by Dalya Bilu
From the minute she set eyes on the big, kicking red bundle in the nurse’s arms, Angela was conscious of Rosa’s beauty, which was in striking contrast to her own faded looks. Even then, as she looked at the baby placed in her arms, she knew that her daughter would be the fairest among women. On her bald head she saw a mop of golden ringlets, and when she looked into her dark, bleary eyes she saw the bright blue hiding in them, and knew that they would be so deep and clear that you would be able to see right through them. Angela examined the delicate ears and saw that they were perfectly formed and set close to the baby’s head like a pair of seashells, and on her bare gums she saw the teeth that would grow strong, straight, and even, gleaming with a whiteness that would never dull. When she removed the diaper wrapped tightly round her body, she saw the many dimples that would pucker her flesh in a benediction of beauty, and her long, full legs. Then she opened the baby’s clenched fists and examined her fingers. She counted five fingers on each hand, and immediately noticed the index finger on the right hand, which was particularly long, and she knew that her daughter, blessed with those long, slender, supple fingers, would be a lucky woman, able to pierce the cigar-shaped buckwheat koubeh dumplings from end to end and stuff them with ease, and that her reputation as a cook would spread far and wide. And when the baby murmured, she heard her laughter, which would be clear and strong and echo in the chambers of the heart, turn the heads of men, and drive them crazy. But none of that could blur the effect of the thing that loomed up in front of her eyes, impudent and defiant, and turned her knees to water: the magnificent bosom that Rosa had grown during the nine months of her stay in the womb. For baby Rosa had been born with breasts.
* * *
And when Angela came home she put the baby to bed in the wicker basket she had bought from the Arab woman who took figs to the market in it. Surrounded by the smell of figs, her magnificent bosom bound up and flattened by a diaper, the baby gazed with her clear blue eyes at the people poking their heads into her cradle and smiled her most enchanting smiles at them.
She soon grew into the prettiest little girl in the kindergarten and the prettiest little girl in the school. She was always a head taller than her friends. Her body was rounded and padded; she had dimples in her knees, her arms, and her buttocks, and dimples in her cheeks when she smiled. Her breasts were round, heavy, and firm; and her pink nipples were always erect. Her slanting eyes laughed at everyone she met, and her fair hair was combed into elaborate curls.
Every morning Angela would wake her up two hours before school began. Like a doll on a spring Rosa would sit up in bed with her eyes closed, dreaming her interrupted dreams and entrusting her head to the hands of her mother, who patiently rolled her hair, curl by curl, into a magnificent mop of ringlets. Rosa’s head soon became a commodity in its own right, and the neighborhood hairdressers added it to their repertoire. Under dying, setting, permanent waving, and straightening, to this very day you can still find advertised in the hairdressing salons of Katamon G “Ringlets à la Rosa.” Once this style entered their list of treatments, the hairdressers watched Rosa like hawks. With sweet words they would invite her into their establishments, part the ringlets, weigh them in their hands, feel each ringlet admiringly with their fingers, consult one another as to the lotion used to set it, secretly sniff the fragrance wafting from her head, and try to get her to tell them what her mother put on her hair. Despite all their efforts to solve the mystery, none of the neighborhood hairdressers succeeded in emulating Rosa’s ringlets. Dozens of little girls in Katamon G boasted hairstyles similar to Rosa’s then, but they all lacked Angela’s “finishing touch,” as she put it, resolutely refusing to reveal her secret formula to anyone.
Rosa would parade proudly through the neighborhood, and her crown of ringlets would draw flies, gnats, bees, butterflies, and other winged insects as into a sweet and deadly trap. In the evening her mother would remove the insects that had found their death deep in the ringlets’ honeyed trap, shampoo her hair with laundry soap, and the next morning she would set to work, parting and curling and applying her secret formula all over again. If not for her heavy body, Rosa might have been invited to take part in the beauty contest for little girls, but Angela did not encourage her daughter to lose even a single kilo, explaining to her repeatedly: “That’s what men like. Fat, juicy women, with something to take hold of. The more there is of a woman the better they like it.”
Armed with her mother’s theories, Rosa feasted on Angela’s cooking, and while her school friends tortured themselves with diets, she put on more and more weight. Her cheeks filled out, her dimples deepened, and her skin tightened over her limbs. In order to underline her daughter’s beauty Angela saw to it that she wore only the finest clothes. Huge parcels of magnificent second-hand dresses, their fabric stiff and rustling, which had clad the bodies of pink-cheeked distant cousins on Sabbaths and holidays, arrived in the mail from America. These dresses, swelling like bells over their petticoats, Rosa wore to school and to play with her friends in the afternoons, and since she had a lot of dresses, she wasn’t afraid to get them dirty or torn. She stood out in the playground among her friends in their white cotton blouses and short blue gym pants, whose elastic constricted their young thighs. As they gathered around and fingered the rustling, transparent material of Rosa’s new dress, admiring sighs and whispers would rise from every side. “Another new dress,” they marveled. “How beautiful,” and, “I wish I had a dress like that.”
Only Ruhama, watching with an envious glint in her eyes, did not come up to feel the stiff, gauzy stuff of the diaphanous dress. Rosa heard from Ruthie that Ruhama talked about her and her fancy dresses and said: “Even if people sent me a hundred dresses like that I wouldn’t wear them, not even on Sabbath, because they’re ugly and they make Rosa look even fatter than she is.” Rosa tried to ignore these comments, which pierced her as painfully as long, sharp pins.
And the more beautiful Rosa grew, the more Angela declined. But in spite of her skinny body, her dreary looks, and her teeth, which began falling out one after the other, dozens of suitors came calling at the house. She would meet these men in the park, the street, or the grocery store. Before they looked at her they looked at Rosa. And they longed to stroke her golden ringlets, to kiss her dimples, caress her smooth clear skin, and bounce her on their knees. When they raised their eyes from Rosa and encountered Angela’s suspicious stare, they would quickly put on expressions full of benevolence and declare that they would be happy to adopt the pretty child and give her a father. Afterward they would come calling with gifts: food, toys for Rosa, fabric for dresses, books, and movie tickets to ingratiate themselves with Joseph—who, after Amatzia was murdered, came to live with them and took on the role of the man of the family. The rich men, the ones with cars, would take mother and daughter for drives in the Jerusalem hills. The others would take them both for walks around the town, for Angela never went out for a walk with one of her suitors without taking Rosa along. When Rosa grew older and no longer joined her mother on her outings, the stream of suitors dried up and turned to a meager trickle, until in the end they all disappeared, as if there were no more eligible men left in the country.
When Rosa strained her memory she remembered almost everything. Big Morduch had a fruit and vegetable store in the city center, and he would bring her the freshest fruits, and while she ate them he would pinch her cheeks and claim that her blush was due to the healthy vitamins contained in the fruits. Rosa was the only child in the kindergarten whose lunch box included red apples in winter and orange loquats in summer. Next in line was Yakov the Butcher, who kept the freshest, juiciest chicken parts for them, and who secretly pressed her thighs like a slaughterer examining an animal before he killed it, and whispered in her ear that she was getting fat because of the meat he brought her. Yonah the Tailor volunteered to sew their dresses for free, and as he took her measurements, he would feel Rosa’s breasts as if by accident, slide his hands over her butt, and look
deep into her eyes with an innocent expression, as if his hands were moving of their own accord. Affectionately Rosa remembered Simcha, the chestnut vendor, and how she would warm her hands in winter over the big basin full of scored chestnuts crackling appetizingly on the smoldering coals. Rosa liked feeling Simcha’s hot hands as they dropped the chestnuts he had pulled out of the fire for her into her pockets, from where they spread a warm glow through her body. In the summer Simcha would exchange the basin for a big, steaming cauldron in which he boiled bearded, yellow corn on the cob over a little bonfire. In exchange for kisses on his sunken cheeks, he would present Rosa with as many soft ears of corn wrapped in dripping green leaves as her heart desired.
Rosa remembered a long list of men who all wanted Angela, but she knew that Angela didn’t want them. With the airs and graces of an impoverished queen her mother received them in the thorny yard of the house, accepted their offerings, and refused to give them her hand. Not one of her suitors, she boasted, had ever been allowed to set foot in her room in Ali Hamouda’s House of Notes. And even when they moved to the new apartment in Katamon G and Rosa had a bedroom of her own, none of them was allowed into this room, which Angela called “Amatzia’s room,” and where she kept all his things as if he were still with her. The bristles of his old shaving brush were still stiff with the residue of the soap he had never rinsed off. His broken comb was full of the curly, straw-colored hairs uprooted from his scalp on the morning of his death. His swollen shoes with the cracked soles were still waiting for his feet underneath the bed. His clothes were hanging in the closet, the dirty underwear he had thrown into the laundry hamper on the eve of his death had never been washed and been preserved as they were at the bottom of the hamper, and his smell still lingered in the air of the room as if he had just left and would soon return. Only his framed pictures hanging everywhere, preserving his life on the kibbutz and his work in the cowshed for posterity, and the wedding picture of them on top of a haystack had been added to the room after he died. Angela told Rosa that all through the ceremony she had sneezed into the rabbi’s face, and she had only discovered years later that she was allergic to hay. Every day she lit a candle in honor of Amatzia’s memory, until the day she died, a few months before the birth of Angel, her last granddaughter.
* * *
Every Thursday afternoon, Angela’s market day, Rosa would steal into Amatzia’s room. With a serious expression on her face, resolved that this time she would cry, she would sit on the bed and try to commune with her father’s memory. But at exactly these moments, as if to spite her, happy thoughts would come into her head and distract her from the sorrow and grief she was determined to feel. In her mind’s eye she would see cream cakes, mountains of ice cream, and stuffed roast chickens, and the smell of freshly baked bread would fill her nostrils. With a strenuous effort she would try to banish the delightful sights and delicious smells invading her on every side and threatening to ruin her grief. Resolutely she would force herself to concentrate on the image of the father she had never known and on the feeling of loss that should obviously have accompanied this bitter fact. But in spite of her efforts to concentrate on her pathetic state, happy sights and thoughts kept stealing back into her head.
As a last, desperate measure she would take her father’s picture down from the chest of drawers, contemplate it at length, and try to concentrate on the handsome stranger looking at her through the glass. As she gazed intently at the friendly face his light eyes would come together and unite into one, sticking out of the middle of his forehead like the single eye of the Cyclops, as if on purpose to make her laugh. At the sight of the new aspect she had given her father Rosa would burst into laughter, replace the photograph on the chest, pick up the shaving brush and deliberately prick her fingers with the stiff, unrinsed bristles in order to hurt herself and make herself sad. But even the contact with her father’s personal possessions did not make her feel close to him. Then she would close her eyes and whisper his name over and over until her jaws grew tired: “Amatzia, Amatzia, Amatzia, Amatzia.” And when in the end the chant came out in the garbled form of “Matza, Matza, Matza,” she would burst into peals of laughter, as if she had just heard the funniest joke in the world. When she finished performing the “ritual of Amatzia,” as Angela, who sometimes came home from the market early and peeped through the door in secret, called it, Rosa would slide off the bed and firmly slam the door behind her, as if to prevent the visions of her father from interfering with her life. Then she would carry on with her games with a light heart until her next encounter with him, when Thursday came round again.
And when Angela would tell Rosa about Amatzia and show her the pictures of their wedding, Rosa would meet the faces of her grandmother and grandfather standing next to their son under the canopy like a hostile wall. She would often ask her mother to take her to visit her father’s kibbutz and meet her only grandparents. And Angela would explain again with pursed lips that her grandmother and grandfather lived abroad, and that it was impossible for her to visit them. The subject came up on her every birthday and every Rosh Hashanah, when she would receive a greeting card from them, without an envelope or stamp. When she grew up she realized that her grandparents, who had been living on the kibbutz all those years, refused to have anything to do with Angela, whom they blamed for murdering their son, and ignored the existence of their only granddaughter. The greeting cards were written by Angela herself, twice a year.
Angela’s nights were dedicated to Amatzia’s memory. Every night Rosa would hear her holding long conversations with her dead husband, telling him about her life, trying to keep him from worrying, and describing Rosa to him in glowing terms—her beauty, her outstanding performance at school, her friends, and her activities in general. Then she would ask him again, as she had asked him every night when he was alive and his warm body was clasped in her arms, why he had chosen her when he could have had any girl on the kibbutz, all of whom set their caps at him, the strongest and best-looking young man in the whole of the Emek. After discussing the subject with him at length and explaining the lack of logic in his choice, she would thank him for choosing her above all the other girls and for the love he had given her, which would be enough to last her for the rest of her life. Then she would take her leave of him and say good-night.
A few minutes after this Rosa would hear her mother’s restless body rubbing itself against the starched sheets. With strange, tingling sensations tickling her groin, she would listen to the creaking of the springs and the clattering of the bed as it thudded slowly and rhythmically against the wall behind it, and finally to the hoarse moans that indicated that quiet was about to settle on the house as her mother sank into a deep sleep. Only after she heard the soft whistling of the air as it escaped from her mother’s lips would Rosa allow herself to go to sleep. As long as she lived in her mother’s house she would listen to the sounds she made at night, and when she sometimes went to sleep over at her friend Rachelle’s house, she would have difficulty in falling asleep without them.
And when she couldn’t fall asleep she would talk to Rachelle about the future, about the husbands they would marry and the children they would give birth to. Then Rosa would return in her imagination to a field of flowers on a false spring day and find herself standing in the middle of that field, trampling the soft grass with her feet as the smell of the sap rose in her nostrils and the first rays of the sun warmed her body and a bright rain of butterflies descended on her head. And she would fall asleep at last.
four
FOUR BUTTERFLIES, FOUR HUSBANDS
Rosa would have four husbands. Ever since she had been a child, everyone in Katamon G was of this opinion. If anyone had asked them why they thought so, they would have been unable to explain how and when this idea had sprung up and become a rumor that crystallized into a firmly held belief and turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. But all the inhabitants of Katamon G would repeat the number like a mantra and whisper it in the secret of t
heir homes and yards.
And when Rosa walked down the street, the neighborhood urchins would line up on either side of her like a guard of honor and call out in time to her steps: “Four, four, four.” Angela didn’t like this silly joke, and she would rush at the teasing boys and shoo them away with yells and threats and the heartfelt wish that they wouldn’t have a single wife between them. And since she looked like a witch out of a fairy tale and was known for her ability to see into the future, they would take fright and scatter in all directions with embarrassed giggles. Still, all the way to school Rosa would hear the number “four” bouncing at her like a rubber ball from between the bushes, from behind the telegraph poles, from the stairwells, and from the shuttered windows of the dark houses. When her uncle, Joseph, who was already a soldier, came home on leave he would demand that she show him exactly which of the neighborhood boys had teased her, but she refused to tell him. Well aware of the bone-cracking strength of his hands, she preferred to swallow the insult rather than seek redress from the uncle who was as jealous of her as a loving husband.
No wonder, therefore, that she hated the number four, hated it so much that she avoided counting it among the other numbers, refused to say it aloud, and in the end invented a new name to replace it, “flor.” And when her friends wanted to tease her, they would invite her to jump rope with them and count her jumps out loud. And Rosa, who in spite of her weight had no rivals in jumping rope, would wear them out, reaching “florty” and then “flor hundred,” until their wrists hurt and they begged her to stop and turn the rope and give them a turn to jump. In arithmetic lessons Rosa would do her best to avoid the teacher’s eye, and whenever she was asked to solve a problem whose solution included the hated number, she would deliberately give the wrong answer. And Angela couldn’t understand why her daughter, who was such a good pupil, had begun to fail in arithmetic, a subject in which she had formerly excelled.
