by Dalya Bilu
When Angela pressed her, Rosa explained that it had all started on that sunny, false spring day, three weeks after Hanukkah, the day the pupae turned into butterflies. On that day spring burst out in all its strength and banished with its radiant face the gloomy days of winter. Warm breezes drove away the clouds, caressed people’s faces, penetrated their bones, and warmed their hearts with the false promise of spring. The mild weather confused the plants, making the grass sprout and the flowers embedded in the earth bloom. They raised their colorful heads, stretching their crumpled petals and spreading false sweet scents afar. Thus they waited, decked out in their finery and perfumed like brides, for the go-betweens to come and help them carry out the commandment of be fruitful and multiply. With their petals quivering in the warm breeze they dazzled the eyes of the insects flying around them, and in the heat of the moment they made no distinction between flies and bees, grasshoppers, beetles, butterflies, and flying ants. For in the work of reproduction all are welcome. Dazzled by their beauty, the creatures circled around them, seduced by the glorious sight, dived deep into their open, greedy mouths, picked up their pollen, sipped the nectar from the wide goblets offered them, and bore away with them the tiny yellow bits of eternity sticking to their legs and wings and covering their bodies.
That week Rosa’s ears buzzed with the hoarse, broken mating cries of the neighborhood cats, the barking of dogs driven mad by the distant smell of a bitch in heat, and the clattering of copulating tortoises. Only just emerged from the bowels of the earth at the end of their winter hibernation, and before they had a chance to warm their cold houses, the tortoises advanced on the humped mates waiting for them in suspenseful silence. Slowly they approached them, their black eyes oozing a transparent mucus, and when they found what they were looking for they began knocking loudly on their shells, calling them to come out. And when their calls went unanswered, they embarked on armored warfare, ramming the females with their hard bodies until their heads and tails poked out of their shells. And when the female saw the insistent suitor facing her, she would stretch out her tail and wait with infinite patience for her armored knight laboriously to mount her humped house. When he reached the top, the climber would close his beady eyes and attach the opening of his tail to the still female. Rosa, who felt sorry for the female tortoises, would chase the desperate suitors away, and they would return and climb onto the females’ backs again and cling to them as stubbornly and resolutely as if their lives depended on it.
That same week, which was particularly hot and full of the sounds of copulation, all the butterflies broke out of their cocoons at once, as if they had received a sign from heaven. Then too a rain of butterflies came down and covered the earth, the trees, and the stones in a thick layer of bright butterfly dust. All the inhabitants of Jerusalem came out of their houses and went into the fields to see the shower of butterflies and collect them in heaps in brown paper bags. That year in the Mahaneh Yehuda market they sold pictures of sunsets made of red butterfly wings and pictures of pirouetting dancers in tutus sewn from the torn-off wings of pink and white butterflies. And next to the mountains of summer fruits, on display for sale, were giant butterflies trapped in heavy wooden frames and protected by glass, their soft bodies fixed to cardboard by long pins and their bright wings outspread.
Among the people wandering like dreamers in the fields where the butterflies and sunbeams danced a demented dance of beauty were Rosa, Rachelle, Ruhama, and Ruthie, the “four R’s from Ali Hamouda’s House of Notes,” as everybody called them even after they had moved to the new neighborhood.
It was Ruhama who dreamed up the idea that stuck Rosa with the number four and determined her fate in the preordained future:
“If we stand still, the butterflies will think that we’re flowers and come to us. Afterward we’ll count how many butterflies each of us managed to attract. And we’ll know how many husbands we’ll marry.”
“But you can only marry one husband,” grumbled Rachelle, who was always in a bad mood and always wanted to be right.
“The butterflies will tell us how many husbands each of us will marry,” Ruhama repeated, and told them all to stand in a row, close their eyes, and think that they were flowers.
Shaking with suppressed laughter the girls stood with their eyes closed, while the desperate butterflies whirled around them like confetti, taking advantage of the single day allotted them and showering them with colored rain.
Spectators said that the heaviest shower of butterflies rained down on Rosa. With the flutter of their silky wings tickling her cheeks she stood between her friends, her heart pounding, her fists clenched, praying for one and one only. Afterward Ruhama told all forty pupils in the class, who told their parents, who told their neighbors, who told their relations, who took the news outside the city, how Rosa stood there, surrounded by a soft, bright, fluttering cloud, and when they opened their eyes they counted four gorgeous big butterflies caught in her curly hair.
“You’ll marry four men,” pronounced Ruhama, and went up to her friend with one miserable gray butterfly caught in her own hair, trying to free itself with weary flaps of its wings. On Rachelle’s head they found one brightly colored butterfly, while Ruthie’s head had none.
“And you won’t have even one husband,” Ruhama said to her in a scornful tone, and to add salt to the wound she hummed the tune that always brought boiling tears to Ruthie’s eyes, bringing it up to date in order to adapt it to the new circumstances:
Once upon a time I went to Yemen,
I saw a little black boy eating a lemon,
And he won’t be Ruthie’s husband in a match made in heaven.
Then she hurried off to spread the tale of Rosa’s four butterflies and accused her of trapping them on purpose. For when she told the story to every passerby, she added that it was all because Rosa smeared her hair with sugar water, and she herself had seen how the butterflies clustered round her, trying to suck the nectar from her hair.
As a result of the story the whole neighborhood knew that Rosa’s glorious curls weren’t natural. Angela, so they said, fixed her daughter’s hair in those elaborate ringlets after first rinsing it in sugar water. When Rosa found out about the stories spread by Ruhama, they had a terrible fight, as a result of which the camp of the “four R’s from Ali Hamouda’s House of Notes” was split down the middle. Rachelle took Ruhama’s side, and Ruthie took Rosa’s. Later on Rachelle rejoined Rosa’s camp, and announced that she had finished with that wicked Ruhama forever. One month later she changed her mind and maneuvered successfully between the two camps.
And so it would be in the future too, even after they were married women with children. Rosa would make friends with Ruhama again only many years later, after the death of her first husband, when she would knock on her door and hold out the face of her husband spread over a big poster, rolled up and fastened with a rubber band.
five
THE LOVE OF UNCLES
Of the “four R’s from Ali Hamouda’s House of Notes,” Rosa was the first to marry. She was the first girl in her class to marry, and perhaps she was also the youngest girl to marry in the whole of Jerusalem.
If the choice had been up to Rosa, she would probably have married Shraga Matzliah, the best-dressed boy in the class and the most outstanding at sports. In spite of the ban imposed on boys by the girls in those days, and vice versa, Rosa loved Shraga. Faithfully she dragged her love with her from class to class of elementary school, for eight whole years.
When she sat next to him on the bench in class and he stroked her leg under the desk, she was sure that he was meant for her. With the insight of a girl who would one day be a woman, she sensed that Shraga was a part of her, a part of her body, a part of her soul, and that very soon, as she confided in Ruthie, after making her swear that she would “die in Hitler’s black grave” if she told her secret, she and Shraga would be married. And when Ruthie said that she was a head taller than he was and a husband should always be taller
than his wife, Rosa replied confidently that her mother had told her that at their age the boys were always shorter than the girls, and afterward they shot up while the girls stopped growing. And even if Shraga stayed short and she went on growing, she didn’t care, because she loved him with a true love that nothing could spoil, not even differences in height.
Rosa knew for certain that she would marry him after he kissed her in the gym when they were in the eighth grade. This kiss opened a door to a new world of feelings, strong sensations, and desires. And when the door opened, they stood on its threshold and felt the sensations and delighted in the magic of the place where they found themselves. Trembling all over, they sniffed the smells of lust surrounding them, saw the provocative sights on every side; new tastes that had never visited their palates touched their tongues, and their ears rang with the sweet sounds of moans and tender words of love. And in those moments they were swept up body and soul in a tempest that bore them to a destination from which there was no return. And as she embraced his slender body and pressed him to her heavy breasts, he slid his tongue between her teeth and promised to marry her.
The taste of that kiss, with its fresh scent of plucked oranges, stayed with her for a long time, even after Shraga himself disappeared from her life, leaving a faint scent of rotten oranges on her hands and clothes. The smell, which took a long time to evaporate, was a constant and painful reminder of her first love. And it would come back in full force at the beginning of winter, when the first consignment of oranges reached the market and their sharp smell would spread through the air, invading the houses and announcing the arrival of the cold days to come. Then the pain would shoot through her body, cleaving its way through the tangle of her memories, pouncing on her suddenly and without any advance warning.
People said that the reason for the Matzliah family’s panic flight from the neighborhood had to do with Joseph, who had heard about the famous kiss from Angela, who heard about it from Shoshana Zilka, who heard it from her daughter, Rachelle, who heard it from Ruthie, who made her swear that she would “die in Hitler’s black grave” if she told. That same day Joseph marched to the school, alarming both pupils and teachers with the grim expression on his face, which was more frightening than usual. Without any preamble he marched straight into the principal’s office and overturned his desk. Many days afterward Levana, the principal’s secretary, was still excitedly telling anyone who would listen that as he turned the desk over, which he did with one casual push of his hand, Joseph muttered that if any of the boys in her class dared come close to his niece, he would crack his head like a coconut. In the neighborhood nobody knew exactly what a coconut was. The children knew the sweet called “Cocos,” a soft, pink, nauseatingly sweet roll with a white center, manufactured by Havilio, while their parents knew the poor substitute for margarine marketed during the years of austerity, called “Cocozine,” which tasted horribly like soap, and was manufactured, so it was said, from coconut oil. But neither the children nor the adults had ever seen a coconut in their lives, and the threat to crack someone’s head like a coconut sounded particularly serious and frightening coming from Joseph, who had probably read about the coconut and even seen its picture in one of the encyclopedias he sold from door to door.
That same day the principal summoned the Matzliah family and asked them to control their son. The next day Shraga didn’t show up at school, and the same week the family packed their belongings and moved to another town. The neighbors claimed that Joseph and the upturned desk weren’t the direct cause of their precipitate departure, since they had been planning to leave for some time. Others claimed that they might have been planning to leave, but Joseph had forced them to put their plans into practice and execute them on the spot.
For days after the parting Rosa stayed home from school, and uncharacteristically refused to take a bite to eat. Her whole body ached, and she was sure that she was going to die. When she was asked where it hurt by the doctor they took her to see after she had refused to eat for three days, she said that her stomach hurt, her head hurt, and her heart hurt. When the doctor’s blushing hands moved over her body, listening to her heart, palpating her stomach, and tapping her back, she told him in a whisper, so that Angela wouldn’t hear, that she felt as if her arms and legs had all been amputated together. And when she heard him talking to her mother in a language she didn’t understand, she knew for sure that he was telling her that she was going to die. Defeated and helpless, she felt his hands climbing to her golden curls, and she wanted to tell him that her hair hurt too, but she was afraid he wouldn’t believe her. And when they left the room Angela told her that the doctor had decided not to give her any medicine, because “time would do the trick.”
All the way home she groaned in pain at every step, and she couldn’t understand what the doctor meant and what trick he was talking about. When she stole a glance at her mother and saw her calm expression, her anger welled up. She was going to die, and her mother didn’t even care.
Years later, when she was a wife and mother, she would sometimes feel the same dull pain striking without any warning, piercing her body and creasing her face into an expression of suffering. Then she would whisper to Angela, who saw her suffering, that she was having another attack of the “Shraga pain.” And Angela would shake her head and repeat the sentence she had been repeating to her all these years: “A long time has passed since then, and anyway you were children.” Then she would remember her own love for Amatzia, which had not dimmed with time, and the pain of her loss, which had only increased with the years, and she would hold her tongue and embrace Rosa compassionately.
If she could only have known what would happen to her beloved daughter after Shraga left town, it is doubtful that she would have allowed things to take the course they did take. And when she thought about what had happened, she would blame herself for her blindness, and wonder how she could have let it happen right under her nose and failed to see what was so obvious. And the more she pondered the painful affair, the less she understood how she could have been so cheated and deceived by the fate that lay before her plain and clear to see, how it had changed its spots, mocked her and tormented her, shamed her in public, and spoiled all her plans.
In those days of remorse Angela suffered severe headaches that affected her entire body, bored into the roots of her teeth, made her sick to her stomach, and produced flashes of hateful orange light that danced in front of her eyes and blurred her sight. And when she emerged from her room at the end of an attack, she looked confused, pale, and exhausted. On the days of her headaches, when she talked to Rosa and her grandchildren, she would pass easily and unconsciously from one language to another: from Hebrew to French and from French to Italian and from Italian to Arabic, and nobody could comprehend her words or her meaning.
The people in the neighborhood said mockingly that “Angela slipped up on the job.” She told everyone’s fortune and knew in detail what was going on in every house, who would marry whom, who was cheating on her husband, how many children this one would have, and why that one would remain a virgin to the end of her life. “But what can you do? The shoemaker always goes barefoot,” they would add with a sigh. People who had never believed in her powers and who despised astrology, tarot cards, and coffee cup readings, said that it was all because of Rosa’s beauty, which was the dangerous type that drove men mad and made even the most rational of them not responsible for their actions. Angela had brought this trouble on her head because she herself had cultivated her daughter’s beauty and femininity as if they were the most important things in the world.
* * *
And when Angela heard these remarks she remembered Rosa’s early years, the war she had waged against her burgeoning breasts, and her attempts to suppress the signs of her daughter’s femininity, until she had given up in despair. When she first saw the breasts that had grown on her daughter’s body when she was still in the womb, Angela had screamed in alarm, and Rosa had screamed right ba
ck. The doctor had reassured her and said that it was a common phenomenon, especially in female babies, and that the swelling on her chest would go down in time. Angela believed him, rocked the baby in her arms to calm her, and after a week and a month went by without any reduction in the size of the breasts, which grew bigger and heavier with the growth of the baby, and the doctors she consulted were at a loss, she knew that she had to do something. At first she put the baby down on her stomach so that the weight of her body would flatten the prematurely ripened breasts. When this failed to have any effect, she bound the magnificent bosom tightly in a diaper every day to reduce its size. For years she waged a daily battle against the breasts until her strength failed her, and when Rosa turned seven she gave up and loosened the bonds forever. As soon as they were freed from the confines of the tightly bound diaper, Rosa’s liberated breasts sprang up, growing and flourishing until her premature development brought catastrophe down on her head.
But her Uncle Joseph encouraged her burgeoning femininity. He chose clothes for her that showed off her figure to advantage, rehearsed her in feminine gestures and seductive smiles, and taught her the facts of life. Angela would tell her friends that from the moment Rosa was born he had helped her enthusiastically and shared the burden of bringing the child up with her. He had looked after her when she went out to do the chores, he would change her diapers, kiss her dimples, rock her on his knees, and tell her stories.
And when she started school he sat with her patiently and painstakingly arranged the eraser, the pencil sharpener, the compass, the indelible pencil, and the colored pencils in the heavy wooden pencil box with its two layers and sliding lid. Then he covered her reading book in cloth, which he sewed with a red seam, and her notebooks in brown wrapping paper. In the morning, while Angela fixed her ringlets, he made her a sandwich from thick slices of white bread spread with margarine generously sprinkled with white sugar. To the sandwich he added a ripe banana, crammed it all into the embroidered cloth bag with her initials on it, and pulled the red cord to close it.
