The Loves of Judith

by Meir Shalev

  “I already told you, he’s called Moshe Rabinovitch,” said Jacob. “And that’s also written on the stone.”

  He was angry because he felt the Italian’s looks piercing and examining him.

  “In his cowshed I saw a woman sitting and drinking grappa.”

  Jacob didn’t respond.

  “Who is that woman?”

  “That’s Rabinovitch’s Judith,” said Jacob, and even though he was tense and ready, he couldn’t hide the tremor that the question and the answer poured into his voice.

  “Never did I see anyone in this country drinking grappa,” said Noshua. “Where does she get it?”

  “Globerman brings it to her.”

  “Why does the dealer bring it to her, Sheinfeld? Why don’t you bring it to her?”

  Jacob was silent.

  “And she’s also got a little boy,” Noshua went on. “Every day he comes to see me how I don’t succeed in picking up his father’s rock.”

  “It’s not his father!” shouted Jacob, and understood immediately that he had made a mistake.

  “So who is his father?”

  “None of your business,” said Jacob.

  “It’s a child who looks like he himself hasn’t decided yet who he looks like.”

  Jacob was silent.

  “I feel a wound here,” said Noshua. “I can help you.”

  “I don’t need your help,” said Jacob, and suddenly, without believing his own ears, he heard himself saying: “No matter what, she won’t be mine in the end.”

  For a moment he hoped it wasn’t he who had said those words, but Noshua who had said them in his voice. But the POW looked at him and said: “Sheinfeld, you know by now that I don’t love women, but precisely because of that there are things I understand better than ordinary men.”

  “I know,” said Jacob.

  “And mainly I know the most important thing, the secret you don’t know.”

  “What’s that?” asked Jacob.

  “That there are rules for love. That love is not a free-for-all. There are rules, otherwise love would kill you like a horse that feels there are no reins on him. It’s very simple. The first rule is: a man who really wants a woman has to marry her. And the second rule: a man who wants to get married can’t sit at home and wait for God to help him.”

  “Where did you hear free-for-all?” Jacob smiled.

  “Don’t change the subject, Sheinfeld,” Noshua’s face became serious. “I’m talking to you now about your life, so don’t ask me about my words. In love there are rules, and where there are rules, the world is simpler. A man who wants to marry a woman has to know how to dance the wedding dance, to know how to cook the wedding food, to know how to sew the wedding gown. Not to sit at home, waiting and saying: No matter what, in the end she will be mine.”

  Jacob trembled. The POW had formulated so clearly and simply all the foggy ideas about harnessing and driving fate that had lodged in his brain for years, but had been scared to strip off the clothes of metaphors and fly into the air.

  “Look, please, at the crows in the sky, everywhere they act the same way. Here and in Italy. The crows are the wisest birds. Look and learn how they woo.”

  “I know how they woo.” Jacob got angry. “I know birds a little better than you do.”

  “Now he has a good wind to put on an act.” Noshua peeped out the window. “Go outside with me, Sheinfeld, and let’s see what you know about crows.”

  They went out. The male crow took off high into the air; for a moment he tottered on the warm air and immediately pulled in his limbs and sank like a stone. Right in front of his beloved, dark and excited on one of the branches, all at once he spread his tail and his wings. A small bang was heard, the gray-black body braked in the air, turned over, and soared.

  So fast and skilled he was that he didn’t seem to lose any speed as he turned over. Now he fell again, spinning around and struggling as if he were wounded and dropping to his death, and just before he hit the ground, he took off again.

  “That’s what they do in all places and all times,” said Noshua. “And even if he and she live their whole life together, every year he will woo her anew. Those are the rules. And if some other crow sings her a serenade or brings her grappa, she won’t look at him.”

  “On the ground he’s so ugly,” said Jacob.

  “That, Sheinfeld, is why he woos her in the air and not on the ground. First rule of wooing: wooing you do where you’re beautiful and not where you’re ugly.”

  Jacob argued that he was ugly both in the air and on the ground, but Noshua said: “Everybody has one or two places where he’s beautiful.”

  And then he added: “Love is something neat and wise. It’s a matter of brains. Like you build a house and like you drive a car and like you cook food and like you write a book—that’s how you love.”

  “Heart or mind,” said Jacob wearily. “A nafka mina.”

  “It’s very nafka mina,” the worker persisted. “But here I see that you’re laughing, Sheinfeld. So you still have hope.”

  And Jacob, who had been moved and swept up into unexpected and unformulated waves of his love for so long, at long last felt good and nice, in the deliberate and assuring arms of rules, and with that big strange man, who knew them so well and knew the way to the solid dry land beyond them.

  “You helped me when I needed help, Sheinfeld, and for that I shall return the favor. I’ll get you the woman from Rabinovitch’s cowshed. You’ll just have to dance, cook, and sew. Those are the rules.”

  “I don’t know how to dance and I don’t know how to cook and I don’t know how to sew,” said Jacob.

  “Dancing and cooking also have rules,” said Noshua. “And everything that has rules can be learned.”

  He finished washing the dishes, shook his hands over the sink, and wiped them on the apron he wore over his dress, and suddenly he came to Jacob, stood him up, and said: “Forgive me one moment, please.”

  He put one hand on Jacob’s scalp and with the other hand, he held his shoulder.

  “Please don’t fall,” he ordered, and with a slight and confident push he spun him around like a top.

  Jacob closed his eyes because of the pleasant whirlpool and the frightening orange stripes that were drawn in its darkness, and even though he didn’t say a word, he heard his own voice saying: “You’ll know how to dance.”

  • • •

  AT DAWN, Jacob entered the old canary house, grabbed a few fine bandooks who slept there, and asked Globerman to take him and his loot to Haifa in the pickup truck.

  “You started again with your birds?” asked the dealer.

  “I’m selling them,” said Jacob. “I need money.”

  All the way he thought of how he would manage to find that English officer, although he didn’t even know his name, but when they got to the navy base, he saw the officer standing at the gate as if he were waiting there for him all those years. He looked just the same as in the days when he came to the albino, but gold stripes were added on his sleeve and a silver stripe in his hair. Jacob gave him the bandooks and the officer paid generously for them.

  From there they went to the Arabic fabric store across from the railroad station and Jacob bought the big, colorful sheets Noshua had instructed him to buy. And from there, they went up to the music store on Shapiro Street, and Jacob bought a big gramophone with a bronze handle and a giant earphone on installments, along with the four records Noshua had told him to bring.

  “There are rules for love,” Jacob informed the amused Globerman when the dealer asked him the meaning of his purchases. “You thought only you and Rabinovitch know that? Now the two of you will see that I know it, too. Love is something neat and Judith will be mine in the end. She and the child, too.”

  When they returned to the village, Jacob saw people gathered at the fence of his house. The trunk of a young eucalyptus tree, thin and tall as a mast, which Noshua had cut down in the forest and dragged to the yard, was stand
ing there, stuck in a pit and held by taut cables. The worker quickly unrolled the cloth sheets Jacob brought, and with skilled and strong movements, he spread and stretched them, tied and built around the mast a big, colorful tent that looked like a giant flower and that smelled good and fresh.

  Like a big cat, the POW climbed the electric pole on the roof of the cowshed, a screwdriver in his pocket and a pair of pliers between his teeth.

  “Watch out for the electricity,” said Jacob.

  “Don’t worry.” Noshua laughed. “Once I saw how an electrician works.”

  He cut, screwed, wrapped, and pulled a wire from there to the tent. The gramophone he put on a wooden box and the four records he put next to it. He lit the bulb, closed the sheet of the tent, stood across from Jacob formally, and said: “Now we shall begin.”

  ALL OVER the world, stated Noshua, there are no more than four dances, and in them there are no more than four basic movements.

  “The turn, the jump, the back, and the forth,” he enumerated.

  “And the right and the left?” asked Jacob.

  “The right is the back of the left, and the front is the left of the right,” said Noshua very compassionately, and went on to explain that all other dances are merely versions, imitations, and hypotheses of the four basic dances: the waltz, the dance of memory, the dance of war, and the dance of touch, the tango, the most sublime and exalted of all dances. “And all the rest,” he said contemptuously, “all those dances of shepherds and harvesters and hunters and the rain and wine dances, and all the dances where people hold hands and form a circle, those aren’t dances.”

  Jacob laughed and as he laughed, he realized that that was the first time he had laughed aloud in many years, ever since Judith had come to the village. And Noshua joined him with a laugh so much like his own that it seemed like its frightening echo, coming back to him from the crest of the big body.

  “And precisely because of that, Sheinfeld, you will learn the tango,” said Noshua. “Not to please her and not to touch her. You will learn the tango because that’s the rule: the bridegroom has to dance a tango with the bride.”

  He wound up the gramophone, put on a record, and Jacob scurried to his feet, for he thought that now he would be ordered to dance, and his body was embarrassed. But Noshua put a heavy hand on his shoulder and sat him down again, and instructed him to listen to the notes of the tango without moving and without getting up.

  “Just sit and listen, Sheinfeld, sit and don’t move at all, so I won’t have to tie you up!” he warned him. “You just listen and listen and listen, and don’t you move. That’s what we will do every day until your body is full.”

  At first Jacob listened to the tango with his ears, then with his diaphragm and his stomach, and a few hours later, when he wanted to rebel and stand up, it was already too late. His body was soft and slack and his muscles couldn’t move his new heaviness.

  He stretched out on the floor of the tent like a person lying in a warm rain, and in the evening, when Noshua suddenly stopped the gramophone and helped his student out to the yard, Jacob discovered that his flesh had overflowed its banks and his feet strode with steps so new to his body that he laughed in surprise and bliss and all the muscles of his body laughed with him.

  77

  NOW NOSHUA CALLED the shots in Sheinfeld’s house.

  He set the agenda, cooked the meals, prepared Jacob’s studies, and followed his training. He ordered him when to go and when to come, when to get up and when to lie down.

  “This agenda is very important,” he kept repeating.

  Sometimes Jacob felt him staring at him with discerning eyes and even sniffing him with an expression he probably copied from the faces of the orange growers before picking, as if he wanted to determine how ripe Jacob was.

  “There are rules for love, Sheinfeld,” he kept issuing his decree. “A very important rule I already told you, which is that love is a matter of the mind and not of the heart. And another important rule I will tell you now: in love you have to give a lot, but you never peel off all the skin and you don’t reveal everything to the end. And what I already told you—that for love, as for all work and exercise and art, you need an orderly life with hours of rest and proper food.

  “Now you won’t go out into the street anymore,” he said. “You won’t see people anymore, and you especially won’t see her. You will walk only in your house and in your yard and in your field. Just like this. One two three four, one two three four. No, Sheinfeld! You won’t count, I’ll walk with you and I’ll count, one two three four. Numbers come from the brain, and the brain, don’t forget, isn’t good for the tango. A waltz is a dance for the brain, a one-step is for the brain, a Charleston is also a dance for the brain, for the stupid brain, but still for the brain. Even our tarantella is for the brain. But a tango that says touch, a tango is a dance for here, here …”

  And all of a sudden the POW’s body moved like a broad, quiet flash, and he was standing behind his student, his blacksmith’s chest clinging to the back of Jacob’s neck, the strong belly to his back, the big hands to his ribs, and from there he slipped down hard to Jacob’s waist and to the bulging bones of the loins, and above them he slipped to the sensitive, scared inside of his thighs.

  “Here,” he said. “That’s the tango. To touch.”

  He tightened his hold. “From here it comes and for here it goes.”

  Jacob felt his behind scared and shriveling and his breath fleeing from his rib cage.

  “Not with the brain,” said Noshua at the back of his neck. “If you had a brain, you wouldn’t have called me, Sheinfeld, and I wouldn’t have come.”

  Jacob wanted to say that he hadn’t called him at all, but as if from his belly came the knowledge that that was pointless. The POW’s hands held him, his legs led him. A lot of water, yellow-green springtime water, flowed around him and didn’t cover him.

  78

  TIME PASSED. The world war came to an end. Jacob pondered the possibility of keeping that from Salvatore. But ultimately, he took pity and told him.

  The POW took a deep breath and said, “I’m going for a little walk,” and an hour later he came back and said he wanted to stay.

  “I thought you would want to go back home, to your little village in Italy,” said Jacob.

  “Someone whose father and mother are dead, and no wife is waiting for him and children he will never have, doesn’t have to go back to any home,” said the POW. “They call me Joshua. I make repairs and I heal wounds and I cook and sew and clean and dance. Now, Sheinfeld, we’ve got work to do.”

  THE END OF THE WAR returned home the sons who had been mobilized into the British army. They brought new ways to the village: they drank beer, they sang songs in English, and told stories of regrets and alienation. Now and then guests appeared in the village, army buddies, and so one day a fellow from Jerusalem showed up, one Meir Klebanov.

  That day, Oded was on the road, Judith was cooking in the house, Moshe was in the mash storehouse, and Naomi was sitting on the roof of the cowshed replacing broken tiles. When she straightened up and wiped her forehead, the sun gleamed on the body of a distant car, glanced off it, and made it shine like an eye, opening and shutting as it moved.

  A car wasn’t a common sight in the Valley in those days and Naomi looked at it and saw it stop next to the old police station on the highway.

  A tiny dot got out of the car and moved in a straight line in the lot, and Naomi looked at it and didn’t know that within fifteen minutes, the dot would arrive from the fields to the yard, and that a few months later that dot would marry her and take her to Jerusalem. From the distance she couldn’t even know if it was a man-dot or a woman-dot.

  The little figure made its way along the edges of the sorghum field, advanced and grew bigger along the row of old pomelos in the citrus grove beyond the wadi, crossed the channel, and slowly became a young man whose name was not yet known, but whose features became clear and whose walk became lig
ht and carefree.

  Even though Naomi couldn’t hear, there was in his stride a hint that he was whistling, and now she already figured out that the route of his walk would bring him to the yard. And indeed, the soft whistling was soon heard and even grew louder, and Naomi recognized one of the soldier’s songs brought back by those who came home from the war.

  Now the walker was close enough for Naomi to see a fellow of about twenty-seven; his hair was thick and smooth and combed like city boys did with a part in the middle, his skin was thin and fair, his features were neither handsome nor ugly, and the crease in his khaki trousers was sharp and precise.

  “Are you looking for somebody here?” she asked when he passed the cowshed.

  The whistling stopped. The fellow’s eyes searched all around. His crepe-soled shoes were polished so hard they shone even though he had been walking in the dust of the fields.

  “This is a private yard,” said Naomi.

  Now the stranger understood that his interlocutor was standing on the roof and he raised his eyes.

  “Excuse me,” he said, “I’m looking for the Liberman family.”

  He had a pleasant baritone and he articulated clearly. A wind suddenly blew and Naomi’s hands clasped her skirt to her thighs.

  “Go out of the yard to the street, turn left, and it’s the sixth yard from here.”

  “Thanks,” said the fellow, and after a few steps he stopped, turned back, and asked: “When will you come down from there?”

  “Later.”

  “I’d come up to you, but I’m scared of heights.”

  “So you really better stay below.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Esther Greenfeld,” answered Naomi.

  The fellow took a notebook and fountain pen out of his pocket, wrote down something, tore off the page, and laid it on the ground. He put a small stone on it so it wouldn’t fly off in the wind, and he straightened up: “Left and the sixth yard from here, Liberman,” he said and left.