THE BEAUTY QUEEN OF JERUSALEM E-Book

Sarit Yishai-Levi

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 818

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

A No. 1 international bestseller, The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem is a dazzling novel of mothers and daughters, stories told and untold, and the ties that bind four generations of women. Gabriela's mother Luna is the most beautiful woman in all of Jerusalem, though her famed beauty and charm seem to be reserved for everyone but her daughter. Ever since Gabriela can remember, she and Luna have struggled to connect. But when tragedy strikes, Gabriela senses there's more to her mother than painted nails and lips. Desperate to understand their relationship, Gabriela pieces together the stories of her family's previous generations – from Great-Grandmother Mercada the renowned healer, to Grandma Rosa who cleaned houses for the English, to Luna who had the nicest legs in Jerusalem. But Gabriela must face a past and present far more complex than she ever imagined. Spanning decades, The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem follows generations of unforgettable women as they forge their own paths through times of dramatic change, and paints a dazzling portrait of a family and a young nation as they struggle to find their way even as others try to carve it out for them.

Leseprobe

The Beauty Queenof Jerusalem

The Beauty Queenof Jerusalem

SARIT YISHAI-LEVI

Translated from the Hebrew by Anthony Berris

SWIFT PRESS

First published in the United States of America by St Martin’s Press 2016

First published in Great Britain by Swift Press 2021

Copyright © Sarit Yishai-Levi 2013

Translation copyright © Anthony Berris 2016

Originally published in Israel by Modan Publishing House 2013

The right of Sarit Yishai-Levi to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80075-019-7

eISBN: 978-1-80075-020-3

To my parents

The Beauty Queenof Jerusalem

1

MY MOTHER LUNA PASSED AWAY shortly before my eighteenth birthday. A year earlier, while the whole family was sitting around the table for lunch as usual, and she was serving her famous sofrito with peas and white rice, she sat down on her chair and said, “Dio santo, I can’t feel my leg.”

Father ignored her and went on reading the paper and eating. My little brother Ronny laughed and shook Mother’s leg under the table. “Mother’s got a leg like a doll’s!”

“It’s not funny,” my mother said angrily. “I can’t feel my foot on the floor.”

Father and I continued eating.

“Por Dio, David, I can’t stand on my leg,” she repeated. “It’s not doing what I tell it.”

Now she was on the verge of hysteria. Father finally stopped eating and took his head out of the paper.

“Try and stand up,” he said. Mother was unsteady on her feet and held on to the corner of the table.

“We should get you to the doctor’s,” Father said.

But the minute they walked out the door, Mother’s leg did as it was told, and she could feel it again as if nothing had happened.

“See? It’s nothing,” said Father. “You’re being dramatic as usual.”

“Yes, right. I’m dramatic,” Mother replied. “If it had happened to you, people would have heard the ambulance siren from here to Katamon.”

The episode passed as if it had never happened. Mother would recount it over and over to Rachelika and Becky and anyone else who was prepared to listen, and Father would lose his temper and say, “Enough! How many times do we have to hear the story about your marionette leg?”

Then the second incident occurred. Mother came home from the grocery, and just as she was about to walk inside, she fell and lost consciousness. This time an ambulance was called and Mother was rushed to Bikur Holim Hospital. She couldn’t stand or walk and was diagnosed with cancer. That was when Mother began to stop talking, especially to Father. He’d try to engage her and she just wouldn’t answer. Her sisters, Rachelika and Becky, neglected their families so they could sit with her almost around the clock. Despite their pleading, she refused to leave the house, ashamed that people would see her, Luna, the woman who had the most beautiful legs in Jerusalem, in a wheelchair.

As much as I hardened my heart at the time, it was distressing to see Rachelika peeling an orange for Mother, begging her to eat her favorite fruit, and Becky gently painting Mother’s nails with red polish, for even then, when she was so sick and weak, she was still meticulous about her manicure and pedicure. Rachelika and Becky both did their utmost to behave naturally, as if nothing terrible was happening, and chattered away, “yackety-yak like a couple of hens,” as my grandmother Nona Rosa used to say. Only Luna, the biggest chatterbox of all, remained silent.

At night one of them would stay over to sleep with Mother, who now occupied the living room sofa’s pullout bed, encircled with dining chairs to prevent her from falling off. All of Father’s pleas that she sleep in their bedroom and he in the living room fell on deaf ears.

“She says she can’t breathe in the bedroom,” Rachelika told Father. “At least you can get a proper night’s sleep so you’ll have the strength to look after the children.”

But my little brother Ronny and I didn’t need Father to look after us. We both took advantage of the fact that everyone was preoccupied with Mother and gave ourselves the freedom to roam. Ronny preferred the company of boys his age and spent whole days in their houses, and many nights as well, while I spent my time with Amnon, my boyfriend. Amnon’s parents had a bookshop at the center of town and his sister was married, so their big house on Hamaalot Street was ours for the taking. Had my father known what we were up to, he would have beaten Amnon to a pulp and sent me to live on a kibbutz.

After her diagnosis, Mother no longer called me a “street girl” or threatened to tell my father when I got home late. She wouldn’t even look at me, but just sat in her wheelchair staring into space or whispering with one of her sisters. Father would make dinner, and he too wouldn’t ask me any questions or show interest in what I was doing. It seemed they all preferred that I spend as little time as possible at home so I wouldn’t annoy Mother, God forbid, who even when in her wheelchair didn’t get good behavior from me.

One afternoon when I was about to leave the house to meet Amnon, Rachelika stopped me.

“I have to stop home,” she said, “so stay with your mother until Becky gets here.”

“But I have a test! I have to go to my friend’s to study.”

“Ask your friend to come here.”

“No!” My mother’s voice, hardly ever heard in those days, made us jump. “You’re not asking anyone to come here. If you want to go, go. I don’t need you to stay here and look after me.”

“Luna,” said Rachelika, “you can’t stay here on your own.”

“I don’t need Gabriela to hold my hand. I don’t need her to look after me or you to look after me or Becky to look after me or the devil to look after me. I don’t need anything, just leave me be!”

“Don’t get angry, Luna. It’s been two days since I saw Moise and the children. I have to go check in.”

“Go wherever you want,” my mother replied and withdrew into herself again.

“God forgive us,” Rachelika said, wringing her hands. I’d never seen my aunt in such despair, but she quickly regained her composure. “You’re staying here with your mother!” she ordered me. “I’m going home for a few minutes and I’ll be right back. And don’t you dare leave her for one second.”

She turned and went, leaving me alone with my mother. You could have cut the air with a knife. My mother sitting in her wheelchair, her face sour and angry, and me standing in the middle of the living room like an idiot. At that moment I would have done anything just not to be alone with her.

“I’m going to my room to study,” I said. “I’ll leave the door open. Call me if you need anything.”

“Sit down,” my mother said.

I paused, caught off guard by her request.

“I want to ask you for something.”

I tensed. My mother never asked me for anything. She only ever told me what to do.

“I want to ask you not to bring your friends here. I don’t want any strangers in the house until I die.”

“Until you die?” I was so alarmed that the only way I could deflect what she’d said was to respond with words that even I couldn’t believe. “You’ll bury us all.”

“Don’t worry, Gabriela. It will be you who buries me,” she said quietly.

The room felt too small for the both of us.

“Mother, you should be thanking God. There are people who get cancer and die right away. God loves you. You can talk, you can see, you’re alive.”

“You call this living?” My mother snorted. “My enemies should live like this. It’s a living death.”

“You’re the one who’s choosing to live like this,” I retorted. “If you wanted to, you could get dressed, put on makeup, and go out.”

“Yes, right,” she said. “Go out in a wheelchair.”

“Your friend the redhead, the one who was in the hospital with you during the war, he was in a wheelchair, and I don’t remember him not leaving the house, and I remember he was always smiling.”

My mother looked at me incredulously. “You remember him?” she asked softly.

“Of course I do. He used to sit me on his knee and spin us in his wheelchair like the bumper cars at the Luna Park.”

“The Luna Park,” Mother murmured. “The ghost train.” She suddenly burst into tears and with her hand signaled that I should go.

I took to my heels. The almost intimate conversation we’d had was too much for me to take. It was the closest we’d come to having a mother-daughter talk, and it too ended in tears.

My mother wept in waves that rose and fell, and in my room I shut my ears with my hands. I couldn’t bear the sound of her despair. Years later I’d regret that moment. Instead of my heart opening, it closed up tight. Instead of taking her in my arms and comforting her, I lay on the cold floor of my room, hands over my ears, and uttered a silent cry to God: Shut her up, God. Please shut her up.

And God foolishly heard me and shut her up. That night the ambulance siren wailed and its brakes screeched outside our house. Four brawny men climbed the fifty-four stairs to the top floor of our apartment building, laid my mother on a stretcher, and rushed her to the hospital. On the operating table the surgeons discovered to their horror that my mother’s body was completely ravaged inside.

“It’s all over,” my father told me. “There’s nothing the doctors can do. Your mother’s going to die.”

Many years after her death, when I found room in my heart for my mother, my Aunt Rachelika told me the secret of her suffering, the never-receding pain. But by then it was already too late to fix what had been broken between us.

I’m a woman of autumn, of yellowed falling leaves. I was born at its back door, two steps before winter.

As a child I’d eagerly await the first rain and the blossoming of the squills. I’d run to the fields, roll in the damp grass, press my face to the soil, and inhale the smell of rain. I’d collect tortoises and stroke their hard shells with my slender fingers, save wagtails’ nests that had fallen from trees, pick autumn saffron and crocuses, and follow the snails that populated the fields.

I’d disappear for hours, and Mother, who was sure I was at Nono and Nona’s, never came looking for me. When I’d get home with damp soil stuck to my clothes and a frightened tortoise in my hands, she’d glare at me with her green eyes and say in a whisper that felt as harsh as a slap, “So different from everyone else. How? How did I have a child like you?”

I too didn’t know how she’d had a child like me. She was so thin and fragile, always dressed in well-cut suits that showed off her slim waist, with high heels like those in the magazines at the seamstress, who’d make all my mother’s clothes according to Hollywood fashion.

There was a time when Mother would sew identical dresses for herself and me, from the same cloth and in the same cut. She’d dress me, warn me over and over not to get dirty, tie a matching ribbon in my red curls, clean my patent leather shoes with spit, and hand in hand we’d go to Café Atara near our house on Ben-Yehuda Street. But after I dirtied the dresses time after time, didn’t show them the proper respect, she stopped.

“What kind of a girl are you? A horani, a primitive. You’ll never be a lady. Sometimes I think you were born in the Kurdish neighborhood!” she’d say, and that was the most terrible thing she could have said, because my mother despised the Kurds.

I could never understand why Mother hated the Kurds. Even Nona Rosa didn’t hate them, certainly not in the way she hated the English. I never heard her say, “May the name of the Kurds be erased.” But whenever there was mention of the English who were in Israel before I was born, she’d always add, “May the name of the Ingelish be erased.” It was well known that Nona Rosa hated the English from the time of the Mandate, ever since her little brother Ephraim disappeared and went in hiding for years as a member of the Lehi underground organization. My mother, on the other hand, had nothing against the English. On the contrary, on numerous occasions I heard her say it was a pity they’d left the country: “If the English had stayed, then maybe the Kurds wouldn’t have come.”

I actually liked the Kurds a lot, especially the Barazani family who lived in the other half of Nono and Nona’s house after our family’s financial situation forced my grandparents to move into the Kurd neighborhood. The two yards were separated only by a thin fence, and once a week Mrs. Barazani would light a fire in the yard and bake a tasty pastry with bubbling cheese inside it. And before the day my mother, with threats of a beating, forbade me to go anywhere near the Barazanis’ side, I’d wait for the moment when “the Kurdia,” as Nona called her, invited me to sit on the floor by the tabun and enjoy the heavenly pastry.

Mr. Barazani would wear a big dress—“like the Arabs in the Old City,” my mother would say—and a rolled-up kerchief on his head, sitting me on his knee as he laughed with his toothless mouth and talked to me in a language I didn’t understand.

“Papukata, where did your mother buy you, the Mahane Yehuda Market?” Mrs. Barazani would laugh. “Because it’s impossible that you and she are related.”

It was only years later that my Aunt Becky told me that our family had a long score to settle with the Kurds.

My Aunt Becky was Nono and Nona Ermosa’s youngest daughter, and she loved me as if I were her little sister. She looked after me and spent far more time with me than my mother did. I was also her alibi when she went to meet her boyfriend, Handsome Eli Cohen, who was as good-looking as Alain Delon. Every afternoon Handsome Eli Cohen would pull up on his shiny black motorbike and whistle. Aunt Becky would go out into the yard, dragging me after her, and shout to Nona Rosa, “I’m taking Gabriela to the playground.” And before Nona had a chance to answer, we’d already be on the bike, me pressed between Becky and Handsome Eli Cohen. We’d drive along Agrippas Street to King George Street, and as we passed the modest building opposite the Tzilla perfumery, where my mother bought perfume and lipstick, Becky would always say, “There’s our Knesset.” Once we even saw Ben-Gurion leave our Knesset and walk toward Hillel Street, and Handsome Eli Cohen drove after him on his motorbike until we saw him enter the Eden Hotel. “There,” Becky told me, “is where he sleeps when he’s in our Knesset, in our Jerusalem.”

At the city park, they’d send me off to play on the swings or slide and they’d kiss until it was almost dark. Only then, when the park emptied of children and mothers and I was the only one left in the sandbox, Handsome Eli Cohen would drive us back to Nono and Nona Ermosa’s. Mother, who’d come to collect me, would yell at Aunt Becky, “Where the hell have you been with the child? I’ve been looking for you all over Jerusalem!” And Becky would reply, “If you’d take her to the playground yourself instead of sitting in Café Atara all day, then maybe I’d be able to study for the exam I have tomorrow, so you’re welcome!”

My mother would smooth her sleek skirt, pass a hand over her perfect hairdo, examine her red-polished nails, and murmur, “Go to hell,” through clenched lips before taking my hand and leading me home.

Eventually Aunt Becky got engaged to Handsome Eli Cohen at Café Armon. It was a lovely party with tables of food and a singer who sang Yisrael Yitzhaki songs. Aunt Becky looked as beautiful as Gina Lollobrigida. When the family had our photograph taken with the engaged couple, Nono Gabriel sat in the middle surrounded by the whole family, and I sat perched on my father’s shoulders and looked down at everyone. That was the last photograph taken of Nono Gabriel, because five days later he died.

Only after he died, during the shiva, the seven-day mourning period, when my mother fainted all the time from crying so much and they had to pour water over her so she’d wake up, and Nona Rosa kept saying, “Basta, Luna! Pull yourself together so we don’t have another tragedy in the family!” and Tia Allegra, Nono Gabriel’s sister, said, “May he rest in peace, Gabriel. Not only isn’t she crying for him, she won’t even let her daughter faint over him”—it was just then that Becky found the right time to announce her wedding date. They all congratulated her but said she had to wait a year out of respect for Nono Gabriel, and Becky said there was no way she’d wait that long, because by then she’d be too old to have children. And Tia Allegra said, “Gabriel, God forgive your sins. What kind of girls did you raise that they won’t even give you the respect of a year?”

My mother, who had come around from her faint, whispered, “Thank God she’s finally getting married. I was worried she might die an old maid.” A fight broke out and Aunt Becky ran after my mother with her sapatos, her slippers, and threatened to murder her if she ever dared call her an old maid again, and my mother told her, “What’s to be done, querida. It’s a fact. At your age I was already a mother.” At that Aunt Becky darted out of the house and I after her down the steps of Agrippas Street until we reached the Wallach hospital graveyard. She sat down on the wall and sat me next to her and suddenly burst into tears.

“Oy, Papo, Papo, why have you gone, why have you left us, Papo? What will we do without you?” Eventually she stopped crying, hugged me tight, and said, “You know, Gabriela, they all say that Nono Gabriel loved your mother Luna more than any of us, but I never felt that he loved me less. Nono Gabriel had a heart of gold and that’s why everybody took advantage of him. And you, my lovely, never let anyone take advantage of you, you hear? You’ll find yourself a boy like my Eli and marry him and be happy. Isn’t that right, my good girl? Don’t search right or left. When you meet a boy like Eli, you’ll feel the love here.” She took my hand and laid it between her breasts. “Right here, Gabriela, between your belly and your breasts, you’ll feel the love, and when you feel it you’ll know you’ve found your Eli and you’ll marry him. Now let’s go back home before Nono Gabriel gets angry with me for running away from his shiva.”

In the end Aunt Becky waited a year until the mourning period was over and only then married Handsome Eli Cohen at Café Armon, where they’d gotten engaged. I wore a white dress and walked in front of the bride, throwing sweets with my cousin Boaz, Aunt Rachelika’s eldest son, who was stuffed into a suit and bow tie. Mother and her middle sister Rachelika had picked out my and Boaz’s outfits together. They did everything together. When Rachelika wasn’t in her house on Ussishkin Street, she was with my mother, and when my mother wasn’t in our house on Ben-Yehuda Street, she was at my aunt’s.

After Nono died, my grandmother remained in her and Nono’s house, and every now and then she’d stop by ours for a visit. She’d always come with chocolate and bamblik licorice sweets, and fascinating stories about the time she’d worked in the homes of the English.

“Enough of those stories already!” my mother would say, annoyed. “Cleaning the toilets of the English isn’t exactly a great honor.”

And Nona would muster up strength and say, “It’s also nothing to be ashamed of! I wasn’t born a princess like you, with a silver spoon in my mouth. I had to feed my brother Ephraim, and besides, I learned a lot from the Ingelish.”

“What? What did you learn from the In . . . ge . . . lish?” my mother would reply mockingly, drawing out the word Ingelish for as long as she could. “And anyway, how many times do I have to tell you, it’s English. English.”

Nona would ignore Mother’s taunts and reply quietly, “I learned to lay a table. I learned Ingelish. I speak Ingelish better than you who learned it in the Ingelish school, and to this day your Ingelish is like my troubles.”

“Me? I don’t know English?” My mother would become angry. “I read magazines in English. I don’t even read the subtitles at the cinema, I understand everything!”

“Right, right, we’ve heard all about you. You understand everything except for one thing, the most important thing, respect and manners. That you don’t understand, beauty queen of Jerusalem.”

And Mother would storm out of the kitchen and leave me with Nona Rosa, who’d sit me on her knee and tell me, “Remember, Gabriela, there is no work that is beneath a person, and if ever, God forbid, you find yourself in a situation, tfu-tfu-tfu, where you have no choice, there’s no shame in cleaning toilets for the Ingelish.”

I liked spending time with Nona Rosa. She was a marvelous storyteller and I was an excellent listener.

“Before you were born, a long, long time before you were born, Gabriela querida,” she would tell me, “our Jerusalem was like abroad. In Café Europa on Zion Square an orchestra played and people danced the tango, and at five o’clock on the terrace of the King David Hotel there was tea and a pianist, and they’d drink from delicate porcelain cups, and the Arab waiters, may they be cursed, wore tuxedoes and bow ties. And the cakes they served there, with chocolate and cream and strawberries . . . And the gentlemen would come in white suits and straw hats, and the ladies in hats and dresses like they wore at their horse races in Ingeland.”

But my grandmother, so I learned years later, had never been to Café Europa or the King David. She told me what she’d heard from the people whose houses she cleaned. She told me her dreams, some of which would come true years later, when her wealthy brother Nick, who Nona called Nissim, would come visit from America and the whole family would gather on the King David terrace, and he would order coffee and cake for everybody. And as the pianist played, I’d steal a glance at my nona, dressed in her best clothes, and I’d see a rare glint of pleasure in her eyes.

Nona Rosa had a hard life. She lived with a man who respected her but didn’t love her the way a man loves a woman. She never knew true love, but she never complained and she never cried. Even during Nono Gabriel’s shiva, when rivers of tears flowed from my mother’s and aunts’ eyes, threatening to flood all of Jerusalem, not a single tear trickled from hers. Nona Rosa would never hug. She didn’t like touching and didn’t like being touched. But I’d sit in her lap, wrap my little arms around her neck, and plant kisses on her withered cheek. “Enough, stop it, Gabriela, basta, you’re annoying me,” she’d chide me and try to shake me off, but I’d ignore her, taking her rough hands and putting them around my body, forcing her to hug me.

Once Nono died, Nona stopped inviting the family over for Shabbat, and we’d hold it elsewhere. After the heavy Shabbat meal I’d walk with Nona to her house and stay there until Mother or Father came to get me. What I loved about her house were the glass-fronted cabinets in which porcelain and crystal tableware stood in perfect order, and the wedding photographs of Mother, Rachelika, and Becky in their silver frames. I loved the big picture of Nono and Nona on the wall: Nono, a handsome young man in a black suit, white shirt, and tie, a white handkerchief peeping from his jacket pocket, sits upright on a wooden chair, his elbow on a table and a rolled-up newspaper in his hand. Nona stands beside him in a black dress buttoned to the neck, the hem reaching to her ankles, with a gold pendant relaxing against her breastbone. She isn’t touching my nono but her hand is on the back of his chair. Nono’s face is finely chiseled, the nose, the eyes, the lips almost perfect. Nona’s is broad, her black hair styled as if stuck to her skull, her eyes wide. They are not smiling, just looking at the camera with serious expressions.

There was the heavy dining table with its lace cloth and center bowl that was always filled with fruit and the upholstered chairs around it, the wide, deep-red couch with cushions that Nona herself had embroidered. My favorite of all was the wooden wardrobe that stood in Nona’s bedroom, which was separate from Nono’s. Lions had been carved into the top, and I would stand for hours in front of its mirrored doors, pretending I was Sandra Dee kissing Troy Donahue and we were living happily ever after.

Their yard, partly protected by the tiled roof, was surrounded by an iron fence entwined with purple bougainvillea and lined with geraniums in white-painted cans. There were stools in the yard, and the chair with the upholstered cushion in which Nono Gabriel loved to sit as evening fell, and next to it a wooden table on which Nona sometimes served dinner. After Nono died, his chair became a monument to his memory and nobody sat in it.

The yard was my kingdom. I’d sit on a stool, gaze at the sky, and wait for a rainbow, because I’d once asked Nona Rosa what God was and she’d told me God was the rainbow in the sky. When I wasn’t searching the sky, I’d imagine I was one of the Hollywood actresses my mother so admired. After all, it was in our Jerusalem that they shot Exodus, and the star, Paul Newman, who my mother said was even better looking than Handsome Eli Cohen, stayed at the King David. Every afternoon during filming my mother would take me by the hand and we’d walk to the entrance of the hotel in the hope of catching a glimpse of him. After a few days of failing to see him, we crossed the road to the YMCA tower, bought tickets for five grush, and climbed to the top, the highest point in Jerusalem. “From here,” she said, “nobody can hide Paul New-man from me.”

But from there we couldn’t see him either because each time he arrived at the King David the black car took him right to the hotel’s revolving glass door, and he slipped through without even a glance back at the crowd that had formed to see him. Eventually Mother managed to see Paul Newman as an extra in the scene where the establishment of the state is announced. She brought the binoculars that Father had bought her for bird-watching on our walks in the Jerusalem hills, and though she had finally gotten to see Paul Newman with the binoculars, my mother was disappointed.

“I saw him, but he, nada, he didn’t see me. Well, how could he from a mile away?” My mother was convinced that if only Paul Newman could have seen her up close, he wouldn’t have been able to resist her. Nobody could resist my mother. Somebody just had to mention to Paul Newman that my mother was the beauty queen of Jerusalem. But nobody told him, and Mother made do with going to see Exodus every day when it was showing at Orion Cinema. Alberto, the usher who had lain wounded in the hospital with Mother during the war, got us in for free.

My mother very much admired movie stars, first and foremost Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Doris Day and Rock Hudson. I dreamed that one day I’d go to Hollywood, even though I didn’t know where Hollywood was, and come back as a famous film actress, and then Mother would stop calling me “primitive” and stop saying that I was different from everyone else and asking how, how had she had a daughter like me. And so I would practice until I made it to Hollywood.

At every chance I got, when Nono and Nona’s yard was empty, I acted like I was living in a movie. I was named Natalie, like Natalie Wood, and I’d dance for hours in James Dean’s arms, and when James and I finished dancing I’d bow to an imaginary audience. One time after I finished dancing I heard loud applause and shouts of “Bravo! Bravo!” I froze and saw the whole neighborhood standing by the fence. Embarrassed to my core, I ran into the house and directly to Nono’s room, lying on his bed and burying my head in the pillow, my eyes filled with tears of shame. Nona Rosa, who witnessed the whole scene, didn’t come after me. A long time later, when I came out of the room, she sat in her armchair in the living room, looked at me, and said, “Gabriela querida, why are you embarrassed? You dance so beautifully. You should tell your mother and father to enroll you in ballet lessons with Rina Nikova.”

Of all our family I was closest to Nona Rosa. While Nono Gabriel was alive his and Nona’s house was the center of the family. We gathered there on Friday evenings for Shabbat, and on Saturday mornings for huevos haminados that we’d eat with cheese-filled borekitas and sweet sütlaç rice pudding, on which Nona would draw a Star of David with cinnamon.

After Shabbat breakfast we’d play in the yard, Mother, Rachelika, and Becky would chat, and Father, Rachelika’s Moise, and Becky’s Handsome Eli Cohen would talk about soccer. There was always shouting because Father was a Hapoel Jerusalem fan and Eli and Moise were Beitar fans. That’s how the time passed until lunch when we’d eat macaroni hamin. After the hamin Nono would take his afternoon nap, and we children were sent for a nap too so we wouldn’t disturb him. Mother, Rachelika, and Becky would carry on chatting, and Father, Moise, and Eli Cohen would go to my father’s sister’s house. Aunt Clara and her husband Yaakov lived on Lincoln Street opposite the YMCA stadium, where every Shabbat afternoon there was a Beitar Jerusalem soccer game. “Watching a game from Clara and Yaakov’s balcony is better than sitting in the reserved seats,” Uncle Moise would say.

My little brother Ronny and I nicknamed Uncle Yaakov “Jakotel” after we saw Jack the Giant Killer, which translated to Jack Kotel Haanakim in Hebrew, at the Orna Cinema maybe a hundred times, because the usher there too had been in the hospital with Mother during the war. “It’s lucky that Mother almost died in the War of Independence,” Ronny would say. “Otherwise how would we get to see movies for free?”

After Nono died and Nona stopped cooking, the Shabbat lunch macaroni hamin tradition moved to our house, and instead of napping after the meal we’d all go to watch the Beitar game. From below, I felt that at any moment Aunt Clara and Jakotel’s balcony would collapse together with the millions of family members on it, so I’d make sure not to pass under the balcony and instead walked on the crowded side of the street next to the stadium.

Left with no choice, every Saturday Father was forced to watch the Beitar Jerusalem team with us from the balcony, even though he always cursed “the sons of bitches” and prayed they’d lose. Everyone would yell, “Damn you, David. Is this what you came for? To put the evil eye on the team?”

Nona Rosa never came with us to see a Beitar game and would go back to her house after lunch. Sometimes I’d walk with her, and while she took her afternoon nap I’d rifle through all her drawers looking for hidden treasure, and when she woke up she’d lose her temper with me and say, “How many times have I told you that you mustn’t put your hands into places that aren’t yours? You know what happened to the cat that put its paw into a drawer that wasn’t his? His paw got trapped and his fingers were cut off. Do you want a hand with no fingers?” And I’d be so frightened that I buried my hands deep in my pockets and swore I’d never ever put my hands into places that weren’t mine, but I never kept my promise.

Every now and again in the afternoon, when Mother went out to Café Atara or someplace else, Nona would come and look after me and Ronny. I’d beg her to tell me stories about the old times before I was born, about the time of the Ingelish and Nono Gabriel’s shop in the Mahane Yehuda Market and his black car in which they’d drive to the Dead Sea and Tel Aviv. And about the time when they lived in a house with an elevator on King George Street, and how the whole family came to see the bath with the two faucets, one for hot water and the other for cold, a bath like my nona had seen only in the homes she’d cleaned.

I asked lots of questions, and my nona would say that I must have swallowed a radio and I was giving her a headache, but you could see that she enjoyed telling me what she’d perhaps never shared with anyone before.

One day Nona sat down on Nono’s chair for the first time since he’d died and said to me, “Gabriela querida, your nona’s an old woman who’s seen a lot in life. I’ve had a hard life. My father and mother died in the cholera epidemic in our Jerusalem and we became orphans. I was ten years old, Gabriela, like you are today, and Ephraim, may he rest in peace, was five and the only one I had left. My brother Nissim had run off to America, and the damned Turks hanged our brother Rachamim at Damascus Gate because he didn’t want to join their army. We had nothing to eat and nothing to wear, and every day I’d go to Mahane Yehuda after it closed to collect what was left on the ground, tomatoes, cucumbers, sometimes a bit of bread. I had to take care of Ephraim and started doing housework for the Ingelish, and there the lady would feed me and I’d eat half and save the other half for Ephraim.

“And then, when I was sixteen, Nona Mercada married me to her son, your Nono Gabriel, may he rest in peace, and all of a sudden I had a good life. Gabriel was very rich and handsome. All the girls in Jerusalem wanted him, and out of them all, Mercada chose me. Why she chose me, the poor orphan, I only found out after muchos anos, many years, but back then I didn’t ask questions. I knew Gabriel from the shop in the market. Every Friday I’d go to get cheese and olives that he and his father, Senor Raphael, may he rest in peace, would distribute to the poor. Who could have dreamed he would end up my husband? That I would be the mother of his daughters? What chance did I, an orphan from the Shama neighborhood with no family and no pedigree, have of even coming close to the Ermosa family? And then, out of the blue, of all the girls in Jerusalem she chose me for her son. Dio santo, I thought I was dreaming, and although she told me I could take some time to think about it, I told her yes right away and my life changed completely. Suddenly I had a house, suddenly I had clothes, I had food, I had a family. That’s not to say that everything was rosy. A lot of things were bad because of my sins, but that didn’t matter to me. The main thing was that I no longer had to clean houses for the Ingelish, and I knew that Ephraim would now grow up with clothes and food. Instead of the family I’d lost, I’d have a new one: a husband, children, a mother-in-law I hoped would be like a mother to me, sisters-in-law I hoped would be like sisters, and brothers-in-law I hoped would be like brothers.

“Gabriela, mi alma, I’m an old woman and soon I’ll die, and after I die, you will be the only one to miss me. My daughters, may they be healthy, will cry a bit and get on with their lives. That’s the nature of people. Time heals, people forget. But you, querida, you don’t forget, not like your mother, who has the memory of a bird. I noticed it when you were still a baby. You never shut your mouth, avlastina de la Palestina, asking questions all the time as if you wanted to inhale the whole world. Now, querida mia, I’m going to tell you about your Nona Rosa and Nono Gabriel and our family and how, from being very wealthy and living in a house with an elevator and a bath, and having the loveliest shop in Mahane Yehuda, we became horanis, poor primitives, with barely enough money to buy wine for Friday Kiddush.

“Everything I know was told to me by your Nono Gabriel, who related the family history as he’d heard it from his father Raphael, may he rest in peace. After Raphael died, Gabriel promised to continue telling the family story, from the day they arrived from Toledo after King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, may their souls burn in hell, expelled the Jews from Spain to Palestine. And because Gabriel and I, for my sins, had no sons, he would tell the story over and over to Luna, Rachelika, and Becky, and make them swear to tell it to their children. But I don’t trust your mother to tell you because her head’s in the clouds and her memory, wai de mi sola, so it’s best she keeps quiet. So come, mi alma, come, bonica, sit here on your old nona’s knee and listen to Nono Gabriel’s story.”

I did as she asked. I climbed onto her knee, burrowed into her bosom, and closed my eyes, inhaling her warm familiar scent that had the sweetness of sütlaç and rosewater. My nona toyed with my curls, rolling them around her thin finger, sighing deeply and pausing the way you do before saying something very important. Then she continued with her story as if she were telling it to herself and not to me.

“After they expelled the Jews from Toledo, the head of the family, Senor Avraham, and his parents, brothers, and sisters traveled all the way from Toledo to the port of Saloniki and boarded a ship that brought them directly to the port of Jaffa.”

“And your family, Nona?”

“My family, mi alma, also came from Toledo to Saloniki and stayed there for many years until my great-grandfather, may he rest in peace, came to Palestine. But I won’t tell you about my family, Gabriela, because from the day I married your grandfather and became part of the Ermosa family, the story of his family became the story of my family too.

“Now listen and don’t interrupt again, because if you do, I won’t remember where I stopped and won’t know where to continue.”

I nodded and promised not to interrupt anymore.

“From Jaffa, Senor Avraham traveled for maybe three days, three nights until he reached Jerusalem. His dream was to kiss the stones of the Western Wall. In Jerusalem he met other Spaniols who took him to the synagogue and gave him somewhere to sleep. At the time small merchants, shopkeepers, artisans, and also goldsmiths and silversmiths who traded with the Arabs lived in the Jewish Quarter in the Old City. There was respect and good relations with the Ishmaelites, and the Spaniols wore dresses like theirs. They even spoke Arabic, and some of the Arabs even spoke Ladino.

“Life was hard in this country back then—Dio santo. A woman had eight children one after the other, and they all died at birth or when they were babies.

“I also had five children with your Nono Gabriel, but only my three daughters, may they have a long life, pishcado y limon, lived. The boys lived less than a month, and after Becky was born my womb closed up.

“I did everything I needed to do to give Gabriel a son. Between the engagement and the wedding I and my future husband, your nono, were invited to a relative’s circumcision. During the ceremony they let me hold the baby and then hand him to my future husband, who passed him on to others, which was the custom for ensuring that a young couple would have sons.

“And truly, blessed be His name, not many days passed after the wedding and I had conceived. How I loved being pregnant. Even my mother-in-law Mercada, who never made life easy for me, was good to me. She and all the women in the family pampered me with honey sweets to make sure I wouldn’t have a daughter, God forbid, and that with God’s help a son would be born.

“Now you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, Gabriela, but whenever she could, my mother-in-law Mercada, may she rest in peace, would stick a knife in my back and through my heart too, but during that first pregnancy she made sure that everyone showered me with love.

“And when the time came, Gabriel rushed to the synagogue with the other men in the family to pray for my well-being and the well-being of the baby. I stayed with the midwife and the women in the family, and my shouting that night was heard from our house in the Old City as far away as Nahalat Shiva in the New City, and I pushed and pushed, dala dala dala, until my soul almost left my body, and it was only when I was sure that the Almighty was taking me to Him that a male child was born. Mercada opened the door and shouted, ‘Bien nacido, it’s a boy!’ and all the family standing outside the door responded, ‘Sano que ’ste, may he be healthy.’ The midwife took the baby, washed it, wrapped it in a white cotton cloth, and laid it on my bosom. But before I could even kiss his red hair Mercada took him from me and ordered the children to run to the synagogue and fetch Gabriel.

“When Gabriel came, he took the baby from Mercada and held it to his heart as if it were precious crystal. Only after he gave thanks to the Almighty did he turn to me, lying between the sheets like a muerta, and for the first time in our lives he kissed me on the forehead.

“What can I tell you, querida mia, that was one of the happiest moments of my life. For the first time since the wedding I felt a little love from Gabriel. Even Mercada, with her face as sour as a lemon, who never smiled at me and always spoke to me curtly and never asked how I was, said to me, ‘Como ’stas, Rosa? Quieres una cosa? How are you, Rosa? Do you need anything?’ And before I could reply, she ordered her daughter Allegra to fetch me some leche con dvash, milk and honey.

“I was happy, Gabriela. I felt that for the first time since I’d become an Ermosa, Mercada and Gabriel were pleased with me. I’d given Mercada a grandson and Gabriel his first son. I felt a warmth in my heart, pride. I felt that now perhaps I belonged. Now perhaps I was part of the family.

“The baby was named Raphael after your great-grandfather, who had died a short time before I’d married Gabriel.

“How I loved Raphael, the apple of my eye. As tired as I was after the labor, I cleaned the room we lived in until it gleamed so the baby wouldn’t catch an illness, God forbid, and die, God forbid, like the babies of the Yemenites in Silwan who dropped like flies just from all the dirt. Raphael’s cradle stood under the window, and over it I hung a tara, an oil lamp that Gabriel brought from the synagogue, and every day after evening prayers Torah scholars would come and recite from the Book of Zohar in honor of baby Raphael.

“But the baby, as much as we pampered him and loved him and prayed for him, he cried all the time, in his cradle, when I carried him whispering words of love: ‘Querido mio, hijo mio, mi alma, what’s hurting you, Raphuli? What’s hurting?’ I didn’t know what to do. I was a child myself, sixteen, maybe seventeen. The baby cried on and on, and then I cried until I ran out of tears, but he never did. He cried without even a break to breathe. Mercada said maybe I didn’t have enough milk, maybe we should bring in a wet nurse, but I didn’t want my baby to feed from another woman, didn’t want strange hands clasping that little body to strange breasts. To increase my milk, Mercada forced me to eat garlic even though I hated it, telling me over and over that only garlic would make baby Raphael feed properly, and then he’d be happy and stop crying.

“Most of all I was frightened of the evil eye and evil spirits. I’d even dress Raphael in girls’ clothes to deceive Lilith, the worst spirit of all, who we knew especially liked to harm baby boys. According to our belief, Gabriela, to appease the evil spirit we had to ‘sell’ the child to somebody else. Gabriel’s mother had been sold when she was a baby, and that’s why she was called Mercada, which means bought.

“When the time came to sell little Raphael, I went to my good neighbor Victoria Siton and informed her, ‘I have a slave for sale,’ which was the code for selling the child. Victoria agreed to ‘buy the slave’ and as payment gave me a gold bracelet. The next day our two families got together and slaughtered a goat for absolution and changed Raphael’s name to Mercado—bought.”

“Is Victoria my other nona?” I asked, interrupting Nona Rosa.

“Back then we didn’t know that Victoria’s son, your father David, would marry Luna and we’d become related, but at the time Victoria Siton was our neighbor in Ohel Moshe, and it was custom to sell your child to a neighbor. Victoria Siton kept baby Raphael in her house for three days, and then we held a new sale ceremony and bought him back from her. But nothing helped, Gabriela, not the girls’ clothes I dressed him in or selling him to Victoria Siton. The damned evil spirits outsmarted us, and when Raphael was almost a month old and we hadn’t yet held the redemption of the firstborn ceremony to celebrate that he’d been bought back, he turned blue like the eye hanging over his cradle to protect him, and by the time Gabriel and Mercada arrived, he was already dead. Mercada lifted Raphael’s blanket over his body and looked Gabriel in the eye and told him it was God’s punishment. At the time I didn’t yet grasp why your grandfather deserved such a punishment from God, and it was only after muchos anos that I understood what that sour old woman meant.

“On the night little Raphael died, I died too. I didn’t die when the accursed Turks hanged my brother Rachamim at Damascus Gate, I didn’t die when my father and then my mother died in the cholera epidemic and I remained alone in the world, a ten-year-old orphan girl with a five-year-old brother. I didn’t die when I realized that my husband didn’t love me and perhaps never would and that the only thing that seemed to interest my mother-in-law was making my life miserable. But when my child Raphael died, I died too, and your grandfather Gabriel died as well, and it was only after your mother Luna was born that he began to live again.

“After Luna was born, we had another son, and he died even before we were able to have him circumcised and give him a name. But for me, even after Luna was born, joy did not come back into my heart, and it didn’t after Rachelika and Becky were born either. Do you know who restored joy to your nona?”

“Who?” I asked, looking wide-eyed at her.

“You, mi alma,” Nona Rosa replied, and although she didn’t like kissing, she kissed my head and I felt as if my heart might burst.

“You brought happiness back to me. My daughters, may they be healthy, have never loved me the way you do, hija mia, and perhaps I didn’t love them the way a mother loves a child. My heart was filled with pain and longing for baby Raphael, and there was no room left for them. But you, querida mia, you, mi vida, my life, I love you a lot. The moment you were born my heart opened again, and into it you brought happiness I’d forgotten could exist in this world.”

“I love you, Nona, I love you best in the whole world,” I said, tightening my arms around my grandmother’s broad waist.

“Love.” Nona Rosa laughed. “In our family, Gabriela, love is a word we never spoke. I never heard words like love from my mother, may she rest in peace. Her whole life was spent in poverty until she died from the epidemic that almost killed the whole of Jerusalem, and Gabriel, of blessed memory, I never once heard him tell me ‘I love you.’ And anyway, what is love? Who knows? Before they got married, my daughters said ‘I love David,’ ‘I love Moise,’ ‘I love Eli,’ and I said, ‘Love? The time of the Messiah has come.’ It’s luck, luck from heaven above that we only had girls, because in our family the men marry women they don’t love. The men of the Ermosa family, Gabriela, don’t let the word love out of their mouths, not even when no one is there to hear. But stories about love that broke hearts, Gabriela, stories about love in which there was no love, that’s something we have in the family. That, praise God, He didn’t keep from us.”

She sighed. “Well, get up. That’s enough for today. I’ve already said more than I wanted. Get up. Your mother will be here soon to take you home and she’ll be annoyed that you haven’t had dinner. Come, querida, help me cut vegetables for the salad.”

The following Saturday after we ate the macaroni hamin and everyone went to watch the Beitar game from Clara and Jakotel’s balcony, I went to Nona’s again. Once more she sat me on her knee and continued the story of the Ermosa family.

“Your great-grandfather Raphael was a very pious man, a scholar who studied the Kabbalah and even made the journey all the way from Jerusalem to Safed to pray with the Holy Ari, Rabbi Isaac Luria. They say that Raphael had decided never to stand under the wedding canopy, that he almost vowed never to have children and instead devote his whole life to Torah study.”

“So how was Nono Gabriel born if his father wasn’t married?”

“Paciencia, querida, all in good time. Listen to me and don’t interrupt, because if you interrupt again I’ll forget what I wanted to tell you and you won’t know anything. Dio santo, why do all the girls in the Ermosa family have no patience?”

Nona took her time before going on with the story, lowering her voice as if whispering a secret. “They say that one day Raphael’s righteous father came to Safed and informed him that he’d found a bride for him—Rivka Mercada, the fifteen-year-old daughter of Rabbi Yochanan Toledo, a pious Jew and rich merchant. Raphael couldn’t disobey his father, but he demanded, and was granted, permission to remain in Safed for three more months, when the wedding would take place. From that moment he dove even deeper into a modest, ascetic way of life.

“The three months passed slowly, and as the wedding date approached, Raphael became even more pious and spent days fasting. And then, Gabriela, then something happened that changed Raphael’s life forever.

“You’re still a little girl, Gabriela, but you should know, mi alma: Love is not only blind, it also blinds. Love can bring great happiness, but it can also bring great tragedy. Your grandmother, Gabriela, didn’t know what the emotion of love was. Your grandfather never loved me the way a man should love a woman, and perhaps I too didn’t love him in the way the Song of Songs says. I was just by his side and gave him daughters, sanos qui ’sten, may they be healthy. I took care of him and the girls and did my best for us to have a good life, no more and no less. But every night before I fell asleep I’d think about what love was, and I couldn’t get this story I’d heard about your great-grandfather Raphael out of my head.

“One day, so I heard, Raphael was walking down one of the alleys in Safed toward the Yosef Caro Synagogue, immersed in himself and murmuring a prayer. His eyes half closed, he accidentally bumped into a young girl. Raphael was startled, and when he raised his head, his eyes met hers, blue as the sea and deep as a well. Her hair was pulled into two golden braids and her skin was white as snow. Raphael, who felt as if he’d seen the beauty of the Divine Presence, quickly covered his eyes with his hand and hurried on his way. But in all the days and nights that followed, he couldn’t clear the girl’s image from his mind. It came to him in the morning when he said the morning prayer, and at night when he said the evening prayer. It came to him in the mikvah ritual bath, and it came to him when he lay down to sleep. He didn’t understand what he was feeling. He only knew that her blue eyes had hit him like a bolt of lightning. Dio santo, he thought to himself. It’s a sin, what I’m feeling for this strange woman, a sin.

“He decided to fast even more and swore he would keep away from places where women were permitted, for he knew that his betrothed was waiting for him in Jerusalem. But the image of the Ishkenazi girl in the alley haunted him like an evil spirit and allowed him no peace. No matter what he did, he could not drive the girl from his thoughts, and he soon found himself lying in wait for her at the top of the alley where he had first bumped into her. He saw her leave one of the houses and followed her, but when she turned and transfixed him with her blue eyes, he again fled for dear life.

“That same day Raphael decided he’d return to Jerusalem earlier than planned to rid himself, once and for all, of the dybbuk with the blue eyes. He couldn’t even imagine speaking to the girl who came from the Ishkenazi community, for he knew that things like that were forbidden, a sin. Do you understand, Gabriela? A sin!”

I didn’t really understand what the Ishkenazi community was, and certainly not what sin meant, but Nona didn’t notice. She carried on telling the story as if possessed by a dybbuk herself, absent-mindedly rocking me on her knee as if she forgot I was there, and probably went on talking even after I fell asleep.

When I woke up, it was quiet and only the murmur of praying and calls of the congregation from the nearby synagogue could be heard. I found Nona sitting pensively in Nono’s chair. “Good morning, querida mia,” she called to me even though it was already evening and dinner was on the table in the yard. Every now and then when I slept over at Nona’s, she’d bake borekitas especially for me and make me sütlaç with the Star of David just the way I liked it.

“And not a word to your mother, Gabriela, so she doesn’t get used to it!” she said. “Let her go on making borekas for you and not ask me to do it.”

Like the rest of the family, Nona didn’t know that Mother bought ready-made borekas from Kadosh, and believed that she baked them herself. My mother had made me swear never to tell anybody, and I kept quiet.

Nona carefully peeled a hard-boiled egg and split it into four. “Eat, eat, good girl. You need to grow.” Then she sat back down in Nono’s chair and continued the story from where I’d fallen asleep a few hours earlier.

“Do you understand what happened, Gabriela? Raphael, may he rest in peace, fell in love with the Ishkenazi girl from Safed, and it was absolutely forbidden for Spaniols to marry Ishkenazim. It was the time of the Turks, when there were maybe six thousand Jews in Palestine and almost all of them lived in Jerusalem. At the time there were not only Spaniol Jews in the country but also Jews from the Ishkenazi countries. Wai wai, how hard it was for the Ishkenazim. Miskenicos, poor souls, they didn’t know Arabic and they didn’t know Ladino and they just didn’t have a clue. Well, the Ishkenazim were Jews too, right? So the Spaniols opened their doors, let them pray in their synagogues, and the Ishkenazim did everything like the Spaniols, even started speaking Arabic and wearing dresses like the Spaniols, who dressed like the Arabs. They did everything they could to blend in with the Spaniols, because after all, we were all Jews and we should help one another. But marry? Heaven forbid! Because the Spaniols wanted to keep themselves for themselves and only marry one another, so as not to mix, God help us, with Ishkenazim and have half-and-half children.

“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.