The Loves of Judith
Page 12
“No,” I said, and irritation at the unknown began bubbling up in me.
“How come I fell in love with her?” Jacob whispered with pleasure.
The slice of bread in his hand moved in the plate, besieging and flanking and heaping, his eyes stared at me above his salad and omelet, seeking signs and proofs in me.
“You know, Zayde, from this side you look like me, from that side like the soykher, and from here sometimes you look like Rabinovitch. And how do you like the meal?”
“The meal’s good,” I said, with my lips dry.
“So you want to know how come I fell in love with her?” he asked for the third time and his voice was so much like mine he seemed to be repeating my own question, even though I hadn’t asked it, at any rate, not aloud.
“ ’Cause that’s what Fate decreed for me.” He stood up solemnly.
He put his plate in the sink, standing with his back and his shoulders to me, like my shoulders, bowed.
“ ’Cause you’ve got a Fate that comes from above,” he went on. “And you’ve got a Fate that comes from the side and there’s a Fate that attacks you from behind and there’s a Fate of somebody else that goes off and comes to you. And with me, the worst Fate, the Fate a person brings on himself from inside. It’s like somebody who reads the Ten Commandments in the Torah, and then right away he gets ideas about how to do sins, and somebody who buys a first-aid kit and then right away accidents start with him, and somebody who takes canaries home gets caught up in love. It’s just like a person’s name. Your mother thought a child named Zayde will never die, and I’m telling you, Zayde, somebody whose name is Jacob will never have it easy with love, that’s how it was from the first Jacob to the last Jacob, from Jacob Our Father to Jacob Sheinfeld who used to taste the soap and to this Jacob Sheinfeld, your father, who once in ten years has to cook you a meal for you to come visit him and agree to talk with him. That’s how us Jacobs make ourselves a hard life with love. Our Father Jacob even changed his name to Israel, and did that do him any good? Outside the name changed and inside the troubles remained. Eat everything on your plate, Zayde, or else you won’t get the egg yolk dessert you love so much, and you should know just one thing: it was impossible for me not to fall in love with her. The sun shined from here, and the wagon came from here, and the eyes looked from here, and you see all at once both what was in the eyes and what was in the memory: a woman comes sailing in a river like in green-gold water, and the wind just then is playing with the cloth of her dress, sticking it and letting it go from the body, and the shadow falls right here on her neck.… So, not to fall in love with her? Like a yellow leaf in the water I was swept up to her. So, can such a thing happen by chance? I ask you, Zayde, can such a thing happen by chance?”
31
THAT NIGHT, TOO, Judith’s first night in the village, Rabinovitch had a hard time falling asleep.
And as usual with insomniacs, he knew what fate had in store for him, and had already despaired of reading a book, which had now become a mechanical leafing of pages, with no words but only pages, and of reviewing memories, and counting the imaginary geese that leaped over the fence of the Village Papish’s yard.
As usual, he thought of his braid, and of his Tonychka who died without telling him where it was, and again he wondered whether she would have shown it to him if she had lived and whether she would have lived if she had shown it to him, and once again he felt the waters of fear flooding his lungs, and close to midnight, when the awful wailing rising from the cowshed and besieging the air was heard, the brothers If, What If, and What If Not stopped dancing their tormenting dances above him, and he saw Naomi jump out of bed and he got up, too.
So strange and surprising was the wailing that, at first, it was impossible to understand that it was the weeping of a woman and not the nightmare of wolves or the scream of a calf who saw the smiling Globerman in a dream.
Moshe wrapped the sheet around his body and rushed into the yard, but he didn’t dare go into the cowshed. He paced around in the dark next to the wall and after a minute or two, he went back to bed, and it wasn’t until Naomi asked him, “Father, why are you trembling?” that he himself noticed it, and he didn’t answer her.
“Who screamed?” asked Naomi.
“Nobody,” said Moshe. “Nobody screamed. Sleep now.”
BY DAWN the wailing vanished, the air above the cowshed congealed again, as the skies are stitched together after the blade of a falling star.
The gray crow uttered his first shout from the eucalyptus and the bulbul immediately joined him with his clappers and the falcon with his trills, and sounds of a kitchen waking up rose in the air. When Moshe returned from milking, he saw his two children sitting at a neat, clean table, smelling of lemon peel, and the plates on the table had pieces of cheese brought by Aliza Papish, the Village Papish’s wife, both out of the goodness of her heart and because she wanted to get a good look at Rabinovitch’s worker before the rest of the village women caught sight of her.
A sliced radish, too, with grains of salt sparkling on it, colored the plates red and white. And a good smell of pressed olives and eggs frying already rose all around. At dawn, Judith cleaned Tonya’s old taboon, the smoke of the burning eucalyptus bark came back to the yard in its full force and bitterness, and the loaf of bread baked in it hunched like a tiny mountain of joy in the middle of the table.
“Now you eat the olives Mother once made?” Oded grumbled at Naomi. “Her jam you didn’t want to eat.”
“And as soon as you smelled Judith’s food, you rushed right down from the tree,” said Naomi.
They ate and went to school, and Moshe went back to the cowshed and stuck two nails in the walls where Judith had showed him. She asked where she could get curtain rings, and she immediately saw him pacing around the yard, his body bent over and his eyes searching for rusty nails. After he straightened and polished them, he went to the cowshed and asked her how many rings she needed.
Before her amazed eyes, Rabinovitch rolled the nails between his fingers one after another, and a dozen rings were quickly strung together and threaded on a wire he stretched, the curtain was hung and spread, and a sort of isolation chamber was created between the cement wall and the cloth wall, and the good smell of lemons already rose from there, made its way in the dense air and the heavy smell of manure.
She spread a cloth cover on the iron bed, and at noon Naomi came home from school holding a pink-purple bunch of wild clover and storksbill. She put the flowers in a can and put the can on the case in the cowshed, and added a brief note: “For Judith.”
“AND WHAT WILL they say in the village?” Moshe argued after dinner. “That I sent you to live in the cowshed?”
“And what will they say in the village if I live with you in the hut?” said Judith.
Naomi was collecting bread crumbs from the table, and Oded didn’t budge. Rabinovitch was silent and wondered if Judith knew he had heard her scream at night.
“Explain to them whatever you want, Rabinovitch,” she added. “I don’t have to explain anything to anyone.”
She finished washing the dishes, shook the drops off her hands with two decisive waves, and wiped them on the cloth apron around her waist with a gesture all women had in those days and now they don’t have anymore, a gesture that disappeared along with the apron.
“Come show me how to untie the cows.” She went out.
And when the embarrassed Moshe followed her, arguing once again, “It looks bad,” she turned to him and said: “You’re a good man, Rabinovitch. I wouldn’t have counted on any other man, but here is where I’ll live.”
They untied the iron yokes and Moshe tapped the rumps of the milk cows and shouted, “Get out! Get out!” to chase them out into their dark yard.
Judith did the same and then took the blue kerchief off her head, quickly moved the curtain aside, and the decisive rustle of the electric sparks of her hair and the metal rings on the iron wire said, Done.
M
oshe shouted again, “Get out, bagobones! Get out!” even though that wasn’t necessary anymore.
One more minute, he waited on the other side of the curtain, and then he returned to the hut, lay down on his bed, and waited.
32
REBECCA SHEINFELD was the most beautiful of all the beautiful daughters of the Schwartz family of Zikhron Ya’akov.
She had suitors not only from her own hometown and from the villages of the Galilee, but also from distant villages in Judea, from Haifa, and from Tel Aviv, and men gathered in Zikhron Ya’akov because of her, “like thirsty wanderers to an oasis.” There were horsemen and winegrowers, young teachers and farmers’ sons. At night they ate roasted grains they took from the barn and drank wine they stole from the winery, and played their ocarinas and mandolins.
Women would also come there because that was how they met men returning at dawn, the softest, most vulnerable time, after longing and fatigue melted their legs and the shining sun illuminated their disappointment. And quite a few couples, they said in the colony, made matches there because of Rebecca.
Every night, her father locked her in her room, climbed up onto the flat roof, and sat down there, an earthenware jug of water at his side, the head of the palm tree rustling next to his own head, and a hunting rifle loaded with grains of salt in his hands.
Rebecca looked at her suitors from the window and was filled with pity for them and for herself. But one afternoon when she went to the butcher, near the line of Washingtonia palm trees of the village, she met Jacob Sheinfeld, a laborer who had immigrated to Eretz Israel a week before, and had come to Zikhron Ya’akov not knowing anything at all about its most beautiful girl.
“Listen to an experienced woman and live in the city,” said her mother when Rebecca announced her intention to marry him and go with him to a new place named Kfar-David. “There’s no worse fate than the lot of a beautiful woman who lives in a small place.”
I asked the Village Papish to interpret that statement and he explained to me that every settlement can include and digest only a certain amount of beauty, that it depends on its size and the number of its inhabitants.
“Jerusalem,” he said, “can bear a dozen beautiful women, Moscow seventy-five, and the village barely one.” And he added that it was like the ability of an animal to absorb snake venom, which depends on its size and its weight. “The horse will live and the dog will die,” he said.
A bitter and quarrelsome old man was the Village Papish, as often happens to people with lust and humor who live beyond their allotted time. Now he claimed that it would be better for beauty itself if it were divided up among many women, but happily it didn’t tend to dissolve and spread out equally and fairly in all the daughters of Eve.
Rebecca married Jacob and went with him to Kfar David, and within a few days, her mother’s words proved to be right. She didn’t find peace in either her marriage or her new place. As soon as she came to the village, the men stopped sleeping because their dreams of her were more exhausting than insomnia, and the fantasy was easier than the looks they gave her when they were awake.
And on that day or that night,
the brawls began,
between the woman
and her man.
Knitting their socks, women whispered,
silently, not to be heard,
and old men peeped around,
quietly stroking their beards.
And Rebecca, who also knew that she was more beautiful than all the women of the village, remembered her mother’s words and didn’t leave her house very much. She gave herself the hardest and ugliest work to do, she didn’t comb her hair, and when she did have to go into the center of the village, she wore her husband’s work clothes. But that only increased her charm because, said the Village Papish, you can’t blur beauty like they blur the truth here, and Rebecca’s walk was the walk of a beautiful woman, and the fluttering of her eyelashes was the fluttering of a beautiful woman, and the way the consonants “p” and “m” were launched from between her lips and the capering clapper of the “l” on the tip of her tongue was the way they yearned to be uttered in the mouth of a beautiful woman.
And when she strode, the coarse gray cloth flapped on her limbs like the wings of birds never seen in the village. And the wind pasted it to the shape of her hips and breasts and to the little hill of her groin, as it can delineate only the shape of flesh of a beautiful woman.
But Rebecca refused to know all those simple things, and when she saw her husband looking at the woman on Rabinovitch’s cart, her weary body bent forward, the wind playing with her clothes, and the light nestling in the shadows of her veins—Rebecca said in her heart that maybe she had been so cautious that she had undone her charm with her own hands.