by Dalya Bilu
Sometimes they would go to old Katamon, and she would show them Ali Hamouda’s House of Notes and the foreign consulates again and point out the new buildings to them. Sometimes she would take them on the bus to town and buy them American ice cream at Café Allenby in King George Street. When she came home she would prepare supper, consisting of salad, omelets, and yogurt. Before they went to bed she would tell them to put out their clothes for the next day, help anyone who needed help choosing and coordinating color schemes, sew on a loose button, mend an unraveled hem, and darn a hole in a sock with the help of a darning egg. While she worked she would listen to radio programs with the older children. Best of all they liked the Paul Templar detective series, and they would huddle together and shiver with fright at the sound of the wind knocking on the shutters. At the end of the day she would put them to bed, each at the hour appropriate to his or her age, tuck them in, kiss them on the forehead, and wish them good-night and sweet dreams.
When their breathing became calm and steady she would stand next to their beds, smell the childish fragrance of their bodies, and listen to the sounds of the night, trying to distinguish the growing noises made by children in their sleep. And when she heard these noises, she would ask each of them in her heart not to grow too fast, to stay just as they were, small and sweet.
In the morning, after the children had dispersed to their schools and kindergartens, Joseph would go out to attend to his affairs, but not before taking her back to bed as he did every day, taking advantage of the quiet, empty house and enjoying his morning erection to the full, and Rosa would start preparing the midday meal according to the menu of the day. For every day of the week she cooked a different meal for the family, seven different menus that repeated themselves week after week in a never-changing cycle.
At midday, when Joseph hurried home to join his family for dinner, he knew exactly which dishes Rosa would put on the table. He was particularly fond of Sundays, when she made Andalusian almond soup, which was milky white even though it didn’t contain a drop of milk, and possessed a smooth texture and a taste like Paradise, flavored with garlic and olive oil.
As a child she had tasted this soup at Shoshana Zilka’s parents’ table in the villa in Katamon, and when she grew up she ate it at the Jerusalem restaurant where she and Joseph celebrated, on the same date and at the same hour, year after year, their wedding anniversary. When she tasted the soup on their first wedding anniversary, all her senses were awakened and she was flooded by memories, and she ordered another plate, and then another one, and when Joseph paid the bill she pestered Moshe Basson, the restaurant owner, for the recipe and announced that she wasn’t leaving without it. With his finger on his lips to indicate that he was betraying a closely guarded culinary secret, he told her that it was an Andalusian soup, and reluctantly dictated the ingredients and method of preparation to her. Afraid that he might change his mind, Rosa hastily scribbled the instructions down on the paper napkin.
When she returned home in triumph she decided that this soup was worthy of opening the week, and thus it came about that the Andalusian almond soup appeared without fail on Rosa’s table on Sundays. She could hardly wait for Sunday morning, and at nine o’clock on the dot she would hurry to Tzadok’s grocery store, where she chose two hundred grams of perfect almonds one by one, in a long and tedious process that tried Tzadok’s patience until it snapped, and every Sunday he would make the same remark: “It’s a good thing that Mrs. Rosa didn’t decide to cook rice today, or we’d be here till tomorrow morning waiting for her to finish sorting it.”
She would put the almonds in a big bowl and pour boiling water onto them. Their thick skins would soften and swell in the boiling water, until long cracks appeared and they split apart. Taking care not to burn her fingers, Rosa would peel off the skin, and when a little mound of naked almonds rose on the marble counter, their white flesh gleaming like ivory, she would soak two slices of dry challah bread left over from the Sabbath in water. As soon as the bread had absorbed the liquid she squeezed it like a sponge and added it to the pile of almonds. Trying to breathe through her mouth she peeled two cloves of garlic and poured five glasses of ice water into a jar. Then she put it all into the mincing machine and turned the handle until she obtained the smooth texture she desired.
After that she tasted her creation, smacked her lips, added three spoons of wine vinegar and a teaspoon of salt, and carefully poured into the bubbling mixture three spoons of green cold-pressed olive oil that she bought from Mohammed, the olive picker from Beit Tzafafa. When a thin layer of white froth had formed on top of the mixture, she poured the fragrant foretaste of Paradise into soup plates and set them on the table. Everything accompanying the soup wasn’t really important, but it was always accompanied by rissoles, pastries filled with meat and potatoes, boiled vegetables, and Arab salad chopped fine and flavored with plenty of parsley, coriander, and lemon.
* * *
The only changes that took place around her that were impossible to prevent, apart from the obvious ones in growing children, fashions, and her own body, were the changes in the building where she had lived ever since leaving the villa in Old Katamon. Within the space of a few years the square, four-storied building in 10 Shabazi Street had lost its original contours. Sometimes, when she gave it a long look, apart from the casual glances of someone going in and out of the building where he lives, she thought that if she went away for a few years she wouldn’t recognize it when she returned.
Porches were closed in, additions were built, new windows opened up, shutters torn out, planters set on windowsills, solar heaters and TV antennas sprouted from the roof, and new families came and went. Every day she wondered anew at the sight of the changes introduced by busy hands. One day all the mailboxes were ripped from the wall, and the ones that weren’t ripped out had their doors removed. Only her own mailbox survived, hanging in the air thanks to the big nail that Joseph had hammered into the wall, with the autumn winds that invaded the stairwell rocking it from side to side with a jarring, metallic creak. The flaking whitewash on the entrance wall too was something Rosa watched with interest. At first the whitewash would erupt in a rash of swollen boils that would burst of their own accord, leaving a frame of new flakes that would drop to the floor in a layer of fine yellowish powder. Sometimes she would notice the round gray marks made one on top of another by the blows of a football aimed hundreds of times at the same spot. They were joined by the striped prints of the soles of the sports shoes of particularly angry boys who let off steam by kicking the wall. Rosa was sure that it was these same boys who had smashed the lamp over the door and stolen the lightbulbs from the stairwell and the landings, causing the residents to grope their way blindly in the dark. She knew that they were also responsible for the huge slogan sprayed all the way across the rough orange stones of the outer wall of the building, proclaiming sadly: LIFE IS LIKE THE HAIRS ON MY ASS—SHORT, HARD, BLACK, AND STINKING. To this motto other philosophical statements had been added during the course of the years, expressions of distress and noble ideas, huge hearts pierced by arrows, declarations of loves and hates and giant drawings of intimate body parts, all of them sprayed in red and black paint the residents were unable to erase.
* * *
When the sweet baby scent of her last child turned into the prickly smell of ordinary sweat, Rosa sensed that her life was about to change. She would quickly complete the chores of shopping, cooking, and washing, and until the children returned from kindergarten and school she would pace the rooms of the house, looking for something to do and complaining to herself about the way the days were dragging out now that there was no new baby for her to look after.
The new occupation came to her accidentally-on-purpose when Joseph asked her to grow a scented plant, “never mind what,” for the habdalah ceremony he strictly observed every Saturday evening to distinguish between the holy Sabbath and the ordinary days of the week. Rosa, who knew his weakness for the smell of lavender, whose f
ragrance had been etched on the scent cells in his brain on their first day in the House of Notes, took a bus to Farhi and Sons plant nursery in Talpioth, and asked for a lavender bush. They led her into a big hothouse covered with torn sacks, and gave her a tiny pot containing a pathetic looking gray shoot, mentioned its Hebrew name, and told her that its scented flowers could be used not only for the habdalah but also for flavoring roasts and for brewing tea with medicinal properties for treating coughs, colds, pneumonia, and insomnia. Before Rosa could transfer the little cutting to a permanent pot it grew into a many-branched bush sprouting hairy purple heads that spread a delicate scent in the air. And no sooner had she picked a twig for Joseph’s blessing than it was immediately replaced by two new branches covered with purple flowers.
When the bush grew big and strong, in spite of the constant use she made of it for the habdalah, in cooking, and in brewing tea, she decided to prepare a dried herb from its blooms. She would gather the flowers when they opened in the evening, after the sun had beaten down on their heads all day and dried up the night dew. Then she would spread them on a net and protect them from the sun and the dew. Sometimes she would tie the twigs in bunches and dry them upside down in the kitchen. And when Joseph came home late at night from Cinema Rosa, he would breathe the beloved scent deep into his lungs, recover from the sad sights he had seen on the screen, and gratefully kiss the nape of the sleeping Rosa’s neck as she waited for him in bed.
After her success with the lavender, Rosa returned to the plant nursery and asked for additional aromatic plants that could be used to flavor food. And the new herbs succeeded too, for Rosa had “green fingers,” as the neighbors said. “Everything she touches grows and flourishes, even if she planted a broomstick in the asphalt, stroked it now and then, watered it and talked to it, that broomstick would respond to her coaxing, put out leaves, grow flowers, and even spread a sweet scent for her.”
She grew her plants on the little kitchen porch, in any receptacle she could lay her hands on. And when the plants multiplied, Joseph built wooden shelves on all three walls of the porch to make more room for her herb garden. She planted the wild thyme in a big can that had once contained pickled cucumbers, and from its dried leaves she prepared elixirs to sharpen the memory and expel worms from the intestines. The sage she grew in a herring barrel, so that people said of Rosa’s sage that it had a heavenly flavor of pickled herrings. The basil took root in an antique kettle. And there was parsley, too, whose roots were used to flavor soup and its ground seeds to flavor fish; medicinal lemon balm, with its delicate taste, which she used to brew tea and flavor salads; yellow chamomile to cure stomachaches and bleach hair; and all kinds of mint for flavoring salads and preparing fresh green drinks on steamy summer days.
And not only common plants grew on Rosa’s porch. Many strange and unfamiliar plants took root in her pots and grew like weeds, dotting the green with multicolored leaves and rare exotic flowers. Every morning Rosa would go out into her hanging garden and find some new intruder she had not planted and whose name she did not know, because whenever she left a pot out on the porch, full of loose earth waiting to be planted, the next day she would find it occupied by a new plant the likes of which had never been seen in the Farhi and Sons plant nursery.
And when the well-known botanist Dr. Yavshem paid her a visit, curious about the garden whose fame had spread, he inspected the plants at length, felt the strange leaves with his fingers, frowned, and wondered aloud how this rare foreign plant had reached Rosa’s porch if no one had deliberately planted it there. Rosa listened to his speech peppered with Latin names, laughed, and assured him that she had not planted this plant whose name she did not know, whose likes she had never seen in the city of Jerusalem, and which had no doubt been borne there on the wings of the Holy Spirit. For Rosa could not have known that migrating birds that had eaten their last meal in a hot, steaming tropical land had carried a secret treasure of rare, exotic seeds in their fermenting intestines especially for her. And when they flew over her porch in a ceremonial salute they had shed their droppings, studded with the seeds that had ripened and sprouted in the heat of their bellies. And the sprouting seeds had taken root in fertile soil of the pots waiting for them there and grown into plants never seen in the city before.
Over one such plant Rosa found Angela stooping one day, absorbed in feverish activity and muttering to herself. The fingers of one hand were digging in the soil while two fingers of her other hand were savagely and furiously tearing off a modest purple flower with crimson stamens.
“What are you doing?” shrieked Rosa at her mother’s bent and violent back. “Why are you picking my flowers?”
“They have to be destroyed.”
“But why uproot them? What harm have they done you?”
“They grow those flowers,” Angela replied, an expression of revulsion on her face, as if she felt suddenly nauseous.
“What flowers?” whispered Rosa, taking her mother’s hands in hers.
“Those saffron flowers,” she replied and went into the house.
After things had calmed down and Rosa washed her hands with the hose attached to the tap on the porch, she noticed that her palms were yellow and that they gave off a bittersweet smell. Only after many days of vigorous scrubbing with bleach and disinfectants did she succeed in ridding her hands of their yellow hue. Rosa didn’t dare talk about the incident to her mother, but she began to keep a close watch on her. And a few weeks later she saw Angela slipping onto the porch again, making her way through the luxuriant growth, parting the leaves of the bushes and, with a stooped back and an expressionless face, snooping after the purple flowers. When she failed to find what she was looking for she calmed down and returned to the kitchen with a gratified look.
“What are you looking for there?” Rosa asked her.
“The seeds of destruction,” replied Angela and said no more.
In those days the porch was full of aromatic plants that looked from a distance like a dark green patch on the expanse of orange flagstones. People would raise their heads to enjoy the sight and say that if Rosa plucked one leaf, the bush would quickly grow two instead, if she pruned a branch a new one would grow in its place, and if she pulled up the entire bush, the seeds it had shed would sprout in a jiffy, grow roots, and produce a new bush bigger, stronger, and more beautiful than the first.
The reputation of the herb garden spread, and the women of the neighborhood would come to Rosa with requests for a branch of sage to dry up the milk in a mother’s breasts, or a bunch of basil to get rid of worms, or rosemary to flavor a roast.
Joseph, ever practical, took pity on Rosa, who was wasting her strength on planting, cutting, and distributing herbs for free, and one day he came home with a box of little transparent cellophane bags. That evening he returned early from the cinema, and after reassuring her that the innovation was not a dangerous threat to the routine of her life, the two of them invaded the hanging garden, trimmed branches, picked flowers, and pulled up shoots. Then they sorted out the fragrant bundle and packed it up in rustling bags, and all night long, with green spots dancing in front of their eyes, they discussed the new profession Rosa was about to enter.
The next morning Joseph went around to all the neighborhood greengrocers and sold them the fresh produce. When all the bags were sold, they asked him for a new supply, for Rosa’s herbs never wilted or went moldy, but remained as fresh and crisp as the day they were picked. Soon Rosa found herself busy from morning to night with her new occupation: planting and cultivating, pruning and packing the herbs into the little cellophane bags, with delivery boys from the shops coming every day with new orders and the cash to pay for them. At night, when Joseph came home with his pockets full of money from the ticket sales, he would find Rosa’s private hoard on the kitchen table, add her daily takings to his, and settle down to the pleasurable task of adding it all up. When he joined her in bed, his fingertips smelling of worn banknotes and coins, he would whisper in h
er ear the new words of love he had learned from the latest movie, stroke her body, and leave the scent of money on her skin. In those days he would say proudly to the men crowded on the wooden benches in Mousa’s hut, drinking red wine and medicinal brandy: “One day Rosa will earn more than I do from those silly plants of hers.”
eight
ANGEL WINGS
Rosa became pregnant for the eighth and last time because of a mishap in the Cinema Rosa. On the night of the conception the film got burned during the screening, and Joseph came home early. On that night she had a premonition and she knew beyond a doubt that she was pregnant and that the child she was carrying was different. Of the vision that was revealed to her it was said in the neighborhood that it was a warning from mysterious higher powers guarding her and trying to prevent her from going all the way. But even though she saw the future and knew that the child she would give birth to would turn her life upside down, she did nothing to prevent it. And when she absentmindedly stroked her swelling belly, she felt a strange sensation at her fingertips, unlike anything she had known in her previous seven pregnancies.
Seven children she had borne her husband during fifteen years, and when she turned thirty she decided that enough was enough and she began to take precautions. And when the children grew up too quickly and left home, looking for mates of their own, she looked forward to having grandchildren. And when they appeared, one after the other, ten in number, they brought her new and unfamiliar joys, and she spoiled them as she had never spoiled her own children. She fed them candies, told them stories, took them to the movies, played cards and board games with them, and together with Angela, who had aged a lot by then, she was happy to baby-sit for them when their parents went out at night.
