by Meir Shalev
Two horses, on they came
one is blind
one is lame
on one’s back rides a cat
his tail is plucked
his whiskers flat
and he’s pursued by a little mouse
wearing trousers and a blouse.
He covered enormous distances on foot, his pockets full of bills and coins that were heavy enough to keep him from flying away in the late summer wind, with a notebook full of cows’ names that kept him from forgetting anything, and with boots full of gigantic feet big enough to keep him from sinking in the mud.
Sometimes he walked alone and sometimes along with a cow, who had a rope tied to her horns, dread in her heart, and whose bleating jolted the air. East of the village, the old forest of eucalyptus turned blue, and in it was the path where traces of cloven hooves and big boots were clearly marked. Beyond it waited the butcher, the knife, and the meat hook. Every hoofprint, Naomi showed me, turned in one direction, and the traces of the boots went back and forth. On that path, the cows walked their final road. Except for one cow, the cow Rachel, who walked the path one night and then came back on it. Because of that night and that cow, I came into the world and I shall tell more about her later.
The cattle dealer always had a filthy rope wound around his shoulder, and he had his “baston,” a thick walking stick with a steel tip. He used to lean on it as he tramped around the yards, and he also used it as a cattle prod and as an index finger and as a weapon against vipers and dogs. They would run after him in the fields, crazed by the smell of blood and terror of the cows that stuck to his clothes and even wafted from his skin.
The cows also sensed this smell, the smell of their own death, coming from the body of the dealer like vapors rising from the underworld, and when Globerman appeared in one of the yards in his hat and with his rope and his notebook and his stick, a quiet snort of warning and dread rose in the air, and the cows would huddle together, their spines tense with fear, their bodies clutching one another, and their horns lowered menacingly.
LIKE EVERY CATTLE DEALER, Globerman could estimate the weight of a cow with one furtive look, but he was too smart to offer to state the weight to the farmer.
“First of all, Zayde,” he taught me the mysteries of give and take, “this way he’ll think he’s cheating you, and second of all, the farmer always gives less weight than there really is there. Because buying a cow is theater, and in this theater the farmer wants to be the saint and the dealer don’t care if he’s the sinner. Because of that, even if the owner thinks a thousand pounds, he’ll say nine hundred, maximum nine hundred fifty, period. So, if he loses money and enjoys that, too, who are we, Zayde, to disturb him?”
Until his dying day, he kept hoping to bring me into his business.
“A soyd, Zayde, a secret.” He bent down to me. “You’re the only one I’ll tell it to because you’re my son. Every dealer knows you got to check out the cow, but only somebody like us Globermans who was made on the Klots knows it’s even more important to examine the dairy farmer, period. You got to know what he thinks about the cow, and it’s even more important to know what the cow thinks about him.
“Love and trade are alike but they’re also the opposite. Because love isn’t just heart, it’s mainly sense, and trade isn’t just sense, it’s mainly heart,” he explained. “When a farmer sells me a bik, a bull, it’s only flesh without a soul, at his price only weight and health are important. But when a farmer sells me a kuh, a milk cow, well, Zayde, that’s another story. To sell this cow is like selling your mother, period. Oy oy oy, how bad to part from her, Zayde, how their eyes talk. Oy meyn kind, oy mamenu—oh how can you let me go, oh how she looks at him.”
“How come you’re selling such a beautiful cow?” he would ask the farmer venomously.
It wasn’t an answer he wanted, but rather to hear the tone of voice and to see how the face turned yellow with disgrace.
“Walk her,” he would demand. “Let’s see, maybe she swallowed some nail.”
Theoretically, this examination was designed to discern a limp or a pain that would indicate an internal injury, which could make the cow declared unkosher after it was slaughtered, but in fact what the dealer wanted was to see how the farmer approached his cow and how she responded to his presence and his touch.
“If he loves her, Zayde, he’s got some regret, and if he’s got some regret, he won’t haggle over the price. That’s how it is. You won’t tell that to nobody. If you ask a trader where he makes a profit, he’s got only one answer: you buy a cow on the hoof, you sell the hoof and you’re left with the cow. Period.”
“I BROUGHT LADY JUDITH a little something,” he declared.
“Lady Judith” was my mother and “a little something” was the general name for all the gifts the dealer gave her. At first he just happened to leave them on the ledge of the trough in the cowshed, and when Judith told him, “You forgot something here, Globerman,” he answered her: “I didn’t forget.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
“A little something for Lady Judith,” the dealer repeated the definition, and then bowed and retreated three steps, turned aside, and left, because he knew that Lady Judith wouldn’t touch the gift in his presence.
Sometimes he added something like: “Lady Judith is alone among the cows and needs a little something to remind her that she’s a woman.” And on days when he was in an especially romantic mood, he said: “You need a man to make you the queen you really are, to carry you in his arms like they carry a baby, period.”
But Lady Judith, who loved her cows, loathed the cattle dealer’s manners, his gifts, his smell, and his periods.
37
YOU’LL EAT REAL SLOW, not fast, no faster than I talk, ’cause otherwise both of us could choke. You’re gonna eat and I’m gonna tell you about Naomi, to make it taste even better. A lot of times I saw her standing at the bookkeeper’s fence just like me, and finally one day I asked her: ‘You want to come in with me?’ He didn’t let no child come close, he always says birds don’t like the kind of children we got here in the village. But when I brought her, he says to her: ‘You’re Rabinovitch’s little girl? Come in, please, come in.’ And that’s how she came with me, didn’t say nothing, just looked. Her head would move back and forth because the canaries sing from all sides of the room, one to the other, this one talks and that one answers. Everybody’s got his own voice and his own song, and that’s how they learn, too. Everybody learns his father’s songs. There are also birds who learned from music they heard or from other birds outside. They imitate, like the worker I once had here, and he could imitate everything: a bird, a cat, a person, voices and movements both. You remember him, Zayde? You were a little boy when he came. And once Naomi asked the bookkeeper if she could take a canary as a gift for Judith and he told her—listen good, Zayde, what he told her—‘Judith’s gonna get her bird, but not from you.’ And she cried then and went away and came back again. It’s very hard for a little girl whose mother died and it’s even harder for a little girl whose mother died and all of a sudden she loves another woman. It’s so many years since I saw Rabinovitch’s little girl. Once she says to me: ‘You got such a beautiful wife, Jacob,’ like both of us was guilty, she’s cheating on her mother and I’m cheating on my Rebecca. She was a little girl with a lot of sense. Too bad she married that city boy Meir. He’s not for her and Jerusalem’s not for her, but they’ve got a child, I heard. Oded still takes you to her in Jerusalem? He’s a real good boy, Oded. Not bright like his sister, but he deserved a better life and a better woman, too. To make a long story short, when Naomi was a little girl, it was interesting to see how she ran after Judith, just like me and the dealer. Believe you me, she would look at her from far away, too, and would bring her gifts, too. She couldn’t bring her clothes and perfume and cognac like the dealer, and she couldn’t make her a big wedding like I did, but she could touch her and we couldn’t, and she understood something I myse
lf never understood, something only my worker explained to me many years afterward, and that’s the most important thing, that love is not some free-for-all, that love has rules and love has laws. To make a long story short, Rabinovitch’s little girl would hug Judith and would take her hand and stroke it, and would bring her flowers from the field. Maybe she was afraid that we, me and Globerman, would take her away and do what her father should have done. Things like that nobody knows. Sometimes your mother used to take her to Tonya’s grave. Alone she wouldn’t go. Little children don’t go alone to Father or Mother’s grave. And not only on the anniversary of her death did she take her there, ’cause then that was with Rabinovitch and Oded, and also Menahem and Bathsheba would come and a few other people from the village, there were also times when just the two of them would go, and I used to stand and peep at them from far away. I can tell you this ’cause you also used to peep. You sat in the box I made you for watching the birds, but you also peeped at human beings. At me you peeped too. It gave me a strange pleasure that you were looking at me, ’cause there, at the bus stop I was the strangest faygele, the strangest bird to look at. So what did your mother have to look for at his Tonychka’s grave? That’s something I never understood. But she used to take the little girl with her, and I saw them standing, the two of them, there at the grave, and all around all the cyclamens were in bloom. Like anemones always grow on old ruins, that’s how cyclamens love cemeteries. Wherever you see a lot of anemones, people once lived there, and wherever you see gravestones, that’s like rocks for the cyclamen, just like that cowshed is like a cave for the swallow and the case of the shutters became a hiding place for the sparrow. The crow’s the only one that don’t leave the trees God made for him in the six days in the beginning and don’t build himself a nest no place else. On one side, he lives near people and ain’t scared of them at all, but on the other side he won’t really live together with them like the dove does, the one bird I can’t stand. It stands with an olive branch in its mouth, the symbol of peace for the whole world, but at home they just murder each other. You yourself saw how doves when they fight on the roof they kill each other to death. It’s just horrible. If one dove is half dead, broken in pieces and can’t stand up, the second dove won’t let him get away. Wolves give up, but not the dove. He’ll go after him and hit him and won’t let go of him until he’s totally killed him. Crows also do things like that sometimes, but the crow, on the other hand, doesn’t brag that he’s the symbol of peace. To make a long story short, they used to stand there at the grave, didn’t talk much, but you saw how Judith’s hand was on the little girl’s back, stroking, stroking, stroking, and the child didn’t move, enjoyed it like a cat does, and then the two of them used to come back from the path in the fields to the casuarina of the road, and the little girl used to run all around like a little calf at Passover, jumping with her tail up and kicking the air, and your mother with her erect back and her straight, shining forehead with the one deep line between the eyes, the line of the secret and the pains, which cut the air like a knife. Believe you me, Zayde, on cold days I could see where Judith walked, from the traces her forehead cut in the air. In summer it used to disappear right away in the heat, but in the cold a strip of trembling air used to remain wherever she passed with that line. Well, and now she’s there herself with the cyclamen and the narcissus, not far from Tonya, and her eyes and the line have already been eaten by the worms, and Rabinovitch has already got two graves to visit there—his Judith and his Tonychka—but strength to go there he ain’t got no more, just to sit on the stump of the eucalyptus he cut down and straighten nails with his hands, for that he’s got strength, to straighten nails and to feel regrets. ’Cause somebody who wants to regret has got so many kinds of regrets. There’s regrets for somebody who went away and maybe he’ll come back. Then there’s regrets for somebody who already came back, but he ain’t the same, and worst of all is to regret somebody who just died and won’t come back no more. Those are exactly the regrets I’ve got for your mother, Zayde, regrets like that ain’t even exercises for resurrection. Those are regrets that come out of themselves and go back into themselves and are like a cancer growing in the soul. And only in one thing are they like each other, all the sorts of regrets, that they don’t have food to satisfy them and they don’t have drink to make them forget and they don’t have a cure to stop them and they don’t have no reasons, either, ’cause they don’t need them. What I’m telling you, Zayde, maybe someday you’ll understand this thing and maybe you never will, but one thing you got to know about these regrets even if you don’t understand, and that’s that regrets don’t need reasons. My poor mother used to say: ‘Oyf benken darf men nisht keyn terutz, to regret you don’t need no excuse.’ That’s very important to know. That’s like the king don’t need no reasons, and the police chief don’t need no reasons, and all the generals in the army don’t need no reasons, either, and my uncle, too, whose factory I worked in like a slave, he didn’t need reasons, either. Just a stick and shouts, that’s all he needs. Somebody who’s got as much strength as regrets, he don’t need no reasons.”
38
I WAS A YOUNG MAN THEN. Youth and immortality bore me beyond Jacob’s torments, his table, and his memories. In my eyes, I was like a big falcon, wandering and dancing on the warm spring air.
Only today, lashed to the doorposts of my own longing, returning to the dust of my regrets, I understand those words of his, know the obstinate heart of memory and all the struggles of contrition.
It was himself he described and about me he prophesied, and about that man, my mother’s lover, the man Naomi showed me in Jerusalem, the man bent in two—he was talking about him, too.
He also told of Moshe, under the collapse of the wagon in the wadi. And he talked about Oded, Oded the orphan, eternally forsaken, a Sinbad of anger and milk and another big land.
And of my mother he talked, of her and the memory of her stolen daughter, and of all the armor she wore on her body. She always turned a deaf ear to every bad word, and always, when a stranger came to the village, she closed herself in the cowshed and sent Naomi as an antenna before her: “Go, Nomele, go see who’s coming.”
Her calculated caution didn’t provide her with a perfect defense. She carefully avoided any encounter with a rag doll in a girl’s hand, and until her dying day, she refused to sift lentils and left them out of the soup. But her daughter seemed to be lying in wait for her and attacked her and smote her in the groin. She saw her when she blended the milk powder in the calves’ watering pail and when she smelled the pea flowers, and she thought about her when she saw a cloud approaching or a flower blooming and when the crows conversed aloud and when the sun rose and the moon died, and at night her eyes were open, remembering in the dark, and her insides were ripped apart with her scream, because in the dark there’s room, she once told me when I was still too young to understand and too naive to forget, in the dark there’s room, Zaydele, for all open eyes and all regrets and all screams.
“You can hide everything in a box, Zayde, in a box and in a cage and in a closet and in a room. Even love you can close up like that, real good,” Jacob told me. “But memory has all the keys, and regrets, Zayde, they even pass through walls. They’re like the magician Houdini, they know how to get out, and like ghosts they know how to get in, when and where they want.”
But Mother’s regrets didn’t stick to me. I have a half-sister in America and I’ve never seen her face, not in my fleshly eyes and not in my mind’s eye. Not even a picture of her remained with my mother, nor do I even know her name. Never did I try to find her or to meet her. Of course sometimes I ask myself all the right questions: Where does she live? Does she look like me? Will you come back someday? Will we see each other? But my insomnia isn’t for her, and my regrets, my half-sister, don’t sail to you.
39
ALMOST THREE YEARS had passed since the day Judith came to the village, and she would sometimes laugh now or make some comment, and
in the afternoon she would take a box out of the cowshed and sit on it in the shade of the tin awning. With a spoon she ate the cheese she made in dripping cloth sacks, and chewed on salty-spicy little cucumbers she pickled in jars in the window of the cowshed. A pleasant west wind blew and said four-thirty, and the hand of the taste of the cucumbers said four days.
Many times I have tried to make pickles like hers, and I haven’t succeeded, but I can evoke the memory of their smell in my nose and then I slide my tongue over my teeth, from right to left and from left to right, back and forth, like walking in a rut, salty salty salty salty salty salty salty ytlas ytlas ytlas ytlas ytlas ytlas ytlas——
And then, when I press it to my palate, it swims in saliva with their precise taste.
Mother wiggled her bare toes and sighed with pleasure, and with her eyes closed she slowly drank her grappa. Then she would get up and go distribute food for the cows, milk, cook, straighten up, and clean, and just before midnight her screaming rose again from the cowshed as if it were her first night there.
Oded used to wake up and grumble: “She’s crying again, looking for pity.” And Naomi breathed only in the intervals between the sobs, and imagined she stopped them because they threatened to rip her own throat, and she felt that her body was turning to stone and growing cold.
“ONLY AFTER she got pregnant with you did she stop screaming,” she told me many years later, in Jerusalem.
“That was the first sign that she had a baby in her belly. But then, when she came, on those first nights—how old was I then? six or something—and I remember, when Judith would scream, it would hurt me here, inside, under my belly button, and here in my chest, you feel it, Zayde? Touch it. That was my first sign that one day I would be a woman.”