Four Mothers

by Shifra Horn

  When she came home in the evening she found Geula, clean and calm, playing with her grandmother.

  “How did the day pass?” she asked, holding her breath.

  “All right,” Sara answered shortly.

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing special,” her mother said, and busied herself at the kitchen sink.

  Only when she put her daughter to bed did the placated Geula tell her how her grandmother had taken her to Fatma’s house, where she played with Muhammad and drank milk.

  Pnina-Mazal returned to the kitchen with her eyes flashing. “Don’t ever do anything like that behind my back again,” she snapped at her mother.

  “I couldn’t bear to see the child suffering,” Sara replied calmly. “You would have done the same thing yourself. It’s too late now to detach her from her wet-nurse. She’s become the daughter Fatma never had. You should have thought about it before you went out to work and before you abandoned her to the mercies of strangers,” she concluded rebukingly and retired to her room.

  Pnina-Mazal ran after her. “And tomorrow? If she asks for her tomorrow will you give in to her again?”

  “You would have done the same thing yourself if you had to stay with her the whole day and listen to her heartbreaking screams,” Sara repeated firmly.

  The next day Pnina-Mazal took Geula to Fatma. Muhammad, who was playing in the yard, clapped his hands when he saw her, and she tottered toward him on her chubby legs and fell heavily into his outstretched arms. Pnina-Mazal pretended not to see what was happening in front of her eyes.

  Fatma, who came out into the yard at the sound of the voices, ran up to the little girl and knelt tenderly in front of her, and Geula immediately inserted her little hand into the neck of Fatma’s blouse and tried to pull out her left breast.

  “She will decide when she’s ready to be weaned,” Fatma whispered gently to Pnina-Mazal.

  Without a word Pnina-Mazal turned away and walked down the path to the waiting car.

  * * *

  It seemed to Sara that Davida would never give birth. Nine months passed and her belly went on swelling like rising dough. The tenth month passed, and every day Davida stroked her stomach, complained of the weight, and refused to give birth. Sara tried to coax her to go to the doctor, but she refused on the grounds that she was perfectly happy as she was.

  “The birth frightens me,” she said to Sara. “I’ve been told that the baby will tear me apart, spill my blood and hurt me all over. Let him stay where he is,” she added, stroking her kicking belly, soothing the baby inside with endearments, and putting him to sleep with lullabies. And if his little hand clenched into a fist and beat against the walls of her belly as if to make them open, she would push it back and scold the mischievous scamp.

  At night she slept on her back, with her belly, twitching and dancing in all directions, looming up in front of her. Yitzhak would try to mount the hill, which shuddered as light tremors passed through it, but was unable to push himself into her body. He would fall defeated onto his back and look anxiously at the white belly stretched as tight as a drum.

  Anxious for the fate of the fetus, Sara found herself consulting Fatma as the two toddlers hung from her breasts like weights, greedily imbibing their milk. Glad to be of help, Fatma detached the children from her breasts and sent them into the yard with a light slap on their backsides. Then she hurried to a niche hidden behind the pile of mattresses, and took out a brightly colored tin box, which she opened with a flourish. A strong smell, which tickled Sara’s nose and made her sneeze, spread through the room. In a confidential whisper, as if the room were full of invisible spies, Fatma breathed her instructions into Sara’s ear.

  In the evening Sara gave Davida a drink to “strengthen her bones and teeth,” and waited until she had drunk it to the dregs, wailing and holding her nose. The next morning her body gave off a strange smell, and even Yitzhak avoided her. All day she complained of pains at the bottom of her abdomen.

  “You’ll give birth soon,” the beaming Sara announced.

  “I won’t let him out,” screamed Davida in a panic. “I won’t let the baby tear my belly open,” she added decisively and hugged her stomach.

  The birth took place a few days later. That morning Davida stayed in bed with Yitzhak’s arms around her and refused to go to work. “You’d better send someone to tell Regina, the kindergarten teacher, that I won’t be coming today,” she said to Sara in a pampered tone.

  Sara brought them breakfast in bed and discovered that the mattress was soaking wet.

  “Your waters have broken,” she announced. “The birth has begun.”

  “And I thought Yitzhak did it,” Davida said, and burst out laughing. Sara was astonished by her jovial reaction, but put it down perhaps to the drink she had forced down her throat to change her mood. Supported by Sara, Davida went into the kitchen leaving a little trail of water behind her, and stood there in the puddle collecting round her feet.

  “I’ll send for Pnina-Mazal to come at once with her automobile to take you to the hospital. It will be safer for you to give birth there, and we’ll be better off without Yitzhak getting under our feet too,” Sara said in a tone that brooked no argument.

  Giggling as if all her fears had vanished, Davida got into the car sent by Pnina-Mazal, gave the driver a provocative look, and stuck her head out of the window so that the whole neighborhood would see her driving past.

  At the hospital she was given a white gown and led groaning with pain to a large hall, where her eyes were met by rows of mountainous bellies. Loud groans rose in the air and doctors armed with wooden ear trumpets passed from woman to woman, pressing the trumpet to the mountain in front of them and listening to the muffled sounds of the fetus.

  Sara was told to go home and come back in the evening. At home she was greeted by a questioning look from Yitzhak, who was sitting alone in the kitchen and staring into space.

  “Davida is going to bring you a son,” she heard herself saying to him. His expression did not change. Sara felt as if his eyes were boring through her body and sticking in the wall behind her.

  In the evening she returned with Pnina-Mazal to the hospital, where Davida was waiting for them with a red-faced baby in her arms. It was as wrinkled as a venerable old man.

  “Why didn’t you tell me it hurt so much?” she hissed at them with a hard, unfamiliar look in her eyes.

  Sara ignored her question and looked at the baby’s face. He was a healthy pink-skinned baby with downy fair hair covering his head and falling onto his forehead and neck. “Mazal tov, mazal tov,” she said emotionally, picking up her new grandson and rocking him in her arms. “Let’s call him Avraham, after his grandfather who disappeared. What do you think?” she asked Davida without waiting for an answer.

  Davida and Avraham came home two days later.

  * * *

  Yitzhak stared at the tiny baby they held out to him and went on chewing the slice of bread Sara had given him. In the evening, when the tumult of the day had died down, Davida went up to her husband with the baby in her arms and he looked at his wife and son with expressionless eyes. Davida shook the baby in front of him but not a muscle moved in his frozen face. She tried to put the baby on his lap but his hands resting motionless on his knees refused to open and accept the new life thrust into them. In desperation Davida held the baby to his nose. His nostrils refused to open and take in the new smell that had invaded the house. At that moment the baby whimpered. Yithzak didn’t bat an eye, as if the voice had failed to reach his ears. When the whimpering turned to loud wails Davida sat down by her husband’s side, unbuttoned her blouse, took out her breast, which had swollen to the size of a grapefruit, and pushed the nipple into the baby’s tiny mouth. He seized hold of it immediately and began to suck with loud, gratified noises, his hands waving in the air.

  Nobody knows for certain what happened there in the kitchen. Later Davida said that Yitzhak, whose eyes had been fixed on an invisible p
oint on the wall all this time, stood up, uttered a terrible, desperate cry, and tried to tear the infant from her arms. “He kept shouting ‘Food, food,’ and hitting his chest like a madman. I was afraid he was going to kill the child and I ran away.”

  Pnina-Mazal, who came running at the sound of the shouts, could not understand her brother, who was howling loudly and repeating the word “food” like a scratched record. Later on, when she sat with Sara in the kitchen and mulled over the events of the day with her, she said that she thought Yitzhak was afraid that the baby was going to eat Davida and wanted to rescue her from him.

  “But he saw you breast-feeding Geula and he didn’t react,” said Sara.

  “True, but Davida belongs to him and he doesn’t want to share her with anyone else,” argued Pnina-Mazal.

  All that night Yitzhak banged his head against the wall, hot tears streaming from his eyes and his teeth chattering feverishly. The next day three burly men arrived at the house and restrained Yitzhak in a white shirt with long sleeves that they wrapped around his body. Trapped and kicking, Yitzhak was led to the lunatic asylum that was housed in a new building outside the town, surrounded by newly planted pine forests. Later that morning, when Davida pushed her nipple into Avraham’s mouth, he seized it firmly between his pink gums and began sucking voraciously. But he quickly spat it out again with an insulted grimace and burst into tears.

  Davida joined in, and the sound of their combined weeping brought Sara hurrying to the room.

  “Your milk has dried up,” she said after lightly shaking Davida’s breast and squeezing the nipple with her fingers.

  “So will we take him to Fatma?” asked Davida, a spark of hope gleaming in her eyes.

  “Certainly, if she agrees.”

  Fatma, delighted at the prospect of a new baby to nurse, once again displayed her impressive breasts and squirted her milk across the room, this time for Davida’s benefit, and immediately accepted the job. Every morning Pnina-Mazal would get into the car carrying the baby in her arms, and Geula, sitting next to her mother, would suck her thumb and glare at him with all the fury of a deposed queen.

  That same week Sara traveled to the hospital to visit Yitzhak. She found him lying in a big room full of white iron beds containing faceless, anonymous people, sighing and mumbling and throwing their heads from side to side.

  She went up to his bed and a little spark of recognition flashed in his eyes before they resumed their customary blankness. He tried to sit up in bed, but with every attempt he was flung back on the mattress with a force that shook the iron bedstead.

  This must be some new illness, Sara thought as she examined his immobile body, only to discover that his arms and legs were fastened with thick leather straps to the edges of the bed. She burst indignantly into the doctors’ room, where she encountered a hard stare from the nurse.

  “Free my son from those restraints immediately. He isn’t an animal. He isn’t dangerous. How can you treat him so heartlessly?” she shouted at her.

  “When he was brought here he went berserk and tried to break things and to harm himself and others,” the nurse said without moving a muscle and with no change in her stiff expression. “If we free him he’ll hurt himself. When he calms down he’ll be transferred to another room where he’ll be free to move about,” she promised.

  With her back bowed Sara went back home, and all that evening she avoided looking into the eyes of her daughter-in-law, who was busy with the baby and showed no interest in her husband’s fate.

  * * *

  While she was brushing her hair in front of the mirror before she went to bed, Sara looked intently at her reflection. The tired eyes looking back at her were sunk in their sockets and framed in a network of finely etched wrinkles. Her cheeks fell slackly and she tried to pull them up with her fingers, but they immediately fell back again, as if intent on uniting with the withered flesh of her thin neck.

  She examined the hairs pulled from her scalp by the comb, laying them one by one on the table in front of her, and drew up the oil lamp to scrutinize the specimens she had collected. A little pile of long coiling hairs rose before her. She picked one hair from the pile, held it at both ends, and examined it in the lamplight. One end of the hair had preserved its original color, but the closer it came to the root the more it faded, until it finally turned snowy white. She gathered all the hair into a ball, threw it into the wastepaper basket, and took off her blouse.

  She pulled down the straps of her woolen undershirt and examined the reflection of her breasts in the mirror. They were still full after feeding three babies, and the nipples stared into their own eyes in the mirror. With a tug of her white petticoat she exposed her belly, which had rounded with the years, and stroked it with her hands, where veins had begun to twine like a vine sending its tendrils in all directions. The mirror was too short for her to examine her thighs and calves, and she promised herself that she would do so early in the morning, when her daughter and daughter-in-law were sound asleep, and she would be able to climb onto the bed and inspect the lower half of her body.

  That night when she was about to blow out the oil lamp the achingly familiar knock was heard at the door. Holding the lamp in her hand she hurried to the door, where Edward was waiting on the threshold with an ingratiating look in his eyes. In the light of the lamp she examined his hair, which had thinned and turned white, and the deep lines etched by the years on his face.

  “Get dressed and come with me,” he said, and she hurried to her room and quickly pulled on her best dress.

  The house that had been locked up all these years greeted her with familiar smells. Edward carried her to the bedroom, rocking her in his arms as if she were a baby.

  “You’re the most beautiful woman in the world,” he said to her, his eyes melting with tenderness.

  Sara giggled uneasily. “I’m already a grandmother,” she warned him.

  “The most beautiful grandmother in the world,” he retorted, and laid her gently on the bed, which sank beneath her with a familiar softness and enveloped her in a gentle, cradling motion.

  When they were satiated she lay in his arms and told him about Ben-Ami, about David, about Yitzhak and Davida, about Geula, and about Fatma. The more she spoke the more the tears rolled down her cheeks, and she sucked them in and felt their saltiness on her tongue.

  “And to think that during all that time I was in America living off the fat of the land, enjoying myself at plays and moving picture shows,” he said. “I wrote you dozens of letters and sent you telegrams, and at my post office they told me there was no chance that you would get them.”

  When he calmed down he told her about Elizabeth, who had not been cured, and who had written books about her childhood in Palestine, which had brought her fame and earned her a lot of money. He told her too about the difficulties of his divorce from Rachel, who refused to let him go even though he told her of his other love, and about his wanderings in the desert with General Allenby’s army.

  When day broke in the windows and he tired of speaking, he piled big biscuit tins on the bed and put them in her hands. Inside them she found his past: Rachel, Elizabeth, and portraits of other people, some of whom she knew. There were pictures of General Allenby and his camp; the Turks abandoning the beaten city; the General’s entry into Jerusalem and the ceremony on the citadel steps; pictures of skyscrapers and of beautiful women with cropped fair hair, wearing short dresses, which exposed their long legs, and long strings of pearls; strange animals whose likes she had never seen before; and the streets of a foreign city full of motorcars. The last bundle of photographs he dropped into her lap was wrapped in a piece of cloth. She unwrapped it carefully and a cry burst from her lips. Edward came up and put his arms around her.

  In some of the pictures she saw herself on the ship with her long hair, carrying little Pnina-Mazal and holding Yitzhak by the hand, surrounded by people who were devouring her beauty with their eyes. In another picture she appeared as a young woman
stretched out on a deck chair on the ship and soaking up the sun. Her hair shone round her like a radiant halo, leaving an aureole of colorless light around her head. In another picture she saw herself leaning against the ship’s railing and looking at the approaching coastline of Jaffa.

  When she reached a sheaf of pictures tied together with a thick string, Edward snatched them from her hands. Sara slapped his hand lightly and tried to take them back. Edward resisted her and slipped the packet under the pillow, upon which he laid his head. Sara refused to give up and tickled his ribs until he burst out laughing and raised his head. She quickly slid her hand under the pillow, groped for the packet, and pulled it out. With her back to the still-laughing Edward she untied the string and gazed incredulously at the pictures.

  She saw herself as naked as the day she was born, smiling through the hair covering her face. In another picture she was lying on her stomach with her firm buttocks sticking up, like the bare behind of a baby photographed in honor of its first birthday, on a white studio bearskin that had borne innumerable bare-assed babies before it. In another picture she was crouching on all fours, with her breasts resting on the bedcover.

  “And you told me that all the pictures were burned,” she flared up angrily. “How could you?”

  “I had to photograph you again and again. For me you’ll stay like you were then and that’s how I’ll always remember you,” he answered quietly.

  Sara compared her tired body and lined face as she had seen them reflected in the mirror in her bedroom at home to the pictures she was holding in her hand. She dropped the pictures onto the floor and held out her arms to Edward, who entered her body gently, murmuring her name.

  In the morning, when she went home with her body saturated with love, she was greeted by Pnina-Mazal’s accusing looks and Davida’s aggrieved ones.

  “And you, where were you?” her daughter-in-law demanded. “Avraham cried all night. Tomorrow’s the brith and you disappear like a ghost in the night.”