Four Mothers

by Shifra Horn

  Sara bit her lip and did not react to the accusing looks and words. She hurried to the stove, put on the kettle, and made them tea.

  “Perhaps the time has come for you to learn to make yourselves a cup of tea,” she said as if to herself, without looking at them. “I won’t be with you for the rest of your lives, and you had better begin to prepare yourselves.”

  Pnina-Mazal felt a guilty pang and made haste to embrace her mother. “I didn’t mean it, I was just worried about you,” she tried to appease her.

  “I’m responsible for myself,” Sara replied loudly, so that Davida too would hear from the next room, where she was busy with the baby. “And don’t ask me where I was,” she added in a whisper, although her shining eyes told her daughter everything.

  “How are Rachel and Elizabeth?” asked Pnina-Mazal innocently.

  “Elizabeth has written a book about her childhood in Jerusalem,” she said proudly, as if it were her own flesh and blood she was talking about. “And the book sold very well and brought her great honor and plenty of money.”

  “And Rachel, what about her?”

  “They’re divorced, and she’s decided never to return to the Land of Israel,” Sara replied, and left it at that.

  “Ask him for their address,” Pnina-Mazal requested. “I’d like to tell them our news. And besides, why don’t you try to find Father and ask him for a divorce? He abandoned you years ago and it’s time you freed yourself from him.” Without waiting for a reply she left for the wet-nurse, with Avraham in her arms and Geula tottering behind her, her red hair bristling.

  * * *

  The day after Avraham’s brith Sara woke up in the morning to the baby’s hungry crying, went out into the garden, and in the fury usually reserved for pulling out weeds she tore up the parsley beds, stamped the mint with her heels, and uprooted the turnips and the cabbages. She worked like a lunatic, and the corpses of her cherished plants piled up around her, their exposed roots shivering miserably in the morning wind.

  Pnina-Mazal ran out after her, hugged her with her thin arms, and asked her in dismay: “Have you taken leave of your senses? What are you doing?”

  “This garden does me no good,” replied Sara with her back bowed, furiously pulling up tomato bushes full of tiny green tomatoes.

  “But why are you pulling them up by the roots? Isn’t it a pity?” Pnina-Mazal tried to restrain her from wreaking further destruction.

  “I’m going to plant red roses instead.”

  “And what will we do with them? Eat them?”

  “I’ll make rose water from them,” she replied, her nostrils quivering in anticipation of the as yet nonexistent smell, which sent a frisson of pleasure from the tips of her toes to the roots of her hair.

  “And what will we do with rose water?”

  “We’ll sell it in the market.”

  “And how will you make it?”

  “Fatma promised to teach me, and I’m going there with you today.”

  “But what do you need it for? I bring home enough money for all our needs.”

  “And if you marry somebody else, what will become of me?”

  “I’ll never marry anyone else,” she promised. “I’ll always be with you.”

  “But I want you to have a family.”

  Pnina-Mazal was silent, and lowered her eyes to the tips of her shoes.

  * * *

  On the stone floor, smooth with years of polishing, Fatma waited with a festive expression, surrounded by glass jars, pipes, bottles, kettles, funnels, and big copper pots. The house smelled strongly of roses, as if all the painted whores of the town had spent the night having a party there.

  “First we’ll feed the children,” she said, and took out her watermelon breasts. Muhammad and Geula ran up to her, took possession of a nipple each, put their arms around each other, and set to work. When their bellies were full they went outside holding hands as if they had been born from one womb, tottering like drunks on their fat legs. Then Fatma took Avraham on her lap and he turned his eyes and nose to the black nipple, took it in his mouth, and the room filled with the sounds of his sucking. When he had finished and given vent to a loud belch, like a Bedouin sheik after a particularly rich meal, Fatma put him down in Muhammad’s cradle.

  “And now to the roses,” she said, and moving quickly, as if she feared that with their exposure to the air of the room their fragrance would evaporate and disappear, she removed the sheet covering a little pile of roses.

  That evening, when she went home, Sara brought a fresh scent of roses in her wake. And when everyone had gone to bed, she went to Edward’s house, with the scent preceding her as if to announce her arrival. There, on the bed, he sniffed her fingers one by one, smelled her armpits, let his nostrils stray over her breasts, thrust the tip of his nose into her navel, tasted her pudenda, roamed down her legs, parted her toes, sucked them one by one, breathed in the heavy, unfamiliar scent, and searched for its source like an explorer searching for the source of a river with many tributaries. And when he entered her he sailed between the perfumed gardens of her body, and the strong scent stiffened his member. And when she left his bed at dawn she left behind her on the sweaty sheets a heavy scent of flowers. In the morning, when he shaved his beard with a razor, the smell of roses wafted from his hands as they slid the razor over the stubble on his cheeks. For hours he labored with soap, with scouring powder, and with hot water to rid his skin of the smell, but to no avail. The scent clung to him, seeped into all the cells of his body, and refused to go away. When he went about his business in the town that day people sniffed suspiciously and turned their heads as he walked past them.

  * * *

  On her way home Sara bought red rose seedlings. She collected chicken droppings from Esther’s henhouse and strewed them over the soil, planted the seedlings in the gaping holes left by the uprooted vegetables, and watered them with water she drew from the pump. When she was finished she went to the market and bought transparent glass bottles, a large kettle, a broad-brimmed basin, flexible copper pipes, and wide-mouthed funnels, exactly as she had seen at Fatma’s house.

  When the rose bushes sprouted velvety red flowers, she recruited her daughter and daughter-in-law to pick them. Pnina-Mazal pricked her fingers on the thorns, gritted her teeth, and plucked the heads of the flowers. Davida had lost weight after giving birth; her arms were as thin as pale sticks, with sharp, protruding elbows, and her knuckles were hard and knobbly. She picked the flowers with sharp, quick movements, as if in a rage at the whole world, pricking her transparent fingers again and again, and with a pricked finger thrust into her mouth complained tearfully that she was sacrificing her blood on the altar of Sara’s roses.

  When the bushes were bare and there was no red left on them, they took the fragrant basket into the house and pulled the red petals off the heads of the flowers. When they had finished their work Sara asked them to leave her alone, put the great copper kettle she had bought in the market on the stove to boil, and stood over it with her face flushed, like a witch brewing magic potions. She completed her work in the morning, and when the girls woke from their light sleep accompanied by the crying of hungry babies, she was waiting for them in the kitchen, her face shining with sweat, an array of bottles sealed with wax and filled with scented water in front of her.

  “On that machine of yours in the office, the one that writes, write on little slips of paper in Hebrew, Arabic, and English the words ‘Sara’s Rose Water,’ and if you have the time, draw a picture of a rose in red ink on them,” she asked Pnina-Mazal.

  “You write and I’ll draw,” piped up Davida, who since giving birth had sat idle at home. “I drew red roses for the children in the kindergarten all the time; I can draw them with my eyes closed.”

  “I don’t think they’ll approve of you coming with me to work,” Pnina-Mazal said, trying to put her off.

  “Go, go,” said Sara to Davida, ignoring the note of hesitation in her daughter’s voice, “and this ev
ening, when you come home with the labels, we’ll stick them onto the bottles.”

  Unwillingly Pnina-Mazal took Davida with her to the office, where she ordered her to sit in a corner, not to talk to anyone, and to draw roses on the pieces of paper she cut out for her, after typing the required words in duplicate and triplicate with the aid of carbon paper.

  After devouring the room and the typewriter with her eyes, and accustoming her ears to the bustle and commotion, Davida settled down to her task, which she performed with small, sharp movements.

  A sudden shadow fell on the red rose she was drawing. She raised her eyes, and saw a fair-haired, blue-eyed man, wearing a spick-and-span khaki uniform with decorations and medals on his chest, smiling at her from under the visor of his cap.

  “Roses?”

  “Yes,” she answered faintly, afraid to look at him lest he notice her palpitating heart and her cheeks that were redder than the drawings of the roses. Her hands trembled as she went on drawing and the petals came out ragged and miserable, as if they had been afflicted with a mysterious disease or premature old age.

  The tall man went on asking her questions she could not understand. Blushing hotly, she silently cursed the English teachers who had failed to teach her anything. “He says you’re very beautiful and you remind him of his mother.” Nissim, the translator who worked with Pnina-Mazal, came to her aid.

  “Thank you,” Davida finally succeeded in getting out of her mouth, and she sent the man a green, liquid, sidelong look.

  * * *

  At home Sara was waiting for them impatiently with a paste she had cooked up from flour and water standing in a bowl on the floor.

  “And now let’s begin to paste,” she commanded.

  Obediently they smeared the paste on the paper and stuck the labels on the bottles, until the bottles ran out and the pile of labels illustrated with red roses diminished.

  That night, as Sara communed with her bottles in the kitchen, breathing on the glass and rubbing them with a clean cloth until they shone, straightening the labels and polishing the wax stoppers, Davida sprayed herself with rose water and stole out of the house.

  George was waiting for her on the outskirts of the neighborhood, clasping his hands in excitement. He took her to the officers’ club, and there, gliding in his arms and steeped in the smell of roses, she found that her feet danced of their own accord to the strains of the records fed without a pause to the giant-eared gramophone.

  Flushed and excited she returned home, where Pnina-Mazal was waiting for her, her eyes flashing in the darkness of the room. “The government doesn’t approve of its soldiers fraternizing with Jewesses,” she shot at her.

  “He calls me Rose,” Davida replied with misty eyes, then curled up under the blanket, imagined his big body breathing next to her, purred to herself like a satisfied cat, and fell asleep immediately.

  The next day Pnina-Mazal refused to take her with her to work. The note fixing the rendezvous with George she received secretly from Nissim.

  That week, when Davida was alone with Sara and her bottles in the kitchen, she told her that she wanted to go to the rabbi and institute divorce proceedings.

  “Help me to take the bottles to the market, and after that I’ll go with you,” Sara replied calmly, as if she had always known that it would happen, and prepared herself in her heart.

  Armed with wicker baskets full of crowded bottles knocking into each other and making tinkling noises, they made for the perfume market. The merchants turned to look at the women walking past them and leaving a long train of flowery scent behind them. Long after they had gone the men went on standing there lifting their noses like desert jackals and sniffing the fresh fragrance still lingering in the air.

  Sara felt the tension rising inside her as she bargained with the shopkeepers, lugging her bottles from one to the other until she found one who was prepared to pay her a few more pennies because of the label with the drawing of the rose adorning the bottle. On the way home, their baskets empty, they went to the rabbis, who after a short consultation promised Davida that by the end of the week she would be free to marry again.

  * * *

  With the parchment scroll of her bill of divorcement in her hand and her baby in her arms, Davida confronted Sara and Pnina-Mazal the next day and announced that she was going to marry George and sail with him to England.

  “George has been released from the army to marry me. He’s going back to England and taking me with him. In his country, he told me, they’ll call me Rose.”

  “But he isn’t Jewish,” Pnina-Mazal said, trying to dampen her enthusiasm.

  Davida looked at them with hard eyes. “He isn’t the only gentile man you know,” she said coldly.

  “You don’t know English, how will you talk to him?” ventured Sara.

  “Who said you have to talk to your husband?” she replied.

  “And the baby, what about the baby?”

  “If you like, I’ll leave him with you,” she said magnanimously.

  That same week she packed her bags, said good-bye to the neighbors, parted from Pnina-Mazal and Sara, kissed the baby on his cheek, and left the house. Months later she sent them pictures of herself arm in arm with George in the snow, her thin body draped in a black fur coat. In other pictures they saw that she had cut off her long hair, stuck strange feathers in what was left, and shortened her skirts. She inquired after their health, asked about the baby, and made no mention of Yitzhak.

  Chapter Fifteen

  One week after selling the bottles of rose water in the market Sara went apprehensively to the perfume shop to ask what had happened to them. The smell of roses that preceded her, like a herald announcing his mistress’s arrival, brought Mustafa the perfume seller running to meet her. He took both her hands in his scented ones.

  “Madam Sara,” he whispered. “They’re all sold. People who bought one bottle came back for more. It must be your beauty that penetrated the water and gave it special properties. Bring me more. They’ll buy it all. People told me that they didn’t only use it for cakes and sweets,” he continued enthusiastically. “If they bathed their faces in it, it made their skin fairer, and if they bathed their eyes, they grew clearer and were cured of inflammations.”

  Sara went home that day with new roses to plant in her own garden and the gardens of her neighbors Esther and Bracha. And the rose bushes grew prodigiously. If she picked a flower, the next day a new bud sprouted in its place, and if she cut off a branch, within a week there would be a new one, covered with buds. All the bushes were full of blooms, but also of thorns, sharp as spurs, as if they wanted to draw blood in exchange for every plucked bloom whose essence was squeezed into the rose water. Try as she might to avoid the thorns and pick the flowers without being scratched, they would spring out at her, tear her delicate skin, penetrate her flesh, and draw her blood. Some of them, particularly obdurate, buried themselves like hooks deep in her body and resisted all her attempts to pull them out. They remained inside her; new skin grew over them and they became flesh of her flesh.

  Every day, late in the morning, when the dew had dried on the flowers, the neighbors would gather in the rose gardens, where the air was steamy with heavy scents, to chat, tell stories, and gossip. They picked the most fragrant of the red blooms, scratched their hands, and licked the blood that dripped onto the silken tissue of the petals and collected in little pools. The next morning they were rewarded for their pains by bottles of fragrant rose water, which they used to lighten their complexions and to cure the pustular sores on their hands and the suppurating eyes of their children.

  The news of Sara’s miraculous rose water spread far and wide, and people besieged her with requests for a bottle of the magic panacea that could alleviate the pain of labor, cure sore throats, bring straying husbands home, calm naughty children, and heal the afflictions of body and soul. And even the famous eye doctor, Dr. Ticho, came to her and bought a bottle. Afterward they said in the town that the doctor
returned the next day and bought up her entire stock. And when a patient came to him with his eyelashes stuck together by yellow pus, the doctor would take a toothpick covered in cotton wool, dip it in the fragrant water, and open the blind eyes. Dr. Shapiro, from the new hospital, heard that gargling with Sara’s rose water cured sore throats and cleared up nasty inflammations on the spot, and he too came to buy her bottles.

  She told nobody how she made the rose water, as if revealing the secret of its preparation would rob it of its magic properties. Fatma the wet-nurse agreed to reveal the secret to the neighbor women after they pressed coins into her hands and swore not to tell Sara. But the rose water they prepared according to her instructions, while fragrant and refreshing, lacked the miraculous properties possessed by Sara’s. When they bathed their faces in it their skin remained dark and cracked; eyes blinded by trachoma did not see; wombs did not open to receive sperm; and broken hearts did not mend.

  Sara picked the roses in the late hours of the morning, when the dew had dried and disappeared from their petals. She collected the heads of the flowers in a white cloth bag and took them into the house. There she dipped them in water, washed them well, and between her thumb and forefinger she rid them of all the pestilential creatures, the winged and the wingless, the soft and the hard shelled, the earwigs and the centipedes, that had made their homes among the scented petals.

  After cleaning the petals she filled the big kettle with water and put it on the stove to boil. Into the water she crammed the red petals and pressed them down. Then she attached a long, flexible copper pipe to the spout of the kettle, sealing the mouth of the spout tightly with a cloth so that the fragrant steam would not escape. The other end of the pipe she inserted in a clean glass jar that she stood on the kitchen floor. She plunged the copper pipe that was on its way to the glass jar into a deep tub of cold water. And when the petal-filled water in the kettle boiled, the vapors passed into the pipe through the spout of the kettle, and in the place where it was plunged into the cold water, they turned into drops of dew saturated with the scent of roses. And drop by drop the fragrant drops fell into the jar. After the jar was full to the brim, she pushed a funnel into the mouth of one little bottle after the other and poured the water steeped with the essence of roses into them. Then she sealed the bottles with fresh wax and pasted on the labels bearing the picture of a rose.