“There will be, Rachelika, there’ll be a young man, with God’s help, and there’ll be a wedding, and this is your dowry, querida. Luna and Becky will marry and be at home for their husbands and children, but you, you’ve got the head to run a shop. You’ve learned from me everything you need to know.”
“Papo querido, is that what you want for me? To work in the shop in Mahane Yehuda? Didn’t you say you wanted me to have an education? Didn’t you say you were working to give us the opportunity you never had?”
Gabriel seemed to reflect on this point.
“Heideh, querida,” he finally said with a big smile, “go and enroll yourself in evening classes.”
She jumped into his arms, kissed him again and again, and danced around the table. Luna looked on amazed at the sight of her always serious sister now deliriously happy, happier than she’d seen her in a long time. She got up from the table and joined her, dancing and laughing, and Becky joined in too, and the three of them danced around the table with their arms around one another’s waists. Gabriel watched his happy daughters and his heart swelled. His gorgeous girls, his wonderful girls, the joy of his life. He didn’t even notice Rosa, looking as if she’d seen a ghost.
She was sitting at the end of the table watching her happy husband and laughing daughters and thinking about her father and mother who died from that cursed disease, about her brother Nissim who’d lived in America so long that she’d forgotten what he looked like, about her brother Rachamim hanged by the damned Turks at Damascus Gate, and mostly about Ephraim, whom God only knew where he was and whom she missed desperately. Ya rabi, oh God, look at her. She had a family, a husband, daughters, but at moments like these not only didn’t she feel close to them, on the contrary, she felt further away. And the more she thought about it, the angrier she got. He has managed to distance my daughters from me. It isn’t enough that in all our life together he’s been aloof from me? Now my daughters are too? Luna, his twin soul, I can understand, I’ve gotten used to it, accepted it, but Rachelika? Becky? What terrible act did my soul commit before it entered this body of mine? And why am I paying such a painful price in this life for what happened in that one? She shoved the chair back and got up from the table. The noise of the chair tipping over onto the floor silenced the girls’ celebration.
“Mother, what’s the matter?” Rachelika asked.
“Nothing’s the matter. Carry on dancing and leave me be!” she snapped and went out onto the balcony.
It was freezing cold, but she didn’t feel it. Insult had seared her body. Her eyes filled with tears as she leaned against the balcony railing and for a fleeting moment considered throwing herself onto the street below, thought about dying and ridding herself once and for all of the pain, of the feeling of not belonging, the feeling of orphanhood that had been with her since the day her mother and father died and left her, a ten-year-old girl, with her five-year-old brother, alone in the world.
* * *
Right after work the next day Rachelika enrolled in evening classes. She decided that she would pay the tuition from her wages and wouldn’t even ask her father for the money. Afterward she ran straight to Zacks & Son so Luna would be the first to know. Rachelika watched her sister stand barefoot in the window display as she pinned a dress to a mannequin. A handsome young man walked up beside Rachelika and looked at Luna as if mesmerized. Rachelika smiled to herself and tapped on the glass to catch Luna’s attention. On seeing Rachelika, she gave that big white-toothed smile and beckoned her into the shop.
“Ya rabi, my God!” the young man said either to himself or to Rachelika. “I don’t know which is the real doll, the mannequin or the doll dressing it.”
Rachelika laughed and said, “If you ask me, it’s the doll dressing the mannequin, and she’s my sister.”
“And what’s your sister’s name?”
“Luna, like the moon.”
“Well, tell your sister I’m moonstruck.”
“Good luck!” Rachelika laughed again and entered the shop.
Luna came out of the window display. “Who was that outside?”
“How would I know? Just a boy. He asked your name. I told him it’s Luna like the moon, and he said he’s moonstruck.”
“Is that what he said?” Luna laughed. “He seems nice.”
“Very nice, but I’m not here for that nice boy, but to tell you I’ve been accepted to the high school evening classes!”
“That’s great, hermanita!” Luna said cheerfully. “At long last you’re starting to get back on track.”
“It’s all thanks to you, Lunika. If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t have even thought of evening classes.”
When she got home from work that evening, Luna seemed different. Her usually glowing skin seemed to glow even more, her eyes were shining, and she cast melting smiles in all directions.
At the first opportunity she pulled Rachelika into their room. “As I come out of Zacks & Son and kiss the mezuzah, the boy who spoke to you while I was in the window is standing there with a rose in his hand. He holds it out to me and says, ‘This is for the doll who’s more beautiful than the one in the window.’ I thank him, take the rose, and start walking, but he follows me. I say, ‘Thanks for the rose, but why are you following me?’ and he says, ‘From today on I’m your shadow. Wherever you go I’ll be right behind you.’”
“And you didn’t get rid of him?”
“Why get rid of him? He’s charming! He escorted me all the way home until we reached the bench at the entrance to the Gan Ha’ir park. We sat down, and he told me his name’s David Siton and he was in the British army and just got back from Italy. He’s a Spaniol like us. He was born in Misgav Ladach hospital in the Old City, he went to school at the Sephardi Talmud Torah, and from one minute to the next I’m liking him more and more. Then he suddenly brings his lips to mine and kisses me. Bells, I swear to God, Rachelika, I heard bells! Would you believe, hermanita, that was my first kiss!”
“I haven’t been kissed yet,” said Rachelika shyly.
“Don’t worry. David’s got friends from the British army. We’ll find you somebody who’ll kiss you.”
“What’s this we, you’re already a couple? Did he propose?”
“Of course he did. He proposed we get married.”
“Today, on the park bench? He’s only just met you!”
“He said that from the moment he saw me he knew I’d be his wife, so why waste time.”
“And what did you say?”
“I laughed, what could I say? Love at first sight, would you believe it?”
* * *
As Luna and David got to know each other better, she was pleased to discover that like her, David too loved life. They spent a lot of time in cafés, in clubs, at the cinema.
“Just look at what fate is,” he whispered in her ear one evening as they sat on their bench at Gan Ha’ir. “The day after I get back to Jerusalem after three and a half years in that damn war, I’m walking down Jaffa Road and I see you.”
Luna blushed. She couldn’t believe this was happening to her. She couldn’t believe that at long last her knight on a white horse had come. She hadn’t the slightest doubt that she’d found the man of her dreams, the man who would be the father of her children. She was so sure of the future of their relationship that she invited David to her home. She introduced him to Gabriel, who was happy to learn that he was the son of Victoria and Aharon Siton, his former neighbors who had “bought” his late son Raphael. A short time after baby Raphael died, the Siton family had moved from Ohel Moshe to Romema and they’d lost touch. Now, thanks to Luna and David, the two families had reconnected, and since the Ermosa and Siton families had known each other for a long time, the relationship between Luna and David quickly became an engagement.
Every evening when Luna finished work at Zacks & Son, David would pick her up at the shop and they’d go and see the early showing at one of the city’s many theaters. After the film they’d walk with their arm
s around each other to their bench at Gan Ha’ir and talk. Luna told David about her sisters and of her great love for her father. He observed that she hardly ever mentioned her mother, but didn’t ask why. He talked about himself sparingly, but she continually urged him to tell her about his life, and he eventually gave in. Once he started talking she could hardly stop him. He told her about his family, the British army, and the war, and mainly his mother, with whom he had a special bond.
Since their engagement, Luna became one of the family in the Siton home. She couldn’t help but notice the big age difference between David’s parents. “My mother,” he started to explain once after they went dancing, “met my father when she was a child. Even though she was only fourteen, she was already a widow. A short time after she was married for the first time, her husband died in the cholera epidemic, and what man would take a widow? Only a widower like him with children. Where could she find a young widower? So they found her an old one who was thirty years older than her and they got married. My father hasn’t worked even one day in his life. His sons who fled from the Turks and went to America sent money, but it was never enough, and we, the small children my mother bore him, as soon as we reached the age of twelve, we were taken out of the Talmud Torah and put to work. I worked in my elder brother’s butcher shop in Mekor Chaim. Afterward, when he moved to Haifa and opened a butcher shop downtown near the port where, forgive me, the prostitutes and the sailors’ bars are, he took me with him. I saw the sailors from the ships, I listened to their stories about faraway countries, and I wanted it too. When I was seventeen I heard they were recruiting men for the British army and putting them on the ships. I wanted to travel overseas. I didn’t think about there being a war overseas. I falsified my age from seventeen to eighteen.”
“How did you do that?”
“I came back to Jerusalem and went straight to the mukhtar of Zichron Tuvia. The mukhtar, may he be healthy, if you gave him a few grush he’d do whatever you asked, so I gave him a few grush and he changed my age from seventeen to eighteen. I joined up at the Sarafand camp and they posted me as a guard at the Royal Air Force station at Al-Bassa near Ras al-Naqoura. I soon realized I’d only see overseas in my dreams and the sea from Ras al-Naqoura.
“But one day a guy who introduced himself as Gad came to the camp. He said he’d come on behalf of the Haganah to look for volunteers for the British army’s Jewish Brigade, and that we’d be going to Europe to fight the Germans. I knew that this was my chance. For me it was an adventure, the opportunity to go overseas. I was recruited into the Royal Engineers and sent on a course where we learned how to build army camps and dismantle bridges. Moise Bechor, my friend from the neighborhood, was with me.”
“Did he want to go overseas too?”
“No.” David laughed. “He wanted to get away from his mother, who nagged him a lot. We’d come home at night and she’d be waiting for him by the door and yell at him, ‘What happened to your grandmother that you’ve come home at this hour? The sun’s already shining!’ When he told her he was joining the British army she ran after him down the street, pleading with him to stay home. I’ll never forget how the miskenica sat down in the middle of the cobblestone street and wept. Believe me, at that moment I thought that our Moise had a heart of stone.”
“And your mother?” asked Luna, who was fascinated by his story. “What did she say?”
“My mother, may she be healthy, was busy looking after my old father, who worked her like a slave.”
“And does Moise really have a heart of stone?”
“A heart of stone?” David laughed. “Moise has a heart of margarine. He’s a great guy. I love him like a brother. We were together the whole of the war. We were with Montgomery’s 8th Army at El Alamein, in the 1st Camouflage Company. We fought Rommel’s Afrika Korps that was on its way to conquer Palestine. After the conquest of Egypt we were loaded onto boats for the invasion of Sicily. We built an entire camp in northern Italy, and the next day it was attacked by German planes and completely destroyed. Dogfights like in the cinema.
“Then we moved on to Monte Cassino. The Italian fascists were dug in on the mountain and we were down below. Every day we tried to move up the mountainside and the Italian fascists pushed us back until the American bombers came and reduced Monte Cassino to rubble. The fascists surrendered right away. They didn’t have the will to fight, those lazy Italians. They always put their hands up.
“The army advanced on Rome and our battalion stopped in Siena. While we were in Siena, Gad came to see us again, this time with a new assignment: to steal equipment from the British and take it to the cargo ships carrying refugees to Palestine. We hid refugee children in the camp and from there sneaked them to the ships, and that’s how we helped the Haganah.”
“And all that just for the adventure?” Luna asked.
“Well, in the war it wasn’t just an adventure. Praise God, Lunika, what we went through in the war. But don’t think, heaven forbid, that I’m making myself into a bigger hero than I was.”
“But you’re my hero,” she said, melting into him.
“And you’re my princess,” he replied, pressing his lips to hers until it seemed she was being swallowed into him. She could kiss him again and again, never sated with the taste of him. She loved the tickly feeling of his mustache, the fragrance of his Yardley aftershave, the way he always wore elegant suits with a matching tie. David Siton was charming, sophisticated, handsome, and most important, interesting. She could never have enough of his war stories, and he was always happy to tell them. But when he came to the story of the time he spent in Venice, she felt he was holding back. Again and again she urged him to tell her about the city where instead of streets there were canals, and instead of cars, gondolas, but he swiftly changed the subject.
“Tell me, my lovely,” he said. “How is it that so far nobody’s snatched you up?”
“From the day I turned sixteen,” she told him, “my mother wanted to see me married. One day they brought a wealthy prospective husband from Argentina. As soon as I saw him I ran out of the house. Not a day goes by when she doesn’t tell me, ‘Get married already. Let somebody else take care of you.’”
“Your mother’s right. It’s time somebody took care of you.”
“When my mother loses her temper with me,” she went on, “she tells me, ‘I hope that your children do to you what you do to me.’ The first time she said that I wanted to run to my Nona Mercada in Tel Aviv so she would do a livianos for me and cure me of my mother’s evil eye. I began screaming like a lunatic, and then my mother said, ‘We’ll find you a husband whether you like it or not. It’s time you were a bride!’
“Then some old guy came along, he was maybe twenty-seven, God knows where she found him.”
“And who was the old guy?”
“My father said that his father owns a big bakery, that they’re very wealthy.”
“So why didn’t you marry him?”
“A man of twenty-seven who isn’t married yet? There’s got to be something wrong with him!”
“So what did you do?”
“What do you think? I ran like the wind out of the house and to this bench in Gan Ha’ir until I saw the old guy and his father leave our building. When I got back, my father wasn’t home. My mother said he was so ashamed he’d gone for a drive to calm down. She shouted that nothing would help me. I could run out of the house as many times as I wanted, but in the end they’d find me a husband, if not the easy way, then the hard way. She wanted me to marry a man I don’t love the same way my father married a woman he didn’t love.”
“Luna, what are you saying?”
“I’m speaking the truth! My father’s become ill because he doesn’t love my mother.”
“Luna,” David was shocked, “she’s your mother. An angel like you shouldn’t be saying things like that.”
“My mother brings out all the demons in me. On the other hand, my father, may he be healthy, loves me even more than he
loves my sisters.”
“And I love you more than I love your sisters.” He laughed and hugged her.
Luna pulled away, pretending to want to be released from his embrace, and in a conciliatory tone said, “Enough of my mother, tell me about Venice, the city that has canals instead of streets!”
“Ach … Venice.” He sighed and looked skyward dreamily. “There’s no place like it. It’s the most divine city in the world. We lived near the Lido, in villas abandoned by the rich people who fled and left their houses as though they’d be coming back shortly: food in the pantry, rows of bottles of red wine. Did you know that the Italians drink wine with every meal? It makes them happy, and we, who before Venice had drunk wine only for Kiddush and on Seder night, learned from the Italians and began drinking wine until we were completely drunk. We danced on the tables, sang in the streets. We were as happy as kings. After the damned war, after so much death, we were finally living!”
“What else happened there?”
He looked at her as if seeing her for the first time. “Didn’t you listen to anything I told you? What more did we need? Life, that’s what happened there, life.”
“And girls?”
“Endless girls! They’d go with us for a pair of stockings. For food they were prepared to do anything! Not only them, their whole family. The father not only pimped for his daughter but for his wife too. He’d sell his womenfolk for bread and cheese.”
“So you had a lot of women?”
“A thousand, like King Solomon.” He laughed.
“Didn’t you have a special one? A one and only?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I want to know everything about you!”
“Luna, my love, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it’s never to tell the whole story. Not you to me and not me to you. We should tell each other only things that we want to hear.”
6
EVEN BEFORE THE MARRIAGE TERMS were agreed on and the wedding date set, Luna decided that if her firstborn was a son, she would name him after her father. “Nobody,” she told Rachelika, “will take from me the honor of giving Papo’s name to my son.”
The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem Page 24
