Four Mothers

by Shifra Horn

  “I’ll thank you never to come here again,” she replied, pushing the basket he tried to give her away and closing the door in his face.

  The next day she found the iron door wide open, with Pnina-Mazal standing in the doorway, Ben-Ami clasped in her arms, and hot tears streaming down her emaciated cheeks.

  “They were here,” she said between her sobs. “One of the neighbors must have betrayed David to them. The military police came. They found him, tied up his hands as if he were a dangerous criminal, and took him with them to the Kishleh jail.”

  Without wasting any time Sara hurried to the police station, a gold napoleon hidden under her dress.

  The eyes of the station commander widened when he saw the beautiful woman standing before him. In a magnanimous gesture he refused to touch the gold coin glittering on her palm.

  “Yes, you can see your son-in-law and even bring him food, but he will be sent from here to the front with the rest of the men,” he said, and led Sara to the jailhouse.

  David was lying on a filthy, sticky mattress, his sparse beard erect and stiff with dirt.

  “How is Pnina-Mazal?” was the first question he asked.

  The next day Sara arrived with Pnina-Mazal and the little food she had managed to spare from her own mouth.

  David pressed against the iron bars, looked into his wife’s eyes, slid his eyes over her stomach, smiled at her reassuringly, and whispered something in her ear. A blush darkened Pnina-Mazal’s pale face and spread to the roots of her hair.

  “What did he say to you?” asked Sara when they left.

  “He told me that I was pregnant and that I would have a daughter,” she said, the blush returning to her face.

  Sara looked at her intently. “He’s right,” she said. “You are with child.”

  Pnina-Mazal looked at her in disbelief. “How do you know?” she asked, as if the two of them had entered into a conspiracy against her. “For six years nothing has happened. And precisely now, in wartime, and when they’re taking him to the army! And besides,” she added, “I’m not late and you’re both wrong.”

  Sara did not reply, but in her heart she began to recite girls’ names that would suit her first granddaughter.

  A week later, on a Friday afternoon, one of the neighborhood children arrived panting at her house and told her that he had seen David being led with the other prisoners to the railway station. Sara called Pnina-Mazal, who was lying in bed and staring at the ceiling, and they stopped a wagon and rushed to the railway station. There they found him standing in a straight row with dozens of other men, some of them sick and old, while a Turkish band played them off with merry tunes as if they were on their way to get married. In the deep, jarring silence that fell when the band stopped playing rose a cry of “David!” He turned round, met Pnina-Mazal’s eyes, smiled at her as if he were setting out on a holiday, and stepped onto the train.

  The lights of the Sabbath candles were already flickering in the windows as they made their way home.

  Their food ran out and the situation of their neighbors was no better. With nothing left in the house to eat, Sara and Pnina-Mazal went to the German army camp. There they joined the emaciated, wild-haired women watching with yearning eyes as the soldiers in their clean, pressed uniforms fed their horses oranges and sweet carrots. With the help of Pnina-Mazal as a translator, Sara offered to wash the soldiers’ clothes in exchange for bread and legumes. She was not the only one. The soldiers looked at the starving women, whose ribs were showing through their threadbare cotton dresses, placed some dirt-stiff worn uniforms in their outstreched hands, and snatched them away again to the sound of loud, coarse laughter.

  The uniform of one young soldier fell into Sara’s lap. He did not snatch it back, and Pnina-Mazal told him in his own language that it would be returned to him, clean and pressed, the next morning. But as they were about to leave with their booty in their hands, the eyes of the camp commandant fell on Sara’s lowered face. He beckoned her to approach him and Pnina-Mazal accompanied her mother with her arms around her.

  Sara’s eyes were transfixed by the glittering sword adorning his thick waist like a precious jewel. The officer appraised her with his pale eyes like a cattle dealer trying to guess the weight of a cow. With downcast eyes she stood before him. He took hold of her chin and raised her head roughly until her eyes were level with the splendid row of medals and ribbons decorating his broad chest. Then he lifted her head higher and forced her to look into his eyes. When eye contact had been achieved he barked something at her.

  “What did he say?” asked Sara.

  “Come, let’s go,” Pnina-Mazal replied, tugging at her arm and trying to pull her away.

  “I need the money, I’m prepared to do any work, just tell me what he wants,” her mother demanded.

  “Let’s go, it would be better to starve to death,” said Pnina-Mazal.

  “I’ll go, but only after tell me what he said.”

  “He said that you’re a beautiful woman and that he wants you to come to the camp tonight and he’ll give you a loaf of bread and a bag of sugar in exchange.”

  Sara turned pale, looked at the officer with flashing eyes, and walked away, her thin body supported by Pnina-Mazal.

  When the last lentil in the house was gone, Yitzhak lay in his bed too weak to say “food,” and Ben-Ami was too exhausted to cry, Sara strode resolutely to the camp. In the evening she returned, her body crushed and broken and in her folded arms a loaf of coarse black bread, a bag of sugar, and a few potatoes.

  * * *

  The last summer of the war was the most terrible of all. The blazing heat lay over Jerusalem like a thick blanket and a fine white dust descended from the sky and covered the town, the hills around it, the houses high and low, the surviving trees, the fences, the streets, the beards of the men, and the faces of the babies; it penetrated the necks of the women’s dresses, powdering their breasts with a deathly white dust, and made people’s teeth gritty when they opened their mouths to speak. And when they tried to strengthen their spirits with words of the Torah, the dust penetrated their throats and made their speech hoarse and halting. When they tried to quench their thirst with precious water from the wells and pumps, the stinking bilge slid down their throats and lined their stomachs with a layer of sticky mire. And whenever they breathed the blazing air into their lungs, the dust tickled the insides of their flaring nostrils and their thin bodies were convulsed by violent sneezes.

  In those days Sara and Pnina-Mazal were busy from morning to night sweeping the layers of dust settling over the house and searching for food. There was no coal to be had for cooking in all the town. First they burned the wooden doors of the cupboards in the alcoves of the rooms, then they burned the kitchen shelves, and when there wasn’t a stick of furniture left in the house they roamed the fields gathering twigs and straw. And when they came home they picked the leaves from the mulberry tree, the wild mallow and the sorrel sprouting in the vegetable beds, and made them into thick soup and rissoles.

  The food Sara brought home from the German army camp did not improve the condition of her little boy. Ben-Ami lay supine on his bed and mumbled the word “food,” like his brother Yitzhak. The smiles that had once wreathed his face disappeared, and it now resembled a twisted mask, like the face of a shriveled old woman for whom the Angel of Death lay waiting in a dark corner. Sara and Pnina-Mazal stood over him every evening, pulling faces and making funny noises, until he consented to open his dry mouth and swallow a few crumbs of millet bread soaked in soup.

  Double-chinned Yitzhak was to be found gnawing the bark of the surviving trees, licking the grass of the fields, sticking straws into ant holes, chasing the ants out of their dens, picking them up one by one, popping them into his mouth, and smacking his lips with relish. When he was finished with the ants, so the neighbors said, he would turn his attention to the sage bushes and finish his repast with a bunch of bitter leaves. If he was lucky and a grasshopper, a locust, or a beet
le fell into his hands, the noise of the insect’s armor snapping as he pulverized it between his teeth could be heard from afar. Sometimes he went to the nearby Arab village, and with cries of “Majnoon, majnoon” (madman) pursuing him, he would stand in the doorways of the mud huts, point to his mouth, and demand: “Food.”

  Sometimes he would encounter the few flocks that had remained to the villagers on his way. The moment his fair head appeared on the horizon, the little shepherds would flee, kicking up a great commotion and placing their entire flock at his disposal. Then he would scan the animals for a black nanny-goat with a baby kid by its side. And if he found one, he would run up to it, and while it bleated and stamped with its slender hooves he would lift it in the air and raise it above his head, as if it weighed nothing at all. Then he would throw back his head, clamp his mouth around its teat, and suck for all he was worth. When its udder was dry, he would drop it to the ground from his great height, where it would bleat with the pain of the blow, and limp back to its abandoned kid. The shepherds knew that the kid butting its head in vain at its mother’s empty teats and trying to extract a drop of milk from them would go hungry that day. And they said that after Yitzhak left the flock with his belly full, there would be deep, bloody holes on the necks of the exhausted goats, as if they had been pierced by a pair of blood-sucking fangs. In the evening he would go home with his stomach full of milk in which floated bits of grass, bark, ants, and grasshoppers.

  The more the flesh of his brother dwindled, the redder Yitzhak’s cheeks grew, and his fair skin was stretched as firm and taut over his bones as that of an athlete who spends his days cultivating his body. Davida too provided Yitzhak with food. On her weekly visits she would bring him a nibbled pita made of millet, or a handful of raisins that had shriveled of their own accord on the tendrils of the vines. Sometimes she brought a few figs that she had succeeded in picking laboriously from the top of the big fig tree on the outskirts of the Arab village. He would eat everything she brought, and Sara didn’t have the heart to ask her to share her bounty with little Ben-Ami, too, who lay languishing in his bed.

  When Sara looked at her children in the evenings, it seemed to her that of them all the one least affected by the famine was the pregnant Pnina-Mazal. Her budding breasts had rounded, her belly had swelled, and there was a healthy rosiness in her cheeks. Pnina-Mazal delighted in her pregnancy and counted the months that passed in sweet expectation of the birth of her baby and the return of her husband from the war.

  And death struck all the houses of the neighborhood. First to die were the toothless old people and infants, who could not chew the coarse food, and after them death sank its sharp fangs into the necks of the children and the adults, and Sara’s house was not spared either.

  “He’s dead,” Pnina-Mazal screamed at Sara when she came back exhausted from the German army camp. “I tried to feed him and he spat it out, made a rattling noise, and gave up the ghost.”

  Swaying on her feet and supported by her neighbors Sara entered the room that had been visited by death. Ben-Ami lay on his bed. His arms and legs stuck out from his body shriveled as dried figs on a string; his mouth was wide open, as if he were trying to drink in one more gulp of air; and his eyes sunk in their dark sockets were open. Sara recoiled.

  Her son’s face looked like the death mask of his grandmother Mazal. She sank sobbing to the floor, and the sound of her terrible screams went on ringing in the ears of her neighbors all night long.

  “He’s better off dead than alive,” spiteful tongues gossiped. “What kind of a life could he have with a father who isn’t there, a whore for a mother, and a crazy brother.”

  He was buried on the Mount of Olives, next to the fresh graves of the many other residents of the town whose strength had failed them, and she visited his grave every day, decorating the loose soil with the wild chrysanthemums and grasses she picked on the way. She stopped going to the German camp, and roamed the streets knocking on doors and asking for work in exchange for a slice of bread and a handful of lentils. With her tall stature and beautiful face she looked like a princess fallen on hard times, and the residents of the wealthy neighborhoods didn’t have the heart to employ her on menial domestic chores and sent her away with a few scraps of food.

  And disaster continued to plague her. On the day she saw Pnina-Mazal waiting for her on the doorstep with her belly about to burst, she knew that David too was dead. They received no official notification, but a solider who returned from the front with a leg amputated told Pnina-Mazal that her husband had not even had time to fight. As soon as they arrived in Constantinople he contracted smallpox. His whole body was covered with pustules, and he lay screaming in terror and scratching his body until it bled. They dumped him in a military hospital, and there, on a filthy, blood-soaked mattress, among the soldiers with amputated legs and arms and bandaged heads, he departed this world. They buried him in haste and at night, in a large mass grave.

  * * *

  During the seven days of mourning Pnina-Mazal beat her belly as if to hasten the birth of her son or to kill him with her fists, and the sound of her weeping kept the neighbors from their in any case restless sleep. At the end of the shiva Sara went out into the garden, and as she bent down over the barren vegetable beds tears poured from her eyes and heartbreaking moans burst from her lips.

  A faint moaning echo suddenly rose from somewhere near the house. Sara pricked up her ears and moaned again. And again there was a deep moan, as if some clown were hiding in her garden and mimicking her mockingly. Sara kept quiet and the moans increased. She ran round the house, and under the mulberry tree she saw her, a fat Arab peasant woman squatting on a filthy sack, as if she needed to void her bowels, her dress hitched up round her waist and her heavy stomach rising and falling with every groan she uttered. As soon as her eyes fell on Sara a sharp scream burst from her throat, as if she had seen a devil standing in front of her and threatening to take her life. Together with the scream, which seemed to go on forever, a strong stream of water broke out of her body, after which a baby’s head emerged between her legs. Sara ran into the house, poured hot water from the kettle into a basin, grabbed a kitchen knife, took a clean sheet from the cupboard, and hurried outside. At that very moment she heard similar groans coming from inside the house. She turned on her heel and ran in alarm to Pnina-Mazal’s room.

  Wide-eyed, Pnina-Mazal stared at her mother standing disheveled in the doorway with the kitchen knife in her hand, like some Lilith threatening to cut open her stomach and steal her fetus. She screamed as if possessed and looked wildly at her mother. Paralyzed by her daughter’s demented stare Sara stood there with the knife in her hand and saw the dam open and the warm waters come bubbling out, gathering in a pool around Pnina-Mazal and soaking her clothes. The contractions began immediately, convulsing her body and squeezing agonized groans from her throat.

  The baby slid out, thin and fragile, her head covered with stiff, bristling red hair. The moment she emerged into the world she opened her mouth in a loud, trumpeting cry, as if to announce: Here I am. Alarmed by the violent cries of the newborn baby, Sara roused herself from her paralysis and with the kitchen knife that was in her hand cut the cord of life connecting mother to daughter. Then she inserted her finger into the baby’s mouth to clear it of phlegm, and in exchange received a bite that left two bloody dents in her finger. Too excited to pay any attention she wrapped the baby in the sheet and hurried outside to see to the second delivery.

  But only a pool of water with blood on its edges remained. The mother had vanished, with her naked baby clamped to her nipple, and the afterbirth bundled into a sack and placed in the wicker basket on her head, together with the medicinal herbs she was taking to the market.

  Sara went back into the house, picked up her granddaughter, cooed at her clenched fists, and dipped her in the basin of warm water she had prepared for the vanished Arab baby. As she was washing off the oily layer that made the little body as slippery as soap, the baby
seized her hand in her mouth, and left two more slits in it. In her astonishment Sara let her drop, and she sank into the water and popped up again like a cork, her gaping mouth emitting a stream of soapy water between the two pointed teeth sticking out of her gums.

  Pnina-Mazal smiled for the first time when Sara placed her freshly bathed daughter in her arms. The infant rooted for the nipple with her nose, and began sucking delicately from her mother’s bursting breasts, as if afraid of hurting her with the teeth she had grown in the darkness of the womb.

  “This child will bring the Messiah,” Pnina-Mazal said to Sara, looking at the baby as if she refused to believe the evidence of her eyes. “Redemption is at hand,” she exulted as she looked at the crumpled little face. “We’ll call her Geula.” (Geula means “redemption” in Hebrew.)

  “They do say that a girl born with teeth will marry the Messiah,” Sara confirmed, touching the sharp teeth in the little mouth cautiously, as if afraid of receiving another bite.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Tidings of imminent redemption came on baby Geula’s very first day. Rumors of the defeat of the Turks and Germans next to Beersheba began to arrive in the town, and in the wake of the rumors the horseless carriages of the Germans were to be seen driving away with a dreadful noise, leaving clouds of dust behind them. And in the wake of the German carriages the Turkish cavalry galloped down the streets, leaving Jerusalem in a turmoil, with everyone waiting for the English Messiah to come and redeem the town from its terrible suffering. With the sound of cannon fire rattling the windows and black iron birds circling the sky like vultures seeking their prey, Pnina-Mazal was jubilant. “The English are coming!” she cried.

  Sara, who was always suspicious of her love of the English, paid no attention to her exultant cries and instead listened to the dire predictions of the neighbors, who said that Jerusalem would be smashed to smithereens, the mills destroyed, the wells poisoned, and the people of Zion cast into the darkest dungeons of the prison houses.