwin.” She walked out of the house and slammed the door behind her.

  * * *

  That night Sara woke from a light sleep to the sound of loud banging on the door. She knew that she would be the talk of the neighborhood if she let Edward go on standing there, beating on the door with his fists and waking everyone up, and so she reluctantly opened the door. He confronted her, angry and determined.

  “You can’t forbid her to come to us,” he said. “She and Elizabeth are friends, she’s a good student, why are you punishing her?” And without waiting for a reply he gathered her up in his warm arms and clasped her to his chest in a desperate embrace, seeking her grimly pursed lips with his.

  Sara extricated herself from his embrace and escaped into the house, leaving the door open. He walked straight into her bedroom as if he owned the place, and closed the door gently behind him. In the light of the oil lamp Edward examined her face earnestly, and began delicately brushing her brow, her eyelids, and her cheeks with his lips. When his tongue probed her ear he felt her body trembling and pressed his mouth to her eagerly parted lips. Her knees gave way beneath her and he seated her on the bed and slowly undressed her, kissing her bare body as he did so. When his lips reached her breasts he clamped his mouth around her nipple and sucked like a hungry baby, and when he entered her she clenched her teeth and suppressed the groan threatening to burst from her depths and wake the household.

  Before he left he asked if he could see the little boy. Gently he removed the blanket and lightly touched his cheeks. Ben-Ami woke up and sent a dazzling smile in the direction of the strange face he was seeing for the first time. Edward stepped back.

  “Mine,” he murmured as if to himself and turned toward the door.

  “Only mine,” she responded and pushed him lightly out of her house. Then she quickly shut the door behind him, as if afraid he might change his mind and demand to come back in. Breathlessly she pressed her back against the door and found herself looking straight into David’s eyes. “I’m leaving tomorrow,” he said shortly, turned his back to her, and returned to Yitzhak’s room.

  The next morning he packed his few belongings and vanished from her house.

  * * *

  The day David left Yitzhak began banging his head on the wall again. His trousers wet and sour with urine, he roamed the house like a sleepwalker, looking for David and grunting obscurely. Pnina-Mazal, in defiance of the whole world, stopped talking to him and disappeared from the house for days at a time. When Sara questioned her friends, they told her that she spent her time at Rachel Godwin’s house. When Rachel was busy, Pnina-Mazal would play with Elizabeth, look at Edward’s photograph albums, and dream of distant worlds. And when Rachel invited her one day to join them for supper she did so without hesitation, and sat down in the big dining room at the long, dark table whose carved legs ended in the shape of a lion’s paw holding a ball.

  “What will you eat?” Rachel asked her tactfully. “Would you like me to order special food for you?”

  “I’ll eat what you eat,” she said defiantly, as if her mother and not Rachel Godwin were standing before her.

  She gobbled down the meat placed before her and finished off with a glass of milk and melt-in-the-mouth butter cookies. A feeling of ease and relief spread through her, and she exchanged glances and giggles with Elizabeth.

  While Pnina-Mazal was enjoying herself at Rachel’s house, Sara struggled with the burden of caring for Yitzhak. Every day she sent messengers to David to entreat him to return, and she even promised that she would give him a weekly salary for looking after Yitzhak. David turned her down. On the seventh day of his absence from the house, Sara went to see him at the yeshiva, dragging Yitzhak behind her. She found him, thinner and shabbier than ever, sitting with his friends studying the Gemara. Yitzhak roared with joy at the sight of him, hurried toward him with his clumsy, lumbering gait, seized him under the armpits, and tried to raise him to his feet. A shadow of a smile appeared on David’s austere face.

  “We want you to come back to us,” Sara said humbly.

  “You know my conditions for staying at your house,” he replied.

  “I’ll pay you a salary,” she offered.

  “I won’t take a penny from you,” he said. “You know my conditions.”

  Sara nodded her head reluctantly and David promised to return that evening.

  And so he did, his meager bundle in his hands, and Yitzhak fell upon his skinny, stalklike neck with its goiter as thick as a turkey’s, and refused to leave his side. Sara served him his supper and avoided his eyes. Late at night, when Edward knocked discreetly at the door, she went out and spoke to him in a whisper. Edward dropped his eyes and returned to the carriage waiting a few streets from her house.

  Chapter Ten

  One day Rachel called Pnina-Mazal as she was playing with Elizabeth and said to her, “As you know, Elizabeth is very sick, and I have to take her back home to America. Perhaps we will find a doctor there to operate on her legs and alleviate the pains from which she suffers.”

  Pnina-Mazal stammered, forgetting her fluent English, “And I won’t see you anymore?”

  “Edward is staying here, and you’re invited to visit whenever you like. He has promised to read with you so your English won’t grow rusty,” Rachel said, trying to evade the question.

  Only shame prevented Pnina-Mazal from bursting into tears and throwing herself at Mrs. Godwin’s feet, hugging her knees and imploring her not to go away and leave her alone.

  “I’m coming with you,” she said finally, after much hesitation.

  “I would be very glad if you could,” replied Rachel. “You would be a great help with Elizabeth. When she’s with you she forgets all her pains. But you have to think of your mother.”

  That evening Pnina-Mazal was particularly nice to her mother, cleared the table and washed the dishes without being asked, played with Ben-Ami and made him laugh out loud, and conversed at length with Yitzhak with her eyes.

  “What do you want this time, what new language have you discovered that you want to learn?” asked Sara in an appeased tone of voice.

  “I don’t want to learn another language.”

  “In that case, what would you like me to do for you?”

  “I want to go away with Mrs. Godwin and Elizabeth,” Pnina-Mazal said firmly.

  “Where are they going, if I may ask?” asked Sara, numb with dread.

  “Elizabeth is very ill and she needs an operation, and they’re going to look for a good doctor.”

  “And where is this doctor?” Sara asked, rehearsing her refusal in her mind.

  “In America,” the girl replied.

  Sara didn’t even bother to answer her.

  “Mother, I’m going with them. They’ll come back after the treatment. I have to go,” she said with the tears welling up in her throat.

  Sara maintained her silence.

  “I’ll go even without your permission.” Pnina-Mazal mustered her courage and confronted her mother’s frozen face. “And you had better agree, because if I leave without your blessing I won’t come back,” she declared, and shut herself up in her room.

  Numb and rigid with pain Sara began making preparations for her daughter’s journey. She sewed new dresses for her, bought her a large traveling bag made of yellow camel hide, and showered her with advice, warnings, prohibitions,
and oaths.

  On the day of the departure the grand carriage arrived, and the driver opened the door for the excited girl and her mother, who could not hold back her tears. The views on the way to the railway station blurred before Sara’s eyes. At the station she felt detached from the shouts, the crowds, and the people milling around her. Porters quickly surrounded them, took their bags, ran along the platform, burst into the open door of the coach, and sat down on the seats upholstered in green velvet to keep their places for them. Sara got in after them and smoothed the seats reserved for herself and her daughter with her tear-soaked handkerchief, as if to wipe out all traces of the backsides that had sat there before them and efface the sight of the ragged, mean-faced porters who had preceded them. Rachel and Edward, who sat opposite them in the coach, avoided her eyes. The hooting of the locomotive, the smell of the burning coal, and the pungent scent of the sage growing along the tracks penetrated the open window of the slowly moving train, made her skin bristle with a sense of foreboding, and reminded her of forgotten sights from her previous journey.

  A few hours later she set foot on the platform in Jaffa, faltering and breathing in the sweat of the porters and the steamy air that enveloped her and covered her skin in little beads of perspiration.

  Leaning on Pnina-Mazal’s slender body, Sara was taken by an unfamiliar route to the Jaffa port, to the foot of the great ship with the name Margaretta emblazoned in black letters on its side. There on the quay Rachel turned to her for the first time and promised her that she would watch over Pnina-Mazal and look after her as if she were her own daughter. This promise brought a fresh wave of tears to Sara’s eyes and she wordlessly embraced her daughter. Pnina-Mazal, the freckles on her nose pale with excitement, kissed Sara and promised to write to her every day and to obey Rachel.

  Chattering and laughing, the little girls settled down on the deck, and Sara examined the lifeboats through the veil of her tears. Suddenly she felt the rocking of the waves on her flesh, seeing and not seeing Edward as he embraced his daughter and kissed his wife lightly on the cheek.

  “Promise me you’ll look after each other,” Rachel said to her husband as they turned toward the ramp.

  “Gladly,” Edward replied, and waved good-bye.

  Supported by his strong arm, her legs failing, Sara left the port area.

  “Hotel, you want a hotel?” demanded an Arab urchin whose feet had grown thick black soles as a result of years of running about barefoot.

  “I know a hotel,” said Sara, and she showed Edward the way.

  * * *

  When she entered the stinking little room she felt as if it were only yesterday that she had lodged there with her children. Pale with the seasickness that had suddenly overcome her, she sat down on the bed, and the sordid room spun round her like a merry-go-round.

  Blind to his miserable surroundings Edward began taking off his clothes impatiently, throwing trousers, jacket, shirt, and socks in all directions. When he was naked he began unbuttoning Sara’s dress while she sat pale and motionless on the bed.

  “So many buttons,” he complained, “a hundred at least.”

  Sara seized his hands hurrying over her breasts and the buttons of her dress, pressed them to her body, and began slowly undoing the buttons while he watched. With every button Edward breathed a sigh of relief, until she reached the last one. Impatiently he pushed her hands away and grabbed hold of the button as if his whole life depended on the thread connecting it to the dress. Under the pressure of his demanding fingers the thread snapped and the button fell off the dress and rolled under the bed with a little clatter, like a hard pea falling on the kitchen floor.

  Sara hurried after it, pushing her head under the bed and exposing her gleaming white buttocks. Before she could get up Edward seized her from behind and threw her onto the soiled sheets of the bed.

  Much later, when she was lying by his side with her head on his shoulder, the button was still clasped in her fist, printing her pink palm with a round mark like that of a coin with two tiny holes in it.

  * * *

  From then on Sara waited in suspense every day for Pnina-Mazal’s letters and Edward’s visits. They would meet in the mornings, when everyone else was busy shopping and cooking. David was with Yitzhak, and Ben-Ami was at the heder, after which he went to Sara’s neighbor Esther, who gave him lunch in exchange for a handsome fee. Then Sara would cover her hair, raise her collar, and make her way by a circuitous route to the carriage that waited for her every day in a different place, agreed upon between them the day before. Pierced by the blank, shuttered eyes of the windows staring at her in dumb rebuke, averting her eyes from the houses bowed beneath the weight of their stone domes and tiles, which closed in on her threateningly as she hurried past, she mounted the carriage with a faltering step. Only when she was safely ensconced in the red velvet seat with her hands on the armrests did her heart stop beating wildly and begin to whisper to her reassuringly again.

  They made love in a large, spacious room, on a huge bed covered with embroidered, lace-trimmed sheets that was reflected in the polished mirror of the dark wardrobe, which boasted a carved pediment as magnificent as that of a temple. The first time she saw their naked bodies reflected in the mirror she giggled and buried her eyes shyly in Edward’s neck. Gently he raised her head and turned it toward the mirror and the sight of their bodies tenderly twined about each other like a pair of supple, loving snakes. Again she averted her eyes, and again Edward turned her head, until she grew accustomed to the sight, and she would gaze at the joined limbs twisting and twining and dissolving into each other, and delight in the “game of limbs” she invented on the brass bed opposite the mirror.

  “Who does this leg belong to?” she asked Edward and pointed to the mirror.

  “And who does this nipple belong to?” he replied, pinching it lightly and making her squeal and giggle like a little girl.

  When they finished making love, and she lay replete on the embroidered sheets with her limbs outspread, Edward would bring his camera and set it on its stand. “You’re so beautiful,” he whispered ardently, and drew aside the heavy curtains protecting the sights of the room from the world outside. “I have to photograph you. Such beauty cannot be allowed to vanish from the world.”

  Sprawled in the pool of light entering through the drawn curtains she looked languidly at the round black eye flickering opposite her, worshiping her body with its wide-open lens. Sara looked straight into it, following with interest its blinks and winks, which were accompanied by a faint clicking sound. Obediently she followed the muffled instructions shot at her through the heavy black cloth, staring impudently at the single eye that gazed without shame at her nakedness.

  “And now raise your arms above your head,” Edward instructed, and she obeyed, stretching her breasts as she did so, and her nipples instantly stiffened and rose toward the ceiling, which was decorated with paintings of fruit and flowers and plump pink angels, whose tiny pointed members seemed to stiffen in response.

  With his head thrust beneath the black cloth covering the camera, Edward clucked his tongue in satisfaction and with the tip of his finger issued his commands to the open eye. The eye looked at the beautiful woman lying before it, uttered a tiny cry of admiration, winked, and engraved the sight forever on its heart. With eager fingers the headless hand removed the plate engraved with the dazzling beauty, and planted a new one on the side of the black box, whose Cyclops eye widened in wonder, as if afraid of missing a single second of that beauty. After immortalizing the crown of creation from a new angle, he asked her to turn over on her stomach, and photographed her round, plump buttocks. Only after he had photographed her naked body from every possible angle did he allow her to get up and put on her clothes.

  Late in the evening, when the darkness waited impatiently for the plates engraved with the memory of that peerless beauty, he arranged the three basins in the kitchen and poured the water, the fixative, and the developing solution into them.
Carefully he dipped the plates into the stinking fluids and tortured them into giving up their secrets. With a pounding heart, his fingertips branded by the real and solid touch of her beauty, he sailed the plates in the water, and the smell made him pleasantly giddy. Shining white shapes appeared before his eyes. At the third basin his eyes were greeted by the sweet sights that melted the lump in his throat. The drops rolled down his cheeks and set a stamp of salt on the naked glory lying wet and shining on the kitchen table, where it was spread out to dry. Replete with carnal pleasure she flaunted her beauty at the illuminated darkness.

  When the work of developing was done he prepared the photographic paper. A pile of gleaming white eggs waited for him in the corner of the little room. Like an expert cook he broke the eggshells and separated the yolks from the whites, which he collected on a flat tray. The yolks he threw casually into a glass bowl, where they peeped at him like yellow-amber eyes. With a practiced gesture Edward gripped the thick paper and dipped it several times into the egg whites, which he had previously mixed with salt. After the paper was coated with the stuff he dipped it in a solution of silver nitrate and hung it up to dry. Soon the line was covered with dripping sheets of paper waiting impatiently to be exposed to the light.

  The next day she asked to see the pictures he had taken.

  “They didn’t come out,” he lied. “The pictures got burned and I’ll have to take new ones.” He took the new ones that same day, after saturating his body with hers, and the flashing of her eyes penetrated the polished lens and was reflected like a flickering flame in the picture, splashing in the chemical fluids of Edward’s laboratory.

  * * *

  The more time went by the more worried and anxious Sara grew. No letter had yet arrived from Pnina-Mazal, and she was not comforted by Edward’s reassurances and explanations that many days would pass before she could expect a sign of life. It was already two months since she had parted from her daughter, and Sara could not sleep at night. She tossed and turned on her bed, pining away in agonies of body and conscience. Even her stolen meetings with Edward ceased to bring her pleasure.