The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem Read Free Page B

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 Newman 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.
    â€œI 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