Four Mothers

by Shifra Horn

  Sara and Pnina-Mazal never received a copy of the book. When Pnina-Mazal tried to find out the reason for the delay, she received an official letter from Elizabeth’s publisher. The letter, which opened with the words “I am sorry to inform you,” explained everything.

  Soon after her return to America, the paralysis had spread through Elizabeth’s body and she died before she could finish her new book. Pnina-Mazal’s letters to Robert went unanswered, and were returned with the stamp: “Address Unknown.” The pictures that had been so carefully selected were never found.

  * * *

  My grandmother Pnina-Mazal never married again. In a moment of frankness Sara told me that she suspected it was because of her, because Pnina-Mazal didn’t want to leave her. Today I’m sure that Pnina-Mazal never remarried because of her cats. She had plenty of suitors, but they were all defeated in the battle for her heart and gave up trying when they saw that her cats were more important to her than they were. The most persistent of them all was Avner from the Main Post Office on Jaffa Road, who was Pnina-Mazal’s neighbor. But he too retired from the field after bloody battles with her cats, who drove a wedge between them.

  Nobody knows how many of them there were. Thirty, forty, or perhaps fifty. And in every imaginable color: black, white, gray, red, brown, and striped. With red, green, brown, and blue eyes. Only at night they all looked the same: black with red eyes, glittering and dazzling as the headlights of a car. And they were everywhere. On the beds, taking over the down quilts, littering in the cupboards and settling down there with their kittens at their teats. Above all they were drawn to the kitchen, the icebox, and the pantry.

  And a strong smell pervaded the air. As if it weren’t cats she kept there but skunks spraying the threshold and the doorways with their stink as if to announce: This is where I live, and anyone who doesn’t like the smell can go somewhere else. And the noise was unbearable, too, especially in springtime, when the howling of the cats in heat rose into the scented air and drove the neighbors insane.

  Avner, the bachelor neighbor, suffered more than anyone else from the warm bundles of fur that surrounded Pnina-Mazal wherever she went. From the day he moved into a rented room in the building where she lived, and his eyes met hers, he made it a habit to drop in for coffee every afternoon, listening to the operas she played him on her gramophone, telling her about his plans for his retirement, and always pretending not to notice the stench. Sometimes they were to be seen holding hands in the Zion cinema, and afterward in the Nava café, gazing into each other’s eyes over the steaming cups of tea on the marble table. The week he intended to go to Sara and ask her formally for her daughter’s hand, the incident occurred.

  Avner spent most of his time at the Main Post Office on Jaffa Road. He licked stamps, tied parcels, and sealed them with red sealing wax. In the evening, when he reached his room, he would put the cauldron on the gas ring, and when the water boiled he would wash his dirty shirt, starch it, and iron it with his steam iron. Anyone who didn’t know him and who saw him in his immaculate ironed shirts was sure that he had a devoted wife at home, competing with her neighbors over the whiteness of her husband’s shirts and the stiffness of their collars. Every morning he left his house in a freshly washed and ironed shirt, and even when the collars and cuffs began to fray, he would go on washing, starching, and ironing his shirts to death.

  One evening, when he returned to his room with the sweet taste of the glue on the stamps he had been licking for eight hours on his tongue, he put the cauldron on the stove to boil as usual, and prepared to wash his best shirt, which he intended to wear the next day when he went to ask Sara for her daughter’s hand. When he had finished washing it, he ironed some other shirts, and as he was putting them carefully away in the wardrobe, he heard a knock at the door. Glad to have his solitariness interrupted, he hurried to the door and opened it wide. But there was no visitor waiting on the doorstep. Disappointed, he closed the door behind him without noticing Pnina-Mazal’s old striped cat stealing into the room. Its swollen belly and teats worn out by generations of sucking kittens dragged on the floor.

  In the morning he got out of bed and with eyes bleary from sleep pulled a shirt from the top of the pile. Then a hairy paw armed with claws as sharp as spurs descended on his outstretched hand and left four bloody scratches on his skin. His hands groping wildly in the darkness of the wardrobe seized hold of the fur of the four-footed creature that was lying on his starched shirts, with the toothless pink gums of five tiny, softly purring kittens sticking to it like leeches. For the first time since he had started working at the Main Post Office on Jaffa Road, Avner did not show up for work that morning. After he had taken his courage in his hands and shaken the mother and her offspring off his shirts stained with blood, hairs, and flea droppings, he could not find a clean shirt to wear. Not even at the bottom of the pile.

  Then he came to a decision. He left the house in a stained shirt full of wisps of fur and strode furiously in the direction of the Machane Yehuda market. He returned with kilos of chicken feet and heads packed in big cardboard orange boxes, which he dragged all the way home. Pnina-Mazal’s fifty cats came out to meet him and followed him in single file up the stairs.

  Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin leading the mice of the town to their deaths, Avner led the column of cats into his kitchen. And Avner was not the kind of man to let the cats eat raw meat. Till late at night he labored, cooking the chicken feet and heads in the great laundry cauldron on the gas ring. Then he dotted plates from his gold-rimmed china dinner service all round the house, and settled down to watch them enjoying their last supper. So he thought, at least, for on his way to the market he had stopped at Oppalteka’s pharmacy at the entry to the Even Israel quarter. What he bought there nobody knows for sure, but it certainly included a sedative. After they had eaten their fill he gave the cats water to push the food into their stomachs, and in the water he sprinkled the pharmacist’s powder.

  And the cats slept. And how they slept, for they did not even feel him picking them up and squeezing them one on top of the other into the cardboard boxes that had previously held their food. He took them to the yard, where he had previously dug a pit, and threw them all into it, big and small; black, white, and striped; fat and thin; speckled and pied. After he had thrown them in he covered them with a pile of earth and danced on it for a long time like a Red Indian warrior.

  * * *

  What happened the next day nobody in the neighborhood will ever forget. The drama began when Pnina-Mazal burst into the street, her hair disheveled, claiming that she had been robbed. The neighbors who had gathered at the sound of her cries burst into relieved laughter when it transpired that the only thing she had been robbed of were her disgusting cats. The cat haters among them sniggered and swore that they had nothing to do with it, and that they wouldn’t have stolen a single flea-bitten tail from her menagerie of wild animals, not even if their lives depended on it. Then they began to joke. They mentioned a certain Yerahmiel, a skinner who worked with Yehuda the tanner, and said that he might have stolen the cats to make a fur coat for the fat lady from the first floor, whose wardrobe was crammed with the furs of creatures that had long disappeared from the face of the earth. Every day, even on the hottest summer days, this woman would emerge from her house with her head held high, all her double chins wobbling, and her body, which resembled a stack of tires, wrapped in the fur of some anonymous hairy creature that had sacrified its short life on the altar of her body. And when the fount of their jokes ran dry, they ran to protect Avner and his daring deed, refusing to hand him over to the furious Pnina-Mazal.

  At that moment a terrible voice broke from the depths of the earth. And the voice grew louder and louder, as if dozens of devils were about to burst out of hell, scatter in all directions, and punish them all for their sins. As the faces of the neighbors clouded in anxiety, Pnina-Mazal’s shrieks turned to shouts of joy: “That’s my Sisi, that’s my Mimi, my Yuki, my Ziva!” For they all
had names and she knew them all and could recognize them by their voices, and many of her neighbors were ready to swear that they had heard her talking to them in their own language, and they answered her, and she did whatever they asked her to. And after she had recognized their voices she ran to the mound of freshly dug earth where the sound was coming from, and began scraping it away with her fingernails. Nobody went to help her. Only Avner, who was kindhearted by nature, and who loved her dearly, and who had only done what he did on the impulse of the moment, took a soup spoon from his kitchen and tried to help her break through the layer of earth.

  One by one they emerged from the bowels of the earth, like soldiers in camouflage uniforms emerging from their trenches, the pupils of their eyes, which had grown accustomed to the darkness, contracting and narrowing to blind slits in the daylight. Tottering and stumbling they emerged on their four velvety paws, indistiguishable from one another, their coats stiff and clotted with dirt. And Pnina-Mazal greeted them joyfully, like a mother welcoming her long-lost children, hugging each of them as if it were the dearest to her heart, calling it by name, kissing its dusty ears, and sending it home with a light slap on the rear. And thus they emerged from the pit, all thirty, forty, or maybe fifty cats, down to the last one, safe and sound and hungry. And people say that there were even three more of them, for one of the cats who had been buried in the last stages of pregnancy had given birth in the darkness of the pit, and came out accompanied by her litter, gripping the napes of their necks between her teeth.

  And the unfortunate Avner, who was a pure-hearted and honest man, could not look Pnina-Mazal in the eye, even though she never said a word to him about what had happened to her pets. His marriage plans were buried in the pit together with the cats.

  That same week he carefully packed all his shining, stiff-collared shirts in tissue paper, after boiling and laundering them all over again, and moved to another neighborhood. Pnina-Mazal remained in her big house with her cats, and from that day on none of her neighbors dared to slander her pets, never mind kick one or another of them who happened to cross his path. For if they had emerged unscathed from the bowels of the earth, and even multiplied there, it could only mean that they were protected by hidden forces, and it was forbidden to touch them, speak ill of them, or even think bad thoughts about them.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The many stories about the women of my family did not bring me any nearer to my father. When I despaired of finding him, my mother’s comrades sent me to Sasha.

  “Sasha knew your mother better than any of us,” they told me. “He was the only one she was prepared to talk to, and not only about the problems of the Party.”

  I found him on Haj Adoniya Hacohen Street, in an old-age home in the Bukharan quarter. I asked a wrinkled, parchment-skinned old crone, dozing on a chair at the entrance to the building, where I could find him. Her reaction to his name was unexpected. The wrinkles on her face deepened in a broad smile, and with an agility surprising for her age she led me to him, skipping like a girl. With a childish gesture she pointed her finger at an old man seated in a fetal position in a wheelchair in the yard.

  He seemed very merry and carefree as he sat there loudly cracking jokes to an admiring audience of his peers. The hard of hearing among them held their ears close to his roaring mouth, and the slanting rays of the afternoon sun reddened their transparent, blue-veined earlobes. He smiled as I approached him and I returned his smile. His eyes, traveling over my body with the appraising look of a man in his prime, brought an embarrassed blush to my cheeks.

  “And what’s a beauty like you doing in this vale of tears?” he asked, and caressed my breasts and legs with his eyes.

  “I wanted to ask you a few questions,” I replied, and the blush spread to my neck and chest.

  “Go on, shoo.” He waved his arms at the old folks surrounding him. “God has answered my prayers. She’s come at last,” he roared at them as they began shuffling off obediently in the direction of the building. “Don’t disturb us. This is the girl of my dreams. Paradise couldn’t be better.”

  I sat down on the chair vacated next to him. The seat was still warm from the buttocks of a little admirer who bore a pointed hump like a mark of Cain on her back. The beady black eyes glittering in her birdlike face fixed me with a malevolent look.

  “Don’t take any notice of her,” he said, and waved his skinny arm dismissively at the little hunchback limping toward the door. “She’s in love with me,” he boasted. “And this is her chair. She curses anyone who sits on it. And she knows how to give the evil eye, too, so you’d better spit on the ground and make a hamsa at her back,” he added with a mischievous smile.

  For a moment I was tempted to do as he said. I looked at him again, and at the sight of the twinkle in his eye I clenched the fingers of my left hand, which had already begun to spread out in the five-fingered sign, into a fist.

  “And now, my beauty, what can I do for you? As you see, I can’t do you much good in the bed department,” he said, and glanced at his loins.

  “I wanted to ask you…”

  “I knew you weren’t going to drag me to bed.” He sighed. “So what’s the question?”

  “Geula from the Party is my mother.”

  For a moment it seemed to me that his face froze and showed signs of embarrassment.

  “I came to ask you if you ever met my father.” I heroically succeeded in finishing the sentence.

  The expression on his face changed again, and this time it grew grave. It seemed to me that another old man had taken his place on the chair. Deep lines netted the laughing expression I had previously seen on his face. He raised his eyes and looked at me, no longer with the look of an old lecher but that of a kindly grandfather whose beloved granddaughter has come to visit him.

  From that moment on he began to talk about her without a pause. As if the mere mention of her name had pressed a hidden button and activated a machine that could not be stopped. He spoke for about an hour, and when he finished talking he fell immediately into a deep sleep, and did not reply when I said good-bye. As if the effort of remembering had drained the last vestiges of his strength.

  What follows is the tape recording I made of his words.

  “Of course I knew her. Who didn’t know her in Jerusalem? She always stood out. She had the reddest hair I’ve ever seen. Not the usual ginger but red as blood. Her hair was stiff and unruly and stood out wildly round her head. She had pointed teeth, which gave her a cunning, foxy look. But that wasn’t the only reason she stood out. She was always the cleverest and most extreme. She reached us very young, at the age of thirteen or fourteen, together with the Arab boy who jumped to attention at her every request. I think they came with an old Party member who later went back to Russia. Was he her teacher? I don’t know. In short, as I said, she was very sharp and very extreme. She wanted us to plant bombs in the Jewish Agency offices and the British army headquarters. She incited us to engage in bloody campaigns against the Hagana, composed virulent leaflets calling for an all-Arab revolt against the British occupation and Jewish imperialism, and painted slogans on the walls. We didn’t always agree with her. And when we didn’t, she would send us hard, dark looks that gave us gooseflesh, even though they came from a mere child, and later on, a young girl. In spite of her youth, she succeeded in gathering a large following. Because of her, we almost split into two camps. The Arab boy, in his quiet way, was the only one who succeeded in restraining her. They spoke to each other in a strange, guttural language none of us could understand. It wasn’t Arabic or Hebrew, or a combination of the two. Later on, when I met her mother, she told me that they had grown up together at the breasts of the same wet-nurse and invented a language of their own. The Arab boy worshiped her, and when she proposed her wild schemes, he would gently stroke her hand. When she got excited she was like a raging fire, lashing out indiscriminately in all directions. The Arab boy would pour water on the flames, not to put them out but to confine the fir
e and prevent it from spreading out of control and consuming everything it came into contact with. A romantic connection between them? I’m prepared to swear that there were no romantic or sexual ties between them. They loved each other very much, but like a brother and sister. Once I even asked her about it discreetly, and she looked at me with those flashing eyes and told me to mind my own business. Afterward, in a moment of grace, she opened up and told me that any such relationship with him was impossible, because it would be like incest. In short, she succeeded in twisting us all round her little finger. She received a lot of encouraging letters and praise from the Comintern. At a certain stage, when her opinions became so extreme that they endangered the Party, we tried to talk to her. But she stood her ground. She ignored all our warnings, and in all the Party debates she would repeat, ‘In the end you’ll see that I was right.’ At that stage, when we began to oppose her ideas, she began to suspect her comrades in the Party of plotting against her, and she went into hiding. The Arab acted as a liaison between her and the Party, and she would send messages and instructions through him. When she saw that we weren’t taking any notice, she gathered a handful of supporters around her and tried to operate independently of us. She printed pamphlets and held secret meetings. In those days bloody incidents took place. She knew that many of the comrades were so fed up with her that they wanted to hand her over to the authorities, in order, for once and for all, to get rid of this “red menace,” as they called her. And so she stayed in hiding. Until she had a baby—in other words, you. Who was the father? She never told a soul. I’m sure it wasn’t the Arab. A secret romance? As far as I know she never had one. Men were afraid of her, of her red hair, of her pointed teeth and her sharp tongue. She was always opinionated, extreme, and hard as nails. She looked like a man, she never showed any tenderness or exposed her feelings, and she walked around with a tough expression on her face, as if to say ‘Don’t come near me and don’t touch me.’ She dressed in a peculiar way too. She always wore men’s clothes that were a few sizes too big for her, and tried to hide her figure. When she finally emerged from hiding we almost fell off our chairs. It was the last thing we expected to see. Never mind the fact that her hair was black with red roots and she was wearing dark glasses like a blind woman—all our eyes were fixed on her stomach. It was huge, and she was in the eighth month of her pregnancy. Apart from that, she was the same as usual: the extreme opinions, the tongue lashings, and the accusations of betrayal. She related to her pregnancy as if it had nothing to do with her, or to be exact, as if it didn’t belong to her body. Nobody asked her who the father was. We were all afraid of her. Only that Arab of hers danced attendance on her and waited on her hand and foot. She exploited him. He would bring her delicacies during the siege of Jerusalem, clean her chair with his handkerchief before she sat down, and support her when she walked. Naturally we asked him who the father was. We were all bursting with curiosity. None of us could imagine her in a romantic context with a man, and speculations were rife. But the moment she approached with her huge belly, we would all fall silent and avert our eyes from her belly, afraid of her sharp tongue. In general, we would always shrink in her presence, and now, with her huge stomach, we were even more afraid of her than before. What did the Arab tell us? He said that he didn’t know. He also stated firmly that he wasn’t interested in what had happened, but only in the results. When we pushed him to the wall, he would shrug his shoulders, roll his black eyes to heaven, and say self-righteously that we should stop prying into her life, that he didn’t care who the father was, and in any case, we could take his name off the list of suspects. Rumors? There were plenty of rumors. Since none of us were attracted to her, and even if anyone was he would be too frightened of her terrible character to do anything about it, we dismissed the possibility that the father was one of the comrades. At the time in question, let me remind you, she was living underground and hardly came into contact with anyone except for her followers, who revered her, were in awe of her, and obeyed her instructions blindly, never mind how dangerous and insane they were. It’s hard to believe that any of her disciples made her pregnant. They worshiped her from afar, they worshiped the ground she walked on. But to get her pregnant? Not even in their wildest dreams. So I repeat: The chance that her daughter was the product of a romantic relationship is very slim indeed. I’m sorry to disappoint you. I don’t believe anyone in the world knows the answer except for your mother herself. And maybe even she doesn’t know. Rumors? There were plenty of those—like the rumors about the cruel gang rape that scandalized the town for months on end. The rumor spread because of a yeshiva student who participated in the rape, and afterward his conscience bothered him and he made the story public, thereby incriminating himself. The rabbis of the yeshiva, Hassidei Tzaddikim I think it was called, denied the whole thing, issuing curses and ostracisms against the impudent boy who had dared to besmirch the reputations of their innocent and illustrious students. What happened to him? Nobody knows. He vanished from the yeshiva after giving evidence at the police station. No doubt he couldn’t cope with the pressures exerted on him. They hushed the whole thing up very quickly, especially because the victim, a man or a woman, never made a complaint to the police but disappeared, and the case was closed. I remember that people speculated about it in secret, and even split their sides laughing at the thought that she had some little yeshiva student with earlocks and a beard swimming in her womb. This thought was particularly amusing to the comrades because she hated those yeshiva students so much, she loathed and detested them. It’s not certain she was raped, but it’s hard to ignore the coincidence, especially since she was living in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Meah Shearim at the time. No, I never visited her there, but I was told that her room was right in the middle of the neighborhood and right next door to the yeshiva from which the rapists came. I’m sorry I told you. Why don’t you ask her? She refuses to talk? What about your grandmother? She doesn’t know either? I’m really sorry. I’m sure there isn’t a person in the world who knows about the circumstances of your birth, apart from your mother. Perhaps she doesn’t know either, and that’s why she has nothing to tell you. One thing I can tell you. That pregnancy softened her toward the end. We sensed that she was truly happy about giving birth. She even began to knit. Yes. Who would have believed it? At our meetings she was quiet and soft-spoken, quite unlike her usual self, and her hands were busy knitting little white bootees and baby jackets. And when you were born, she brought you with her to the Party meetings. She would put you down in a padded Jaffa orange crate, and glance at you lovingly from time to time while she clattered her knitting needles. The noise of those knitting needles drove everybody crazy, but we were afraid to ask her to stop. And the Arab? He stuck to her like a Siamese twin, and he was very proud of you. He would rock you in his arms as if he really was your father, coo at you, and sing you songs in Arabic. Later on I heard that she concluded her legal studies. She wanted to defend the persecuted Arab minority, so she told us on one of her appearances at the Party office; these became rarer and rarer, until she stopped coming altogether, and disappeared together with her Arab. From then on I never heard a thing about them until you suddenly showed up, as beautiful as the girl of my dreams. Promise me that you’ll come back to visit me in my dreams, and give your mother my regards.”