The Loves of Judith (15 page)

S
OMETIMES—YOU
’
LL FORGIVE ME
, Zayde, for saying such a thing—I even thought that maybe Tonya died so I would meet Judith. It’s awful to talk like that, eh? It’s awful even to think it. But love makes very strange thoughts and against thoughts there’s nothing you can do. That’s something even the cruelest king knows. The thought is inside the cage of the head and there’s no way you can get it out of there, but inside its cage it’s the freest bird and it sings there whatever it wants and whenever it wants. And that’s how I used to think that thought, and right away I would rip it out like you tear up weeds, and you can’t leave
even one single piece. ’Cause at Rabinovitch’s, it really was a great tragedy, the children was crying and sometimes you’d also hear blows coming from there. Naomi he never touched, not once, but when he’d give Oded a
flosk
, the boy would shut his mouth tight and not a sound would come out, and the little girl would cry instead of him. ’Cause, you know yourself, Zayde, that Rabinovitch ain’t no man to raise a hand to a child, but in a situation like that you can go nuts, you can lose all your patience. How much can a human being drag on his back? The house and the yard, and the kitchen, and the cowshed, and the field, and the citrus grove, and the cows, and the children? Once he runs into me in the street, takes ahold of my shoulder, and it’s like he wants to tell me something, but there’s only tears in his eyes and the marks of his fingers stayed on me for a month afterward. I think that was the only time I saw the ox really in tears. ’Cause, even at Tonya’s funeral he didn’t cry. In general, Rabinovitch and I, both of us loved one woman and we got a lot of disagreements and differences between us, but all in all there was some sympathy between us even before your mother came to the village and something remained even afterward. I have affection for people that are built like him. In the village on the Kodyma River, there was a farmer who was just like him, a
goy
, short and thick like a box—as tall as he was wide and just as thick, everything the same. When that
goy
would castrate a bull, first of all he would give the bull a
zetz
on the forehead with his own forehead, bam! And another one, bam! And another one, and once the bull falls and gets up and another time the man falls and gets up, until finally the bull’s eyes would turn up and his knees would shake, and by the time he figured out with his beast mind what happened and where all that dizziness was coming from, the
goy
already came up to him from behind with the knife and the bull was already passing out from so much pain and his balls were already in the frying pan with potatoes and garlic and onions, and he was already hitched up to the plow and working in the field like a castrated bull should, walking and plowing forward and turning
around and going back, and turning around again and plowing forward and backward and forward like that and not looking to the side. When others are eating your balls, Zayde, you don’t look to the side no more, you just go and go and come back in the rut with the plow. So you should know, Zayde, I think because of the blow Rabinovitch gave Oded back then, he got scared of himself and brought her to work ’cause he was scared maybe one day he’d do something awful. ’Cause, people like Rabinovitch don’t know their own strength. A blow from the
lappe
of the beast, that can be the end not only of a child, but even of a grown-up person. And believe you me, Zayde—after Tonya died he became even stronger than he was before. That’s a thing that happens sometimes, a man becomes a widower and he gets so strong it’s like he flourishes with grief. There was a tree like that there, I don’t know what the
goyim
call it, but we called it
der blumendiker olman
. You know a little Yiddish, Zayde? She didn’t teach you a word of Yiddish? That’s funny, a person called Zayde and he don’t know no Yiddish at all. Never mind.
Der blumendiker olman
is the flowering widower, and that tree, every year it would break and freeze in the snow, really die, and every spring it would put out a whole lot of little green leaves with buds straight from its poor trunk and bloom again. It happens like that sometimes with widowers, too, and that’s how it was with Rabinovitch. All of a sudden he’s flourishing, his teeth are white again, and when he walks he walks with big strides, and when he breathes he can smell things very far away, far in time or far in distance, and also, believe you me, Zayde, from all that grief and cold, his bald head even grew a little hair. What can I tell you, Zayde? Sometimes grief is the best manure. Some people say something wasn’t right here—there are always people who will turn up their nose at everything—a person in mourning shouldn’t look so good. But if you ask me, Zayde, maybe that’s how a person heals himself. Sometimes the soul is the doctor of the body and sometimes the body is the doctor of the soul. If they don’t help each other, who will? And once at night, maybe twelve-thirty, when I was standing in the dark and
waiting maybe Judith’s shadow would pass by the window of the cowshed for a moment, all of a sudden I saw Rabinovitch come out of his house and into the yard, I thought he was going to her, but he just went in under the wagon and waving both hands, he yelled, and believe you me, he picked it up from one side maybe three feet high. Unbelievable how much strength and how much anger can be in one person’s body, how strong his body can get, all the pain and all the memories and all the regrets, everything a woman can hold in her womb when she’s pregnant, a man can hold in his bones and muscles, but give birth he never will and puff up he never will, he just gets hard and heavy inside, like he’s full of stones, another stone in the belly and another stone and another stone, men get like a quarry from all those children we’re never gonna give birth to. I once heard about a
shiksa
like that, who was pregnant forty-five years and never gave birth. Sometimes I don’t believe these stories myself, but they’re my father’s memories, and a father’s memories you’ve got to believe. If you don’t believe the memory of your father, your own flesh and blood, what will you believe? When she was seventeen some guy working in the lumber mill raped her. He grabbed her by the hand, laid her down on a bag of sawdust, and got on top of her by force, and when she finished wiping her eyes from the tears, and her legs, forgive me, from all the filth and the blood, the poor thing told her father what the guy did to her, and right away she got so many slaps on the face from him that she lost an eye, and the guy, her brothers grabbed him and killed him with a pitchfork from the barn with all four teeth through his ribs. Well, after a few weeks she was already puffed up with the pregnancy like a barrel and the father said, this is really very good, she won’t get a husband anymore now, the
kurve
, so at least let me get a grandson out of her who will work hard like his poor father and help me in the field. Days go by and weeks go by and months go by and that one never had no baby. The nine months go by, and ten months, and a year go by, and two years go by and three and four,
and she’s still got a belly like a pile of wheat in the barn, with her breasts like watermelons, throwing up every morning like a drunk in a bucket, walking all the time with her hands like this on her hips from such a backache. At first people thought maybe she was like a cow that sometimes puffs up from clover, and they wanted to stick her with a
trokar
like with a cow because of the gasses, but with her it wasn’t air. If you put a hand, you felt it kicking. What didn’t they do with her? They went with her to the church, to their witches, they brought one woman who rummaged around in her there and with special grass made her smoke down there, they even came to our rabbi, and he told them—listen good to what he told them, Zayde—this is what he says to them: you lay her down on the table and you put a bottle of schnapps, forgive me, between her legs, ’cause a
goy
, even if he’s little and even if he hasn’t even been born yet, when he’ll smell the schnapps he’s gonna come out from anyplace where he is. Well, ten years like that, twenty, and the years go by, and she’s still pregnant. Her father dies, her mother dies, and she’s already sixty years old and she’s still got that belly, and the baby’s inside, what can I tell you, already a grown-up fetus, more than forty, and he’ll never come out. So now you understand, Zayde, how come I fell in love with your mother?”

“No,” I said, and irritation at the unknown began bubbling up in me.

“How come I fell in love with her?” Jacob whispered with pleasure.

The slice of bread in his hand moved in the plate, besieging and flanking and heaping, his eyes stared at me above his salad and omelet, seeking signs and proofs in me.

“You know, Zayde, from this side you look like me, from that side like the
soykher
, and from here sometimes you look like Rabinovitch. And how do you like the meal?”

“The meal’s good,” I said, with my lips dry.

“So you want to know how come I fell in love with her?” he
asked for the third time and his voice was so much like mine he seemed to be repeating my own question, even though I hadn’t asked it, at any rate, not aloud.

“ ’Cause that’s what Fate decreed for me.” He stood up solemnly.

He put his plate in the sink, standing with his back and his shoulders to me, like my shoulders, bowed.

“ ’Cause you’ve got a Fate that comes from above,” he went on. “And you’ve got a Fate that comes from the side and there’s a Fate that attacks you from behind and there’s a Fate of somebody else that goes off and comes to you. And with me, the worst Fate, the Fate a person brings on himself from inside. It’s like somebody who reads the Ten Commandments in the Torah, and then right away he gets ideas about how to do sins, and somebody who buys a first-aid kit and then right away accidents start with him, and somebody who takes canaries home gets caught up in love. It’s just like a person’s name. Your mother thought a child named Zayde will never die, and I’m telling you, Zayde, somebody whose name is Jacob will never have it easy with love, that’s how it was from the first Jacob to the last Jacob, from Jacob Our Father to Jacob Sheinfeld who used to taste the soap and to this Jacob Sheinfeld, your father, who once in ten years has to cook you a meal for you to come visit him and agree to talk with him. That’s how us Jacobs make ourselves a hard life with love. Our Father Jacob even changed his name to Israel, and did that do him any good? Outside the name changed and inside the troubles remained. Eat everything on your plate, Zayde, or else you won’t get the egg yolk dessert you love so much, and you should know just one thing: it was impossible for me not to fall in love with her. The sun shined from here, and the wagon came from here, and the eyes looked from here, and you see all at once both what was in the eyes and what was in the memory: a woman comes sailing in a river like in green-gold water, and the wind just then is playing with the cloth of her dress, sticking it and letting it go from the body, and the shadow falls right here on her neck.… So,
not to fall in love with her? Like a yellow leaf in the water I was swept up to her. So, can such a thing happen by chance? I ask you, Zayde, can such a thing happen by chance?”

T
HAT NIGHT, TOO
, Judith’s first night in the village, Rabinovitch had a hard time falling asleep.

And as usual with insomniacs, he knew what fate had in store for him, and had already despaired of reading a book, which had now become a mechanical leafing of pages, with no words but only pages, and of reviewing memories, and counting the imaginary geese that leaped over the fence of the Village Papish’s yard.

As usual, he thought of his braid, and of his Tonychka who died without telling him where it was, and again he wondered whether she would have shown it to him if she had lived and whether she would have lived if she had shown it to him, and once again he felt the waters of fear flooding his lungs, and close to midnight, when the awful wailing rising from the cowshed and besieging the air was heard, the brothers If, What If, and What If Not stopped dancing their tormenting dances above him, and he saw Naomi jump out of bed and he got up, too.

So strange and surprising was the wailing that, at first, it was impossible to understand that it was the weeping of a woman and not the nightmare of wolves or the scream of a calf who saw the smiling Globerman in a dream.

Moshe wrapped the sheet around his body and rushed into the yard, but he didn’t dare go into the cowshed. He paced around in the dark next to the wall and after a minute or two, he went back to bed, and it wasn’t until Naomi asked him, “Father, why are you trembling?” that he himself noticed it, and he didn’t answer her.

“Who screamed?” asked Naomi.

“Nobody,” said Moshe. “Nobody screamed. Sleep now.”

B
Y DAWN
the wailing vanished, the air above the cowshed congealed again, as the skies are stitched together after the blade of a falling star.

The gray crow uttered his first shout from the eucalyptus and the bulbul immediately joined him with his clappers and the falcon with his trills, and sounds of a kitchen waking up rose in the air. When Moshe returned from milking, he saw his two children sitting at a neat, clean table, smelling of lemon peel, and the plates on the table had pieces of cheese brought by Aliza Papish, the Village Papish’s wife, both out of the goodness of her heart and because she wanted to get a good look at Rabinovitch’s worker before the rest of the village women caught sight of her.

A sliced radish, too, with grains of salt sparkling on it, colored the plates red and white. And a good smell of pressed olives and eggs frying already rose all around. At dawn, Judith cleaned Tonya’s old
taboon
, the smoke of the burning eucalyptus bark came back to the yard in its full force and bitterness, and the loaf of bread baked in it hunched like a tiny mountain of joy in the middle of the table.

“Now you eat the olives Mother once made?” Oded grumbled at Naomi. “Her jam you didn’t want to eat.”