by Dalya Bilu
Having received the green light to go ahead, Mischa would begin with the unchanging ritual she found so enjoyable. With a skinny hand trembling with suppressed desire, he would fish out from under the mattress a few of the soft, flat cookies spotted with green mold that he kept especially for her, offer them to her, take one for himself, and begin telling her his stories. From him she heard of his wife and child, who never returned, and of the hunger in the camps, which was so terrible that the inmates ate potato peels and the bark of the single tree growing in the concrete yard. And of the people with bloated bellies who gave up the ghost under the cold iron sky of the camp. With shivers running down her spine, she would take another of his sweat-soaked cookies, sniff it with relish, scrape off the green mold with her fingernail, bite into it, and ask him to tell her about the people who were turned into soap and about his first meal after the liberation, and how in spite of the explicit orders of the doctors he had eaten and eaten until he almost died. Toward the end of the visit she would ask him to show her his arm. And he would roll up his sleeve, as shy and blushing as if she had asked him to undress completely in front of her. When the blue tattoo was exposed in all its shame she would touch his dry skin with her finger, gravely stroking each numeral in turn. And with his flesh coming out in goose bumps he would read the numbers out loud to her, teaching her addition and subtraction, multiplication and division with their aid, and she would learn it all by heart, with the result that she knew how to read and write numbers and do arithmetic long before her three little friends.
Full of stories and hungry for food she would kiss him good-bye on the gray stubble of his sunken cheek and slip back to her room. If neither Angela nor Joseph was watching, she would raid the icebox and polish off its contents, and in case she felt hungry during the night, she would take the loaf Angela was saving for breakfast and Joseph’s school sandwiches to bed with her, where she would fall asleep with her mouth full of half-chewed bread. In the morning she would wake to her mother’s furious shouts as she searched for the missing loaf and blamed everyone, but especially Mischa, for its mysterious disappearance. After she discovered the column of ants leading to Rosa’s hoarded food, where they had entrenched themselves in a nest of breadcrumbs, she bought a lock for the icebox and opened it only as required.
“I’m not about to stand for hours in line to buy food for the family, and beg for extra coupons, and risk getting caught on the black market, just so you can gobble everything up in a single evening,” said Angela, who nevertheless took food from her own mouth to give to her daughter, and grew thinner as Rosa grew fatter.
Thus deprived of her natural sources of nourishment, Rosa made the rounds of the residents, putting on her saddest expression, the expression of a poor fatherless child that melted the hardest hearts, and sat as a welcome guest at the meals of the other families. She would open her supper with herring, sour cream, and baked potatoes at the Warshavskys and continue at the Zilkas with highly seasoned eggplants, soup full of weeds pulled up from the garden, and a thin, steaming Iraqi pita baked in the clay taboun. At the table of the Sharabis she ate sponge bread dipped in fatty marrow soup and finished off with a sharp salad and a phosphorescent green sauce made of fenugreek. When she returned to her room she would ask Angela to make her an omelet from egg powder with a spinach patty, polish off a jar of yogurt, gulp milk straight from the saucepan where it had been put to boil, break bread with her hands, take half the loaf to bed with her and hide it under her mattress, where she shared her hoard with the new kingdom of ants that had come into being immediately after the previous one had been liquidated by her mother. The cookies she loved best of all she kept for Mischa.
With Mischa she celebrated the biggest and longest feasts of all on the Day of Atonement. When the other occupants of the house wandered round their rooms like ghostly shadows, their dry mouths giving off the bitter smells of empty stomachs, their faces pale, and their tongues coated white, Rosa would escape the punishment of the fast and slip away to knock on Mischa’s door. He would open the door a crack, check to see who it was, stretch out a skinny hand and pull her into a kitchen full of the smell of cooking. On the table she would see delicacies that never made their appearance there on ordinary days of the year: black bread thickly spread with butter, a pink ham for which he had paid a fortune to the administration officer of the nearby Greek Embassy, potatoes boiled in their skins, sweet carrots cooked in wine and raisins, a finely chopped salad, onion rings bathed in oil, black olives, and fresh cookies for dessert. After they had eaten their fill they settled down on the bed, and Mischa would play with her curls, kiss her dimples, stroke her skin, and tell her stories about the camps. Then she would ask him why he never fasted on Yom Kippur. Mischa would fix his dull eyes on her transparent sapphire ones, stroke her arms and legs, weigh his words gravely, and answer her in the same words year after year: “There, in the camps, every day was Yom Kippur. There we fasted enough to last us all our lives, and even if I live another thousand years I still won’t use up all the days I fasted there. For this Yom Kippur I’ve already fasted,” and he would raise a glass of wine to the sooty kitchen ceiling, winking at Rosa and declaring: “Let’s have a happy holiday!”
Some say that Rosa’s aversion to bathing stemmed from Mischa’s stories. Every Friday afternoon, when all the residents were freshly bathed, their hair soft and shining from the laundry soap with the picture of a menorah stamped on it, the house would fill with Rosa’s screams as she battled Joseph and her mother in the bathroom. These battles would leave blue bruises on her plump flesh and half-moons of bleeding little holes on their hands, a painful reminder of her pointed teeth. After a lengthy, stubborn struggle in their room, they would finally succeed in imprisoning her hands in theirs, and Joseph would carry her, kicking and screaming, to the bathroom, where he would throw her onto the floor and with Angela’s help strip off her clothes, push her into the tub, and peel the dirt off her with a rough loofah that left fine red scratches all over her skin. When her body was scoured and her hair clean, they would lead her back to the room wrapped in a stiff towel and dress her in her Sabbath clothes.
Many years later, when Rosa already had children of her own, Angela reminded her of these forced baths.
“Why didn’t you want to wash?” she asked her.
Rosa reflected a little before she replied, shook her head, and said with a serious expression: “It was because of the camps.”
“What camps?” asked Angela in surprise.
“The extermination camps,” said Rosa quietly.
“What have the extermination camps got to do with washing?” asked Angela incredulously.
“They led them into the showers on the pretext that they had to wash,” said Rosa, “and there they gassed them, and afterward they made them into soap.”
“Mischa told you that, didn’t he?” asked Angela.
“I don’t remember,” she lied. “I don’t remember where I heard those stories,” Rosa replied with lowered eyes, the terrible scenes described by Mischa coming back to haunt her.
Rosa grew fast and soon outstripped her friends—Ruthie Sharabi, Rachelle Zilka, and Ruhama Warshavsky. When they walked through the neighborhood streets together Rosa looked like their big sister, with her hefty body and swelling breasts that kept getting heavier underneath the broad bands of cloth her mother wound tightly round her chest to flatten them. Sometimes, when they tired of jumping rope and playing hopscotch, the girls would hide from the boys in the yard, behind the Warshavskys’ tattered sheets hanging out to dry, and discuss grave and weighty matters. Their favorite subject was what their lives would be like when they grew up. Rosa, who was an only child and longed for brothers and sisters, would jump in first and declare with shining eyes that above all she wanted a husband and a lot of children, even seven or eight, the more the better.
Ruhama, who suffered because of her little brothers and detested the patter of their little feet, would shake her head in disagreement an
d announce that she, of course, would have a husband, but she didn’t want any children, because children meant trouble, diapers, noise, dirt, and aggravation, like her mother always said, and besides, it was a shame to waste money on them. Whatever money she had she was going to spend on herself and on a beautiful house full of flowers.
Rachelle naturally wanted a husband and children, but not too many: “One or two is enough, because three’s already too many.” And, unlike Rosa and Ruhama, she knew that she wanted a profession. She wanted to be a bank clerk and to count lots of money every day. “And anyone who touches money all day long will have money, because money sticks to your fingers, my father says so,” she would whisper to her friends with gleaming eyes.
And when the three of them looked at Ruthie, waiting to hear her plans for the future, the little girl would lower her emerald eyes to the ground, pluck a stalk of wood sorrel with her slender fingers, put it to her lips, and chew on it without thinking, until the delicate, sour taste filled her mouth and brought a grimace to her face.
“Well?” they would press her.
“I don’t know,” she would say in embarrassment. “I don’t know what to want.”
“If you don’t want anything, you won’t have anything,” Ruhama warned her. “No husband, no children, nothing. You have to want.”
And Ruthie would become confused under the pressure of her friends, look with lowered eyes at the stalk of wood sorrel, which had lost its crispness and turned into a limp, masticated lump, sigh, and say that there was no need to ask for anything.
“Then you won’t have anything,” Ruhama would sum up. And as always when she wanted to annoy Ruthie, she would sing:
Once upon a time I went to Yemen,
I saw a little black boy eating a lemon,
And he’ll be Ruthie’s husband, a match made in heaven.
Since none of the girls had ever seen a black boy, and the way Ruhama said the word made it seem like a curse, the idea of their friend marrying someone like that seemed shocking and threatening to them. Ignoring the insulted tears beginning to drip from Ruthie’s emerald eyes, Ruhama would announce that it was time to return to their jumping and hopscotch.
* * *
In her spare time Angela began to tell fortunes by reading coffee grounds. She had learned this skill from her aunt Lise, who knew how to read coffee cups like an open book. First she told the fortunes of the neighbors, and when they came true the neighbors brought their friends, who brought more friends, all fearful and curious to know what lay in store for them. A lot of banknotes accumulated in Angela’s hands, joining the money brought home by Joseph, who had graduated from high school and was working in the movie theaters of the town while waiting for his military service to start. When she had a tidy sum, she applied to the Housing Ministry. As a widow she received a grant, and they were moved from the villa into a small apartment on the third floor of a new building in 10 Shabazi Street, one of the jerry-built housing projects in Katamon G, whose outer walls were covered with a jigsaw of orange stones amateurishly stuck in the plaster by builders new at the trade.
In the new building they were greeted by three small rooms, a kitchen, a gleaming bathroom, and a private toilet. Without any urging, Rosa shut herself up in the bathroom and spent the whole day soaking in the warm water, scrubbing her skin and stripping off old memories. She emerged in the evening, the tips of her fingers swollen and wrinkled as a washerwoman’s; her flesh pink, fragrant, and shining; her long hair shampooed, and her eyes radiant. Suddenly Angela realized how she had grown and how beautiful she was, and Joseph, who was angry with her at first for keeping him out of the bathroom, gazed into her calm eyes, drowned in their blue lakes, and forgot all his grievances.
Although Rosa had asked Rina to move into the new house with them, Rina refused with incomprehensible obstinacy. And when Rosa pressed her, she said that the villa was her home, she had the key to the front door hanging round her neck, and she would never move. Rosa was tired of her oppressive silences, the lacy dress that never got dirty, and the games she made her play with the doll, Belle, and she didn’t miss her at all. They left the angel bed, which Rosa had outgrown, behind in the villa, and took only the doll as a souvenir, even though Rosa refused to play with it. And when Angela found the doll thrown under Rosa’s new bed, she dusted its dirty dress and set it on top of the wardrobe as an ornament. From its perch the doll would stare at Rosa with its cold eyes in mute reproach and remind her against her will of the old house, of Rina, and of the nights they had spent together. Soon Belle’s hair was full of dust, glittering spiderwebs reached from her elaborate curls to the ceiling, and her lace dress turned gray with grime. One day, during the spring cleaning in honor of Passover, Angela picked the doll up and turned it over. But Belle was silent, and no cry of “Mama, mama, mama” escaped her lips. With a heavy heart Angela shook out her curls and gave her a new hairstyle to match Rosa’s. Then she wiped away the dust powdering her china face, took off her lace dress, and washed it carefully. Together with a handful of sharp-smelling mothballs, she wrapped the naked doll and the laundered dress in an old sheet, and after some hesitation she buried them deep in the closet next to the dead Amatzia’s winter clothes.
“When you get married and have a daughter, you can give her the doll,” she said to Rosa, or perhaps to herself, and continued her spring cleaning.
A few weeks later they were joined in the new neighborhood by the Warshavsky and Zilka families, and at the end of the year the Sharabis too received an apartment of their own and moved in with Ruthie but without the grandmother. “She died in the middle of chewing ghat, and when they took her body to bury it, it was as dry and light as if there was nothing left of her but skin and bones,” said Ruthie. And when Rosa started school, the girls from Ali Hamouda’s House of Notes were all together again in the same class.
* * *
Many years later, when Rosa had children of her own, she would grow sick of the sight of the neglected houses and the yards full of thorns and junk surrounding her and suffocating her soul in Katamon G.
Then she would take her children for walks at twilight in the neighborhood of Old Katamon, among the magnificent villas of the Arab effendis who had abandoned their homes and property in their panic-stricken flight. The streets that had once borne Arab names were now named in honor of Jewish acts of heroism and historic dates. As they went from street to street Rosa read the names out loud and explained their significance. From Portzim Street they climbed up to Palmach Street, down Tel Hai to the Twenty-ninth of November Street, and from there to the streets of the Thirty-five and Conquerors of Katamon, and to Relief Convoys and Water Distributors Streets, commemorating the siege of Jerusalem.
When she wandered round the streets of Old Katamon she remembered the night of the looted carpets, and she wondered what had happened to them and where they were now. The well-tended villas made of chiseled Jerusalem stone looked to her like palaces. Here and there the flags of foreign states flew from imposing houses, with limousines bearing diplomatic license plates parked outside them. Rosa would point to the flags and explain to the children: “That’s the Greek flag, that’s the Italian, that’s Sweden, and that one’s Chile.” She would pick fragrant honeysuckle flowers from the fences as she walked and show the children how to suck out the sweet drops of nectar. When they passed jasmine bushes she would decorate their heads with the sweet-smelling blossoms, and from the passionflowers she would pull off the long, slender petals to reveal the shy little man hiding inside them to the children. She would peep with them through the slats of the wooden fences and devour with her eyes the flourishing gardens and the people serenely sitting and walking in them.
And when she approached Ali Hamouda’s House of Notes, she would slow down and stop. Surrounded by her children, she would stroke the gleaming wrought-iron gate adorned with the treble clef, and widen her nostrils to take in the scent of the jasmine mingled with that of the lavender bushes, which had grown bac
k, covered with fragrant purple flowers. Then she would point a trembling finger to the half-open green shutter and whisper to the children as if she were telling them a secret: “That was our room.” And they would stare wide-eyed with disbelief at the magnificent villa standing opposite them surrounded by trees and lavender bushes. Rosa would try to explain to them that in those days it wasn’t like it was today, when only one family lived in the house—that then a number of families were obliged to crowd in together. And they would listen to her politely and ask to go back to their own familiar neighborhood.
When Rosa realized that they didn’t believe her stories, she began visiting the house on her own. On the days when longings pierced her body, she would hide behind the fence, and her eyes would invade the window of her room and grope their way blindly among the familiar furniture. In her mind’s eye she would see the icebox, the doll, Belle, the angel bed, and Rina. And when in her imagination she lay next to her on the mattress, she would be assailed by the old smells of the air heavy with cigarette smoke and sweat mixed with cheap perfume, the stink of soiled diapers, the smells of mold and rust. And when she encountered Mischa’s face she would hurry home with a great hunger gnawing at her stomach, and she would not be appeased until she had opened the fridge and devoured its contents. With her stomach full she would sit on her armchair and swear that she would never visit the house again, until a force stronger than she was carried her back there again.
two
THREAD OF SAFFRON
On winter nights, when a cold wind raged outside and blew through the cracks in the windows of the third-floor apartment on 10 Shabazi Street, Angela and Rosa would snuggle up under the thick kapok quilt and play the memory game. In spite of their urging, Joseph refused to join them, burying his head in a book and ignoring their invitations. Rosa was always the first to begin, but her memories ran out too quickly. After all, she was only a little girl, and little girls don’t have many memories, Angela would console her, and at her request she would tell her the memories she loved best of all, the memories of her uncle Joseph when he was a baby. And while Angela spoke, Rosa would giggle and steal sly looks at the hefty, broad-chested Joseph, whom she could on no account imagine as a baby.
