Four Mothers

by Shifra Horn

  “The main thing is that I understand her,” she would say whenever her mother brought up the subject of the secret language Geula spoke to Muhammad and the Arabic she insisted on speaking to her. “And the fact that she insists on speaking Arabic to you doesn’t matter. She’ll learn Hebrew when she goes to school.”

  “But school has already started. And she refuses to be parted from Muhammad,” Sara tried to argue.

  “I’ll take care of it,” said Pnina-Mazal wearily.

  That same week Geula was led to the first-grade class in the Lady Meyuhas School for Girls, screaming and kicking, trussed up in the “best dress” that she had never worn before.

  That afternoon Sara was summoned from home and asked to present herself at the school. In the headmistress’s room her granddaughter was waiting for her, her new dress covered with blue ink spots. Her long hair, which had been braided and tied with red ribbons when she left home, was loose and wild. She sat squirming on the chair and baring her pointed teeth in a vicious expression.

  “I don’t think the child fits into the framework of our school,” said the headmistress, examining Sara’s elegant gown. “She refused to speak Hebrew and answered the teacher in a strange language. She only agreed to speak in Arabic, to the girls from Haleb and Egypt. And that’s not all. The teacher handed out ink-pots and pens, and she dipped her fingers in the ink and drew blue roses on the blouse of the little girl in front of her. Then she grabbed hold of the lid of the desk and kept opening and shutting it. And when she was finished playing with the desk she began climbing on and off the chair. And when the teacher lost patience and tried to drag her to the corner she bared her teeth and threatened to bite the finger she was admonishing her with. I advise you to take her home and keep her there until she’s ready for school.”

  With her face flushed, Sara seized her granddaughter’s arm, making white marks on the skin, and left the school. That evening she decided with Pnina-Mazal to hire a private tutor to teach Geula Hebrew.

  Pnina-Mazal found a new immigrant from Russia, Gershon, who spoke a polished Hebrew and was ready and willing to teach the child. Although he really wanted to do manual labor, work on the roads and build the country, he had been rejected for these jobs on account of his weak, fragile body.

  Wearing an embroidered cotton shirt with a high collar, tied round his slender waist with a tassled cord, his sparse hair neatly parted in the middle, Gershon surveyed, through the lenses of his round glasses, the little girl who burst into the room. Geula clung to the skirts of her mother’s dress, looked contemptuously at the teacher they had brought her, and announced in her private language that she would only agree to be taught by him if they brought Muhammad too.

  “You have to learn Hebrew,” Pnina-Mazal said, “and Muhammad will learn Arabic.”

  “I won’t learn without him,” the child insisted.

  Pnina-Mazal gave her a hard look and walked out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

  In the afternoon, when Sara was busy with the supplicants, the bottles, and the holy water, Gershon emerged from the room disheveled and deathly pale, painfully holding his left hand, which was embellished by two bleeding crescents of sharp-toothed bite marks.

  “She refused to talk to me,” he said later to Pnina-Mazal. “And when she did talk she did so in a guttural language I’ve never heard before. And then she spilled the ink on the table, painted with her fingers, made a mess everywhere, climbed up my legs, and used my body as a swing and my head as a springboard. In the end she gave me this bite in the bargain,” he said, and waved his hand before her eyes. “If things continue like this I don’t think I’ll be able to go on.”

  Sara hurried to give him a well-sweetened cup of coffee and sprinkled blessed water on his bleeding hand.

  The next morning she sent Pnina-Mazal to Fatma’s village. She returned holding Muhammad by the hand. As soon as Geula saw him she ran up, spoke to him excitedly in their language, took his hand, and sat him down beside her. And thus they sat obediently, hand in hand, throughout the lesson. At midday Gershon came out of the room with his face wreathed in smiles.

  “There’s still hope,” he said to Sara. “Both children learned a few basic words in Hebrew today and agreed not to talk their strange language.”

  When the lesson was over the children ran up to Yitzhak’s chair as usual, curled up in his warm lap, and went to sleep.

  Chapter Sixteen

  In those days the first murder took place in the neighbor Esther’s yard. She came running to Sara’s house in alarm, clutching a pile of bloody feathers in her hand.

  “All night long I didn’t sleep a wink,” she said in agitation. “All night the chickens cried for help and my husband wouldn’t let me go out and see what was happening for fear I might step on a snake or bump into a jackal. And see what they did to me. They killed my Shoshana. They robbed me of my best layer, and left me with the feathers.”

  Sara crossed the yard with her and entered the chicken run. Signs of a bloody battle were evident everywhere. Broken eggs were squashed on the ground, their sticky contents providing a feast for the glittering green flies, who finished off their meal with the blood smeared on the feathers flying all around.

  “We’ll wait for tonight,” she said to the terrified Esther. “If nothing happens tonight, it won’t happen again.”

  “But who did it?” cried Esther, who had loved the plump Shoshana best of all her brood. Shoshana had come to her as a little yellow ball of fluff and down. Since the first sight she saw in her life, which had now come so abruptly to an end, was Esther’s doughy face, she would eat from her hand and follow her like a shadow wherever she went. Even when Esther stood in the kitchen cleaning the carcass of a chicken that had been taken from the henhouse and slaughtered in the yard, its head chopped off its bleeding neck before her very eyes, Shoshana’s blind faith in her mistress did not falter. She would cuddle up to her benefactor’s feet with her warm, feathery body even when the steamy air of the kitchen was full of swirling down, and the smell of singed feathers spread throughout the house. When the aroma of roasting chicken filled the kitchen and soup glistening with fat and full of necks and clawed feet bubbled on the stove, she would gaze at her mistress with her yellow eyes full of love and trust.

  In the neighborhood people said mockingly that when it snowed in Jerusalem Esther would steal into the henhouse and despite her husband’s vociferous protests and her children’s scornful sniggers, smuggle Shoshana into the house wrapped up in her woolen shawl. Then she would thaw her icy feathers under the down quilt on her bed, and warm her frozen body with her own plump flesh.

  That night Esther did not sleep a wink, mourning her beloved chicken and listening to the sounds of the night. The screeches from the henhouse were not repeated. But the next morning, when she went to feed the chickens, she was greeted by the same atrocious scene as before. Another broody hen had disappeared, leaving a heap of bloody feathers behind her. Again Esther burst into Sara’s house, alarming the women waiting on her doorstep with her ghastly expression and bloody hands.

  She spent yet another sleepless night standing at the window overlooking the henhouse. There was no suspicious movement in the yard, and the henhouse was as still and dark as usual. Once, she was startled by the sound of a little screech breaking the silence, but when she hurried out she discovered that it was only a dream that had disturbed the rest of one of her broody hens, which fell asleep again immediately, tucking its head into the warm down of its body. The next morning she woke up in her chair, her head giddy from lack of sleep, her mouth dry, and her limbs stiff. She ran to the henhouse and again she found a sticky pool of broken eggs and a vanished chicken.

  In despair she went the same day to the tinkers’ market and came home with a large wooden board to which a strong coiled spring was attached by a thick square wire. “It’s a trap,” she explained to Sara. “I’m going to bait it with a piece of meat and put it in the henhouse tonight, and we’l
l see what’s caught in it.”

  That night Esther slept the sleep of the just, and the next day she found the usual upheaval in the henhouse. The trap stood on the floor where she had left it, but the bait had vanished into thin air. The same thing happened on the following nights. When only one scrawny hen and one red-combed rooster were left in the henhouse, she decided to bring them into the house at night, but she left the trap in the henhouse nevertheless. Before the first rays of the sun appeared in the sky, the rooster under her bed began to ruffle his feathers. He stretched his body, lengthened his neck, and a triumphant crow burst out of his scrawny, naked crop. Afraid of the reaction of her family, who had been woken by the noise echoing throughout the dark house, Esther began to run after the rooster, which hopped onto the beds, pecked at their occupants’ hair, and crowed loudly into their ears. The chase ended in the kitchen, where she found the rooster perched on the wooden table, pecking at the remains of their last meal.

  With much effort she managed to catch both birds, then put on her slippers and shuffled outside, determined to return them to their rightful home. As she shuffled across the yard, with the fowls flapping their wings under her arms, she saw a sight that tore a scream from her lips. Two pairs of glittering eyes greeted her in the forefront of the henhouse, one at the height of the ground and the other floating above it. Rooted to the spot, with the chickens struggling soundlessly in her hands, she stood still and stared at the demonic eyes gleaming at her. She heard a little girl’s voice and another voice gurgling in reply. When the two pairs of eyes encountered her corpulent stock-still figure, they opened wide and flashed green sparks at her. Immediately after that the sound of pattering feet was heard. One pair of eyes came quickly up to her and slipped between her feet planted at the entrance to the henhouse. From close quarters she could make out the pointed nose, the short legs, the small, elongated body, and the bushy tail dragging on the ground and leaving a long train like a feather duster behind it.

  Esther let go of the chickens and they dropped to the ground with clucks of relief and started running round the yard in search of worms for breakfast. She advanced in the direction of the remaining pair of eyes gleaming at her from the darkness of the henhouse. Her hands groping in gloom in front of her encountered wiry, bristling hair. She immediately recognized it as Geula’s, from all the times when she had grabbed her by the hair and led her to her grandmother’s house.

  “What have you done?” she screamed at her. “Why did you let him kill my hens?”

  Her body trembling, the little girl mumbled, “I didn’t want the fox to die. All I did was free him from the trap.”

  Esther, always merciful, led Geula home, asking her only: “If you see him tomorrow, tell him not to come. And if my chickens are spared, I won’t tell your grandmother.”

  That night the chickens slept as usual in the henhouse. The next morning Esther heard the rooster’s voice announcing the dawn of a new day. She hurried out to the henhouse and found both her surviving chickens without a single feather missing from their tails. Whether Geula had watched over them all night or chased the fox away Esther did not know. From that day on she called her Vixen. When Sara asked Esther to explain the nickname, she said that the color of Geula’s hair reminded her of a fox’s fur, her pointed teeth of a fox’s teeth, and her cunning of the cunning of the animal that she had never succeeded in seeing face to face. From then on, whenever Esther cooked a chicken, she would place its head, its innards, and its clawed, chopped-off toes on an old tin plate at the entrance to the henhouse. The next day the plate would be empty. To anyone who asked about this strange custom of hers, she replied that this was the only way she could ensure that her family would always have chickens to eat.

  * * *

  As usual, it was Esther who brought the bad news. “The Arabs are getting ready to kill us all,” she panted, hanging on tightly to the buttons of her blouse as if to keep her heart from jumping out of her skin in its terror. “They’re going to gather after the Friday prayers and invade our houses, rape the women, and smash the children’s skulls,” she said, and her eyes darted from side to side as if counting the heads of her vast brood of children and grandchildren, to make sure that none of them were missing. Pnina-Mazal, who had come home early from work, confirmed the rumor.

  “It’s true, they’re talking about it at the staff headquarters too, and trying to make preparations in time. The Arab nationalists are raising their heads,” she admitted. “Don’t leave the house this Friday, and don’t let Geula and Avraham roam the streets. Lock yourselves in and close the shutters.”

  While Sara and Pnina-Mazal were sitting in the kitchen and discussing the evils about to befall them, Fatma burst through the door, her hair wild as a keener’s at a funeral and her immense bosom heaving with every breath. “I heard they’re coming here too. Come and stay with me. There they won’t dare touch you,” she urged, distractedly stroking Geula’s untidy hair. Sara looked at the line of supplicants waiting outside the kitchen door and shook her head.

  “I’m staying here with the children. Nothing will happen to us. Stop worrying,” she said to Fatma, and handed a bottle of water to the old man standing at the head of the line, placing his shaking hands in hers. “Take a sip of the water twice a day, and you’ll feel better,” she said gently.

  On Friday Pnina-Mazal went to work, leaving Yitzhak planted in his padded chair and Avraham playing with a pile of empty bottles in the kitchen. Since there was no line waiting at the door as usual, Sara busied herself with baking bread for the Sabbath and waited for Gershon to arrive for Geula’s morning lessons. But the teacher did not come. With her hands sticky with dough Sara opened the door of the children’s room. Trousers, shirts, and panties were strewn around the room as if a violent hurricane had passed through and scattered the contents of the drawers in all directions. There was no sign of Geula. Alarmed, she went out into the yard, but the little girl was nowhere to be seen.

  Holding her sticky, floury hands out in front of her, she knocked impatiently at Esther’s door, leaving doughy traces behind her. A frightened pair of eyes peeped out of the window, the door opened a crack, and Esther’s sturdy arms pulled her inside.

  “What are you doing outside? Have you taken leave of your senses? You nearly made me die of fright.”

  “Geula, where’s Geula, is she with you? She’s not at home,” said Sara weakly.

  “Have you checked the top of the mulberry tree?” said Esther mockingly.

  “You know very well that she doesn’t climb up there anymore,” Sara replied. “Are you sure you haven’t seen her this morning?”

  “And who told you that she went out this morning?” Esther retorted. “Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night to inspect the chickens I catch a glimpse of Geula in the yard, whispering with strange men in the dark. Once I even saw her leaving the boundaries of the neighborhood, and that wasn’t in the morning or the afternoon either,” she said, with a note of rebuke in her voice.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?” asked Sara tearfully.

  “You’re busy with your bottles, and I was sure you knew about it; after all, you let her run wild and put no limits on her freedom. She doesn’t want to go to school—you bring her a private tutor at home; she doesn’t want to wear dresses—you let her wear Fatma’s children’s cast-off trousers; she doesn’t want to be by herself—you bring her the Arab boy for company. If she wants to, she stays on the top of the tree; if she wants to, she comes down. Why should I tell you anything if you let her do whatever she likes? She’s been a bad example to my daughters and granddaughters from the day she was born. ‘Why is Geula allowed to play outside all day?’ and ‘Why doesn’t Geula have to help with the housework?’ That’s all I hear all day long. And now you don’t know where she is? Don’t you worry about her. From what I’ve seen up to now she knows how to look after herself,” she snapped, gathering her brood about her and counting their heads with her hands.

&n
bsp; * * *

  Sara left feeling chastised. The dough on her hands had hardened, sticking her fingers together, and she had to knock on Bracha’s door with her elbow. A little hatch opened up on the door and she squeezed through it into the dark house. Geula was not among the children clustering fearfully round Bracha either, and after taking a sip of the sugar water she offered her, Sara left her house feeling weak with anxiety. When she failed to find Geula in any of the neighbors’ houses, she began running round the streets of the deserted town calling her name, while people peered at her through the slats of their closed shutters and shouted at her to take shelter because the pogromists were coming. Her eyes blind with fear, Sara hired an Arab coachman, who only after seeing the money in her hand agreed to take her where she wanted to go.

  Sara arrived at the British staff headquarters and burst into Pnina-Mazal’s office panting for breath. Without hesitation Pnina-Mazal ordered the car and the driver to take them to Fatma’s village.

  “She’s here with us in the village,” Fatma said calmly, as if she had been waiting for them all morning, and her eyes gleamed at them from the darkness of the room.

  “Where?” both women asked at once.

  “The teacher Gershon is with her, too, and so is Muhammad”—she added the name of her son even though it was self-evident that he would follow wherever Geula went.

  “And what has Gershon got to do with it?” asked Pnina-Mazal.

  “He came with her last night. They knocked at my door. Muhammad went out and they went off together, and I haven’t seen them since. People say that they’ve shut themselves up with some other Jews in a house at the edge of the village, and they’re printing a newspaper and talking all day.”

  One of Fatma’s children volunteered to lead them to the house. He pointed from a distance at a stone house surrounded by a thorny hedge, with all its windows shuttered by heavy iron blinds. Then he turned on his heel and ran for his life, as if the house were full of evil genies. Muffled voices and the creaking of a rusty machine reached their ears.