Two She-Bears

by Meir Shalev

  And added: “You see white hair, a walking stick, bending over. But there are things even the best binoculars don’t reveal. Look at our friend here, who bites like a dog but lies on the ground, bound like a sheep. He saw me, a short older guy, a bit of a weight problem as the doctor put it, Coke-bottle glasses, a lovely bald spot growing under my hat, and he thought he could do whatever he wanted. But ‘many are the thoughts in the heart of man, yet the Lord’s plan will prevail’: I am drinking herbal tea and he is lying in the dirt beside a dead goat knowing that soon he will lie beneath it in the pit.

  “It has no shepherd and has no master

  It stands and chews on leaves in a pasture.

  They took the goat and went on their way

  Perah and Zerah are done for the day.”

  “A very nice poem,” said the young man. “Did you write it?”

  “Lost cause. What’s going on down in the wadi? Where’s that old man now?”

  “He disappeared on me. Suddenly I don’t see him,” said the young man.

  He walked past the tree and urinated. But he didn’t look at the stream he emitted nor at the spot it hit the ground, as men always do when urinating, but into the distance, to the point where he lost sight of the old man. When he was done he zipped up his trousers, absentmindedly sniffed his fingertips, smiled a little smile to himself, and returned to his place.

  The man who was tied began convulsing on the ground. His eyes were wide open and his lips produced a strangled moan.

  “Again you’re starting? You want the lighter in your other ear too?”

  But the man kept twisting and bending and groaning. He stared at something behind the young man’s back, his eyes filled with suffering and supplication. His two captors turned and saw an old man, very near them. First the white-haired head came into view amid the rocks, then the big bent-over body, an elderly man dressed in old blue work clothes. A pack over his shoulder, the heavy walking stick in his hand, and a colorful patch over his left eye—a whimsical patch that seemed to belong to someone else—sky blue with a red poppy embroidered at the center.

  “So. The friend you saw before has come to visit,” said the man in the hat to the young man. “You didn’t take him seriously and now he got to us without our knowing.”

  “I watched him till he disappeared, like you told me, and you also said maybe he would go away on his own, and suddenly he’s here and I don’t know from where.”

  The old man drew near and stood still. His one eye stared at the man who was tied up, twitching and moaning. He shifted his gaze to the dead goat and the young man in the leather jacket, who massaged his right hand and distorted his face in pain, then glanced at the gun without pausing and stopped at the man in the hat, who looked back at him and smiled politely. The jaybird, which had watched them the whole time from the branches of the oak tree, flew away.

  2

  “Good morning,” said the old man.

  “Top of the morning to you,” the man responded, doffing his hat with a theatrical flourish.

  “Excuse me a second,” said the old man. “I don’t hear so good.”

  He took a tiny pouch from his shirt pocket, pulled out a hearing aid, and stuck it in his ear.

  “What did you say?”

  “I answered you, good morning.”

  “Good morning. I usually don’t meet people here. You hiking?”

  “A nature hike. You’re also hiking?”

  “I collect seeds here.”

  His good eye again scanned the three men, but his facial expression remained unchanged and he asked no questions.

  “What kind of seeds?”

  “You interested in flowers?”

  “Interested in flowers? Did you hear him? Am I interested in flowers…” And the man in the hat laughed loudly. “Tell him which flowers. I have a big hothouse of orchids. Orchids from Thailand and Costa Rica and Ecuador. A hothouse plenty of people would be more than happy to inhabit. With timers, sensors, humidity and acidity gauges, mist generators, and irrigation with purified water.”

  “Those are plants that don’t belong here,” said the old man, sitting down on a rock. “Like you, in this wadi.”

  “So you heard us here and decided to come and see what’s happening?”

  “I didn’t hear a thing. As you saw. My hearing aid wasn’t in my ear but in my pocket. I always come here, rest awhile in the shade, and continue collecting.”

  “That’s allowed, collecting seeds?”

  “You don’t tell on me and I won’t tell on you.”

  The man in the hat chuckled. “That’s a good one. Drink some tea with us?”

  “No, thank you, I’ll go on my way. I haven’t yet managed to collect much. I won’t bother you. Have a nice day.”

  “How will you get back from here? You want us to take you?”

  “No need. They’ll come get me from the road later.”

  The man who wore the hat nodded at the young man in the leather jacket, who replaced the binoculars in the knapsack.

  “Sit with us awhile, let’s talk,” said the man in the hat to the old man. “I’m bored with these two. This one doesn’t talk to me because he has nothing to say, and this one doesn’t talk to me because, as you see, his mouth is closed.”

  The old man did not respond.

  “What happened to your eye, if I may ask? The wars of Israel?”

  “No. My wife did it.”

  The man in the hat burst out laughing. “What kind of story is that?”

  “The truth.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “She hit me with a piece of a branch.”

  “A man like you?”

  “If you hit the right spot you don’t need your gun or my stick. A simple thin dry branch is enough.”

  “What did you do to her?”

  “We did many things to each other. I deserved it. She cheated on me and I killed her lover.”

  “Listen, all I wanted to do was chat a bit. You don’t have to tell me everything.”

  “I always wanted to tell somebody that story. It’s too bad that it’s a shit like you who gets to hear it.”

  “You know how it goes. If you tell me things like that, in the end you’ll have to kill me.”

  “Not a bad idea.”

  “Based on what you’ve told me till now, there’s not much difference between us.”

  “You’re right. I should have been killed too. Everybody would have been better off.”

  “Could you show me a few of the seeds you’ve already collected?”

  “They’re in my pack. You can see them afterward yourself.”

  “I want to see them now, if you don’t mind,” said the man in the hat.

  The old man’s eye surveyed the three men and suddenly narrowed, and his fingers gripped his stick tighter, and his jaw tightened too. But the man in the hat, taking notice of all this, thrust his hand with surprising speed and force, seized the end of the hefty stick as the old man raised it, pulled it, and flung it away.

  “There was a time,” said the old man calmly, “when no man could do a thing like that to me. But after I turned ninety I got a bit weaker.”

  “The seeds, please. I don’t like waiting.”

  “They’re in the pack, in paper bags. You can open it and look. If you intend to take them for yourself, don’t put them in plastic bags or a closed box, or they’ll rot.”

  He took the pack from his shoulder and handed it to his interlocutor: “Take it, you worthless bum. What’re you afraid of?”

  Behind him, the young man in the leather jacket bent down, picked up a rock the size of a grapefruit. The old man sensed this and turned but could not withstand him, and the young man swung his arm and hit him. The rock smashed his temple. The big, heavy body fell sideways to the ground.

  “Leave him just as he is,” said the man in the hat, “and put the rock in your hand under his head. Make sure the side with the blood is exactly under the fracture.”

>   The young man did as he said. “What do we do now?” he asked. “He said they were coming to get him.”

  “Exactly so. They’ll come, they won’t find him on the road, they’ll go looking, they’ll come up here. He said this was his regular place. They’ll get here, Oy-oy-oy, what happened? Grandpa is lying here dead, they’ll call the police, the police will say an old man a hundred years old went for a hike, fell, and broke his head. What kind of family are you, that you allow a man as old as that to hike here alone? And here’s the rock with all his blood, right under his head.”

  “It was me put it there to look like that,” said the young man with satisfaction.

  “But you forgot something.”

  “What?”

  “His hearing aid. Luckily it’s in his other ear, not the side where you hit him. Take it out, wipe it clean, and put it back in the pouch and his shirt pocket. And quickly, please. We have to get out of here.”

  The young man did as he was told. The man in the hat said to the man who was tied, “You left me no choice.” And to the young man he said, “Hold his legs. He’ll go wild and kick.”

  He seized the neck of the man who was tied and strangled him, not stopping even after he went limp. After a minute more he let go and said to the young man, “Into the pit.”

  The two carried the corpse to a small cave at the edge of the wadi. At its bottom was an ancient water cistern, half full of stones and sediment. They threw the dead man in, the young man climbed down and covered him with stones, climbed back up, took the dead goat, and threw it in too.

  “Check that you can see the goat from the top without going into the pit,” said the man in the hat.

  “I can see it,” said the young man.

  “And him?”

  “No.”

  “Final check. That we didn’t forget anything.”

  “I did it already.”

  “You call that ‘I did it’? Where’s his stick?”

  “Where you threw it before.”

  “What will they say later on, when they find him? That a man throws his stick five meters away when he falls and dies? Put it by his hand and let’s move, we’ll go out through the other wadi.”

  They climbed to the shallow ridge, the man in the hat first, the young man after him, slipping on stones and cursing.

  “Why did you wear those shoes?” said the man in the hat. “You knew we were hiking in nature. You could have come with the appropriate shoes.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  On that morning Dovik took Grandpa Ze’ev to his wadi, said goodbye, but after a few seconds ran after him and said, “I’ll walk with you a little, Grandpa.”

  “No need,” said Grandpa Ze’ev. “You have to get back to work. We’ll meet here at three.”

  “I have time,” said Dovik and joined him. I think he wanted a taste of our sweet childhood hikes with him.

  “You weren’t afraid to leave him there?” I asked him the next day. “You didn’t have a sense that something might happen to him?”

  “No. I did this so many times before. And you also took him there sometimes and left him there without any concern. Why worry about a man like him, in a place that’s like his second home?”

  The two walked together, talked a bit, Grandpa asked Dovik if he remembered all the plants he had taught him about.

  “No. Only some of them. Ruta remembers them better.”

  At a certain point they parted. Dovik left him there with his stick and pack and as always went back in the afternoon to pick him up at the appointed place and time: three p.m., on the road by the little bridge. But Grandpa Ze’ev, a very punctual person, wasn’t waiting there. Dovik got worried. He didn’t know what to do. He wanted to go to the carob tree to look for him, but what would happen if Grandpa Ze’ev would show up and not find him at the meeting place?

  He shouted “Grandpa! Grandpa!” a few times, and finally went and found him lying there with his head in a puddle of blood.

  He called me immediately, and along with the shock of the news that our grandfather was dead, I was frightened by the way he said it. He used the same words with which he informed me twelve years earlier about Neta’s death: “Ruta,” he said, “I have something really terrible to tell you, Grandpa is dead.” And continued: “He apparently fell, cracked his head open on a rock, right under his carob tree. We’ll talk more later, I want to call the police.”

  After two minutes the phone rang again: “The police said they’re coming, I should wait by the road and bring them here, but I told them that I’m not going to leave the body, that you would meet them.”

  I ran to Dalia, told her, asked that she come too and that we go in her car because I was in no shape to drive, and suddenly Eitan turned up and asked me what was going on. In that first moment I didn’t even realize that these were the first words he had spoken to me after twelve years of silence and hard labor and I simply answered him. I said that Dovik found Grandpa dead in the wadi, that I was going there with Dalia.

  “I’ll come too,” he said, and only then did I realize. I didn’t just realize, I was shaken: not just the first words, but going somewhere for the first time since Neta died.

  He sat in the backseat. Dalia said, “Eitan, how come you started to talk? What happened that you decided to come?”

  He didn’t answer.

  We rode. Involuntarily, maybe because Eitan was sitting in back, I remembered drives we used to make, the two couples, going out together. Dovik driving, Dalia next to him, Eitan and I in the back. Dovik would say to him, “You don’t know that in our moshava the men sit in the front and the women in back? The whole moshava will talk about this girly husband we brought.”

  Those were fun trips. Mostly to get ice cream at the junction or see a movie in the city. I remembered that once a young soldier hitchhiking on the main road came over at the traffic light and asked where we were going. Eitan said to him, “We’re going to Alice to return the scarf she forgot at our place on Friday and then for coffee at a cousin of Dalia’s. Does that work for you?” The poor soldier was so confused that Eitan had to get out of the car and usher him in. “Come, we were only kidding, we’ll take you all the way home. We were also in the army once. Just get in and tell us where.”

  At the entrance to the wadi stood a van, and a constable and police inspector were getting out. I told them, “Yes, it’s here, but we have to walk a bit into the wadi on this trail.”

  They looked at us suspiciously.

  “I’m the sister of the man who called you,” I said, “and the dead man is our grandfather.”

  “And who are these?”

  “These are my husband and sister-in-law. My brother informed us and we know the area and know exactly where he is, so come with us. Here, this is the trail.”

  The inspector asked, “You said this is your husband?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why are you talking instead of him?”

  I told the inspector that my husband doesn’t talk much. What could I tell him, about our disaster?

  The inspector looked at him. “Where do you work?”

  I said, “He works at our family’s plant nursery.”

  The inspector shrugged his shoulders. “Okay, we’ll discuss it later. Who’s showing us the way, also you?”

  “Yes.”

  He told the constable to stay on the road and when the forensics team arrived to show them the trail. And to me he said, “Lead the way. I’m right behind you.”

  We started walking. No one spoke. We heard only the heavy smoker’s breathing of the inspector and the shoes on the stones.

  After ten minutes he asked if it was far.

  I said, “At this pace, another fifteen minutes.”

  He asked, “How do you know this trail? It’s not marked.”

  I told him that in our childhood we would hike here a lot with our grandfather.

  “The one who just died?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what was Grandpa
doing here alone?”

  I wanted to throw up. Not only from the ache in my gut, which had so far succeeded in blocking my tears, but also because I can’t stand it when someone calls someone else’s family member “Grandpa” or “Abba” instead of “your grandfather” or “your father.” What’s going on? You’re also his grandson all of a sudden? And how does he know that my grandpa was here alone? Maybe he wasn’t here alone? Maybe there was someone else here? Maybe that someone saw something or even attacked him? The last thing we needed was a stupid investigator.

  “Don’t worry,” said the inspector, who was apparently as intelligent as I feared. “We take all possibilities into consideration.” And he asked, “And how did you know to come exactly here?”

  “Because my brother told me on the phone that he found him beside the big carob, and I already told you that this is a place we went to a lot and we know the tree well.”

  And in my heart I felt how the words “wadi” and “carob tree” sum everything up, as if I knew that one day this would happen and he would die at his place, as befits men like him to die.

  I walked first, the inspector behind me, followed by Dalia, with Eitan at the rear. After a few hundred meters Eitan suddenly went up the north slope of the wadi and walked there, parallel to us.

  “What’s he doing there? Tell him to come back and walk with us,” said the inspector angrily.

  “Eitan,” I called, “come back, please. Walk with us.”

  He scurried down the slope toward us. He step seemed lighter to me, as if my first husband had suddenly popped out of him, but only slightly, for a brief moment. He didn’t stumble or slip like Dalia and the inspector but neither did he have those old “Come my beloved” Song of Songs moves of his, skipping in the hills and valleys.

  Too bad we didn’t force him earlier to come out to places like this, I thought, without Grandpa Ze’ev having to die. Maybe we were afraid that whatever he would remember on the hike would be bad for him, and besides, he didn’t ask, and anyway, who could talk to him? Only Grandpa told him what to do.

  “Here,” I said. “You can already see the carob, and the man over there is my brother, who called you.”