The Loves of Judith (20 page)

Summer passes, the birds and the wind tear the paper cups, and the tiny fruit flies, who go nuts from the sweetness and lust, hover over the oozing cracks in the rind of the fruit and tell me it’s autumn.

Then the pomegranates dry out and harden in their torn wrappers like mummies whose shrouds are undone. Their black rind tells me it’s winter and their seeds crumble like corpses’ teeth in its winds.

M
AYBE YOU
’
LL STOP
singing to my sister all the time,” grumbled Oded.

He was a little boy, but rage and fear aged his features with premature wrinkles, strengthened his body, and gave him the gait of a grown man.

At night, Judith put him and Naomi to bed and told them stories, but the love and attention in Naomi’s face wasn’t to Oded’s liking, and he complained.

His voice was bitter and dull: “Our mother told us nicer stories.”

“I’m not your mother.” Judith folded the blanket down off his face.

She gave him a look he hasn’t forgotten to this day, and when he describes it to me now, an angry, frightened little orphan still dwells between the words.

“If you want to fight with me, Oded,” she told him, “don’t hide under the blanket. You’re not a baby anymore. Come out and fight seriously.”

And when she saw the embarrassment spreading over his face and smoothing the anger out of it, she stroke his amazed cheek, said, “Good night, children,” and went to the cowshed: to her cows, her bedroom, her bed, her screaming.

“G
O TO HER
, Father.” Naomi got up one night and stood at her father’s bed.

Moshe shook his head no.

“I’ll go with you,” said Naomi. “We’ll go in and ask her why she’s shouting like that.”

“We shouldn’t go to her,” said Moshe.

“Then I’ll go to her if you won’t.”

Rabinovitch sat up with a start. “You won’t go to her. Nobody will go to her. Grown-up people don’t cry to make you come to them. She’ll cry a little and it’ll pass.”

One night, Naomi couldn’t help it anymore. She sneaked into the yard of the cowshed, held on to the waterpipe, and tried to stand on the trough and peep at the bright figure, with gaping mouth and eyes, huddled in her corner.

Moshe’s heavy hand blocked his daughter’s mouth. He picked her up and held her tight.

“She shouldn’t know that we know,” he growled into her ear as he carried her to the house.

And when he took his hand away, a flock of words burst from her mouth like a bevy of finches from the thicket.

“The whole village knows, Father!” she shrieked. “And she knows that everybody knows. Even the children in school are talking.”

“Never mind what they’re talking.” He put his hand on her again. “But she mustn’t see you going there.”

“They think you’re doing things to her!” The words bubbled up from her mouth and scalded the skin of his hand.

“Shut your mouth or I’ll tie a towel on your face! When you grow up you’ll understand.”

And the screaming melted away. The gashes she ripped in the air were stitched back together. Scars were visible but only a moment and vanished at once.

“It’s like the flesh of a woman down below that don’t get no marks,” Jacob told me.

He poured the cognac. “Only births leave traces there,” he said. “But not love and not infidelity. Not us men. Only on our mother’s flesh do we leave marks, not on the flesh of our wives. Look there someday, Zayde. You’re a grown man now. Look and
see for yourself. On the skin of the face and on the skin of the hands, all the stamps of life remain. Even on our
shmekele
nothing is erased. Anybody who can read, reads the marks on his
shmekele
like a diary. Globerman told me that once. Like the rings on a tree trunk they stay there. Here’s the good years and here’s the bad years, here’s the names and here’s the times. There’s a rock like that in Lake Kinneret that shows you marks of how much water there was every year. That’s how it is with us. But with a woman down below, nothing. No mark. There it’s just like the Kinneret. You see the old storms in the lake? You see in the air of the day the screams that passed through it in the night? See? You don’t see there, either.”

L
IKE A CUCKOO
’
S FLEDGLING
, Judith pressed and pushed all other thoughts out of his mind. He thought only of her, her and her screaming and her body and her cart cruising in the greenish yellow sea of chrysanthemums, and he didn’t understand, he told me, how she could be in two places at the same time: “With Rabinovitch in the yard and with me in my head.”

Sometimes he saw her on the street or in the center of the village, and he would nod hello to her and torment his heart with naive plans and childish hopes to meet her in another way and another time and another place.

And one day Moshe Rabinovitch came to Jacob to hatch two hundred chicks for him, and asked if Sheinfeld could wait a few weeks to be paid.

Jacob was so happy he said: “The money ain’t nothing, Rabinovitch, never mind the money.”

He hurried to the incubator, dismantled it, washed and disinfected its parts and dried them in the sun, and when the chicks
hatched and the incubator was filled with chirping, Jacob came to tell Rabinovitch to prepare the coop for them.

“I’ll bring them tomorrow,” he said, his eyes roving and searching.

But Judith didn’t appear and Jacob went off.

The next day, he hitched up the wagon and brought the chicks in two closed cases. The smell and the chirping drove the cats out of their minds. Some of them assembled in Rabinovitch’s yard and besieged the coop, looking for a crack. But Moshe poured cement all around, right on the edge of the screen, and fastened every single joint with wire because he knew that hunger makes cat limbs supple and their murderous impulse gives them the ability to squeeze inside like snakes.

The concrete floor was already covered with sawdust and Jacob bent over and gently emptied the case of chicks onto it. The yellow block, dense and chirping, scattered into dozens of frantic little balls and immediately banded together again in a murmur of fear and excitement.

And then the door suddenly squeaked. The chicks fell silent all at once and that shudder again penetrated the back of Jacob’s neck. He knew it was Judith who came into the coop and was standing behind him.

His heart fluttered. That’s what will happen to the human heart when fear shrinks its chambers and, at the very same moment, when happiness expands its top floors.

“And the heart—you knew that, Zayde?—the heart melts. And right away, a mess in all the hands and all the feet. Here some muscle shakes, bones are like milk powder in water, blood is like soup, agitated and boiling.

“Very simply, I couldn’t breathe,” he recalled. “I was very simply choking. That’s how a man tells himself he’s in love.

“How did Rabinovitch live with her there in the yard and not go nuts?” he wondered. “You understand that, Zayde? When he saw her working, when he saw how she moved, when she lifts up a jug of milk or drags the buckets to the calves and her body is
straining under her dress … How can a person lay like that in the hut and know she’s in the cowshed, right behind a wall of wood and a wall of air and a wall of cement? You can just go nuts.”

T
HAT EVENING
, when Judith was milking and Moshe was unloading the clover off the wagon, he suddenly asked her if she had noticed Jacob’s looks.

“He likes you,” he stated.

“A nafka mina,”
said Judith.

“Well,” said Moshe. “What joy. The whole village is dreaming of Sheinfeld’s wife, and Sheinfeld is making eyes at you.”

Judith finished washing and hardening the teats of the milk cow. In straight white jets, the milk sprayed into the bucket, and the high-pitched ping of its initial impact grew deeper and more muffled from one spray to the next.

The cow turned her head and looked at Judith. Her big tongue thrust out and was inserted into her nostrils with the sound of a wet cork. The warm, sweetish smell rose in the air and was absorbed in the walls and Judith’s eyes blazed.

She leaned her sweating forehead on the cow’s belly, and when the cow gently lifted her hoof, hinting at some discomfort, she said: “Shaa … shaa …” and stroked the big thigh, pressing gently on the point that paralyzes the intention and the ability to kick.

Years later, when I was seven years old, she told me that the horse gets love in exchange for his love and the dog gets authority for his loyalty and the cat food for his charm, but the cow doesn’t get anything, except rebukes and kicks. She gives her milk and her strength and her children while she’s alive, and afterward they take her flesh and skin and horns and bones.

“They don’t throw away any of the cow,” she summed up.

And Jacob said: “That’s how it is with a great love. With a great love only one person always gives everything. Always there ain’t nothing that gets lost.”

•  •  •

H
E LAY IN HIS HOUSE
, his head asleep, his heart awake, and his eyes two holes gleaming in the dark.

Crows, swallows, canaries, and sparrows slept their slumber. The barn-owl, white queen of the gloom, spread silent wings and emerged from her hiding place.

Rebecca was also awake, for insomnia is contagious.

“Sleep, Sheinfeld, I don’t have any strength anymore,” she said. “When you don’t sleep, I’m tired in the morning.”

But Jacob was silent. His bones squeaked and his flesh hurt.

“And I said thank God my eyes, wide open in the dark, don’t shine thoughts on the wall. Just imagine that, Zayde, that she would see my thoughts and I would see her thoughts like in the cinema or with a magic lantern.”

With a strange clarity, he felt his ribs pressing together in his chest and, like long teeth, chewing the flesh of his heart.

“What’s with you lately, Sheinfeld?” asked the most beautiful woman in the village.

And Jacob didn’t answer. For what good are words when it comes to love?

O
NE EVENING
, the door didn’t open. The groping hand wasn’t stretched out. The albino didn’t emerge.

The canaries were singing as they usually did, but Jacob was worried. He waited a little and moved out of Yakobi and Yakoba’s yard and put his face up to the lattices of the big hut. Then he knocked on the door. The singing stopped and a dreadful silence reigned. Jacob was afraid to go in, convinced himself that the bookkeeper was still asleep, and left.

The albino wasn’t seen the next evening, either, and Jacob was scared because the wheelbarrow of papers from the treasurer’s office was standing at the door, and the pickup truck was parked in its usual place and its hood was cold. He called the Village Papish who didn’t hesitate to break down the door of the hut and, in a tempest of the turbulent shrieks and struggles and feathers of the canaries, the bookkeeper was lying naked on the floor, cold and fat and stiff.

“He’s dead.” The Village Papish straightened up from the body.

He ran to summon the medic, and Jacob was left alone with the pinkish gray albino. The hair on his snowy white corpse was snagged with flying grains of sawdust, birdseed shells, and droppings.

The smell of death began to be felt in the air. Jacob immediately poured water into the tiny porcelain basins and scattered all the varieties of seeds and crumbs there in the feeding troughs, seeking consolation and serenity in the routine movements of work.

Then came those who took care of such matters, and they very matter-of-factly took the corpse away.

The birds, who were terrified by the turmoil in their hut, had calmed down now. The thin shrieks of alarm vanished. The last particles of down stopped dancing around in space and settled on the floor. A slight encouraging sound of singing began rising from the cages, a fragmentary conversation at first, a tiny bit here and a tiny bit there, and they went on in a loud and defiant song. And Jacob, who had been sitting alone on the floor of the canary house for a long time, was infected with the ancient faith of all bird breeders—that their singing is a sign of thanks and love. A faith like that will also be found among kings and kindergarten teachers, drill sergeants and village choirmasters.

He got up and went back home. Rebecca served him dinner, but Jacob didn’t pay any attention to his food and took no pleasure in it, either. Finally, he left most of his dinner on his plate,
got up from the table, and said he had “to go take a look and see what was going on with the poor birds,” and didn’t notice that that was the second time that day he had imitated the dead albino’s style of speaking.

He didn’t observe his wife’s weeping, got out of her embrace, dragged a folding cot to the canary house, and lay there all night in the gloom, waiting fearfully for some heir or relative to pop up, brandishing a signed will and white eyelashes, proof of relationship, and demand the poor birds.

But the albino was childless and no one showed up. The council published an obituary notice in the newspaper and addressed the Mandatory court in Haifa, and even those relatives who usually come to light only after death, those cousins even the dead person himself doesn’t know—even they didn’t come.

The council sent two representatives “to check the inventory.” In the albino’s kitchen cabinets were a few Czech government yearbooks, five pairs of sunglasses, dozens of tubes of stinking skin lotion, and two pairs of shoes.

After rummaging through the dead man’s clothes closet, they discovered that the threadbare black suit he always wore was in fact five identical black suits, all cut the same, and all equally threadbare, and on their ten sleeves were the same shiny old suede patches.