The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem

by Sarit Yishai-Levi

  “It seems to me, madam,” now the officer was angry, “that you’re telling me barefaced lies! Your brother’s wanted for the murder of a British policeman. He’s a member of the Stern Gang, and we’re going to find him and hang him and his friends too.”

  Rosa was shocked by what the officer had told her, but in her heart she felt great pride. Something had finally come of her little brother. He wasn’t just a drunk qui no vala nada, worthless, as Gabriel said. He was fighting the Ingelish, damn them. Little Ephraim, may he be healthy, her dear brother, the apple of her eye, was no longer a drunk. He was a hero!

  Gabriel was waiting for her outside the Russian Compound.

  “The sons of bitches wouldn’t let me in,” he apologized.

  Breathlessly she told him about Ephraim. “Can you believe that’s what’s become of him?”

  “What are you so happy about?” he said, dampening her enthusiasm. “Being in the Stern Gang is right for him. They’re all bandits, they’re worse than the Arabs.”

  “But Gabriel,” she said, “he’s fighting to drive the cursed Ingelish out of Palestine!”

  “We don’t have to kill the English to get rid of them. We need to talk to them, negotiate. As they say in the Haganah, violence and murder are not our way. Jews do not murder for the sake of it.” With that he ended the discussion and started walking.

  Rosa was left not knowing what to do with herself. Only moments ago she’d been so proud of her little brother who’d stopped being a drunken oaf and become a freedom fighter, and now her husband was calling him a murderer. He can call him whatever he wants; for me he’s a hero! she thought. If only she could tell him that she, his big sister, was proud of him, so he knew she was here for him! Gracias, gracias el Dio, may He be praised forever, Ephraim is a man again.

  * * *

  The Habima Theatre was performing Uriel Acosta at the Edison. At the Maccabi sports field there was a national competition between Hapoel Jerusalem and Maccabi Hashmonai Jerusalem. But Gabriel was stuck at home with Rosa, staring at the newspaper advertisements. He needed to get out of Ohel Moshe, out of Jerusalem, and escape from himself. Since the day he saw Rochel with the Englishman in Tel Aviv, he had found no peace. An awful pain had settled in his chest. Nothing made him happy, not even his daughters, not even Luna. He felt like old age had overtaken him, a man of a little more than thirty feeling like an old man of sixty.

  He spoke to Rosa even less than he did before. When he’d come home from the shop he wouldn’t play with the girls. He didn’t have the patience. He’d lost a lot of weight and stopped shaving. Dark stubble adorned his face. The elegant, meticulously dressed man now appeared more unkempt than ever before. He started wearing a black French-style beret and spent a lot of time in his chair in the yard staring into space. He had even stopped buying Haaretz, the paper that once seemed glued to his hands.

  For years he’d leave the shop for his afternoon break, walk to Jaffa Road, and buy the paper from Franz, the fat newspaper seller who was a lawyer in Austria, and linger for a while exchanging views with him.

  “Did you hear about the tragedy in Tel Aviv?” Franz had asked in his thick German accent one afternoon before Gabriel became ill. “Tel Aviv’s first grandchild, Aharon Ellman, fell from their balcony and died.”

  “How did he die?” Gabriel asked, momentarily coming alive.

  “The mother,” Franz replied, “left him in his cradle on their third-floor balcony on Hagilboa Street, the child lost his balance, fell from the balcony, and died.”

  Gabriel took his paper, left a half-grush coin on the counter, and went on his way.

  Ill winds are blowing in the country, Gabriel thought as he walked back to the shop. The Jewish people are in danger. The death of a young child because of his mother’s negligence, sad though it might be, was but a tiny grain of sand in the storm that was approaching. He felt it in the pit of his stomach. He didn’t think he could endure his life any longer. Rosa, even the girls had become a burden. And Luna, she didn’t give up. She nagged him, the miskenica; she wanted her papo back. But he couldn’t go back to what he was, Dio mio, he couldn’t go back to being her beloved papo. He didn’t love himself, so how could he love her? How could he love her sisters? If only he could run. He’d join the Haganah. Perhaps if he occupied himself with the troubles of the Jewish people, he’d be less preoccupied with himself.

  In Germany they’re firing Jewish public transportation drivers and Jewish doctors from the hospitals. And what are we doing here in Palestine? Striking, Gabriel continued his train of thought. At such a difficult time, the teachers had decided to go on strike. They opposed teaching mornings and afternoons, so the girls were no longer going to school in the mornings, and he had Rosa going on at him. All of a sudden she’d started complaining. Up till then she hadn’t had a single grievance about anything, which made it easier to tolerate her, but now, sano que ’ste, she had a mouth on her. First she drove him crazy with her borracho brother, that wretched drunk, making him into a national hero. Then she complained that the girls were at home all day giving her a headache. What does she want, for me to leave the shop and look after them? I still have some self-respect. But do I? Does anyone really have self-respect these days? We’ve become a people of doormats, it’s disgusting! The British do as they please with us—curfews, arrests, intimidation. Just look at the big heroes in the market. All they know is talk: We’ll show them, we’ll do this, that, and the other to them. But each time there’s a curfew they rush to close their stalls and scurry home like mice to their holes. We’ve got self-respect? Crates of oranges that fell off a cargo ship wash up on the beach, and the whole of Tel Aviv is there—men, women, old people, and children—looting crates that aren’t theirs, foreign property, the fruit of other people’s labor. Looting the Sea, the paper said. Is this what people do with respect?

  Where have the old times gone? He longed for the pride felt in the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine in 1920, after Joseph Trumpeldor, who had lost an arm in the Russo-Japanese War, fell with his comrades defending Tel Hai. Gabriel would always remember the passionate eulogy delivered by Berl Katznelson, who said, among other things, “May the People of Israel remember the valiant men and women who braved mortal danger in days of struggle.”

  There hadn’t been much time for emotion back then. Each day brought fresh troubles as relations with the Arabs deteriorated. Gabriel, who had done business with both local Arabs and merchants from the Old City, had harbored hopes that the troubles were still caused by people from the radical fringes on both sides, as his own father, may he rest in peace, had explained to him. But when Arab hooligans ran amok in the Old City’s alleys, looting shops and homes, and burst into their house and took his mother’s jewelry, he began to question this belief. The sight of tens of thousands of Arabs celebrating in the city square, raising their hands to heaven and chanting, “Idbach al Yahud! Slaughter the Jews!” was permanently imprinted on his memory.

  When did we become enemies? Weren’t we always good neighbors over the years? Gabriel wondered.

  In normal times he would have taken Luna to hear the Yemenite singers Bracha Zefira and Nachum Nardi, who had come specially from Tel Aviv to perform at the Edison. He loved music, and Luna, unlike Rosa who was interested in nothing and was uneducated, Luna enjoyed culture like him. He was teaching her to enjoy the theater, the cinema, opera. When they were in Tel Aviv last year he’d taken her to the Opera House in Herbert Samuel Square to see The Barber of Seville, conducted by Mordechai Golinkin. Yes, he went to the opera with Luna, who was only a child, for who else could he have gone with? Which of the people in his life liked opera? His ignoramus of a wife? His sister Allegra and her fool of a husband? Perhaps his mother. If she were a normal human being and not the evil witch she’d become, she might have been a worthy companion for the opera.

  Once, long ago, before the Flood, before the catastrophes befell him, when she was a mother like a mother should be, he’d learned
a lot from her. “As wise as a man!” people said of Mercada. She’d explain about the celestial bodies, the Great Bear, the Little Bear, the Milky Way, the moon and stars. She’d tell him how God created the world and describe the logic of the universe. There was more depth and knowledge in her than in anyone he had ever known. Even though she had not one day of schooling, she knew more than most people. She’d taught herself to read and write, with the help of his father Raphael, who had immense respect for her intelligence. Not one Spaniol woman of her age—neighbor, relative, or acquaintance—could read and write. Only his mother, Mercada Ermosa.

  But perhaps in the end his mother wasn’t all that clever. If she was, then perhaps she wouldn’t have forced him to give up the love of his life, and when his father died, she wouldn’t have killed him, her eldest son, whom she loved best of all her children.

  * * *

  For a few days now Gabriel hadn’t gone to the shop. He lay in his bed like a dead man and refused to get up.

  “Gabriel querido, que pasa?” Rosa tried to talk to him, but he didn’t answer. He looked through her with glazed eyes. Those aren’t Gabriel’s green eyes, but the eyes of a corpse! she thought, horrified. Dio mio, who can get him out of bed? Luna, only Luna. I’ll talk to the girl, beg her if necessary.

  Rosa didn’t have to beg. Luna was only ten, but she could sense that her father was very sick and was scared to death.

  “Papo, what’s hurting you, querido?” she asked him with a gentleness she had never shown to anyone else.

  Gabriel wanted to speak to console her, his lovely daughter, but his voice stuck in his throat and not a sound escaped. He wanted to hug her, but he felt as if he were strapped to the bed, his arms trapped under the blankets.

  Rachelika and Becky were standing next to Luna at Gabriel’s bedside. Little Becky was weeping, not understanding why her father was sad, why her mother was sad, why her sisters were sad. Rachelika helped Luna rearrange the blanket and the pillows under Gabriel, who lay there unmoving like a block of wood.

  “Mother, come and help us lift Papo up,” Rachelika said, and as Rosa hurried over, Luna pushed her away. “There’s no need, we’ll manage. Go and make him some tea,” she said.

  The blood rose to Rosa’s head. Who’d ever heard of such a thing? She won’t let me anywhere near Gabriel and hardly lets Rachelika look after him. She wants him just for herself! But now wasn’t the time to get angry with the flaca. She’d settle that score when Gabriel was better.

  This couldn’t go on. When Dr. Sabo had examined Gabriel, he’d told her, “Your husband’s as healthy as an ox. He needs a little fish oil and sulfur salts to build up his strength, that’s all,” and wrote a prescription.

  She’d fetched the medicine, but Gabriel refused to take it. He’d been behaving like a child. You’d speak to him and he’d turn over onto his other side.

  In the mornings the girls went off to school and she remained at home alone with him. She was at a loss. How should she speak to him? What could she say? From where could she summon the strength to force this big man out of bed and onto his feet? He wasn’t Ephraim, whom she could shout at, pull off the blankets, and kick out of bed. He was her husband, Gabriel Ermosa.

  Help came from a place she’d never imagined. On a Friday, five days after Gabriel first took to his bed, five hours before Shabbat arrived, there was a knock at the door. Rosa opened it, and her heart almost dropped into her shoes at the sight of that sour old woman standing there: her mother-in-law Mercada.

  “Donde ’ste Gabriel?” Mercada asked as she walked in without even a hello, as if it had not been years since her foot last crossed the threshold of this house that had once been hers.

  As Mercada stood at Gabriel’s bedside, for the first time in five days he reacted to what was going on around him. His eyes, dead and apathetic, widened at his mother standing over him and transfixing him with her gaze.

  “Como ’stas?” his mother asked in a businesslike voice but got no answer.

  Mercada didn’t waste a second. She turned to Rosa and ordered, “Go outside and don’t let anybody in until I open the door.”

  Rosa quickly went into the yard, not daring to disobey or ask questions, sat down in the chair, and waited.

  When the girls came home from school, Rosa didn’t let them go inside. Rachelika and Becky played hopscotch and only Luna stubbornly insisted on entering.

  “Don’t touch the door,” Rosa told her.

  “But I want to say hello to Papo.”

  “Soon. Nona Mercada is with him now. We’ll go inside soon.”

  “Nona Mercada from Tel Aviv?” Luna was overjoyed and tried to turn the door handle, but Mercada had locked and bolted the door from the inside.

  “Quiet, quiet,” Rosa begged Luna not to disturb Mercada, Heaven forbid the sour old woman lose her temper.

  It had been years since she had gone to live with Allegra in Tel Aviv, and Rosa was still as frightened of her as she had been when she first came to this house, the poor orphan from the Shama neighborhood, the frightened bride.

  Luna didn’t listen, the stubborn girl, and banged on the door, shouting, “Papo! Papo!”

  She’ll wake the dead on the Mount of Olives yet, Rosa thought. Luna didn’t stop yelling and pleading with her grandmother. “Nona, Nona, open the door, let me in!”

  But Nona was locked inside with her son and the door didn’t open. Luna was stubborn, but Mercada was twice as stubborn!

  Hours passed and the sun was already setting. It would soon be Shabbat and Mercada hadn’t opened the door.

  The girls lost patience. Becky started crying and Rachelika, who usually had the patience of a saint, started nagging. Luna stood with her ear to the door trying to hear and climbed up to the window trying to see inside, but the sour old woman had closed the curtains.

  Soon the Ishkenazis from Mea Shearim would come past, sound a loud blast on the shofar, and call, “Shabbes!” and she’d still be sitting in the yard with her restless girls waiting for Mercada to open the door.

  Soon she too would run out of patience. “Heideh,” she told the girls, “we’re going to Tio Shmuel and Tia Miriam’s.” By the time they reached Shmuel’s house in the adjacent Sukkat Shalom neighborhood, it was almost Shabbat.

  “Your mother’s at our house with Gabriel,” she told Shmuel.

  “My mother’s come from Tel Aviv?” he asked, and right away wanted to go see her.

  “Don’t go,” Rosa said. “She told me to stay away, closed the door, and said we could only come back in when she opens it.”

  “How long has she been with him?”

  “Almost since they closed the shops in the market for Shabbat,” she replied.

  While the girls played in the yard with their cousins, Rosa, Shmuel, and Miriam sat inside in a tense silence.

  Miriam suddenly said, “She’s probably doing livianos for him to drive out the fears that put him in bed.”

  As Miriam said this, Rosa’s heart was suddenly quiet, calm. There isn’t anyone Mercada can’t save with her livianos, she thought. Before the night is over, she’ll save Gabriel too, and he’ll rise from his bed once more.

  * * *

  Rosa and the girls didn’t go home that night. When the time came for Kiddush, they sat around the Shabbat table in Shmuel and Miriam’s house. She and the girls hadn’t bathed, so they welcomed the Sabbath in their everyday clothes, and for the first time since the girls were born, they drank the Kiddush wine at a Shabbat table that wasn’t their own and with a man who wasn’t their father. The girls, Rosa noticed, didn’t complain, except for Luna who constantly shot angry looks at her mother and the door. After Kiddush and the Shabbat dinner, Miriam said to Rosa, “Until Mercada comes to call you home, put the girls to bed with my children. When it’s time, we’ll wake them up and you’ll go back.”

  Rachelika and Becky were quite happy about having a sleepover with their cousins, but Luna stomped her foot and insisted, “I want to sleep in my own hou
se!”

  Miriam tried to pacify her, but Rosa didn’t even make an effort.

  “I’m going home!” Luna persisted, bolting through the door with Rosa on her heels. I’ll die if I’m seen running after this girl, Rosa said to herself. I’ll walk at a snail’s pace so people don’t think, God forbid, that I’m chasing after her, so nobody in Ohel Moshe sees how this child walks all over me. If I wasn’t afraid she’d run to the Ingelish police again, I’d just let her go.

  It was a ten-minute walk to their house in Ohel Moshe, ten minutes that seemed like eternity. Rosa was frightened of both Mercada and Luna. Both of them, the old woman and the girl, cast terror into her heart.

  Luna stood by the door, pounding it with her fists and kicking it wildly. “Papo, Papo, Papo!” she shouted. “Open the door, Papo, I want to come in.” But the door remained locked, and when Rosa arrived, the child started throwing herself to the ground, doing her usual performance. Rosa was afraid to leave her there. It hadn’t been that long since the girl went to the police and told them that she’d thrown her out of the house. She remained standing beside the child, who had deafened the whole neighborhood and no doubt disturbed their Shabbat dinner. But nobody came out into the yard. Rosa was mortified. Even the neighbors had gotten used to Luna’s performances.

  Luna’s screams and sobs shattered the Shabbat eve silence. Like a dog baying at the moon, thought Rosa, she’s screaming like a lunatic! The door of the house suddenly shot open and the sour old woman was in the doorway, banging her cane on the floor as she said in an icy voice, “Basta!” All at once the sobbing stopped and the child stood agape facing her grandmother, who went back inside and slammed the door.

  Rosa was petrified. Luna got up and went through the yard gate and into the alley. Rosa followed step by step, making sure she didn’t go to the Ingelish police and tell them lies again. But Luna didn’t go to the police. She went back to Shmuel’s house.