Four Mothers

by Shifra Horn

  * * *

  In those days the smell of roses pervaded all the houses of the neighborhood. Every night the women, their hands scratched, their hair wild, and their faces flushed, brewed the fragrant potion. And the smell of dying roses accompanied them wherever they went, and everyone who met them on their way could tell by their smell that they were Sara’s neighbors. But only Sara’s rose water possessed magic properties, and when she walked through the streets of the market with her bottles rattling in her big wicker basket, she was accompanied by the heady scent of freshly plucked roses.

  And when the demands for Sara’s magic rose water multiplied, so did the money in her pockets, until she purchased a broad field next to the neighborhood wall, and planted it with straight rows of red-flowered bushes. Then too she went to Fatma’s village and recruited the children to pick the roses. And she built a wooden shed next to the field and set up a distillery in it, where she and Fatma were busy all day long, distilling the blessed water from the rose petals and filling the bottles with it. And Fatma brought her children with her, and Geula, Muhammad, and Avraham played at her feet, and when they were hungry they undid the bodice of her dress, exposed her breasts, and drank their fill of rose-scented milk.

  Edward too offered his services to the fragrant enterprise and generously donated his old carriage, which had been replaced by a motorcar, to transport the bottles. The aged horse, whose ribs stuck out of his walking corpse and threatened to tear his parchment-thin skin, would trudge through the streets of the town, his hooves ringing, pulling the bottled miracle water behind him, and after every few steps he would turn his head and with avid, flaring nostrils sniff his fragrant freight.

  Soon the breath escaping from his yellow-toothed mouth began to smell like roses, and the sweat pouring from his body too gave off a heavy scent of roses. His brother horses would come and sniff his black coat, and with soft neighing noises they would rub their bodies against him in order to soak up his smell. And thus the streets of Jerusalem were walked by delicately scented horses. And when they arched their tails and dropped damp, steamy turds behind them, even these turds would give off sweet smells.

  And when the famous travel writer Irwin Thomas came to the Holy Land on his way from India, Yemen, Ethiopia, Egypt, and the Sudan in order to write about the Christian holy places, and arrived in Jerusalem, he stood amazed before the horse manure that spread its fragrance throughout the town. And the story of the sweet breath and fragrant turds of the horses of Jerusalem was printed in The Times of London, where his articles were published. “And the holy air of the city turns even piles of stinking horse manure into an essence of perfume which the most refined London lady would gladly dab behind her ears and in the creases of her elbows before setting out for the Opera, smelling of the sweetest scents which have ever reached your noses,” he wrote in an article entitled “The Sweet-Smelling Holy Manure of the Horses of Jerusalem.” Angry letters were written to the editor. Many readers demanded that Irwin Thomas be fired, claiming that the holy air of Jerusalem had deprived him of his wits, so that he had begun to write of bodily excretions and horse manure instead of the holy places, and saying that it was blasphemous to mention holiness and horse manure in the same breath.

  In the end the poor man went out of his mind, and was found walking naked in the streets of Jerusalem, digging a blackened silver teaspoon into the piles of dung, lifting it to his nose, breathing in the smell with quivering nostrils, and then tasting the contents of the spoon while smacking his lips in enjoyment. After this he would roll around in the dung, smear it on his hair, and roam the streets with his naked body smelling of roses, setting women and girls of tender years to flight and proclaiming the gospel of the holy smell to the harsh stones of the city.

  Finally men in white coats caught him, restrained him in a long straitjacket that covered his nakedness, and led him to the lunatic asylum on the outskirts of the city, where the young pine trees had already grown soft crests. There they put him in the ward for the incurable, where his strapped bed stood next to Yitzhak’s. And he would talk feverishly of the holy air that turned manure into fragrant gold, and say that the moment he was released he would collect the turds and send them to London, where he would be paid for them in gold. Yitzhak would stare right through him and widen his nostrils to breathe in his smell.

  In the wake of Thomas’s article the noted equine nutritionist Dr. Henry Cook arrived in Jaffa and took the train to Jerusalem. It was said that he was seen wandering the streets of the town, collecting the turds in glass jars and sealing them with thick cork lids. And when he reached his room in the Allenby Hotel he opened his trunk and took out the instrument that magnifies a fly into an elephant, crumbled the manure between his fingers, and inspected the results closely through the thick lenses. Then he hired a horse and carriage and examined every aspect of the animal’s life. He took a particular interest in the sack of fodder tied around the horse’s neck, felt its contents with his snuff-stained fingers, removed a few stalks of straw and sniffed them, stuck them in his mouth, and chewed them with his strong teeth.

  When he returned home he took with him in his suitcase specimens of manure and fodder in well-sealed jars. And when he opened the suitcase for inspection at Dover, the customs shed was filled with a heavy fragrance, and he was given a fine for smuggling unknown oriental perfumes in solid form and commercial quantities into the country. And when he argued that all he had with him was horse manure they looked at him as if he had gone mad, and confiscated the sweet-smelling stuff. And at a congress in Kent on the subject of “the nutrition of English race-horses and its influence on their performance on the track,” he stood on the platform and took from his pocket the one test tube he had managed to save from the customs officers, displayed the dried-up manure it contained to the delegates, and spoke at length on the diet of the horses in the Holy City that turned their excrement into perfume.

  * * *

  And the smell of the roses wafting from Sara’s distillery evaporated in the air, perfumed the surroundings, and rose up to the clouds. And when the first rains fell on the town covered with the gray summer dust, the water bathed the dirty streets in a sweet smell. And barefoot children whose eyes were clogged with yellow matter raised their faces to the showers falling from the clouds, like members of some ancient tribe dancing for joy outside their caves at the advent of the first rain, widening their nostrils like savages to sniff the smell and washing their faces encrusted with dried sweat and summer dust. And purblind eyes were opened, filthy faces were cleansed, and sores left by lice and bug bites were covered by pure new skin.

  And when the demand for the rose water increased, and customers began arriving from Motza, Bethlehem, and Hebron, Sara bought another field with the money she had earned, recruited more children, and expanded the distillery. Fatma brought her neighbors from the village, and together, enveloped in the heavy scents, they distilled the healing waters. At night Sara would count the money she had earned that day, and the next morning she would send Pnina-Mazal to deposit the stacks of coins in the Anglo-Palestine Bank. And the more the money accumulated the more the beggars and tramps multiplied outside the house and the distillery, refusing to leave until she handed out bread and cheese and distributed a few coins among them.

  One morning the door to the house was barred by a man dressed in rags, his beard matted and stiff with dirt. He refused the coins she offered him and declined the bread and cheese she had prepared the night before for distribution to the poor who came knocking at her door. His prematurely aged hands, covered with pale brown spots, gripped a bottle of water.

  “Saint,” he addressed her reverently, “bless the water, my wife is very sick.”

  “If you wish I’ll give you a bottle of rose water for her,” Sara said.

  “I’m not a beggar. I don’t want your charity. Just hold this bottle in your hands and your healing powers will enter the water and my wife will be cured,” he replied.

  “I�
��ll give you money for a doctor. That water won’t help her,” Sara said, obediently holding the bottle of water he put into her hands. One week later he knocked at her door and thanked her for his wife’s recovery. In the following days more people arrived with bottles of water in their hands, and they asked Sara to hold the bottles and to bless their households. And the line lengthened from day to day. They stood there patiently in the burning sun, teenage virgins who wanted a husband, barren women whose wombs had not yet opened, children afflicted with boils, the lame and the paralyzed and the insane, children with bloated stomachs, and even a lame horse brought by the neighborhood coachman together with a bucket full of water for her to bless. And Sara would go out to them and bless their bottles with her scratched hands. And when the sick were cured others took their places, and her hands were full, and Fatma remained alone in the distillery.

  And there came a day when the rose water merchants stopped coming to her house. When she asked them why, they explained that there was no longer a demand for her rose water. “In any case you bless the plain water, and it too has healing powers, so why should they buy the rose water for money if they can get the same thing for nothing?”

  And when the demand ceased, Sara was obliged to curtail the rose picking; she sent the children home and scaled down her business. The people who besieged her door with their bottles occasionally bought her fragrant rose water too, but most of these unfortunates lacked even the money to buy a crust of bread, and Sara soon found herself feeding as well as blessing them. In the end she sold her fields to a wealthy contractor, who built large new houses with flat roofs on them. Sara went home and continued to bless the dozens and hundreds of bottles of water held out to her every day.

  * * *

  When she succeeded in getting away from the wretched supplicants standing patiently at her door, she harnessed Edward’s old horse to the fragrant carriage, packed a few bottles of rose water, and set out for the hospital to visit her son. Before she entered the room, Irwin Thomas would avidly breathe in the scents that announced her arrival, smacking his lips with relish as if the smell had penetrated the taste buds on his tongue too, and excitedly shake Yitzhak as he lay flat on his back in his white bed and stared at the ceiling. And when she sat down on the white-painted wooden chair, Irwin Thomas would sit at her feet, bury his head in her lap, and breathe in her smell while shudders of delight ran up and down his body. Yitzhak would look right through her and greedily drink the rose water she brought him. Sometimes he would polish off all three bottles without any perceptible effect. But when she said good-bye she felt as if he looked at her and understood everything she said.

  And when time passed and Yitzhak’s hair began to turn white and his body grew slack and obese, and rolls of quivering fat appeared beneath his chin, she asked permission to take him home, and her request was granted. For days on end Yitzhak would sit in the garden, warming his bones in the sun and browning his skin, which had grown white during his years in the hospital. He would sit without moving for hours on end, and the neighborhood urchins would steal up to him, utter shrill, sudden cries, and throw dead lizards and snakes into his lap. When he didn’t move they grew bolder, came right up to him, and danced round him like savages. And Yitzhak, as if he had turned into a pillar of salt, would stare in front of him, blind to the commotion surrounding him.

  In the neighborhood people said that one day the wickedest of the little boys collected dry branches and lit a fire at his feet. The smoke coming in at the kitchen window brought Sara running into the yard to rescue her son, who sat quite still, as if he did not feel the flames licking at his shoes. From that day on she left him sitting on a chair inside the house, in front of a window overlooking the yard. The children would walk past the window, make faces, and throw little stones at him, and he would stare at them without moving a muscle of his big, flaccid body. And when strangers came to the neighborhood they would see him sitting in the window and ask him for directions, and when he failed to reply they would shrug their shoulders and continue on their way.

  * * *

  Geula’s behavior kept Sara awake at night. She had grown into a strong, skinny child, with sharp white teeth, freckles all over her face, and rebellious red hair that stuck out stiffly in all directions. She would wander round the house naked as the day she was born, refusing to put on her clothes even on cold winter days. And when her mother tried to dress her in a frock and long stockings, as was right and proper for a girl of her age, she would bite her mother’s hands, stamp her feet, and refuse to put them on. The only clothes she agreed to wear were the wide, shabby, patched trousers and the plain striped shirt that she had received from Fatma.

  When her mother combed her long, tangled hair she would protest vociferously, filling her lungs with air and letting out bloodcurdling shrieks that startled even Yitzhak’s motionless body from its place. Nor would she allow her mother to wash her hair, and Sara would steal up and pour water over her head while she was splashing naked with Muhammad in the copper basin used for washing the rose petals. On a number of occasions Sara caught her attacking her long hair with the heavy scissors once used for cutting the roses. Thick locks would fall to the floor, leaving the little girl’s scalp full of round pits and bald patches, around which her long red hair grew wild.

  When Geula went out to roam the neighborhood streets mothers would make haste to call their daughters in and shut the door. She would pull the little girls’ hair, smack their bottoms, tear their dresses, throw the beetles and lizards she collected in the fields at them, and incite the boys to pelt them with stones.

  She was very fond of the mulberry tree, especially in the summer, when its lumpy berries attracted the birds of Jerusalem, which settled on its branches in droves and pecked greedily at the soft fruit. With their bellies full they would fly off again and shed their droppings unerringly on the spotless laundry hanging on the washing lines, leaving purple stains that the most strenuous efforts of the housewives failed to remove. And in the summer nights the bats swooped down with squeaky little cries and hung upside down from its branches, filling their hairy bellies with its sweet fruit.

  The mulberry tree was Geula’s hiding place. Here she would sit, ignoring Sara’s calls for her to come inside, and it was only after all the treetops roundabout had been scanned that her red hair was finally discovered flaming on the uppermost branch of the great mulberry tree, where even the cats could not climb, and if they did they were unable to come down again, and remained where they were, wailing and mewing for help. Geula on the other hand would look down scornfully at the search party gathered at the foot of the tree, smile her sharp-toothed smile, and only when she felt hungry climb down as lightly as a dancer.

  After she climbed to the top of the tree, concealed by the green foliage, she would pick the plumpest mulberries, fill her mouth with juice, and spit the purple pulp mixed with her saliva onto the heads of the passersby. When she succeeded in hitting the back or chest of a yeshiva scholar she would rejoice to see the ugly purple stains spreading over his spotless white shirt. In those days her backside was red with Sara’s slaps, and Sara’s hands were sore from hitting her granddaughter’s hard backside. During these beatings Geula would close her eyes and grit her sharp teeth, and she never made a sound.

  All their efforts to separate her from Muhammad failed, and he remained her bosom friend even after they were both weaned from his mother’s breasts. There was already talk of sending her to school, but at the very mention of the idea she would cling to Muhammad with the desperation of a drowning man, scream at her mother, and refuse to let go of him. And so the two of them were left to their own devices, scampering about the house, chattering to each other in their own private language, which only Pnina-Mazal could understand, and using Yitzhak’s broad lap as a playground. They would climb up his thick legs as he sat motionless in his chair or bounce up and down on his feet as if he were a seesaw. And when they grew tired they would climb into his lap and nestle t
here like birds in a nest. And when they had rested they would clamber up his chest, climb onto his shoulders, and perch by turn on his big, fair head, straddling it with their legs. Then they would rise carefully to their feet and jump from his head to the floor, shrieking with fear and delight.

  Fatma’s dwindling breasts they left to Avraham, Yitzhak’s fair-headed son, who stuck to them like a leech for hours at a time. And when the fancy took them, they would include the tiny toddler, whose nose was always running, in their games. Then they would stand him before his father and command him in their unintelligible language to climb into his lap. Avraham would stand opposite the motionless lump of his father, one finger in his mouth and the other deep in his nose, and survey him with his mother Davida’s green gaze, like an art critic contemplating a painting in a museum. At such moments Sara could have sworn that she saw tears welling up in the eyes of her son.

  * * *

  Although she had her hands full with her healing work, Sara occasionally found time to try to restrain her wild granddaughter and to talk to her in Hebrew. Geula would agree to stay with her in the kitchen only when she bribed her with cookies soaked in rose water. Then she would swing her legs over the edge of the chair, open her mouth like a baby bird, and thank her grandmother with a polite “Shukran” in Arabic.

  “Say ‘Todah,’ Geula,” Sara said, trying to teach her Hebrew.

  “Shukran,” the little girl repeated obstinately.

  In the evening, when Pnina-Mazal came home tired from the British staff headquarters, Sara would try to talk to her about her daughter.