The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem (58 page)

I wailed, and he let me go on for a long time until the well of my tears dried up. Only when I calmed down did he begin to speak. “Your mother wasn't a wife to me for many years. We were like a couple of strangers long before she became ill. We lived in the same house, we functioned as parents to you and Ronny, but we were not man and wife in the way a man and wife should be. I'm a man, Gabriela, I have needs, and Vera loves me. She's good to me.”

“Father, I don't want to hear about you and Vera.”

“Before you judge me, it's important that you know that the only reason I didn't leave your mother was you, you and Ronny. I wanted you to grow up with a father and mother in the same house.”

“How generous.”

“If you knew only a quarter of the truth, then perhaps you wouldn't judge me, perhaps you'd understand.”

“Understand what? That my mother's body wasn't yet cold and you're already bringing your lover into her home? Tell me, Father, now that she's sleeping in Mother's bed, is she also wearing her clothes? Is she wearing her jewelry?”

“All of a sudden you're defending your mother's honor?” he asked, his eyes full of pain. “Why didn't you defend her honor when she was alive? All those years all she got from you was grief. You made only trouble for her, only arguments, and all that time I was defending you and fighting with her over you, and all of a sudden it's all the other way around? All of a sudden I'm the bad guy?”

“If it was the other way around, Mother would never have brought another man home, never!”

“There's a lot you don't know about your mother, Gabriela. Don't let me open my mouth about it.” And at that he turned his back and left the apartment.

Uncle Moise, who all this time had been standing silently by the window, looked at me for a long time. Before following my father out he said quietly, “Before you lose your father too, 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.”

I of course didn't ascribe any importance to what Uncle Moise said and didn't ask my aunt to tell me things about my mother. I was determined to move forward with my life, not go back to Jerusalem. I stood at the window and watched my father and Moise walk away down the narrow street. My father's back was bowed, Moise's hand on his shoulder, and for a moment I wanted to run after them and call my father to come back, tell him I didn't mean it, I was just being difficult—after all, I've always been a difficult child—that I still love him the way I did long ago, when I loved him more than anything else in my life. But it was as if my feet were stuck to the floor and I couldn't move.

Amnon came to stand beside me and asked in amazement, “What was all that about?”

I turned my head and looked into his kind blue eyes. I touched his hand as he stroked my cheek, and I knew then that he really cared. Tears started running down my face, and he hugged me as I cried my heart out. He didn't say a word, just held me, and afterward we fell into bed and made love all night.

We slept late in the mornings and went to the beach in the afternoons, lying for hours on the warm sand until the sun set, unable to keep our hands off each other. When it was time for me to go to my waitressing job at the Red Teahouse, he'd walk with me as far as Mapu Street, head back to the apartment from there, and then pick me up at the end of my shift.

It could have gone on forever or until I got bored and had had enough of him, but Amnon had his own plans in life. He enrolled in an architecture program in London and prepared to leave his apartment and me and move on with his life. He hadn't asked me to join him because he'd understood without my telling him that I was with him just so I didn't have to be alone. I hadn't even attempted to remove the barrier blocking my heart, somewhere between my belly and my breasts, where my Aunt Becky had told me you're supposed to feel love. Because I didn't want to love. I just wanted not to spend the night alone, not to confront a new day alone each morning, so I wouldn't have to feel or remember, so I wouldn't have to face my life.

I thought I could fool the whole world into seeing in me what I wanted to see in myself: a young, liberated, carefree woman who didn't have to answer to anybody, not even herself. And maybe I succeeded in fooling everyone, just not Amnon. He saw that all the show and bluster was hiding an unhappy young woman who couldn't find her place. He saw my inside, but when he'd tried to get in there, I rebuffed him.

“I don't want to fuck,” he told me one time. “I want to talk.”

“Not with me,” I replied. “With me you fuck, not talk.”

He threw me off him, got out of bed, and slammed the door.

After a few days in which he didn't utter a word to me, he suggested I start looking for someplace else to live. But then, when he no longer wanted me, I couldn't leave him.

“Leave me alone,” he pleaded. “I can't take it anymore. I have to get ready for London and you're distracting me.”

The more he begged me to leave, the more I wanted to stay. He stopped picking me up from work, and when I came home I would sneak into his bed. One night he grabbed my shoulders and shook me. “What's wrong with you?” he said in a voice as tough as steel. “When I want to, you don't. When I don't want to, you don't leave me alone. Go already, just go! If you don't go, I'll throw you out.”

He left for London the next day, not before giving me the key and making me promise to stay in the apartment until I found somewhere else to live.

His first letter arrived a week later in a flimsy blue airmail envelope and stamps bearing the image of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. The paper was as thin as the envelope. I held it in a trembling hand and read:

My one and only impossible love,

It's so cold in London and I miss you. As much as I try, I can't get you out of my head. Unfortunately, you touched me in a place no woman has touched before. I don't understand why it was you, because we both know you're a fool, such a fool that you can't differentiate between who really loves you and someone who just wants to have fun. But maybe it's you who just wants to have fun? Maybe it's you who doesn't want to love? And in spite of it all I'd still be happy if you were here with me now.

Amnon

*   *   *

Three months after Amnon flew to London, I joined him.

I insisted on going out my first night there. I was curious and wanted to devour the new world I'd entered, taste every last thing in it. Tel Aviv's Lod airport, my first time there; the flight; the landing; the vast Heathrow Airport, which scared me so much; Amnon, who was waiting for me outside the arrivals gate, and only when I saw him could I relax; the Underground train that took us to Victoria Station; the people crowded into the train without touching each other—it was all new and exciting and I felt I was at the start of the greatest adventure of my life.

Amnon took me to his local smoke-filled pub, ordered us beers, and led me to an empty table. My eyes roamed all over the place, unable to get their fill of what was happening around me, the music, the noise, the usually restrained English people talking in loud voices, the TV screen showing a soccer game, the young girls, knockouts in miniskirts and thigh-high boots, the boys with their long hair and jeans. I saw hands wandering, I heard rolling laughter. I was high. I'm in London, a thousand light-years away from Jerusalem, swinging London, London of the liberated world, I thought to myself. Everything is so foreign yet familiar. The happy atmosphere of the noisy pub is like the pub at the end of Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv. The men and women are so different, but they're wearing jeans and minis just like the young people in Tel Aviv.

“I can't believe I'm here, it's crazy! I'm at the biggest party of the seventies, the world of ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,' Jean Shrimpton, and Twiggy,” I yelled through the haze of alcohol and the loud music. I felt free to dance to the hypnotic sound of Jimi Hendrix's guitar, free to chug beers, free to be like Julie Christie. The more I drank, the more I brazenly flirted with the guy sitting next to me at the bar, completely ignoring Amnon.

Over the next few weeks, when I came to him from the beds of strangers and asked him to hold me, Amnon forgave me again and again. And I thanked him silently, for I too was unable to be without him. We consoled each other, and it sometimes seemed to me that a scrap of happiness was suddenly insinuating itself in me and calming my troubled soul. I'd snuggle into his arms and feel they were protecting me from the unease inside me and the noise outside.

Once, after we'd made love and lay sweating in his water bed, trying to get our breath back, Amnon asked, “What's my place in your life?”

“Don't start with that,” I said. “Leave it.”

“I won't leave it,” he persisted. “You don't tell me how you feel about me, so at least tell me how I fit into your life.”

“I don't want to play this game.”

“Why not?”

“Because I'm scared.”

“Of what?”

“I'm scared of saying you're important to me. I need to have a way out.”

“Why do you need a way out?” he asked, caressing my breasts.

“So I can escape just before you leave me.”

“Who's leaving you, my little fool,” he said and held me tight. “If anybody's leaving it'll be you. If anybody's going to get hurt it'll be me, and we both know it.”

“There's something broken in me,” I told him. “I don't know how to be in a relationship.”

“You're breaking my heart,” he said.

“I don't mean to.”

“I don't understand you. I don't understand why you won't let me love you.”

“Maybe it's because of the curse,” I said quietly.

“What curse?”

“The curse of the Ermosa women. My Grandma Rosa told me that the Ermosa women are cursed with men who don't want them, and vice versa.”

“I know that you sleep with other men,” he said.

“And you still want me?”

“More than any other woman.”

“Why?”

“Look me in the eye,” he whispered, and I drowned in the sea of love I saw in his eyes. “Because of this.”

But instead of staying in a place where I was loved, I banged my head against the wall and drove him away. Amnon couldn't take any more and got up and went to India. After this time, I knew, I wouldn't get another chance.

*   *   *

After Amnon left me in London and flew to India to heal his broken heart, I sat in a smoky London pub crowded with drunks. If people were talking to me, I didn't hear them. I was drinking one beer after another so I didn't have to think or feel. A long-haired young man I hadn't noticed before was sitting next to me. For every glass of beer I drank, he downed two. A short time after we were both sufficiently drunk, he tried to kiss me. I was tipsy when he invited me to go outside and smoke a joint.

Maybe it was the joint, maybe the beer, but it was mainly because of the loneliness that I later found myself rolling around in bed with him. Not long afterward, I moved into Phillip's flat on noisy Finchley Road. Its windows were always closed because of the cold and the unbearable racket of the traffic outside. At night we'd turn on the gas heater, inserting a five-penny piece into the meter, and I'd lie on the rug close to the heater and cover myself with an old fur jacket I'd bought at the flea market.

Phillip was moody and wore a permanent scowl. He drank himself senseless and smoked like a chimney. The gloomier the weather turned, the more my fear of loneliness took over, and I felt I was helplessly becoming dependent on his presence.

He was a reclusive character, Phillip, a loner. On numerous occasions he'd leave me alone in the apartment and come back wasted in the early hours of the morning. Some nights he'd ask me to go to the pub with him, and when I did I felt like a fifth wheel, that he didn't actually want me there. He didn't drink with me, didn't dance with me. I'd sit at the bar like a wallflower, watching him flirt like crazy with English girls whose skin was pallid and wrinkled.

But the more he distanced himself from me, the more I hung on to him. The more he rebuffed me, the more I felt like I needed him. Phillip didn't even notice how desperate I was for his attention. He'd sit in the room chain-smoking and staring at the ceiling, and I'd try to talk to him but he wouldn't answer. He treated me like I was worthless.

Desperate, I began following him everywhere. I clung to him like a shadow in the narrow Soho alleys when he went looking for the young boys who sold him hash. I followed him when he went drinking, always beside him, never with him. If he noticed that I was following him, he didn't let on, and I liked the game. It added drama to my boring life.

One night when we came home drunk from the pub he began undressing me on the front steps, and we crumpled onto the freezing ground. I couldn't keep it in any longer and yelled, “God, I want you!” I bent over him and brought my mouth to his and my eyes to his and asked in a seductive voice, “Do you want me?” And when he didn't answer after what seemed like an eternity, I realized he'd fallen into a drunken stupor and hadn't heard me at all.

The next day he didn't remember anything that had happened, and I, deeply mortified, all I wanted was to go to India and look for Amnon. Restless, I decided to go out for a walk.

The cold wind sliced my face and threatened to blow me over. Eventually I gave in and hurried inside a small church. Sitting down in a pew, I was a little girl lost in an unfamiliar place. What was this dependency I'd developed for Phillip? Me, Gabriela Siton? How had it happened that I needed a guy who didn't want me, who saw me as no more than a flatmate who paid rent? What did I even really know about Phillip? Apart from his muttered yes and no, he'd never told me anything about himself. There I sat in a church, lusting after a man who didn't even know the color of my eyes.