The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem (62 page)

*   *   *

The El Al plane was far from London and on its way to Tel Aviv. “I need a cigarette,” I told Rachelika, and made my way to the rear of the cabin, where smoking was permitted. I went into the bathroom and reached my hand deep into the pocket of my jeans. In a scrap of aluminum foil I'd hidden a couple of lines of cocaine. I sat on the toilet, trying to arrange the line on a small mirror I took from my purse, and just as I brought my nose to it, the plane suddenly jolted. The mirror fell to the floor and smashed into pieces, and the white powder scattered in all directions. That was a sign, I was sure of it. It was a sign that if I carried on sniffing, I'd never find peace, I'd never find forgiveness. I breathed deeply, took the foil with the remnants of the cocaine, emptied it into the toilet bowl, and flushed. With a foot I swept the small shards of glass behind the toilet, blew away what remained of the cocaine, washed my face and hands, and went back to my seat.

“I feel a whole lot better now,” I told Rachelika.

“I can see.” She smiled.

*   *   *

I didn't even try to pretend I was happy to see the large delegation awaiting my arrival at the airport. All of my close family were there: Father and Ronny, Becky and Handsome Eli Cohen, Moise and all the cousins big and small. They were holding balloons and a sign that said in colored letters: W
ELCOME
H
OME,
G
ABRIELA
. Ronny was the first to run to me, almost squashing me with a big hug. He'd grown into a handsome young man. “Let me look at you a minute,” I said, holding him away from me. He'd changed so much! I'd left him as a child and now found him a man. His button nose had grown and changed his whole face, which now bore stubble.

“How can I pinch your cheek now? You're all prickly,” I said. An army buzz cut was all that remained of his lovely hair. “And how can I pull your hair?”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw my father hesitate momentarily before he came over and hugged me, crushing me against his chest. I lay my head in the nook between his neck and shoulder, like I had when I was little. “I've missed you, my little girl,” he said. “I've missed you terribly.” But unlike in the past I quickly freed myself from his embrace. My anger hadn't dissipated.

I hurried to hug Moise and Handsome Eli Cohen, and then fell into Becky's arms. She wouldn't let me go and hugged me and kissed me and then held me at arm's length and said, “God almighty, what's this, isn't there any food in London? I can almost see right through you. You're almost transparent.”

Hollow,
I thought to myself, is probably a more accurate word.

“Where am I staying?” I whispered to Becky so my father wouldn't hear.

“What do you mean, where? At your house.”

“I'm not going to Father and Vera's house.”

“He got her out of the house,” she whispered back. “He told her to go to her own apartment so you wouldn't have to see her.”

“How long will she be staying at her own place? For the next two hours?”

“Gabriela, your father went crazy missing you. We all did. He's prepared a welcome for you. Don't disappoint him.”

I didn't disappoint him. I got into his car, declining to sit in the front and instead preferring to crowd into the backseat with Boaz and Ronny. We drove all the way to Jerusalem, Father in front like a chauffeur and me, Ronny, and Boaz squished in the back. The few questions they asked I answered with yes and no, and the three of them quickly realized there was no point in pushing me.

As Becky had promised, Vera wasn't in the house, but I found signs of her everywhere, mainly because I was looking for them. There was a bottle of Nina Ricci perfume in the bathroom, and my mother didn't like Nina Ricci. She called it an old woman's scent.

Hanging in the closet were some dresses that weren't my mother's.

“Where are Mother's dresses?” I asked my father who had followed me into the bedroom.

“In the hall closet,” he said. “You can take whichever ones you want.”

“You think I'd wear one of Mother's dresses?” I replied with disgust. “What, I'm from the twenties?”

“Gabriela,” he said in a tired voice, “you just got back, you haven't been here for two years, and you already want to start a fight? Don't you think you should lay down your weapons? I'm not asking you to love me the way I love you. I'm not asking you to tell me you missed me the way I've missed you. I'm asking for a truce.”

He sat down on his and Mother's bed and looked so vulnerable it was as though he was the child and I the parent. I wanted to hug him, I wanted to tell him I loved him, that I'd missed him, that I'd missed him so much. But then I remembered that he'd defiled my mother's honor in the bed he was sitting on, and my heart hardened.

“I'm terribly tired,” I told him and ran to my childhood room, which to my surprise was exactly how I'd left it.

“Hasn't anyone slept in here?” I asked Ronny, who'd joined me.

“Father didn't let Vera's children sleep in your room.”

“Where did they sleep?”

“In the small living room.”

“And where did you watch television, where did you eat dinner?”

“In the big living room.”

“Wow, Mother probably died all over again just from the thought of you using the big living room not for guests. So where are they?”

Ronny became serious. “Father wanted you to come home, so he told Vera to take the children and go back to her own place.”

“For good?”

“No, just until you get used to the idea, until you accept her. I think he wants to marry her.”

“What?”

“Stop being a baby, Gabriela, accept Vera already. She might as well be Father's wife now and she's good to him. She's also good to me. She cooks for me and washes my uniforms when I come home on leave. She takes good care of me.”

“Traitor,” I told him. “I wouldn't have believed it of you.”

“Mother's dead, Lela.” His voice softened as he called me by the name he'd used when he couldn't yet pronounce mine.

“Don't you miss her?”

“I miss her, but I'm realistic, and in reality, Vera is now Father's wife.”

“That's just it. She was Father's wife even while Mother was alive. He cheated on Mother all the time.”

“I don't want to hear this. Life's too short. Look at Mother, she died so young. Why do I need to face all that right now? I'm just starting my life and I suggest you do the same. There's no point in being angry and hanging on to the past.”

But nothing helped, and I carried on being angry. I was so angry that the next day I went to Rachelika's and told her I wanted to move in with her.

“No, Gabriela, you can't live with me. You can't insult your father like that. Grow up, it's time you did. Accept your father and Vera. Believe me, it'll make life easier for you.”

“Thanks for the good advice, but I don't need it. I'll get by,” I said and turned to leave.

“Where do you think you're going?”

“To look for a job waitressing and rent a room in Nachlaot.”

“You're not renting a room in Nachlaot. You're going back home to live in your own room. Find a job, enroll in university, and then look for a room in Nachlaot. But until then you're going to live at home.”

“Rachelika, since when have you told me what to do?”

“Tell me, what did that good-for-nothing Englishman do to you that's made you spit such venom on the whole world, and mainly on your father?”

“What does any of this have to do with Phillip?”

“If it has nothing to do with him, then what do you want, tell me? What do you want, that we bring your mother back to life? And what for, so you can make her life a misery just as you did when she was alive?”

I was silent. And encouraged by my silence, Rachelika continued pouring out everything she'd wanted to say to me from the moment she'd arrived in London. “She didn't get one moment of happiness from you. You never got along with her, you always misbehaved with her. You were always complaining to me that she was a bad mother, she didn't understand you, didn't see you, she thought only of herself, nothing interested her except her clothes and her lipstick and her Hollywood, isn't that what you said? So why are you turning her into a saint all of a sudden? And your father into Amalek? All of a sudden you've forgotten how good he was to you, how he looked after you all those years, how he was your rock when you cried on his shoulder because your mother didn't understand you? All of a sudden you've forgotten who sang you ‘Sleep, sleep, my baby' every night? Who took you to the zoo, the Medrano Circus, who showered you and put on your pajamas and went to school with you when you got into trouble?”

“What's happened, Rachelika?” I asked in awe. “You're defending Father and disrespecting Mother?”

“Disrespecting? You should be ashamed of yourself for saying things like that, Gabriela. I'm just reminding you of how things always were. I'm just saying that God knows why you've made your mother a saint since she died, when we both know she wasn't.”

“We both know? I felt that you thought she was perfect. You always loved her more than anyone else in the world.”

“Like my life, like Moise, like my children,” Rachelika said quietly. “But that's not to say I didn't see her worst qualities. She was my beloved sister. After Moise, she was the person closest to me in the whole world. I'd tell her all my secrets and she'd tell me hers. But that doesn't mean I was blind. I saw very well that she didn't have patience for you, how she looked at you but didn't see, how she held you but didn't touch. How, from the moment she came home from the hospital after two years there, she wanted to get away and did everything she could to leave you with me and Becky and Nona Rosa. What do you think, that my unconditional love for my sister blinded me?

“And you weren't exactly a paragon of virtue either. Do you know what it means for a mother to know that her daughter, her own flesh and blood, doesn't want her? Do you know what it was like for her when she was lying broken in the hospital, and with great difficulty, with a superhuman effort, she went downstairs to the garden to see you, and you saw her and started screaming like you were being slaughtered? Do you know how long it took you to call her Ima? You, who at two years old knew the Even-Shoshan dictionary backwards? There wasn't a word you didn't know how to say, except for one: Ima. Do you know when you said Ima for the first time? When you were three, and you went with your mother to Freiman & Bein's shoe shop and the saleslady asked you who the beautiful woman who brought this beautiful little girl to buy shoes was, and you said, ‘Ima.' And that day your mother danced in the streets. She was as happy as if she'd won the lottery.”

“I don't remember,” I said. “I don't remember her dancing in the streets when I said Ima. I don't remember her being happy. I don't remember her ever hugging or kissing me.”

“Well, your mother always had an issue with kissing and hugging. Even when I gave her a kiss, she didn't like it. Your mother didn't like being touched too much.”

“She actually hugged and kissed Ronny quite a lot. She loved Ronny, but not me.”

“She raised Ronny from the day he was born. He was such an easy baby. He ate, slept, and smiled. You were just the opposite. You gave her hell.”

“A mother should love her child even if it's not an easy baby,” I said.

“I know, my child, I know. Your mother had a hard time with you. She loved you and cared for you, but she simply didn't know how to talk to you, how to approach you. Every time someone told her that you looked like her, she'd say, ‘Gabriela's better looking than me!' And do you know what it meant for your mother to say that someone was better looking than her? Even her own daughter? She was so proud of you, Gabriela. Every time you came home with good grades, every time somebody complimented you, she'd beam with pride. She just didn't know how to show you. She loved you a lot. Believe me, my child, you must believe me so you can forgive her, so you can forgive yourself, so you can get on with your life without so much anger inside you.”

I listened to Rachelika, I tried to believe her, but I was unable to soften my heart. I couldn't forgive, not my mother, not my father, and certainly not myself. Instead of letting myself sink into my aunt's arms, I said coldly, “This conversation is starting to get heavy. I'm going.”

Rachelika took a deep breath. “Go, then, Gabriela, but straight home. Your father made a big gesture to you when he asked Vera to leave the house after four years and go back to her own apartment. You should appreciate it.”

“Appreciate what? That he took his lover into my mother's bed? It's not that he found her after Mother died. She was in the background the whole time. She was his lover while he and Mother were married.”

Rachelika stood at the window and waited for a long moment before replying in a quiet, barely audible voice, “It's not that simple, Gabriela.”

“It's very simple. He cheated on Mother.”

“Life isn't black and white, Gabriela. And after two years of living in London, you should know that.”

That reminded me of what Uncle Moise had said when he came to visit with Father in Tel Aviv: “Ask your Aunt Rachelika to tell you a few things about your mother Luna, and do it quickly so you don't die a fool.”

“Rachelika, maybe it's time to tell me what you've been keeping from me?”

“I don't think it's my place, Gabriela. Maybe it would be better if you asked your father why he went to look for love with Vera, why your mother's love wasn't enough for him.”

“He's my father. A daughter doesn't ask her father questions like that.”