The Loves of Judith

by Meir Shalev

  Jacob looked into her eyes, whose transparent color became rough and opaque as plaster, and with complete calm, he announced that the albino had bequeathed him the poor canaries and from now on they were his.

  FOR ONE MOMENT, the most beautiful woman in the village wanted to fall down on the floor and scream, but she immediately felt an invisible arm supporting her back and strengthening her knees. All at once, all the mysteries she had solved long ago were clear to her: her husband’s insomnia, his sighs, his devotion to those silly canaries whose song, let’s admit it, is not so pleasing to the ear.

  And Judith’s journey in the green and yellow springtime field, and Jacob’s trembling, and his talk in the rare, brief slumbers he managed to get, and the days when the colors changed in the irises of his eyes—riddle after riddle, they were all deciphered for her, and a third eye seemed to be opened in her forehead; she walked straight out behind the hut, stretched a precise hand, and pulled out of the space between the floor and the ground the yellow wooden canary hidden there, and threw it away.

  From there she carried the picking ladder to the canary house, propped it up and climbed it, once again stretched her hand, and from the space between the ceiling and the roof, she heaved up the small notebook where Jacob had written with the ox’s back-and-forth movement: Judith Judith Judith Judith Judith Judith Judith Htiduj Htiduj Htiduj Htiduj Htiduj Htiduj Htiduj Judith Judith Judith Judith Judith …

  And from there, she walked with complete confidence to the citrus grove, where the rustle of the leaves was associated with such clear sighs, Judith Judith Judith Judith, and she went past the rows of trees one after another, back and forth, Judith Judith Judith … Htiduj Htiduj Htiduj Judith Judith Judith …

  And there, at the third tree in the third row, she dug and found the blue kerchief of Rabinovitch’s worker, stolen on a dark night and with a pounding heart off the clothesline in the yard.

  A smile spread over Rebecca’s lips, cleared her brain, and stretched the lines of the solution between all the dots that had punctured it.

  “And beautiful as she was, she was seventy times more beautiful then. All of us were dazzled,” said the Village Papish.

  That very same day, Rebecca left the house and the village, with her dress and her hatred and her beauty and her wisdom on her back, and returned to the home of her mother, Mrs. Schwartz of Zikhron Ya’akov. The Village Papish followed her out of the village, coaxing her in vain to stay and let him remove all obstacles, no matter what they were.

  “One fine day she went off and disappeared,” he said. “Nobody knew where, nobody understood why.”

  She flew off as the nightingale

  soars from her nest,

  before anyone suspected,

  before anyone guessed.

  A cold rainy day will come,

  a second and a third,

  and every eye will weep,

  mute sadness can’t be heard.

  The Village Papish recited the poem sadly and solemnly, his thin lips took on the precise shape of the words, and his eyelids marked the yearning of the rhyme at the end of the lines.

  MRS. SCHWARTZ—practical, wrinkled, and active—didn’t rest for a single moment. Letters came and went, messengers and carrier pigeons appeared and disappeared, and then a chauffeur-driven car climbed up to Zikhron Ya’akov and took Rebecca and her mother to the ancient port of Tantura.

  A small ship, well-shaped and white, with the name Rebecca golden on its rib, emerged clearly from the warm mist rising from the sea. A boat was put down and approached. Two sailors took Rebecca from the shore.

  Haim Green, a wealthy English merchant, who had once been a young English lieutenant and had waited whole nights at her house in Zikhron Ya’akov, was waiting for her on deck.

  Rebecca spun around, spewed two clouds out of her two chimneys, and slowly went off. Mrs. Schwartz waited until it vanished, and then she got in the car and returned to her village.

  For twenty-five years neither Rebecca the ship nor Rebecca the woman returned to the Land of Israel, until one day a picture of “Sir Haim and Lady Green,” who were “immigrating to our Land to build and be built in it,” appeared in the newspapers. The two of them were photographed on the dock of the port in Haifa, both with striped collars, gleaming smiles, and captain’s hats, and the Village Papish, who had never forgotten those features, went shouting into the surprised street of the village: “She came back, she came back, she came back!”

  And Lady Green was indeed Rebecca, and Sir Haim was her husband, whom the years had changed from a young and wealthy English merchant into an old and rich English banker.

  “He was an important man and a courteous man,” said the Village Papish. And indeed, Sir Haim contributed money to schools, established laboratories in universities, supported poor students, and bought the beautiful house on Oak Street in Tivon. And by virtue of the polite generosity that characterized all his ways, he also hurried up and died so his widow could bring back her first husband and live with him, an old winner, indulgent and tearful as she was, in the last year of her life.

  But on the day Rebecca abandoned the village, “and we all looked like a face with a gouged-out eye,” Jacob was the only one who didn’t pay any attention to her departure. He closed himself in the storeroom, busy building a gorgeous wooden cage, painted sky blue and gold, with an enamel trough and basin and two seesaws.

  In the evening, when he came out of the storeroom and went into the house, he called out, “Rebecca … Rebecca …” a few times, and when there was no answer, he made himself a cup of tea and went to sleep, and before dawn, he got up and went out without noticing the emptiness and the chill that had lain next to him all night long.

  He hastened to his urgent romantic affairs, and that evening, when Judith returned from watering the calves, she found a wooden birdcage hanging on the central beam of the cowshed. A big friendly roller, who could sing short fragments of operetta and was the most beautiful of all the male canaries the albino had left behind, hopped and sang, and on the wall gleamed a note that said, or maybe quoted, a hackneyed saying of lovers: “The birds sing what a human can’t say in words.”

  53

  I SAID BEFORE THAT BATHSHEBA called her husband Menahem a “decent bird.” Moshe, on the other hand, called his brother a “crazy fowl,” but he loved him, appreciated his good mind, and even revealed to Menahem that at night he searched for his braid, which Menahem remembered just as well as Moshe: that and nothing else.

  The two brothers were very different from one another, but that difference brought them close together and didn’t drive them apart. Menahem, his wife, and his sons often came from the neighboring village to visit his brother, and Judith, Moshe, and Moshe’s children frequently went to visit him and Aunt Bathsheba in their village.

  Oded hitched the wagon and put sacks of straw on it to cushion the jolting on the wooden boards. A sturdy and responsible boy he was, and demanded to hold the reins.

  Everybody sat down in the wagon and Naomi laughed at Rachel’s worried face looking at them from the cowyard.

  “C’mon-c’mon-c’mon-c’mon,” called Judith, and Rachel jumped lightly over the fence and accompanied them, striding on her long legs, lingering now and then to pick herself a bunch of clover and flax blossoms.

  Lines of rage crept onto Moshe’s forehead: “Why does she follow us everywhere like a dog?”

  “What do you care, Father? Nobody will talk about you. She’s following Judith and she doesn’t bark,” said Naomi.

  And Judith said: “Meantime, she’ll eat a little grass on the way and that saves you money, Rabinovitch.”

  “It’s undignified,” grumbled Moshe.

  THE DIRT ROAD MEANDERED along the old pipe that had once brought water from the spring to the village. A lot of castor oil bushes grew there in those days, and at the edge of the field was a big, chirping colony of field mice. At night, the jackals would hunt them and then come and wail in high voices, dripping bl
ood, right under the windows of the houses. Your heart would fill with dread and cold and the village dogs, even though they were bigger and stronger than the jackals, were also terrified by the savagery of the truth evident in their wailing, and they knocked on the doors of the houses, pleading to be let in lest they be bitten or tempted.

  Years later, when I dropped out of school and returned to the village, I worked here plowing the common field. Four days I sat on the old D-6 and plowed the way I like to write: back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. Falcons hovered over me, cowbirds and crows, who knew the plowing seasons by now, flocked together, and hopped behind me, gleaning worms and insects the plow turned up onto the soil. And when I came here, I allowed myself to veer from the furrow to the edges of the field. The blades of the plow burst into the burrows of the field mice and the birds made an awful slaughter of them.

  At the end of the field, bunches of nests marked the curve of the channel of the wadi. The water deposited an abundance of silt here and a lush growth flourished in it.

  From the time of my childhood to this day, I have come down here. On Saturdays in autumn to gather raspberries, and in the spring to pick anemones and narcissus.

  In winter Moshe didn’t let me go. The water turned gray then and rose, the mud became deep, and the riverbanks became slippery and treacherous.

  “Why do you send him there alone?” he yelled at Mother.

  “Nothing will happen to him,” she answered. And to me, she said: “Go, Zayde, and don’t come back late.”

  I went, and sometimes I’d see them, my three fathers, peeping at me from a distance and scared about my safety.

  BY NOW, Moshe let Oded hold the reins even across the wadi. Silence prevailed. Moshe didn’t talk to anyone about his Tonychka, but this was the wadi, that was the water, and here was the place.

  Even the horse, the horse Rabinovitch bought to replace the mule that replaced that she-ass, hesitated a bit before he crossed the channel. He went down with recoiling hooves, his nostrils expanding and his neck bristling as if he knew, too. But when he came to the water line and wanted to retreat, the slope of the bank and the weight of the wagon and Oded’s scolding would push him from behind and force him across.

  The hooves sank in the shallow water and generated precise mud roses. Their reflections shuddered, riding on drops of spreading nacre, and the wheels immediately rumbled and churned up the river. The dragonflies took off and the muscles of the horse’s big fragrant thighs were outlined under his skin as he strove to climb the opposite slope.

  The back wheels came out of the water, the thin waves were absorbed in the banks, the silt slowly sank. Like the flesh of a woman, the channel returned to its previous state, and not a single trace remained in it.

  For a few more minutes, thick brown drops streamed from the wheels to the dust and left clods and tears of mud in it, and Oded now shouted, “Whoa,” and stopped the horse at the railroad station, where they had once picked up Mother.

  “Let’s stop here and have something to eat,” said Moshe. “It’s not nice to come hungry to people.”

  Everyone got out of the wagon and stretched their legs. Naomi spread an old sheet on the grass. Rachel grazed on the side, tried to butt butterflies, ate flowers, and breathed sighs of satisfaction. Judith opened the basket and took out the egg sandwiches with green onion that smelled like a traveling family, and she was still turning out their exact copies years later, when everyone was older, and I had come into the world and would ride with them.

  We sat in the shade of the mighty eucalyptus trees of the station and ate.

  Rotten wooden sockets were piled up on the side. The railroad tracks had been pulled up and removed by then, had become rails for cattle pens and beams for building haystacks.

  The train that had brought Mother no longer travels here, and the nearby camp, where Italian prisoners of war were once interned, has now become a gigantic melon field, and remnants from a stone chimney of an old army kitchen are all that can still be seen there.

  I climbed the water tower of the station. In its days of glory it had launched steam locomotives, and now its walls were split and it had become a kingdom of lizards and owls. They looked at me with their round eyes, bowed and gurgled in a ridiculous ceremony of intimidation whose rules I didn’t understand. I used to crumble their dry vomit and the findings are still recorded in my old childhood notebook: “Field mouse skulls, lizard vertebrae, feathers of miserable sparrows.”

  From the treetops, crows watched us curiously, waiting for us to go and leave scraps. The bolder ones had already hopped onto the ground not far from us with their erect necks and their black eyes. I knew some of them, because they were among those who gathered in afternoon confabs on our eucalyptus tree, which, in those days, was still standing in the yard in its full power and height.

  IN UNCLE MENAHEM’S carob orchard, the fruit was already swollen and their green was pierced with brown, and in Uncle Menahem’s throat the vocal chords were already muted.

  “Hello, Zayde, how are you?” he wrote on a sheet of his notebook, pulled it out and handed it to me.

  “Fine, Uncle Menahem,” I took out the note I had written beforehand, as if I were also mute. I don’t know why, but I always called him “uncle,” even though I never called his brother “father.”

  Uncle Menahem’s whole body shook with inaudible laughter, and his hands stroked my head. I knew what he would do now. He took a big handkerchief out of his pocket, folded it sideways into a triangle, folded it again, point on point, turned it over and rolled it, and his fingers were already poking the tail of the handkerchief into its folds until a kind of cloth sausage remained in his hand. Then he released the ends and tied an imaginary knot of two ears on one side.

  “A mouse!” I exclaimed excitedly, and Uncle Menahem put the cloth mouse on his left wrist and with the quick fingers of his right hand, he made it jump into my face so suddenly it scared and delighted me every time as it had the first time.

  His springtime muteness was so complete that not even a shout, a laugh, a sigh, or a groan managed to escape from his throat. By now he knew how to prepare himself for the weeks of silence that were in store for him. As far as the farm was concerned, he gave his sons orders beforehand, like someone ruling his household, and ahead of time, he prepared the notebook he would use to communicate with anyone he needed. At the top of every page, in red ink, was the sentence, “I have lost my voice,” so that he wouldn’t have to apologize and explain.

  Time had made him so accustomed to his allergy that he started enjoying it and even looking forward to it. It was clear to him that during the spring silence, he worked better, had time to read, listen to music, immerse himself in smells and sights. A pleasant smile often illuminated his face, a sign of wonderful thoughts, the kind that relinquish the need to ride on words.

  A few weeks after Passover, Uncle Menahem’s voice returned to his throat. It was preceded by a sense of ripe fruit forming around his heart, but the return of speech itself was usually revealed to him in the middle of the day, when a thought he thought suddenly surprised him by being heard outside his skull, as if someone else had said it in a voice like his. Or in the morning, when the mirror said something to him in the middle of shaving. Or in the middle of the night, when he would turn over and wake up because he dreamed he heard himself talking in his sleep, and only when the words bounced back from Bathsheba’s back did he understand that he had really said them.

  He jumped up immediately and got dressed and ran to us through the fields, hoping that one of the hoors would come out of his wife’s jealous vision, put on skin and flesh, and chance on the way and he could talk to her and melt her flesh with words.

  “Moshe! Judith! Children!” he shouted as he came into our yard, and the words, which had been waiting for him all spring, flew out of his mouth in excited orbits, just like those swallows that fly and shriek at the height of their power and who never land.

  54 />
  RACHEL GREW UP and became a cow whose masculinity was unmistakable. Her muscular shoulders were unusually high and much broader than her rump, her udders were tiny, and the rose of hair on her forehead was lower than a calf’s and made her look like a hooligan. Her ways were the arrogant ways of a young, playful bull and embarrassed Moshe to the point of open disgust.

  “That’s not how a cow behaves,” he kept repeating.

  He kept talking about his intention to sell her to Globerman and whenever he said that, Judith would pretend he was talking on her deaf side, but a revealing cloud of anger darkened her forehead and her eyes.

  Uncle Menahem, who knew how much Judith’s soul was tied to the soul of her cow, and who, unlike his brother, recognized a person’s right to behave even in strange and amazing ways, suggested she consult his neighbor, Samson Bloch, the livestock expert I mentioned before.

  “Just don’t let him ask you his nonsense,” he said.

  The people of the Valley loved and appreciated Samson Bloch, but he infuriated them with his popular research on rutting seasons in cattle, which he accomplished by pestering the women of the Valley with intimate questions.

  “The professor at the university operates on a mouse to know what happens in a human being, and I ask the woman a few questions to know what the cow feels,” he explained.

  “A woman in love is not a cow in heat,” Bathsheba yelled at him one day.

  “A female is a female and a male is a male,” said Bloch. “Balls and ovaries, noise and turmoil. What difference does it make if they walk on four legs or on two? If they chew the cud in their belly or they chew the cud in their mind?”