The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem Read Online Free Page A

she woke up she’d lose her temper with me and say, “How many times have I told you that you mustn’t put your hands into places that aren’t yours? You know what happened to the cat that put its paw into a drawer that wasn’t his? His paw got trapped and his fingers were cut off. Do you want a hand with no fingers?” And I’d be so frightened that I buried my hands deep in my pockets and swore I’d never ever put my hands into places that weren’t mine, but I never kept my promise.
    Every now and again in the afternoon, when Mother went out to Café Atara or someplace else, Nona would come and look after me and Ronny. I’d beg her to tell me stories about the old times before I was born, about the time of the Ingelish and Nono Gabriel’s shop in the Mahane Yehuda Market and his black car in which they’d drive to the Dead Sea and Tel Aviv. And about the time when they lived in a house with an elevator on King George Street, and how the whole family came to see the bath with the two faucets, one for hot water and the other for cold, a bath like my nona had seen only in the homes she’d cleaned.
    I asked lots of questions, and my nona would say that I must have swallowed a radio and I was giving her a headache, but you could see that she enjoyed telling me what she’d perhaps never shared with anyone before.
    One day Nona sat down on Nono’s chair for the first time since he’d died and said to me, “Gabriela querida , your nona’s an old woman who’s seen a lot in life. I’ve had a hard life. My father and mother died in the cholera epidemic in our Jerusalem and we became orphans. I was ten years old, Gabriela, like you are today, and Ephraim, may he rest in peace, was five and the only one I had left. My brother Nissim had run off to America, and the damned Turks hanged our brother Rachamim at Damascus Gate because he didn’t want to join their army. We had nothing to eat and nothing to wear, and every day I’d go to Mahane Yehuda after it closed to collect what was left on the ground, tomatoes, cucumbers, sometimes a bit of bread. I had to take care of Ephraim and started doing housework for the Ingelish, and there the lady would feed me and I’d eat half and save the other half for Ephraim.
    â€œAnd then, when I was sixteen, Nona Mercada married me to her son, your Nono Gabriel, may he rest in peace, and all of a sudden I had a good life. Gabriel was very rich and handsome. All the girls in Jerusalem wanted him, and out of them all, Mercada chose me. Why she chose me, the poor orphan, I only found out after muchos anos, many years, but back then I didn’t ask questions. I knew Gabriel from the shop in the market. Every Friday I’d go to get cheese and olives that he and his father, Senor Raphael, may he rest in peace, would distribute to the poor. Who could have dreamed he would end up my husband? That I would be the mother of his daughters? What chance did I, an orphan from the Shama neighborhood with no family and no pedigree, have of even coming close to the Ermosa family? And then, out of the blue, of all the girls in Jerusalem she chose me for her son. Dio santo, I thought I was dreaming, and although she told me I could take some time to think about it, I told her yes right away and my life changed completely. Suddenly I had a house, suddenly I had clothes, I had food, I had a family. That’s not to say that everything was rosy. A lot of things were bad because of my sins, but that didn’t matter to me. The main thing was that I no longer had to clean houses for the Ingelish, and I knew that Ephraim would now grow up with clothes and food. Instead of the family I’d lost, I’d have a new one: a husband, children, a mother-in-law I hoped would be like a mother to me, sisters-in-law I hoped would be like sisters, and brothers-in-law I hoped would be like brothers.
    â€œGabriela, mi alma, I’m an