The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem (63 page)

“And perhaps not her aunt either,” she said softly.

“You told me after my mother died that you're like my mother now, you told me that you were my first call for anything at all. So now I'm asking you, my dear Aunt Rachelika. You want me to rid myself of my anger, to move on with my life, but how can I move on with the secrets you're all hiding from me? I know there are secrets, and I'm ready to hear them.”

My aunt gathered me into her arms. “My sweet girl, my precious, I don't even know where to begin.”

“At the beginning, and don't keep any of the painful details from me.”

And so, cradled in my aunt's arms, I finally heard my mother's story.

“Your mother, miskenica, had dreams. She thought she was a princess who deserved a knight on a white horse, until life came along and her dreams blew up in her face. Your father, what can I say, wasn't the knight on the white horse she'd been waiting for. She realized that not long after they'd gotten married, but it was too late by then, and Luna had to accept what she'd been given. In fact, it was me, who'd never had big dreams, who'd gotten a dream man, not a knight on a white horse like the one Luna dreamed of, but a knight with the biggest heart, and Becky, may she be healthy, found a boy who worshipped the ground she walked on, and only Luna, the Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, got the wrong man. There was never a grand love between your father and mother. At first she thought she could hear bells, but quite quickly the sound of bells became the sound of a hammer hitting her head.

“When you were born she hoped that now, after the birth of a daughter, their life would finally change for the better. But then the war broke out and she was wounded and was in the hospital for two years. And it was there in the hospital that something happened that changed her life.”

“What happened?”

“She found her knight on a white horse.”

“My mother found her knight while she was lying wounded in the hospital?”

“He was more badly wounded than her. At first they just talked. They'd share the pain of their wounds, their dreams of a healthy life. They were friends. But after they were discharged, they began meeting in secret every day. And that was when your mother finally came to understand what true love was, what it meant to care for somebody else before yourself, what it meant when your soul connected with the soul of another.”

“My mother met her lover every day? So Ronny could be his child?”

“God forbid, Gabriela, Ronny isn't his. He couldn't have children, he was paralyzed from the waist down. Now do you understand what pure love is? Your mother loved his soul more than she loved his body. She was happier than she'd ever been in her life, and though I warned her that she was skating on thin ice, that she was endangering herself and her marriage, she wouldn't listen. Every day she'd leave you and Ronny with Nona Rosa and Becky and go meet him. Then one day he died—he'd never completely recovered from his wounds—and when he died, your mother died too. That was the day your father realized that your mother's heart was broken because of another man, that throughout almost all the years they'd been married, your mother had loved another man.

“The night her lover died, your father knocked on my door in the middle of the night and asked me to come to your house and be with her. She was so shattered that he was afraid she might try to kill herself. He asked me to look after her so she wouldn't hurt herself.

“Your father forgave her in the end, but things were never the same. From the day her lover died she was never the same woman. Something died in her heart. And she missed her beloved until her dying day. Do you know what she said to me before she closed her eyes? She said, ‘I'm not frightened of dying, Rachelika, I'm going to meet Gidi.' That was his name. And your father, what was he to do if his wife didn't want him? Seek comfort in another woman. And that's how he found Vera. And Vera loves him and gives him everything that Luna withheld from him, so don't punish him. It was your mother who pushed him into Vera's arms.”

At long last another thread in the tapestry of Ermosa family secrets had been woven before my eyes. Who would have believed that my mother had had an affair? That her cool, proper facade concealed a volcano?

My mother had led a double life. On the one hand she was a wife, the mother of children, and on the other a brokenhearted woman who'd never recovered from the death of her one true love. It wasn't surprising that she'd accepted Vera's presence in my father's life all those years.

Suddenly I saw my mother in a different light. Human, vulnerable, misunderstood. And strangely, serenity descended upon me.

*   *   *

Har Hamenuchot in Jerusalem is a bald, sad hill. Row after row of graves hang on the mountainside without a single flower or tree between them. The stony hill overlooks the road into Jerusalem, a menacing and frightening reminder to all those who pass. It is to here that the people of Jerusalem are brought when their time comes. Here is the end of their road. Men, women, children, young and old, Sephardim and Ashekenazim, each of them is laid to rest in their community's section. Nono Gabriel and Nona Rosa were brought here, and here, in the Spaniol section, my mother was buried too.

Had my mother been alive to see it, she would have loved her gravestone. A slab of white marble, and on it, in raised lettering, the words:

HERE LIES MY WIFE, OUR MOTHER AND SISTER

THE DEARLY BELOVED LUNA SITON,

DAUGHTER OF GABRIEL AND ROSA ERMOSA

MAY HER SOUL BE BOUND IN THE BOND OF EVERLASTING LIFE

Yet it is a very simple gravestone for a woman who had so much style and good taste. My mother loved flowers, and there isn't even one blooming by her grave.

How many unfulfilled dreams did my mother have? How many places did she want to visit but never got the chance? She didn't manage to become an elderly woman. Her face had not yet become furrowed with lines, no gray streaked her hair. She didn't live to see her children beneath the wedding canopy, and her grandchildren will know her only from photographs.

It's the fifth anniversary of her death. I'm standing at her graveside holding a bunch of red carnations, her favorite flower. My father and Ronny are reciting Kaddish; Rachelika and Becky are weeping silently, each in her husband's arms, their children beside them; and dozens of relatives and friends are clustered around the family. It looks like a funeral rather than a memorial service, I think, so many people here to love and honor my mother.

People move to the grave, place a stone on it. The more distant ones say their good-byes and leave. Only the close relatives are left. Rachelika takes a cloth and Becky fills a bottle from a nearby tap and they quickly and gently wash the gravestone as if they're washing my mother's body. They pay special attention to the letters of her name, carefully running their fingers over each one as if caressing it.

I'm standing to the side, not part of what they're doing, waiting for them to finish, wanting them to leave, ashamed they might see that I'm on the verge of tears. I want to be alone with my mother, press my lips to the cold stone and say good-bye. I want to hug her in death as she had never let me hug her in life, as I'd never let myself. I want to make peace with her, rid myself of the ache in my chest. Why hadn't I said good-bye to her while she could still feel? If my mother could see me now from her place in heaven she would probably shrug her angel's wings in disbelief: I, Gabriela, the most different child of all, I, the street girl, the one who was always misbehaving, is now standing by her grave and yearning for her.

“We have to get going, Gabriela,” Becky says. “It's getting late.”

“You go,” I reply. “I'm right behind you.”

Becky walks away with Handsome Eli Cohen's arm around her, and I remember how, when Nono died and Becky fought with Mother and left the shiva, and I ran after her and we sat on the wall of Wallach hospital, she told me, “You'll find yourself a boy like my Eli and marry him and be happy. Don't search right or left.” But I haven't yet found my Handsome Eli Cohen, and the one time in my life when there was perhaps a faint hope I'd found him, I didn't listen to my heart. I ignored the signs and pushed him away. I didn't see the gift that had been presented to me. And now it's too late, for since then, the narrow gap that he had opened in my heart has closed, and my heart is shielded by a rampart that even a thousand cannons can't bring down.

It's becoming gloomy and starting to rain. I pull my coat around me and recall autumn last year. Autumn in London, where I crossed Regent's Park, treading carefully on the golden leaves so as not to crush their beauty, enjoying the orange-gold vista of the park. I raised my eyes to the sky, inhaled the fresh, chilly air, glanced at the treetops as the leaves were carried in the wind. I'd never witnessed such a magnificent sight. My twenty-second birthday was just around the corner, and I was standing at the height of my youth, a yellow woman shedding her leaves, defeated.

I sat down on the carpet of golden leaves and played with them, taking fistfuls and sprinkling them over my head, my face, my body like rain. There I was, another link in the chain of cursed Ermosa women: Mercada, Rosa, Luna, Gabriela. Luckily, Rachelika and Becky had been saved from the curse; luckily they'd had sons. Luckily I was the only daughter born to that generation of Ermosas, the only and last daughter, because the curse would end there. I would not have children, I'd decided. The woman who'd marry my brother, the women who'd marry my cousins, would not carry the curse. I would be the last woman of the Ermosa tribe so the curse could be removed.

*   *   *

The rain's stopping, and a patch of blue sky is revealed from behind the clouds. I raise my eyes heavenward and fill my lungs with the good smell that comes after rain, the rain that like Rachelika and Becky also washed my mother's grave. With the hem of my coat I wipe the raindrops from the stone.

I'm alone. My family has gone down the steps to the road where Handsome Eli Cohen's black car and my father's white Studebaker Lark are waiting, and into which everybody will pile like sardines and drive to Rachelika's house for the customary meal.

It's a bit frightening in the cemetery, and a shiver runs through my body. I look right and left to make sure there's nobody around, and only then, once I'm sure that no one can see what I'm doing, I take a red lipstick from my purse and carefully apply it to my lips in the shape of a heart the way my mother used to, drawing the lipstick in careful strokes, trying to keep within the lines. I bring my mouth to the gravestone and kiss it gently, leaving the print of my red lips on the cold white stone, breathing a little life into it. I remove the cellophane from the bouquet of flowers and spread the red carnations all over the slab.

“Ima,” I whisper, and kiss the stone again for the last time.

I go down the steps to where my family are all standing by the cars.

And that's when I see him. I'm stunned, not quite believing my eyes. “What are you doing here?” I ask as he walks over.

“I saw the announcement in the paper.”

“And you've been here the whole time?”

“The whole time.”

“Are you coming?” Ronny calls to me before he gets into my father's car.

“You go ahead,” I tell him. “I'll be there shortly.”

The cars drive off and Amnon and I are left on our own.

“You know,” I say, “when I was standing by my mother's grave I was thinking of you.”

“Really?” he asks. “What were you thinking about?”

“I was thinking that once upon a time I had the opportunity to love and I blew it.”

“There isn't a day in my life,” he says quietly and looks into my eyes, “when I don't think about that missed opportunity.”

I stare into his big eyes and fall into his arms. Then he holds me away from him a little and says, “So how are you?”

“I'm good now, but it's been unbelievably bad.”

I tell him about Phillip, about my mother and her dead lover. And I tell him that I know my mother has brought him back to me because I've stopped being angry.

Amnon doesn't say anything. He just hugs me and it's as though I'm exactly where I should be.

It's pitch-black on Har Hamenuchot. The dead have gone to sleep. Below us on the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv road a swarm of cars is flowing, their headlights dancing. We sit down at the foot of my mother's grave.

“And you,” I whisper, “what have you been up to all this time?”

“I ran away from you as far as India,” he says. “I was on a long journey with myself. I searched for relief from the pain, from the sense that something was missing. At first I was angry with you. Afterward I became angry with myself. I asked myself over and over why I hadn't fought for you, why I'd given up.

“I traveled all over India. I went to Manali and Dharamshala, the Himalayas, Kasol and the Parvati Valley. I went south to Rajasthan and in the end I reached the paradise called Goa. And there, where the tide's ebb and flow soothes one's soul, where the jungle kisses the golden sands of the beach and the cows lie in the sun just like the people, I made up my mind to do three things: shave off my beard, go back home, and look for you. Your father told me you were still in London and taught me a word in Ladino, paciencia. So I took a deep breath and waited patiently. I knew you'd come back, and I knew that when we reunited we'd be together. I'm not leaving you again, Gabriela.”

“And I thought I'd lost you forever,” I whisper, “that my one chance had been taken from me. I thought I'd never love again. And here you are. You've come back.”

I kiss him, melting into his arms. It's a miracle, I think to myself in awe. Here I am feeling love exactly where Becky told me I would: between my belly and my breasts.