The Loves of Judith

by Meir Shalev

  He took heart, approached his teacher, and in a wink found himself trapped in the Italian’s confident and pleasant embrace.

  His heart pounded, but his feet and his hips were already accustomed, and his body, suddenly its own master, was clasped to Noshua’s solid belly, and they were dancing.

  “That’s how it is in the tango. Sometimes you’re the man and I’m the woman, and sometimes you’re the woman and I’m the man, and sometimes both of us are women, and sometimes both of us are men,” laughed the POW.

  A good smell rose from his mouth, and Jacob was embarrassed by the touch of that big, skilled body and by the broad, guiding hand on his back, and by the strong, demanding belly that pushed him and played with him, and he was even more embarrassed by the instructions pouring down at an increased pace:

  “A woman isn’t a piano that has to be shoved!”

  “A woman isn’t a blind man who has to be shown the way!”

  “A woman isn’t a stone that has to be picked up!”

  “A woman isn’t a balloon that has to be held so it doesn’t fly away!”

  “So what is a woman?” Jacob suddenly shouted.

  And Noshua smiled into his ear, and while spinning, dipping, pulling, and stepping, he whispered to him: “One two three four. A woman is you, is you, is you.”

  A GLASS OF COGNAC slipped through my fingers. A small smash was heard, a thin strip of blood poured, soap bubbles turned pink.

  Outside the owl hissed. A short flutter of death was heard among the branches. A wind of already-four-in-the-morning-soon-I’ll-calm-down rustled in the leaves.

  I returned to Jacob’s bed, sucked my cut finger, and couldn’t fall asleep. I got up, stopped the old gramophone’s spinning, and wandered around the rooms of my new house.

  The chill air told me that in twenty minutes the birds would start singing the songs of dawn, and I, as I said, all I had to do was hear the voice of the first early-rising bird to know the season and the hour and how much time I had left to live in the world. In winter, it’s the robin who starts in the five A.M. dark and wakes up the swallow and the warbler, who join him, and by six the voices of the blackbirds and the jays are heard. At the end of spring, the larks and the falcons are the first ones up, and in midsummer only the warbler is up before them. The crow, like man, has no fixed time, but as soon as one crow wakes up, all his friends follow suit.

  “At night the world is covered up and sleeping,” Mother told me one morning, when she got up to distribute the mash in the troughs and saw that the child Zayde, the immortal bastard, was already awake and listening, “and in the morning the birds peck at its blanket and poke holes in it.”

  81

  SOMETIMES JACOB FELT that Noshua knew the house and yard even better than he did.

  “Maybe you were here before?” he kept asking, and pretended to be joking to hide his fear.

  “Maybe,” Noshua would keep answering, and one day, after he returned from Rabinovitch’s rock, he headed straight for the storehouse in the yard, and with the confidence of a prophet he rummaged around and burrowed and dug and tossed out, until he found what he was looking for—the albino accountant’s heavy old pots and pans.

  He assessed their weight in relation to their thickness and smiled happily.

  “These pots and pans are yours?”

  “They belonged to somebody who once lived in the house next door,” said Jacob. “Now they’re mine.”

  The pots and pans were filthy dirty. Noshua scratched them with his thumbnail a few times and his eyes lit up.

  “A good chef would sell his son for pots like these,” he said.

  He sent Jacob to bring some steel wool while he made mixtures of ashes and oil, lemon and sand, all kinds of pastes for scraping and scouring. And when he rubbed the pots and pans their gleam began to emerge through the black and the dirt, until dull beams of red copper—the most exciting, warm, and human of all metals—burst out.

  Noshua explained to Jacob that copper pots and pans are intended for master chefs, who are cold-blooded and hot-tempered, and for women who eat with patience and strength. He hammered nails in the kitchen wall and the skillets hanging there looked like three suns setting.

  “Now I’ll cook you a special meal,” he said. “Go outside, Sheinfeld. I’ll call you when everything’s ready.”

  Jacob went out, but he walked around the house and peeped through the window and saw the POW tie Rebecca’s old apron around his waist and his big nimble hands cutting and mixing, stirring and pouring, and all of it with a confidence that brought a smile to Jacob’s face, for he understood that Noshua had once seen a master chef at work, and now he was amusing himself with his imitations.

  And suddenly, right in front of his amazed eyes, the POW dipped his finger—with no hesitation or grimace of pain—into the boiling sauce bubbling in the pot. He left it there a few seconds and then put it in his mouth. His face, the mask of a curious child, became thoughtful. He seasoned and stirred and dipped his finger again, licked it, and nodded and called Jacob to the table.

  The food was fragrant and tasty and unlike anything Jacob had ever eaten.

  “Chew a lot and eat a little, Sheinfeld,” said Noshua. “And you may leave a lot on your plate. That’s a good custom.”

  And when he saw Jacob’s questioning eyes, he added: “A really loving couple never eat too much. If you see a couple in a restaurant eating too much, know that they hate each other, that they want to kill each other by eating, and mainly that they fill their belly so they’ll have an excuse not to go to bed together afterward.”

  And after a brief silence, he said: “And the most important thing, Sheinfeld, both in food as in love, are the rules. In a house where there are no rules, Fate goes wild, Luck tarries, and Chance visits. But in a house where there are rules, Fate does what it’s told, Luck you don’t need, and Chance stays outside, knocking and yelling and can’t come in.”

  • • •

  A FEW BIG YELLOW sheets of paper that hadn’t been cut into notes remained in the house. Noshua found them and instructed Jacob to write on them the do’s and don’t’s of cooking—some of them were very strange—and to hang them on the kitchen wall:

  “Don’t keep flour together with seasonings.”

  “A knife should be longer than the diameter of the cake.”

  “Cilantro is parsley’s crazy sister.”

  “The light for eating should be as bright as the light for reading.”

  “Pears should be kept so they can’t touch one another.”

  “The front part of the cow is eaten in winter and the back part in summer.”

  “Every beverage for drinking has a companion for eating.”

  And one summer morning, out of the blue, as the two of them were sitting in their underwear in the tent and reciting the rule “Eggs are first poured into a small bowl and only afterward into the big bowl,” the Italian suddenly smacked his forehead and shouted: “Cretino! Cretino! Cretino! How didn’t I think of that before? I know how to pick up Rabinovitch’s rock.”

  And from that day on, he forbade himself any imitation of man or beast or bird, and for a few days he even spoke in a new voice, which was so strange that Jacob imagined it was his real voice.

  A new stage began. He no longer played with the village children and no longer pestered cows and jays. From now on, the Italian POW devoted all his free time to studying Moshe Rabinovitch’s movements and memorizing what he did and how he did it.

  82

  ONE DAY A LETTER came from one of Naomi’s friends, a girl from Nahalal who was studying at the Moshav Movement Teachers’ College in Jerusalem. She invited her to come visit for “a few days.”

  “You’re going to him?” asked Judith.

  “I’m not going ‘to him.’ ” Naomi got angry. “And who is this ‘him’ anyway? I’m going to my girlfriend, and maybe I’ll visit ‘him,’ too.”

  Oded took her to Jerusalem in the milk tanker.

  �
��Where are the two of you sleeping?” he asked in a restrained tone.

  “In the street.”

  “I’m asking you where you’re sleeping, Naomi, so answer and don’t get fresh.”

  “I’ll go up to strange men with a gold tooth in their mouth and nicotine stains on their mustache, and I’ll ask them if I can sleep at their place, and if they say they don’t have any room for me, then I’ll say: ‘That’s just fine, sir, the two of us can crowd together in the same bed.’ ”

  “If you go on like that, I’ll turn the truck around right now and take you back to the village.”

  “You won’t turn any truck around and you won’t take anybody back. The milk will get sour in the tank.”

  “And where is your girlfriend?” asked Oded after three hours of silence, when dawn bloomed on Jerusalem.

  “She’ll be here right away,” she said.

  And indeed, the girlfriend from Nahalal did come and take Naomi to her room in the nearby Bukharan neighborhood, where Meir was waiting for her and took her for a cup of strong, sweet tea in a restaurant for night workers in Beit Israel.

  The dawn cold stood in the air. Naomi clasped her hands around the thick, small cup, so different from the thin Russian tea glasses in her father’s house.

  The sun began to rise. Bells pealed. She and Meir bought some fresh bagels and Naomi couldn’t help eating two of them on the way to his room. Going down Princess Mary Street, Meir removed the three sesame seeds that had stuck to her lips—one with a cautious finger, the second with a light puff, and the third with a delicate lick.

  He lived fairly close to Ludwig Meyer’s bookstore, in a rented room with thick walls that delighted her immediately with its red carpet, its deep window ledges, and its low bed. A smell so similar to the smell of Meir’s body came from the pillows on the bed that you couldn’t tell who took the smell from whom.

  “YOU’RE A FOOL, Nomele,” said Mother.

  “You’re the last one who can give me advice,” said Naomi.

  I heard them weeping in close but different voices that didn’t blend into one another, and a few months later, in the spring of 1946, the wedding was held under the big eucalyptus in Rabinovitch’s yard.

  I remember the funny clothes of the strange guests from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and the chorus of wild canaries that suddenly descended on us along with the exulting riffraff of goldfinches and green finches that joined in. And I remember the big gramophone—Sheinfeld’s worker brought it on his shoulder from the colorful tent, set it up near the wall of the cowshed, and kept on turning its handle and playing tunes on it.

  Jacob didn’t dance. He sat off to the side and suddenly called me to come to him.

  Six years old I was at the wedding of Meir and Naomi, and it seems to me that the first speech I heard from Jacob I heard then, when he sat me on his lap and made a remark that didn’t suit my age: “Every human being, Zaydele, feels death when his child is born and when his child marries and when his parents die. Did you know that?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, now you do.”

  I wanted to get off his lap and go on walking around among the tables, attracting looks, candy, and amazement, but Jacob tightened his hold on me and went on with his strange speech: “Three fathers to die before you, you got, Zaydele, and a special name against death you got, and children, I’m afraid, it looks like you ain’t gonna get. That you inherited from me. I don’t have no children, either. I just have a part of a child. I just have thirty-three and a third percent of you, but when you was born, I cried like a father cries for a whole child. People say we cry from joy, but it’s not from joy, Zaydele, it’s from sadness we cry, ’cause a lot of signs of the Angel of Death we can’t understand, but that sign we do know. That’s his sign to announce that your turn is coming. Well, Zaydele, I feel that you want to go now, so run off, play, be happy. We got a wedding today, we got to be happy.”

  MEIR’S RELATIVES LOOKED AT ME with ironic, questioning eyes, conferred in whispers at the sight of Aunt Bathsheba’s black widow’s weeds, and were scared of Rachel, who suddenly burst out of the cowshed and strode into the divided sea of terrified guests and tottering tables to where Mother was sitting.

  Embarrassed giggles were heard when Uncle Menahem, whose spring muteness had struck three days before the wedding, began distributing to all the strangers his notes saying: “I have lost my voice. I am the uncle of the bride and the husband of the widow. Congratulations!”

  Then he beckoned me to him. His pleasant hand tapped encouragement on my shoulder and another note of his was placed before my eyes, saying: “What do you care, Zayde, let them look at us.”

  Meir’s mother, puffed up like a brood hen, kept grumbling about the smells rising from the Village Papish’s goose yard and about the mire that stuck to her shoes. At last, Globerman grabbed her arm and took her off for a dance that made her face flush with the effort and the closeness, and because of the sudden affront to her body. His gigantic feet moved like wild animals around and between her feet, his hand investigated the stunned slope of her spine, his fingers estimated the submissive layer of fat at the bottom of her back.

  “You shouldn’t believe in age, Mrs. Klebanov,” whispered the dealer. “You’re a beautiful, soft, and tasty woman, and a woman who’s got such a fine hill at the bottom of her back shouldn’t have to do such things to herself.”

  Mrs. Klebanov couldn’t imagine that the strange and attractive smell emanating from his neck was the smell of blood. His hand rose up again, examined the thorns of her vertebrae through the fabric of her dress. Suddenly she sighed softly. Drops of warm and forgotten gold, annoying and shameless, rose in the most treacherous tissues of her flesh.

  “Which side are you from?” She blushed.

  “Rabinovitch’s,” said Globerman.

  “You’re Rabinovitch’s brother?”

  “No,” said the cattle dealer politely, “I’m the father of Rabinovitch’s son.” And he pointed at me. “Say hello to Meir’s mother, Zayde.”

  Two children guests, or “petits bourgeois,” as Uncle Menahem called them in a mocking note, wearing dark blue berets and low shoes, pulled out a pocketknife and wanted to carve their names in the soft flesh of the eucalyptus. But Mother went to them and hissed in a voice only I heard: “Leave that tree alone, little carcasses, or I’ll take your knife and I’ll cut off your ears.”

  Rachel lowed, the children fled, the crows, nervy and fearless, dove and pecked at what fell from the tables.

  Two days after the wedding, the sky turned gloomy with spring clouds, a heavy late April rain fell, and the first big quarrel between Meir and Mother erupted.

  I don’t remember what the quarrel was about, but at dawn, Naomi packed clothes in a suitcase and books in a fruit carton, and Oded, frozen and pale with rage, drove his sister and his new brother-in-law to Jerusalem.

  EVEN AT THE WEDDING, Noshua watched Moshe Rabinovitch, observed, and learned. By now he had stopped his attempts to pick up the rock and concentrated solely on Moshe. That year he had already acquired most of the Rabinovitch ways, both the big ones and the small ones, but he hadn’t showed them to anyone, not even to Jacob.

  And one day, after Sukkoth, when the days had grown short and the air was already laden with a smell of water and the first touches of cold, Noshua walked behind Moshe in the dark as he was returning from the dairy.

  Moshe sensed something but didn’t know what. Once, twice, he turned his head around, striving to see and understand, and then he felt her all over his skin and all over his flesh, his Tonychka, his twin reflection, who had risen from the dead and was walking in his wake, and his flesh shuddered.

  Noshua, who didn’t know all those ancient, concealed things and didn’t imagine that in his attempts to imitate Moshe he would also become like his dead wife, walked in his wake again the next night, too.

  And then, when that feeling struck him again, Rabinovitch didn’t delay and didn’t hesitate, but turn
ed around and ran into the gloom behind him, grabbed the stunned worker by the neck, and shouted at him: “Where’s the braid? Now you’ll tell me where’s the braid!”

  Noshua almost collapsed. Moshe was a head and a half shorter than him, but his grip was like the grip of an iron vise.

  “If you had told me, you’d still be alive today,” shouted Moshe.

  And his hands, suddenly despairing and weak, slackened and dropped. Noshua fled, choked and triumphant, laughing and coughing, to the house of his student.

  MEANWHILE, JACOB STARTED learning the next stage, the very difficult one, of the tango: while dancing, Noshua posed riddles to him, told him stories, asked him questions, and argued with him, so his brain would be busy and leave his body to itself.

  At first it was very complicated. If, for instance, the POW asked him what was two hundred thirty-five less one hundred seventeen, Jacob’s body grew stiff and his knees were startled and got tangled up in each other. And things had come to such a pass that, one day, when he asked him, while dancing, the well-known logical conundrum about the man who meets at a crossroads the man who always lies and the man who always tells the truth—Jacob’s legs gave out and he fell facedown.

  But his legs quickly acquired experience and were now confident enough to give up the contact with his brain and his thoughts. Within a few months, he had succeeded in reciting the six laws of overlapping triangles while doing the “Paso Doble” of Buenos Aires, and in carrying on a heated argument, even with some mockery, about the unity of the body and soul while doing the most vigorous turns of “Jealousy.”

  83

  BY THAT TIME, I was in school, and all the children there, both big and small, used to make fun of me, my name, my three fathers, and my mother. Because of their pestering and their cruelty, I sought shelter in the crests of the village cypresses and eucalyptuses, at heights that people with regular names didn’t dare scale. That’s how I discovered the crows, their nests, and their children.