The Loves of Judith

by Meir Shalev

  “You’ll write about all those things, Zayde,” he shouted. “Otherwise, why am I telling you all that? You’ll remember and you’ll write.”

  65

  THEY’LL ALL DIE IN THE END,” said the Village Papish. “Those spoiled housebirds don’t know what weather is.”

  But Jacob Sheinfeld’s released canaries endured sun and wind, rain and hail with surprising valor.

  They dined on thistle seeds and on the offal in the troughs, nested on every tree, and didn’t recoil from owls, cats, or hawks. And those creatures did bring down starlings and titmice, but Jacob’s canaries they didn’t attack. Now the canaries were seen on every pole and every roof in the village, and at the end of winter, they started mating with the gold finches and the green finches, and the bandooks they gave birth to also caught the mission of wooing and the ungrateful fate of hired serenaders.

  Like a thousand yellow postmen of love the males flew around singing, like yellow notes stuck to the branches of the trees, like a host of yellow cantors bearing an ancient supplication with no end and no beginning.

  Nevertheless, Judith didn’t grant his plea, and a whole year after their release, when the desperate birds returned to Jacob, admitted their failure, and asked for their old cages, the village’s wrath was kindled. Rabinovitch’s Judith, everyone said, had gone too far this time.

  But despite the villagers’ prophecy, Jacob didn’t take his life. In the year that began with his release of the canaries and ended with their return, he had already stopped his public wooing. His notes no longer turned the village yellow and his figure crossing the street became a rare sight. Everyone was dazed and amazed and Jacob was calmer than ever. He let the canaries back into their old cages, but he didn’t lock the doors anymore and the birds started coming and going to their hearts’ content. They sang less now and Jacob heard only a flapping of many wings, like the rustle of blood a person sometimes hears when sleep won’t come and he lies in the dark, counting memories and listening to the veins in his temples.

  Sometimes Jacob climbed the hill near the village, stood there under the big dom tree, and looked into the distance, as if wishing for someone to come. If the wind blew in the right direction you could hear the shouts and songs and melodies of the Italian prisoners of war in the camp, and Jacob listened and smiled knowingly to himself.

  But usually he would go to the edge of the road, sit there on a stone, and wait. In great expectation, his skin quivered like a horse’s hide, his eyes filled with tears from the dust, and his fingers were clasped. In those days, there was no bus stop there yet, and when they built it, it was decided to erect it where Jacob Sheinfeld sat, because drivers and passersby were already used to stopping there and exchanging a word or two with him, and an atmosphere of waiting, befitting a bus stop, already prevailed there.

  When he returned home, he went into the canary house, cleaned the troughs of seeds that had sprouted and died, and washed the abandoned basins of the salt sediments that amassed on their sides.

  “Only great plans and only great things,” he repeated to himself. “Only great things influence great love.”

  The empty cages with their open doors and the dry putrefaction in them told him that things yearned for really do wait until the world and the time are right. That knowledge was frightening, like thoughts about the size of the universe and about the passage of time and about the invisible ropes of gravity, and all other thoughts where abysses are gaping at their feet and black lanes of fog trail behind them.

  “Like the bud that waits and opens only on the exact day it has to,” he explained to me, pacing in the kitchen. He was impatient, like a poet seeking consolation in metaphors. “Like on one day in winter, all the snails come out of the ground. Everybody in his own place. How does that happen, Zayde? How do they know? All kinds of people will tell you it’s God. So I ask you, Zayde, doesn’t the God of the Jews have anything more urgent to do than take care of them? But the light together with the heat together with the time and together with the water in the ground, and everything is right and everything is ready and waiting, so the snail don’t have no choice and he comes out. And back then I said to myself, You, Jacob, you will prepare everything just so, and she’ll have to come.”

  He took me out to the porch of his house. It was dark, but Jacob pointed to the edge of the west, beyond the invisible ridge of Mount Carmel, and declared: “The Prophet Elijah knew all those secrets a long time ago.”

  If you put the wood right, he said, fire will come out of it by itself. And if you hold all the ceremonies for the rain, the little cloud will come and the drops will fall.

  Now he got excited and sad at the same time, stood up and sat down, wrung his old fingers, talked about the “natural order,” and about the sublime expressions of that order: the force of gravity of the earth, great, clutching, annihilating, embracing, and making sure everything is in its place.

  Things pull and push each other, he said. Trees don’t walk. Cows don’t fly in the air. The water of the sea doesn’t overflow its basin. The stars, unlike humans, don’t smash each other.

  And because of those laws, he claimed, if you put all the pieces of the mosaic together, the last, lost, longed-for piece would go on and be set in its place.

  “And that’s how I understood what Menahem Rabinovitch told me, the issue of the great love and great things. That if the whole world is ready—the tables and the benches and the wedding canopy and the dress and the food and the rabbi—then the bride has to come, too. And then I knew that everything I did before, with the canaries and the gifts and the notes and the pleas, all of it was wrong. It wasn’t her love I should have chased, not her heart, not her body. I should just have prepared the wedding. Prepared so good that she would have had to come. At first I understood those things like in a dream, but then my fat worker came to me, Joshua. And when he came, I knew: that’s it, Jacob, now you’ll learn how to do everything that has to be done for the wedding. Now you’ll prepare everything that has to be prepared for the wedding. And then everything will come in its place, like it should.”

  66

  RACHEL WAS SOLD to Globerman in the winter of 1940, in that week of the east wind that sometimes comes in early March and sometimes in mid-February, and always amazes the Valley with five turgid, rainy nights and six days of deep blue skies and fresh gleaming sun.

  Judith took advantage of the third clear day and went to Haifa with Naomi to buy a few things for the house, and Moshe took advantage of their absence and sold the cow.

  The heart and the mind, each in its own way, want to know why. But that question isn’t important, and if it does have an answer, it doesn’t teach us anything. For even if many of us won’t achieve our heart’s desire, only a few will release a thousand canaries for it, only a few will sell a barren cow that was loved by the woman who worked on their farm.

  Perhaps Moshe gave in, and maybe he rebelled, and possibly he wanted to show that he was boss? Or maybe he just needed money? As for me, I have no explanation for it, just as I have no explanation for many other human acts, except for what Globerman himself often repeated to me: “A mensh trakht un Gott lakht—man makes plans and God laughs.”

  And yet, even if the reasons are trivial, the results are important. Rachel was sold for slaughter, Mother rescued her and brought her back home, and nine months later, I, Zayde Rabinovitch, came into the world.

  NATURALLY, the sale of Rachel was secret and hasty.

  Rabinovitch, who was filled with a sudden boldness, and the dealer, whose lust for lucre overcame any other feeling that lodged in him, didn’t shirk. This time, Globerman, who was always strict about counting money in front of the owner, stuck a messy and uncounted fistful of bills into Moshe’s hand and wanted to get away fast with his plunder. He tied his rope to Rachel’s horns and waved his baston close to her nose because he feared that the barren cow—manly and unexpectedly strong—would attack him when he pulled the rope.

  “On the fac
e of a bull you can see what he’s going to do, but with a tumtum like that you don’t know anything,” he said to Moshe.

  But without Judith, all of Rachel’s strength left her. She followed the dealer at three paces of capitulation, and suddenly she bleated in a weepy voice and sat down on her behind in a human, spread-out position, as if all at once she had turned from a sturdy lad into a dead-tired old woman.

  Rabinovitch and Globerman had enough experience to know that in such a case the cow was liable to hold them up for hours, and the two of them feared Judith’s return and her rage.

  “You’ve got to help me now, Rabinovitch!” said Globerman.

  Usually the farmers only helped the dealer to lead the calves they sold him. When a milk cow was sold, her owner went home so as not to witness her being taken away, and if the cow was especially beloved, he would go far away into one of the fields, where he would talk to himself and the trees and the stones, or he would go to the middle of the village and bother people there until the dealer and his victim had gone and the bleatings had died out in the distance.

  That was obvious and accepted, and the dealer never asked the dairyman’s help. But this time Moshe jumped behind Rachel, wrapped her tail around his fist, and twisted it hard. The surprise and the pain made her jump and she got up and followed her purchaser.

  At dusk, Naomi and Judith returned from Haifa. When they saw Rachel’s empty place, Naomi started shouting and crying, but Judith told her, “Go into the house now, Nomele,” and not another word did she say.

  She milked with Moshe in a silence that dried his tongue and turned the joints of his fingers to stone so that he hurt the cows. Then she went into her corner and pulled the curtain over it.

  Moshe, who had prepared himself for a fight and a quarrel and had filled his quiver with arguments and justifications, retreated to the house to eat dinner with the children. Oded sat at the table with him, but Naomi lay in her bed with her eyes shut and was silent.

  Oded said: “Very good that you sold her, Father. She wasn’t worth anything anyway.”

  “Go to bed, Oded,” said Moshe.

  He himself walked around the house for a while, then he went out and tramped back and forth in the mud next to the northern wall of the cowshed, and when he finally went in, he saw that Judith wasn’t there. Worry and relief filled him, but didn’t blend with one another, and so they oppressed him many times over. He returned to the house, lay down in his bed, and waited.

  A GUSTY WIND BLEW OUTSIDE. The pungent smell of wet cypresses stood in the air. The eucalyptus swayed mighty arms.

  Rain began to fall, drumming on the roof, humming grief in the gutters, silencing and swallowing other noises.

  Moshe pricked up his ears and shut his eyes until he heard distant breathing, carried on the storm, and a banging that sounded like heavy hooves in the mud, approaching and not arriving. A few times he jumped up from his bed and went outside and finally he put on his boots and, clad only in his nightshirt, he ran into the rain through the fields to the eucalyptus forest.

  The mud held his feet, the cold air singed his lungs, and when he got there, panting and tired, he didn’t dare cross the forest. With heavy steps, he returned to his house, undressed, and lay down in his bed and clamped his eyelids shut.

  “C’mon-c’mon-c’mon,” he heard, and also his own name—“Maydele” in his mother’s mouth and “Rabinovitch” in Judith’s mouth and “my Moshe” in his Tonya’s mouth filled with water. But he didn’t know if he really heard or maybe it was only the rain and the wind, maybe the leaves of the groaning eucalyptus, maybe the surging of pain in his own skull.

  And when he went back out into the yard, naked and shivering with cold under the blanket he wrapped around himself, he didn’t see anything there. And it was only about an hour later, when he had fallen asleep, that the bolt of the cowshed rang in its socket with the clear ring of unmistakable dreams, and Moshe understood that at long last he was sleeping, and two minutes later, when he wrapped himself in the blanket again and strode with a slow flight and eyes closed to the cowshed, he saw the two of them there, drenched and cold as ice.

  Rachel, her nose steaming in the cold, stood in her usual place, her head leaning over to Judith, lying at her feet on the filthy cement floor, either sleeping or swooning.

  “What is the cow doing here?” shouted Rabinovitch.

  Judith didn’t answer.

  She was frozen, her skin bristling and her eyes cold and hateful as the eyes of a dead fish.

  Moshe woke up. He ran home and found that the bundle of money the dealer had given him for Rachel was in its place.

  His heart turned to stone. When he returned to the cowshed, Judith had already gotten up off the floor, lit the wood in the half-barrel, and was wiping Rachel with dry sacks.

  The two of them were groaning with fatigue and cold.

  “Where did you bring the cow from?” shouted Moshe.

  Judith sniffled and her whole body shivered.

  “That’s none of your business, Rabinovitch, and don’t raise your voice to me,” she murmured.

  “What money did you pay him?”

  “It didn’t cost you a penny.” She wrung water out of her hair. “I bought Rachel back, and now she’s mine.”

  “The dealer returned a cow?” exclaimed Moshe. “The dealer has never returned a cow before. Who ever heard of such a thing?”

  Judith didn’t answer.

  “You stole her!”

  Judith laughed, and so much scorn and malice creaked in her laughter that Moshe was terrified of the truth that was closing in on him.

  “If you didn’t pay him with money, what did you pay him with?” His voice shook as if the answer was choking him even before he heard it.

  “Now Rachel is mine,” answered Judith. “Her milk you can take in exchange for the food she eats and for the place she takes up, but this cow is mine now.”

  “What did you pay him with, kurve? With your pirde?” Moshe suddenly shouted, unexpectedly coarse and with a feeling he didn’t know was in him, and he didn’t believe his lips and tongue knew such vulgar words.

  The words nailed Judith to the spot. Only her head moved as if it were on a hinge, revolved slowly, and turned to him.

  “I heard words like that once,” she said with complete calm, picked up the pitchfork leaning against the wall and walked toward him.

  She didn’t slow down and she didn’t assault and she didn’t feint and she didn’t threaten. She struck a blow with the pitchfork without any hatred, but only skill, and Moshe, who immediately understood that she didn’t intend empty intimidation, retreated, stumbled, and when he wanted to hold on to something his foot slipped on the shovel of the dung runnel.

  The blanket slid off his body and he fell on his back into the frozen dung heap. Once again the pitchfork was aimed at him in that efficient and practical way of thrusting into a pile of hay, and this time he didn’t manage to get out of the way and one of the tines pierced his arm.

  The wound was deep and surprising and Moshe yelled in pain, but Judith’s face remained calm and chill. She extracted the pitchfork from the flesh of his arm and when she brandished it a third time, Moshe rolled aside, stood up naked, and fled the cowshed.

  In the house, he locked the door, collapsed onto the floor, and then crept and washed the blood and mud and dung off his body, and poured alcohol on his wound. It wasn’t weakness that shook his body, but the novelty of it. He bandaged his arm, lay down in his bed, and slowly understood that the fingers choking his throat when he wanted to swallow or sleep were not anger or fear, but the simple stroking of jealousy. An alien and strange feeling was this envy, which he had never felt in his life, either.

  Once again he fell asleep, and once again he woke up, because he didn’t hear Judith’s wailing and wondered why, and wanted to get up and go back to the cowshed, but the pain in his arm and the pounding swelling under it reminded him of what had happened and told him that he better stay in hi
s bed. He closed his eyes and started dreaming that he was choked by something pressing on his chest, but there wasn’t anything there, only the hands of the angel and the dream of his strong thighs clasping his body, and his nipples searing his chest with a double brand of possession, and his finger that was laid on his face and said to him, “Shaa … shaa … sleep now, shaa …”

  Lips whispered in his neck, “Sorry,” and a warm wet silk grazed and beat and stroked his flesh pleasantly, and the delight was so great that the dream went on even after he opened his eyes, and now the pain in his wounded arm became unbearable and his fever rose high.

  A good, heavy smell, forgotten and remembered at the same time, covered his face like a spread-out dress.

  “Who are you?” he asked, and no woman answered.

  Outside, the storm had stopped now and robins began the chirping of night’s end. One from Tonya’s pomegranate tree and his foe from Papish’s yard. Rabinovitch knew he was left alone and could sleep another hour. But when he woke up the second time, the sun had already crossed the windowsill and the sparrows and crows had already stopped singing the dawn song and the doves had already returned from the mash warehouse of the village and were now humming the hum of the full gullet, and the air was already clear and warm and dry and only the wet smell of the earth wafting from his body and from the open window testified to him.

  Judith served him a big cup of tea with lemon in bed, examined his wound, and said: “Don’t get out of bed today, Moshe, I’ve already milked for you.”

  “All by yourself?” asked Moshe.

  “I went at dawn to Sheinfeld and he came and helped me,” she said.

  FROM THAT NIGHT ON, Judith’s wailing was no longer heard.

  “There are women who feel it the minute they get pregnant,” Naomi told me. “And I’m sure that’s how it was with her. Like an animal she was in those kinds of things. Even the time of ovulation she knew exactly to the second. She told me that herself, when I got my first period and she gave me a woman’s talk. So, if she slept with the three of them that night, or if she got pregnant without sleeping with anyone, only she knew exactly how that happened. But now, Zayde, it really doesn’t matter anymore. That secret of hers she also took with her to the grave. It’s very crowded, Zayde, in your mother’s grave, with so many secrets.”