The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem (59 page)

I had once asked him, “Why are you like this?”

“Like what?”

“You're either drunk or sleeping.”

“Why not?” he answered slowly. “Do I have anything better to do?”

“Talk, for instance. Tell me why you're always running away to drugs or drink.”

He laughed in my face. “I'm not running away. I'm in the here and now. It's where I want to be. I want to smoke and drink and fuck and sleep. That's me, take me or leave me.” He shrugged. I wished I'd had the strength to leave him, and a wave of yearning swept over me: for our house on Ben-Yehuda Street; for Nono and Nona's house; for the Shabbat macaroni hamin; for the Seder when they'd open the doors between the rooms in Nono and Nona's house so there'd be enough space around the table for everybody, and they'd read the Haggadah in both Hebrew and Ladino; for the old pioneering songs they'd sing at the end of the Seder; for Uncle Jakotel, who'd get drunk and climb onto the table and drum with knives and forks. And most of all I longed for my Nona Rosa to hug me and tell me, “The Ingelish, may his name be erased, he should go to hell. He isn't worth the ground you tread on, mi alma. He's not worth you being sad for a second.”

Nona Rosa's words about the fate of our family's women passing from generation to generation, her belief that the men they loved didn't love them back, resonated in my mind as I sat in the church. I'd never thought that my life would be like the unfortunate lives of the Ermosa women who'd come before me. Throughout my short life I'd done everything possible to break the thread binding me to my mother. All my life I'd tried to escape the fate of Rosa and Mercada.

And suddenly I was tired from that journey, from the winding road I was walking along that seemed to be leading me nowhere, tired of the apathy that gripped me, of the crazy obsession I'd developed for the strange Englishman.

I thought about Amnon and wondered where he was right now, and if he still thought about me or whether he had healed his heart with a new love. I recalled how he'd eagerly wait for me after work each evening, hugging me so tightly that he almost broke my bones. I missed his eyes, which laughed with his mouth, his big body, so different from Phillip's skinny frame.

Amnon wanted me with him all the time, like air. “Let me sniff you,” he'd say. He let me be whomever I wanted, and sometimes he could even make me forget my dead mother and my suffocating aunts and father. How I'd clipped my own wings, and how, instead of continuing to be as free as a bird, I'd become a willing captive in a relationship that existed only in my mind. How could I have replaced Amnon with this impossible character who hadn't the faintest idea that he was hurting me, this zonked-out, skinny Englishman who muttered words I didn't understand? And only because he didn't want me I stuck to him like a sore.

I hadn't heard a word from Amnon since he'd left, but a friend of his had told me he was in Goa, living in a commune of hippies, that he had a black-haired American girl who loved him very much. I felt a twinge in my heart, but I was glad for him. If one of us deserved to be happy, it was surely he.

As I left the church I was greeted by torrential rain. I spread my arms out wide and let the rain wash away the pain of my humiliation and loneliness. When lightning flashed, in an instant I knew what I had to do: I had to go back to being Gabriela Siton, the girl who'd sworn she'd never be like Rosa and Luna, the young woman who'd decided to break the chain of unhappy women in her family. But would it be possible to break away when their blood flowed in my veins?

London no longer seemed glamorous to me. The cold, rainy weather, the bad economic situation, the trade unions' strike, the political rallies held every other day, the images of police breaking their batons on demonstrators' skulls, the hatred of colored immigrants from Jamaica and Asia, the immigration authorities who made their lives a misery—all of this had turned London into an alienated city, light-years away from the London I'd dreamed of when I was saving up to buy a ticket.

To scrape by, I waitressed at a cheap Greek restaurant in Camden Town and spent most of my time there. One night I came home exhausted after a hard day at the restaurant, my ass red from being pinched and my soul dulled from the insults of strange men. All I wanted was to smoke a joint and collapse into bed. All the lights in the house were on, a Pink Floyd record was playing at full volume, and the acrid smell of hash hung in the air. People were rolling around on the mattresses, men and women, men and men, everyone with everyone, and only I felt like an outsider, like I didn't belong in my own home. Nobody had noticed that I'd arrived. I could have hanged myself from the rafter and nobody would have given a shit. I went to the record player and lifted the arm, scratching the record as I did.

“What the fuck d'you think you're doing?” yelled somebody I'd never seen before.

“Get the hell out of here!” I started shouting. “All of you, get the hell out!”

The bedroom door was open, and on my bed was a tangle of naked bodies. I burst in, ranting and raving like a possessed woman. “Get out of here!” I shouted and hit the naked bodies. Phillip raised himself up from under the body of the man on top of him, or maybe it was the woman lying under him, a puzzled expression on his face. I was completely hysterical and fell onto the floor crying and screaming. The man and woman fled for their lives, and I went on crying. I couldn't stop myself.

“Mother,” I cried out, “where are you? I need you so much, Mother, just look at what's become of me.” That was the first time I'd cried for my mother, the first time I'd admitted to myself that I missed her, that I needed her love to protect me from the chaos of my world, from myself.

“Mother,” I wailed, “come and get me out of here.” I sank into self-pity, curling up like a fetus on my defiled bed, and wept for the little girl I once was and for the wretched woman I'd become, for the dreams my mother had probably had for me, dreams I had surely shattered. How I wanted her to come and take me to our house on Ben-Yehuda Street, to Father and Ronny and her plants on the roof. The tears flowed down my cheeks, and my heart ached. I hugged my body as if my mother's arms were around me, the perfectly manicured hands that in all my life had never embraced me.

*   *   *

My mother is standing by her dressing table and applying red lipstick with an artist's hand. And she's mad at me again, God knows why, and now Father's home from work and Mother has presented him with the list of problems I caused her that day. Father removes his belt, winks at me, takes me into the other room, and whispers, “Now yell so Mother thinks it's hurting you.” But instead of hitting me with the belt he holds me close, and I can hear my mother in the other room saying, “Cry, cry. Better you cry now than Ronny cry later.”

Miskenica, my mother, how she didn't have the head for me or for Ronny, how she wasn't suited to be the mother of two children, how she wanted to get rid of us every chance she got and go to God knows where.

She did everything she could to restore the youth that had been taken from her the day she'd married my father; she did everything to restore the splendid body that had been ruined the day she'd gotten pregnant and brought me into the world, I'd heard her tell Rachelika. How the damned war had ruined her life and health! How nothing had gone back to the way it was before the war, before she was wounded, before the birth, before the wedding. When she was Beauty Queen of Jerusalem. And now not only did she hate her body and her face, she also had two children on her head and a husband who drove her nuts.

Rachelika, so she told me later, had tried to silence her, but my mother got angry. “I've had enough of this child. She chatters all the time and gives me such a headache.”

“Really, Luna,” said Rachelika, trying to soothe her sister, “you should thank God that you're walking on two feet, that you have two children. Who'd have believed when you were lying in Hadassah like a corpse that we'd see you come home healthy and in one piece and have another baby?”

“I didn't come home healthy and in one piece! That's what you, David, and nobody else in this family understand! My body's ruined. I have a zipper across my belly, and what's inside my belly, the liver, the kidneys, will never be healthy, and that's what you call coming home healthy and in one piece!”

“Lunika, some came home without an arm, without an eye, without a leg. Look at the redhead, that poor miskenico in a wheelchair. You, thank God, came back whole. You're back to being as beautiful as ever. Why don't you thank God for that miracle? Why are you always angry with the whole world, especially your daughter, who hasn't done anything to you!”

“She doesn't love me, my daughter,” my mother said sadly. “And she does everything to spite me all the time.”

“How can your daughter not love you? Give her time. Don't forget that for two years she didn't know you. We'd bring her to the hospital and she'd be frightened to go to you. Then when you came home you hardly had time to adjust to each other before you had another child.”

“Enough, Rachelika, why are you on her side? Why aren't you on mine?”

“God almighty, Luna! Can you hear yourself? What, you're competing with a little girl?

“I'm competing with her? She competes with me. The moment her father comes through the door she jumps at him right away, kisses him, hugs him. She wants me to be jealous because her father kisses her and doesn't kiss me!”

“Luna! You've gone completely crazy! Put your ego aside for a moment and look at the child. She's fabulous! People are constantly amazed by her.”

“It's because she's so fabulous that she drives me crazy. I'm irritable, Rachelika, I've had a hard day.”

Everybody irritated my mother. Nona Rosa irritated her, I irritated her, Ronny irritated her, and my father especially irritated her. She'd lose her temper with him most of all, slamming doors, yelling, throwing herself onto the bed and crying, and Father would tell her, “If you make a scene like that again, I'm leaving!”

“Go to hell and don't come back!” she'd scream, and he'd leave the house.

I'd hug Ronny, and together we'd hide under the bed, waiting out another fire drill.

*   *   *

The strong smell of cigarettes and dampness hit me as I opened the door to the flat. The quiet almost propelled me backward. I'd never been alone in the flat before. At any hour of the day and night there were people in it, music blaring from the speakers standing on both sides of the record player. Now there was nobody here. I searched desperately for a joint and found a bit in a small box on the dining table. I started rolling with the cigarette papers I always carried in my purse, and put on a Three Dog Night record. “One is the loneliest number,” my favorite band sang, and again I was crushed by a wave of self-pity and childhood memories.

I thought about the strained relations between Nono Gabriel and his mother Mercada, the hostility between Nona Rosa and Mercada, who had never tried to conceal the fact that she despised her daughter-in-law. Things that Nona Rosa had mentioned about the speed with which Mercada had married her to Gabriel, and how of all the virgins in Jerusalem she had chosen her, the poor orphan, to be her handsome son's bride. I loved Nona Rosa profoundly, but I too, whenever I looked at the photographs of her and Nono from when they were young, I wondered how my handsome and well-to-do grandfather had married such a heavyset, penniless orphan. And I thought about Mercada: What a heart of stone she must have had when she'd forced Nona Rosa onto Nono Gabriel to keep him away from the woman he loved. I wanted to ask Rachelika and Becky if they knew anything about it, or my mother. If only she'd still been alive I would have called her.

Though would I have? While she was alive I never called her. Our conversations were brief, matter-of-fact. I never poured my heart out to her, never asked her advice. I never cried on her shoulder; she never held me close and whispered comforting words. I could never shake the anger and disappointment at my mother, who laughed and touched everybody but me. Why hadn't my mother known how to show me love?

I never cried with my mother, not even when she told me she had cancer. “It's not that bad,” she'd said. “You can recover from it.” But she didn't recover, and the sicker she became, the further I moved away from her. I was in twelfth grade and spent every free moment with Amnon, even Rosh Hashanah eve, and in our family that was unforgivable. Despite my father's forbidding me to go, for the first time in my life I disobeyed him and went with Amnon to visit his aunt and uncle at the kibbutz. In the middle of the night, a few hours after the meal had ended, I suddenly awoke to shouts. Amnon's Aunt Dvora had returned her soul to her maker.

I'd run away from my dying mother, but death had pursued me. I spent New Year's Eve in the house of a dead woman I'd met only a few hours earlier.

A few months before she died, when she was in remission from the awful disease, for the first time in her life my mother left Israel and with my father went on a cruise to Europe. It was her last wish. She wanted to see the world before she died, so Rachelika told me. And my aunt, though she had serious concerns, let her go. Father too wasn't keen on the idea. He was afraid of being alone at sea with his sick wife. But the preparations for the trip excited my mother so much that everyone else became infected by her excitement. The ship was to sail from Haifa and the whole family went to see them off.

Mother couldn't wait for the trip. The day before they sailed she went to the hairdressers' on Koresh Street and even bought a new wine-red jersey suit, which was very flattering despite her thinness. The pink rouge she'd used on her cheeks even succeeded in hiding her pallor. When they boarded the ship, there was no woman as elegant as her in sight.