by Meir Shalev
He took one look at Rachel and shook his head: “A waste of time.”
He brought out a measuring tape and measured her height and the length of her body, from the shoulder to the end of the tailbone and the hoof of her front leg.
“Exactly the same,” he said. “Look for yourself, Judith, the height is exactly the same as the length. Dos iz a tumtum. Nit a bik un nit a ku.”
“I want that cow,” she said. “And if she doesn’t give milk, Rabinovitch will sell her to Globerman.”
“That’s the fate of cows,” said Bloch. “How much milk can come out of this udder?”
“Even a little bit, that’ll help.”
“There’s only one way,” said Bloch. “To milk her and milk her and milk her until one day maybe something will come out of there. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.”
Judith went back home and started milking Rachel.
At first the cow complained, shook, and kicked. But Judith coaxed her with words and caresses until she gave in.
Rabinovitch, who saw her doing that and knew what was said, told her she was wasting her time and energy.
Globerman couldn’t help saying: “Maybe you’ll also milk the other calves, Lady Judith, they’ll love you for it a lot.”
“This cow I’ll milk until milk comes out of her udder and blood comes out of my fingers,” answered Judith. “And you won’t get her ever.”
55
On the window, on the window,
a pretty bird has come to stay.
A boy runs to the window—
the pretty bird, she flew away.
Cry, boy, cry,
a pretty bird did fly,
a boy runs to the window—
a pretty bird did fly.
IN THE BIG WOODEN CAGE hanging on the beam of the cowshed, Jacob’s beautiful canary struggled.
At first he sang faithfully and strong, but like hired wooers, he was ashamed and fell silent when he noticed that no one admired his singing. A few weeks later, his feathers started molting at an embarrassing rate. Judith opened the door of the cage for him and he flew off—annoyed, ashamed, and happy, as far as mixed feelings can nest in the heart of a bird—and returned to his master.
When Jacob saw the canary, he understood that love isn’t a matter for proxies, but for the person himself, and since he didn’t find in himself the boldness to appeal to Judith with words, he performed a deed. He went to the city, bought himself some yellow sheets of paper—“yellow is the color of love,” he replied to my question, amazed at my ignorance of such basic things—and cut them into squares of various sizes, which were quickly filled with words, turned into love notes, and piled up and buried in a locked drawer.
• • •
EVERY AFTERNOON, Mother indulged in a little nip, and immediately put her bottle of grappa back in its hiding place and went out to work.
Once she forgot, and Globerman, who always managed to come at the wrong time, peeped into the cowshed and saw the bottle on the table. He didn’t say anything, but on his next visit, he asked: “Maybe you’ll raise a glass with me sometime, Lady Judith?”
“Maybe,” she answered. “If you know when to come and how to behave.”
“Tomorrow at four in the afternoon,” said the dealer. “I’ll bring a bottle of liquor and I’ll know how to behave.”
At four, the familiar pounding was heard, and the green pickup truck was braked by the trunk of the eucalyptus.
Globerman, shaved and polished, without the rope and without the baston, in clothes and a hat that were surprisingly clean and made it hard to recognize him (“oysgeputzt,” was Jacob’s adjective), knocked at the door of the cowshed with a thin shiny stick and waited patiently and politely for it to be opened.
Judith, in that flowered dress, opened the door and the dealer wished her good day. His eyes and his shoes sparkled with excitement. The skin of his face and hands smelled of a delicate eau de cologne, roasted coffee, and chocolate. When he turned from the doorway, he entered and presented a green bottle on the table; next to it he put two thin balloon glasses and announced: “French cognac. And pettitt furs I brought you, Lady Judith, they go good with the liquor.”
They sat and drank the cognac, and for the first time, Judith was grateful to the cattle dealer, who changed from head to toe, drank moderately and in silence, and was wise enough not to make brutal and coarse statements and not to mention his desire for Rachel.
When he took his leave of her, he asked if he could come again the following week, and ever since, he would come every Tuesday with his liquor and his “pettitt furs,” would knock on the door of the cowshed, and wait until she invited him in.
“Maybe you’d like me to tell you stories?” he asked, certain she would agree.
“In every person, there’s something left from the time when he was a child,” he explained to me many years later. “And with that something, you can win him over. With men, it’s usually some toy, with women it’s a story, and with children themselves, you’ll be amazed, Zayde, it’s learning something, period.”
He told Judith about the women in his family, and how, “throughout all the generations,” the color of their eyes changes when they make love. “And that’s how the father knew when they had plucked his daughter’s flower and the husband knew when his wife had cheated on him.”
He told her about his youngest brother, who was fastidious and sensitive and so disgusted with dealing in meat that he threw up in their father’s butcher shop and in the end became a vegetarian.
“The intellectual of our family, shy and delicate like a flower, a chick, a poet!”
Ultimately, the young intellectual of the Globerman family went to study art in Paris, and once his friends got him drunk and put a girl in his bed to deliver him from his virginity and his melancholy. In the morning, when he felt the warmth of her skin and the soft pricking of her nipples and the ring of flesh tightening over his flesh, he fell in love with her even before he opened his eyes.
That day, the two of them got married in city hall, and it wasn’t until after the wedding that he discovered she was the youngest daughter of a butcher.
Globerman burst into a roar of laughter. “And today he’s not a vegetarian or an artist anymore. His love and her father made him into a pig butcher and a great expert in horsemeat sausages, because from fate and from blood and from inheritance, Lady Judith, nobody has yet managed to escape. And everybody who does escape, the Lord sends His big fish after him to catch him.”
“You tell me some story,” he asked after Mother didn’t say anything.
“I don’t have anything to tell you about, Globerman.”
“Everybody has a little peckele on his shoulders,” said Globerman. “Just tell me something small. Tell me about the fish that swallows you every night, Lady Judith—where does it take you? About your hands, tell me, Lady Judith, about your memory, about the beautiful line between your eyes, about something you left behind.”
“Here are my hands, Globerman,” said Mother, and suddenly stretched out her hands to him. “Let them tell you by themselves.”
Globerman held her hands. His heart fluttered. For the first time in many years, he felt fear flooding his heart.
“Where did you come from, Lady Judith?” he whispered.
“A nafka mina, Globerman,” Mother pulled her hands back. “Who cares.”
“And why here?”
“Because here the big fish vomited me out,” laughed Lady Judith.
RABINOVITCH JUST STARED at the wall of the cowshed and didn’t say a word. But Jacob, who didn’t hear these words but only the laughter rising from the window, was filled with a growing despair. One day, he lay in wait for Globerman in the field, and when the pickup truck appeared, he jumped in front of it and shouted loudly and bitterly: “Why do you take her away from me? You’ve got money and you’ve got meat and you’ve got women everyplace. Why?”
But the shout didn’t come out of him, it
just echoed in the chambers of his heart and strove upward, and Globerman, who miraculously succeeded in stopping the pickup truck about a foot away from the canary breeder who stood trembling in front of him, got out of the driver’s cabin and asked: “Have you gone nuts, Sheinfeld? Find better drivers to jump at like that.”
“Everything’s fine,” said Jacob, and ran away.
In the days that followed, his yellow notes started creeping out of their locked drawer. At first they dropped onto the floor, then they were stuck to the walls of his house, and then to the fence of his yard, and from there they spread over the whole village: tacked to the administration bulletin board, nailed to the wall of the dairy, tied to the electric pole with grafting straw, and impaled on tree trunks.
“Where I got courage for that, I don’t know,” he said.
He decided to turn his love into a matter for the whole village and he had no shame. His notes were seen everywhere, gleaming in their bold color and their shining words. The expression “on my bed at night” was said there, “deep as the sea” was whispered, “will my torments end” was shouted.
“Where did that ignoramus find such beautiful words?” sneered the Village Papish.
But Jacob wasn’t offended and one day he even came to the general assembly, and in the middle of a discussion about paving the access road to the village—in those days only the basalt path was there and the winter rains turned it into quicksand every year—he got up and started talking eagerly about the winding paths of his love, and amazingly he wasn’t called to order or expelled from the assembly.
In general, the village doesn’t need weighty reasons or professional opinions to decide that some member or other is an idiot or a lunatic. But for some reason, that wasn’t the case with Jacob. A gauze of a dream was woven in the scorched eyes of the farmers as he was talking, it rose and overflowed onto the rind of their cheeks. Their coarse fingers, whose skin was hardened by scythe handles and scarred by leaf blades of maize, drummed with sudden softness on the tables. Everyone wanted to imagine the victory of his love.
“Love, what?” the Village Papish shouted. “All of a sudden you’ve got something to wait for besides the rain, eh? First let him bring Rebecca back here!”
But Jacob drew valor and encouragement from the smiles and nods that started lighting up in the audience like small candles of pleasure, and in the following days he dared address the village bulletin, and started sailing over its pages a series of letters and articles whose titles were “To Judith” and whose lines were pleas and love.
He got up, rummaged in the drawer, and took out a note.
“And one day I burned all the notes,” he said. “Just this little one happened to be left. Look, Zayde, what beautiful words.”
A big X was hoisted over the note, and underneath, it said: “At sunset I shall wait for you at the field of anemones. Please don’t disappoint me this time.”
“Why the X?” I asked.
“In Russian that’s the letter for ‘ch,’ ” said Jacob. “Every time she didn’t come to a meeting, I put a ‘ch’ on top. Ch and another ch and another ch and another ch. In Russian, that’s the laughter of fate.”
Judith didn’t come, and one day, at five o’clock in the afternoon, Jacob came to her.
Judith was milking Rachel, and Jacob wanted to smile and tell her he had patience, and that he could wait, that the two of them could calm down and even enjoy the expectation. But as soon as Judith asked him what he wanted, his knees buckled like the knees of a condemned man, and he stumbled—“like an idiot,” he said—on the calves’ watering bucket, fell down, and hit his forehead on the corner of the trough.
The blow made a deep wound in his forehead, he blacked out for a minute, and his face was flooded with blood. Judith rushed to him, cleaned his forehead with her kerchief, and sprinkled cow sulfa on him, and before he knew if he had come to, his mouth was already wide open and frightening and painful words were rolling out of it.
“All of a sudden I told her all the dumbest things—that if I was a woman, I would be her. Like a stupid bastard I laid on the floor in all that blood, saying, I am you, Judith, I am you.”
56
AT THAT TIME, Naomi was about eleven years old, and understood what was going on. She asked Judith what she thought of Jacob and Judith said: “Nomele, Sheinfeld is a noodnik. Take a good look and don’t forget, because every woman needs to know what a noodnik looks like.”
“And who do you love best?” asked Naomi.
“You.” Judith smiled.
“No, Judith, which one of the three do you love the best? Father or Sheinfeld or Globerman?”
“Of the three of them, I love you and Rachel the best,” said Judith. “And now, Nomele, let me rest a little by myself.”
“I MISS THAT ‘NOMELE’ OF HERS,” Naomi told me. “I miss the smell of lemons from her hands, I miss a lot of other things of hers.”
I told Naomi what Jacob told me, and she said he was right, men don’t seek in their wives the mother or the daughter or the virgin or the whore “and not all the other nonsense written in books.”
“It’s their sister they seek,” she said. Their twin buried inside them, so close, so touching, so naked—and unattainable. “And you’re all so stupid.” She hugged me. “We’re the only ones dumber than you. That’s your good luck.”
“How will we end up, Naomi?” I asked.
“You men?”
“Us, me and you.”
She laughed. “The same thing: I’ll ask you what your name is, you’ll say ‘Zayde,’ I’ll understand that there’s a mistake here and I’ll go sleep with somebody else. That’s what’s happening to us now and that’s what will happen to us later on, too.”
Years before that, when I was seven or eight years old and Naomi and Meir were still living in their small first apartment, I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of their talking.
After a few minutes, there was silence, the door of their room opened, the wall of the corridor lit up, and Naomi came out of the room naked.
I saw her. She crossed the corridor, closed herself in the shower, and turned on the faucet, but her weeping was clear and lived above and below and within the sound of the flowing water.
Then she came back. The light from the bedroom shone obliquely on her naked body, from the hollow of her neck to the golden dune of her hip, it sliced and served me a gleaming triangle of her flesh.
I didn’t tell anyone about the eternal picture of mine, but a few years ago, when I asked Uncle Menahem what he thought about the search for the twin sister, he said there was some truth in that but there was nothing new in it, and the ancients had already said that. But things are much more complicated and become clear to us only when they’re no use anymore.
And the Village Papish snorted contemptuously and said that men are so ugly, that not one of them, at any rate he hopes, has a twin sister. And then he added that it’s only a lack of choice that makes those monkeys lovable to their mates.
And Globerman burst out laughing and said: “Well, Zayde, congratulations, that’s how it starts. First tales about a twin sister, then a hand job in front of the mirror, and finally maybe you’ll want to sit down on your own shmuck.”
AND JACOB, lying wounded and stunned on the filthy floor of the cowshed, looked at his love. In his excitement, he had forgotten that she was hard of hearing in her left ear and he interpreted the expression of amazement and concentration on her face as disgust with the blood pouring from his wound. He got up and fled to his house and there he burst through the door and shouted, “Rebecca, Rebecca, help me,” and only an echo replied from the empty hut and from the cold half of the bed and from the incubator, whose cases were filled with tiny dry chick carcasses.
Only then did he realize that it had been several days since he had seen his wife and he understood what the whole village already knew: that she had left him and he wouldn’t see her again.
He groped his way to the
trough, washed the sulfa and the coagulated blood from his eyebrows and his forehead and his eyes. Then he sat in front of his small shaving mirror, dipped a needle and thread in alcohol, clamped his jaw, and stitched together the torn lips of his wound.
The thread seared its way in the flesh, the edges of the wound shook until they were fastened to one another and tightened. The awful pain pierced Jacob’s brain, made his bones shudder, and poured a stream of tears from his eyes.
From now on, he decided, lying and shaking in his empty bed in his empty house, he would give up the exhausting stages of conversation, bouqets of flowers, embellishments, remonstrances, jests, and beautiful words, because he didn’t have any special talent for them anyway. From now on he would challenge Fate. He would grasp it by the horns, bend it to his will, or be gored to death.
• • •
“NOW I’M GONNA tell you something about Fate, Zayde. I’m gonna tell you something about Fate and you’re gonna eat and you’ll listen. Back home, there was a rich Jew who played with fate. His name was Haim, but everybody called him L’Haim, because he liked to make toasts banging glass against glass. Globerman used to raise a glass with your mother in a refined way, they’d clink the crystal and he’d say: ‘May Lady Judith’s ears also enjoy.’ But this Jew would bang it real hard, and then he’d lick the blood and wine off his own fingers and off the woman’s fingers until both of them together would melt with pleasure. A person like L’Haim I never saw in my life. One day he came to us in town, a Jew sixty years old, without a wife, with two carts and two children, and nobody knew who it was or what it was, where he came from or where he was going. Money he had like water and all his cases was full of silk and furs, and in a loud voice he announced so everybody should hear: ‘When I die, these children won’t be left to ask for charity. Each one of them is gonna have something to start life with.’ And so it happened what always happens, that family and money get mixed up—the children grew up and started waiting for L’Haim to die already and L’Haim started hating the children, and so much he hated them that he finally decided to stop working and to use up all his money to the very end of his life, so there wouldn’t be one red cent left for the children. That’s how it is, when somebody’s crazy, he can’t stop. All he can do is move his craziness in another direction, but crazy he’ll stay. He sold his big house and his most beautiful furniture, and for himself he left only one little house and two horses to go from place to place and one maid, and he figured he had another seventeen years left to live, and he figured out how much he’d need for clothes to wear and food to eat: so many pounds of meat, so many pounds of flour and salt and sugar, and so many quarts of liquor and so much wood for heating, and so many crystal glasses to drink a toast with more women and to cut more fingers. And he was so precise he even figured the secret charity a Jew should give, and the tithe for the rabbi, and Sabbath and holiday feasts, and from the seventeen years he had left, he remembered to subtract the food for the Fast of Gedalia and Yom Kippur, and Ten Teveth and Ta’anit Esther, and Seventeen Tamuz and Tesha B’Av, and since he was a firstborn son, he also had to fast on the eve of Passover. You never even heard of all those little fasts, Zayde? All that together was seven fasts times seventeen years, altogether take away a hundred and nineteen days of eating, and that’s also quite a bit of money and a little more life. And how many bars of soap he’ll need and all kinds of other little things, ’cause here and there sometimes a button falls off a garment and rolls God knows where and you’ve got to buy a new one ’cause no matter how hard you look for it, it don’t help. And he also figured out how much it would cost him to feed the horses, and he left enough money to buy new horses after he’ll send the old ones to be skinned, and even snuff and milk for the cat and seeds for the bird L’Haim took into account. And then, when the children understood he was serious, they started hollering: Father is stealing our inheritance! And they went to the rabbi, but the rabbi said: There’s nothing to do. A man’s money is his own and his will is to be respected. The sons said: And what if Father lives longer than the money and will be old and won’t have anything and will fall on our shoulders? And L’Haim said: I won’t live long. With me, everything is numbered and measured, when the money runs out, I’m gonna die, and when I die, the money’s gonna run out. And to make doubly sure, he went and ordered himself a big hourglass in the city of Makarov, with the amount of sand and the width of the hole for seventeen years on the dot. I remember how they brought that hourglass on a wagon, upside down and tied to boards and wrapped in cotton. They put it in the yard and L’Haim saw that everybody already came to see, and then he lifted up his hand and he brought it down and he shouted, ‘Itzt, now!’ and two special men turned the hourglass over so everybody would see how the time started running to the end of L’Haim. ’Cause that’s what’s beautiful about an hourglass, that it don’t measure the time of the world. It measures its own time and ain’t interested in what happened before and what’s gonna happen after. And so many people came to look and he talked so much and was so proud of the accounts of his life and of his hourglass and of all the money he left for himself, and he told how before the end he’s gonna sit next to the hourglass and watch the last grains of his soul leaving his body, until all around that’s the only thing people were talking about. And one evening, nine months and one week after L’Haim stopped working, he was sitting on his money box and eating his herring and smiling at his sand, and all of a sudden, two robbers came into his house and broke his head in one blow with an iron pole, and they broke the hourglass with one blow, too, and all the money they took with one blow, too. And so everybody saw that L’Haim was right. His time and his money and his life all ran out in the same moment, and as L’Haim himself said, nothing was left for his sons after him. ’Cause when Fate decides to take a hand in some game, Zayde, even if you made up that game, then he sets all the laws and all the rules. And Fate and Luck and Chance, you should know, Zayde, they’re not where people look for them, in cards and dice, not at all! I’m telling you, Zayde, they’re in life itself. And that’s why I’m also telling you: never ever play cards or dice! Only chess you play, ’cause we’ve got enough dice in life when somebody else is throwing and we’ve got to make a move. And enough in life there’s somebody else shuffling the cards for us. So you don’t need that in games, too.”