The Loves of Judith (14 page)

“Between meat and spices?” I asked.

“No. Between the meal and the one who eats it,” said Jacob, wiping his hands on his apron and sitting down across from me.

“You like it, Zayde?” he asked after a brief silence.

“Very much.”

“So the match worked.
Ess, meyn kind
.”

J
UDITH
’
S
reply came to Uncle Menahem through a man from the kibbutz marketing cooperative who used to buy carobs from him.

Menahem opened the envelope, read the letter, rushed to his brother, and announced: “She’ll come next week.”

Moshe was perturbed. “Do I have to prepare something special for her?”

“Never prepare something special for a woman you don’t know,” said Menahem. “You won’t succeed, and the two of you will get angry. She asked only for a corner of her own and a day off sometimes. Call the children now, I want to talk to them.”

He sat Naomi and Oded on his lap and told them that a “woman-worker” would soon come to the house, and added:

“I know this woman and she’s a very good woman. She won’t be your mother. She’ll just live and work at your house. She’ll cook for you and wash your clothes and help in the yard and the cowshed. It’ll be easier for all of you. For Father and for you and for that woman, too, it’ll be easier. She’ll come soon and we’ll all go together to bring her from the railroad station.”

T
HAT NIGHT
, Rabinovitch awoke to the sound of dragging and banging, and when he went out to the yard, he saw Oded building a floor of boards in the lowest branches of the eucalyptus.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m building me a nest in Mother’s tree,” said Oded.

“Why in the middle of the night?”

“Got to get done,” said the boy gravely. “By the time the woman-worker comes, I’ll have me a house.”

The days peeled off one after another, until Judith came, and on the last evening, when only a few hours separated him from her, Moshe took clean clothes out of the closet, lit the wood in the oven, and boiled bathwater.

“We’ll wash real good,” he said, and scrubbed his children with his big, good hands.

“The woman-worker shouldn’t think poor dirty people live here,” said Naomi.

Oded was sullen and dejected and his body was hard and recalcitrant under the water, but Naomi enjoyed the washing and the touch of her father’s hands. The warm vapors, the smell of soap, the nap of the towel on the skin of her stiff back gave her a pleasant shudder of anticipation.

The next morning, Moshe didn’t send his children to school, and after the milking he washed, too, the very same way he washes today: he stands on a wooden crate under the awning of the cowshed and showers with a rubber hose. He stood on the crate, like a bear on a rock in the river, the water pouring over his body, a big loofah in his hand and a foaming cube of laundry soap at his feet. Then he sat down on the milking stool in the fragrant shade of the eucalyptus and Naomi used a scissors to clip the thin yellowish tendrils growing wild on the back of his neck, and combed the crown of hair around his bald pate.

“Now we’re all pretty.” Moshe got up from the stool. “
Dayosh!
Come on, let’s go!”

He threw a bundle of straw on the wagon, Naomi put in a few folded sacks and sat down next to him, and Oded agreed to come down from the tree and join them in exchange for a promise to be allowed to hold the mule’s reins all the way.

“All the way except for the wadi,” his father granted his request.

Oded was crazy about wheels and trips and driving. When he was three, he was already running in the village streets holding an iron hoop as a steering wheel, and when he was five he learned the principles of steering on a wooden board with wheels at the corners, which he galloped madly on the slope from the supply warehouse to the entrance to the village.

“Today, too, that whole semitrailer is just a horse and wagon!” he laughs. “It’s a little bigger, but I learned to go in reverse back then, with a real horse and a wagon with shafts.”

For years now I have been riding with him at night and I’m still impressed at how he can maneuver the tank in reverse. “It’s easier than you think and it’s more complicated than it looks,” he says. “But people don’t really understand what it is to drive a rig this size. Look at him, look at that shitty little Prince, cutting me off before the intersection, like a cockroach on my mirror. Does he know what distance I need to brake? In America they’d shoot him for a thing like that. There they respect trucks.”

When they got to the wadi, the regular silence prevailed. The water flowed slowly, shallow and transparent and pleasant, and as water does, it carried memories, wiped out smells and traces.

Moshe took the reins from his son’s hands. Well, he said to himself, the water that drowned Tonya isn’t here anymore. It flowed to the sea, will evaporate, thicken, and become clouds again, will pour and overflow, will drown another woman and orphan her children.

Naomi’s and Oded’s faces turned glum, as if they were painted with their father’s musings. The cart wheels clattered across the channel and silt rose from the bottom and muddied the water.

From here the road turned and continued along the other bank of the wadi until it connected with a bigger one a mile or so later. Tadpoles capered in the mud, strange gnats rushed around on the skin of the water with long, straddling legs, and beyond the bend of the riverbed the heralding whistle of the
locomotive was heard, startling frightened herons, and pillars of smoke ran wild.

I
N A GRAY COTTON DRESS
, with a blue kerchief on her head, her eyes squinting with dread and light, Judith got off the train.

She stood erect, but she looked so tense and scared that Moshe’s heart froze with pity and terror, for he worried that instead of helping him, she would be another burden on his hands.

“You saw right away that she didn’t have a penny to her name. She wore old shoes and stockings that had once been white, and I decided right off the bat that I loved her,” Naomi said.

She had a big, tattered leather bag, and Uncle Menahem, who also came to the railroad station to greet her, hurried to take it from her.

“Welcome, Judith,” he said. “This is my brother, Moshe Rabinovitch, and these are the children, Oded and Naomi. You say hello, too, Oded, say, ‘Hello, Judith, welcome.’ ”

Judith climbed onto the bundle of straw that had been put in the wagon especially for her, and when she placed her foot on the connections of the shafts her left knee came up, and the delight in the movement of her leg was depicted on the fabric of her dress. The children looked at her and Moshe concentrated on the mule’s shining rump as if he were reading the future in it.

When they crossed back through the wadi on their way home, Judith suddenly felt Naomi’s hand stealing into hers.

Moshe steered the mule so that they would come straight to the yard from the fields, and wouldn’t go through the highway and the village street, but everybody knew and they were waiting and watching, and the wagon cruising slowly among quiet waves of gold and green, wild chrysanthemum and mustard, and the woman with the tired face sitting on the straw throne, was clearly seen by eyes waiting in fields, at windows of cowsheds, and through winks of curtains.

When they reached the yard, Oded announced that he was
going up “to my new house in Mother’s tree,” and Moshe, Judith, and Naomi went into the hut. Two rooms and a kitchen were what it had in those days and Moshe told Judith that at night she could sleep in the children’s room or put up a bed in the kitchen, which was quite big.

“If we decide you’ll stay here, maybe we’ll build another room,” he said, and Judith didn’t answer, nor was it clear if she considered it a promise or a threat, but she did tell him that she didn’t hear well on her left side.

He was embarrassed and wanted to get to her right side, but Judith turned and went out to the yard. While his words were still hovering around her and seeking an opening, she went into the cowshed, looked at the empty northeast corner, with only a few sacks and some tools, put her big leather bag down, and said: “I’ll live here.”

“With the cows?” Moshe was amazed.

“I’ll be fine here,” said Judith.

“What will they say in the village?”

“I’ll clear it out and clean it up, and you’ll bring the bed and the crate for my clothes.”

And with sudden boldness, she added: “And if you would please put two nails in the wall for me, here and here, I’ll put up a curtain from here to here. A woman also needs a corner to herself, without eyes looking at her and fingers pointing at her.”

O
NCE EVERY TWO WEEKS
, the albino started the old green pickup and disappeared for a mysterious night.

He was careful to come back before sunrise and in the village they said he was visiting a “restaurant where they serve more than food.” So, when he returned, the bookkeeper trailed vapors
of alcohol and women, which made the canaries hoarse, made the farmers cry, and attracted stray dogs from the fields. In the village office, they knew by now that it was better to leave him in his dark room the next day, and let his wine and his weariness and his odors wear off before they gave him more work to do.

That night, the
Malakh-fun-shlof
passed over Jacob’s bed, and in the predawn silence, he suddenly heard the slow throbbing of the pickup returning its owner to his house, and he immediately leaped to the window. The pair of headlights capered dull orange, drew tipsy circles in the fields, and Jacob was filled with excitement.

“What are you looking at there at this hour?” Rebecca murmured from their bed.

“In spring, nineteen hundred and thirty-one it was,” he said. “That night I couldn’t fall asleep and the next day Judith came. I remember that day very well. Rebecca and I had a little kerosene incubator back then, for three hundred chicks at the same time, which in those days was really something, and a few brood hens for the house, and three cows, and we had a grove of oranges with a row of grapefruits and a row of King walnuts, because in those days they didn’t have this rage for pecans yet, and two rows, one of apples and one of pears, and a little vineyard of grapes. I remember everything. Just then we were working in the citrus grove, we were weeding and sawing branches that died in the winter, and all of a sudden Rabinovitch’s wagon came from the fields, and right then I lifted my head and I saw her. So you’ll ask me now how come I fell in love with her, come on, ask, Zayde, ask and don’t be scared. How come I fell in love with your mother, you ask? So I’ll tell you exactly what happened, Zayde, and you’ll understand whatever you’ll understand. It just so happened by chance that I was wiping my brow, you know with my hand like this, you see? And at the end of the gesture, it just so happened by chance that I picked up my head, and then I saw her like my hand opened me a window. The cart passed by like a boat, not stopping, and right then, it really just so happened by chance, a space
opened up between the clouds and the sun peeped out for one moment. I keep saying, it just so happened by chance, but if so many things just so happen by chance together, it’s a sign there’s some plan here, some trap like they set for birds. A trap like that is a very simple thing, Zayde, but if it just so happens by chance that there’s also a crate there and it just so happens by chance that there’s also a string and it just so happens by chance that there’s also a stick and it just so happens by chance that there’s also a lid and if it just so happens by chance that somebody put a few grains inside there, then, all in all, it can’t be it just so happened by chance anymore, and the bird is caught there completely on purpose.”

The fruit trees blossomed and Jacob, half hidden behind the bright petals and the transparent walls of their scent, watched the cart approaching, and because of the place and the angle, Judith seemed to him to be sailing slowly on a broad, yellow river that had no banks.

He didn’t know his own mind. The light, bright and fragile as porcelain, sketched the shade of the blossoming walnut branches, fell on the field, illuminated the thin ivory nape, described the bluish shadows of the veins standing out on the backs of the hands, and hinted at strength of soul and torments, and the stockings that drooped a bit over the strong, delicate ankles.

Judith leaned forward a little and the spring wind, as I imagine it, played with the fabric of her dress, pressed it to her thighs and let go of it, and as always happens at the moment when you fall in love, an old picture surfaced from Jacob’s depths and sought and found its mate.

He was right. Those traps are very simple. It’s enough for a cloud to float over the sun, for an echo of a fleeting scent, for a fragile angle of light. Enough for her reflection to be realized in the frames of memory—and the string is pulled, the wire is tripped, the door falls, and the trap is sprung. This is how fate hunts his prey and bears it off, a happy fluttering victim, to his lair.

“What happened, Sheinfeld?” asked Rebecca.

Like many women in those days, she called her husband by his last name. If she had called him by his first name, she would have understood the dispositions of his soul better and their whole lives would have turned out differently. But, as the Village Papish used to say: “Who thought of those things in those days?”

Jacob was jolted out of his thoughts.

“Nothing,” he told her. “Nothing happened.”

His trembling hand once again wiped his brow and unwittingly spread a thin strip of black planters’ ointment, as if drawing the scar to be cut there in the future.

“I wasn’t lying, I just didn’t understand. None of what happened I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand that Rebecca would leave the house, I didn’t guess the whole hard life I would have because of Judith.”

And then Rebecca also noticed Rabinovitch’s wagon.

“You’re a fool, Sheinfeld.” Her face turned glum.

She bent over again, picked up the hoe, and didn’t say another word.