by Meir Shalev
One way or another, the wailing wasn’t heard anymore. There were those who heard laughter rising from the cowshed and there were those who didn’t hear anything, but everyone understood that something had happened, and in the village they started talking.
As usual with us, you don’t know if reality nourished rumors or vice versa, but the proof increased and became clear: the whites of Judith’s eyes grew turgid, her breasts rose, her waist hadn’t yet swelled, but several women saw her gathering and eating wood sorrel.
And one morning, about two and a half months after that night, when Moshe entered the cowshed and saw her leaning over Rachel’s neck and throwing up in the runnel, he knew that all the gossips were right.
A few weeks later, Globerman and Sheinfeld came to him, as if they had agreed on something, and said: “It can’t be, Rabinovitch, that Judith will bring up a baby among the cows.”
The three of them went to the cowshed to talk with her, but Judith said she felt good and comfortable in her corner there, close to her beloved Rachel. So the three men looked into one another’s eyes, went into the house, and started arguing and measuring and drafting plans. And the next day, Globerman and Sheinfeld went to the city in the pickup truck and Moshe Rabinovitch went out and started digging ditches for foundations.
In the afternoon, the pickup truck returned, bowed down under a burden of sacks of cement and sand and gravel and loaded with rubber bags and tools and boards for casting, and Globerman went into the cowshed, took out his and Judith’s bottles of grappa and cognac—“It’s not good for our child in the belly”—and filled the closet with flowered maternity dresses, dried fruit, his pettitt furs and sausages.
Construction of the new cowshed went on for about two months, and after the cows were transferred there, Rabinovitch took the twenty-pound hammer and destroyed all the concrete stalls and troughs in the old cowshed, Sheinfeld and Globerman cleared out the shards, and in the next weeks, they built new internal walls that created two rooms and a kitchen and shower, broke out some more windows, and stretched a net for a new ceiling.
Finally, the owner of the store who had sold them all the building material appeared, and thus the City Papish, the alleged brother of the Village Papish, was revealed and confirmed and went from a joke to reality right before the eyes of the whole village. The City Papish had shouted arguments with his brother about every subject in the world and meanwhile he floored and whitewashed and plastered the walls and stretched electrical cables and water pipes, which breathed life into the structure and made it a house, the house I was born in, and in it my mother brought me up, this is the house that was once a cowshed, whose bricks subdue its memories, and a soft smell of milk rises from its walls.
That whole time, the men didn’t talk much, but in the shrunken space of the cowshed, the three of them were very close to one another. Sometimes their shoulders touched, sometimes their hands, and when the dealer brought a cast-iron stove from the Druze village on the mountain, he called Moshe, who carried it in his arms from the pickup truck to the cowshed, and Jacob went and cut down two trees in his abandoned citrus grove and brought a full load of heating logs.
“That’s for you, Judith,” he said. “Oranges burn strong and give a good smell.”
67
WHO GOT HER PREGNANT?” Naomi asked Oded.
“Her? All of them!” answered Oded.
“Who got her pregnant?” Naomi asked her father.
“Nobody,” said Moshe.
“Who got you pregnant?” Naomi asked Judith.
“A nafka mina,” said Judith, and when Naomi persisted and kept investigating and wept, she finally said to her: “I got pregnant by myself, Nomele, by myself.”
“YOU REMEMBER THE day you were born here? You remember, Zayde?”
“Nobody remembers the day he was born.”
“I remember. I was here.”
“I know.”
“Maybe I’ll stay with you here and not go back to Jerusalem?”
“You’ve got a child, Naomi, and you’ve got a husband in Jerusalem.”
Warm smells of a village night rose in my window. My heart soared from my rib cage and a rustle of clothes taken off was heard in the dark.
“Don’t turn on the light,” she said, because she didn’t know that my eyes were closed.
She got into my bed and asked: “What’s your name?”
“Zayde,” I said.
Outside, the blackbirds started chanting, their voices melting the chill of dawn and painting the east with the orange of their beaks.
“Your eyes have become blue, Zayde,” said Naomi. “Open them and you’ll see yourself.”
An old grief looked out of her eyes. Her tears gleamed. She got out of bed, gleaming in the dark of the room.
“In the middle of class, I got up and ran here. She was already on the floor and that smell was in the air, like the smell of Uncle Menahem in the fall, but it was from Judith’s water, which had already broke. The smell of that water only women and doctors know.”
“Don’t be scared, Nomele,” said Judith. “Don’t call anybody, go to the house and bring clean sheets and towels.”
Her face was contorted with pain.
“Don’t die,” shouted Naomi. “Don’t die!”
And the smile turned Judith’s lips pale.
“You don’t die from this,” she said. “You just live more.”
And she started laughing and groaning: “Oy, how much I’ll live now, Nomele, oy, how much I’ll live now.”
In their mud dwellings in the corner of the roof, the swallow fledglings shrieked and gaped the red of their jaws. Rachel, in the cow yard, bleated and butted the iron door.
“And now,” said Judith, “the kurve will give birth to a new little girl.”
Lying on her back, she rolled her dress over her belly, dug her heels into the floor, spread her thighs, and raised her behind in the air.
“Fast!” she ordered. “Put the sheet under me.”
Naomi looked terrified into her gaping groin, which seemed to be shouting.
“What do you see there, Nomi?” asked Judith.
“Like a wall inside,” said Naomi.
“That’s her head, right away she’ll start coming out and you’ll help her very very slow. Just don’t worry, Nomele, in just one more little minute she’ll come out. It’ll be an easy birth. Just wait for her with your hands and you’ll catch her.”
“It’s a boy,” said Naomi.
“And then she simply tore her dress,” she told me, her words and her lips in my neck and the warmth of her thigh on my belly, “and the buttons flew into the air, and she said: ‘Fast, Nomele, fast, I can’t anymore, put him on my chest.’ And I put you on her chest, the white chest of a dove she had, and then she wailed.”
Naomi wanted to flee from the cowshed, for until that moment, Judith was cool and very decisive, while now, the final night wailings were extracted from the depths of her belly and came out of her mouth.
She stepped back, wiping her sticky hands on one another until the wall supported her back, looking at the woman twisting in the swamp of straw and blood, her scream running out of her throat and her son clasped in her arms.
SHEINFELD, RABINOVITCH, and Globerman came to the circumcision in their best clothes and didn’t leave me for a minute.
Jacob, who didn’t know how to sew then, bought me some baby layettes.
Moshe Rabinovitch built me a cradle that could be stood on legs and also hung from the rafter.
And Globerman, true to his way and his values, brought a big bundle of bills, wet his finger with saliva and started dividing them into five small piles, and called out to the guests: “One for the child, one for the mother, one for the father, one for the father, one for the father …” Until the Village Papish and the City Papish stood up and shouted at him: “Give the present already and shut up!”
68
Shlaf meyn Zaydele, meyn kleyne,
shlaf meyn kind u
n her tsikh tsu,
ot dos feygele dos kleyne,
iz keyn andere vie du.
Sleep, my Zayde, sleep, my little one,
listen to your mama, little one, do,
for that bird, that little bird,
it is you, my child, O, it is you.
IF THE ANGEL OF DEATH comes and sees a little boy named Zayde, he understands at once that there’s a mistake here and goes to somebody else.”
And I, with complete faith in the name she gave me, grew up and became a man, convinced that on the day I became a grandfather and justified my name, the Angel of Death would come to me, his patience run out, his face flushed with the wrath of the deceived, would call me by my right name and pour out my life on the ground.
I REMEMBER SMALL, very clear pictures, pictures of infancy.
Once I woke up at night and saw her lying on her back. It was a hot summer night, the sheet had slipped off of her, her arms were spread out, her chest was bared. The severity of her face had departed. Even the line on the bridge of her nose was softened.
I got up to cover her, and when the sheet hovered over her body, she stretched and relaxed and smiled in her sleep and waves seemed to pass over her naked flesh. I fluttered the sheet again and let it drop onto her until a soft sigh escaped from her throat and when I raised the sheet a third time, her eyes suddenly opened. They were hard and clear, just like her voice, which said: “Enough, Zayde, go to sleep.”
I said: “But I want it nice for you.”
I remember how Mother got up and took my arm and led me firmly to my bed and went back and lay down in her bed and both of us knew that we were both awake.
And I remember that Jacob taught me to read and write when I was three and a half years old, after I complained that I was the only one who couldn’t read Uncle Menahem’s springtime notes.
And I remember that Globerman gave me thin, salted, very tasty slices of raw meat to suck.
And I also remember the game of the “awful bear” with Moshe and the first time I fell out of the eucalyptus tree. Everybody, including me, was sure I was dead, and when I opened my eyes and sought God and the angels, Mother said to me: “Get up, Zayde, nothing happened.”
Her stories penetrated my memories and were decanted into them. The she-ass, for instance, died of old age even before I was born, but I clearly remember how she was clever enough to steal barley from the horse: when the horse gathered a mouthful of barley, she bit his neck. He tried to bite her back and the seeds fell out of his mouth and the she-ass gathered them up from the floor.
“And I remember that, too,” said Naomi. “And I also remember how we used to eat pomegranates together—first we sat down on the rock and then on the walk Father paved for her. And I remember how she used to send me to catch doves and how she used to kill them. She pulled their necks with two fingers until there was a kind of little click, and then she’d bite her lower lip between her teeth.”
We were standing next to the crows’ meeting tree in the cemetery of the German Colony in Jerusalem, and Naomi laughed and challenged me to a tree-climbing contest. “At falling you’re better, but at climbing I’ll beat you.”
And then she said: “I have to visit Meir’s mother. Will you come with me, Zayde? She lives nearby.”
Naomi called her mother-in-law “Meir’s mother” or “Mrs. Klebanov,” so I don’t know her first name. Maybe I did know it when I was five and Naomi and Meir got married, and since then I’ve managed to forget it. In her garden, she had a fabulous rosebush, a thin old almond tree, and a creeping honeysuckle.
The rosebush was unique. It was tall as a tree and had thorns like a cat’s claws. So big and sturdy it was that it didn’t need to be tended or watered, and it smelled so strong that people stopped by it, thunderstruck, and gnats swooned in the deep tangles of its flowers.
Even during the days of war and siege, when all the flower gardens died of thirst, as Mrs. Klebanov related proudly, its leaves turned green and didn’t wither.
Mrs. Klebanov was a widow, and even though she was determined to age fast, her features preserved the lines of an old beauty, the kind that waits for deliverance.
“I remember you,” she said. “You’re the worker’s son. You were a little boy at Meir’s wedding, weren’t you?”
“I was also at that wedding,” said Naomi. “Me you don’t remember?”
“You’ve got a funny name, don’t you?” Mrs. Klebanov questioned me.
“My name is Zayde,” I said.
“And how old are you?”
At that time, I was twenty-three.
“A person your age whose name is Zayde, he can only be a liar,” Mrs. Klebanov decreed. “Tell me, please, you lived there in the cowshed with the cows, you and your mother, didn’t you?”
“Something like that,” I said. “I didn’t really live with the cows, but in a house that used to be a cowshed.”
“That sounds very interesting,” concluded Mrs. Klebanov. “I remember talking about that afterward with my husband’s relatives. A woman with a child and she lived with the cows.”
From the porch came a strange metallic banging, and the echo that answered it was even louder than the banging itself.
“That’s the birds pecking the water tank. They’re the only ones who come visit me,” grumbled Meir’s mother.
I glanced out the window. On the porch a big tank stood on four blocks. A Jerusalem water storage in case of emergency. Mrs. Klebanov would scatter breadcrumbs on it and the sparrows would gather and peck them off the tin cover. They were grateful, as befits small hungry birds who live in a cold, hardhearted, close-fisted city, and Mrs. Klebanov was pleased to see the gratitude beaming from their round eyes. The echo that answered the banging of their beaks, she said, told her how much water was left in the tank.
Sometimes a heavier and stronger beak was heard, and she knew that the crow from the big cypress had come and chased the sparrows away and was pecking at their bread.
Mrs. Klebanov didn’t like black animals bigger than her hand. She immediately burst onto the porch, justice trampling at her side and a bristling broom in her right hand. With a shout of, “Get out of here! Kishta! Get lost!” she got rid of the thief.
Her face flushed, she returned to the room and went to the kitchen to calm down and make us some tea. Naomi whispered to me that her mother-in-law usually shooed dogs away in Hebrew, goats in Arabic, and cats in Yiddish, but with crows, she didn’t know what nation they belonged to or what language they spoke. So she used them all.
We drank the tea, which was sweet and tasty and very hot, and we left.
• • •
“TO TAKE HER TO JERUSALEM is like plucking a flower from the earth and throwing it onto the road to get run over,” Oded told me.
The time that had passed since his sister married Meir hadn’t blunted his anger. Often, ever since I was a little boy, he drove me in the village truck to visit them in Jerusalem. Sleepy and excited, I would run in the dark to the dairy. Oded allowed me to climb up onto the tank and check the lids and, as we were leaving the village, to pull the cable of the horn over his left shoulder.
Then I would fall asleep and not wake up until dawn, when Oded would maneuver the gearshift at the entrance to the yard of Tnuva, the marketing cooperative, in Jerusalem. Naomi was already standing there waving, Oded replied with a loud honk of greeting, and the supervisor rushed out of his office and shouted: “Sut up, pleesh! Don’t hong the horn! At five in the morning, people are shtill shleeping in Jerushalem!” And Ezriel, the driver of Kfar Vitkin, shouted: “Shamshon, Shamshon, you sut up your-shelf!”
Oded stopped with a mighty gasp, jumped out of the horse cabin and hugged his sister, and immediately went back to the cabin and took out the package that Judith had sent her from the village, which was always wrapped in brown packing paper cut from a powdered milk sack and tied with a rope, and in it were fruits and vegetables, pomegranates in season, sour cream and cheese and eggs and a letter
.
“That’s from home, Naomi. Here, this is just for you, you heard? Eat it all up yourself and don’t give him anything. I’m serious, why are you laughing?”
“If I had been there when he came, it wouldn’t have wound up like this,” he declared. “He wouldn’t have taken her, she wouldn’t have gone with him, he wouldn’t have even gotten into the yard. Came from the fields, that lowlife, like a jackal who comes to steal from the chicken coop. I don’t understand how your heroine of a mother didn’t catch on and throw him out of there.”
And two or three days later, on my way back to the village, I would always wake up there, when the big truck came out of Wadi Milek, and the Valley, warm and beloved and spacious, was spread out before me again. Oded told me again about the train that used to run there and about the ravenous herds the Arabs used to set loose on the village fields, “and we’d go out to them and drive them away with whips,” and about the old antiaircraft posts of the English and the adventures of Police Sergeant Shvili, and the legend about the destroyed stone chimney in the field, remnant of the Italian POW camp, whose guards didn’t do any work and smells of cooking, and how songs were always rising from there.
“You’ll write about all those things, Zayde, right?” he yelled.
69
JACOB BOILED A POT of water on the fire, cracked an egg into the palm of his hand, slipped the white between his spread fingers, and put the yolk into the bowl. A little wine, a little sugar, and the whisk was gleaming in his hand, steam rose, and the warmth emitted the smell of wine in the air.