Four Mothers

by Shifra Horn

  And so it could have continued, but for the stone thrown by an Arab boy next to the Nablus Gate and intended for another. The stone was aimed at a black-garbed yeshiva student on his way to the Western Wall, and cast from the roof of Abu Fasha’s café, which was situated at the foot of a hill covered by the rain-eroded tombstones of an ancient cemetery. The murder was witnessed by dozens of men silently sucking their hookahs and contemplating the scene with dreamy expressions on their faces while rolling amber prayer beads between their slack fingers. Later investigation revealed that the stone, which had been uprooted from the paved courtyard of the café, had fallen straight into the open roof of Edward’s Ford on its way to Sara’s house, and smashed his skull.

  * * *

  On the day the stone was thrown Sara locked up her house, sent away the women besieging her door, and armed with bottles of rose water presented herself at the Augusta Victoria Hospital at the Mountain of Olives, where Edward had been taken. As soon as she appeared in the doorway with the fragrant bottles in her hands Edward’s bandaged head turned toward her.

  His nostrils eagerly breathed in the familiar and beloved smell, and he held his weak arms out to her. With tears streaming down her finely wrinkled cheeks she caressed his bandaged head, stroked his unseeing eyes, kissed his dry lips, which sought hers beneath the bloody bandages, and whispered words of love in his ear.

  When the nurse in a nun’s wimple left the room Sara raised his head and put the rose water to his lips. Edward swallowed it like a drowning man, and little rivulets streamed down his face and onto his body, seeped into the bandages covering his head, soaked the hospital pajamas, and collected in the heavy mattress, banishing the smell of death and dying of the patients who had preceded him. He turned his unseeing eyes to Sara and whispered, “You’re the most beautiful woman in the world.”

  With tears in her eyes Sara made the usual reply, “They have eyes and see not … I’m an old grandmother already.” After she had composed herself she looked at Edward. His head beat against the pillow in a desperate attempt to see her, but not a single ray of light penetrated his bandaged eyes to bring him the sight of her beloved face.

  When his head stopped thudding, his lips were sucked inward, his ears stopped reacting to her endearments, and his body was still, she called the doctors. They took his pulse and told her that they were sorry. She went on standing silently by his side for a long time, until one of the nuns gave in to her pleas and unrolled the bandages from his face as carefully and gently as if she were treating a feeling, breathing man. Edward’s blue eyes were wide open under the bandages. They gazed at her lovingly as if determined not to forgo the sight of her beloved face for a fraction of a second, and his lips, which gave off the scent of wilted roses, were parted in a blissful smile.

  In the evening she went to his house and banged on the carved iron gate. The faithful Sudanese servant, whose curls had turned white and whose shoulders were stooped, greeted her with tears streaming down his cheeks. Without her having to say a word he knew the purpose of her visit, and he led her through the rooms of the house, where the cupids on the ceilings looked down with tired, faded faces, the arrows of love unused in the quivers on their backs. With the heavy bronze key clattering on his waist he opened a little side door and pulled a string to switch a red light, which swayed above their heads and spread shadows of blood on the windowless walls. When her eyes grew accustomed to the dim light she saw the tall stacks of biscuit tins he had told her about. With the servant’s help she emptied the room and loaded its contents onto the cart she had hired at the Jaffa Gate.

  That night, with tears streaming ceaselessly down her cheeks, she opened the tins piled around her and filling her room, and she stroked the faces looking up at her. In her mind’s eye she saw Edward standing with his legs planted firmly apart to photograph General Allenby’s cavalry, kneeling to photograph little Geula with her arms around Muhammad, looming over her to photograph her head rising above the heads of the women surrounding her.

  When the red rays of the sun filtered through the slats of the blinds, she reached the last packet. Her face turned red. For a moment it seemed that she would tear them to pieces, but she calmed down and went up to the old sandouk standing in the corner of the room. She lifted the lid and sneezed as a cloud of dust covered her head. Quickly, as if afraid that someone would discover her secret, she pulled out her wedding dress and ripped off a wide band of cloth. Then she wrapped the cloth carefully round the sheaf of pictures in her hand, pushed the bundle wrapped up like a body in a shroud into a little tin box, and buried it deep in the chest. The other pictures she crammed higgledy-piggledy into the biscuit tins, emptied the sandouk of its contents, and replaced them, tin upon tin, with the treasure left her by Edward, with love.

  Worn out by a sleepless night and by the weeping that had torn her body apart, she hurried to the door in the morning at the sound of a knock from the brass-knobbed cane. A strong smell of withered roses greeted her as she opened the door and she heard Edward’s voice saying, “You’re the most beautiful woman in the world.” This time she did not answer him. She left the door open and went into the kitchen to make coffee for her lover who was no more.

  They buried him with due pomp and ceremony in the American colony cemetery, under a rustling glade of pine trees on the summit of Mount Scopus, in a spot overlooking a view of Jerusalem. His eulogists mentioned his contribution to the city and stole hard looks at Sara, who tore the collar of her dress and murmured Kaddish to herself. When the ring of hostility tightened round the fresh grave, she withdrew and went up to the stooping Sudanese servant, and they stood there together and looked at the black, excluding backs of the men of the American colony encircling the grave and performing their alien rites. For a long time she waited with the Sudanese until the last of the mourners left. When she was alone she took a bottle of rose water out of her bag, went up to the grave, murmured words of love, and drenched the parched soil with the scented water.

  One week later the war broke out. Edward’s house and his grave remained on the Jordanian side of the divided city.

  From that time, until the city was liberated, the same scene was repeated month after month, year after year. The members of the convoys to Mount Scopus recounted that at the Mandelbaum Gate checkpoint they would see an old woman whose beauty shone through her black clothes blocking the armored cars with her body. She wanted them to take a bottle of rose water with them up to the mountain and pour it onto one of the graves there. And she explained that it was in the section of the cemetery reserved for the American colony, and the cross engraved on the marble tombstone pointed in the direction of the new city. The members of the convoy never refused her request. After taking the bottle they received her blessing and a bottle of scented water to strengthen their spirits.

  They found the grave easily. It was surrounded on all sides by red rose bushes, which gave off fresh, flowery scents. And when they poured the rose water onto the grave, it washed away the dust that had gathered on the tombstone, swept away the pine needles lying on it, and watered the rose bushes planted around it.

  After the liberation of Jerusalem she did not go up to the mountain. Nor did she ever return to his house near the Nablus Gate, which in the course of the years had become a luxurious hotel. And when longings pierced her heart she would light her bedside lamp, go up to the sandouk, take out one of the biscuit tins, and spend a night of love with her lover who was no more.

  * * *

  The sons and grandsons of Abu Fasha, who inherited his café, did not bother to replace the uprooted paving stone with a new one, as if they wanted to leave the empty space as a memorial to that first stone, thrown before its time, the first in the long line of murderous stones that were to be thrown in the city of Jerusalem in the years to come.

  * * *

  A few decades after Edward’s death, in a particularly rainy year, the puddle that had collected in the hole left by the uprooted paving stone in Abu Fa
sha’s café brimmed over. That same evening, when the café was crowded with people, the waterlogged hilltop cemetery collapsed onto the café sheltering beneath it. The dead invaded the living in a landslide of tombstones, yellowing skeletons, human skulls baring their teeth in frozen grins, and mountains of brown mud full of human bones, which choked those sitting in the land of the living with the pipes of steaming hookahs still in their mouths. That same night, when the rescue party was cleaning up the floodlit death scene, the body of Abu Fasha’s son was found, his crushed skull stuck in the hole left by the absent paving stone.

  * * *

  One morning the line of women waiting for Sara’s blessing was longer than usual. Crazy Dvora ran to and fro, handing out numbers to the perspiring women with round yellow sweat stains spreading under their armpits.

  Number one hundred and three accepted her slip from Dvora with a small smile of thanks. She was a middle-aged woman seated in a wheelchair, wearing a white lace dress; a straw hat trimmed with red cherries shaded her face. In contrast to all the other women with their perspiring bodies and exhausted faces, she looked as fresh as if she had just emerged from the bath. Her fair hair, which was streaked with gray, was braided into two plaits that encircled her fair face like a halo. Her tip-tilted nose was delicately strewn with freckles that spread to the middle of her plump cheeks, and her feet were shod in white canvas sandals that had never trodden the ground. Next to her sat a young man in a brightly colored shirt and trousers, with fair hair, pale blue eyes, and heavy sideburns. He was humming a rhythmic tune to himself and tapping his feet.

  “Lady, don’t you think you’re a little too old for a fertility blessing?” asked Dvora in her rude way as she thrust a number slip into the woman’s hand. “And as for the wheelchair, Sara doesn’t do legs anymore. Only fertility. But if you want to wait, nobody’s stopping you. You can always try,” she added and turned to the woman next in line.

  The springs of the wheelchair squeaked slightly as it rolled into the darkness of the house. Sitting up in bed and smiling, Sara received them in her room.

  The woman’s eyes, which were straying over the room, suddenly opened wide. Her face paled and she gripped the arms of her chair in a desperate attempt to stand up. Then she dropped back heavily again, took off her round glasses, which had misted over, and wiped them agitatedly on the wide skirt of her dress. The young man followed her look and his eyes came to rest on the picture that had focused her attention. It was hanging on the whitewashed wall, above Sara’s bed, between two pictures of men in fezzes.

  “That’s my father,” she said, partly to herself, partly to the young man, who was looking at her anxiously.

  “Elizabeth,” Sara said, breaking the tense silence in the room, “you’ve come back. How good it is to see you. How is your mother?”

  “My mother died ten years ago,” came the halting, somewhat surprised reply.

  Silence fell again. Elizabeth sniffed the scented air appreciatively and hesitated before going on. “My father told me about the smells. I’ve come from the house. I had to wait a long time at the Mandelbaum Gate before they gave me a permit to enter the town, and I have to go back tomorrow. They told me that you have the photographs.”

  “Yes, your father left them to me,” Sara said almost apologetically.

  “I’d like to have the photographs of myself and my mother and a few of the town as a memento,” said Elizabeth, her voice full of pleading, as if she expected a refusal. “I’m writing a new book about Jerusalem and my family and I’d like to illustrate it with the photographs. If you have no objections, of course,” she added.

  “Come back this evening, and Pnina-Mazal can help you choose.”

  As if unable to believe her good fortune, Elizabeth turned to the youth, who was gripping the handles of her wheelchair so tightly that his knuckles turned white, and translated Sara’s words to him. A smile appeared on his face, his blue eyes opened wide, and he nodded at her in thanks. At that moment Sara felt the earth slipping beneath her feet as she heard the ocean waves murmuring in her ears, threatening to drag her down to the depths.

  “Please allow me to introduce my son Robert,” said Elizabeth, noticing Sara’s pallor. “He accompanies me everywhere.”

  “Edward’s grandson,” Sara whispered, as if to herself.

  Robert bent down and whispered something to his mother with a smile. “He wants me to tell you that you’re the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen,” Elizabeth said.

  “They have eyes and see not,” Sara whispered, turning even paler than before. “I’m already an old grandmother.”

  At that moment the tension relaxed and Elizabeth turned her wheelchair toward Sara and buried her head in her lap, weeping bitterly. Sara stroked her hair.

  “I know he was happy with you,” she said. “In all the letters he sent me he told me about his love for you and about all your good deeds.”

  Sara was moved by her words. She sat leaning forward on her bed, stroking Elizabeth’s head, her eyes fixed on Robert as tears rolled down her cheeks and wet the gray head on her lap.

  Crazy Dvora burst into the room with an anxious expression on her face. The line outside was growing longer and she couldn’t understand what was taking them so long in the room.

  Elizabeth, Edward—Dvora,” Sara introduced them. And she immediately recovered, cleared her throat, and said, “Sorry, I meant Robert, Edward’s grandson.”

  Dvora and Elizabeth pretended not to have noticed the mistake.

  Afterward she asked Dvora to take her guests to Pnina-Mazal, who had bought a spacious new apartment in the suburb of Rehavia and taken Yitzhak to live with her. Sara warned them that Pnina-Mazal’s house was full of cats, and anyone who disliked four-footed creatures with whiskers might prefer to meet her outside her home. Elizabeth burst out laughing at the description of the cats and informed Sara that she too had a house full of cats, and that perhaps their common love of the creatures had originated in their childhood, for they had grown up like sisters.

  * * *

  Early that evening Elizabeth, Pnina-Mazal, and Robert burst into Sara’s house. Pnina-Mazal pushed the wheelchair and from time to time she hugged Elizabeth’s shoulders warmly. So radiant with happiness were the two women that an onlooker might indeed have taken them for a pair of sisters, arbitrarily parted by the cruel hand of fate and meeting again after long years of separation. Robert, deprived of his occupation, stood to one side, Edward’s shy smile on his face and his hands delving deep in his pockets as if searching for something to do.

  On Sara’s scarred wooden table supper was ready: warm homemade pitas, a finely chopped salad in a tahini sauce, eggs fried with fragrant herbs, green olives from the giant jar standing in the corner of the kitchen, and purple mulberry preserves for dessert.

  Giggling like schoolgirls Pnina-Mazal and Elizabeth sat and reminisced, and after they ran out of memories they talked about cats, compared numbers and sizes and gave each other advice on rearing and breeding.

  After black coffee and sesame cookies Sara led them to her bedroom. “Open the lid of the sandouk,” she instructed Pnina-Mazal.

  The two women stared in astonishment at the stacks of tins revealed to their eyes.

  “You never told me.” Pnina-Mazal looked reproachfully at her mother.

  Sara ignored the tone of rebuke in her voice and asked them to take out the tins and put them on the bed. When they reached the tin at the bottom of the chest she stopped them and explained that it contained pictures that were not fit to be seen.

  With flushed, expectant faces, as gay and lighthearted as a couple of schoolgirls, Pnina-Mazal and Elizabeth opened tin after tin. They spilled the pictures onto Sara’s starched bed linen, and fanning them out like hands of cards they inspected and discussed them one by one.

  With every picture removed from its tin and laid aside Sara felt as if she had been stabbed by a dagger. When she could bear it no longer she left them to it, and only returned when R
obert came into the kitchen some hours later and told her that they had finished. Sara tried to ignore the big pile of photographs lying on Elizabeth’s knees as she sat erect in her wheelchair and said good-bye to her with a smile and a hug.

  “Naturally I’ll send you a copy of my book,” promised Elizabeth, raising herself slightly in her wheelchair to kiss the bending Sara’s forehead, and she wheeled herself rapidly into the darkness outside as if afraid that Sara would regret it and ask her for the pictures back. Pnina-Mazal and Robert argued over the right to push the wheelchair; Pnina-Mazal won, and pushed her friend through the narrow alleys of the neighborhood.

  When they reached the taxi waiting at the end of the road, crazy Dvora caught up with them, panting for breath and holding a flat parcel wrapped up in newspaper in her hand.

  “Sara wanted you to have this too,” she said and gave Elizabeth the parcel.

  Elizabeth put the parcel on her knees. Carefully she unwrapped the newspaper and found herself looking into her father’s light blue eyes.

  “Sara wants to give me the picture that was hanging on her wall?” she asked incredulously.

  “Yes, she asked me to tell you that the picture belongs to you. She only had it for safekeeping,” she said, and made her way back up the alley to Sara’s house, her wooden clogs clattering loudly on the paving stones.

  Elizabeth stared at the picture and tears streamed from her eyes and wet the lenses of her glasses, trickled down her nose, and dripped onto the glass of the frame, where they collected in a salty little puddle.

  Pnina-Mazal gently stroked her hair, then opened the door of the taxi and together with Robert helped the weeping Elizabeth to get in and sit down.