by Meir Shalev
Then everybody went away and the albino went on working all that night and the nights that followed. He trimmed the hedge, pulled up the passionflowers, cut down Yakoba’s rosebushes, and grafted new strains onto the stumps. He turned over the soil of the yard with a pitchfork, and when dawn broke, he scurried into the shelter of the house. The crows, to whom every excavation and hoeing prophesies a plethora of plunder, hurried to land in his yard, hopping around and searching for the earthworms and mole crickets brought up to the surface of the earth by the pitchfork’s teeth.
“And that,” said Jacob, “that’s how it all started. Nobody knew, even my wife Rebecca didn’t know. And Rabinovitch the Ox didn’t know. And Globerman the dealer didn’t know. And I myself, I certainly didn’t know. Only later on I understood that was how it started.”
He got up from the table, went to the window, and spoke with his back to me.
“The coop burned down, and the albino came. And Tonya Rabinovitch drowned and your mother Judith came. And Rebecca went, and the canaries flew off, and Zayde was born, and the worker came, and Judith died, and Jacob stayed. There’s something simpler than that? That’s how it always happens at the end of every love. The beginning is always different and the middle is always complicated. But the end is always so simple and so much the same. In the end, there’s always somebody who comes and there’s somebody who goes and there’s somebody who dies and there’s somebody who stays.”
12
BLACK CLOUDS GATHERED, a wind blew, the wadi overflowed, and Tonya and Moshe didn’t sense anything and didn’t worry.
The rain played its cold songs on the roofs and hummed in the tin gutters. In the shelter of the sheds the livestock huddled together. Sparrows with puffed-up feathers and narrowed eyes entrenched themselves in lattices. A pair of crows, creatures who have no fear in their heart but only curiosity, practiced hovering and climbing in the gusts of wind against the piercing downpour.
At three o’clock, Tonychka got up and Moshe emerged from his brief afternoon nap, they ate, as usual, a few oranges and a few thick slices of bread with margarine and jam, drank, as usual, a few cups of boiling-hot tea, and when the rain stopped they hitched the mule to the cart and went to bring grapefruit and pomelos from the citrus grove.
A sharp, cold wind, painful as a wet canvas sheet, came down from Mount Carmel and slapped their faces. The mule’s hooves sank in the deep mud and were extracted from it with a sticky noise, leaving slushy pits in it. In the fields were the outline of new little channels which the water, in its endless downward affinity, cuts in the earth every year.
Tonya and Moshe passed the vegetable patch and the vineyard, crossed the wadi, and came to the citrus grove. Together, they loaded the heavy crates, and when they turned to go back, Tonya grabbed the reins and Moshe pushed the wagon from behind and helped the mule get it out of the black mire. Tonya turned her head around to look at him. Steam rose from the skin of his face, which was flushed with the effort.
She loved her husband’s strength and was proud of it. “Please just wait a minute, right away I’ll call my Moshe,” she would declare whenever one of the neighbors had to struggle with a heavy sack or a recalcitrant animal. Near their house, next to the wicket in the fence, lay a rock that weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds, and Tonya made a florid sign on it that said: “Here Lives Moshe Rabinovitch Who Lifted Me Up from the Ground.” Wags said that such a sign should have been put on Tonya herself, but the rock was famous in the area and now and then some fellow would show up from one of the towns or the English army camp or the Druse villages on Mount Carmel and try to lift it up. But Moshe was the only one who was strong enough and Moshe was the only one who knew how to kneel down and embrace the rock with his eyes shut and Moshe was the only one who knew how to groan as he lifted it and how to carry it like a baby against his chest. Everyone went back to his place downcast and limping—downcast because of the failure, and limping because everyone, without exception, kicked the obstinate rock furiously and broke the big toe of his right foot.
THE RAIN BEGAN coming down again. When they returned to the wadi, Rabinovitch saw that the water had risen a lot. He climbed onto the wagon, took the reins from Tonya, retreated, and guided the mule so that it would cross the riverbed at a right angle. But the moment its hooves trod on the steep, slippery bank, the mule groaned in a voice that sounded surprisingly like a woman’s, and stumbled.
From now on, things moved in the horribly familiar course of catastrophes:
The mule sank down between the shafts. The wagon tipped onto its side and turned over with a slow but very determined movement. Rabinovitch fell under it and his left thigh was trapped and crushed.
He yelled in pain. The broken kneecap tore the flesh and the skin and was exposed to the cold touch of the water. He almost blacked out, but dread—one of those dreads that is clear even before its reason is understood—turned his eyes to Tonya.
Most of her was lying beneath the overturned wagon. Only her head and neck were sticking out. Her skull and the back of her neck were sunk in the mud, her hair was clogged with water, the skin of her face, which always looked ruddy and healthy, turned gray all at once.
In the water, so close to her head, grapefruits and pomelos bobbed around as innocently as toys in a bathtub.
“Get me out of here,” she whispered.
She was hoarse with fear. A tongue of blood poured from the corner of her mouth, bright and thin. Only her eyes moved and looked at him.
Moshe, his crushed leg pinning him to the mud, thrust his hands under the side of the wagon and estimated the load.
“Get me out, my Moshe.…”
Her voice was choked, it wanted to be a scream but didn’t succeed.
“Listen to me, Tonychka,” said Moshe. “I’ll raise the platform a little, and you’ll crawl out.”
Now the head also moved, nodded slowly, and the eyes opened wide in understanding and agreement.
“Now!” groaned Moshe.
His face grew dark with the effort. Veins and sinews stood out in the thick joints of his hands. The wagon creaked and was raised a little, and Tonya twisted, struggled, and gave up.
“I can’t,” she moaned. “I can’t.”
The pain cut Moshe’s trapped leg and the wagon came back down.
Some say that, in moments like that, time stands still. Others say that it passes doubly fast. And even others say that it is broken into a thousand tiny splinters that won’t ever be put together again. But on that rainy day, on the fall of the overturned wagon in the wadi, time didn’t pay attention to those hackneyed conjectures—it didn’t slow down and it didn’t speed up, it just passed by in its path, huge and nonchalant, wings beating and hovering as usual over the world.
A thin mist dripped, dotting the surface of the water with pockmarks, the wintery sky grew dark, and meanwhile the wailing of the mule and the scent of fear wafting from its body attracted a few jackals, and they recoiled from Moshe’s shouts and the clods of mud he pitched at them.
One jackal leaped and sank its teeth in the mule’s hind legs, and Moshe, who had managed to pull out one of the posts of the side of the wagon, hit him and broke his back. The others were frightened and retreated, but later on they understood that the man couldn’t get up, and since they’re clever and hunger sharpens their intelligence and makes them brave, they approached the mule from the head, where the pole was too short to reach, and they leaped and tore pieces from its muzzle and lips.
“The pomelos are floating,” Tonya said suddenly.
“What?” Moshe trembled.
“The grapefruits are sinking,” Tonya explained. “And the pomelos are floating.”
“The villagers will come soon and save us. Keep your head out of the water, Tonychka, and don’t talk.”
It rained harder, the wadi rose, the grapefruits turned yellow like tiny faded moons under the water. Tonya, who lay on the other side of the wagon, now had a hard time keeping her head above w
ater. Moshe tried to support the back of her neck with the pole, but couldn’t.
The sweat of fear bathed his bald scalp. He saw how the water was rising, how the nets of muscles on the side of his wife’s neck were trembling, and he understood what was going to happen.
Suddenly the head sank and immediately floated up again, as if kicked by the dread of death.
“Moshe …” a little girl’s voice was heard. “My Moshe … der tsop … the braid in the box …”
“Where?” shouted Moshe. “Where’s the braid?”
The water climbed and the head was covered, and rose up once again, and this time the voice returned and was Tonya’s voice.
“My end has come, Moshe,” she murmured.
Rabinovitch turned his eyes and squeezed his jaw and his eyelids shut until the air bubbles stopped slipping out of her mouth. Then the sun also declined, yellowish gray beyond the clouds, and only after she disappeared, and the twilight and the rain wiped out the memory of the horrible sounds of her death, did Moshe once again look at the dark place where his wife’s head had vanished. He was attacked by a horrible coughing. Tears of grief and failure flowed from his eyes. Lizards of regret, quicker and more slippery than any feelings, were already mining burrows in his body.
Out of horrible anger he once again clutched the edge of the wagon and hurled and roared—“Get out now, get out, Tonya!”—to the astonished jackals and the dying mule.
The wagon slipped out of his hands onto his broken leg and Moshe fainted, came to, and fainted again, and a few hours later, when his own shouts woke him up, he saw as if in a dream the hurricane lamps approaching and heard the shouts and barking of the search party. But by then he had already been so struck by night and sadness and cold and pains that he didn’t have the strength to call to them. It was only the mule’s groans of distress that showed them the way.
13
TWO YEARS PASSED from that day to the day my mother came to work in Moshe Rabinovitch’s house, take care of his orphans, and milk his cows.
I know only a few details about those years in her life, where she was and what she did.
“A nafka mina, who cares,” she’d dismiss me whenever I’d ask her about it, and would immediately get annoyed. “Now hurry and sit on the right side, Zayde, you heard!” Because once again I had forgotten and was sitting on her deaf side.
When I grew up a little, I also asked my three fathers, and they gave me three different answers.
Moshe Rabinovitch told me that she had worked for a time in the winery of Rishon Le-Zion, “and there she also learned to drink her liquor,” he smiled.
The cattle dealer Globerman, who had eyes and access all over the country, told me that my mother’s parents “stayed in exile after they heard what she did in the Land of Israel, because they didn’t want to see her no more.”
And when I kept asking and wanted to know more, the dealer said that men mustn’t investigate their mother’s past.
“What went on between Lady Judith’s legs before you came out of there, Zayde, isn’t none of your business, you don’t have to know, period,” he stated in his usual coarse way, which I still had trouble adjusting to, but which didn’t offend me anymore.
And the canary breeder, Jacob Sheinfeld, my mother’s suitor and victim, served me his fragrant dishes one after another and told me simply: “Rabinovitch’s Judith from heaven she came to me, heaven, and she went back there from me.”
That’s what he said, and his hands drew circles on the table, and the white scar on his forehead suddenly turned red, which always happens when he turns pale.
“You’re still little, meyn kind. But you’re gonna grow up and you’re gonna learn and you’re gonna know that in love there are rules. And it’s better you learn those rules from a father, so you don’t need later on to suffer because of love itself. How come a child has a father? So he’ll learn from his father’s troubles and not from his own troubles. How come all us sons of Israel is the sons of our father Jacob? So we’ll all learn from his love. People are gonna tell you lots of things about love. First of all, they’re gonna tell you it’s something for two. No, Zayde. For good hate you need two. But for love, you only need one person. And one little thing is enough for love, like I already told you. And someday, when you’ll fall in love with a woman because of some one little thing, her eyes, let’s say, somebody’s gonna come along and say: you fall in love with her eyes, but in the end you gotta live with the whole woman. No, Zayde. If you’ll fall in love with her eyes you’ll also live with her eyes. And all the rest of that woman is like the closet for the dress.”
He dropped his eyes under my amazed look. His hand stopped stroking the table, but his mouth went on talking: “Those things even God don’t understand. The God of the Jews, loneliness He understands real good. But love He don’t understand at all. One Lord all alone up in heaven, no kids, no friends, and no enemies, and the worst thing—no woman. In the end He gets crazy from so much loneliness. So He makes us crazy, too, and calls us whore and virgin and bride and all kinds of names a dumb man calls a woman. A woman ain’t none of those things. In the end she’s flesh and blood. It’s too bad, only now I understand all that. Maybe if I understood it back then, if I understood that love is from the brain, not from the heart, is laws and rules, not dreams and craziness, maybe I would have had a better life. But understanding is one thing and succeeding is something else. If one man is going to get the one woman he really wants, somebody’s got to run the whole world for that, and all parts of the world got to move and fall into place. ’Cause nothing goes by itself. And sometimes a person drowns in water here in the Land of Israel so that in America somebody else will win at cards. And sometimes a rain cloud comes here all the way from Europe so on a stormy night a man and a woman will be together. And if somebody commits suicide, it’s a sign that somebody else wanted him to die very very much. And when a crow screams, somebody hears that scream. And when I saw Judith coming, when I saw the wagon going real slow, and the sun shining straight down—I looked on her and I knew: this is the woman my eyes could raise from the earth. Could raise her up and take her to me. In the land of India, there are people like that. They can move a cup on the table just by looking on it. You knew that, Zayde? In the children’s newspaper at the Village Papish’s house, I read about it. In his house they kept the old issues. Over there in India they got whatchacallit, fakirs, who don’t feel no pain. They stop their breath and their heart. And they can move a cup on the table to the left or the right just with a look. Believe you me, Zayde, with a look. Right and left. Left and right. Move the cup like that. And a cup, you should know, Zayde, it’s a lot harder to move a cup than to move a woman.”
14
IT WAS MOSHE’S older brother, Menahem Rabinovitch, whose stories and sweet carobs led Moshe and Tonya to immigrate to the Land of Israel, who knew Judith and advised Moshe to bring her to work in his house and farm.
Only after I grew up did Uncle Menahem tell me the name that was forbidden to mention, either in speaking or in writing, the name of my mother’s first husband. He said the name and told me the story.
“They were living then in Mlabes or Rishon, I’m not absolutely sure.”
My mother’s first husband was a soldier in the Hebrew Brigades, and when World War I ended, he came back to the Land of Israel and didn’t find work.
Every day he went out to the main street of the town to look for work. A proud man he was, and didn’t plead with the landlords, but rather fixed them with that soldier’s look he had acquired in the war and which had now become a stumbling block for him because he didn’t know that that look wasn’t good in peacetime.
“People use what they’ve got, even if it’s not exactly fitting,” Uncle Menahem explained. “They smile when they should cry, pull out a gun when they should give a smack, and envy their lady loves instead of making them laugh.”
Long hours that man lay in bed and kept silent. They lived in a rented room which
had previously been a pen for Turkish ducks. Feathers that were already crumbled to dust turned his eyes red. The old stench of poultry droppings slapped his face like unforgotten insults.
Judith suggested he grow vegetables and sell them in the market, and the man got up and sowed a few garden beds behind the shack. But even among the sprouts he found no rest. A big tree rose in the yard and crows entered it in the afternoon for their noisy encounters, shouted and hovered over the crest of the tree like evil tidings. Their wings and their shouts blackened his hopes so much he hurried back to the room. Sometimes, he’d make a supreme effort and go sit on the banks of the Yarkon River, hug his knees, and close his eyes as if he were seeking consolation within his own body.
If not for Judith, who went on taking care of the vegetables, and raised a few brood hens in the yard, and made jam from the citrons that dropped in the landlord’s citrus grove, and was marvelous at patching and resurrecting any tattered garment, they and their little daughter would have died of pride and starvation.
At last the man said he wanted to go to America, work there for a year at the Wilmington Foundry in the state of Delaware, a metal plant that belonged to the father of an American friend he had met in the Hebrew Brigades.
“I’ll make money and I’ll come back home,” he said. “One year, Judith, two at the most.”
At the time, she was sitting at the table shelling lentils for soup, and she immediately turned her deaf ear to him. But he grabbed her shoulders and shouted, and she was forced to listen.
“Even in America there’s no work.” She was angry and alarmed. “And people will jump off roofs there.”
Two mounds piled up in front of her, a big brown one of lentils and a small gray one of splinters of dust and stone, husks and dried worms. Between her knees stood their two-year-old daughter, her eyes on her mother’s nimble fingers.