by Dalya Bilu
Only a small minority dared to admit that it was love, a very great love. For even though they had lectured him day and night, insisting that he deserved a better-looking, better-connected, and healthier woman, Amatzia had rebelled against his parents and comrades, abandoned everything, married her with a ring and a rabbi, because that was what she wanted, moved into the Mamilla quarter of Jerusalem with her, and lived with her there in poverty.
It seemed that the dire prophecies of the elders of the kibbutz and their unremitting efforts to separate the couple only strengthened his love for her. And she, grateful to him for choosing her over all the other girls, tried to requite his great love. The old folks in Mamilla well remembered the couple living parsimoniously in their cramped little room. At night they would hear Angela’s shouts of joy and Amatzia’s deep groans in response. Night after night the pair of them kept their neighbors awake, until they decided to send a deputation of pious women to Angela, to put the fear of God into her and tell her that it was sinful for a woman to go to bed with her husband night after night all month long without skipping a single day for the uncleanliness of her menstruation and without going to the mikvah to purify herself of her blood. And when the women of the neighborhood met to consult over the watermelon seeds laid out on colorful blankets to dry, they came to the conclusion that she was probably pregnant, since only a pregnant woman could sleep with her husband every night without skipping a single day, and they decided to leave her alone.
In spite of the austerity that left Angela’s body even skinnier than before, except for the rounded little belly sticking out of her skirt, and although there were days when they did without a hot meal, Amatzia and Angela did not give up their other love, the love of the cinema. Once a month, Angela told Rosa, when they had succeeded in saving a little money, they would take turns buying a single ticket and going to see a movie. The other one would wait outside the movie theater and for days on end would feed on the details and listen in suspense to the story of the plot. Together they would hum the tunes and reenact the most important scenes, the scenes of love and kisses.
Their love, which was greater than all the love stories they saw in the movies, came to an abrupt end. The warning sign came a week before Rosa was born, an event they were anticipating with all the eagerness of a couple in love. That night, after they had satiated each other’s bodies, and Angela cuddled up blissfully in Amatzia’s arms and waited for sleep, she sensed the baby crying inside her. For a long time she lay on her back with her eyes open and listened to the stifled weeping rising from her body. And when the crying grew louder and the beating against the walls of her stomach grew harder, she could stand it no longer and she woke Amatzia with a gentle shake and told him what was happening to her.
“Amatzia, the baby’s crying inside me.”
Amatzia sat up in bed.
“Are you sure your labor isn’t beginning?” he asked anxiously, afraid they wouldn’t find transportation to get them to the hospital in time because of the curfew.
“No. She’s just crying. The baby’s crying. I don’t know what’s wrong with her,” she repeated.
All that night Amatzia lay by her side, stroking her face, kissing the baby in her stomach whose crying he couldn’t hear, and trying to calm them both, until the sky turned pink and the exhausted Angela fell asleep in his arms.
A few hours later, when he went out to look for work as a porter, he was murdered by an impassioned Arab coming out of the Temple Mount on the Muslim holiday of Id-al-Fitr. His ears ringing with the Mufti’s call to kill the Jews, he plunged his dagger straight into Amatzia’s stomach and sliced his liver in two. For hours he lay bleeding in the sewage canal next to the main street leading to Mamilla, until the river of blood flowed down the hill and collected in a puddle at the entrance to the Valley of Hinnom, alerting passersby to his plight. When they followed the trail of blood they found him lying on his back, his body dry and drained.
Angela said that he had left the house quietly in the morning so as not to wake her. When she woke up in a panic, the hollow of his body next to her in the bed was already cold. After drinking her morning coffee she overturned the empty cup on the saucer and did the same with the muddy dregs of Amatzia’s cup waiting for her in the sink. She did this every morning without his knowledge. After washing her face and combing her hair she examined the results. The dry coffee had congealed on the sides of her cup in a strange configuration of spidery black trickles she was unable to decipher. Alarmed, she examined Amatzia’s cup and saw the figure of a big-bodied man lying at the bottom of the cup with a huge hole gaping in his stomach. She knew immediately that a calamity was about to befall him. In an act of desperation she did something unthinkable in coffee-reading circles and poured the remains of the cold coffee standing in the pot into her cup. She quickly drank the sinister black liquid, and with the bitterness choking her throat she poured the dregs straight into Amatzia’s cup, covering the evidence with a new layer of grounds. With a pounding heart she examined the results. The figure of the slain man looked back at her mockingly, in a new configuration of coffee grounds swollen with water. She burst out of the house like a madwoman and ran through the streets in her dressing gown, her huge nine-month-old belly sticking out in front of her. With prayers and vows she tried to turn away the evil fate swooping down on him, and with tears bathing her face she stopped the passersby and asked them if they had seen her husband, but nobody could tell her where he was.
In the afternoon rumors reached the quarter of an unknown young man that had been murdered. Immediately afterward her brother, Joseph, who was living on a kibbutz arrived on a surprise visit. In the evening, when the policemen knocked on her door accompanied by two neighbors and a nurse from the hospital, Angela was waiting for them, with Joseph holding her hand and her face as white as a sheet. The room was sparkling with cleanliness and she was wearing her one and only maternity dress, whose collar she had already torn as a sign of mourning.
They buried Amatzia on the Mount of Olives under the cover of darkness. Preceded by an armored car and surrounded by armed British policemen to prevent violence and bloodshed, the bier made its way up the bare, rocky hill covered with tombstones, and there they laid him quickly to rest in the hastily dug pit. That night Angela’s mind took pity on her and effaced the fragmentary images, the words and gestures, which if she had taken them in would no doubt have driven her to throw herself into the pit after her husband.
Angela did not remember the sight of the bloody towel pushed deep into the gaping wound in the body of the man who had loved her as no other man was capable of loving.
She didn’t remember the hateful words and the accusation—“Murderess!”—hurled at her by her mother-in-law.
She didn’t remember how the kibbutz members who accompanied him to his last resting place stood around the grave like a hostile wall, and shooed her away like a chicken when she tried to approach.
She didn’t remember how she had pushed her way through them, supporting her vast belly with her hands.
She didn’t remember how the fatherless baby had struggled inside her, crying and beating its little fists against the walls of her womb.
She didn’t remember how she had chased them all away and fallen on the grave, digging her nails into the mound of freshly dug earth and refusing to move even when a policeman’s baton came down lightly on her shoulders, and how in the end the British policemen had been forced to pick her up in their strong arms and carry her away, kicking and screaming.
A few hours later, when she was sitting shiva for him with two neighbor women at her side, feeding her sugar water and mopping up her tears with a big handkerchief, she noticed her black fingernails and she couldn’t remember how the dirt had gotten there. And when she wanted to know if Amatzia had suffered when he was stabbed, the mourners explained to her that Amatzia hadn’t felt any pain, that the stab of the knife is felt by the victim like a hard blow and afterward, when the blood begins to flow
and the life drains out, a sense of lightness spreads through the body, until the soul escapes and flies up to heaven. And Angela listened to the explanations, and she couldn’t understand how healthy people, who had never been stabbed in their lives, could know with such certainty how a stabbed man felt at the moment of the stabbing and after it, until the moment when the soul departed from the body.
* * *
And when the city of Jerusalem was divided, and the grave remained on the other side, she could no longer go and visit it—until the Six-Day War rejoined the two halves. Then she went up to the Mount of Olives and, with the crackle of gunshots still reverberating in the blackened mountains, she looked for the grave. For months she searched the hillside every day, until she knew every rock and tombstone, identified the people buried there by name, remembered the dates of their births and deaths, and knew who lay next to whom. But she never found Amatzia’s grave. During those dark days of searching, when Angela thought painfully of the husband who had disappeared from her life without leaving a grave behind him, her thoughts turned willy-nilly to her parents, who had vanished without a trace.
The tragedy that had taken place a month before her marriage came back now to haunt her, and she saw her parents swallowed up by the sea on their way to Palestine, together with another forty-five people on board the ship hit by a British naval mine meant for another vessel. And when she wept on Amatzia’s vanished grave, she wept too for the memory of the parents she had never had a chance to mourn. For immediately after the news of their death she had married Amatzia, and she had been unwilling to mar their happiness together with her grief.
Angela did not yet know that one of the passengers on the ship plying its way though the dangerous sea, teeming with German submarines and mines below and hostile fighter planes above, was Solomon Bokobasa, the boy born on the same day as she was and promised her in marriage with a handshake. As a child she had blocked her ears with her thumbs when her mother told her how her father had forced David Bokobasa to make a pact with him. And when she saw her intended, whom everyone called “Solomon the Praying Mantis” because of his swaying gait and the way he prayed in the synagogue, she would run away, refusing to believe that when she grew up she would have to marry him. But her mother told her that once the fathers had sworn an oath to each other, she had no choice in the matter, because whoever broke his oath would be cursed. And during the sleepless nights imposed on her by her father, Angela would think about Solomon the Praying Mantis and the oath their fathers had sworn, and she knew that she would rather die than marry him and give birth to little praying mantises just like him.
As soon as her letter with the news that she had fallen in love with a kibbutznik from Givat-Rimonim reached her parents, they began making hasty preparations to sail for Palestine, terrified in case she married him and brought the curse down on their heads. They ignored the warnings broadcast every day on the radio that anyone setting sail while war was raging on the seas was taking his life in his hands, packed their possessions, and boarded the ship, laden with presents and accompanied by Solomon Bokobasa, dressed in his best Sabbath suit. In big traveling trunks they crammed wedding outfits for the bride and groom, copper trays, tin kettles, carpets, amulets, solid gold bracelets, rings studded with rubies, goat’s hair blankets, and a ton of preserved food flavored with saffron. Janah took all his property with him to Palestine, as well as four sacks of saffron, two years’ harvest, which he hoped to sell in the land of Israel and the surrounding countries and make a fortune. For three days the ship sailed, until it hit the mine, which blasted a huge hole in its hold. At the very same moment a storm broke out at sea and the ship was engulfed in water. Soaked to the skin, Janah held on to his son, Joseph, trying to protect him from the waves raging all around and lashing the deck with long tongues of foam, sweeping away everything they encountered in their path. But when he found himself standing up to his waist in water tinged a bright yellow color, he went out of his mind, forgot his son and his son-in-law-to-be, and rushed off to rescue the soaked sacks of saffron. He clung to them with all his might and main until a great wave came and washed him off the sinking deck into the sea, and as he plummeted into the black depths he caught a final glimpse of his precious sacks bobbing gently on the waves above, turning the foam yellow as they floated slowly away.
Three days later a passing merchant ship found the sole survivor of the wreck, Angela’s hulking brother, Joseph, floating on top of the sacks and beating the yellow waves with his big hands. For months afterward ships sailing in the vicinity of the wreck reported sighting yellow, bitter-smelling waves and thousands of dead fish with orange scales floating on their backs with their white bellies turned up to the sky.
Since, with his big body and serious face, Joseph looked far older than his years, the sailors who had saved him were astonished to see him squatting day and night on the deck with his thumb in his mouth and tears pouring endlessly from his eyes. He didn’t stop crying until he reached Palestine and was reunited with his sister as she stood under the marriage canopy with Amatzia. On the kibbutz, people made fun of his big body and serious face and put him to work at the hardest and most physically demanding jobs, justifying their actions on the grounds that his sister had robbed them of the finest of their sons, and however hard they worked him he could never make up for their loss of the unique and irreplaceable Amatzia.
When Amatzia and Angela left the kibbutz, fed up with the hostile attitude of the members, and moved to Jerusalem, and Joseph remained of his own free will, the kibbutz treasurer claimed that he did so as a conscious act of atonement for the departure of his renegade brother-in-law, while Angela believed that he stayed on the kibbutz because he did not want to burden them.
But the real reason Joseph stayed was rooted in his love of the movies. Every Friday night the kibbutz members would gather on the lawn in front of the dining hall and wait for the movie of the week to be screened. Joseph would sit by himself, apart from the rest, and as the pictures flickered on the screen the tears would drip from his eyes. At the end of the movie he would steal into his bed in the corner of the tent and, his eyes swollen with weeping, he would turn his face to the canvas wall and pretend to be asleep.
On the day that Amatzia was murdered Joseph went up to Jerusalem, and when the policemen came with the terrible news he was already there, waiting for them at his sister’s side. For years Angela tried to get him to explain to her how he knew what had been revealed to her in the coffee grounds, but he only shrugged his shoulders and said: “I just felt that you needed me.”
And at the end of the week of mourning, as soon as they returned from Amatzia’s grave, her labor began. Without being asked, Joseph packed a little bag with a nightgown, underwear, a toothbrush, and soap, accompanied her to the bus station, and in the bus he sat beside her on the hard wooden bench, supporting her huge belly in his strong arms so that she would not be jolted by the turns in the road and hurt the baby inside her. And when they reached the hospital and Angela collapsed onto the bench bent double with pain, he gave her particulars to the reception clerk. And on Angela’s registration form, in the place reserved for the name of the father, it said “Joseph Janah” and in brackets “Kanafi,” the Hebrew name given him by the officials of the Jewish Agency when he arrived in the country.
Supported by her brother, Angela walked to the delivery room, lay down on the bed, and parted her legs. And when the baby tried to cleave through the darkness of her womb and tore her body apart in its efforts to reach the light, Angela’s screams pierced the ceiling and burst through the roof and rose high into the sky to announce the birth of his daughter to her husband in heaven.
Rosa, whose birth was natural but difficult, was a big baby. She weighed six and a half kilos, and all the doctors and nurses came to see the gigantic baby who never cried, not when she was born, or when they slapped her on the buttocks, or even when she was hungry. When all the other babies in the room were screaming to high heaven over su
ch trifles as hunger, noise, or wet diapers, Rosa lay on her back with the spasm of a smile fixed on her face, infecting anyone who looked at her and her smile with a strange, tingling happiness. She was the most famous baby in Palestine, and got her picture in the newspaper when she was only two days old.
“A reporter and a photographer came to the hospital to ask about me,” Angela told her daughter, basking in the memory, “and they took a picture of you smiling in your crib.” Charitably Rosa would look for the umpteenth time at the yellowing picture, which Angela had covered with hard plastic to protect it from the ravages of time, and listen to her mother telling the story she had heard a thousand times before: how in order to emphasize her remarkable size they had photographed her with the other babies born on the same day lined up on either side of her, looking like underdeveloped embryos in comparison to the blooming, fully formed Rosa. Then she would read out loud what was written under the picture on the front page of the newspaper: “The biggest baby in Israel born in Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem.” The main item described the baby and gave her weight, and the last line referred the reader to the middle of the paper and the sad story spread over two pages there. Under the screaming headlines: BORN FATHERLESS, the article told the sad tale of Angela, who had lost her husband a few days before giving birth to her daughter, and showed a picture of her, small and emaciated, clasping a huge baby wrapped up like a mummy to her undernourished bosom.
