Book One
Ratiba
1966
I had wanted an old time, authentic wedding, with Ibrahim riding through his village on horseback. You can’t get more romantic than that, I thought. Ibrahim laughed at me, claiming I was the only person he’d ever met who’d want such an outmoded ceremony, telling me I was a contradiction of willfulness and sentimentality, sounding like my sister who was always muttering things like that about me. For his part, Ibrahim wanted me to wear the traditional wedding dress that his mother had worn, which was really old-fashioned, that his father had kept for a hundred years and more in a wooden box, specifically for that purpose. Much to our surprise, Kasim wouldn’t let me. “No,” he told Ibrahim. “Your mother’s dress won’t be worn again.” I wanted to ask why not but didn’t. Instead we sent to Haifa for a dress that was fluffy white, that my sister and I embroidered just the same—rows of red and gold stitches down the bodice, making me look like a hybrid.
I begged my father-in-law, “Please,” I said, “don’t hire a hall for the ceremony. Let us marry on the slope of the hill among the trees and the evening breezes at the back of your house.” But Kasim refused. “We’re not poor,” he said. “We need to entertain our friends in style.”
So we congregate in Ibrahim’s village, west of Jerusalem, in the presence of Kasim’s family and friends, in a rented hall where toasters and dishes and sets of silverware grow into a marriage-mountain in their tinsel wrappings on the table near the door, where gobs of blue-and-gold plaster cover the walls, where painted flowers gather dust in the corners, and a crown in the center of the sky-blue ceiling hangs during the ceremony, immediately and ominously, over our heads. When I enter, the women, my sister playing her part among them, vent their excitement in a burst of ululations, scaring a thousand devils out of me, as my mother would have said, because I wasn’t expecting it; then the atmosphere eases, for which I’m more than grateful, as drums and a lone, weeping lute play around us like doves of sound. I clamp onto my sister’s arm, first stifling the need to squeak like a mouse the way I do when I’m excited, then, just as suddenly, repressing the urge to cry, refusing to let go of my sister, to let her move away. This is the defining moment of my life, I tell myself, biting my lip till it hurts. Don’t botch it. We gather for the ceremony.
For the second time in two weeks, Kasim separates me from my sister, draws me to one side.
“You are a good woman,” he says. What’s the matter with him? I’m not even twenty-one. “Tell me now,” he says. “It’s not too late. Would your parents have blessed this union?”
It’s hot. Overcrowded. The hall is way too narrow. Why is he pestering me about parents? About “unions,” as though I was some national entity? Why now, again, at the last minute? If I were to change my mind, would he send everyone home?
“Of course,” I say.
“Good,” says my father-in-law and disappears into the crowd.
Kasim addresses us in front of his guests: “The marriage of a man and a woman,” he says, “is the meeting of two souls. From this day on, you are like the wheels of a carriage. If you work in rhythm with each other, knowing each other’s every thought, anticipating each other’s every move, you and your children will be happy.”
Ibrahim is holding both my hands now, looking only at me. I see nothing, hear nothing, care about nothing but him, my husband, my husband’s orange eyes until, like a bullet shot to heaven, the women pierce the air again with their voices, protecting us from harm.
The women are chanting al zaghareed, congratulating me on my choice of husband and on my decision, from this point on, to tend to his needs. Men are gathered down the center of the room, dancing. Women cluster around, clapping, throwing seeds at us. The singer is wailing way too loudly now, the music pounding in my ears. For a moment, my heart catches as a fishhook in my chest, frozen by the absence of my parents, refusing to beat, refusing to release its flow of blood.
“Raula,” I gasp through the din, “I can’t. I can’t do this.”
“What can’t you do?”
“This. Can’t do it. Can’t breathe.”
She laughs out loud as though I’m joking. Then, in an undertone so I have to read her lips to hear her, “This is no time to panic,” she tells me. “Focus on Ibrahim.” And thrusting me toward him between the two lines of dancing men, my beloved sister spins me around until nothing remains in my mind but my love of my groom and my immediate need to remain upright.
Friends have gathered around Kasim. He looks at my sister and me and tells them, “In the absence of Ratiba’s parents, I felt reassured when I met Raula that my son is marrying into a good Muslim family. Raula’s manner of speech,” he says, “set my mind at ease.” Yes, I think, my stuffy father-in-law has a problem with me.
My sister is mingling with my husband’s family, people she doesn’t even know, handing round glass dishes of dates, of figs, listening attentively, laughing her wonderfully light laugh as they talk, drawing everyone, especially my new brother-in-law and his wife, to her with her charm and her haunting gray eyes. I am trussed up in my self-embroidered wedding dress next to Ibrahim, who is busy being kissed by all the men at our wedding, feeling like a queen bee, Ibrahim looking foreign and adult in his suit. His relatives are circling around me, oohing and aahing, extending their hands, frightened to touch, believing perhaps that I might sting them, wishing us well. My hairpins are digging into my scalp. My new shoes are pinching my toes; I should have worn them in before the wedding. I want to take them off to change back into pants.
A ragged line of mustached men dance al debkeh. Kasim’s neighbor is blatantly inspecting my sister for his son as he moves, his wife joining in his game, nodding, elbowing me, smiling in approval. How are they to know she will disappear after the wedding, abandoning our aspirations, I’ll tell them, for the temptations of the United States? I’ll tell Ibrahim too, on a weekly, monthly basis. For some reason, he’ll never tire of asking, “What happened to Raula?” he’ll ask. “Why doesn’t she write?”
“She does,” I’ll lie, and he’ll ask why I never write back.
We move outside to the patio on the slope of the hill. The patio, it turns out, is larger than the hall. Raula helps the women carry trays of cracked wheat and lamb, the aroma wafting after them as they go, sets them on the sheets that cover the ground.
“See?” Kasim says, leaning into me. I have never seen him smile before. “You have your trees, your evening breezes.” Raula—I just love the way my sister’s name rolls over my tongue—carries the baklava and coffee from guest to guest, and to us, the bride and groom, as we nestle close to each other, immersed now in our own company, responding only peripherally to the good wishes of our guests. Love songs are pumped through a loudspeaker. Under cover of the music, I whisper my question to Ibrahim. “Some day, in the future, if ever you stop feeling this way about me, will you tell me?” Kissing me ever so lightly, like the brush of a butterfly on my neck, then gazing wickedly into my eyes, he says, “I won’t need to. You’ll know.”
Orit
Shuli said I fell into this world, like many of my generation, from the back alley, off the outstretched arm of my mother. That’s the way Shuli said things. Nevertheless, much later as a young adult, I was lucky enough to visit Rome. There, in the center of the magnificent Sistine Chapel ceiling, I saw God’s arm stretched out to man’s, and I recognized those arms as my conduit to life.
*****
Shuli was my mother. She was gentle when you caught her attention. The trouble is that wasn’t such an easy thing to do. Because Shuli was never fully there, was always concentrating on other things—other than me, that is. I was four years old. I trailed after her from room to room, the metal blinds of our apartment pulled down against the heat, sprinkling eyes of light across the floor that winked and watched me, moving the shadow monsters that lived beneath my bed, under the table, behind the chair, in the corner—a giant one in the corner, next to the plant, waiting to pounce. I was clutching Boobie, my comfort blanket, for protection. I’d given Boobie a gender. She smelled like me. I dragged her behind me on the floor, so she collected dust and fluff and little bits of things on the way. Really what I was doing was waiting for Shuli to notice me, to pick me up. But when she finally lifted her head out of the storage chest where she was sorting out clothes and saw me with my arms stretched toward her, she gave a start as though I’d frightened her. When she did that, I jumped too and started to howl.
“I thought you were still sleeping, Ority,” she said “Why didn’t you tell me you were there?” But I’d been whimpering for a while. I knew because I could feel the snot and the tears being smeared round my face by my free hand. She picked me up.
“Yehuda,” she told my aba, “put music on,” and she became my ima again. “Come, babush,” she cooed. “Dance with me.” She wrapped me completely in those long arms of hers that wound around my back and all the way round her too. That’s how long they were. We glided across the room, stepping on the shadow monsters, killing them, her curtain of hair caressing me like wings, I swaying and dipping in the safety of her arms to the strains of Aba’s music; she smelling of the lavender lotion that stood as a permanent fixture on the bathroom sink and never ran out.
There was a gentleness to Shuli that stayed with her, like the bathroom lotion, right up to her last, stubborn, miserable days, way after she’d stopped dancing, when she was lyiing on my dead aba’s bed refusing to walk or talk. But after two minutes of that, she said, “Okay. Orit, sweetness, that’s enough. Go play.” She plopped me down again as though the music had been turned off, as though I was a purse or a scarf she no longer needed. So I sat on the stone floor, in the blinded room, and waited for her to notice me again.
Aba walked in, also on his way to some more important chore. He lifted me, raised the shades so that its tiny eyes raced together back into the ceiling, like those animals that Aba said rush into the sea when it’s their time for the next world, and the day was there. He set me in the corner of the sofa, tied each of my fingers with colored threads and bits of torn handkerchief, drew faces on them with his colored pens.
“This finger is Ima,” he said, hugging me, teaching me also, as always, the Arabic name for mother—ommy. “When you grow up,” he told me, “you’ll speak Arabic just as well as Hebrew.”
Next to Shuli, my aba was my favorite person in the whole world. He stuck a cotton ball on my Ima-finger for hair and gave it her voice. Then, “This one is me,” he, said, adding the Arabic for father—abee—and a thimble. “This one is little Ruti.” He emitted a crying sound like my baby sister, making me laugh. “Play with us. We are at a party, and we have to dance and eat yummy cake. See? See us lick off the crumbs?” When he wanted to leave me to work at his desk, my aba, said, “One of your finger people is sad and lonely, Ority, and the others are trying to make him happy. How would you make him happy?” He covered me with Boobie, my comfort blanket, placed my thumb, like a stopper, in my mouth for me to suck on so I had to pull it out quickly before baby Ruti’s face rubbed off. He put songs on the record player for me to listen to with my family of fingers. I didn’t know that my finger family would develop into my life’s work.
“A woman on a bus gave you to me while I was still in Europe,” Shuli told me, when I was old enough for first grade. “When she sat down next to me, I thought you were a bunch of clothes the woman was clutching to her breast. Later, when I stepped onto the curb with you on my arm, I couldn’t remember what the woman looked like, what she wore, whether her eyes were blue or brown, or even whether she was tall or not. I would never have been able to identify her for the authorities.”
Shuli wouldn’t tell me who “authorities” were, or why she’d need to identify a stranger on the bus for them. Still, I loved this story. Every night, as she’d bend over my bed, I’d spread my Boobie blanket over mother Shuli’s knee and beg her to tell it to me. She always told it the same way.
“World War Two was over,” she’d begin. Then…
“‘My name is Haya,’ the woman whispered. ‘I’m working with an organization trying to trace the families of those who’ve survived and are living in transit camps.’
“‘I’m on my way out of here,’ Shuli said. ‘I’m waiting for papers, and I’m in a hurry.’”
Haya told Shuli that I had no name, that she wanted to find me a temporary home, just for the weekend, because the transit camp was infested with lice, because there was no one in the camp to look after me. Shuli took me. She told me that when she closed the door of the room she was living in and put me down, I scrambled away from her, wouldn’t let her come near me. Two days went by, she told me. I wouldn’t come out from under the table, just stared at her, Shuli said, dirty hair hanging over my “haunted gray eyes.” I wouldn’t let her change me. I puddled on her straw rug, the one she said she loved because it had a star woven into the center. She left food for me in my safe place under the table, but I wouldn’t eat it, she said, until she turned her back. At the end of the weekend, Haya came back; Shuli saw that she wasn’t tall, had curly brown hair and serious eyes beneath a woolen cap. I was still under the table, clutching the blanket that Shuli had thrown over me, that I wouldn’t let her take from me, which was smelly, she said, from my pee. Shuli wouldn’t give me up. “I’m keeping her,” she said. “Her name will be Orit.” Shuli became my ima.
I was three years old, I remember, here, in Israel. I had a white dress like a bride, like Shuli, my mother, exactly like her. Shuli was getting married. We got ready at the same time; I putting on my new socks as she pulled on her stockings. I checked her dress at the back, making sure it looked good. She bent down so I could straighten her veil; she buckled my shoes.
“What color ribbon do you want?” she asked. I couldn’t make up my mind, so she tied my hair up in yellow, pink, and blue, all intertwined. “Stop jumping up and down,” she laughed. But I couldn’t so she gave up on the bow.
“Hurry,” I kept telling her. “We’ll be late.”
She was putting lipstick on for the first time ever. “How does it look?” she asked me. She was so beautiful with the lipstick.
“Can I have some?” She put lipstick on me too. “Hurry,” I said. “He’ll think we’re not coming.”
Shuli was hugging me. She was laughing instead of getting ready.
“He’ll not wait for us,” I told her, jumping up and down. “We’ll miss the wedding.”
People were sitting in rows on either side of us. Shuli was carrying me up the aisle to marry my aba—his name was Yehuda—with me holding the bouquet. A man in a hat and a white scarf read stuff and sang.
“That’s the rabbi,” Shuli whispered, tickling my ear with her breath. “He’s performing the ceremony.” My aba put his arms around Shuli after the ceremony, so I was squashed between them, in the warm lavender smell of their embrace, he kissing me with the side of his mouth while staring into my ima’s dark blue eyes, at the paleness of her skin, at her shiny black hair that she’d curled, just for that day, beneath her veil.
******
I was four and a half when Ruti was born. “Don’t climb into the crib with your shoes on, Ority. It’s new! Don’t pick up the baby!” My parents hovered over me, sure that I meant to hurt my new baby sister. I would have never hurt my sister.
–
Batya Casper PH.D, is a theater teacher, director and actor. Among her previous publications is: Electra: A Gender Sensitive Study of the Plays Based on the Myth, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland &Co, Inc. Publisher, 1995. Casper has lived periodically in Israel since early childhood.
Learn more at: www.israelathebook.com.
Why did you decide to write this book?
