The Loves of Judith (17 page)

One after another, like the pages turning in a book, the secrets of the cowshed were revealed to her. She learned to anticipate the cow’s intention to kick even before the animal itself knew, she remembered the caprices of the two old milk cows, managed to decipher all the hints written on the nose and rump of a sick calf and to recognize the hierarchies of authority and respect that prevailed among the cows.

A few months later, Rabinovitch instructed her to take a cow in heat to mate at Samson Bloch’s, in the next village, not far from Uncle Menahem.

Samson Bloch was an expert cattle breeder. More than once he saved a calf from dysentery with a simple mixture of flax soup, olive oil, and scrambled egg. Everybody knew the ingredients, but he was the only one who knew the order, temperature, and quantities to blend together.

Bloch rivaled Globerman in assessing the weight of livestock by looking, he castrated calves and colts better than the veterinarian, and rumor had it that he sold the castrated testicles to that Haifa restaurant where the albino bought more than food.

He had a stud bull named Gordon, “an old bull, but he works just like the young ones,” Bloch explained proudly to anyone.

“Did she give you any trouble on the way?” he now asked Judith.

“She was a little nervous,” she said.

“Now, after a rendezvous with Gordon, she’ll go back home like a baby,” said Bloch. “She’ll be quiet and happy as a bride.”

In the afternoon, when Judith brought the cow back to the cowshed, she felt that all the other milk cows looked at her in a new way and she smiled to herself. She loved the cows and, as for them, they didn’t look at her suspiciously, didn’t talk to her on her deaf side, didn’t ask her where she came from, nor did they make any remark when they saw her sipping from the bottle of liquor she hid among the bales of hay.

And at night, when the wailing ripped out of the innards of the woman who was to be my mother, tore her throat, and woke
her up, the cows turned their big, slow heads, looked at her with patient eyes, and went back to their rest and their rumination.

O
N THE OTHER SIDE
of the village, the albino kept up his nocturnal construction.

Within a few weeks, next to Yakobi and Yakoba’s old hut rose a new room with a smooth cement floor, double wooden walls, and a whitewashed slate roof, with a small sprinkler to cool it on hot days. That was the room for breeding canaries. The screen on the windows was dense enough to keep a cat or a snake from getting inside, and on the lattices of its shutters, the bookkeeper installed a special system for opening that allowed effective ventilation of the hut without blinding its owners.

And when he completed the construction, the albino came and knocked on Jacob’s door.

Rebecca opened it and her face turned gloomy when she saw the guest, but the albino saw Jacob over her shoulder and asked him if he wanted to visit “the birds’ new house.”

Already in the new room there was a dusty hot smell, the smell of sawdust and feathers familiar to everyone who breeds birds and chicks. The new birdhouse had no cages. The canaries flew in the open space and the bookkeeper told Jacob that he intended to put the nesting material there and let them couple by themselves, except for the special mating for sale, and for those he had set up separate family cells.

When Jacob entered, the canaries were startled, flew and fluttered in the air.

“They’ll get used to you right away and will calm down,” said the albino.

In the following days, Jacob began knocking from time to time “with the tip of my little fingernail,” on the door of the hut, going in, looking, working, and studying. With the devotion and willingness of an apprentice, Jacob helped the albino record layings and hatchings, cleaned the breeding and birth cages, and washed troughs and lattices.

“Everything you should be doing in our incubator, you do for his birds,” Rebecca remarked to him one day, and Jacob looked at her and didn’t answer.

The albino taught him to recognize the various seeds that composed the canaries’ food—turnip and radish seeds, hashish and grains—to crumble the hard-boiled egg, the carrots, and the potatoes. To soak the poppies in milk and feed them to the singers, “because their digestion is very nervous.”

He taught him to recognize the mating song of the male, for experienced breeders know that it’s not a love song, but a sign that it is time to supply him with jute and wool scraps to build a nest.

The albino lodged the growing fledglings with the males because the mothers tend to pluck off their feathers to pad the new nest.

“Look what good fathers they are,” he said.

And indeed, as soon as the nestlings were in their fathers’ care, the males turned into devoted and strict trainers, took pains to feed the little ones and to teach them to sing. Jacob remarked that not all birds acted like that, and the albino was surprised because, aside from the canaries he bred, he didn’t know any winged creature. “He could hardly tell the difference between a crow and a goose.”

Jacob told him about the monogamy of storks, geese, and cranes, and praised the crow’s famous fidelity to his mate, and even told something that Menahem Rabinovitch had once revealed to him, that “the ancient Egyptians used to paint a crow as a symbol of married life.”

The albino loved to hear about the customs of the finches, who don’t like to couple with their mates in the winter. When the females migrate south, the males remain in Europe, freezing with cold, loneliness, and longing. Some of them join their women later, and some meet up with them again only in the spring.

“For a male to stay alone in the summer is no big deal,” said Jacob. “But in the winter, that’s another thing altogether. That’s when he learns what it is to be alone. And when she comes back, beautiful and tired, full of love and sun and stories, he learns how much gratitude there is in love.”

The ways of the finches painted a sweet expression on the bookkeeper’s plump face.

“They meet in the spring,” he repeated. “It’s lovely and wise for a couple to meet only in the spring.”

Jacob remarked that the canaries are also very faithful to their mates, and then a pink smile of derision spread over the face of the albino: “That’s how it is with a couple when you close them up together in the same cage,” he said.

W
HITE JUICE SPILLED
from the stems, gathered and congealed and turned dark. Then the red silk petals withered, wrinkled, and dropped off, the ovaries of the poppies puffed up, turned dark, and toughened. And at night, the bookkeeper went out with a little pruning hook clicking in his hand, chopped the rigid capsules, and cracked them with his fingers. He cooked the small black seeds in the congealed sap and fed the dough to his birds.

Every few weeks, the little Morris Minor came from Haifa with the navy officer in it who bought a few pairs.

“Poor birds,” the albino meditated aloud after the officer left. “Now they’ll go down into Egypt.”

With warm oil he cleaned the pale down on the backside of one of his rollers, and said: “This one’s got diarrhea, Jacob. Don’t give him any carrots or potatoes today, just hard-boiled egg white and a little poppyseed to eat.”

He suggested that Jacob abandon agriculture and devote himself to breeding canaries.

“It can be a good livelihood,” he said.

“It’s a livelihood that doesn’t suit the ideas of the village,” said Jacob.

“Chickens or canaries, they’re both birds,” said the albino.

“It’s not the same thing,” said Jacob.

“Nonsense,” said the albino. “I’ll teach you everything I know, and after I leave, you’ll stay.”

“Where will you go?” Jacob asked apprehensively.

But the albino smiled impatiently and asked Jacob to go to the center of the village and bring him a half-inch faucet from the warehouse.

“Go, get out,” he urged him. “They’re going to close right away.”

Jacob went to the center, and here came Rabinovitch’s Judith toward him, striding straight opposite him with the flowers of her dress and her blue kerchief, and she looks and approaches just the way she looks and approaches in his imagination. Never did she chance upon him like that, walking opposite him, in a surprisingly empty street, toward him, straight toward him. He wanted to calculate the point of their meeting but couldn’t because his feet counted his steps and his eyes counted her steps, the brain added them together and the heart divided the sum in two.

When one last meter separated them, he gathered his strength and asked her how she was, and even said: “My name is Jacob.”

“I know,” answered Rabinovitch’s worker as she walked.

Her face was so close he could faint, the burn of a look, a fleeting profile, a white neck, and heels. Her dress flapped on her limbs, her back, so erect, went off into the distance.

H
E STIRRED
with a wooden ladle, put his face close to the pot, and sniffed.

“What’s the secret of the taste, Zayde? That everything will be fresh. That everything will be delicate. Just to touch. Just to put one on top of the other. Just to show the food its seasoning: nice to meet you, I’m potato. Nice to meet you, I’m nutmeg. Please meet Mr. Soup, nice to meet you, Mrs. Parsley. Seasoning, Zayde, it ain’t a smack in the face, seasoning’s got to be like a butterfly’s wing touching your skin. Even in simple Ukrainian borscht, the garlic shouldn’t change your expression, just give you the feeling of a smile. Once I told you a story so you’d eat my food, and now I make you food so you’ll listen to the stories. That means you ain’t a little boy no more, Zayde, so pay attention to your name, start being careful.”

T
IME
, indifferent, mighty, and benevolent, bore away the initial curiosity on its stream. Gossip and guessing started boring even those who invented it. The sense of danger also passed on.

By now everybody had learned that you didn’t approach Rabinovitch’s Judith on her left side and you didn’t ask her anything about who she was or where she came from.

Oded and Naomi came to school clean and neat. The movements of Moshe’s body were once again calm and confident. The blessing, that blessing inspired only by a woman’s hand, returned to his farm.

Each of the three men who were to be my fathers was tending to his own business.

Jacob Sheinfeld, who bequeathed me his drooping shoulders and his house and his dishes and the wonderful picture of his wife, meditated on Judith and learned how to breed canaries.

Moshe Rabinovitch, who bequeathed me the color of his hair and his farm, listened to her screaming and searched for his braid.

And my third father, the cattle dealer Globerman, who bequeathed me his money and his enormous feet, started placing cunning little gifts in the cowshed: a small bottle of perfume or a new blue kerchief or a mother-of-pearl comb for her hair.

“For Lady Judith,” he would repeat.

The dealer was a tall, thin man, his hands were stronger than they were thick, and his face concealed intelligence. Winter and summer he wore a big, worn leather jacket, and on his head was always an old beret that looked like he also used it to blow his nose. In those days he didn’t yet have the pickup truck. He always walked and sometimes he sang strange songs to himself, and their language sounded foreign even if they were sung in Hebrew. Some of them I remember well:

He covered enormous distances on foot, his pockets full of bills and coins that were heavy enough to keep him from flying away in the late summer wind, with a notebook full of cows’ names that kept him from forgetting anything, and with boots
full of gigantic feet big enough to keep him from sinking in the mud.

Sometimes he walked alone and sometimes along with a cow, who had a rope tied to her horns, dread in her heart, and whose bleating jolted the air. East of the village, the old forest of eucalyptus turned blue, and in it was the path where traces of cloven hooves and big boots were clearly marked. Beyond it waited the butcher, the knife, and the meat hook. Every hoofprint, Naomi showed me, turned in one direction, and the traces of the boots went back and forth. On that path, the cows walked their final road. Except for one cow, the cow Rachel, who walked the path one night and then came back on it. Because of that night and that cow, I came into the world and I shall tell more about her later.

The cattle dealer always had a filthy rope wound around his shoulder, and he had his “baston,” a thick walking stick with a steel tip. He used to lean on it as he tramped around the yards, and he also used it as a cattle prod and as an index finger and as a weapon against vipers and dogs. They would run after him in the fields, crazed by the smell of blood and terror of the cows that stuck to his clothes and even wafted from his skin.

The cows also sensed this smell, the smell of their own death, coming from the body of the dealer like vapors rising from the underworld, and when Globerman appeared in one of the yards in his hat and with his rope and his notebook and his stick, a quiet snort of warning and dread rose in the air, and the cows would huddle together, their spines tense with fear, their bodies clutching one another, and their horns lowered menacingly.

L
IKE EVERY CATTLE DEALER
, Globerman could estimate the weight of a cow with one furtive look, but he was too smart to offer to state the weight to the farmer.

“First of all, Zayde,” he taught me the mysteries of give and
take, “this way he’ll think he’s cheating you, and second of all, the farmer always gives less weight than there really is there. Because buying a cow is theater, and in this theater the farmer wants to be the saint and the dealer don’t care if he’s the sinner. Because of that, even if the owner thinks a thousand pounds, he’ll say nine hundred, maximum nine hundred fifty, period. So, if he loses money and enjoys that, too, who are we, Zayde, to disturb him?”