The Loves of Judith

by Meir Shalev

  17

  THAT WAS A GREAT tragedy with Tonya,” said Jacob. “A very great tragedy. We had a few other catastrophes, but a thing like that? To drown like that in the wadi? Is a wadi to drown in? In the Kodyma River you drown, in the Black Sea you drown, but in our wadi? In how much, twelve inches deep? A catastrophe like that doesn’t just happen. Eat, Zayde, please eat, you can eat and listen at the same time. Once I thought maybe because they looked so much alike and there was rain and fog there, so the Angel of Death made a mistake and Tonya died instead of Moshe. But she died and he remained with all that failure and regretting, and that’s really something, Zayde, ’cause you got to know how to miss a dead woman. That’s not like missing a live woman. Those two regrets I know real good and I know exactly what I’m talking about ’cause I missed your mother both when she was living and when she was dead. How old are you today, Zayde? Exactly twelve and you’re also an orphan yourself, so maybe you can understand these things even without me confusing you. What can I tell you, Zayde, like a black shadow fell over the village. A young widower, two little orphans … and nothing matters to the God of the Jews. At the end of the winter she died and a month later spring came with joy and dancing. Buds flower, larks sing, cranes call. Kroo-kroo … kroo-kroo … you know the sound of the cranes in the fields, don’t you, Zayde? Their voice isn’t loud, but you hear it far, far away. Once, during World War II, I saw an Italian prisoner of war from the prison camp dancing there in the field with three cranes. Birds immediately feel that Italians aren’t like other men. From far away, I thought it was four people, they was so tall and have a kind of royal crown on their head. And when I started coming close, the prisoner of war picked up his feet and took off for the camp and the cranes opened their wings of nine feet across and started flying. A yener prisoner-of-war camp … you remember it? You were a little boy then. They had a hole in the fence and they would come out like my poor birds from the cage I’d leave open, and they’d run around here in the fields, and nobody guarded them because they didn’t really want to escape. Have another helping, Zayde. Come on, open your mouth, meyn kind. I remember how my foster uncle’s youngest son would eat. From the day he was born his mouth was always open and his first word was ‘more.’ Not ‘mother,’ not ‘father,’ but ‘more.’ At the age of six months, he pointed to the pot of food and said, ‘Nokh!’ Anybody who can say ‘more’ don’t need many other words to get along good in life. There are people who get along real good all their lives with just two words, the word ‘that’ and the word ‘more.’ That boy would eat to gobble up a bull like they say, like a bottomless barrel, and his mother really loved to see him eat and say more and more, and he grew and grew so much that she was scared of the evil eye, and would call him to the table only after everybody else had already finished eating, and then she would stand in front of him with a big sheet spread like this in her hands, to hide him while he was eating, so nobody would see him and, God forbid, give him the evil eye. So eat now, Zayde, open your mouth big and eat and I’ll sing you a little song for your appetite:

  At the window, at the window,

  Stood a bird today,

  A boy ran up to the window—

  Pretty bird has flown away.

  Weep, child, such dismay,

  Pretty bird has flown away …”

  18

  AT FIRST MOSHE RABINOVITCH’S catastrophe was the property of the whole village. During the weeklong mourning period, his friends mobilized, milked his cows and picked the fruit left in the citrus grove. And in the next few weeks, until his broken leg healed, they came to give him a hand and a shoulder, and lent him a mule or a horse for the day until he found a new work animal. The orphans were invited to eat by all the neighbor women, and Aliza Papish, the wife of the Village Papish, showed up to glorify the floor of the hut, to do the laundry, and to clean.

  But time passed, the helpers dropped off until they stopped altogether, and the neighbor woman’s husband told Moshe he couldn’t afford to feed the children.

  Rabinovitch, who was still encased in plaster from his chest down to his ankle, got very angry. After all, from the start he had offered to pay the neighbor for the meals, and when he now asked him again how much money he’d want, the man blurted out a sum that could support an army brigade. Moshe threw him out and arranged with the wife of the manager of the village warehouse, and from that day until Judith came to his house, Oded and Naomi ate dinner there for a reasonable price. Sometimes a few English officers also ate there; and the albino bookkeeper, who dared come out of Yakoba and Yakobi’s old hut only after sundown, also dined there.

  THE NARCISSUS BULBS Moshe pulled up from the bank of the wadi and buried in the earth of Tonychka’s grave bloomed quickly. New baby crows were noisy in the nest at the top of the eucalyptus tree. The world went on as usual, moved and revolved in its orbit, bore its dead and its living like a ship in search of a port.

  The sun climbed up, the air grew warm, and every afternoon, Moshe wallowed like a calf in the emptied field, chewed grass and bared his wounded flesh to the spring.

  Lapwings drummed near him on long legs, presenting their splendid, ever-clean suits. Chirps of bliss of the field mice, those who were saved from the wrath of the winter, were heard rushing under the grass. A smell of blooming assaulted from the fields, quickening the blood in the veins, and downed the deformed finches in their flight.

  From that custom of lying naked in the field and absorbing the beams of spring, Moshe isn’t yet weaned. Years later I would see him come to the field, take off his clothes, and stretch out in the high grass. And once, when I stationed my observation-box behind the field and watched the larks dancing, Moshe came, stripped, and lay down right next to the box.

  His thick short body breathed slowly, his hand smoothed the hair on his chest and belly, and when the heat rose, the hand moved his testicles from side to side.

  Two big flies walked around on his face and he didn’t brush them off.

  So close and exposed and innocent he was, and he didn’t sense that I was there at all, for the branches and the grass hid the box even from the birds, and although I was almost baked by the heat of the sun, I didn’t dare move, for Moshe suddenly began saying to himself, “My Moshe, my Moshe,” leaned on his side a bit, and a smell like the smell of Uncle Menahem rose in the air, but I was too young to understand it, and I thought they smelled alike because they were brothers.

  RABINOVITCH’S BROKEN THIGH mended fast, but when he asked the doctor to take off the cast, the doctor claimed it wasn’t time yet. Moshe didn’t argue with him. He returned home, went into the cows’ big trough, and lay there until his bonds melted and the water in the trough turned as white as milk. A few days later he hitched up the wagon and went to the next village with his children for the Seder with Uncle Menahem and his wife Bathsheba.

  Uncle Menahem and Moshe were different from one another. Menahem was tall and thin, and even though he was older than his brother, he looked younger. He had long fingers, whose delicacy wasn’t damaged by working the land, and thick brown hair, and a warm, pleasant voice, and a trimmed mustache the family called an “American mustache,” even though no one knew precisely what that was.

  And he also had the biggest farm of Cypriot carobs—the juiciest and lushest carobs. I remember how he would proudly break such a carob and let it drip dark honey.

  “If Bar Yokhai had a tree like this in the clearing, he would have been satisfied with one single carob from one Sabbath eve to the next,” he said.

  Uncle Menahem talked about his carobs the way a dairy farmer talks about his livestock. He had a lush “herd,” a few “bull” trees, and a few score “cows,” and he said that if he could, he would take his trees out to pasture, walk behind them, and pipe on a flute.

  “One day, Zayde, we’ll invent trees without roots. When we go for a walk or to work in the field, we’ll whistle at them and they’ll run behind us, and we’ll always have shade,” he told me.

&nb
sp; He also had a tale he loved to tell and I loved to hear, about a goyish farmer who wandered around the Ukraine with a gigantic, blossoming apple tree, which he planted in a big wagon, full of soil, drawn by four oxen, and bees flew behind it.

  At any rate, Uncle Menahem didn’t rely on the wind to carry the bull carob pollen to the cow carob flowers, but fertilized them himself. In late summer, he climbed the male trees, shook the fragrant pollen into paper bags, and quickly scattered it among the female branches. Because of that, the heavy, dusty, ineffable smell of sperm stuck to him, embarrassed the neighbor women, amused the neighbor men, and drove his wife, Aunt Bathsheba, out of her mind.

  Aunt Bathsheba loved her husband to distraction and was sure that all the women in the world felt the same way about him. Now she feared that the smell of sperm, which didn’t leave his body even after she shoved him into the shower and scrubbed him with a brush until he turned red and shouted in pain, would attract strange women to him. So every woman who got within sight of Uncle Menahem was called a “hoor” by his wife, and since the village was small and the jealousy was great, the hoors multiplied and Aunt Bathsheba’s anger rose.

  “A husband like Menahem has to be quiet in the spring,” she explained. “It would be better if he were quiet all year, but it’s especially good for him to be quiet in the spring and not start doing everything he knows—telling tales, lying lies, and confessing confessions.… All those things are very dangerous to do near the hoors in the spring.”

  And thus it happened that in the third year of his marriage, Uncle Menahem was afflicted with a strange allergy, which would attack him every spring and was not expressed in the usual way, with sneezing and itching and tearing, but with a complete silence of his vocal cords.

  Tonya once said that Bathsheba put a curse on Menahem, but the aunt denied it: “A wife shouldn’t do such things. That’s why there’s a God in heaven.” She smiled with the righteousness of someone whose task is done by others.

  One way or another, every year, one morning between Purim and Passover, Uncle Menahem would wake up with his voice gone. The first words he said on the first morning of his muteness misled him into thinking he had gone deaf, but later he understood that his lips moved, but his voice didn’t emerge.

  At first, his forced muteness turned him into an irritable, short-tempered man, and turned Bathsheba into a quiet and satisfied woman. But in later years, Uncle Menahem calmed down and got used to it and learned to use notes to talk with those around him, while Aunt Bathsheba was once again filled with her jealousy and dread. Now she feared that the spring that muzzled her husband’s throat would impel him to run after the hoors in new ways.

  “After all, he’s a decent bird,” she kept saying.

  And once, when I was six or seven years old, I told Uncle Menahem that I knew what was the difference between him and Jacob Sheinfeld.

  “What’s the difference, Zayde?” asked Uncle Menahem in a note.

  “Both of you are birds,” I told him, “but you’re a decent bird and Sheinfeld is a strange bird.”

  Mother smiled, Naomi laughed, Menahem’s body quivered with pleasure, and his hand wrote me a note: “Ha ha ha.”

  “A man who doesn’t have words will jump around and put on an act like monkeys in the woods,” said Bathsheba, who was frightened herself by the mighty result her jealousy could produce.

  Uncle Menahem didn’t jump around and didn’t put on an act, but was silent and withdrew into himself, with that kind of withdrawal thin men experience at the end of summer, when the days begin to grow short.

  He also developed the defiant humor of the mute. “I don’t need to recite your boring Haggadah,” he announced in a big formal sign he waved in front of everybody at that Passover Seder.

  Oded and Naomi and the three sons of Bathsheba and Menahem laughed. And so did Moshe, who hugged his brother when he came in that year; he wept and said: “This is the first Seder without a wife and without a mother, Menahem,” and he smiled.

  “Menahem thinks you should get married again right away,” said Bathsheba and Menahem nodded.

  But Moshe wasn’t even willing to talk about that, and certainly not, as he said, in front of the children.

  Moshe and Bathsheba sang with the children all the songs they remembered from the old country, Menahem drummed them on the table, and Oded found the Afikommen and asked for “Mother to come back.”

  Moshe was shocked and turned pale, but Menahem tapped the boy on the back of his neck and wrote: “That’s a fine wish, Odedi, but in the meantime, you’ll get a pocketknife.”

  19

  SOMETIMES, MOSHE wanted to grieve, to be weak, for he felt that a flourishing body didn’t suit a mourning soul.

  He wanted to collapse, but he couldn’t. On the contrary, after Tonya’s death his body seemed to grow even stronger. As if the muscles that despaired in her neck grew strong in his, as if shoots of green life sprang suddenly from the ashes of mourning and—shameful as it was—glimmers of relief, and explicit and embarrassing twigs of a flourishing of widowers; no one admits that, but everyone discerns it and knows what it means.

  Moshe’s speech, which was generally heavy, became fluent and faster, his slow peasant’s gait started dancing sometimes, and thin new hair sprouted on his smooth head—not a thick new mane of youth, but an infant down that darkened his bald pate.

  His body had healed by now and grew so strong that he went back to work as if nothing had happened. He harvested and picked and hoed and plowed, and in the evening, after milking, he once again hung the four milk jugs on a pole he had made from a two-inch pipe, loaded it on his thick shoulders, and took it to the dairy.

  From there, he went to fetch his children from their supper. The empty milk jugs dangled at the ends of the pole, clanged with a hollow gloom, and Moshe’s thoughts echoed them in his heart.

  He entered the warehouse manager’s home. The albino bookkeeper said hello and Moshe growled some reply. He despised everything outside the normal order of the world, and the bookkeeper, with his owlish life, the hues of his hair and eyes and skin, made Moshe uneasy.

  But the albino didn’t want to endear himself to him or to anyone else. He tended to his birds and did his work and didn’t bother anybody. Once a week, the treasurer brought a wheelbarrow full of receipts and papers to Yakobi and Yakoba’s old shack, and knocked on the door. The bookkeeper, with his pink eyes and his black suit, opened the window a crack and whispered: “Please come in quietly so you don’t frighten the poor birds.”

  After the treasurer left, the albino would swoop down on the papers, calculate accounts, sharpen pencils, and weigh the balance sheet of the outside world, which was flooded with light.

  The song of his birds and his closed shutters protected him from the wrath of the sun, and only at dusk, when his enemy declined, looking weary and yolklike, to rest for a moment on the horizon before departing from the world, did he come out of his shelter to stretch his bones and inhale some fresh air.

  First the door would open. An arm in a long sleeve, terrified and quivering like a mole’s muzzle, sniffed the light and the air, slowly turned over, assessed the ire of the dying sun and the dissolving heat of the earth. And when the hand was assured, the rest of the albino came out behind it, his sunglasses looking up and his step hesitant. He retreated inside immediately, and came right back out again, carrying canary cages, as if he were taking his dogs for a walk.

  After he hung the cages on the tow chain of the pickup truck, which stretched from the corner of the house to the trunk of the nearby cedar, he sat down in a chaise longue and set out a tray of peeled cucumbers cut lengthwise, white pepsin cheese, herring, a bottle of beer, and a worn-out book that wrung bloody tears from his eyes and soft groans of pleasure from his throat.

  Meanwhile, the children began showing signs of their orphanhood. Oded wet his bed every night and Naomi lost weight.

  “Nominka doesn’t eat,” the warehouse manager’s wife said to Moshe.<
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  “Her food isn’t any good,” Naomi said later as they walked home.

  “Tell me what you like to eat,” said Moshe after a long silence. “And I’ll tell her.”

  “It’s Mother’s food we want,” said Oded.

  “We all want Mother’s food,” said Moshe.

  The summer was hot and fragrant as always. The darkness of the village surrounded them with the silence of owls’ wings. Tiny slivers of straw flew from the barn floor and scratched the skin of Moshe’s neck like last summer, when his Tonychka was still alive and went with him to the threshing.

  Three more times the moon would fill up and empty out and then, Moshe knew, his firm body would soften and fill with autumn. Storks would glide in the sky, a dewy wind would come from the mountain, the squills would feel it and rise up at the edges of the fields.

  He loved the circles of memory the storks sketched in the sky, the devotion of the squill in its earth and the vibrating longings of its twigs. Never was he an eloquent speaker, and those two, the squill and the stork, defined for him—one with its wings and the other with its bulbs—the passing of time and the eternity of place that words can’t describe.

  THE LAST HORNETS assembled on the young grapes of the vineyards, new clouds piled up, the robin, the tiny fighter, returned from the north. He came back and took charge of the pomegranate tree, and his furious battle chirps were heard from the thicket, delineating the borders of his estate and his tolerance.

  Cold, damp winds moved the cypresses, small, supple acorns dropped from them and bounced on the roof of the shed. The wadi overflowed again, and every day, like a wounded animal seeking a cure, Moshe searched his house and his yard for the box with the braid, that braid the dead women of his life had hidden from him.

  In the village sky, clouds of starlings rose up like smears of enormous brushes, in flocks that met, spread out, merged, and separated. In the morning they flew east over the valley and at night they came back. They landed for the night on the canary pines near the water tower so fast that the big trees seemed to suck them into their foliage. Only the quiet chatter was heard among the branches, the chatter of birds and children before they fall asleep, until that, too, fell silent.