The Loves of Judith

by Meir Shalev

  Now the other door of the oven was opened and this time a smell of baked strudel rose from it. For half an hour it had been tormenting my ability to pay attention, and now it burst in on the tunnels of my nose and entangled my senses.

  Jacob stuck a toothpick in the crisp crust, took it out, licked it, and chuckled with satisfaction. Then he pulled the pan and with unexpected expertise separated the cake from it with a thin strong wire, and slid it onto a metal rack.

  A wonderful smell of flaming rum and burnt sugar and lemon rind and apples and raisins rose from it.

  “You see,” said Jacob, “cake you cool on a rack and not in a pan, and then it don’t stay wet underneath like a rag.”

  “How do you know those things?” I asked.

  “There was my worker here and he taught me all I need.”

  A new tone, of false teeth, rose from his jaw. He poured the two of us a strong and very clear drink that tasted of pears. And then he said he was tired, that I shouldn’t touch the dishes. “Tomorrow, the cleaning woman will come, Zayde, and she’ll do everything.”

  He lay down, almost dropped onto the bed.

  “What are you thinking about, Jacob?” I asked.

  “About a wedding.” His voice shook. “About making matches. Of food and digestion, and of flesh and soul. It’s harder to make a match between the body and the soul than between a man and a woman. From a match like that, even to get excited is impossible. Only to commit suicide it’s possible, but what good is that then? Body and soul have to know how to grow together, to get old together, and then they’re like two poor old birds in the same cage, and neither one of them’s got any strength in his wings. The body is already weak and falls. The soul already forgets and regrets, and to run away from each other is also impossible. Well, the only thing left then is knowing how to forgive. That’s the wisdom that’s left after all the rest of the wise things are finished: knowing how to forgive each other. If not to forgive another person, at least to forgive yourself.”

  He groaned and fell silent. I sat on the chair next to him and didn’t know whether to go on talking or not.

  Jacob lay on his back with one hand crooked behind his neck. To my amazement, the other hand suddenly crept into his pants, at a depth that couldn’t be mistaken. When he noticed my embarrassed look, he pulled it out, but a few minutes later, the hand sneaked back into its nest as though it were placed there on its own.

  The two of us felt uneasy and finally Jacob said: “Look here, Zayde, this is how it’s comfortable for me to lay, and please don’t be offended, that’s how we hold and comfort each other. Both of us are soft and old now and enjoy memories. How many friends does a man still have left at this age?”

  And the two of us laughed.

  • • •

  “LOOK AT HER,” he said after he had fallen asleep for a few minutes and had woken up when I stood. “Sometimes I look at that beautiful picture and I don’t remember who it is. Her smell isn’t on the sheets anymore and the touch of her skin isn’t on my skin anymore, and her memory isn’t in the heart or the head. If I say to myself Rebecca Schwartz or Rebecca Sheinfeld, I immediately correct myself—Rebecca Green. Everything she wanted he did for her, that Englishman Green. He took her away, he brought her back, he bought her this house, and right away he died, ’cause she wanted to stay alone. In England, he was a great figure, really half a lord, but in this story, he was like a small extra from the theater. His part ends and he goes off without complaints. In a play, you’ve got one part. A little one or a big one. But in life you get to be in a lot of plays and you’ve got a lot of parts. If somebody did a play about the life of the Village Papish or about Rabinovitch, I’d have a very small part in it, but if somebody made a play about the life of your mother, there I’d have a bigger part, eh? And you can have one starring part, the big part in the play about your own life. Never, Zayde, don’t let nobody ever take the main part in the play of your life, like I did.”

  “HOW DID HE LIVE with her? After he gave her up back then?” I wondered. “I don’t understand that.”

  “I can’t hear,” yelled Oded into the roar of the motor. “What did you say, Zayde?”

  And after I shouted, too, he laughed. “Don’t be a baby, what’s wrong with that? What did he have left after the canaries went and after your mother didn’t want him? In a house in Tivon, there was a beautiful room waiting for him, and good food, and the clothes of her English husband that fit him to a T, and a cleaning woman cleans his room, and a nursemaid wipes his ass, and a taxi takes him whenever he wants to sit at our bus stop, and the driver waits for him until he finishes sitting there and saying come in come in, and in the kitchen he’s got a beautiful picture of his wife, and next to his bed he’s got a beautiful picture of your mother. So what doesn’t he have?”

  “And Rebecca agreed to all that?” I said. “That he loves another woman?”

  “Loves another woman, so what?” shouted Oded. “Let him love whoever he wants to. That one’s dead and this one’s alive. It doesn’t matter who he loves, the main thing is who he’s with.”

  He killed the motor. A big, tormented gasp blurted out, and a big lizard of silence crept in its wake.

  “When you see the end coming close you start thinking different,” Oded bisected that silence with his shout.

  But Jacob didn’t see the end coming close and didn’t start thinking different, and the love didn’t fade from his body or from his soul.

  “Now, at long last, they feel good together,” he told me, his hand moving slowly in his pants, doing good and forgiving, examining and consoling. “Now the soul and the body know each other real good. I know where it hurts and it knows where I hurt.”

  60

  EVERY DAY HE GOT UP early for his birds, changed the water and the bottom of the cages, prepared the mixtures of greens and fruits, the sesame seeds and the beets, the egg yolks and shells, gave poppies to the nervous ones, hashish to the gloomy ones, and honey to the hoarse ones.

  “Should I tell you something?” he said to me. “I didn’t like their singing very much. Outside there are birds that sing much much better than them.”

  It was the routine of the work that he liked, and the loneliness and the serenity, and every day he went out to his wooing and his yellow notes, which he continued to hang on every corner of the village.

  And since the notes were visible and their color stood out and attracted, and their words were clear and open, the villagers would study them and express their opinion, and they soon started hanging their own notes on the village bulletin board: anonymous sheets torn out of notebooks, fragrant wrapping paper for oranges, thick strips ripped from powdered milk sacks by hands that wanted to write and speak. First about Jacob’s love for Judith, and then about love in general.

  Ultimately, the committee put up another board next to the old one because that one was loaded with so much nonsense and clichés that the various announcements of the secretary, the film projectionist, the sower, and the education committee disappeared among them.

  The new board was devoted solely to the issue of Jacob and Judith, and you could always see people near it, arguing, laughing, exchanging opinions and truths about love, and sighing.

  And one evening the Village Papish went into Rabinovitch’s cowshed and said to Judith: “You don’t have to give in to him, all you have to do is show up for one date, you’ll chat a little bit, explain to him whatever you have to, like a decent woman should do in such cases.”

  Judith was quick to turn her deaf ear to him, but the words “decent woman” got around her, surrounded her head, and burst into her consciousness from the good ear.

  The blood rushed from her face. “I am a decent woman,” she said furiously. “It’s not my fault that that man is crazy. I am a decent woman. Did I ask for that love of his? Did I separate him from his wife?”

  “About such things, Judith, you don’t talk logically,” the Village Papish answered her. “Because now it’s only a
matter of good manners, but in another two weeks, God forbid, it will be a matter of saving a life.”

  • • •

  “STOP PESTERING Judith, Sheinfeld,” Moshe Rabinovitch warned Jacob. “She came to work here and not for your craziness.”

  The articles in the leaflet and the announcements on the board didn’t bother him. But the yellow notes swooped down on him from every corner and pierced his eyes. His heavy fists clenched and his forehead shook and wrinkled.

  One day such a note appeared nailed to the big eucalyptus tree in the yard, and Moshe didn’t even bother to read it. Its place and its color were enough for him. He tore it down and ran to Jacob’s canary house, pounded the door with his short, thick hands, and it was torn off its hinges and knocked down.

  The canaries were startled. They started fluttering and struggling in the cages. Feathers and shrieks flew and Jacob looked back at Moshe with pure and innocent eyes and said to him: “Stand quietly, Rabinovitch. You’re scaring the poor birds.”

  Moshe was amazed and stood still and didn’t say a word. Jacob calmed the canaries, and since he knew that the shouts would make them hoarse, he started preparing the appeasing mixture of lemon juice and honey for them. Moshe was embarrassed and hurried to repair the hinges of the door, and after he left, Jacob bathed and shaved, changed his clothes, and went out for another one of those meetings in the field that Judith didn’t come to and they all ended with “ch.”

  61

  THAT WHOLE TIME, despite Rachel, and in spite of the harsh words exchanged in the field, Judith and the livestock dealer went on meeting once a week for an hour or two of sitting and drinking together.

  The bottle of liquor and the glasses Globerman left in the cowshed, and once, when Judith told him that she didn’t drink from that bottle except when he was there, his heart was filled with unexpected delight.

  “That’s our bottle,” he said in a soft voice. “Just for the two of us. Here’s to us, Lady Judith.”

  “To us, Globerman,” she said.

  “You want me to tell you some tale about my father?”

  “Tell me about whoever you want to.”

  “Everything I know I learned from my father,” declared the dealer. “And mainly the most important rule for a fleysh handler is that principles and livelihood you mustn’t put in the same drawer.”

  “I already noticed that, Globerman,” said Judith.

  “To buy a cow I learned from him, to check, to haggle, to cheat, and to win. When I was ten years old, he used to send me to sleep in the owner’s cowshed, to see that he didn’t give the cow salt so she’d drink a lot before the weighing, and to watch that he didn’t make money from her shit. You know how they make money from shit, Lady Judith? The night before the weighing, they give the cow something for constipation and so all the shit stays in her belly and is weighed like meat.”

  Globerman senior would buy cattle from the Arabs of Kastina and Gaza.

  “He was a great dealer. He sold to the Turkish army and then to the English, too. Every time he would buy twenty, thirty head from the sheikh from Gaza, pay him a few pennies in advance, and the rest, he would tell the sheikh, he would give him when every cow arrived safely. That sheikh had a stupid herder, and he would bring the cows from Gaza to Jaffa, walking with them along the shore. Every time with five cows in case, God forbid, robbers or wild animals or a flood would come, the whole herd wouldn’t be lost.”

  When the first group of cows came, Globerman senior received the herder with great honor, served him food and drink, and took care to put a small chilled bottle of Lebanese arak aside.

  “What’s that? The herder wondered, running a knowing and delighted finger over the tiny dew drops thickening on the side of the bottle.

  “Cold water,” said Globerman senior, who was familiar with the prohibitions of his guest’s religion and the weakness of his faith.

  He poured him a generous drink, and the herder swallowed it and almost choked on the flame and the sharpness.

  “Good water,” he groaned with pleasure.

  “From our well,” said Globerman senior.

  “A good well,” said the herder.

  “May you be healthy.” Globerman senior touched his forehead. “Ashrab, drink some more, ya-sahab, you’re thirsty from the road.”

  He tossed slivers of ice into the liquor glasses, he served olives, peeled cucumbers, and fresh bunches of parsley stems, he speared and roasted pieces of meat on a canoon of coals made of sour orange wood, and when the two of them finished eating and drinking and groaning from the good taste of the water, Globerman senior took a sooty firebrand and scratched five vertical lines on the wall of the butcher shop and a horizontal line going through them all.

  “Those are the five cows you brought today, habibi,” he said to the herder. “Now go and come back with five more, and we’ll eat some more meat together and we’ll drink some more good water from the well together, and we’ll write another five lines here on the wall. And so you’ll bring all the cows here and on the last round, the lord sheikh will also come, and see with his own eyes and make the account himself.”

  They dipped their hands in ashes and stamped their signs on the wall to confirm the group of cows, and the herder parted from his host with words of gratitude and peace, treated himself to one last sip of water before he set out, and returned to his city.

  A week later, he came with the second group. Once again he ate and drank his fill, and once again Globerman senior made five charcoal lines on the wall of the butcher shop and the two of them confirmed the group by stamping their handprints.

  With the last five cows, the sheikh who owned the herd also came to get his money and discovered—here the dealer thumped his boot with his stick and cackled a choking laugh—“and discovered something awful.”

  “Well, you tell me, Lady Judith.” He winked. “What did he discover?”

  “What?”

  “He discovered that that week, Father plastered the butcher shop.… Three layers of whitewash over the signs and over the stamps and over everything, and now go and argue with somebody who was born on the butcher block about how many cows he got.” Globerman roared with laughter.

  Judith sipped from her glass and smiled. She untied the blue kerchief and her hair dropped onto her shoulders.

  Outside, the afternoon wind began blowing. The rustle of the eucalyptus grew stronger and the dealer knew that in a little while, Lady Judith would get up and say: “Well, Globerman, it’s now half an hour to five and I’ve got to go to work.” He stood up, put on his hat, and touched the fingers of his right hand to its brim in farewell.

  “I better go now, and that way you won’t have to throw me out afterward,” he said. “And another story I’ll tell you next time.”

  He went out into the yard, glad that he had succeeded in having a conversation without saying “period” even once, and he shouted, “Oded, Oded!” so the boy would come and maneuver his pickup truck out of the yard for him.

  “If it wasn’t for our eucalyptus tree, he would have gone straight into Papish’s geese,” said Naomi. “Look how many marks he left on it.”

  When I look at the scarred stump that was once a tree—crows nested in its crest and Oded built himself a house and Jacob stuck love notes on it and the dealer’s pickup truck braked at its flesh and Moshe sits on it today and straightens nails—my imagination makes its lopped-off past flourish. The branches bloom again, thicken and split, the foliage rustles again, the branches grow long, and I already hear the premonition of that cracking, and bend my neck and wait for the smash of the break, the roar of the fall, the dread of the blow, and nothing shakes me out of my dream and wakes me from her death.

  It would have been good if he had uprooted that stump from its place and burned it, so it wouldn’t stand here like a tombstone. But Moshe loves the lopped-off trunk, a memorial to his vengeance, as he loves his rock, the testimony to his strength. Sometimes he goes to the rock and taps it with
the affection of old-time foes, and on autumn days and in late summer, when a cool afternoon wind comes down from Mount Carmel and blows in the open haystack, he comes to the eucalyptus stump, with a strong hand he rips off every new branch and growth from the edges of the cut, and once again he tells the eucalyptus that this is its punishment: “To die you won’t die, and to bloom you won’t bloom.”

  Then he sits down on the trunk and starts working. His wooden board is on his lap and on it is a pile of crooked nails. A pile of straightened nails quickly rises next to it, and as the one declines, the other grows.

  He is an old man. He’s short of breath and his face is always red, as with an invisible effort. Senescence distorts his lips and makes him look like a child who can’t understand the world. But yearning for his braid still fills his heart and his awful strength still bubbles in the muscles of his arms, and even though I have known him for many years now, I still find it hard to believe my eyes when I see him straightening nails between his thick fingers as if they were metal wires.

  “It calms him,” says Oded.

  After Rabinovitch finishes the job of straightening, he polishes the nails with sea sand and used motor oil. When they shine new and gleaming, a smile of pleasure rises to his face.

  He was always fond of sparkling things, that’s what Uncle Menahem told me, and when he was a little girl, he would modestly raise the hem of the frock his mother dressed him in, kneel down, and insert nails in the wooden floor of the house with precise hammer blows.