The Loves of Judith

by Meir Shalev

  Things, in their hinting way, began to take shape in her mind. Lines began to be drawn and to connect the dots. Tonya in the wadi, the albino and his birds, the fire, the poppies, the woman cruising on the sea of chrysanthemums. All those, Rebecca knew, were merely the onset of evasiveness, like the emerging heads of buds, just the modest onset of what was coming, but after them what would she be? her heart asked her. After them what would she be and who would behold her?

  She was a wise woman and could imagine the future and sense what was coming before it was completely clear. In dread mixed with curiosity, she waited for what was going to happen.

  33

  SOMETIMES AN ELEGANT English officer appeared in the village, dressed in a white navy uniform, driving a rattling wood-plated Morris Minor. He went to the albino bookkeeper and bought birds from him.

  One day another guest came: a blind goldfinch hunter from the Arab village of Illut beyond the eastern hills. No one noticed his blindness because his confident steps led him straight to the hut of Yakobi and Yakoba.

  The Arab knocked on the door, and the albino opened it immediately, something he usually didn’t do.

  “How did you find the way?” he asked.

  “As a man goes up a river until he comes to the source, that’s how I came to the birds,” said the blind man. And with a happy grin, he added: “And I didn’t fall down, not even once.”

  He savored the sound of the canaries’ song and told the albino that the fellahin feed their finches and their bandooks on umbuz.

  “That’s hashish seeds,” he explained. “The bandook takes the hashish in his mouth, forgets he’s in a cage, and then he’s happy and sings like a bridegroom, doesn’t give a damn about the whole world.”

  On his next visit, the goldfinch hunter brought a few bandooks—hybrids of wild goldfinches and canaries—along with the hashish seeds that were good for their singing.

  Like mules, bandooks can’t produce offspring either, and so their wild blood doesn’t get thinned out in generations of domestication and prison. Their breeders can’t boast of pedigrees and hereditary titles, but the colors of the bandooks and their song are always loud and fresh, and the enchanted albino decided to feed them nourishment even more inspiring than hashish.

  He sowed poppies in his yard and began extracting the sap from their stems. The big flowers quickly turned red at the top of their stalk, rose up, and set fire to the yard with a sinful splendor, and as poppies will do, they moved slowly even in the gustiest winds.

  Jacob looked at the poppies, listened to the bandooks and the canaries, and couldn’t get his mind off the woman who came to work on Rabinovitch’s farm.

  Poppies have an amazing quality: they don’t disappear from the eye of someone who looks at them, even after he turns his eyes away from them. Red and black, they look at him even if he closed his eyes. And Jacob stared at them, blinked long and short blinks, and didn’t know how dangerous were the experiments he was making.

  One night, a few months after Judith came to the village, the old green pickup truck returned to its stable in a straight, sure line, and the albino, sober and fresh as a baby, got out and unloaded sacks of cement and plaster, bricks and boards, and iron scaffolding from the back.

  Behind the fence, Jacob heard the sounds and looked into the darkness. The fair head gleamed like a buoy in the dark air, and the rhythmic noise of the work told Jacob that the bookkeeper was an experienced builder and could see in the dark like a cat.

  For a few days, he followed the construction, and it seemed to him that the albino was watching him and even paying attention to him. And indeed, one evening, when the bookkeeper sat down to rest in his garden, leafed through his book, sighed, and sipped his drink, he suddenly took off his dark glasses and gave Jacob a long, reddish look that ended in a smile.

  Excitement assaulted Jacob’s torso, and fear nailed his feet to the spot.

  “What are you doing there all day at the fence?” asked the most beautiful woman in the village.

  There was no anger in her voice, not even any wonder, just fear and worry.

  “Nothing,” said Jacob.

  At night she heard the pounding of his heart, the prattling of the snakes that whispered longings inside him, and by day the birdsong prophesied ill to her. She was alone, wrapped in the fabric of her beauty and in the mantle of her dread, and now she understood what her mother had told her years before: beautiful women don’t have real women friends.

  The Village Papish told me that in her first days in the village, the women sought Rebecca’s friendship. Some stood at a safe distance and observed her, and some dared to approach and touch her arm and open their mouths a bit, unaware that they were trying to gulp the air she exhaled.

  “And after they saw that beauty’s not a contagious disease, they kept away from her,” he said.

  But even he couldn’t prophesy the full force of the love that gripped Jacob’s heart or all the wild sprouts and branches that would grow up.

  Abigail and Sarah,

  Leah and Yael—

  everybody in the town

  was perfumed by her smell.

  The Village Papish sang his song to Rebecca, his fingers drumming on my knee and his voice growing louder.

  34

  NOBODY KNEW WHAT RABINOVITCH’S worker carried in her heart or what she had up her sleeve.

  Everybody watched her with their own eyes, observed things that usually hint and reveal a secret: smells of new dishes, a strange perfume, an unfamiliar and revealing garment waving on the clothesline.

  But only the scream rose from the cowshed at night, and it certainly didn’t solve anything.

  Soft agreed signals of warning were exchanged among the women, like the choked whistles of spring that field mice exchange when the jackal cleaves the tall grass.

  But there was nothing predatory about her. There was some mystery, unintentional, and there were brief, fragrant movements of her hands as she worked, and touches she exchanged with Naomi; and that stubborn shell of hers, sometimes opaque as plaster and sometimes transparent as a grape skin, carried with her and around her.

  Obviously, the pitchfork and the reins, the needle and the ladle weren’t strangers to her hands, and she quickly learned how to milk. At first she milked like a beginner, only between the finger and the thumb, and when the cows got used to her touch, and she got used to their closeness, Moshe taught her how to milk with four fingers pressing the teat one after another, from the index finger to the pinkie. Her arms ached from the effort and her fingers shook, but then her muscles grew strong and from the melody of the streams of milk in the bottom of the bucket, you could hear the milking of an experienced hand.

  One after another, like the pages turning in a book, the secrets of the cowshed were revealed to her. She learned to anticipate the cow’s intention to kick even before the animal itself knew, she remembered the caprices of the two old milk cows, managed to decipher all the hints written on the nose and rump of a sick calf and to recognize the hierarchies of authority and respect that prevailed among the cows.

  A few months later, Rabinovitch instructed her to take a cow in heat to mate at Samson Bloch’s, in the next village, not far from Uncle Menahem.

  Samson Bloch was an expert cattle breeder. More than once he saved a calf from dysentery with a simple mixture of flax soup, olive oil, and scrambled egg. Everybody knew the ingredients, but he was the only one who knew the order, temperature, and quantities to blend together.

  Bloch rivaled Globerman in assessing the weight of livestock by looking, he castrated calves and colts better than the veterinarian, and rumor had it that he sold the castrated testicles to that Haifa restaurant where the albino bought more than food.

  He had a stud bull named Gordon, “an old bull, but he works just like the young ones,” Bloch explained proudly to anyone.

  “Did she give you any trouble on the way?” he now asked Judith.

  “She was a little nervous,” she
said.

  “Now, after a rendezvous with Gordon, she’ll go back home like a baby,” said Bloch. “She’ll be quiet and happy as a bride.”

  In the afternoon, when Judith brought the cow back to the cowshed, she felt that all the other milk cows looked at her in a new way and she smiled to herself. She loved the cows and, as for them, they didn’t look at her suspiciously, didn’t talk to her on her deaf side, didn’t ask her where she came from, nor did they make any remark when they saw her sipping from the bottle of liquor she hid among the bales of hay.

  And at night, when the wailing ripped out of the innards of the woman who was to be my mother, tore her throat, and woke her up, the cows turned their big, slow heads, looked at her with patient eyes, and went back to their rest and their rumination.

  35

  ON THE OTHER SIDE of the village, the albino kept up his nocturnal construction.

  Within a few weeks, next to Yakobi and Yakoba’s old hut rose a new room with a smooth cement floor, double wooden walls, and a whitewashed slate roof, with a small sprinkler to cool it on hot days. That was the room for breeding canaries. The screen on the windows was dense enough to keep a cat or a snake from getting inside, and on the lattices of its shutters, the bookkeeper installed a special system for opening that allowed effective ventilation of the hut without blinding its owners.

  And when he completed the construction, the albino came and knocked on Jacob’s door.

  Rebecca opened it and her face turned gloomy when she saw the guest, but the albino saw Jacob over her shoulder and asked him if he wanted to visit “the birds’ new house.”

  Already in the new room there was a dusty hot smell, the smell of sawdust and feathers familiar to everyone who breeds birds and chicks. The new birdhouse had no cages. The canaries flew in the open space and the bookkeeper told Jacob that he intended to put the nesting material there and let them couple by themselves, except for the special mating for sale, and for those he had set up separate family cells.

  When Jacob entered, the canaries were startled, flew and fluttered in the air.

  “They’ll get used to you right away and will calm down,” said the albino.

  In the following days, Jacob began knocking from time to time “with the tip of my little fingernail,” on the door of the hut, going in, looking, working, and studying. With the devotion and willingness of an apprentice, Jacob helped the albino record layings and hatchings, cleaned the breeding and birth cages, and washed troughs and lattices.

  “Everything you should be doing in our incubator, you do for his birds,” Rebecca remarked to him one day, and Jacob looked at her and didn’t answer.

  The albino taught him to recognize the various seeds that composed the canaries’ food—turnip and radish seeds, hashish and grains—to crumble the hard-boiled egg, the carrots, and the potatoes. To soak the poppies in milk and feed them to the singers, “because their digestion is very nervous.”

  He taught him to recognize the mating song of the male, for experienced breeders know that it’s not a love song, but a sign that it is time to supply him with jute and wool scraps to build a nest.

  The albino lodged the growing fledglings with the males because the mothers tend to pluck off their feathers to pad the new nest.

  “Look what good fathers they are,” he said.

  And indeed, as soon as the nestlings were in their fathers’ care, the males turned into devoted and strict trainers, took pains to feed the little ones and to teach them to sing. Jacob remarked that not all birds acted like that, and the albino was surprised because, aside from the canaries he bred, he didn’t know any winged creature. “He could hardly tell the difference between a crow and a goose.”

  Jacob told him about the monogamy of storks, geese, and cranes, and praised the crow’s famous fidelity to his mate, and even told something that Menahem Rabinovitch had once revealed to him, that “the ancient Egyptians used to paint a crow as a symbol of married life.”

  The albino loved to hear about the customs of the finches, who don’t like to couple with their mates in the winter. When the females migrate south, the males remain in Europe, freezing with cold, loneliness, and longing. Some of them join their women later, and some meet up with them again only in the spring.

  “For a male to stay alone in the summer is no big deal,” said Jacob. “But in the winter, that’s another thing altogether. That’s when he learns what it is to be alone. And when she comes back, beautiful and tired, full of love and sun and stories, he learns how much gratitude there is in love.”

  The ways of the finches painted a sweet expression on the bookkeeper’s plump face.

  “They meet in the spring,” he repeated. “It’s lovely and wise for a couple to meet only in the spring.”

  Jacob remarked that the canaries are also very faithful to their mates, and then a pink smile of derision spread over the face of the albino: “That’s how it is with a couple when you close them up together in the same cage,” he said.

  WHITE JUICE SPILLED from the stems, gathered and congealed and turned dark. Then the red silk petals withered, wrinkled, and dropped off, the ovaries of the poppies puffed up, turned dark, and toughened. And at night, the bookkeeper went out with a little pruning hook clicking in his hand, chopped the rigid capsules, and cracked them with his fingers. He cooked the small black seeds in the congealed sap and fed the dough to his birds.

  Every few weeks, the little Morris Minor came from Haifa with the navy officer in it who bought a few pairs.

  “Poor birds,” the albino meditated aloud after the officer left. “Now they’ll go down into Egypt.”

  With warm oil he cleaned the pale down on the backside of one of his rollers, and said: “This one’s got diarrhea, Jacob. Don’t give him any carrots or potatoes today, just hard-boiled egg white and a little poppyseed to eat.”

  He suggested that Jacob abandon agriculture and devote himself to breeding canaries.

  “It can be a good livelihood,” he said.

  “It’s a livelihood that doesn’t suit the ideas of the village,” said Jacob.

  “Chickens or canaries, they’re both birds,” said the albino.

  “It’s not the same thing,” said Jacob.

  “Nonsense,” said the albino. “I’ll teach you everything I know, and after I leave, you’ll stay.”

  “Where will you go?” Jacob asked apprehensively.

  But the albino smiled impatiently and asked Jacob to go to the center of the village and bring him a half-inch faucet from the warehouse.

  “Go, get out,” he urged him. “They’re going to close right away.”

  Jacob went to the center, and here came Rabinovitch’s Judith toward him, striding straight opposite him with the flowers of her dress and her blue kerchief, and she looks and approaches just the way she looks and approaches in his imagination. Never did she chance upon him like that, walking opposite him, in a surprisingly empty street, toward him, straight toward him. He wanted to calculate the point of their meeting but couldn’t because his feet counted his steps and his eyes counted her steps, the brain added them together and the heart divided the sum in two.

  When one last meter separated them, he gathered his strength and asked her how she was, and even said: “My name is Jacob.”

  “I know,” answered Rabinovitch’s worker as she walked.

  Her face was so close he could faint, the burn of a look, a fleeting profile, a white neck, and heels. Her dress flapped on her limbs, her back, so erect, went off into the distance.

  36

  HE STIRRED with a wooden ladle, put his face close to the pot, and sniffed.

  “What’s the secret of the taste, Zayde? That everything will be fresh. That everything will be delicate. Just to touch. Just to put one on top of the other. Just to show the food its seasoning: nice to meet you, I’m potato. Nice to meet you, I’m nutmeg. Please meet Mr. Soup, nice to meet you, Mrs. Parsley. Seasoning, Zayde, it ain’t a smack in the face, seasoning’s g
ot to be like a butterfly’s wing touching your skin. Even in simple Ukrainian borscht, the garlic shouldn’t change your expression, just give you the feeling of a smile. Once I told you a story so you’d eat my food, and now I make you food so you’ll listen to the stories. That means you ain’t a little boy no more, Zayde, so pay attention to your name, start being careful.”

  TIME, indifferent, mighty, and benevolent, bore away the initial curiosity on its stream. Gossip and guessing started boring even those who invented it. The sense of danger also passed on.

  By now everybody had learned that you didn’t approach Rabinovitch’s Judith on her left side and you didn’t ask her anything about who she was or where she came from.

  Oded and Naomi came to school clean and neat. The movements of Moshe’s body were once again calm and confident. The blessing, that blessing inspired only by a woman’s hand, returned to his farm.

  Each of the three men who were to be my fathers was tending to his own business.

  Jacob Sheinfeld, who bequeathed me his drooping shoulders and his house and his dishes and the wonderful picture of his wife, meditated on Judith and learned how to breed canaries.

  Moshe Rabinovitch, who bequeathed me the color of his hair and his farm, listened to her screaming and searched for his braid.

  And my third father, the cattle dealer Globerman, who bequeathed me his money and his enormous feet, started placing cunning little gifts in the cowshed: a small bottle of perfume or a new blue kerchief or a mother-of-pearl comb for her hair.

  “For Lady Judith,” he would repeat.

  The dealer was a tall, thin man, his hands were stronger than they were thick, and his face concealed intelligence. Winter and summer he wore a big, worn leather jacket, and on his head was always an old beret that looked like he also used it to blow his nose. In those days he didn’t yet have the pickup truck. He always walked and sometimes he sang strange songs to himself, and their language sounded foreign even if they were sung in Hebrew. Some of them I remember well: