by Meir Shalev
The madam smiled and said that he was not the first father ever to bring her his son, “and you, sir, I can see from your hands, the wrinkles near your eyes, and the way you walk, that you are a fellah, a man who works the land, so you need to know that my girls know a lot about agriculture, how to plant and water, to grind and pluck, to pick grape after grape or eat the whole cluster, and most important, sir, the virginity that young men lose here will never again be found, even if hunted with a lantern.”
“All well and good,” said the father, “but planting is enough, and only in the hole, and everything should be normal, as God made us. She shouldn’t scare him with special things, which your girls, I have heard, do with their eyelids and fingers.”
On the wall behind the madam, four tassels, yellow and blue and red and green, dangled at the ends of ropes that disappeared into the ceiling. She nodded with understanding and asked if he would like an Arab lady or a Jew.
“I have heard,” said the father, “about a Circassian woman you have here.”
“The Circassian isn’t appropriate,” said the proprietress. “She is exactly what you said not to give him. But I have already decided who will take him.”
“Who?” asked the father.
“If you like, you can see her first.”
The father was shocked. “See her? Certainly not! I rely on you.”
“And in the meantime?” asked the madam. “Perhaps the gentleman would also like some small service?”
Absolutely not. The gentleman will wait at the café next door. He turned around, heading for the street, then paused on the third stair and turned back to the madam and asked if she happened to know how to use her fingers to whistle too.
Most men do not take their sons to whorehouses, and such a question would seem odd to them, but the madam nodded: Of course she knows how. She will pay attention and keep an open ear and eye, and if something happens, she will whistle at once, loud and clear.
“You can hear me from here to Damascus and from here to Jaffa,” she promised him, “and not just you—all the fathers who worry about all the sons will hear, from the Nile to the Euphrates. There’s just one more small matter: I generally get paid in advance.”
The father paid her and summoned his son. Ze’ev came from the carriage, fairly embarrassed. The madam looked him up and down the way a man looks at a woman, reached out to the wall, and tugged the blue tassel.
The joyful ding-dong of a distant bell descended from the upper floor, and the madam told Ze’ev to climb the stairs, where he would see a yellow door and blue door and red door and green door, and knock on the blue one and wait for it to open.
Ze’ev glanced at his father, who indicated with his chin and eyebrows that he should go upstairs, and he did. The landlady listened, counted silently till four, the number of seconds that young men like him hesitate at the blue door, and then heard him knocking and it being opened and heard his steps—confident steps, she privately noted.
The prostitute who was there, not young and not old, not ugly and not beautiful, not skinny and not fat, greeted Ze’ev by taking his two hands in hers and stepped backward toward the bed. She lay down on her back, leaned against the wall on a big round pillow, and undid the belt of her robe. Ze’ev feared she would expose herself completely, that her nakedness would instantly eclipse his imagination. To his relief she was not naked but wearing a flimsy shirt, and when she stretched backward the fabric oscillated in breaking waves that augured excitement.
“All yours,” she said, and instructed him to get undressed behind a screen while she got up and closed the heavy drapes, leaving the room almost totally dark, for she knew that he would likely be abashed by his naked arousal. He emerged and sat beside her, and she stroked his head and hugged him a bit, and after a moment removed his hand from atop his loins, gave a good look, and said, “They said a little bird was coming for its first time and they sent a warhorse.”
About half an hour later, as he left there and went downstairs to the café, Ze’ev saw his father studying his walk and facial expression, trying to determine what happened. The two got into the carriage, returned to the home of the Arab where their horses were tied, and on the way said nothing to each other. When they rode up to the ridge from Tiberias and saw the valley below, the father asked, “So what do you say, Ze’ev?”
And Ze’ev smiled and lied. “Everything is fine now.”
Another day went by, and the father asked him again, and Ze’ev again lied, and on the third day he and Ruth traveled to their home in the new moshava and apart from necessary banalities did not converse the entire way. They entered the house, Ruth began organizing her new kingdom, Ze’ev went out to the field, and at night they went into their new bedroom and found that changing their place was not enough to change their luck.
3
How does a man know that his wife has slept with another man? Sometimes she herself tells him, sometimes someone else does, sometimes she looks at him with new disdain, and sometimes with unprecedented fear. Sometimes she denies herself to him, or the opposite: desires and demands him in a way she had not desired and demanded him before.
If our man is endowed with brains and sensitivity, he will understand that all of these are evidence that testifies to nothing. Not to her loyalty or her betrayal, her indifference or her lust, old impatience or new patience, not to anything else or its total opposite. And if he is not endowed with brains and sensitivity, he will understand the very same thing. These things are elusive. One moment someone looks you in the eye and the next moment their eyes are averted, one moment you pierce them with your gaze and the next moment you’re knocking on shuttered eyelids, and the truth doesn’t shine out but sinks inward, where the worm of suspicion crumbles the soul and burrows tunnels in the body.
Night after night, day after day. There are those who do nothing, but there are those who investigate and clarify: surveillance, searches, sniffing clothes, emptying pockets, cross-examination, digging through the trash bin, and inspecting the bedsheets. I haven’t included phones and computers, since these didn’t exist in those days, but then as now, all the troops are lined up: ears are attuned, eyes alert, trackers pick up the scent—commandos of memory, platoons of logic, battalions of deduction.
As for Ze’ev Tavori, he was exempt from all that, for he did not suspect his wife until the truth hit him full force in the face. At first he observed that she made a greater effort than usual to cuddle close to him and initiate intercourse, but he didn’t understand the real reason. Then he noticed a new habit: she would get up suddenly and leave the house, sometimes in a great hurry, and when he followed her one day, he saw her heading for the cowshed, or beyond it to the vineyard, and when he drew nearer he saw her bending over and vomiting between the grapevines. He almost hurried after her to ask if she needed help, but withdrew and went away. And then, one day, one of the local women approached him, her face bright and happy, and congratulated him on his wife’s pregnancy.
He was shocked. His anxiety now had a name and a meaning. But he quickly recovered and thanked the woman, who gave him a strange look and said, “Your wife is young, this is a first pregnancy, it’s possible she hasn’t told you yet, but other women don’t need to be told. They know what they see.”
Indeed, Ruth’s figure had not yet thickened, but her eyes glowed with the beautiful glow of a first pregnancy, something that few men notice but was apparent to the women of the moshava. In the ensuing days other women congratulated him and extended their good wishes. He did not know if they approached her too or what they said or what she answered, but his heart was heavy and dark and his gut convulsed with terror, for only she and he knew that she was not pregnant by him. How long could they pretend? And how could he watch her belly swelling beside him? An alien sperm had invaded her womb and his home, a fetus not his was growing inside her, multiplying cell upon cell, declaring its existence to others.
Ruth said nothing to him, and he was afraid to question he
r and considered the possibility of pretending he was the father and responded to well-wishers with an odd mixture of smiles and gloom. They attributed this to the fact that not all men adjust quickly to a first pregnancy, and there are those who are upset by second and third pregnancies too; and he feared the truth would come out and therefore did not confide his agony to anyone. He merely looked at every man in the moshava, trying to find the answer in a gaze or downcast eyes, laughter or fear. He imagined a crushed neck in his hands, a pulverized chin under his fist, gurgling lungs, and the snap of broken bones.
And he saw her that way too, beaten, strangled, stoned to death as an adulteress, buried alive. He pictured the foreign, fleshy battering ram pounding within her, spilling its seed at the lip of her womb, the tiny bastard growing in there, floating in its fluids. What would he do at the moment of the birth? And afterward? As he pondered this, all he could see was a curtain with nothing behind it.
A few weeks passed, and Ruth began to sense that the fetus was female. Another womb, small and pure, she felt, was growing within her, in that perfidious, lustful womb of hers, as she described it in her heart. If she could kill this fetus by the sheer power of her mind, she would do it. If she could, she would rip it out with her fingernails, but the mind does not always control the body. A little daughter grew inside her, very slowly, with the calm confidence of someone who knows nothing about her mother. A little daughter. A baby. A girl.
She did not yet have good friends in the new moshava to talk with about her worries and fears, and she was afraid to write a letter to her mother, because in every moshava there are eyes that read letters even in sealed envelopes. As for Ze’ev, he was never inclined to candid conversations with others. And though he searched the eyes of neighbors and relatives for sparks of derision, or at least of suspicion, he did not find them, but reality has its own ways of showing itself, and when his wife’s belly began to protrude under her clothing, men too began smiling at him and congratulating him on the pregnancy, which was the first pregnancy of the moshava, and Ze’ev responded with gloomy smiles and nods of greeting. His father, who came for a visit, said, “Well, well, I knew everything would be all right,” and then, as if unable to contain his joy, clenched his fists and declared, “Now here’s a real man. Hands of iron, brow of basalt, shvantz of copper!”
But Ruth, who knew her husband, realized that something terrible was going to happen. Unlike Ze’ev, who had not understood the signs of her pregnancy until he was congratulated by the local women, she understood his pregnancy: the revenge and the rage swelling in the placenta of his fury, joined umbilically to his soul and nourished by its dark arteries, and she knew that this birth would come sooner than the birth of the fetus in her womb.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Every time Eitan came to visit Dovik he would come alone, never with a girlfriend, and he would always ask me how I was and make conversation. And when I went into the army—I didn’t want to join their unit, which was how it went with them, guys bringing in their sisters—and I came home in uniform, he suddenly looked at me differently, like I was no longer his friend’s little sister but someone interesting in her own right. Mainly when I came in my work uniform, which was short on me and too wide, but suited me fine. It aroused a desire to touch me, he told me years later, “to check if you were actually real.”
We began to talk, and even before we became a couple we made each other laugh, and we had looks that we exchanged when Dovik and Dalia didn’t get what was funny, and there were little discoveries of our similar tastes in movies and food. Not books, by the way, for the simple reason that Eitan doesn’t read. And I saw how Grandpa Ze’ev trained his eye on us the way he didn’t look at others, and I picked up that not only Dovik but he too was interested in this match and that Eitan would stay.
That was it. Every encounter added more layers and desires and reasons, and we fell in love. It didn’t happen as quickly as I’m making it sound, but when we fell in love we understood that we had already been in love for a long time. When I say “a long time” I mean I was already out of the army and had gone to university and gotten my teaching certificate.
That really is a long time.
Correct. But it makes no difference. Things have to happen at their own pace. We understood. We fell in love. And finally I got pregnant and then we got married. I hope you have no problem with that. Eitan joined the Tavori nursery business and Neta was born, spitting image of his father as a child. There are women who don’t like the expression “spitting image.” These are women with two family names, and instead of common sense they have emotional intelligence. I, by the way, have not an ounce of emotional intelligence. I have tons of emotion and I also have intelligence but, alas, with me they don’t mix.
I remember: Our first time was beautiful. That’s important, because it’s not like that for everyone. Sometimes it’s so tense and clumsy that it’s awful. From time to time my female students come and tell me that it happened and how it was and what happened and what they felt, and want to know if what they felt was okay or not, and if in the future it’ll be better, as if I were some sort of authority. They sit with me under the mulberry tree and ask for advice—what if he, what if she, what if people will know with whom, and what if they tell. God, how pathetic is that. Ruta the teacher, the pal, the wild woman, the strong one who overcame her disaster, who smiles, who bravely looks to the future. Ruta-tuta, who hasn’t had sex with her husband for years but overflows with advice for her female students: It’s important that the first time be with love, and important in general that it be with love, and how you know that it’s love, and at what age to start, blah blah blah…
Twice, by the way, male students came to me with similar questions. There was a period when I hoped that Ofer would come to tell me that it also happened to him. Ofer, yes, my former student, who almost drowned on me in the Sea of Galilee, the one who takes pictures, and I would tell him, Very nice, Ofer, tell me how it was but not with whom, so I won’t stomp out of the woods and tear apart the girl who stole you.
Whatever. For Eitan and me the first time was during my second year at university when I came home for a holiday, and he came to visit Dovik and Dalia. He brought fish and barbecued them, and Dalia, who is a good cook, prepared fabulous rice in her special rice pot, and her marvelous spicy tomato-garlic-pepper salad, and potatoes for Dovik, for whom a meal isn’t a meal without a kilo of potatoes. We drank white-wine spritzers the way Grandpa likes them, and after the meal everyone went to take a nap, Grandpa under his mulberry tree, with the big fan and the extension cord, Dovik and Dalia under the air conditioner in their bedroom, while Eitan rocked in my hammock with his eyes closed.
I sought to clarify the meaning of this takeover.
“Eitan,” I said.
He didn’t reply.
“Eitan,” I said, “this is my hammock. I haven’t been home in two weeks and I want it.”
He didn’t answer, and I grabbed the edge of the hammock with both hands and yanked it upward. Eitan toppled over, landed on the ground, but managed to break his fall with his hands and got up quickly.
“You see? I got out for you. You just have to ask nicely,” he said.
I lay down in the hammock, he went in the house for a few minutes, came back, took a chair, and sat down next to me and rocked me gently.
“You have plans?”
“To study art in Italy.”
“I mean now.”
“To nap undisturbed in my hammock.”
“Want to take a little trip?”
“To Altamira in Spain, to see the cave paintings.”
“Not a honeymoon, Ruta. Now.”
“If you hook up the hammock on the back of the pickup and drive slowly so I won’t fall, yes. A little trip now.”
“Want to go to Dovik’s pond?”
“You have a bathing suit?”
“Already wearing it.”
“And you’ll bring a treat for later?”
�
�Already in the cooler.”
“And if I didn’t want to come?”
“I’d go alone and eat alone and swim naked.”
That was that. We went. We talked on the way. It felt good, like a breeze was moving back and forth between us with the tempo of the words and sentences and glances. We were at that dangerous phase where if we didn’t do something we would turn into just friends and condemn ourselves to the fate of friends: permanent longing. Not to eat or be eaten. Not to drink or be drunk. Not to be satisfied or slaked. I later wrote myself a note: “We are both Tantalus, the pure water below, the tasty fruit above.”
We arrived at the pond. We lay down on the bank, Eitan in his bathing suit, I in a bikini top and shorts; that was always my style. Eitan told me how he and Dovik first met here, and I was surprised. In general everything that becomes a story has several versions, but the story Eitan told me was absolutely identical to the story Dovik told about the very same meeting. Then we got in the water to swim. In the middle of the pond I smiled at him and said, “Let’s see if I can dive down to the bottom,” and I disappeared.
I dived to the bottom, hid behind a big rock, and stayed there the way I know how, my full four minutes. After thirty seconds he began to worry. He dived, came up, looked for me, called my name. I saw his silhouette, swimming and looking for me, I heard his legs beating the water, worried and scared. His voice reached my ears: “Ruta!…Ruta!…Where are you?” And again he dived down, came close, but didn’t see me. Every few seconds I exhaled a few tiny bubbles, so as not to form a cluster that would give away my location.
I was filled with desire, which did its thing. Even in the water my loins were burning. Even in the water I was totally wet. You remember I told you that I cry underwater and don’t feel the wetness of the tears? Well, that I felt clearly. I touched myself, I told him long after that day, when he asked if I didn’t get bored there—it was four minutes, after all—I touched myself and I felt the body’s tears of joy and love and lust. And that was that. I finally ran out of breath and had to come up for air.