by Meir Shalev
“Come out now, come out!” The awful bleating was heard all over the village and brought all those who hadn’t been drawn by the smell.
Everyone stood at that distance where people stand when a mad dog appears in a neighborhood or when an uncastrated bull breaks out of its fence. They didn’t come close, but they shouted soothing words to Moshe and asked him to get up and go back home.
At last, Oded, who had recovered, ran to the pile of straw, and when he grabbed his father’s hands and pulled his thick heavy body to him, Moshe became light as a feather and was lifted off the ground.
Moshe let his little son lead him home and there he dropped onto his bed and fell asleep, and didn’t wake up until the next day, to the irritated cries of the cows. He got up to milk, sent the children to school, saddled the horse, and rode to the next village.
“Tell that woman of yours to come,” he said to Menahem without even getting off his horse.
“Wait a minute, Moshe, let the horse eat something, drink, sit down and let’s talk a little,” Menahem requested.
“Not today, Menahem.” Moshe drew his horse back. “Write fast and tell her that she should come.”
“It’s almost spring, Moshe,” laughed Menahem. “If we don’t talk today, we’ll have to wait until after Passover.”
“I’ll wait. Today, write to the woman. Let her come.”
He dug his heels into the horse’s belly and galloped back home.
23
MORE DESSERT?”
“Yes,” I said.
Once again the water was boiled, the yolks were separated, the wine gave its fragrance, the finger was dipped.
“Every time it comes out a little different.” Jacob chuckled. “Maybe it still needs a little bit of fat from an old carcass, eh?”
He brought to the table a shining goblet transparent as a dragonfly’s wing, stuck a spoon in it, and pushed it over to me.
He didn’t tell me to do it, but I shut my eyes and opened my mouth wide. I heard him panting as he put the spoon on my tongue.
Words can’t describe that sweetness, which I haven’t managed to achieve again to this day. Many years have passed since that first meal, but the memory of the dessert still caresses my palate and is so strong and clear that sometimes, when I pick my teeth with a toothpick, I still extract from between my molars a sweet grain left there from back then.
“You know what you’re eating?” asked Jacob.
I shook my head no.
“It’s an Italian dessert.”
I was afraid that if I opened my mouth, the good yellowy taste would fly out.
“Once I had a lot of canaries,” said Jacob.
I nodded and shut my eyes again and Jacob poured another spoonful of bliss and amazement into my mouth.
He observed me as if he wanted to know what else I knew. I expected him to ask: “Why did you do that to me, Zayde?” But Jacob didn’t suspect and didn’t know and didn’t ask, not during that meal and not during the ones that came after, and he only said: “You like it?”
I had come to the moment when I’d have to swallow what was in my mouth. “Very much,” I said. “The best thing I ever ate.”
“Maybe you also want to hear some music?” asked Jacob. He dipped two fingers in the bowl and licked them with pleasure. “How strong the yolk is,” he said. “And so much life in it.”
It was late by now. From the wall the most beautiful woman in the village looked at me with her scary eyes. The treat Jacob put in my mouth made me drowsy.
“It’s good,” I said.
He put a record on his phonograph, guided the arm, and scratchy dance music spread through the room.
“That’s a tango,” said Jacob. “Here in the village, they don’t dance that. That’s a dance of love and weddings, of a man and a woman. Tango is touching. You know what that is, Zayde?”
He didn’t stand up, but his two fingers whirled like little legs on the table, leaving yellowy tracks of sweetness on the wood.
“If you want, Zayde,” he said, “I’ll teach you that dance.”
“Not now,” I said.
“This tango,” said Jacob, “it’s a dance not like no other dance. It’s the only dance for couples which a person can also dance alone, and even sitting down you can dance it, and even laying down, and even in your dreams. The Village Papish said that once, and I can’t forget his beautiful words: the dance where no one leads, the dance of repressed lust and inflated yearnings. Sometimes he talks so beautiful, Papish, that your heart really aches to hear him.”
Twelve years old I was, and now I was a little scared and I wanted to go home.
“I don’t want to learn how to dance now,” I announced, and stood up.
“Of course not now, Zayde.” Jacob laughed. “See, you’re only a child. Someday, if you get married, I’ll teach you. A man’s got to know how to dance the tango at his own wedding. I’ll teach you all you got to know before you get married.”
“I won’t get married. I mustn’t!” I said firmly as my legs were already leading me to the door.
We went out into the little garden. The big poppies were already withered. The high yellowing grass tickled my legs with its slow wind dances. Jacob Sheinfeld put his hand on my shoulder and bent down to me until his cheek grazed mine. I felt his lips seeking an answer and rest, barely touching my temple, and when he felt my recoil, he also recoiled, straightened up immediately, and took his hand off my shoulder.
“You don’t got to visit me, Zayde,” he said. “You don’t even got to say hello to me in the street. I’m used to it by now. Ever since Rebecca left, ever since Judith died, I’m alone. But in a few more years, when I’ll invite you to another meal, you’re gonna come.”
The thin white scar that could be seen on his brow despite the darkness suddenly vanished, and I knew that he was blushing.
“All right,” I said.
I went home. A warm early summer night enveloped my body, and the feeling was so pleasant I imagined I was swimming. A sweetness of wine and sugar and egg yolk reigned in my mouth and I knew it would never evaporate from there, not even after it was erased from my memory.
A smell of smoke and scorching rose in the air. In the distance, bonfires gleamed, and black and red silhouettes circled around them.
I ran there. It was my classmates dancing and burning the larvae of the locusts.
“You’ll come?” Jacob shouted behind me.
“I’ll come,” I shouted back.
I smoothed my tongue over my teeth, from right to left and from left to right, back and forth, over and over. I ran from there. I pressed my tongue to my palate, and swallowed the sweet saliva that came into my mouth.
SECOND MEAL
24
THE SECOND MEAL Jacob cooked for me about ten years later, after I got out of the army.
I didn’t have a distinguished career in the army. My name gave me trouble in every drill and my immunity from death didn’t make me a brave fighter, but rather a lazy, quarrelsome fellow who didn’t accept authority.
The night before I was inducted, Jacob lay in wait for me next to the tree where the crows gathered and suggested we go together to my mother’s grave.
“Don’t bother me, Sheinfeld,” I said.
I was no longer a child and I could recognize an expression of pain and offense, but I wasn’t yet grown up enough to change my mind and apologize.
Jacob recoiled as if I had smacked his face, and then he said: “Just watch out, Zayde, and don’t tell the officers there what your name means, because then they’ll send you across the border for all kinds of dangerous things.”
I laughed and told him he worried too much, but I did take his advice. I didn’t tell anyone what my name meant, not even after the traffic accident I survived intact, as usual: I was sleeping in the backseat of a jeep that turned over. The driver, a gray-haired reserve officer with a potbelly, who showed me a picture of his granddaughters when we’d started out, was crushed and kil
led. I was thrown into the nearby ditch and walked away without a scratch.
As a recruit, I revealed a talent for target shooting which I didn’t know I was graced with. I was sent to a course for sharpshooters, and afterward I stayed there as an instructor.
The training base was a small camp, with straight angles and whitewashed stones. Eucalyptus trees surrounded it, and their strong smell evoked memories, depressed me. Ancient abandoned crows’ nests were turning black in their crests, and when I asked why the birds had deserted the place, one of the instructors told me: “If you were a bird, would you live next to a sniper base?”
My days passed with blocked ears, stolid isolation, and constant shooting at thousands of cardboard enemies and not one single live human. I spent hours endlessly setting sights, endlessly shooting bullets into the same hole, and endlessly writing letters, some I sent to Naomi in Jerusalem and some I kept. I have the ability to write backward and forward, using regular writing and mirror writing, and because of this strange talent, Globerman once told me that maybe I wasn’t the son of any of my three fathers, but of some fourth man. One way or another, I especially love the writing that Meir, Naomi’s husband, once told me is called “Bostropeidon,” meaning “the ox’s gait”: one line in regular writing and the next line in mirror writing, just as the ox plows the field, back and forth on his traces along the previous rut. And I was so devoted to that writing that Naomi complained she was fed up with standing at the mirror to read my letters.
She would send me packages from Jerusalem, with funny drawings, terrific poppyseed cakes, and stories that didn’t interest me about her husband Meir and their little son.
Jacob also sent me letters—short and rare, in a twisted handwriting and with spelling mistakes that suited the way he talked. Globerman, as usual, sent money, and on every bill, next to the signature of the bank director, he added his own signature and a word or two. And Moshe didn’t send me anything, but always went with me to the dairy on Saturday night when I left to go back to the base. Now I was much taller than him. He hugged me when he parted, shook my hand in his rough bear paw, and I climbed into the heights of Oded’s truck and went off.
IN 1961 I FINISHED my service, returned the snipers’ Mauser to the arsenal along with my telescopic sight, came back to the village, and turned down Globerman’s offer to come study cattle dealing.
“It’s good work, Zayde,” he told me. “And it was always a profession passed down from father to son. You’ll learn from me everything you need to know, you’ll be a finer soykher, a fine dealer, just like somebody born on the Klots.”
With all my affection for Globerman, it was good enough for me to be born on the floor of the cowshed. Being born on a butcher block didn’t seem to me to be an improvement in family pedigree. But Globerman was a generous father, a fascinating conversationalist, and an unfailing source of tales, diagnoses, and opinions, and now and then I’d accompany him for a day or two of work and stories.
“My mother would turn over in her grave,” I told him, “if she knew that I was with you in the slaughterhouse.”
At the time, we were riding in his ancient green pickup truck on the dirt roads of the Valley and the dealer was imparting moral lessons and memories to me.
“Gib a kook, Zayde—take a look,” he said. “The camp for the Italian prisoners of war used to be here. Here, right where the little hill is, they had their own kitchen, and those red bricks is all that’s left of the chimney of the oven. All day long they’d sing here and cook and dance, and the best smell in the world would come out of that chimney of theirs, and in the fence there was a big hole everybody knew about, where the prisoners of war could leave quietly and return quietly without bothering the guards.
“Ask Sheinfeld sometime,” he added. “He knew those Italians better than I did.”
There was some cunning mixed into his voice. I understood what it meant, but I knew that Globerman was testing me and I didn’t respond.
The pickup circled and shifted on its worn-out shock absorbers and the poor cow standing in the back was hurtled between the wooden sides. The cattle dealer was a terrifying driver, who kept swerving out of the lane and bumping into stones, trees, and animals who weren’t quick enough to get out of the way. Oded, who had taught him how to drive years before, told me more than once: “Be careful when you drive with him. Globerman’s sure the gearshift is a stick for stirring the oil.”
The dealer asked me if I had had “all kinds of tsatskes” in the army.
“I don’t like tsatskes very much,” I said.
“In the end everybody gets the woman he deserves. How did they used to say back home? Reuben gets the tsatske and Simon gets the klavte, and Levi gets the balabuste. Maybe the time has come for me to look for some decent tsatske for you, a woman with power, Zayde. With flesh like the kishre of a year-old calf. A woman who, when she closes her legs on you and laughs, your whole body sings like a bird. Someday, when you understand flesh, you’ll also understand what I’m talking about now. Meanwhile, wait until luck introduces us to such a woman.”
“And if we don’t have any luck?”
“The world is full of radish women and potato women and hardboiled egg women,” said Globerman. “And I already told you, Zayde, everybody gets what he deserves, period.”
His proximity to blood and money made the dealer very dogmatic about certain aspects of life, especially in relation to gluttony and flirting.
“Everybody’s wrong!” he declared. “A beautiful woman, when she’s dumb, she’s the dumbest, and when she’s smart, she’s the smartest. Because in a woman beauty goes together with sense and in a man beauty comes together with stupidity.”
He looked at me and smiled, I smiled back, and the old pickup, which was only waiting for such an opportunity, burst into the nearby orchard and broke an apple tree.
Globerman cursed long and leisurely, turned off the motor, and in the silence that prevailed, he said: “And besides that, Zayde, with every woman there’s some secrets that only the eye and hand of a fleysh handler can know. The time has come for you to know that, Zayde, ’cause you’re twenty-two years old now, and if you would work like you should, with the flesh of the cow and not with her milk, you’d already have known all these things a long time ago. A normal person looks at nonsense in a woman, at lips and eyes, and if he’s a little bolder, he also watches how her tukhis moves when she walks and how her udders dance when she works. But a person who was born on the Klots knows, for instance, that at the end of her back, right where if she had a tail it would grow, there every woman’s got like a little hill of fat. The first chance you get, let’s say, when you’re dancing with her, you give her a tap there, Zayde, here, tappen like this.”
He stretched out a nimble hand and tapped the place where I don’t have a tail.
“Right here. Men ain’t got nothing there. But in a woman, from her little hill here you can tell about her other little hill, the one she’s got in her Paradise in front. There she should have a fat and beautiful and happy hill. A ziesskayt of flesh. If she ain’t got a hill there, the whole body is very sad, period.”
He got out to check the damage.
“This truck’s got a bumper like a bull’s forehead,” he declared proudly.
GLOBERMAN’S WORLD was clear and sure, the letters and signs were unequivocal, the hints broad and decisive, periods bellowed at the ends of sentences.
“And one more thing you can learn now from your father, that if she’s also got a little hair on her upper lip, not a real mustache, God forbid, Zayde, only like a shadow of grass, that’s also a good sign that that woman is a warm woman with a beautiful forest on her beautiful hill.”
He took a bill out of his pocket and nailed it to the trunk of the broken apple tree.
“That’ll be enough,” he said. “So they shouldn’t say Globerman ain’t honest and don’t pay for damages in cash. You understood what I told you about the hill? So, even before she takes off her cloth
es, you already know important things about her that even her own mother don’t know.”
The pickup went back onto the dirt road, its belly raking the thorny spine between the banks, and we started across the eucalyptus forest. The lane, where the dealer and his victims used to leave traces of hooves and boots, had already been expanded from the width of a cow to the width of the pickup, and only the rings of the tires were visible in it now.
“Already the thief’s standing there,” the dealer said to me when we emerged from the forest and saw the butcher waiting at the gate of the slaughterhouse. “Don’t you say a word, Zayde, you just look and learn. That dog is a big swindler, and who do you think he learned to be a swindler from? Like all of us, he learned from his father. And how do I know they’re a family of swindlers? From my father, who taught me who I should watch out for. In their butcher shop, when some pious jerk would come in to buy kosher meat, his father would stick his hand behind his back deep into his pants and put it on his own tukhis like that. The customer would look at the meat and ask: ‘Dos iz glatt? It’s smooth kosher?’ And he’d stroke his tukhis in his pants and say: ‘Yo, yo, dos iz glatt.’ And if you asked him later why he lied, right away he’d pull down his pants without no shame, turn around, and say: ‘Is that glatt or isn’t it? Touch it and feel how smooth it is.’ ”
Satisfied with my hoot of laughter, Globerman parked the pickup truck and led the cow out of it.
“Right away you’ll hear the same thing,” he whispered to me through clenched jaws. “He fanfatehs. Talks through his nose. That’s also a sign you should know, Zayde: anybody who talks through his nose is a swindler, period. But we’ll do everything honest and faithful, right? Just remember, don’t mix in. And especially don’t tell him how much we bought it for.”
The butcher who talked with a nasal twang observed the cow, made her walk, tapped the points of her spine, felt her rump and the nodes in her neck, the whole examination Globerman used to do at our village.