by Meir Shalev
My body was shaken and beaten; the awful hooves whistled by me like the axes circus performers toss at their blindfolded girls. My hand grasping the rope was almost pulled out of my shoulders and my skin was flayed off on clods of dirt, but my heart was serene and confident.
“Zayde,” I said once again to the Angel of Death. “My name is Zayde.”
In the shining white light, I saw him lick his pencil, examine his notebook once more, and understand that there was some mistake here.
His jaws gnashed in rage, and with a gasp of wrath and menace, he went somewhere else.
The loud whinnying and the yells of the Village Papish rushed Moshe Rabinovitch to me. He ran heavily across the ten meters between the two yards, and what I saw then I shall never forget.
With his left hand, Rabinovitch grabbed the stallion’s halter and pulled him down until their heads were level, and with his right fist he struck the white star in the center of the horse’s forehead one blow, and no more.
The stallion jerked back, stunned and surprised, and the majesty of his virility fell as if it were lopped off. He dropped his head, his eyes sank back, and with a moderate, ashamed pace he returned to our yard and went inside his fence.
The whole thing lasted no more than thirty seconds. But when I stood up, safe and sound, my other two fathers were already there: Jacob Sheinfeld had run up from his house and the dealer Globerman came in his green pickup truck, collided, as he always did, with the big eucalyptus tree, and jumped out, yelling and waving the nail-studded bastinado.
And Mother came tranquilly, stripped off my shirt, shook the dust off it, washed and disinfected the scratches on my back, and laughed. “A little boy named Zayde, nothing will happen to him.”
SO IT’S NO WONDER that as time went on, I became convinced that my mother was right and I came to believe in the power of the name she gave me, and so I take the precautionary measures it entails. Once I lived with a woman, but she ran away from me, amazed and despairing, after a few months of abstinence.
“A son will bring a grandson, and the grandson will bring the Angel of Death,” I told her.
At first she laughed, then she got angry, and in the end she left. I heard she married somebody else and that she’s barren, but by that time I knew all the jokes and mockery of fate, and my heart was inured to it.
THAT’S HOW MY name saved me both from death and from love. But this has nothing to do with the story of my mother’s life and her death, and stories, unlike reality, have to be preserved from all excess and addition.
A slight melancholy may be woven into my way of talking, but it isn’t evident in my life. Like every person, I create moments of grief for myself, but the pleasures of life aren’t alien to me, my time is my own, and as I said before, three fathers showered their benefits on me.
I’ve got a knipele of money and a green pickup truck bequeathed to me by Globerman the cattle dealer.
I’ve got a big beautiful house on Oak Street in Tivon, the house bequeathed to me by the canary breeder, Jacob Sheinfeld.
And I’ve got a farm in the village, Moshe Rabinovitch’s farm. Moshe Rabinovitch still lives there, but he’s already registered it in my name. He lives in his old dwelling, facing the street, and I live in the pretty little house in the yard, the house that was once a cowshed, where bougainvillea twine around its cheeks like colorful sideburns, where swallows flutter yearnings at its windows, and a soft smell of milk still rises from the cracks in its walls.
In bygone days, doves hummed in it and cows gave milk. Dew collected on the covers of the jugs, dust in dances of gold. Once a woman lived in it, laughed and dreamed, worked and wept, and in it she brought me into her world.
That, in fact, is the whole story. Or, as practical people say in their deep, loathsome voices: that’s the bottom line. And everything that will sneak in above it from now on are details with no purpose but to satisfy that pair of small, hungry beasts—curiosity and nosiness—who nest in all our souls.
4
IN 1952, about a year and a half after her death, Jacob Sheinfeld invited me to the first meal.
He came to the cowshed, his shoulders drooping, the scar on his forehead gleaming, and the moss of solitude darkening the wrinkles of his face.
“Happy birthday to you, Zayde.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “You’ll please come to me tomorrow for dinner,” he said, and turned and left.
I was then exactly twelve years old, and Moshe Rabinovitch made me a birthday party.
“If you were a girl, Zayde, we’d make you a bat-mitzva today.” He smiled, and I was surprised because Rabinovitch didn’t tend to talk in “if” and “what if.”
Oded, Rabinovitch’s older son, who was already the village truck driver, brought me a silver-plated Bulldog model of a Mack diesel. Naomi, Rabinovitch’s daughter, came specially from Jerusalem and brought me a book titled The Old Silver Spot, with pictures of crows and the notes of their calls. She kept kissing and crying and hugging and stroking until I was filled with embarrassment, desire, and dread all together.
Then the green pickup truck appeared, collided, as always, with the mighty stump of the eucalyptus where big scars, mementos of all the previous collisions, could be seen in its flesh, and another father burst out: Globerman the cattle dealer.
“A good father doesn’t never forget a birthday,” declared the dealer, who never failed to fulfill any parental obligation.
He brought some premium cuts of beef ribs and bestowed a sum of cash on me.
Globerman brought me money for every event. For birthdays, holidays, the end of every school year, in honor of the first rain of the season, on the shortest day of the year in winter and on the longest day of the year in summer. Even on the anniversary of Mother’s death, he would thrust a few shillings into my hand, which horrified and disgusted everybody, but it didn’t surprise anybody because Globerman was known throughout the Valley as a greedy, coarse man. And in the village people said that five minutes after the English expelled the German Templars from nearby Waldheim, Globerman showed up there with his pickup truck, broke into their abandoned houses, and looted the crystal and porcelain dishes they had left behind.
“And by the time we got there with the wagons”—the narrators were enraged—“there wasn’t anything left.”
Once I heard the Village Papish scolding Globerman for the same thing. The word “robber” I understood, “Hashbez” I guessed, and “Akhen” I didn’t get.
“You stole! You plundered!” he rebuked him.
“Me steal? I didn’t steal.” Globerman chuckled. “I obtained.”
“You ‘obtained’? What does that mean, you ‘obtained’?”
“Some of it I obtained by pulling and some of it I obtained by dragging. But steal? Not me. I didn’t steal nothing,” roared the dealer, with a laugh I can still recall clearly to this day, many years after his death.
“I’ll tell you what’s the difference between just a gift and a gift of cash,” he said now in a loud voice so everyone would hear. “To think up what gift to buy somebody iz a lokh in kop, a hole in the head. But to give somebody cash iz a lokh in hartz, a hole in the heart. Period.”
And he closed my fingers around the money and declared: “That’s how my father taught me and that’s how I’m teaching you. It’ll be just like you yourself was born on the Klots, the butcher block.”
Then he pulled out the flat bottle he always carried in his coat pocket and I recognized the smell of the grappa Mother loved to drink. He poured a lot of liquor down his throat and a little bit of liquor on the fire, roasted the ribs he brought, and sang aloud:
Zaydele went walking down the street
Went with a penny to buy himself a treat
Oh, Zaydele, it’s only a deceit
The cent went off and there’s no treat
Daddy, Daddy, he is bold
Mommy, Mommy, she will scold
They’ll beat poor Zaydele till he’s out cold.
A
nd Moshe Rabinovitch, the strongest and oldest of my three fathers, caught me and tossed me up in the air over and over again, threw and caught my body with his thick, short hands. And when Naomi yelled, “And one to grow on,” and I soared for the thirteenth time, I saw a swarming cloud of wings threatening to cover the village.
“Look,” I shouted. “Starlings in summer!”
And at first glance, the raging nimbus did indeed look like a flock of starlings that had lost its sense of time. But it soon turned out that, thanks to the swings of Moshe Rabinovitch’s strong hands, I saw the locusts rising on the Valley that year, 1952.
Moshe’s face became melancholy. Naomi panicked. And Globerman said for the nth time: “A mensh trakht un Gott lakht—man makes plans and God laughs.”
Within five minutes the dull drumming of the Arab peasants was heard beyond the hills, coming out of their houses to the fields, armed with screaming women, long sticks, and noisy, empty gasoline cans to rout the enemy.
Globerman sipped more and more grappa from his bottle and served Moshe more and more meat, and in the evening, when all the children went to the fields with torches and bags, spades and brooms to kill the locusts, my third father, Jacob Sheinfeld, came, laid his hand on my shoulder, and invited me to dinner.
“All the gifts ain’t nothing. Money gets used up. Clothes you rip up. Toys get broke up. But a good meal, that stays in your memory. From there it don’t get lost like other gifts. The body it leaves real fast, but the memory real slow.”
That’s what Jacob said, and his voice, too, like the voice of the dealer, was loud enough to reach everyone’s ears.
5
A STRANGE BIRD,” that’s what they called Jacob Sheinfeld in the village.
He lived all by himself, he had a little house, a garden which was once well-tended, and a few empty canary cages, relics of an enormous flock that was now dispersed.
His field, which had once boasted a citrus grove and a vineyard, vegetables and fodder, was now leased to the village for common cultivation. His incubator he had already closed. His wife who had left he had already forgotten.
Jacob’s wife was named Rebecca. I knew she had left him because of my mother. Never did I see her, but everybody said she was the most beautiful of all the women in the village.
“What do you mean, all the women in the village?” the Village Papish amended. “All the women in the Valley! All the women in the country! One of the most beautiful women in all the world and in all times!”
The Village Papish was one of those admirers who are devoted to female beauty, and in his house he had splendid art albums he used to leaf through with washed, caressing hands, and sigh: “Sheyner fun di ziebn shtern—more beautiful than the seven stars.”
Like a distant, glowing nebula, Rebecca was sealed in his memory and in the common memory of the village. To this day—even after she had gone off and remarried and come back in old age, and managed to bring Jacob back to her before her death—they still talk about her here. And whenever a handsome woman comes to visit or a new baby is born who is very beautiful to behold, memory immediately compares her with that reflection of the beautiful woman who once lived here, whose husband was unfaithful, and who went off and left us all behind, “wallowing in ugliness and desolation and the black soil,” as the Village Papish said.
I WAS TWELVE YEARS OLD THEN, and in the way whose beginning is hazy and whose end is painfully sharp, I understood that I was responsible for Jacob’s catastrophe and for his solitude. I knew that, if not for me and the deed I did, my mother would have granted his suit, given in to his pleas, and would have married him.
As in a box, I hid from my three fathers the secrets concerning them and her. I didn’t reveal to them why she behaved as she did or why she chose the one she did. I didn’t tell them that, sitting in my observation-box, camouflaged with branches and grass, I saw human beings, too, and not only crows.
Nor did I tell them about the mockery and scorn, my lot in school.
“What’s your name?” laughed the little children.
“What’s your father’s name?” teased the big children, guessing aloud which of the three was my real father.
They were scared of Rabinovitch and Globerman, so they clung to Jacob Sheinfeld, whose isolation and mourning made him an easy target. He also had a strange custom which stirred pity and disgust in everyone’s heart: he would sit at the village bus stop on the highway, saying either to himself or to the dusty casuarinas or to the cars passing by, or maybe to guests visible only to him: “Come in, come in, friends. How nice of you to come, friends, come in.”
Sometimes he seemed to greet them. He stood up formally, and as if he were reciting an ancient slogan, he said: “Come in, friends, come in, we’re having a wedding today.”
Often, when I went on a trip in the village milk truck with Oded Rabinovitch, we’d see him sitting there.
“Look at him how he looks,” said Oded. “If he was a horse, they would have shot him long ago.”
But not to Oded, and not even to his sister Naomi did I reveal what evil I had done to Jacob in my childhood.
THE NEXT EVENING, after I finished my homework and helped Moshe with the milking, I washed, put on a white shirt, and went to Sheinfeld’s house.
I opened the small gate and was immediately wrapped in strange and wonderful smells of a meal. They slipped out of the house, but didn’t go over the hedge, and stayed in the yard.
Jacob opened the door of his house, and when he told me his “Come in, come in,” the smells grew stronger, winding around my neck and ankles, bearing me from the yard inside the house and filling my mouth with the saliva of excitement.
“What were you cooking there, Jacob?” I asked.
“Good food,” he said. “A gift for you on a plate.”
Jacob’s gifts weren’t frequent or public like the dealer’s gifts, but they were more interesting. When I was born, he gave me a pretty yellow wooden canary that was hung over my crib. When I was three, he folded yellow paper boats for me and we’d sail them together in the wadi. For my eighth birthday, he prepared a surprise that made me very happy: my big observation-box, painted with camouflage spots, equipped with holes for observation and ventilation, two handles, and a pair of wheels.
“From that box, you can watch your crows and they won’t know you’re there,” he told me. “But don’t use it for watching human beings. That’s not nice.”
Inside the box, Jacob had put up clips for paper and pencils and arranged a place for a bottle of water.
“And you’ve also got places to stick branches and leaves here, Zayde, so the crows wouldn’t feel nothing and wouldn’t run away,” he said. “By me, the canaries sit in the cage and I’m outside. And by you, you sit in a cage and the crows are outside.”
“They don’t run away from me,” I said. “They know me by now and I know them.”
“Crows are just like human beings.” Jacob smiled. “They don’t run away, but they put on a show for you. If you’ll hide in the box, they’ll act like normal birds.”
The next day, I asked Globerman to take me and the box in his pickup truck to the eucalyptus forest.
The forest stretched over the eastern edge, next to the common fields of the village, and beyond it was the slaughterhouse. The forest was dense and dark, and only one lane bisected it, the lane where the dealer would lead his livestock to their fate.
In its high crests, crows nested, and in that season you could still make out offspring who were almost as big as their parents and were beginning their flying lessons. The old crows showed them various exercises; and the young ones, who could still be easily identified in their first year by their disheveled feathers, sat bunched together on the branches. Now and then one of them would slip off his perch, flutter panicky in the air, screw up his courage, and return to his place, pushing his neighbor on the branch until that one would also fall and fly a little.
I sat in the box, I saw everything and the crow
s didn’t sense me. In the evening, when Globerman came to take me back home, all my limbs would be shriveled but my heart would be broad and happy.
JACOB SAT ME DOWN at the kitchen table, a big, smooth table, where white plates gleamed like full moons, and silver dishes glittered next to them.
“In honor of your birthday,” he said.
His eyes tracked the expression on my face as I ate, and I neither could nor would hide my pleasure.
By the age of twelve, I knew what I loved to eat and what I hated, but I couldn’t imagine that food could give such profound and poignant pleasure. Not only my tongue and my palate, but also my throat and my guts and my fingertips sprouted tiny taste buds. The smell filled my nose, saliva flooded my mouth, and even though I was still a child, I knew I would never forget the meal I was eating.
Strangely, my pleasure was accompanied by a thin grief that gnawed at the bliss and the taste and the smell that filled my body.
I thought of the simple meal I ate with my other father, with Moshe Rabinovitch, who generally stayed with potatoes, eggs, and the chicken soup he boiled so violently, as if he wanted to make sure that the chicken whose neck he had wrung and whose feathers he had plucked wouldn’t come back to life.
A man of habits and ruts is Rabinovitch. As always, even now he doesn’t talk during a meal. He chews his food very thoroughly, rolls it from side to side, and when his hand loads the fork again, I know that in another six chews he will swallow.
Only he and I were left at home. Mother was dead now; Naomi was married and lived in Jerusalem; Oded didn’t leave the village, but he lived in another house. As always, even now we sit alone, Moshe and I, eat and are silent. After he eats, he drinks a few cups of boiling tea, one after another, and I wash the dishes and straighten up the kitchen just as Mother would.
And when I finish, I get up and say, “Good night, Moshe,” because I didn’t call any of my three fathers “father,” and I go out to the little house in the yard, and there I lie down alone. In my bed, which is her bed. In her cowshed, which became my house.