by Meir Shalev
Neighbors and relatives came to the bride with good-night wishes, woman to woman. Two of them whispered in her ear that a baby conceived on the wedding night would be big and healthy and good. But the bride paid them no mind. The neighbors could say what they wanted, her body had already spoken the truth: in the hopeful excitement of her loins, the expectant dryness in her throat, the pleasant uneasiness of her diaphragm. She had not yet known a man and was fearful, but her fears were overcome by emotion and desire and curiosity.
She remembered: When she was about eleven and Ze’ev was fifteen, she saw him at a spring down in the wadi, bare from the waist up. The magnificent ox of the Tavori family was also there with him. Ze’ev first washed the ox with pails of water and a hard brush and combed the end of his tail, and then stripped completely naked. Ruth saw his arms and the back of his neck, bronzed by the sun, and his thighs and back, completely white. He bent over and stood straight and poured water from the pail over his body and apparently sensed that she was looking at him, even from afar, and turned around.
For a moment she saw his sparkling eyes and the dark patch of his loins. Did he smile at her? Did he get angry? He ducked into the bushes and shouted, “Go home, Ruth!” And when she didn’t leave, he continued, “You already saw me, you saw. Now please go, because I’m washing up.” Then she went, but the words “you saw me” mixed love into her desire, and though she was only eleven, she knew that love and lust were mingled for him too.
The couple rose from their chairs. The invited guests looked at them with affection. They were a handsome and loving couple. Neither of them was especially beautiful, but together they were strikingly attractive. This was perhaps because they looked alike: they were both tall and broad-shouldered, their teeth were straight and white and their necks thick and strong, and both radiated the dumb luck of healthy young people. They smiled at each other, and because of their height their smiles sailed over the heads of the guests. They wanted to repair to their room, but they knew they had to play by the rules, and were also a bit abashed, because everyone would know why they were going.
The yard emptied out very slowly, and finally the bride’s mother called her into the kitchen and said, “Well, we had a big long day, and you probably want to rest now.” Ze’ev and his parents and Ruth’s father also entered the room, and the father said, “The guests have gone to sleep, let’s also go to sleep.”
The four parents exited the kitchen. The couple was left alone.
“Ruth”—Ze’ev smiled—“I am very happy you agreed to marry me. Thank you.”
“I’m happy too,” said Ruth. “I hoped you would want me and I knew I would say yes. I knew it even when we were children and you would come to our yard, riding on your ox.”
She came closer to him and, in a gesture of the moment that would remain in their family in future generations, she extended her right hand and placed it in the center of his chest, spreading her fingers as a sign of love and faith, and he leaned a little forward to sense her soothing strength.
They entered their room, locked the door, did not turn on a light, and went to the opposite sides of the bed. A new sheet was spread upon it, and a new lightweight blanket. As a wedding gift, the mothers of the bride and groom had sewn them each a new nightshirt. Together they had bought the cloth and together had sewn the shirts, broad, white, and long, identical in pattern and different in size—the mother of the groom sewed the bride’s shirt, and the mother of the bride sewed the groom’s. That was the custom then.
The nightshirts were ironed and folded and placed on the conjugal bed, which also had been built—assembled—for the wedding. Most of the beds in the moshava were single beds, built by the same carpenter and therefore of uniform shape and size. And when a couple got married, the two fathers would take the groom’s bed from his house and the bride’s from hers and attach them one to the other with three wooden boards and large screws, at the head and middle and foot. And here in the center of the room stood the bed that Ze’ev’s father and Ruth’s father had put together, and on it were the nightshirts sewn by the mothers-in-law, hers on the left and his on the right.
The two of them took off their clothes and put on the shirts in the dark and immediately the bride heard the groom grumble that his shirt was too small and wouldn’t fit across his shoulders. She understood that the mothers had mistakenly laid her shirt on his side and his on her side.
She laughed softly, a laugh he didn’t appreciate, since she had already taken off his shirt while he was still wrestling with hers, and he knew she was totally naked, waiting in the dark, but he was afraid of tearing the stitches of her shirt. He finally worked free of it, and as they tried to exchange shirts, their hands touched. Although the darkness engulfed their blurry nakedness, they were suddenly frightened and withdrew, tossing the nightshirts to each other. White and silent, like two giant barn owls, the shirts floated past each other, landing on the correct sides of the bed. The two felt around and picked them up and put on the shirts that had been given to him and to her, sat down on the bed, the man on his side and the woman on hers, then lay down on their backs.
They lay side by side. Only the woven linen covered the skin, and the skin the flesh, and the flesh the ribs that enclosed the two hearts. They had already stolen kisses in the vineyard, as the old saying went, and the groom had once even stroked the bride’s right breast over her blouse, and they had also hugged and squeezed and felt the rising heat of their loins through his clothes and hers, and his hardness and her softness, but they had not yet become one flesh, as a woman and her man.
They lay there in the darkness, until Ruth felt Ze’ev’s hand looking for hers, finding it, lifting it to his lips. He sat up and leaned on his left elbow and kissed her fingers one by one, and she was pleased by his unexpected gentleness, so different from his rough conduct in the fields and on guard duty, and was happy that the words of one of her married friends—“all the disgusting stuff that awaits you”—had not materialized. “And if he attacks you like an animal,” her friend had continued, “lie there quietly. It’s over quickly, in general. And if necessary, I’ll explain what to do to get it over with even quicker.”
His other hand joined in, rested on her cheek and nudged her face toward him. She leaned over to him and they embraced, and kissed, lovingly taking their time, in the confident knowledge of what was to come, as if wishing to postpone it a bit, to enjoy a few more minutes of curiosity and longing.
After kissing the fingers of her other hand the groom leaned over to his bride and put his hand on her hip and pulled her a bit toward him, and she responded and drew closer, and when their bodies were pressed together he again kissed her lips and she could sense that he was smiling in the dark and hoped that he could feel her smile. The groom pulled up the bottom of his nightshirt almost to his chest, and the bride pulled hers up to her hips and lay motionless on her back, as her mother had instructed, quoting a verse from the biblical book of her namesake Ruth: “And lay thee down, and he will tell thee what thou shalt do.”
His weight was strange and new to her body. She tried to anticipate the feeling she was about to have, when he would be inside her. She held him, moved her body a bit so that their knees and ankles touched, and her breasts were pressed to his, nipple to nipple, and this was very pleasing to her body and her heart, and when she spread her thighs for him and moved her body under his, she let out a deep sigh, so loud it surprised them both, and she suddenly felt that his flesh had gone limp and soft, and a shock ran through him and through her.
She, despite her lack of experience and perhaps because of it, tried to draw him closer, to embrace him with her thighs, and he pressed his flesh to hers, but he already understood, though this had never happened to him before, that on this night his flesh would not comply. The feeling was so clear and simple that he imagined that his organ had fallen off his body, like a fruit dropping from its tree to the ground.
For a moment he touched himself, as if seeking v
erification, and when his fingers confirmed the feeling he slid off her, lay beside her on his back, pulled the nightshirt down to his knees, and covered up with the blanket. Very quietly, very slowly, he again sent a stealthy hand to reconnoiter the territory, to assess if it was strong or weak, small or big, and the organ was in fact there, in its usual place, but the hand felt that same strange feeling, that it wasn’t part of the body but detached from it.
He was young. So young that quite often his organ would get hard all by itself, from ideas and images that went not through its owner’s head but through its own. So young he didn’t yet know the potential consequences of an odd glance, a teasing word, an inappropriate smile, an unpleasant body odor, a stupid remark, a lingering grudge, an uninvited memory, one drink too many—the reasons are plentiful and the result is the same.
His hand was still there, as if defending his loins, and he again gave a little squeeze—was there anything solid inside the limpness? Something to build and be rebuilt? And with horror he sensed another strange thing: that only the hand felt the squeeze, not the organ. And now he felt his hand was not alone, that his wife’s hand was there too, stroking him.
There was something clinical in her touch, chilling. He recoiled.
“What are you doing?” he whispered furiously.
“I just wanted to take your hand in mine,” she said. “To lie hand in hand. What’s the matter?”
Confused, she tried awkwardly to embrace him. He froze and pulled away.
“Leave me alone,” he said. “You don’t need to hold my hand like I’m a little boy.”
And after a minute or two he said, “Go to sleep now.”
“And you?”
“I have to check the water by the cowshed. My father drank too many l’chaims and undoubtedly forgot, and the cows are not to blame that there was a wedding.”
“Don’t go. Your father didn’t forget, and Arieh and Dov are here too. Stay with me, we’ll doze off and sleep together. You also had quite a bit to drink. It will pass. It’s nothing.”
Ze’ev did not reply. Ruth sat up in bed and again put her palm to his chest with her fingers spread out, but he shrank from her and her touch. She lay down on her back and closed her eyes. After a short while, without checking if she was asleep or awake, he got up and took off the wedding nightshirt, dropped it on the floor, put on his pants, and opened the door.
The moon had already moved to the west and shone so brightly that his body in the doorway was a huge, masculine silhouette. She saw him walk out and close the door after him. His feet felt the dirt of the yard, his bare chest felt the wind, its warmth and chill interwoven, typical of the spring month of Sivan.
For a moment he felt good, but then he smelled his father’s pipe and followed the scent and saw him sitting on a chair and smoking beside the grape arbor, a bottle of schnapps in his hand.
He tried to withdraw into the shadows, but his father felt his presence.
“Why aren’t you sleeping?” he asked him.
“I couldn’t fall asleep.”
“Usually you fall asleep afterward, but sometimes all that love and excitement can keep you awake,” the father said and gave his son a look that invited an exchange of manly smiles, but quickly realized that this was not the case.
“Was everything all right?” he asked worriedly.
“It wasn’t.”
“What wasn’t?”
“It wasn’t.”
“What wasn’t? You weren’t together?”
“We almost were. But suddenly not.”
“What happened?”
Silence.
“She rejected you? She was scared? Wouldn’t open?”
“It was me. Suddenly I didn’t want to.”
“What do you mean you didn’t want to? You’re a young guy. At your age it’s not you who does or doesn’t want. Your body does the wanting. At your age it always wants.”
“At first my body wanted and suddenly didn’t want.”
The father puffed on his pipe and fell silent. Then he said, “These things happen to everyone once in a while.”
And after a moment, which seemed very long to the son and short to him, he took a swig from his bottle and probed. “She said something to you? She did something that wasn’t right?”
“No. She didn’t say or do. She lay there and waited.”
“Go back to her,” said the father. “You hear? Now go back to bed. If you don’t do it tonight, that’s very bad.”
He took apart his pipe and blew into the mouthpiece to remove the tobacco juice that was burning his tongue.
“Tonight it won’t happen, Abba. We’ll do it tomorrow. Tomorrow night.”
“Go to her now. Get into bed and lie next to her.”
“I already lay next to her.”
“Touch her the way you dreamed of touching a woman.”
Ze’ev was silent.
“Think of a different woman and the things she did to you.”
“How can you talk that way, Abba. This is my wife. I love her.”
“Love? Love is a luxury. Only a small part of the life of a man and woman. You need to think about your whole lives now. If you don’t do it tonight, she will think that you’re not a man. Then she will consult with her mother and her sisters and their friends, and they will tell their mothers and sisters and friends. This story must not start to go around here in the moshava.”
“She already went to sleep, Abba. Tomorrow will be fine. Maybe I drank a little too much, I’m not used to it like you are.”
The father sighed.
“I’ll go check if there’s water for the cows,” said Ze’ev.
“I already checked,” said the father.
“Just to be sure,” said Ze’ev and went and checked, and when he got back his father was no longer on his chair, but someone else was on guard duty, who flashed him a gap-toothed smile.
He went back to Ruth, worried she was still awake and afraid she had fallen asleep. He lay beside her, listened to her breathing, hoping she would touch him and hoping she wouldn’t, and eventually fell asleep and did not dream.
In the morning they awoke. At first they lay side by side in silence and then got up and put on their clothes with a mixture of embarrassment and hostility. Ze’ev joined his father and brothers in the vineyard. Ruth, to his dismay, joined the women in the yard and kitchen.
The next night was reminiscent of the first, and the third was reminiscent of the previous two, and on the fourth night, when Ruth didn’t put on the nightshirt in total darkness but instead lit a candle and got into bed as naked as the day she was born and caressed his genitals first with one hand and then with two and then also with her tongue, he was shocked: Where did she get this expertise? Had she been with another man before him? Or maybe she had spoken about his failure and gotten advice from one of the women in her family, and even now the story was going around with winks and whispers? His father was right. The whole moshava would know, and so terrified was he that his whole body shriveled.
2
A few days went by, and Ze’ev told his father that he wanted to take his wife and return to his new home in the new moshava. The father asked that he stay two more days, because he wanted him to come with him to Tiberias and help him with something.
They rode to Tiberias, chatted a bit on the way, mainly about horses and farming and pruning and grafting, and the British attitude toward Jewish settlement versus their attitude toward the Arabs. On the way they stopped at a Bedouin encampment, where they were served coffee and the father conversed with a few male acquaintances. Ze’ev sat on the side and listened. He was proud of his father, who spoke good Arabic and knew how to behave according to local custom. They then bade farewell to their hosts and traveled northeast along the mountain ridge.
The Sea of Galilee, languid and milky, lay before them, with Tiberias on its shore. Most of its houses were then built of black basalt, and only a few sat on the slopes west of the lake. They drove down to
ward the town and turned north onto a spit of land with several handsome homes. In one of these dwelt a wealthy Arab, a friend of the father. They sat in his garden, the older men ate and drank and talked, and Ze’ev ate a little and drank a little and kept quiet. More people came, some sort of contract was signed, paper money changed hands, and then the father whispered something into the ear of the host, who whispered something back and signaled with his fingers.
A little boy darted from the shade of a tree, ran off at great speed, his heels raising dust. A few minutes later he returned, beaming proudly, seated beside the driver of a carriage drawn by two horses. Ze’ev and his father left their horses in the host’s garden and got into the carriage and rode to a filthy alley near the lakeshore, south of the fishermen’s pier.
The driver came to a halt beside a house with pink window curtains and two large flowering pinta trees in its yard, and opened the carriage door. Ze’ev had never been to such a place, but understood at once what it was. The father told him to wait a moment in the carriage, went to the mistress of the house, and gravely explained to her that his son had gotten married a few days ago and there were problems.
“How many days?” inquired the lady.
“One week exactly.”
“You should have come the very next day,” said the proprietor, a fat Jewess, a speaker of German and Arabic and French and English and the sign language of the deaf and Yiddish and Ladino and Hebrew, “but not to worry. I have just the girl for him.”
“I would like a clean and healthy lady for him, good and patient,” said the father, adding: “Not too young and not too old, not too beautiful and not too ugly.” And he explained that everything about her should be middling and average, so that she would not later reappear to his son as either nightmare or the object of longing, haunt his nights or suddenly shimmer before him in the heat of the day, and must not leave marks on his body or his soul and should be experienced without flaunting it.