The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem

by Sarit Yishai-Levi

  * * *

  When my mother’s condition improved slightly, Rachelika decided it was time to take me for a visit to the hospital. “Perhaps if Luna sees Gabriela it will improve her mood,” she said. But to her horror, she recognized that not only wasn’t my mother in the mood to see me, I wasn’t in the mood to see her either. When they lay me beside her on the hospital bed I burst into tears and waved my little arms in every direction, and Luna devolved into hysterics. “Take her away, take her away,” she said. “And don’t bring her anymore. A hospital’s no place for children.”

  It was a hard scene to witness, and my Aunt Rachelika, whom nothing in the world could break, couldn’t bear it. Tears flowed from her eyes as she took me from my mother and gazed at her sister. Luna had lost weight and was as feeble as a leaf in the wind. Her beautiful hair had started falling out, and there were bald patches on her pate. She looked like one of the Holocaust survivors whose pictures frequently appeared in the newspapers.

  Rachelika kissed her sister and took her leave. “You’re right, Lunika, a hospital is no place for babies. We’ll wait till you’re strong enough to get out of bed and go down into the garden, and then I’ll bring her again.”

  My mother didn’t answer, her spirits now so low that she didn’t say a word for days on end. My father would plead with her, “Luna, say something?” but she’d remain silent. It sometimes seemed to David that she was punishing him. Only the redheaded boy in the next bed could rouse the occasional smile from her. Despite his condition, which was no less serious than hers, his spirit infected all the other patients in the ward, even Luna.

  She was never alone. There was always a family member at her bedside to give her anything she needed. Rachelika, Becky, Rosa, other relatives, and neighbors all took their turn looking after Luna and taking care of me. “Chicitica miskenica,” Nona Rosa told me many years later, “how many hands you passed through!”

  The war raged on. Every now and then one of the convoys managed to elude the Arab gangs lying in ambush and break through to Jerusalem. Rachelika and Becky would run down to Jaffa Road and together with “the whole of Jerusalem” would welcome the heroic soldiers with cries of joy and love, and then stand in line to receive the ration of food.

  On one such occasion a surprise awaited them. From Tel Aviv Tia Allegra had sent a package containing oil, rice, flour, sugar, two tomatoes, a packet of butter, and even some sweets and bizcochos she’d baked specially. That evening the neighbors were invited for an equal portion of the goodies. That was the custom. Anyone who received a package would share it and not keep it, God forbid, all for themselves. They made a point of sharing with families with babies and sick people.

  “We had a lot of tricks to invent food,” Nona Rosa explained to me many years later. “When the food ran out, your aunts, may they be healthy, would go with the neighbors to the fields behind Ohel Moshe near Sheikh Badr, where the Knesset building is now, and they’d pick hubeiza, mallows, like the Arab women. Then we’d make a fire in the yard, boil water, and add the hubeiza seeds, a little onion, salt and pepper, and we’d have a splendid soup. If there was enough flour and a drop of oil, my dear neighbor Tamar would bake bread, which was her specialty, and we’d dip it in the soup and have a feast for a king.”

  Rosa did her utmost to keep the household in order, trying to stick to the traditional Spaniol dishes as much as she could, going to great lengths to make something out of nothing. She had long since stopped putting meat in the Shabbat hamin, and instead she made kubebas, bread dumplings that she spiced with salt, pepper, and herbs picked from the fields. Fortunately, the family loved her kubebas, and years later, even when they could afford meat and there was no shortage, my family continued to eat the kubebas that Nona Rosa had made during the war and the following period of austerity.

  Three months had passed from the day my mother was wounded, and while her condition had improved somewhat, she was still unable to get out of bed. Most of the time she’d lie on her back, eyes closed. The redheaded boy would try to make her laugh and would just about squeeze a tired smile out of her.

  “Ahalan, lovely lady”—he smiled at her—“I’ve been told you have green eyes, but I don’t believe it.”

  She opened her eyes.

  “Oh, at long last. I’ve been lying here next to you for three months and this is the first time I’ve seen your eyes. You have such beautiful eyes, why do you keep them closed?”

  She didn’t answer, but deep down she took pleasure in the compliment. It was the first time since she had been wounded that somebody had gotten through to her.

  As the situation in Jerusalem worsened, the number of neighbors and relatives who volunteered to sit with my mother dwindled, and the burden fell mainly on Rachelika and Becky. Nona Rosa preferred to look after the babies rather than sit with my mother, who even though she was critically wounded still scowled at her.

  Between bombardments the neighbors would sit in the yard to get some fresh air, chat, and enjoy the sun after days and nights cooped up indoors.

  “Heideh, querido,” Nona Rosa said to her husband, “let’s go and sit outside for a while.”

  “You go. I’m happy inside.”

  “But querido, it’s been a long time since we went outside. The sun will do you good.”

  “Nothing will do me any good. What point is there in my life when I sit in the chair all day and can’t even visit my daughter.”

  Rosa’s heart ached. She knew how much he was torturing himself for not being able to visit Luna. She decided to speak to David. Maybe he’d have an idea for getting Gabriel to the hospital.

  And so my father parked an army jeep by the Ohel Moshe gate, carried Nono Gabriel to it, and sat him in the front seat. Rachelika and Becky climbed into the back, and Nona Rosa stayed behind to look after Boaz and me.

  When they reached the hospital, my father carried Nono Gabriel up the stairs to my mother’s ward. Carefully and gently he lowered him to the floor so he wouldn’t fall. Supported by my father on one side and my Aunt Rachelika on the other, Nono Gabriel walked slowly and with measured steps to his daughter’s sickbed.

  “Lunika, look who’s here,” Rachelika said.

  Luna opened her eyes, and when she saw her father, the dam holding back everyone’s tears broke. There wasn’t a dry eye when the sick man bent over the bed and kissed his daughter’s fevered brow, and Luna’s cracked lips whispered, “I’m alive. Don’t cry, Papo, I’m alive.”

  * * *

  The Arab Legion overran the Etzion Bloc and the defenders who weren’t killed were taken prisoner. The Old City fell and its Jewish residents fled to the western part of the city. Arnona and Talpiot, the city’s southern neighborhoods, were shelled incessantly. Kibbutz Ramat Rachel was also taken by the legion but was then retaken by the Israeli Defense Forces. There was a cease-fire in late spring, but a month later, as the figs ripened and the sabras, the prickly pears, were bursting with juice, the fighting erupted again in full force. The convoys barely made their way into besieged Jerusalem. People were starving, and infant mortality was on the rise.

  One night Nona Rosa was awakened by my crying. She went to the playpen and picked me up. I had a high fever, my diaper was soaked with watery, bloody feces, and my face was contorted in pain. My wails tore at Nona Rosa’s heart, and my crying woke the whole house.

  “The child has a high fever,” Rachelika said. “We have to get her to Dr. Kagan and quickly.”

  My father wrapped my little body in a blanket and with me in his arms ran all the way to Bikur Holim Hospital.

  Dr. Kagan was already there and was being run off her feet. It took only one look for her to say, “She’s got dysentery like half the children in Jerusalem. We need to admit her.”

  Dr. Kagan treated me with devotion as if I were her own daughter, as she treated the scores of children in her care, but my condition didn’t improve and the fever didn’t abate. I cried and cried until my strength was spent and my crying became
a sad wailing, matching that of the rest of the children in the ward.

  I was critically ill. My poor father didn’t know who to take care of first, my mother or me. Even Rachelika broke down. She could endure anything, even Luna’s suffering, but not the suffering of a baby.

  Becky moved into the hospital and slept on the floor at the foot of my crib in a blanket she brought from home. She spent hours pacing in the corridors with me in her arms. Nona Rosa found herself pleading to God as she hadn’t pleaded since she lost her firstborn son, holding a Book of Psalms and staring at the letters she didn’t know how to read, lighting candles and making vows. And Nono Gabriel withdrew into himself more and more. He hardly spoke and even stopped listening to his radio, for what could it tell him that he didn’t already know? The cursed war was inside his own home. Who could tell him anything about the injustices of the war when his own daughter and granddaughter were its victims?

  “Why aren’t you doing anything?” my father pleaded with Dr. Kagan. “Why aren’t you helping my daughter?”

  “I’m sorry,” the doctor replied, “but there’s nothing more to do beyond what we’re already doing. We’re replacing the little one’s fluids and salts in the hope it will help. We don’t have any penicillin, we’re out of drugs. We’re waiting for them to arrive with the next convoy.”

  But the convoy couldn’t break through and my condition deteriorated.

  “Dio santo, how frightened I was that we’d have to sit shiva for you, God forbid,” Nona Rosa told me. Her nightmares returned, all the memories that over the years she’d tried to repress, the pain of her son Raphael’s death assailing her anew as if she had just now lost him. Dio Senor el mundo, she begged her god, don’t let me lose a granddaughter too.

  And while I was fighting for my life in Bikur Holim and my mother was fighting for hers in Hadassah, Rachelika was fighting to hold the family together. She was constantly rushing around looking after her son and her sister and her niece. She was unafraid of the danger and would leave the house once a day and go from one hospital to the other. Even Nona Rosa’s pleadings that she let Becky, who was living in the hospital, look after Gabriela and just visit Luna were to no avail. Rachelika was out of her mind with worry. She finally found some small consolation in a letter that arrived from the field, reading it over and over until she could draw enough strength from it.

  “I love you, my soul,” Moise wrote. “I love you as much as life itself, both you and Boaz who I hardly know.” He asked about the family and Luna and only at the end, in one sentence, did he write that he was safe and well. Thank God. She was calmed on that front, and now she had to do the same on the others. But how could she while Luna was still fighting for her life and her baby was at death’s door?

  One time, before Rachelika went home to Boaz, she told Becky, “Try and rouse Gabriela’s will to live. You have to!”

  But how could Becky rouse the will to live in such a little baby? She was only a child herself, how could she help Gabriela recover? Where was her Eli now when she needed him so badly? He would have given her strength, he would have helped her save Gabriela.

  “You have to get better,” Becky told Gabriela. “Do you hear me, my sweet, my lovely, you have to drink, because if anything happens to you I’ll die. Do you hear, my honeybunch, I’ll die.”

  She put the bottle into the baby’s mouth, and with her last remaining strength Gabriela pushed it away. As the doctor had instructed, Becky wet the corner of a diaper and put it between the baby’s lips, but she turned her head.

  Becky didn’t put her down for a moment. She refused to lay Gabriela in her crib, frightened that as soon as the baby didn’t feel her thin arms around her, something terrible would happen. The responsibility for Gabriela’s life was on her shoulders. Even David was unable to cope and cried like a baby. And Rachelika miskenica, when Dr. Kagan heard that she had a baby at home, she forbade her to come. She could infect Boaziko. So every day she stood in the hospital yard and Becky held Gabriela in her arms by the window so Rachelika could see her, and only once she had did she run to Luna’s bedside.

  Luna knew nothing of Gabriela’s illness. The family decided not to tell her. Anyway, she’d asked them not to bring the baby, and she was so preoccupied with her own pain and troubles that she didn’t even ask. It’s better this way, Rachelika thought. When the war’s over, when Luna gets better, God willing, and when Gabriela gets better too, they’ll tell her. Everything will be fine. Luna will find room in her heart for Gabriela, and they’ll be able to make up for lost time.

  * * *

  Gabriela’s condition continued to decline, and pain threatened to tear David’s heart from his chest when he held her frail body in his arms. Her sweet face was twisted in constant pain, her expression was apathetic. She no longer laughed aloud when she saw him and didn’t raise her arms for him to pick her up. She couldn’t even cry anymore. He couldn’t bear it. He fell apart, wept like a child. Compared to him, Becky, may she be healthy, a fifteen-year-old child, was a rock. Rachelika, Rosa, each of the Ermosa family women is more of a man than me, David thought. He didn’t know which one to worry about first, his wife or his daughter. He didn’t know who to pray harder for. So instead of praying he cried, not in the dark and not in secret but openly, holding his dying daughter, clasping her tiny body to his heart, defeated.

  Like David, Jerusalem too felt defeated. The city looked like it had suffered an earthquake, smoking ruins, people moving like shadows, seeking refuge from the exploding shells. The city center was shelled daily. The crowded, vibrant Jaffa Road and Ben-Yehuda and King George Streets were deserted now, the shops shuttered, the houses darkened. No one came or went. The Arab Legion had taken Atarot and Neve Yaakov. Kibbutz Beit Haarava had also fallen, the Old City had fallen, and if a miracle didn’t happen soon, the New City would fall too.

  * * *

  If the makeshift Burma Road into Jerusalem hadn’t been opened a month after I contracted dysentery, it’s doubtful that I would have lived. When the siege was broken and supplies reached the city, drugs arrived too. My condition slowly improved, I started eating again and put on weight, and I regained my vitality. Now when my father came to visit me in the hospital I’d burst into shouts of joy, wave my arms, and laugh at him, and he’d sink his face into my tummy and make funny noises, lifting me in the air with a big smile on his face.

  Two months after I was taken to the hospital I returned home. My recovery was the only thing that lifted the cloud over the Ermosa family home at the time. My mother’s condition had improved slightly, but she wasn’t yet out of the woods. She had been in the hospital for many months and the end still wasn’t in sight.

  My father, who had been forced to give up his duties and become a dispatch rider when I got sick, rejoined his unit defending Jerusalem and spent every night in one of the defensive positions, his weapon cocked. When he was relieved in the morning he’d hurry to the hospital to visit my mother, and when Becky or Rachelika came to take over, he’d rush to Nono and Nona’s house to be with me until it was time for him to go back on duty. He scarcely slept.

  The convoys that brought supplies to Jerusalem along the Burma Road also brought mail from the front. Becky lived from letter to letter. Each time a convoy reached the city, she’d hurry to Handsome Eli Cohen’s parents’ house, and he’d never disappoint her. Each time he sent a letter to his parents, there was one for her filled with love and longing. She’d open the envelope excitedly and read the letter over and over, kissing it and staining it with tears. At every chance she visited the home of her beloved’s parents. She felt that when she was close to them, she was close to him as well.

  Optimistic letters arrived from Moise too, relating the advances made in the south and the approaching end of the war. Yet the more he tried not to worry her in his letters, the more Rachelika worried. She could sense his helplessness. His words of love couldn’t conceal his anxiety for her, Boaz, her family, and the wounded Luna, but she tried to r
epress the pain she felt so she could carry on.

  While Handsome Eli Cohen and Moise wrote to their loved ones whenever they could, Nona Rosa didn’t receive any sign of life from Ephraim. Despite her concern, she felt sure that just as he’d managed throughout all the long years in the Lehi, he’d manage this time too. Her main focuses now were Luna, over whom the threat of death still hung; her husband, whose condition was constantly worsening; and the maintenance of the household. Rachelika and Becky were a major help and took over all her usual tasks, except for looking after the babies. But the money was running out, and even if Gabriel now agreed to her cleaning the houses of strangers, who would she work for? Who had money for a housemaid in wartime?