by Meir Shalev
The mother, who feared for the floor, but knew that little girls have longings that mustn’t be dammed, scratched a square on the floor of the kitchen, a yard square, and allowed Moshe to pound his nails only there. Within a few weeks, the whole area was filled with dense nail heads that were polished until they gleamed and were smooth as glass.
“Moshe was a very nice little girl,” Uncle Menahem concluded that story about his brother. “And a boy who was a girl and wore a dress and had a braid, will beat every other boy in every contest of love.”
62
ONE DAY, Aunt Bathsheba came striding up vigorously from the fields, her face white from rage and her body black from her dress. The sight was so bold and bizarre that no sooner had people peeped out of the windows than they came out of the houses and followed her.
“What happened?” Moshe rushed to his sister-in-law. “What’s that dress?”
“That’s a widow’s dress,” Aunt Bathsheba announced. “You don’t see? Menahem died and I’m a widow.”
“What do you mean, died?” yelled Moshe. “What are you prattling about? Lunatic!”
With a fearful heart, he climbed up onto the horse’s back and galloped to the next village. His brother, safe and sound, came out to meet him, wiped the horse, made sure he didn’t drink too much, and poured some water for Moshe, too. Then he told him that he did indeed sometimes cheat on his wife, but despite her jealousy, suspiciousness, and sleuthing, Bathsheba never managed to catch him in the act.
“That was a mistake on my part,” said Menahem. “I should have given her a chance to catch me once with a ‘hoor’ or two and she would have calmed down. If a woman has only suspicions and no proof, she just goes crazy.”
One day Bathsheba questioned him until he broke down and admitted that he had a “hoor” from time to time.
“Where?” asked Bathsheba.
“In my dreams,” said Menahem, and burst out laughing.
He thought that she’d laugh, too, because dreams are a legitimate and acceptable haven and even tyrants don’t impose their rule over them, but Bathsheba set up such a ruckus that Menahem’s soul revolted against her and her jealousy. This time he took an unexpected act of revenge against the force of her gall: he started meeting with his “hoors” in the most annoying place—in her own dreams.
“You didn’t leave me any choice.” He smiled when she accused him of that. “If you’d let me meet them in my own dreams, we’d get out of yours.”
“Absolutely not,” said Bathsheba, and in the following days she discovered that her dreams were starting to invent for her husband not only places to meet, but also new “hoors” to satisfy his passions.
She tried to stay awake, but then her defiant husband expanded the scope of his activity and also started cheating on her in daydreams, too. And this time—she saw it clearly, for daydreams are illuminated by daylight—Menahem was also making love with Shoshana Bloch, one of the only women she had never suspected.
“I saw you with Bloch’s ‘hoor’!” she yelled.
“Maybe you’ll describe to me what we were doing.” Menahem was astounded, and when Bathsheba took a deep breath and opened her mouth wide, Menahem put a gentle hand on it and blocked it and requested: “But very slow, so I’ll enjoy it, too.”
Bathsheba went outside, looked directly at the sun, and blinked a few times, and since she couldn’t get the adulterous couple out of her eyes even like that, she rode on the bus with them to Haifa, went into Kupershtok’s clothing shop, and asked for a black dress.
“When did your husband pass away?” asked the salesman, sympathizing with her grief.
“He didn’t pass away, I’m passing away from him,” said Bathsheba.
“I don’t understand,” said the salesman.
“For me he’s dead and I want a widow’s dress!” declared Bathsheba. “What don’t you understand?”
The dress fit her very well and gave her great pleasure. She returned on the three o’clock bus, got off in the center of the village, made sure to show off her black to everyone, and after a long walk and a stop at every one of the neighbors’ houses, she reached her husband’s carob orchard.
Menahem, still emanating the revealing smells of the semen of his trees, was pruning dry branches on one of the treetops, and suddenly noticed his widow standing under the tree.
She raised her eyes to him, twirled around, and asked venomously: “It suits me?”
“Very well,” smiled Menahem.
Suddenly he was filled with lust for that handsome widow, who was wrapped in black and rage. He came down from the tree, yearning to bend over, roll up her skirt, and spread and kiss the white thighs on her dark dress.
But Bathsheba retreated and started shouting.
“For me you’re dead,” she shrieked. “You and all your ‘hoors.’ And now everybody will see me with this dress and know that that’s it, that there is no more Menahem. Menahem died and his wife is a widow!”
That’s what she shouted and she kept it up all day long, and continued following him around and shouting in the house, too, and Jacob, who was enclosed in his own affairs of the heart and didn’t know any of that, came to Menahem that week of all times, because he wanted to consult with him about Judith, and he also saw her storming around in her yard.
“What happened?” He was frightened.
“He died!” shouted Bathsheba. “You don’t understand what it is when somebody dies? You don’t know when a woman wears black?”
But the late lamented peeped out the window and beckoned to Jacob to meet him in the haystack.
“What do you think about her?” he asked.
“Maybe I’ll come another time?” Jacob apologized.
“No, no,” said Menahem. “Now is a good time for problems of love.”
Jacob described all his efforts and struggles, showed him some of his notes, and complained about Judith meeting Globerman, listening to his stories, and drinking cognac with him.
Menahem laughed, then he became glum, and finally grew impatient.
“You’re concerned with trivialities, Sheinfeld,” he told his guest. “That’s love? A few tsetelakh and a few faygelakh? Listen carefully to what I’m telling you, listen and remember because I won’t talk anymore: for a great love, only great plans help, a great love is influenced only by great things. And now, excuse me, Sheinfeld, my wife is mourning for me and I have to go and console her.”
63
A LONG TIME has passed since those days. Many of the deeds that were done and the feelings that were felt back then in the streets of the village have been forgotten by now. Jacob’s scar, burning in his forehead like a scarlet thread, turned pale with the years. Apparently the stitches worked well and the scar is visible only when memories flush Jacob’s face and it stands out with its pallor.
One way or another, Jacob decided to do something great. One blazing hot day in late summer 1937, at twilight, the canaries were heard singing excitedly and very loud, and by the time the people caught on that it wasn’t coming from inside the breeding house but outside it, the singing had already moved across the village.
Everyone hurried out of the houses and saw that Jacob Sheinfeld had hitched the wagon, loaded four big cages full of canaries on it, and was heading for Rabinovitch’s yard.
One by one, the people moved out and accompanied him with a silent procession that grew as it went along the street.
Jacob drove the horse to the cowshed and called out: “Judith!”
A late summer twilight, hot and dusty, stood in the air. This was the season when the first pomegranates swell up and burst with longing. This is the time when the turtledove drips the beads of his voice from the gloom of the cypress. In the top of the eucalyptus, the crows gathered for their daily meeting. In the cowshed, Judith was washing the jugs and Moshe Rabinovitch was stacking fodder in the troughs for the evening milking.
“He’s coming to you,” he said to her.
Judith didn’t answe
r.
“Go out to him. I don’t want that leech here!”
Naomi says he was jealous of my mother, but I think Rabinovitch loathed Jacob’s wooing and couldn’t stand that persistent cloying sweetness anymore.
He felt anger and weariness and knew that if he went out to Jacob or if Jacob came into the cowshed, the whole thing would end badly.
Judith straightened up over the bucket of disinfectant, took the blue kerchief off her head, wiped her forehead and her hands with it, and went out of the cowshed.
“What do you want?” she shouted. “What do you want from me and what do you want from your poor birds?”
And then the deed was done that will never be forgotten, and the best proof of it is that even people who didn’t witness it remember it well.
Jacob took hold of the rope that was cleverly tied to the locks of all four cages, and raised his hand.
“This is for you, Judith!” he shouted.
He pulled the rope and the four doors gaped open all at once.
Judith was amazed.
Moshe, on the other side of the cowshed wall, was also amazed.
Jacob, who hadn’t believed he would do it until that very minute, was amazed, too.
Silence reigned. The people fell mute as they always do in the presence of a great deed of renunciation and sacrifice. House pets and wild animals fell mute because the border between freedom and captivity was violated. And the wind fell silent all at once, as if to clear the way for the yellow wings that would soon fly off.
The canaries, who had indeed imagined that something great was going to happen from the moment their cages were loaded onto the wagon, were also stunned and stopped singing. But they immediately recovered, and when Jacob repeated his shout, “That’s for you, Judith!” the silence that closed over his words was broken by the exultant yellow flapping of a thousand wings soaring to freedom.
The escorts all groaned in unison, and Judith, deceived and angry, felt as if a strange and bold fist were shriveling her heart.
“Now you won’t have any more canaries, Jacob,” she said. “Too bad.”
Jacob got out of the wagon and went to her.
“I’ll have you,” he said.
“No you won’t,” she took a step back.
“Yes I will,” said Jacob. “You just now called me Jacob, for the first time.”
“You’re wrong, Sheinfeld,” said Judith emphatically.
But Jacob was right. That was the first time she had called him “Jacob” and not “Sheinfeld,” and the taste of his name in her mouth was like the taste of the bitter almond—sudden and annoying.
“It’s you who are making a mistake,” said Jacob, shaking and knowing that the whole village was looking and listening. “After the poor birds, I don’t have anything greater to give you, all I’ve got left is my soul.”
“Your soul I don’t want, either.”
And she turned and went back to the cowshed, and Jacob, who knew her ways and knew she wouldn’t come out again, held the horse by his bridle, turned the empty wagon around, and went back home.
INSIDE THE COWSHED, Moshe Rabinovitch stopped milking, straightened up, and leaned against the wall.
“Well, Judith,” he said at last. “So now maybe you’ll agree to meet with him once.”
“Why?” she asked, surprised.
“Because after that, all he can do now is commit suicide. What’s left of a person who gave honor and work and property and everything for love? He didn’t keep anything on the side for himself.”
Even though he didn’t know it, he spoke from the sympathy that only two men competing for the heart of one woman can have for one another, and a slight nausea climbed into Judith’s throat.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “Someone who really loves a woman doesn’t commit suicide for her. Suicides love only themselves.”
“How many men do you know who would do what he did for a woman?” asked Moshe.
“And how many women do you know who want such martyrs?” asked Judith. “And how many women do you know at all, Rabinovitch? And since when did you become such a maven? And why do you poke your nose in it? I’m only your worker. What you’ve got to say, you say only about the milk I milk and the food I cook. That’s all.”
Outside, the people were still standing around crowded together, and it took a while until they started scattering in a funereal silence. The murmuring died down. The dust settled. A feeling of impending disaster stood in the air.
64
WHEN I WAS A BOY,” Oded told me, “Father used to sit at night and polish brown pennies until they gleamed like gold coins, and I was scared the crows would go crazy and break the windows to steal them. I’m amazed you didn’t find a coin like that in their nests to this day.”
“They don’t hide sparkly things in nests,” I said. “They bury them in the ground.”
Oded’s left arm, the more suntanned arm, is lying on the rim of the steering wheel. His right hand dances between the gearshift and all sorts of buttons and handles, and now and then it rises in the air to explain or to emphasize something.
His face is flushed, the gray undershirt is stuck to the potbelly that settles in folds as he sits. His sandaled hairless feet are on the wooden pedals.
“For the wheel of the old Mack, you had to have arms of steel. Now, with power steering and the hydraulic seat and the retarder and the half automatic and all those luxuries, the only exercise I get is smacking the alarm clock every night,” he told me, and burst out laughing.
“I told Dinah once, ‘Come on, let’s go to America and we’ll take a horse of a semitrailer, without the wagon, the biggest Peterbilt horse, with a cabin that sleeps two and a refrigerator and a fan and a radio and a shower and whatever gimmicks they’ve got.’ That horse, when you release it from the trailer, it just sings aloud, it’s the best, most comfortable, strongest car in the world. And to tour America with it, Zayde, to look at the scenery from on high—what could be better? Mile after mile passes by, forests and desert and fields and mountains, and when you measure in miles instead of kilometers, the whole thing looks altogether different. A mile is a mile and a kilometer is a kilometer. All you’ve got to do is hear those words, ‘mile’ and ‘kilometer,’ to understand the difference between them. ’Cause what can a driver do here? Transport a little milk and a few eggplants and eggs and peppers, maximum from the Jezreel Valley to Jerusalem, like a grocery store errand boy with a bike and a carton. It’s lucky they still call me from the army sometimes to tow a few tanks in the reserves, from Sinai to the Golan and from the Golan to Sinai, that’s maybe getting close to something. Not that I look down on it, God forbid, but in this country, a semitrailer can’t make a U-turn, you’ve got to do a little in reverse not to cross the border. And over there, an endless country, big, wide, not stingy with anything. Over there when they say ‘the Grand Canyon,’ it is a canyon and it is grand, and not like where they took us once, an outing of village kids to the end of the Negev near Eilat, and a whole day we walked in the sun to see a canyon, and in the end that whole canyon was just like the crack of an ass—small and red. Over there a canyon is a canyon and a mountain is a mountain and a river is a river. Like the Mississippi, for instance, is really a sea. You know how to spell Mississippi, well, just look at you, Zayde, a brain from the university, getting along with all the p’s and s’s.… So, listen, Zayde, there’s a little song—m-i-s, s-i-s, s-i-p-p-i—somebody taught it to me, some girl, a hitchhiker I once picked up, a tourist from America. And over there when you go with a truck into a gas station, you’ve got good food and clean bathrooms, and music, and they fill up your coffee cup when you finish it, a refill they call it. I saw that once in some movie—a driver is sitting at the counter in a gas station, stretching his legs in his boots, drinking his coffee, the waitress comes, a real woman, not some dumb kid, a woman who has learned something from her life, with white shoes like a nurse and a little apron, and when he’s at about a fourth of the cup, sh
e asks, listen, Zayde, what she says: ‘Would you like a refill, sir?’ Not like here, where they’re so stingy about everything and give you a cup of mud coffee, and a wet sandwich with a carcass of a tomato inside and the bathroom is full of drek and the paper you’ve got to bring yourself. Because who needs a bathroom in a gas station here? Wherever you go, wherever you are—you’re always a pee away from home.”
A white vapor and a good smell of warmed resin rose from the pine grove on the flanks of the mountain. The sun climbed up. The big truck slid down the slope of the road, turned left at the top, and after a short climb it turned and all at once the Valley seemed to be spread out under its wheels.
Oded filled his chest with air, turned his face to me, and smiled. “Every time I visit her in Jerusalem, Naomi asks me about this moment, when you come out of Wadi Milek. You go up to the left and turn right and suddenly the valley opens up. Here’s Givot Zayid, here’s Kfar Joshua, Beit Sha’arim, and there’s Nahalal, in the distance Givat Moreh. The Valley. Then she asks me and I say to her, ‘Do you miss it, sister? Just tell me and I’ll come take you back home.’ And you should see Meir’s face when I tell her that.”
From the heights of the cabin lies the land of Naomi’s regrets stretched out as far as the eye can see, to the blue walls of the distant mountains. In the checkered fields a big oak tree stands out here and there, souvenirs of the glorious forest that used to be here.
“You know very well that I and your mother weren’t friends. But about Meir we were in full agreement,” he said.
We crossed the indolent channel of the Kishon, went through Sadeh Ya’akov, turned right, and climbed with a loud groan to Ramat-Ishai, which Oded still called Jeida. We went down and we went up and near the old British police station, Oded told me for the eightieth time about the exploits of Sergeant Shvili, who used to wander around among the Arab villages with the Kurbatch and make order.