The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem (5 page)

“
Wai de mi,
Gabriela, what scandal and shame an Ishkenazi bride could bring down on a family. Like Sarah, the daughter of Yehuda Yehezkel, who married Yehoshua Yellin the Ishkenazi. And though Yehuda Yehezkel reminded everyone over and over that the groom's father was an esteemed Torah scholar, it didn't matter. Nothing helped, what shame. The Sephardim were so opposed to marriage with Ishkenazim that Sir Moses Montefiore himself offered a prize of a hundred gold napoleons to anyone entering into a mixed marriage. And do you know how much a hundred gold napoleons is, Gabriela? Something like a thousand lirot, maybe ten thousand lirot, and despite the poverty in Jerusalem and even though a hundred gold napoleons was a sum that most people could only dream of, nobody jumped at the offer.

“Raphael, may he rest in peace, couldn't stop thinking about the Ishkenazi girl. Her blue eyes followed him wherever he went. You understand, Gabriela, mi alma, even though he'd just caught a glimpse of her she'd plunged deep into his heart and stayed there, and instead of studying Torah day and night he thought about the Ishkenazi girl. As I said, he walked the alleys of Safed moonstruck, looking for her—in the morning after morning prayers, in the afternoon when the hot sun forced people to stay inside their cool stone houses, and in the evening after prayers when his friends gathered at the synagogue. Late at night too, when even the moon and stars went to sleep, he would wander through the alleys, peeking into windows, opening yard gates, hoping he'd see her. But it seemed that the Ishkenazi girl had vanished. He never saw her again, and although she was still in his heart, deep inside he felt relief and saw it as an omen from heaven.

“A few weeks before the wedding he went with his father to the home of the bride's family to meet her for the first time. The whole way there Raphael was silent and didn't ask his father even one question about the bride. And the bride, poor thing, locked herself in one of the rooms in the house and refused to come out and meet her groom. For the three days and three nights prior, so they said, she had been so frightened she didn't stop crying, and all her mother's words of kindness and love didn't help. The more her mother told her about her role as a wife and the more she gave her precise instructions on how she must behave with her husband on their wedding night, the more she wept.

“Raphael and his father sat in the family's living room for a long time, waiting for the bride-to-be to come out. When her father's patience expired, he excused himself, went into the room where his daughter was crying her heart out, and threatened her with a thousand deaths if she didn't stop shaming him.

“Rivka Mercada finally left the room, hiding behind her mother, and peeped at the groom with the red beard, not daring to look him in his eyes, which anyway were fixed on the floor. The meeting was short and Raphael was glad that on their way home his father didn't ask his opinion of her.

“On the morning of the wedding the groom's mother, the bride's mother, and relatives from both sides gathered in the bride's house, and together with her close friends they escorted her to the bagno, the bathhouse, singing and dancing and throwing sweets at her. After the ritual bath Raphael's mother took the cake she had brought from home, sliced it above the bride's head, and gave the slices to her virgin friends and blessed them, saying she hoped that they too would find a groom swiftly in their time, amen. Then each of the women went to their own houses, and Raphael's mother had a talk with her son, giving him specific instructions for how to treat his bride on their wedding night.

“‘Querido mio,' she said, ‘today I am putting you into the hands of another woman. From today you are hers, but don't forget, I am your mother and I will always be more important than your wife. And when you have a child, with God's help, and he marries, your wife, his mother, will be more important than his wife. That's how it is with us. The mother always comes before the wife. The mother is the first senora. Your wife, mi alma, is one of us, a good woman. Your father and I chose her after we met with many girls. Her father and mother have spoiled her, and that's why you must put her in her place right from the start so she knows who the master of the house is! Don't pamper her the way her father has. She has to make sure you have a clean house, cook for you, and do your washing, and with God's help give you healthy sons, but you have to care for her too, provide for her, respect her, and treat her like a princess. On the night of the wedding, mi alma, treat her as a man should a girl, but be gentle with her, do not force her, and if it doesn't work the first time, then try again, and if it doesn't work the second time, then try a third time. Very slowly, gently, and with God's help, in nine months' time we'll celebrate a circumcision.'

“Raphael was embarrassed and lowered his head, trying not to hear what his mother was telling him. But she talked and talked, and only when he raised his eyes and gave her a piercing stare did she stop.

“‘Just one more thing, querido,' she said before he lost patience with her. ‘Just before you stomp on the wineglass, put your foot on the bride's foot for a moment to make sure that you will be the senor of your house, the master, the king.'

“When the time of the wedding arrived, with good fortune Raphael dressed in his best clothes and strode at the head of a big procession to the Yochanan ben Zakai Synagogue. After the marriage was sanctified, after he swore, ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand lose its cunning,' and after his mother whispered in his ear not to forget the matter of the foot and he did as she asked, he stomped on the wineglass and everyone shouted, ‘Mazal tov!' Then he found himself alone in the yichud room with his bride, both of them standing embarrassed and not knowing what to do. Raphael felt that something had broken inside him, and from that moment he lost the fervor of faith. On the spot he decided to give up fasting and Torah study. And when he lifted his new bride's blushing face and forced her to look into his eyes, he swore that he would make his wife a happy woman and would do anything for her and their future children.

“On the wedding night he treated her with gentleness, and she submitted to his touch and let his body enter hers. But in the act of love on that first night and the nights that followed, he did not kiss her even once. And Rivka Mercada, whose mother had never spoken one word about kissing, didn't feel that Raphael was keeping something from her, and she lay silent until he got up, went to his own bed, and left her to sleep in peace.

“Aaach … God forgive my sins.” Nona Rosa sighed. “That's how it all began.”

“What began?” I asked, not understanding what my grandmother meant.

“The whole business of the men in the Ermosa family wanting other women and not their own wives,” she replied in such a low whisper that I hardly heard her. “It began with Mercada and Raphael. He wanted another woman and was married to Mercada. He came to her at night but not out of love, and she didn't suspect he was keeping something from her. And I too never enjoyed the act of love. I just lay on my back and waited for my husband to finish. You're still young and don't know about making love. When you grow up, I pray for your sake that the curse passes you over. Don't look at me like that, mi alma, you don't understand what I'm saying now, but when you grow up and meet your betrothed, promise me you'll do everything you can to feel love. Don't lose the opportunity like I did. Promise me, Gabriela, never marry a man who you feel doesn't love you more than you love him, so that life doesn't pass you by and you become a dried-up old woman like me. Love, Gabriela, fills a person, and anyone whose body does not flow with love, withers. Remember, Gabriela, remember what your grandmother's telling you.”

*   *   *

My Nona Rosa never spoke to me again about love or the men in our family who loved other women and not their wives. Never again did I sit on her knee in Nono's chair. Mother no longer dropped me off to sleep over at Nona's, and Nona didn't come to our house to babysit Ronny and me when my parents went to the cinema or dancing at the Menorah Club. Instead Father picked up Nona every Saturday in the white Lark and brought her to our house, and when I'd run to her and encircle her body with my arms, kissing her wrinkled cheeks, she wouldn't shake me off with a laugh as she used to and say, “Basta, basta, Gabriela, you're hurting me.” She wouldn't say anything. She'd just look at me like I wasn't there. She also forgot how to speak Hebrew and spoke only Ladino, which I didn't know, and when I'd tell her, “Nona, I don't understand. Tell me in Hebrew,” my mother would lose her temper and say, “That's all I need right now, for you to start nagging. Leave Nona alone and stop bothering her.” And my father would say, “What do you want from the child, she doesn't understand what's happened to Rosa.” My mother would reply, “And you do? Who understands what's happened to her? Old people get sick, but she's as healthy as a horse. She just forgets. My mother's different from other people.”

Now my nona too, not only me, was different from other people. Perhaps that's why I'd felt as if she and I had shared a covenant, and the more she shut herself up in her world, the more I wanted to enter it. But from day to day my beloved nona moved further away, and her face that I loved so much turned blank, and her eyes dimmed, and her big soft body turned stiff, and when I put my arms around it I felt like I was hugging a wall.

Nona also started doing strange things. One Saturday when Father brought her to our house and sat her at the table where we were all eating macaroni hamin, she took off her dress and sat there in her petticoat. Ronny started laughing, and I realized that something awful had happened because Mother got hysterical, and Father quickly covered Nona with her dress. For the first time in my life I wasn't forced to eat everything on my plate, and in the middle of the macaroni hamin we children were sent to play downstairs. My parents stayed in the living room with Rachelika and Moise and Becky and Handsome Eli Cohen, and they talked and talked until it got dark. They forgot to call us back upstairs, so we went up without being called, and as I peeked into the small living room, I saw that Aunt Becky was crying and Rachelika was crying and my mother was standing at the window smoking a cigarette, and my father and Moise and Handsome Eli Cohen were talking together. And in the middle of it all Nona Rosa was sitting completely detached from the commotion around her. I heard Rachelika say that Nona mustn't be left alone, that she should sleep at our house that night. Mother said, “But where can she sleep? With me and David?” And Father replied, “I'll sleep on the couch in the living room and she can sleep with you.” And Mother said, “Don't talk nonsense, David. How can I sleep in the same bed as my mother?”

Then I came into the room and said, “I'll sleep with Nona Rosa in my bed,” and Mother said, “That's a good idea. Gabriela can sleep at my mother's and look after her.” Father lost his temper. “Are you out of your mind? A ten-year-old girl, what kind of ‘look after her' do you have in mind?” And Mother said, “All right, she'll sleep here on the living room couch, but only tonight. Tomorrow we'll have to think about an arrangement. It can't go on like this.”

That night they put my nona to bed on the couch and covered her with a blanket, and when everybody else had gone to bed I got up in the dark and saw her sleeping with her eyes open and whispered, “Nona,” but she didn't reply, so I stroked her cheek and kissed her and hugged her tight until I fell asleep.

In the morning Father found me on the couch, but Nona wasn't there or anywhere else in the house. She went missing for a whole day. Nona had gotten lost.

They found her only late at night in the Mahane Yehuda Market, sitting in the doorway of the shop that had been Nono's. Another time she was found wandering in the Abu Tor neighborhood, trying to cross the border and get to the Shama neighborhood, where she was born and which since the War of Independence had been in Jordanian hands. My Aunt Rachelika decided to move Nona into her own house and look after her. “Because if I don't take her in, she'll be taken to the Talbieh asylum,” she'd said.

Nona Rosa died in her sleep on the eve of Yom Kippur.

There was no way that Mother would allow me to attend the funeral.

“A cemetery is no place for children,” she said, and for the first time Father didn't take my side and argue with her. Ronny and I stayed at home on our own, and Ronny, who could feel that I was sadder than usual, didn't tease me as he normally would. On the sideboard in my parents' living room, in a beautifully worked copper frame, was a photograph of my Nono Gabriel, my Nona Rosa, and their three daughters: Luna, Rachelika, and Becky. I brought it to my lips and kissed my nona, and the tears that fell from my eyes threatened to drown me. I missed her so much and was incapable of accepting that I would never see her again and that she would never again tell me about our family, whose men married women they didn't love.

For many months after Nona Rosa's death I'd walk from our house on Ben-Yehuda Street to hers, stand by the locked gate, and wait for her. Perhaps Nona wasn't really dead. Perhaps this time too she had just gotten lost and would soon find her way home: She'd walk in her measured gait down the five steps to the narrow alley, across the cobblestones, taking care not to catch her foot on a stone so she wouldn't fall, Heaven forbid, and crack her skull as she'd warned me so many times, her large frame swaying from side to side “like a drunkard,” my mother would say irritably, and talking to herself as she did before she died, “like una loca,” my mother would say in Ladino so we children wouldn't understand.

Nono's chair still stood in its place in the yard, and beside it the table at which I'd eaten sütlaç with a cinnamon Star of David so many times. I approached the small stone house, put my face to the window, and peered in. Everything was in order as it was when Nono and Nona were both alive. No one had touched the house since Nona had passed on, as my father used to say. I pressed my nose to the window as hard as I could, doing my best to see the photograph of Nono and Nona that hung on the wall, but I couldn't see it.