The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem

by Sarit Yishai-Levi

  “I didn’t go to the Kurds,” I whispered.

  “So where did you go?” my father asked, not understanding.

  “I went to Nona Rosa,” I replied and burst into tears.

  “My darling,” my father said, dropping the belt, kneeling, and taking me in his arms. “My sweetie, you know that Nona Rosa won’t be going back to her house anymore. She’s living at Har Hamenuchot now.”

  “I thought she’d gotten lost again and that she’d soon find her way back,” I wept. “But she didn’t come. She didn’t come.” My father kissed me and tried to pacify me, but the spring of my tears welled uncontrollably.

  “Dio santo, David, I asked you to give her a little slap, not kill her,” my mother said from the doorway, looking astounded at the sight of her weeping daughter clasped in her husband’s arms.

  “She was missing Rosa,” my father said. “She went looking for her at her house.”

  My mother looked at me as if she couldn’t believe her ears, her stare morphing into an expression I hadn’t seen before. Perhaps there was even some tenderness in it. But instead of hugging me like I wanted so much, instead of consoling me as my father had, she simply walked out of the room and closed the door behind her.

  Then came the day when the family decided it was time to remove the furniture and belongings from Nona Rosa’s house and return it to its owners, the Barazani family. Mother said we should sell it all to the junkman, because we’d already sold everything of value when we’d needed the money and everything leftover was worthless.

  “Nothing’s worth anything for you!” Becky exclaimed. “The dinner set is worthless? The Shabbat candlesticks? The chandelier? It’s all worthless?”

  “So you take them, but we’ll sell the rest to the junkman.”

  “Calm down, Luna,” said Rachelika, who was the most reasonable of the three sisters. “The cabinet’s worth a lot. It has crystal mirrors and a marble surface.”

  “So you take it. I’m not bringing junk into my house. I have enough garbage as it is.”

  “All right,” Rachelika said, “I’ll take the sideboard and the cabinet.”

  “And I’ll take the dinner set,” said Becky.

  “No, actually I want the dinner set,” my mother blurted.

  “You just said it’s all junk,” Becky said, annoyed.

  “No, the dinner set is from Father and Mother’s wedding. It was a gift from Nona Mercada.”

  “So why should you get it?” said Becky, not giving in.

  “Because I’m the eldest, that’s why. I’ve got rights.”

  “Just listen to her. I’m going to explode!” Becky stood up and started shouting. “Just a moment ago it was all junk, and just when I said I wanted the dinner set, she suddenly wants it for herself. If Rachelika’s taking the sideboard and you’re taking the dinner set, what’s left for me?” She was on the verge of tears.

  “Whatever you want,” my mother said. “As far as I’m concerned you can take it all: the armchairs, the couch, the table, the pictures, everything.”

  “I want the wardrobe with the mirrors and the lions,” I said.

  The three of them looked over at me, astonished.

  “What did you say?” my mother asked.

  “I want the wardrobe with the mirrors and the lions on the top that was in Nona’s room.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense,” my mother said.

  “I want it,” I said, stomping my foot.

  “And where are you going to put the wardrobe with the lions? On my head?”

  “In my room.”

  “All right, you’ve been heard, Gabriela. Don’t interfere in grown-up matters. Go outside and play.”

  “I want the wardrobe with the lions!” I persisted.

  “And I want a Cadillac convertible,” my mother replied. “Go downstairs and stop getting in the way.” She turned her back on me and continued dividing up Nona’s things as if I wasn’t there.

  “All right, we’re in agreement,” she told her sisters. “Rachelika’s taking the cabinet, I’m taking the dinner set, and Becky, you take whatever you want of what’s left.”

  “I want the wardrobe with the mirrors and the lions!” I repeated.

  “You can want all you like!”

  “What is it with you and that wardrobe?” Rachelika asked gently.

  “I want a memento of Nona,” I said, weeping.

  “But sweetie,” Rachelika said, “it’s huge. Who’s going to carry it up five flights to your apartment? Your mother’s right. You don’t have room for it. I’ll take you to Nono and Nona’s house and you can choose whatever you want.”

  “But the wardrobe,” I wailed, “I want the wardrobe with the lions.”

  “Enough, ignore her. Why are you even talking to her?” my mother said to Rachelika irritably.

  “Luna, basta! Can’t you see the child’s sad? It’s not the wardrobe. It’s the sentimental value, isn’t it, dolly?”

  I nodded. I wished Rachelika were my mother. If only I could swap so that my mother would be Boaz’s mother and Rachelika would be mine. My mother loved Boaz more than me anyway.

  Rachelika held me to her and kissed me on the forehead. I sank into her arms. The softness of her belly and big chest enveloped me, and for a moment I felt I was being hugged by Nona Rosa. Feeling warm and safe surrounded by my aunt’s big body, I finally calmed down.

  They sold the wardrobe with the lions to the junkman as well as the chandelier, the couch, the table, the chairs, the armchairs, and the tapestries. Mother took the dinner set but gave in to Becky on the candlesticks and the rest of the porcelain crockery. Rachelika took the glass-fronted cabinet and the big grandfather clock that nobody else wanted.

  As I stood in Nono and Nona’s yard for the last time and watched the junkmen load their precious and cherished possessions onto a cart harnessed to a tired old horse, the tears flowed from my eyes. Rachelika wiped them away and showed me a bunch of items wrapped in an old tablecloth that in a moment would be heaved onto the cart. “Pick whatever you want,” she said, and I chose a big oil painting of a river encircled by mountains with snow-covered peaks that reached into a clear blue sky. I had never really paid the painting any attention before, but it was all I had left, and I clutched it close to my heart.

  And when the junkmen finished emptying the house and it was time to load the wardrobe with the mirrors and the lions, I stood to the side as they struggled to get it through the door. It was as if the wardrobe was resisting, and they were left with no choice but to remove its doors. I couldn’t stand the sight of the doors separated from one another, and as I ran toward the cart, my mother shouted to Becky, “Catch her! Why did we have to bring her here with us?”

  * * *

  Every day at two o’clock on the dot Father would come home from the bank. While he was still downstairs he would whistle to the tune of “Shoshana, Shoshana, Shoshana” so we’d know he’d arrived, and I’d run to the landing and look down over the railing. He always carried the rolled-up copy of Yedioth Ahronoth that he’d pick up on the way. Once he walked through the door, he’d go and wash his hands and then take off his jacket and carefully hang it over the back of a chair so it wouldn’t crease. Father always took great care with his appearance when he went to the bank. Even in the summer when everybody was wearing short-sleeved shirts and sandals, Father kept his jacket on and wore shoes that he took extra care to polish. “A person should respect his place of work,” he’d say, “so that his place of work will respect him.”

  After he’d take off his jacket he’d loosen his tie, and only then would he sit down at the table for lunch. One day, when Mother served macaroni with kiftikas con queso, cheese croquettes in tomato sauce, Father topped his macaroni with a respectable portion of kiftikas con queso and sauce, mixed it up, and ate it all together.

  My mother lost her temper. “Why are you eating like a primitive, David? You should eat each thing separately, first the kiftikas and then the macaroni, and put
the tomato and salted cheese sauce on the macaroni.”

  “Don’t tell me how to eat,” my father said. “I learned to eat macaroni long before you even knew what macaroni was. The Italians eat macaroni exactly like this, only they have kiftikas with meat and they sprinkle cheese over it.”

  “I want mine like Father’s,” I said.

  “Of course you want it like Father’s,” my mother hissed. “Great, David. Now your daughter will become uncivilized like you.”

  Father ignored her and continued eating. “Not enough salt,” he said.

  “That’s because I’m not in love,” she replied. But I didn’t understand what she meant.

  “And pepper too,” my father went on. “You cook like my troubles, without flavor and without aroma.”

  “If you don’t like it, then go eat at Taraboulos.”

  Ronny and I tried to ignore the daggers flying across the table. For a long time now our parents’ relationship had been tense. Through the wall that separated our room from theirs I’d hear them arguing at night, my mother crying, my father threatening he’d leave if she went on nagging, the door slamming, words of hatred shouted in a whisper so that we children wouldn’t hear. I’d cover my ears with my little hands and pray to God that Ronny was asleep and couldn’t hear what I did.

  One afternoon, when Rachelika came over with her children and they sent us off to play while they whispered together in the kitchen, I heard my mother tell her, “If it weren’t for the children I’d have sent him to hell a long time ago.” And Rachelika replied, “Paciencia, hermanita. It’s just a bump in the road, and it’ll pass,” to which my mother said, “It’ll never pass. It’s how he is, always looking at other women. Only now he’s looking at the same one all the time and I have to live with it.”

  Rachelika said, “I thought you didn’t care what he did,” and my mother replied, “Of course I don’t care about him, but he’s my husband and he humiliates me and I get so upset I could kill him. And worst of all, he lies. I know he has someone on the side, and he lies about it.”

  And Rachelika said, “Enough, Luna, you have to get hold of yourself so that nothing happens to you. You must think of the children. Don’t break up your family, God forbid.”

  “What frightens me,” said my mother, “is that if anyone breaks up the family, it’ll be him, and what will I do if he gets tired not only of me but of the children as well? How can I raise two children on my own? That woman, may she burn in hell, I’d tear her clothes off and throw her naked onto Jaffa Road.”

  Then they started talking so quietly that no matter how hard I pressed my ear to the wall I couldn’t hear, and the more I tried to understand who the woman was my mother wanted to throw naked onto Jaffa Road, the less I understood. And most of all I didn’t understand how it could be that my mother didn’t care about my father, and why my mother was frightened that Father would break up the family, and what breaking up a family meant. Was it like tearing down a building, like they did with Ezra’s grocery in Nahalat Shiva, and putting up a new building in its place?

  After lunch my father rose from the table and went straight into the bedroom without helping my mother clear the table. Unusual for her, my mother didn’t say a word about it. She cleared the plates and put them in the sink, cleaned the tomato sauce from Ronny’s face, and took off his stained shirt.

  “You’re a primitive too,” she scolded him, and after she changed his shirt and sent me to my room to do homework, she washed the dishes and lay down on the living room couch, warning us to be quiet and not wake her. And it occurred to me then that my mother hadn’t been going to nap in the bedroom with Father for a long time.

  When I saw that Mother had closed her eyes, I slipped into their bedroom. Father was asleep on his side in his undershirt and underpants and hadn’t bothered to cover himself. I went over to him quietly and waved my hand over his eyes to make sure he was really asleep and wouldn’t, God forbid, suddenly wake up and surprise me. Peeping from the pocket of his pants that were folded neatly over the back of the chair by the bed was his brown leather wallet. I carefully removed it, took out a five-lira note, and put the wallet back.

  I hid the five lirot deep inside my backpack, and the next day, after getting off the Number 12 bus at the last stop on my way home from school, I stopped at Schwartz’s store and bought myself a new pencil box with colored crayons, and even had enough money left over for a pack of yellow Alma gum and a chocolate-banana ice cream. And when my father didn’t say a word about five lirot missing from his wallet, I continued taking from it, a different sum each time but never more than five lirot.

  As time went by, I got bolder. I started stealing money from the teachers’ purses at school and stuff from the children’s backpacks in class: erasers, pencil boxes, stickers, and the allowance their parents had given them. One time I stole so much money that I had enough to take Ronny to the Luna Park and go on all the rides and buy us both a falafel and soda.

  Mother and Father were so busy fighting that they didn’t notice. Even when Ronny, despite my warning, told Mother that I’d taken him to the park, she said, “That’s nice,” and didn’t ask questions. The fights taking place behind Father and Mother’s bedroom wall became more frequent. My mother’s crying tore through the silence of the night as my father tried to hush her. Sometimes he’d leave the house, slamming the door, and I couldn’t fall asleep until I heard him come back hours later. One night when they couldn’t control their volume and even my fingers couldn’t drown out the noise, Ronny crawled into my bed, hugged me tightly, and cried. I held him close, stroked his head, and rested my lips on his forehead until he fell asleep. When I woke up in the morning I was soaked to the skin. Ronny had wet my bed. Mother came in and when she saw the soaking bed asked me, astonished, “What’s all this? Did you do peepee in bed?” and I wanted to tell her it wasn’t me, but my little brother’s sad eyes stopped me and I stayed quiet.

  “That’s all I need right now,” she said. “You should be ashamed of yourself! A big girl like you doing peepee in bed.”

  That day after morning recess I was called to the principal’s office, and I knew the game was up—I’d been caught.

  My legs were trembling as I knocked on the principal’s door. He was sitting at his big desk, and behind him hung a large picture of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, and beside it, one of the president of the State of Israel, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. Without speaking the principal signaled me to sit in the chair across from him. As soon as I sat down, my homeroom teacher Penina Cohen got up from the chair next to mine and stood beside the principal, who pointed to my backpack situated on his desk.

  “Is this your bag?” asked Penina Cohen.

  “Yes,” I nodded.

  “Yes what?” she asked harshly.

  “Yes, miss.”

  And then without a word the teacher emptied its contents onto the desk. Pens, erasers, crayons, pencil boxes, and piles of coins and bills fell from it together with my textbooks and homework books. The principal looked at me and said, “Gabriela Siton, can you explain this?”

  I couldn’t and didn’t want to explain. I just wanted the ground to open up and swallow me so I could disappear from that room, from the school, from the world, forever.

  Everything that took place in the principal’s office next has been erased from my memory. It was only at home afterward that I heard the story from my father. When teachers’ complaints about missing items increased, they realized that a thief was active in the school. No one suspected the students until students began reporting missing erasers and pencils and pencil boxes and money. And when my teacher noticed that I was her only student who hadn’t complained about theft, and when the children began telling about my after-school spending sprees, the suspicion immediately arose that the thief was Gabriela Siton. And just to make sure it was me, they took me out of the classroom and then searched my backpack without me knowing.

  That day I was sent home early. My parents were summone
d to the principal’s office, and after they got home, my father beat me with the belt with the painful buckle, but this time he didn’t pretend to pacify my mother. He really thrashed me. Ronny cried and threw himself onto the floor. My father was in a rage and hit me again and again until even my mother came to my defense: “Enough, David, you’ll kill the girl.” He stopped only when I was writhing in pain on the bathroom floor. But that was nothing compared with my real punishment: facing my friends in class the following day.

  From then on my status changed. The other kids in school bullied me. Years later whenever I couldn’t sleep, instead of counting sheep I’d recount the nicknames of the children who were with me in school. I remembered them by the order in which they sat in class: Ita Pita, who was bullied because she was fat, Fay the Lay, who, so rumor had it, let boys feel her tits after school, London Bridge, who’d immigrated from London just as we started to learn English, and me, the girl who until then had been class queen, I was called Ganefriela, a play on the Hebrew word for thief.

  My father walked around like a caged tiger, trying to hold back his anger. “I’m a bank employee,” he said, “as straight as a die, but my daughter’s a thief!” He couldn’t forgive himself for his terrible failure in my upbringing, and he refused to forgive me. But he certainly made no attempt to understand why a girl who had “ev-ery-thing,” as my mother repeatedly said, had to steal.

  My mother didn’t give a thought to it. She didn’t know about the hell I went through every day at school, the insults I suffered, the bullying, and even if she had, I doubt she or my father would have done anything to stop it. They surely would have thought it a fitting punishment for somebody who’d brought such shame on the family. So I didn’t say a word.

  * * *

  They never mentioned my thievery again. My father and mother carried on with their petty, sad life, and as time went by their quarreling was gradually replaced with tense silences.