The Loves of Judith

by Meir Shalev

  “Well, Zayde”—Jacob Sheinfeld grabbed me in the street—“maybe you’re gonna find with the crows some gold jewelry and bring it to your mother as a gift.”

  I told him, with the seriousness of children, that there was no scientific proof that crows steal jewelry. And he burst out laughing and declared: “The crow isn’t a scientific bird.”

  “You want to come in?” he asked when we reached the gate of his yard.

  His worker was cooking in the kitchen, and when I entered he bowed to me comically and barked like a dog. Jacob poured tea and told me that in his village, the village on the banks of the Kodyma, there was “one shaygets” who rode the train to the city every year, “for there were very, very rich people there.” In the city, the shaygets searched and found abandoned crows’ nests and took jewels and precious stones from them which the crows had stolen from rich women who left their windows open.

  “Thieving from a thief is not a theft,” declared Noshua from the stove.

  “Only male crows steal jewelry,” explained Jacob. “And they don’t hide it in the family nest. Only in an old nest or even in the ground, ’cause they don’t trust nobody, not even Mrs. Crow and certainly not baby crows. And when nobody sees, they come all by themselves to look at their treasure, to play and enjoy. And that shaygets, you should know, Zayde, he used to ride to the city without a ticket on the roof of the train, but coming back to the village, he rode first class, with a case full of gold and two gypsy women on his lap.”

  IN THE MIDDLE of winter, when the rain was still falling, but the days were already starting to get longer, the crows started breaking dry branches off the trees and building their nests with them. On the rough skeleton, they placed thinner twigs and the concave surface they padded with straw and strings, ropes and feathers. They were so firm and bold that I frequently saw them swooping down and plucking off strands of hair from an angry cow. They didn’t use their old nests anymore and those remained strong and stable, and falcons and owls often took possession of them.

  Then the female crow started hatching the eggs, and the male crow guarded her from his lookout point on one of the nearby trees.

  By now I could distinguish the revealing direction of his look as well as the tail of the mother, sticking out like an oblique black stick over the rim of the nest. When I climbed up to the nests to look, the male crows would surround me furiously and would take off to a nearby tree and make do with loud protests. Once I discovered two fledglings thrown into the tree trunk, two victims of a cuckoo. They were small and ugly, their eyes were blue, and their pinion feathers were only just beginning to sprout on their wings.

  Two grades ahead of me was a child who pestered and abused me a lot and called me names. I told him it was possible to take a fledgling like that home, raise it, and make it into a tame crow. The minute he picked up the fledgling, the crows swooped down on him in flaming fury, beat him with their wings, and pecked his head until he fled home crying and yelling. That whole year, they lay in wait for him in the schoolyard and in his parents’ yard, and tried to wound him every chance they got.

  That has nothing to do with the story of my mother’s life, and so I shall make do with a brief and parenthetical statement, that that was the first and the last time I took revenge on anybody, and I discovered that even though I value and respect the instinct of revenge, satisfying it doesn’t give me any pleasure.

  SOMETIMES WE’D STAND around Jacob’s yard and hope the worker would come outside, put on a little show for us, or resume his war with Rabinovitch’s rock. Our eyes tried to penetrate the sheets of the colorful tent and our nostrils tried to pick up the lids of the pots. The smells of the dishes Noshua cooked were different and better than everything that was cooked in our own houses, and his ways were distinct and attractive. We knew he was a foreigner, but none of us suspected that Sheinfeld’s worker had been an escaped Italian prisoner of war. The war was over by now, the camp was dismantled and plowed up, the worker spoke our language, dressed like all of us, and only later did we find out that Globerman had arranged all his necessary documents and papers, at Jacob’s request.

  Suddenly Sheinfeld came out to the yard, spun around, and walked with strange steps, and the children stared at me, as if they were trying to see what I thought about my mother’s obstinate suitor. Their parents also looked at me like that, for they, too, wanted to know what I thought about my mother. But I had no opinion, and Mother didn’t tell me anything about her three loves, and I didn’t ask her.

  “SO MAYBE YOU, Zayde, maybe you know whose you are? Maybe now, so many years after she’s gone, somebody will say at long last? Maybe you’ll make a test in a hospital to know? I heard they got a special microscope for that. But in you, they see everything even without a microscope. Here, look at yourself and you’ll see what inheritance means. You got big feet like Globerman, blue eyes you got like Rabinovitch, drooping shoulders you got like me. Too bad, if it were the other way around, it would be much better. Even in a normal family a child don’t always look like father or mother, sometimes he looks like an uncle and sometimes like a brother of the father of the grandfather. Back home, one woman once gave birth to a daughter who looked just like her husband’s first wife. What do you say about something like that, Zayde? If she would have given birth to a daughter who looked like her first husband, that’s not so nice, but it’s not so hard to explain, either. But such a thing? Where does it come from? Interesting, Zayde, the whole business of looking alike. See, they say that it’s not only children and parents, husbands and wives also come to look like each other over the years. Maybe it’s their blood that gets mixed? Maybe it’s his semen she gets and is absorbed in her inside there? Maybe it’s from her liquid that he absorbs? See, with both of them that’s very delicate skin there, and with some women it’s just like a sweet river there, believe you me, and you even have to hang the sheets outside to dry afterward. There was a goya back home like that, and the whole village used to count how many times a week they’d hang up the wet sheets, and the clowns in the synagogue used to say about her and her husband ‘the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea.’ Moths used to come and die on those sheets in the dark, and dogs, even from villages very far away, used to always come there to wail and go nuts. So, Zayde, what if I had stayed with Rebecca all the years, maybe today I would look like her and be a handsome man, eh? Moshe and his Tonychka really did look like each other, but that was even before they met. From birth they looked alike, and that it seems is why they fell in love, ’cause with a man there’s nothing that attracts him more than a woman who looks like him. Right away he wants to get into that body without knocking on the door. Right away he feels like he’s got permission from God to do everything. I wish I also had such a simple and good answer to my love. What can I tell you, Zayde, those matters of looking alike, they’re very complicated. And here, with Rabinovitch, something even more interesting happened. Judith and Tonya’s little girl came to look alike. The little girl got Judith’s walk, and her face, don’t tell me you didn’t see how much they looked alike. Real slow it came, that looking alike, until in the end, you’d look and swear that Judith and Naomi are really mother and daughter.”

  THE SUN BROKE FORTH. I opened the closet. The big mirror looked at my yellow hair, my drooping shoulders, my big feet.

  In fact, I said aloud to myself, there really aren’t any answers in me. Just more questions.

  The sand pouring out of her eye sockets, the cypress shadows creeping over her grave, the white of her bared bones.

  “May I have this dance?”

  His old, dead, shriveled arms reached out to me.

  His feet stumbled. His cold hand sought support on my back. A trace of his brittle chin was laid on my shoulder. The sun rose, and I shook him off me, went back to bed and closed my eyes, ripe and ready for my brief sleep.

  “And to the wedding, see, you know, Zayde, she didn’t come. Everybody came to the wedding I made, everybody ate the food
I cooked, she put on the bridal gown I sewed, and all alone I danced the dance I learned. How did that happen, Zayde? See, she was on her way to me, so what happened?”

  84

  NOSHUA WENT ON searching and found the albino’s old scythe. He honed the curved blade, mowed the grass of the yard, and raked it into a pile along with the straw and the old briers that time had amassed there. Then he took a crushed cigarette out of his shirt pocket, and even though nobody had ever seen him smoke before, he lit it. He inhaled the smoke with great pleasure; and he didn’t blow out the match, but tossed it onto the pile. The fire caught with a roar and with flames, and turned a new generation of curious faces red.

  “And now, food for the wedding,” he declared.

  He turned up the ground with the pitchfork, inserted posts, stretched wires, dug beds, and sowed vegetables. Behind the canary house, onions and eggplant, peppers and squash quickly sprouted. In the front of the lot grew the garlic and the parsley and various kinds of leaves and grasses whose good smell was twined with the notes of the tango and the chirps of the canaries, and a few ancient poppies, which had been waiting in the ground in violation of every law, also decided to show up among them.

  Noshua instructed Jacob to fertilize the vegetables with blood, but Jacob was scared of the idea. “Why blood? Are we lacking manure here? With all the cows and chickens?”

  “And why dung?” Noshua marveled. “If you were a tomato, which would you choose?”

  The slaughterhouse, the small active kingdom of the butchers, and the cattle dealers, was beyond the eucalyptus forest, and the figure of Jacob, with two small jars hanging from a pole on his shoulders, was seen there three times a week.

  Blow flies, lusty and ravenous, flew behind him like a greenish bridal veil of death. Martens and jackals, their eyes shut, rubbed against his legs, mad with the smell of blood rising from the jars.

  At that time, Jacob gave me the observation-box, and I often hid here, watching the birds who came to eat their fill of the offal from the knives of the ritual slaughterers and the porgers.

  And humans I saw, too. I saw, I heard, and I remembered.

  “If Lady Judith knows that you are watering your garden with cows’ blood, you won’t ever see her again,” Globerman said to Jacob, when the two of them met on the path leading through the forest. “Please remember, sir, what Globerman says.”

  Jacob didn’t answer.

  “So what, Sheinfeld?” the dealer changed the subject. “You are still dancing?”

  “Yes,” answered Jacob with the seriousness of lovers, that naïve seriousness that wards off all mockery.

  “You’re a fool, Sheinfeld,” said Globerman. “But that’s nothing, there are a lot of other fools besides you. He who is a fool is never alone, he’s in a very big company.”

  “With Judith, we’re all fools,” said Jacob, and with a sudden daring, he added: “With Judith, even you are a fool, Globerman.”

  My heart pounded, shook my ribs and the sides of the box. The steel tip of the baston gently tapped the toes of Jacob’s boots.

  “Yes, Sheinfeld,” murmured the cattle dealer. “With Judith we’re all fools, but only you are also an idiot. You act like an idiot and you love like an idiot and you’ll also end up like an idiot.”

  “And how does an idiot end up?” asked Jacob.

  “An idiot ends up exactly like a fool, but it’s an end everybody sees, period,” said the cattle dealer, and after a brief, cold pause that fell on the two of them, he added: “And because you are an idiot, I’ll give you an example that will help you, Sheinfeld, that even an idiot like you can understand. Your love is like walking around with a hundred-pound bill in your pocket. That’s a lot of money, right? You think you can make a life with it, right? But you can’t make anything with it. With a hundred pounds you can’t drink a glass of beer, you can’t eat a sausage, you can’t get into the movies, you can’t even go to a whore. Nobody’s gonna give you change for a hundred-pound bill, and nobody’s gonna sell you nothing, period. That’s exactly like your love.”

  “With great love only great things work,” declared Jacob proudly. “Not small change.”

  Pity and scorn were all mixed up in the cattle dealer’s voice: “I don’t know what your dancing-clowning worker is teaching you or what Menahem Rabinovitch tells you when you run to cry to him,” he said. “But love, you should know, Sheinfeld, you have to change it to pennies, not to think so big, not to talk too high, not to sacrifice your whole life all at once. All your canaries you released for her and you didn’t get nothing in return. Not her did you get and not the change from the birds did you get.”

  “Shut your mouth,” said Jacob.

  The cattle dealer waved his hand in well-acted despair. “Why I give you advice I don’t know. After all, I love that woman, too, and her son I want, too. But I feel sorry for you, Sheinfeld, ’cause you’re an idiot and you’re confused. My father used to say about somebody like you that God had mercy on you when He put your balls in a bag, or else you’d lose them, too. So at least know how to use the advice I’m giving you now. You’ve got to know how to bring something small here, tell a little story there, that’s what works, Sheinfeld, something small, and many times.”

  85

  THE ISRAELI WAR OF INDEPENDENCE BROKE OUT. Men disappeared from the village. Shots were heard from the road and distant smoke rose beyond the hills. New graves were also dug in the village cemetery. But Noshua, with a perfect Galilean accent and with bare feet that left traces, went to the nearby Arab village and came back, bleated in the voices of ewes, and a trusting little lamb trotted behind him.

  After two weeks of fattening, leaping in the field, and games of hide-and-seek, Noshua led the lamb to the walnut tree, tied its hind legs with a rope, hung it head down on one of the branches, and before the lamb understood that this wasn’t a new game, he picked up an old sickle that had lost all its teeth, stretched his victim’s neck, and cut off his head in one smooth movement.

  Even before the decapitated lamb’s spasms stopped, the worker had already cut the joints of his limbs, right above the hooves, placed his lips to the pieces, and blew hard.

  “Pay attention, Sheinfeld,” he said to Jacob, tapping the entire small body with both hands.

  Blowing air separated the skin from the flesh, and when Noshua cut along the lamb’s belly, he stripped off the skin like a coat.

  “If you know how to do this, it’s very easy, and if you don’t know, it’s very hard,” he said.

  Excited by the fragrant proximity of death, the crows hovered and hopped around. Lust and impatience made them so bold they came close and pecked Noshua’s blood-soaked shoes. He tossed them the intestines and he baked the lamb in the aromatic ashes of what once were the branches of the orange trees in Rebecca and Jacob’s citrus grove.

  “Sit here, Sheinfeld,” said Noshua, picked up a small, fragrant piece of meat with his fingers, blew on it to cool it, and put it to his student’s lips. “And remember that there are rules,” he went on. “You will look into her eyes and her eyes will look at you, and then real slow they will close. That’s the sign that she trusts you, and then, real slow, the lips will open, and real careful you’ll offer it, but you won’t yet really put the meat inside. You’ll wait a minute and then there’ll be a sign: her tongue will peep out a bit, like a little hand, to accept the gift. Then you’ll touch it with the meat and she’ll open her mouth and take it. That’s great trust and that’s great love, you should know. To open your mouth like that and to eat with your eyes closed, that’s more trust than to lie together with your eyes closed.”

  Jacob’s eyes closed, his jaws spread apart, his tongue peeped out. Trusting and groping and smelling the fragrance and the warmth, it took and gathered its booty into his mouth.

  “Eat now, Sheinfeld, eat,” and another small piece was put in his mouth.

  “After the wedding, you’ll sit together at the table, the whole village will watch and you will feed her
just like this. Not a lot, not with a fork, just a bit and only with the fingers. You’ll look at her as she chews, and she’ll look at you.”

  And Jacob opened his eyes wide, looked and chewed and swallowed. The scar blazed on his forehead. Saliva and tears, milder than all the other liquids of the body, made what he swallowed slide to his jaw, his thighs trembled, and his heart melted.

  Noshua noted the expression of pleasure and love on his student’s lips and hurried to extract his fingers before he was bitten. He stood up and put a record on the gramophone and Jacob couldn’t decide whether the tune fit itself to the POW’s movements or whether the Italian placed his feet on the notes with the ease of a schoolgirl skipping into a jump rope.

  And then Noshua turned his head to Jacob and asked: “Finished with the mouth?”

  Jacob nodded.

  “Now the two of you will dance.”

  And he gathered him up in his arms, pressed him to his body, and together they danced the tango, the dance of restrained lust, dried saliva, and the pain of regrets of the flesh.

  THE ENDLESS NOTES of the dance and the scents of the vapor and the seasoning and the mixing and the thickening rose from Sheinfeld’s yard and hovered over the earth. Everybody understood what they meant and knew what their purpose was, and yet mystery surrounded the house and the tent and the two men who lived, studied, trained, and prepared there.

  A thin covering, like a fabric that envelops hired killers, alchemists, and very young widows, veiled all their ways.

  Many people stopped at the house and tried to crumble its walls with their looks. Others only slowed their pace and gulped the air.

  “In the Land of Israel young men are killed, and those two are playing over her,” said Oded, who came on leave for a few hours. He was serving in the Harel Brigade as a convoy truck driver, and brought letters to Naomi and from Naomi into besieged Jerusalem.