by Meir Shalev
On the wall hung a picture of Rebecca. Now and then, I looked back at her, but I didn’t say anything to her.
Once, before I was born, Rebecca Sheinfeld was the most beautiful woman in the village. So beautiful that even people who weren’t born then still talk about her. So beautiful that no one still remembers the lines of her face, the color of her hair, or the shade of her eyes, but only the fact of her beauty.
When she was young, she refused to be photographed because of her beauty, and when she came back, many years later, she refused to be photographed because of her old age. Only one picture of her remains from those days, the picture that hangs to this day in the kitchen of the house in Tivon, and the teeth of time have damaged that, too, for Rebecca in her frame isn’t as beautiful as Rebecca in stories and memories and dreams.
“The cook,” Jacob summed up, “is, after all, a matchmaker.”
“Between meat and spices?” I asked.
“No. Between the meal and the one who eats it,” said Jacob, wiping his hands on his apron and sitting down across from me.
“You like it, Zayde?” he asked after a brief silence.
“Very much.”
“So the match worked. Ess, meyn kind.”
28
JUDITH’S reply came to Uncle Menahem through a man from the kibbutz marketing cooperative who used to buy carobs from him.
Menahem opened the envelope, read the letter, rushed to his brother, and announced: “She’ll come next week.”
Moshe was perturbed. “Do I have to prepare something special for her?”
“Never prepare something special for a woman you don’t know,” said Menahem. “You won’t succeed, and the two of you will get angry. She asked only for a corner of her own and a day off sometimes. Call the children now, I want to talk to them.”
He sat Naomi and Oded on his lap and told them that a “woman-worker” would soon come to the house, and added:
“I know this woman and she’s a very good woman. She won’t be your mother. She’ll just live and work at your house. She’ll cook for you and wash your clothes and help in the yard and the cowshed. It’ll be easier for all of you. For Father and for you and for that woman, too, it’ll be easier. She’ll come soon and we’ll all go together to bring her from the railroad station.”
THAT NIGHT, Rabinovitch awoke to the sound of dragging and banging, and when he went out to the yard, he saw Oded building a floor of boards in the lowest branches of the eucalyptus.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m building me a nest in Mother’s tree,” said Oded.
“Why in the middle of the night?”
“Got to get done,” said the boy gravely. “By the time the woman-worker comes, I’ll have me a house.”
The days peeled off one after another, until Judith came, and on the last evening, when only a few hours separated him from her, Moshe took clean clothes out of the closet, lit the wood in the oven, and boiled bathwater.
“We’ll wash real good,” he said, and scrubbed his children with his big, good hands.
“The woman-worker shouldn’t think poor dirty people live here,” said Naomi.
Oded was sullen and dejected and his body was hard and recalcitrant under the water, but Naomi enjoyed the washing and the touch of her father’s hands. The warm vapors, the smell of soap, the nap of the towel on the skin of her stiff back gave her a pleasant shudder of anticipation.
The next morning, Moshe didn’t send his children to school, and after the milking he washed, too, the very same way he washes today: he stands on a wooden crate under the awning of the cowshed and showers with a rubber hose. He stood on the crate, like a bear on a rock in the river, the water pouring over his body, a big loofah in his hand and a foaming cube of laundry soap at his feet. Then he sat down on the milking stool in the fragrant shade of the eucalyptus and Naomi used a scissors to clip the thin yellowish tendrils growing wild on the back of his neck, and combed the crown of hair around his bald pate.
“Now we’re all pretty.” Moshe got up from the stool. “Dayosh! Come on, let’s go!”
He threw a bundle of straw on the wagon, Naomi put in a few folded sacks and sat down next to him, and Oded agreed to come down from the tree and join them in exchange for a promise to be allowed to hold the mule’s reins all the way.
“All the way except for the wadi,” his father granted his request.
Oded was crazy about wheels and trips and driving. When he was three, he was already running in the village streets holding an iron hoop as a steering wheel, and when he was five he learned the principles of steering on a wooden board with wheels at the corners, which he galloped madly on the slope from the supply warehouse to the entrance to the village.
“Today, too, that whole semitrailer is just a horse and wagon!” he laughs. “It’s a little bigger, but I learned to go in reverse back then, with a real horse and a wagon with shafts.”
For years now I have been riding with him at night and I’m still impressed at how he can maneuver the tank in reverse. “It’s easier than you think and it’s more complicated than it looks,” he says. “But people don’t really understand what it is to drive a rig this size. Look at him, look at that shitty little Prince, cutting me off before the intersection, like a cockroach on my mirror. Does he know what distance I need to brake? In America they’d shoot him for a thing like that. There they respect trucks.”
When they got to the wadi, the regular silence prevailed. The water flowed slowly, shallow and transparent and pleasant, and as water does, it carried memories, wiped out smells and traces.
Moshe took the reins from his son’s hands. Well, he said to himself, the water that drowned Tonya isn’t here anymore. It flowed to the sea, will evaporate, thicken, and become clouds again, will pour and overflow, will drown another woman and orphan her children.
Naomi’s and Oded’s faces turned glum, as if they were painted with their father’s musings. The cart wheels clattered across the channel and silt rose from the bottom and muddied the water.
From here the road turned and continued along the other bank of the wadi until it connected with a bigger one a mile or so later. Tadpoles capered in the mud, strange gnats rushed around on the skin of the water with long, straddling legs, and beyond the bend of the riverbed the heralding whistle of the locomotive was heard, startling frightened herons, and pillars of smoke ran wild.
IN A GRAY COTTON DRESS, with a blue kerchief on her head, her eyes squinting with dread and light, Judith got off the train.
She stood erect, but she looked so tense and scared that Moshe’s heart froze with pity and terror, for he worried that instead of helping him, she would be another burden on his hands.
“You saw right away that she didn’t have a penny to her name. She wore old shoes and stockings that had once been white, and I decided right off the bat that I loved her,” Naomi said.
She had a big, tattered leather bag, and Uncle Menahem, who also came to the railroad station to greet her, hurried to take it from her.
“Welcome, Judith,” he said. “This is my brother, Moshe Rabinovitch, and these are the children, Oded and Naomi. You say hello, too, Oded, say, ‘Hello, Judith, welcome.’ ”
Judith climbed onto the bundle of straw that had been put in the wagon especially for her, and when she placed her foot on the connections of the shafts her left knee came up, and the delight in the movement of her leg was depicted on the fabric of her dress. The children looked at her and Moshe concentrated on the mule’s shining rump as if he were reading the future in it.
When they crossed back through the wadi on their way home, Judith suddenly felt Naomi’s hand stealing into hers.
Moshe steered the mule so that they would come straight to the yard from the fields, and wouldn’t go through the highway and the village street, but everybody knew and they were waiting and watching, and the wagon cruising slowly among quiet waves of gold and green, wild chrysanthemum and mustard, an
d the woman with the tired face sitting on the straw throne, was clearly seen by eyes waiting in fields, at windows of cowsheds, and through winks of curtains.
When they reached the yard, Oded announced that he was going up “to my new house in Mother’s tree,” and Moshe, Judith, and Naomi went into the hut. Two rooms and a kitchen were what it had in those days and Moshe told Judith that at night she could sleep in the children’s room or put up a bed in the kitchen, which was quite big.
“If we decide you’ll stay here, maybe we’ll build another room,” he said, and Judith didn’t answer, nor was it clear if she considered it a promise or a threat, but she did tell him that she didn’t hear well on her left side.
He was embarrassed and wanted to get to her right side, but Judith turned and went out to the yard. While his words were still hovering around her and seeking an opening, she went into the cowshed, looked at the empty northeast corner, with only a few sacks and some tools, put her big leather bag down, and said: “I’ll live here.”
“With the cows?” Moshe was amazed.
“I’ll be fine here,” said Judith.
“What will they say in the village?”
“I’ll clear it out and clean it up, and you’ll bring the bed and the crate for my clothes.”
And with sudden boldness, she added: “And if you would please put two nails in the wall for me, here and here, I’ll put up a curtain from here to here. A woman also needs a corner to herself, without eyes looking at her and fingers pointing at her.”
29
ONCE EVERY TWO WEEKS, the albino started the old green pickup and disappeared for a mysterious night.
He was careful to come back before sunrise and in the village they said he was visiting a “restaurant where they serve more than food.” So, when he returned, the bookkeeper trailed vapors of alcohol and women, which made the canaries hoarse, made the farmers cry, and attracted stray dogs from the fields. In the village office, they knew by now that it was better to leave him in his dark room the next day, and let his wine and his weariness and his odors wear off before they gave him more work to do.
That night, the Malakh-fun-shlof passed over Jacob’s bed, and in the predawn silence, he suddenly heard the slow throbbing of the pickup returning its owner to his house, and he immediately leaped to the window. The pair of headlights capered dull orange, drew tipsy circles in the fields, and Jacob was filled with excitement.
“What are you looking at there at this hour?” Rebecca murmured from their bed.
“In spring, nineteen hundred and thirty-one it was,” he said. “That night I couldn’t fall asleep and the next day Judith came. I remember that day very well. Rebecca and I had a little kerosene incubator back then, for three hundred chicks at the same time, which in those days was really something, and a few brood hens for the house, and three cows, and we had a grove of oranges with a row of grapefruits and a row of King walnuts, because in those days they didn’t have this rage for pecans yet, and two rows, one of apples and one of pears, and a little vineyard of grapes. I remember everything. Just then we were working in the citrus grove, we were weeding and sawing branches that died in the winter, and all of a sudden Rabinovitch’s wagon came from the fields, and right then I lifted my head and I saw her. So you’ll ask me now how come I fell in love with her, come on, ask, Zayde, ask and don’t be scared. How come I fell in love with your mother, you ask? So I’ll tell you exactly what happened, Zayde, and you’ll understand whatever you’ll understand. It just so happened by chance that I was wiping my brow, you know with my hand like this, you see? And at the end of the gesture, it just so happened by chance that I picked up my head, and then I saw her like my hand opened me a window. The cart passed by like a boat, not stopping, and right then, it really just so happened by chance, a space opened up between the clouds and the sun peeped out for one moment. I keep saying, it just so happened by chance, but if so many things just so happen by chance together, it’s a sign there’s some plan here, some trap like they set for birds. A trap like that is a very simple thing, Zayde, but if it just so happens by chance that there’s also a crate there and it just so happens by chance that there’s also a string and it just so happens by chance that there’s also a stick and it just so happens by chance that there’s also a lid and if it just so happens by chance that somebody put a few grains inside there, then, all in all, it can’t be it just so happened by chance anymore, and the bird is caught there completely on purpose.”
The fruit trees blossomed and Jacob, half hidden behind the bright petals and the transparent walls of their scent, watched the cart approaching, and because of the place and the angle, Judith seemed to him to be sailing slowly on a broad, yellow river that had no banks.
He didn’t know his own mind. The light, bright and fragile as porcelain, sketched the shade of the blossoming walnut branches, fell on the field, illuminated the thin ivory nape, described the bluish shadows of the veins standing out on the backs of the hands, and hinted at strength of soul and torments, and the stockings that drooped a bit over the strong, delicate ankles.
Judith leaned forward a little and the spring wind, as I imagine it, played with the fabric of her dress, pressed it to her thighs and let go of it, and as always happens at the moment when you fall in love, an old picture surfaced from Jacob’s depths and sought and found its mate.
He was right. Those traps are very simple. It’s enough for a cloud to float over the sun, for an echo of a fleeting scent, for a fragile angle of light. Enough for her reflection to be realized in the frames of memory—and the string is pulled, the wire is tripped, the door falls, and the trap is sprung. This is how fate hunts his prey and bears it off, a happy fluttering victim, to his lair.
“What happened, Sheinfeld?” asked Rebecca.
Like many women in those days, she called her husband by his last name. If she had called him by his first name, she would have understood the dispositions of his soul better and their whole lives would have turned out differently. But, as the Village Papish used to say: “Who thought of those things in those days?”
Jacob was jolted out of his thoughts.
“Nothing,” he told her. “Nothing happened.”
His trembling hand once again wiped his brow and unwittingly spread a thin strip of black planters’ ointment, as if drawing the scar to be cut there in the future.
“I wasn’t lying, I just didn’t understand. None of what happened I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand that Rebecca would leave the house, I didn’t guess the whole hard life I would have because of Judith.”
And then Rebecca also noticed Rabinovitch’s wagon.
“You’re a fool, Sheinfeld.” Her face turned glum.
She bent over again, picked up the hoe, and didn’t say another word.
30
SOMETIMES—YOU’LL FORGIVE ME, Zayde, for saying such a thing—I even thought that maybe Tonya died so I would meet Judith. It’s awful to talk like that, eh? It’s awful even to think it. But love makes very strange thoughts and against thoughts there’s nothing you can do. That’s something even the cruelest king knows. The thought is inside the cage of the head and there’s no way you can get it out of there, but inside its cage it’s the freest bird and it sings there whatever it wants and whenever it wants. And that’s how I used to think that thought, and right away I would rip it out like you tear up weeds, and you can’t leave even one single piece. ’Cause at Rabinovitch’s, it really was a great tragedy, the children was crying and sometimes you’d also hear blows coming from there. Naomi he never touched, not once, but when he’d give Oded a flosk, the boy would shut his mouth tight and not a sound would come out, and the little girl would cry instead of him. ’Cause, you know yourself, Zayde, that Rabinovitch ain’t no man to raise a hand to a child, but in a situation like that you can go nuts, you can lose all your patience. How much can a human being drag on his back? The house and the yard, and the kitchen, and the cowshed, and the field, and the citrus grove, an
d the cows, and the children? Once he runs into me in the street, takes ahold of my shoulder, and it’s like he wants to tell me something, but there’s only tears in his eyes and the marks of his fingers stayed on me for a month afterward. I think that was the only time I saw the ox really in tears. ’Cause, even at Tonya’s funeral he didn’t cry. In general, Rabinovitch and I, both of us loved one woman and we got a lot of disagreements and differences between us, but all in all there was some sympathy between us even before your mother came to the village and something remained even afterward. I have affection for people that are built like him. In the village on the Kodyma River, there was a farmer who was just like him, a goy, short and thick like a box—as tall as he was wide and just as thick, everything the same. When that goy would castrate a bull, first of all he would give the bull a zetz on the forehead with his own forehead, bam! And another one, bam! And another one, and once the bull falls and gets up and another time the man falls and gets up, until finally the bull’s eyes would turn up and his knees would shake, and by the time he figured out with his beast mind what happened and where all that dizziness was coming from, the goy already came up to him from behind with the knife and the bull was already passing out from so much pain and his balls were already in the frying pan with potatoes and garlic and onions, and he was already hitched up to the plow and working in the field like a castrated bull should, walking and plowing forward and turning around and going back, and turning around again and plowing forward and backward and forward like that and not looking to the side. When others are eating your balls, Zayde, you don’t look to the side no more, you just go and go and come back in the rut with the plow. So you should know, Zayde, I think because of the blow Rabinovitch gave Oded back then, he got scared of himself and brought her to work ’cause he was scared maybe one day he’d do something awful. ’Cause, people like Rabinovitch don’t know their own strength. A blow from the lappe of the beast, that can be the end not only of a child, but even of a grown-up person. And believe you me, Zayde—after Tonya died he became even stronger than he was before. That’s a thing that happens sometimes, a man becomes a widower and he gets so strong it’s like he flourishes with grief. There was a tree like that there, I don’t know what the goyim call it, but we called it der blumendiker olman. You know a little Yiddish, Zayde? She didn’t teach you a word of Yiddish? That’s funny, a person called Zayde and he don’t know no Yiddish at all. Never mind. Der blumendiker olman is the flowering widower, and that tree, every year it would break and freeze in the snow, really die, and every spring it would put out a whole lot of little green leaves with buds straight from its poor trunk and bloom again. It happens like that sometimes with widowers, too, and that’s how it was with Rabinovitch. All of a sudden he’s flourishing, his teeth are white again, and when he walks he walks with big strides, and when he breathes he can smell things very far away, far in time or far in distance, and also, believe you me, Zayde, from all that grief and cold, his bald head even grew a little hair. What can I tell you, Zayde? Sometimes grief is the best manure. Some people say something wasn’t right here—there are always people who will turn up their nose at everything—a person in mourning shouldn’t look so good. But if you ask me, Zayde, maybe that’s how a person heals himself. Sometimes the soul is the doctor of the body and sometimes the body is the doctor of the soul. If they don’t help each other, who will? And once at night, maybe twelve-thirty, when I was standing in the dark and waiting maybe Judith’s shadow would pass by the window of the cowshed for a moment, all of a sudden I saw Rabinovitch come out of his house and into the yard, I thought he was going to her, but he just went in under the wagon and waving both hands, he yelled, and believe you me, he picked it up from one side maybe three feet high. Unbelievable how much strength and how much anger can be in one person’s body, how strong his body can get, all the pain and all the memories and all the regrets, everything a woman can hold in her womb when she’s pregnant, a man can hold in his bones and muscles, but give birth he never will and puff up he never will, he just gets hard and heavy inside, like he’s full of stones, another stone in the belly and another stone and another stone, men get like a quarry from all those children we’re never gonna give birth to. I once heard about a shiksa like that, who was pregnant forty-five years and never gave birth. Sometimes I don’t believe these stories myself, but they’re my father’s memories, and a father’s memories you’ve got to believe. If you don’t believe the memory of your father, your own flesh and blood, what will you believe? When she was seventeen some guy working in the lumber mill raped her. He grabbed her by the hand, laid her down on a bag of sawdust, and got on top of her by force, and when she finished wiping her eyes from the tears, and her legs, forgive me, from all the filth and the blood, the poor thing told her father what the guy did to her, and right away she got so many slaps on the face from him that she lost an eye, and the guy, her brothers grabbed him and killed him with a pitchfork from the barn with all four teeth through his ribs. Well, after a few weeks she was already puffed up with the pregnancy like a barrel and the father said, this is really very good, she won’t get a husband anymore now, the kurve, so at least let me get a grandson out of her who will work hard like his poor father and help me in the field. Days go by and weeks go by and months go by and that one never had no baby. The nine months go by, and ten months, and a year go by, and two years go by and three and four, and she’s still got a belly like a pile of wheat in the barn, with her breasts like watermelons, throwing up every morning like a drunk in a bucket, walking all the time with her hands like this on her hips from such a backache. At first people thought maybe she was like a cow that sometimes puffs up from clover, and they wanted to stick her with a trokar like with a cow because of the gasses, but with her it wasn’t air. If you put a hand, you felt it kicking. What didn’t they do with her? They went with her to the church, to their witches, they brought one woman who rummaged around in her there and with special grass made her smoke down there, they even came to our rabbi, and he told them—listen good to what he told them, Zayde—this is what he says to them: you lay her down on the table and you put a bottle of schnapps, forgive me, between her legs, ’cause a goy, even if he’s little and even if he hasn’t even been born yet, when he’ll smell the schnapps he’s gonna come out from anyplace where he is. Well, ten years like that, twenty, and the years go by, and she’s still pregnant. Her father dies, her mother dies, and she’s already sixty years old and she’s still got that belly, and the baby’s inside, what can I tell you, already a grown-up fetus, more than forty, and he’ll never come out. So now you understand, Zayde, how come I fell in love with your mother?”