by Meir Shalev
“I’ll bring them tomorrow,” he said, his eyes roving and searching.
But Judith didn’t appear and Jacob went off.
The next day, he hitched up the wagon and brought the chicks in two closed cases. The smell and the chirping drove the cats out of their minds. Some of them assembled in Rabinovitch’s yard and besieged the coop, looking for a crack. But Moshe poured cement all around, right on the edge of the screen, and fastened every single joint with wire because he knew that hunger makes cat limbs supple and their murderous impulse gives them the ability to squeeze inside like snakes.
The concrete floor was already covered with sawdust and Jacob bent over and gently emptied the case of chicks onto it. The yellow block, dense and chirping, scattered into dozens of frantic little balls and immediately banded together again in a murmur of fear and excitement.
And then the door suddenly squeaked. The chicks fell silent all at once and that shudder again penetrated the back of Jacob’s neck. He knew it was Judith who came into the coop and was standing behind him.
His heart fluttered. That’s what will happen to the human heart when fear shrinks its chambers and, at the very same moment, when happiness expands its top floors.
“And the heart—you knew that, Zayde?—the heart melts. And right away, a mess in all the hands and all the feet. Here some muscle shakes, bones are like milk powder in water, blood is like soup, agitated and boiling.
“Very simply, I couldn’t breathe,” he recalled. “I was very simply choking. That’s how a man tells himself he’s in love.
“How did Rabinovitch live with her there in the yard and not go nuts?” he wondered. “You understand that, Zayde? When he saw her working, when he saw how she moved, when she lifts up a jug of milk or drags the buckets to the calves and her body is straining under her dress … How can a person lay like that in the hut and know she’s in the cowshed, right behind a wall of wood and a wall of air and a wall of cement? You can just go nuts.”
THAT EVENING, when Judith was milking and Moshe was unloading the clover off the wagon, he suddenly asked her if she had noticed Jacob’s looks.
“He likes you,” he stated.
“A nafka mina,” said Judith.
“Well,” said Moshe. “What joy. The whole village is dreaming of Sheinfeld’s wife, and Sheinfeld is making eyes at you.”
Judith finished washing and hardening the teats of the milk cow. In straight white jets, the milk sprayed into the bucket, and the high-pitched ping of its initial impact grew deeper and more muffled from one spray to the next.
The cow turned her head and looked at Judith. Her big tongue thrust out and was inserted into her nostrils with the sound of a wet cork. The warm, sweetish smell rose in the air and was absorbed in the walls and Judith’s eyes blazed.
She leaned her sweating forehead on the cow’s belly, and when the cow gently lifted her hoof, hinting at some discomfort, she said: “Shaa … shaa …” and stroked the big thigh, pressing gently on the point that paralyzes the intention and the ability to kick.
Years later, when I was seven years old, she told me that the horse gets love in exchange for his love and the dog gets authority for his loyalty and the cat food for his charm, but the cow doesn’t get anything, except rebukes and kicks. She gives her milk and her strength and her children while she’s alive, and afterward they take her flesh and skin and horns and bones.
“They don’t throw away any of the cow,” she summed up.
And Jacob said: “That’s how it is with a great love. With a great love only one person always gives everything. Always there ain’t nothing that gets lost.”
• • •
HE LAY IN HIS HOUSE, his head asleep, his heart awake, and his eyes two holes gleaming in the dark.
Crows, swallows, canaries, and sparrows slept their slumber. The barn-owl, white queen of the gloom, spread silent wings and emerged from her hiding place.
Rebecca was also awake, for insomnia is contagious.
“Sleep, Sheinfeld, I don’t have any strength anymore,” she said. “When you don’t sleep, I’m tired in the morning.”
But Jacob was silent. His bones squeaked and his flesh hurt.
“And I said thank God my eyes, wide open in the dark, don’t shine thoughts on the wall. Just imagine that, Zayde, that she would see my thoughts and I would see her thoughts like in the cinema or with a magic lantern.”
With a strange clarity, he felt his ribs pressing together in his chest and, like long teeth, chewing the flesh of his heart.
“What’s with you lately, Sheinfeld?” asked the most beautiful woman in the village.
And Jacob didn’t answer. For what good are words when it comes to love?
43
ONE EVENING, the door didn’t open. The groping hand wasn’t stretched out. The albino didn’t emerge.
The canaries were singing as they usually did, but Jacob was worried. He waited a little and moved out of Yakobi and Yakoba’s yard and put his face up to the lattices of the big hut. Then he knocked on the door. The singing stopped and a dreadful silence reigned. Jacob was afraid to go in, convinced himself that the bookkeeper was still asleep, and left.
The albino wasn’t seen the next evening, either, and Jacob was scared because the wheelbarrow of papers from the treasurer’s office was standing at the door, and the pickup truck was parked in its usual place and its hood was cold. He called the Village Papish who didn’t hesitate to break down the door of the hut and, in a tempest of the turbulent shrieks and struggles and feathers of the canaries, the bookkeeper was lying naked on the floor, cold and fat and stiff.
“He’s dead.” The Village Papish straightened up from the body.
He ran to summon the medic, and Jacob was left alone with the pinkish gray albino. The hair on his snowy white corpse was snagged with flying grains of sawdust, birdseed shells, and droppings.
The smell of death began to be felt in the air. Jacob immediately poured water into the tiny porcelain basins and scattered all the varieties of seeds and crumbs there in the feeding troughs, seeking consolation and serenity in the routine movements of work.
Then came those who took care of such matters, and they very matter-of-factly took the corpse away.
The birds, who were terrified by the turmoil in their hut, had calmed down now. The thin shrieks of alarm vanished. The last particles of down stopped dancing around in space and settled on the floor. A slight encouraging sound of singing began rising from the cages, a fragmentary conversation at first, a tiny bit here and a tiny bit there, and they went on in a loud and defiant song. And Jacob, who had been sitting alone on the floor of the canary house for a long time, was infected with the ancient faith of all bird breeders—that their singing is a sign of thanks and love. A faith like that will also be found among kings and kindergarten teachers, drill sergeants and village choirmasters.
He got up and went back home. Rebecca served him dinner, but Jacob didn’t pay any attention to his food and took no pleasure in it, either. Finally, he left most of his dinner on his plate, got up from the table, and said he had “to go take a look and see what was going on with the poor birds,” and didn’t notice that that was the second time that day he had imitated the dead albino’s style of speaking.
He didn’t observe his wife’s weeping, got out of her embrace, dragged a folding cot to the canary house, and lay there all night in the gloom, waiting fearfully for some heir or relative to pop up, brandishing a signed will and white eyelashes, proof of relationship, and demand the poor birds.
But the albino was childless and no one showed up. The council published an obituary notice in the newspaper and addressed the Mandatory court in Haifa, and even those relatives who usually come to light only after death, those cousins even the dead person himself doesn’t know—even they didn’t come.
The council sent two representatives “to check the inventory.” In the albino’s kitchen cabinets were a few Czech government yearbooks, five pairs o
f sunglasses, dozens of tubes of stinking skin lotion, and two pairs of shoes.
After rummaging through the dead man’s clothes closet, they discovered that the threadbare black suit he always wore was in fact five identical black suits, all cut the same, and all equally threadbare, and on their ten sleeves were the same shiny old suede patches.
In the pantry were pots and skillets, heavy as rocks and very dirty, and a yellow wooden canary, marvelously precise and carved, which Jacob immediately took for himself without telling anyone.
He remembered the worn-out book the albino used to read and weep over as he sat in the yard of an afternoon, and after a feverish search, he found it, too, hidden in a closet in the canaries’ hut. To his surprise, it wasn’t a personal diary or a love story or a book of poetry, but old schedules, carefully bound, of trains that had once traveled between Prague and Berlin, Vienna and Budapest.
The next day, Jacob went to the nearby village to ask Menahem Rabinovitch how come a person was interested in schedules of trains that never traveled here. The carob grower leafed through the book and smiled and explained to him that everybody has his own ways of taming regrets and sharpening memory, and everybody, in his own way, tries and fails.
44
EVERY AFTERNOON, the crows assemble for a meeting.
They come to find out what’s new, and I come for the same purpose. To human eyes all crows look alike, but I know every one of them by name and by his history. Some I recognize as I recognize people, by their face, and others by the borderline between the gray and the black on their chest. So I know who died and who disappeared, who was born and who got married.
They come from all around for meetings and conversations that go on almost until dark, and then each goes off to his own tree and his abode.
Until the day my mother died, they used to congregate on our big eucalyptus tree. After Moshe cut it down they still hovered over its ruin for two more days, black and screaming as if their world were destroyed, and on the third day, they transferred their meeting to the old railroad station beyond the wadi, and to the plot of anemones.
There, the young crows, who are as big as their parents, but whose wings are still tentative, show off their progress in flying. The old ones utter well-turned caws. The scouts and the guards supervise what goes on in the area.
Now and then, some of them swoop down on a cat who came out of the village or pester an owl who appeared in the light. Some take off to pursue a buzzard and even pick a fight with an eagle circling in the sky. What a fine spectacle that is. Six or seven crows fly to the eagle, but only one of them does battle. Eager for excitement and fearless, light, and nimble, he swoops down on the eagle, attacks him from the side, rises underneath him, and the eagle, when his patience runs out, tries to clash with him, to hit him and bring him down, in vain. The crow evades him and turns over, lands like a rock, and immediately rises again and attacks and he’s supple and bold, craving entertainment and honor.
But back then, when the albino died, the eucalyptus was still standing in the yard, and seven days after his funeral, the crows cut off their regular meeting, and suddenly they all landed in the cow yard. Excitement and suppressed violence were obvious in their behavior. They ran around on the rails and screamed bizarre, coarse screams that startled the doves out of their regular lodging on the roof.
Now I’m tempted to say that they wanted to herald my birth. And secretly I’m proud that it was a noisy black flock of crows and not white doves that prophesied my coming into the world. But back then no one paid attention to such stretches of time, and no one connected the crows to the death of the canary breeder, especially since everyone knew that such a gathering of crows in the cow yard could mean only one thing: the impending birth of a calf.
The crows are mad about cow placentas. Their senses are so sharp and their passion is so great that they’re often the first to discern labor pains, sometimes even before the pregnant female herself. Now they danced on the fence, hopped, and shrieked on the roof of the cowshed and terrified the cows in heat.
Moshe heard them, went out to the yard and noticed the breathing of the cow and the swelling of her loins. A thick rope of mucus was already stretching under her tail.
“Well, children,” he said. “Ask nice that we’ll have a heifer.”
“What difference does it make?” asked Naomi.
“A farmer is glad when females are born in the cowshed and males in the house,” said Moshe.
He noticed the reservation spreading over Judith’s face and wanted to appease her, but he didn’t yet know the keys to her anger or the preludes to her wrath.
“Well, Judith, that’s only a saying of farmers.” He was embarrassed, put on his rubber boots, and went back to the cow.
THE BIRTH WAS LONG and hard. Rabinovitch tied a rope around the fetus’s legs and pulled hard for a long time.
“You’re hurting her, Father!” cried Naomi. “You’re pulling too hard.”
But Moshe didn’t answer and Oded said: “Shut up, Naomi, you don’t understand anything about it. Giving birth isn’t any business for women.”
The cow groaned. Her eyelids seemed to pull down. The other cows looked at her with heavy faces.
“Here, it’s coming out,” said Moshe. He put his hand in up to the elbow, turned the body of the fetus to a more comfortable position, and pulled out a fat calf that was already dead.
“Dammit.” He tossed the carcass aside. “Hitch up the horse, Oded, and drag it to the eucalyptus forest.”
He went into the cowshed, but Judith was looking at the cow, whose eyes were shut with weakness and whose legs were trembling, and she said: “She’s got another one inside.”
“How do you know?” asked Oded. “How come you understand more than my father?”
“I know,” said Judith, and she touched the cow’s nose and added: “She’s cold as ice. Fast, go call your father to come back. She’s hemorrhaging inside.”
Suddenly the cow’s knees buckled and she knelt down, and when she turned over helplessly on her side, a heifer burst out of her guts, followed by a spring of blood. She spread her hooves and her neck, shook and groaned.
“Father, Father!” shouted Oded. “There’s also a heifer—”
Moshe rushed to the yard. One look at the dying cow and the flowing blood was enough for him. He ran to the cowshed and came back with the corn scythe.
“Take the children away from here so they won’t see,” he said to Judith. “And run and get the dealer. I think he’s wandering around in the village today.”
His broad body hid the act, but a new puddle of blood immediately collected at his feet.
Off to the side, the heifer started trying to stand up. She was strong and nimble, and when she made it, the typical physical features of a barren heifer appeared. She was tall, her shoulders broad and sloping, her legs long, and her face the face of a male.
“Sonofabitch,” Moshe cursed. “The calf died, the mother passed away, and now this tumtum.”
Fifteen minutes later, Mother and Globerman came.
“Did you manage to slaughter it in time?” asked the dealer.
“I did.”
Then Globerman noticed the dead calf and his peculiar twin.
“Troubles come in threes, eh, Rabinovitch?” he said.
Moshe didn’t answer.
“Look at that maydele how she looks,” said the dealer. “It’s always like that when there’s a tsvilling—a kelbele un a bikele. It’s her brother’s blood that made her half a boy. She won’t give milk and she won’t give birth. I’ll take her, too.”
“Her you won’t take,” Judith said suddenly.
“I’m talking to the boss now, Lady Judith.” Globerman took his filthy beret off his head. “That heifer is half a calf. If you give her to me, Rabinovitch, we’ll make a deal for the old lady, too. I’ve got an Arab who’ll give a good price for the carcass.”
But the heifer already started walking, shaking and wet, stumbl
ing and searching for a teat. Her feet led her to Judith, and Judith took a sack and started wiping the mucus and blood off her.
“Rabinovitch,” she suddenly said, “I’ve never asked you for anything up to now. Don’t give him this heifer.”
“That’s the most beautiful sound in the world,” said Globerman. “The voice of a woman pleading.”
“Leave that heifer here,” said Judith. “I’ll take care of her.”
“It’s not a heifer, it’s a calf, and I’ll take him now,” said the dealer. “He can already walk by himself.”
“No!” shouted Judith, and her voice was loud and shrill and strange.
Moshe looked at her, at the dealer, at the heifer, and at his feet.
“Listen, Globerman,” he said at last. “You say she’s a calf? So I’ll sell her to you like we sell a calf. We’ll raise her, we’ll feed her a little so she puts on weight, and we’ll sell her to you in half a year.”
The dealer took out his notebook, pulled his pencil from behind his ear, and asked: “What will you name her?”
“Roast Beef,” said Oded.
“Shut up, Oded!” said Naomi.
“We won’t name her,” said Moshe. “Only milk cows have names.”
In the yard, the crows hopped, bloody fragments of placenta dripping from their beaks.
“I need a name,” said Globerman. “Without a name, I can’t write in my notebook.”
“We’ll call her Rachel,” said Judith.
“Rachel?” Moshe was amazed.
“Rachel,” said Judith.
When I grew up and my Mother told me the rest of the story about her and her cow Rachel, I realized that Rachel may have been the name of my sister who was taken to America, and when I said that to my mother, her face became glum and she said: “What are you talking about, Zayde? What strange ideas you have.”
“So what is her name?” I asked. “Maybe you’ll finally tell me her name.”