The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem

by Sarit Yishai-Levi

  Hanging in the closet were some dresses that weren’t my mother’s.

  “Where are Mother’s dresses?” I asked my father who had followed me into the bedroom.

  “In the hall closet,” he said. “You can take whichever ones you want.”

  “You think I’d wear one of Mother’s dresses?” I replied with disgust. “What, I’m from the twenties?”

  “Gabriela,” he said in a tired voice, “you just got back, you haven’t been here for two years, and you already want to start a fight? Don’t you think you should lay down your weapons? I’m not asking you to love me the way I love you. I’m not asking you to tell me you missed me the way I’ve missed you. I’m asking for a truce.”

  He sat down on his and Mother’s bed and looked so vulnerable it was as though he was the child and I the parent. I wanted to hug him, I wanted to tell him I loved him, that I’d missed him, that I’d missed him so much. But then I remembered that he’d defiled my mother’s honor in the bed he was sitting on, and my heart hardened.

  “I’m terribly tired,” I told him and ran to my childhood room, which to my surprise was exactly how I’d left it.

  “Hasn’t anyone slept in here?” I asked Ronny, who’d joined me.

  “Father didn’t let Vera’s children sleep in your room.”

  “Where did they sleep?”

  “In the small living room.”

  “And where did you watch television, where did you eat dinner?”

  “In the big living room.”

  “Wow, Mother probably died all over again just from the thought of you using the big living room not for guests. So where are they?”

  Ronny became serious. “Father wanted you to come home, so he told Vera to take the children and go back to her own place.”

  “For good?”

  “No, just until you get used to the idea, until you accept her. I think he wants to marry her.”

  “What?”

  “Stop being a baby, Gabriela, accept Vera already. She might as well be Father’s wife now and she’s good to him. She’s also good to me. She cooks for me and washes my uniforms when I come home on leave. She takes good care of me.”

  “Traitor,” I told him. “I wouldn’t have believed it of you.”

  “Mother’s dead, Lela.” His voice softened as he called me by the name he’d used when he couldn’t yet pronounce mine.

  “Don’t you miss her?”

  “I miss her, but I’m realistic, and in reality, Vera is now Father’s wife.”

  “That’s just it. She was Father’s wife even while Mother was alive. He cheated on Mother all the time.”

  “I don’t want to hear this. Life’s too short. Look at Mother, she died so young. Why do I need to face all that right now? I’m just starting my life and I suggest you do the same. There’s no point in being angry and hanging on to the past.”

  But nothing helped, and I carried on being angry. I was so angry that the next day I went to Rachelika’s and told her I wanted to move in with her.

  “No, Gabriela, you can’t live with me. You can’t insult your father like that. Grow up, it’s time you did. Accept your father and Vera. Believe me, it’ll make life easier for you.”

  “Thanks for the good advice, but I don’t need it. I’ll get by,” I said and turned to leave.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “To look for a job waitressing and rent a room in Nachlaot.”

  “You’re not renting a room in Nachlaot. You’re going back home to live in your own room. Find a job, enroll in university, and then look for a room in Nachlaot. But until then you’re going to live at home.”

  “Rachelika, since when have you told me what to do?”

  “Tell me, what did that good-for-nothing Englishman do to you that’s made you spit such venom on the whole world, and mainly on your father?”

  “What does any of this have to do with Phillip?”

  “If it has nothing to do with him, then what do you want, tell me? What do you want, that we bring your mother back to life? And what for, so you can make her life a misery just as you did when she was alive?”

  I was silent. And encouraged by my silence, Rachelika continued pouring out everything she’d wanted to say to me from the moment she’d arrived in London. “She didn’t get one moment of happiness from you. You never got along with her, you always misbehaved with her. You were always complaining to me that she was a bad mother, she didn’t understand you, didn’t see you, she thought only of herself, nothing interested her except her clothes and her lipstick and her Hollywood, isn’t that what you said? So why are you turning her into a saint all of a sudden? And your father into Amalek? All of a sudden you’ve forgotten how good he was to you, how he looked after you all those years, how he was your rock when you cried on his shoulder because your mother didn’t understand you? All of a sudden you’ve forgotten who sang you ‘Sleep, sleep, my baby’ every night? Who took you to the zoo, the Medrano Circus, who showered you and put on your pajamas and went to school with you when you got into trouble?”

  “What’s happened, Rachelika?” I asked in awe. “You’re defending Father and disrespecting Mother?”

  “Disrespecting? You should be ashamed of yourself for saying things like that, Gabriela. I’m just reminding you of how things always were. I’m just saying that God knows why you’ve made your mother a saint since she died, when we both know she wasn’t.”

  “We both know? I felt that you thought she was perfect. You always loved her more than anyone else in the world.”

  “Like my life, like Moise, like my children,” Rachelika said quietly. “But that’s not to say I didn’t see her worst qualities. She was my beloved sister. After Moise, she was the person closest to me in the whole world. I’d tell her all my secrets and she’d tell me hers. But that doesn’t mean I was blind. I saw very well that she didn’t have patience for you, how she looked at you but didn’t see, how she held you but didn’t touch. How, from the moment she came home from the hospital after two years there, she wanted to get away and did everything she could to leave you with me and Becky and Nona Rosa. What do you think, that my unconditional love for my sister blinded me?

  “And you weren’t exactly a paragon of virtue either. Do you know what it means for a mother to know that her daughter, her own flesh and blood, doesn’t want her? Do you know what it was like for her when she was lying broken in the hospital, and with great difficulty, with a superhuman effort, she went downstairs to the garden to see you, and you saw her and started screaming like you were being slaughtered? Do you know how long it took you to call her Ima? You, who at two years old knew the Even-Shoshan dictionary backwards? There wasn’t a word you didn’t know how to say, except for one: Ima. Do you know when you said Ima for the first time? When you were three, and you went with your mother to Freiman & Bein’s shoe shop and the saleslady asked you who the beautiful woman who brought this beautiful little girl to buy shoes was, and you said, ‘Ima.’ And that day your mother danced in the streets. She was as happy as if she’d won the lottery.”

  “I don’t remember,” I said. “I don’t remember her dancing in the streets when I said Ima. I don’t remember her being happy. I don’t remember her ever hugging or kissing me.”

  “Well, your mother always had an issue with kissing and hugging. Even when I gave her a kiss, she didn’t like it. Your mother didn’t like being touched too much.”

  “She actually hugged and kissed Ronny quite a lot. She loved Ronny, but not me.”

  “She raised Ronny from the day he was born. He was such an easy baby. He ate, slept, and smiled. You were just the opposite. You gave her hell.”

  “A mother should love her child even if it’s not an easy baby,” I said.

  “I know, my child, I know. Your mother had a hard time with you. She loved you and cared for you, but she simply didn’t know how to talk to you, how to approach you. Every time someone told her that you looked like her,
she’d say, ‘Gabriela’s better looking than me!’ And do you know what it meant for your mother to say that someone was better looking than her? Even her own daughter? She was so proud of you, Gabriela. Every time you came home with good grades, every time somebody complimented you, she’d beam with pride. She just didn’t know how to show you. She loved you a lot. Believe me, my child, you must believe me so you can forgive her, so you can forgive yourself, so you can get on with your life without so much anger inside you.”

  I listened to Rachelika, I tried to believe her, but I was unable to soften my heart. I couldn’t forgive, not my mother, not my father, and certainly not myself. Instead of letting myself sink into my aunt’s arms, I said coldly, “This conversation is starting to get heavy. I’m going.”

  Rachelika took a deep breath. “Go, then, Gabriela, but straight home. Your father made a big gesture to you when he asked Vera to leave the house after four years and go back to her own apartment. You should appreciate it.”

  “Appreciate what? That he took his lover into my mother’s bed? It’s not that he found her after Mother died. She was in the background the whole time. She was his lover while he and Mother were married.”

  Rachelika stood at the window and waited for a long moment before replying in a quiet, barely audible voice, “It’s not that simple, Gabriela.”

  “It’s very simple. He cheated on Mother.”

  “Life isn’t black and white, Gabriela. And after two years of living in London, you should know that.”

  That reminded me of what Uncle Moise had said when he came to visit with Father in Tel Aviv: “Ask your Aunt Rachelika to tell you a few things about your mother Luna, and do it quickly so you don’t die a fool.”

  “Rachelika, maybe it’s time to tell me what you’ve been keeping from me?”

  “I don’t think it’s my place, Gabriela. Maybe it would be better if you asked your father why he went to look for love with Vera, why your mother’s love wasn’t enough for him.”

  “He’s my father. A daughter doesn’t ask her father questions like that.”

  “And perhaps not her aunt either,” she said softly.

  “You told me after my mother died that you’re like my mother now, you told me that you were my first call for anything at all. So now I’m asking you, my dear Aunt Rachelika. You want me to rid myself of my anger, to move on with my life, but how can I move on with the secrets you’re all hiding from me? I know there are secrets, and I’m ready to hear them.”

  My aunt gathered me into her arms. “My sweet girl, my precious, I don’t even know where to begin.”

  “At the beginning, and don’t keep any of the painful details from me.”

  And so, cradled in my aunt’s arms, I finally heard my mother’s story.

  “Your mother, miskenica, had dreams. She thought she was a princess who deserved a knight on a white horse, until life came along and her dreams blew up in her face. Your father, what can I say, wasn’t the knight on the white horse she’d been waiting for. She realized that not long after they’d gotten married, but it was too late by then, and Luna had to accept what she’d been given. In fact, it was me, who’d never had big dreams, who’d gotten a dream man, not a knight on a white horse like the one Luna dreamed of, but a knight with the biggest heart, and Becky, may she be healthy, found a boy who worshipped the ground she walked on, and only Luna, the Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, got the wrong man. There was never a grand love between your father and mother. At first she thought she could hear bells, but quite quickly the sound of bells became the sound of a hammer hitting her head.

  “When you were born she hoped that now, after the birth of a daughter, their life would finally change for the better. But then the war broke out and she was wounded and was in the hospital for two years. And it was there in the hospital that something happened that changed her life.”

  “What happened?”

  “She found her knight on a white horse.”

  “My mother found her knight while she was lying wounded in the hospital?”

  “He was more badly wounded than her. At first they just talked. They’d share the pain of their wounds, their dreams of a healthy life. They were friends. But after they were discharged, they began meeting in secret every day. And that was when your mother finally came to understand what true love was, what it meant to care for somebody else before yourself, what it meant when your soul connected with the soul of another.”

  “My mother met her lover every day? So Ronny could be his child?”

  “God forbid, Gabriela, Ronny isn’t his. He couldn’t have children, he was paralyzed from the waist down. Now do you understand what pure love is? Your mother loved his soul more than she loved his body. She was happier than she’d ever been in her life, and though I warned her that she was skating on thin ice, that she was endangering herself and her marriage, she wouldn’t listen. Every day she’d leave you and Ronny with Nona Rosa and Becky and go meet him. Then one day he died—he’d never completely recovered from his wounds—and when he died, your mother died too. That was the day your father realized that your mother’s heart was broken because of another man, that throughout almost all the years they’d been married, your mother had loved another man.

  “The night her lover died, your father knocked on my door in the middle of the night and asked me to come to your house and be with her. She was so shattered that he was afraid she might try to kill herself. He asked me to look after her so she wouldn’t hurt herself.

  “Your father forgave her in the end, but things were never the same. From the day her lover died she was never the same woman. Something died in her heart. And she missed her beloved until her dying day. Do you know what she said to me before she closed her eyes? She said, ‘I’m not frightened of dying, Rachelika, I’m going to meet Gidi.’ That was his name. And your father, what was he to do if his wife didn’t want him? Seek comfort in another woman. And that’s how he found Vera. And Vera loves him and gives him everything that Luna withheld from him, so don’t punish him. It was your mother who pushed him into Vera’s arms.”

  At long last another thread in the tapestry of Ermosa family secrets had been woven before my eyes. Who would have believed that my mother had had an affair? That her cool, proper facade concealed a volcano?

  My mother had led a double life. On the one hand she was a wife, the mother of children, and on the other a brokenhearted woman who’d never recovered from the death of her one true love. It wasn’t surprising that she’d accepted Vera’s presence in my father’s life all those years.

  Suddenly I saw my mother in a different light. Human, vulnerable, misunderstood. And strangely, serenity descended upon me.

  * * *

  Har Hamenuchot in Jerusalem is a bald, sad hill. Row after row of graves hang on the mountainside without a single flower or tree between them. The stony hill overlooks the road into Jerusalem, a menacing and frightening reminder to all those who pass. It is to here that the people of Jerusalem are brought when their time comes. Here is the end of their road. Men, women, children, young and old, Sephardim and Ashekenazim, each of them is laid to rest in their community’s section. Nono Gabriel and Nona Rosa were brought here, and here, in the Spaniol section, my mother was buried too.

  Had my mother been alive to see it, she would have loved her gravestone. A slab of white marble, and on it, in raised lettering, the words:

  HERE LIES MY WIFE, OUR MOTHER AND SISTER

  THE DEARLY BELOVED LUNA SITON,

  DAUGHTER OF GABRIEL AND ROSA ERMOSA

  MAY HER SOUL BE BOUND IN THE BOND OF EVERLASTING LIFE

  Yet it is a very simple gravestone for a woman who had so much style and good taste. My mother loved flowers, and there isn’t even one blooming by her grave.

  How many unfulfilled dreams did my mother have? How many places did she want to visit but never got the chance? She didn’t manage to become an elderly woman. Her face had not yet become furrowed with lines, no gray streaked h
er hair. She didn’t live to see her children beneath the wedding canopy, and her grandchildren will know her only from photographs.

  It’s the fifth anniversary of her death. I’m standing at her graveside holding a bunch of red carnations, her favorite flower. My father and Ronny are reciting Kaddish; Rachelika and Becky are weeping silently, each in her husband’s arms, their children beside them; and dozens of relatives and friends are clustered around the family. It looks like a funeral rather than a memorial service, I think, so many people here to love and honor my mother.

  People move to the grave, place a stone on it. The more distant ones say their good-byes and leave. Only the close relatives are left. Rachelika takes a cloth and Becky fills a bottle from a nearby tap and they quickly and gently wash the gravestone as if they’re washing my mother’s body. They pay special attention to the letters of her name, carefully running their fingers over each one as if caressing it.

  I’m standing to the side, not part of what they’re doing, waiting for them to finish, wanting them to leave, ashamed they might see that I’m on the verge of tears. I want to be alone with my mother, press my lips to the cold stone and say good-bye. I want to hug her in death as she had never let me hug her in life, as I’d never let myself. I want to make peace with her, rid myself of the ache in my chest. Why hadn’t I said good-bye to her while she could still feel? If my mother could see me now from her place in heaven she would probably shrug her angel’s wings in disbelief: I, Gabriela, the most different child of all, I, the street girl, the one who was always misbehaving, is now standing by her grave and yearning for her.

  “We have to get going, Gabriela,” Becky says. “It’s getting late.”

  “You go,” I reply. “I’m right behind you.”

  Becky walks away with Handsome Eli Cohen’s arm around her, and I remember how, when Nono died and Becky fought with Mother and left the shiva, and I ran after her and we sat on the wall of Wallach hospital, she told me, “You’ll find yourself a boy like my Eli and marry him and be happy. Don’t search right or left.” But I haven’t yet found my Handsome Eli Cohen, and the one time in my life when there was perhaps a faint hope I’d found him, I didn’t listen to my heart. I ignored the signs and pushed him away. I didn’t see the gift that had been presented to me. And now it’s too late, for since then, the narrow gap that he had opened in my heart has closed, and my heart is shielded by a rampart that even a thousand cannons can’t bring down.