The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem (7 page)

“Don't tell me how to eat,” my father said. “I learned to eat macaroni long before you even knew what macaroni was. The Italians eat macaroni exactly like this, only they have kiftikas with meat and they sprinkle cheese over it.”

“I want mine like Father's,” I said.

“Of course you want it like Father's,” my mother hissed. “Great, David. Now your daughter will become uncivilized like you.”

Father ignored her and continued eating. “Not enough salt,” he said.

“That's because I'm not in love,” she replied. But I didn't understand what she meant.

“And pepper too,” my father went on. “You cook like my troubles, without flavor and without aroma.”

“If you don't like it, then go eat at Taraboulos.”

Ronny and I tried to ignore the daggers flying across the table. For a long time now our parents' relationship had been tense. Through the wall that separated our room from theirs I'd hear them arguing at night, my mother crying, my father threatening he'd leave if she went on nagging, the door slamming, words of hatred shouted in a whisper so that we children wouldn't hear. I'd cover my ears with my little hands and pray to God that Ronny was asleep and couldn't hear what I did.

One afternoon, when Rachelika came over with her children and they sent us off to play while they whispered together in the kitchen, I heard my mother tell her, “If it weren't for the children I'd have sent him to hell a long time ago.” And Rachelika replied, “Paciencia, hermanita. It's just a bump in the road, and it'll pass,” to which my mother said, “It'll never pass. It's how he is, always looking at other women. Only now he's looking at the same one all the time and I have to live with it.”

Rachelika said, “I thought you didn't care what he did,” and my mother replied, “Of course I don't care about him, but he's my husband and he humiliates me and I get so upset I could kill him. And worst of all, he lies. I know he has someone on the side, and he lies about it.”

And Rachelika said, “Enough, Luna, you have to get hold of yourself so that nothing happens to you. You must think of the children. Don't break up your family, God forbid.”

“What frightens me,” said my mother, “is that if anyone breaks up the family, it'll be him, and what will I do if he gets tired not only of me but of the children as well? How can I raise two children on my own? That woman, may she burn in hell, I'd tear her clothes off and throw her naked onto Jaffa Road.”

Then they started talking so quietly that no matter how hard I pressed my ear to the wall I couldn't hear, and the more I tried to understand who the woman was my mother wanted to throw naked onto Jaffa Road, the less I understood. And most of all I didn't understand how it could be that my mother didn't care about my father, and why my mother was frightened that Father would break up the family, and what breaking up a family meant. Was it like tearing down a building, like they did with Ezra's grocery in Nahalat Shiva, and putting up a new building in its place?

After lunch my father rose from the table and went straight into the bedroom without helping my mother clear the table. Unusual for her, my mother didn't say a word about it. She cleared the plates and put them in the sink, cleaned the tomato sauce from Ronny's face, and took off his stained shirt.

“You're a primitive too,” she scolded him, and after she changed his shirt and sent me to my room to do homework, she washed the dishes and lay down on the living room couch, warning us to be quiet and not wake her. And it occurred to me then that my mother hadn't been going to nap in the bedroom with Father for a long time.

When I saw that Mother had closed her eyes, I slipped into their bedroom. Father was asleep on his side in his undershirt and underpants and hadn't bothered to cover himself. I went over to him quietly and waved my hand over his eyes to make sure he was really asleep and wouldn't, God forbid, suddenly wake up and surprise me. Peeping from the pocket of his pants that were folded neatly over the back of the chair by the bed was his brown leather wallet. I carefully removed it, took out a five-lira note, and put the wallet back.

I hid the five lirot deep inside my backpack, and the next day, after getting off the Number 12 bus at the last stop on my way home from school, I stopped at Schwartz's store and bought myself a new pencil box with colored crayons, and even had enough money left over for a pack of yellow Alma gum and a chocolate-banana ice cream. And when my father didn't say a word about five lirot missing from his wallet, I continued taking from it, a different sum each time but never more than five lirot.

As time went by, I got bolder. I started stealing money from the teachers' purses at school and stuff from the children's backpacks in class: erasers, pencil boxes, stickers, and the allowance their parents had given them. One time I stole so much money that I had enough to take Ronny to the Luna Park and go on all the rides and buy us both a falafel and soda.

Mother and Father were so busy fighting that they didn't notice. Even when Ronny, despite my warning, told Mother that I'd taken him to the park, she said, “That's nice,” and didn't ask questions. The fights taking place behind Father and Mother's bedroom wall became more frequent. My mother's crying tore through the silence of the night as my father tried to hush her. Sometimes he'd leave the house, slamming the door, and I couldn't fall asleep until I heard him come back hours later. One night when they couldn't control their volume and even my fingers couldn't drown out the noise, Ronny crawled into my bed, hugged me tightly, and cried. I held him close, stroked his head, and rested my lips on his forehead until he fell asleep. When I woke up in the morning I was soaked to the skin. Ronny had wet my bed. Mother came in and when she saw the soaking bed asked me, astonished, “What's all this? Did you do peepee in bed?” and I wanted to tell her it wasn't me, but my little brother's sad eyes stopped me and I stayed quiet.

“That's all I need right now,” she said. “You should be ashamed of yourself! A big girl like you doing peepee in bed.”

That day after morning recess I was called to the principal's office, and I knew the game was up—I'd been caught.

My legs were trembling as I knocked on the principal's door. He was sitting at his big desk, and behind him hung a large picture of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, and beside it, one of the president of the State of Israel, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. Without speaking the principal signaled me to sit in the chair across from him. As soon as I sat down, my homeroom teacher Penina Cohen got up from the chair next to mine and stood beside the principal, who pointed to my backpack situated on his desk.

“Is this your bag?” asked Penina Cohen.

“Yes,” I nodded.

“Yes what?” she asked harshly.

“Yes, miss.”

And then without a word the teacher emptied its contents onto the desk. Pens, erasers, crayons, pencil boxes, and piles of coins and bills fell from it together with my textbooks and homework books. The principal looked at me and said, “Gabriela Siton, can you explain this?”

I couldn't and didn't want to explain. I just wanted the ground to open up and swallow me so I could disappear from that room, from the school, from the world, forever.

Everything that took place in the principal's office next has been erased from my memory. It was only at home afterward that I heard the story from my father. When teachers' complaints about missing items increased, they realized that a thief was active in the school. No one suspected the students until students began reporting missing erasers and pencils and pencil boxes and money. And when my teacher noticed that I was her only student who hadn't complained about theft, and when the children began telling about my after-school spending sprees, the suspicion immediately arose that the thief was Gabriela Siton. And just to make sure it was me, they took me out of the classroom and then searched my backpack without me knowing.

That day I was sent home early. My parents were summoned to the principal's office, and after they got home, my father beat me with the belt with the painful buckle, but this time he didn't pretend to pacify my mother. He really thrashed me. Ronny cried and threw himself onto the floor. My father was in a rage and hit me again and again until even my mother came to my defense: “Enough, David, you'll kill the girl.” He stopped only when I was writhing in pain on the bathroom floor. But that was nothing compared with my real punishment: facing my friends in class the following day.

From then on my status changed. The other kids in school bullied me. Years later whenever I couldn't sleep, instead of counting sheep I'd recount the nicknames of the children who were with me in school. I remembered them by the order in which they sat in class: Ita Pita, who was bullied because she was fat, Fay the Lay, who, so rumor had it, let boys feel her tits after school, London Bridge, who'd immigrated from London just as we started to learn English, and me, the girl who until then had been class queen, I was called Ganefriela, a play on the Hebrew word for thief.

My father walked around like a caged tiger, trying to hold back his anger. “I'm a bank employee,” he said, “as straight as a die, but my daughter's a thief!” He couldn't forgive himself for his terrible failure in my upbringing, and he refused to forgive me. But he certainly made no attempt to understand why a girl who had “ev-ery-thing,” as my mother repeatedly said, had to steal.

My mother didn't give a thought to it. She didn't know about the hell I went through every day at school, the insults I suffered, the bullying, and even if she had, I doubt she or my father would have done anything to stop it. They surely would have thought it a fitting punishment for somebody who'd brought such shame on the family. So I didn't say a word.

*   *   *

They never mentioned my thievery again. My father and mother carried on with their petty, sad life, and as time went by their quarreling was gradually replaced with tense silences.

When I outright refused to continue with my classmates to Leyada, the Hebrew University Secondary School, they disapproved but didn't force me. When I went to enroll in a school considered far inferior, they didn't even bother to come with me to a meeting with the principal, and I handled the entire process myself. And when, at age sixteen, I went to a party at Beit Hachayal, the soldiers' club, came home with a handsome boy in a white navy uniform, and stood in the doorway to our apartment building kissing him like there was no tomorrow, my father came downstairs, pulled me roughly out of the boy's arms, beat me, locked me in the bathroom, and gave me a strict punishment: to come straight home after school, not meet my girlfriends, not listen to Radio Ramallah, not go to the cinema. To go into my room each day and not come out until it was time for school the next morning.

That was the day that the unspoken alliance between me and Father was finally broken, an alliance that had saved me from my mother's anger more than once, an alliance that until then had made my father my safe haven, a place where I was welcome and loved unconditionally. When Nona Rosa died my father had become my only refuge. But no longer. The seeds of the rift had been slowly sown during my adolescent years, and my father was unable to accept the fact that I had become a young woman with needs of her own.

On the third day of my sentence, instead of going to school and coming home directly after, I walked to the central bus station, boarded a bus to Tel Aviv, and then headed to Rothschild Boulevard, where Tia Allegra, my mother's elderly aunt, lived.

I knew the boulevard well, after all the pleasant vacations I'd spent there. I stood outside Tia Allegra's house and took in the beautiful Bauhaus building she'd lived in for years, the rounded balcony, the tall trees and shrubs in the entrance garden. I drew in a deep breath, the air of freedom that spread throughout my body every time I came to Tel Aviv, pushed open the wooden door, and slid my hand over the banister as I climbed the marble stairs to Tia Allegra's apartment on the second floor and rang the bell.

“Who is it?” my mother's aunt asked.

“It's me, Gabriela,” I replied. Through the locked door I could hear the old lady hobbling along with her cane.

Tia Allegra opened the door. “Dio santo, Gabriela, what are you doing here, querida? Don't tell me it's Sukkoth today and I didn't know!”

I fell into my old aunt's arms and started to cry.

“What's happened, querida mia? What's the matter, hija? Why are you crying?”

“I'm tired,” I told my old aunt. “I want to sleep.”

She led me into one of the rooms and said, “Lie down, querida, and when you wake up you can tell me why you're here. But rest now, and I'll make some habas con arroz because you'll probably be hungry when you wake up.”

I don't know how long I slept, but when I woke up it was already dark and Tia Allegra was sitting in her deep armchair by the balcony door. Next to her was her usual trolley with a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits.

She smiled at me. “Did you sleep well?”

“Yes.” I nodded. “I was very tired.”

“Go into the kitchen,” she instructed. “I've made you something to eat. Warm it up. My legs won't take me anywhere these days, and they hurt from standing over the stove.”

I entered the kitchen, loaded a plate with white rice and beans in tomato sauce, mixed it, and went back to the living room to eat it beside my aunt.

“How's the habas con arroz?” she asked. “I've lost my sense of taste recently and my children are always complaining that there's not enough salt in it.”

“It's delicious,” I said, enjoying the comfort of food I'd known since the day I was born.

“I called your father at the bank,” she said. “He told me that I should put you right back on a bus to Jerusalem. I told him it would be better if you stayed the night. In the morning my son-in-law Shmulik will take you to Jerusalem in his car so we're sure you make it home and don't run away to God knows where.”