The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem by Sarit Yishai-Levi

Author:Sarit Yishai-Levi
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466890503
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

7

GABRIEL LAY IN HIS BED listening to the silence of the house. He was still unused to the emptiness. He missed the commotion that had filled it when his three daughters had all lived there. But they’d grown up and that was the way of the world. The fledglings left the nest, that’s how it was. At one time young people would carry on living with their parents for the first year of marriage at least, but young people had become modern. They rented a room and embarked on their lives. Perhaps it was better that way. It hadn’t done him any good, living with his mother. His mother—it’d been a long time since he’d heard from her. He hadn’t seen her since Luna’s wedding. She hadn’t attended Rachelika’s. She’d said that traveling all the way to Jerusalem was hard for her, and Allegra had apologized on her behalf.

In the past, once a month he’d receive a letter from Allegra with an update on the family and his mother, who’d become a cantankerous old woman. But now the mailman brought letters from Allegra only infrequently. How long had it been since he’d last heard from her? Two, maybe three months. Today he’d sit down and write her despite his shaking hand. What once took him five minutes to write now took an hour, and he’d get annoyed. He couldn’t stand not having control of his hand, of his life.

The situation with the shop was bad. It was difficult to obtain stock, nobody went to Lebanon or Syria anymore, and commerce with the local Arabs had also ceased. Even the women from the Arab villages had stopped coming to the market with cheeses and olive oil. The scarcity of goods and customers alike had brought the shop to the brink of total disaster. Despite their ambition, poor Rachelika and Moise hadn’t been able to restore the shop to its former glory. Yesterday they’d come to see him with more bad news.

“Papo,” Rachelika said, “Moise and I have to talk to you about something important.”

“Then talk, queridos, say what you have to say.”

“Senor Ermosa,” Moise began, “times are hard, there are no customers in the shop, and even when there are, we don’t have anything to sell them. We’ve finished everything that was in the sacks and we have nothing to replace it. Today we had about five customers and they left empty-handed.”

Gabriel sighed. He didn’t want to hear this. He couldn’t bear it. The shop had been his father’s and grandfather’s before him. Why, why had it fallen to him to bring the family business to ruins? He couldn’t even pass it down to the next generation.

Rachelika and Moise were silent, conscious of Gabriel’s pain. Rachelika embraced her father and kissed him. “Papo, these aren’t only hard times for us. The market stalls are all empty.”

“Don’t tell me that the market’s empty,” Gabriel said.

“It’s empty, Papo. People come and go but there’s nothing to buy. People come to our shop, a delicatessen, to spoil themselves, not for bread, not for a tomato, not for meat.

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