The Loves of Judith (23 page)

“That doesn’t hurt? To dip your finger in the pot like that?”

“Hurt?” he put his finger in his mouth to taste if it was good. “What more can hurt this body? I don’t hear good anymore, I don’t see good, pains I almost don’t feel, and I don’t remember so good, either. It looks like pains and memory are a sense like hearing and seeing, eh? This morning I thought that somebody who doesn’t remember so good, simply forgets to die, too. And so we trudge on and on, and finally nobody knows what our name is and what we did in our life. ’Cause what’s an old man got outside of old age? Strength he don’t have and sense he don’t have and a woman he don’t have. Just a little memory he’s got, that breaks his whole body.”

And a few seconds later, he added: “And if God gives you
more years, what He gives you after all is a chance to do more foolishness.”

“T
HERE IN THE VILLAGE
near the river was a very old
goy
. At the age of a hundred, all of a sudden he got scared that they wouldn’t take him in the next world, ’cause even in the next world they like young men more. Maybe that’s why the Angel of Death was so mad at your mother for giving you that name. He thought he had a nice young
yingele
by the hand and all of a sudden, such a Zayde, what a
brokh
. So every Sunday that old man starts going to church and yelling at their god he should take him already, he was fed up, he was waiting so long and all the time people was cutting in line ahead of him. You know, to be old you don’t have to study and you don’t have to work and you don’t need sense for that and there’s no success in it. All you got to do is wait and it’ll come. I, for instance, stopped shaving with a mirror a few years ago. Ask me why, Zayde, come on, ask.…”

“Why?” I asked.

“So I’ll tell you why. ’Cause first of all after so much time the hand knows the face good enough and don’t need a mirror. And second of all, at my age, one way or another, you see another human being in the mirror. So let him shave inside the mirror and I’ll shave outside the mirror. And one more thing that’s good about old age, all kinds of people around you all of a sudden ain’t there. Some disappeared ’cause I just got fed up with them, and some disappeared ’cause I forgot them, and that’s the best way to get rid of people, and another part disappear ’cause you just don’t see them no more, and all the other ones disappear ’cause they just die. And then you know it’s the Angel of Death who’s trying to hit you. Like artillery officers shooting cannons from far away—the first times they hit near the target, and real slow, they get closer and closer until they hit it. And meantime, like Robinson Crusoe alone on the island, that’s how I live. That’s what old age is like. An island. And every place I go, my island comes with
me. That’s how come nobody talks to an old person in the street, he walks like a solitary island with all that water around. Sometimes you see a ship far away. You make bonfires and you jump and you yell: Here I am! I’m alive! But only the errand boy from the store comes, and the cleaning woman, and once in ten years Zayde comes. It’s lucky the Village Papish comes here sometimes, from his island he swims to my island. To talk he comes and even more to look at the picture of Rebecca and to yell at me. Once he used to come to me on the bus, and now he calls on the phone and I send my cab driver to him to bring him like a lord. Just recently I told him that in me the brain is already like a rag, and you know what he says? He says: ‘You shouldn’t be scared of that, Sheinfeld, ’cause you were already an idiot by the age of thirty.’ And he still laughs at how I talk. Is it any wonder I talk like this? While he was studying in Cheder and the Yeshiva, I was a slave in my evil uncle’s shop. But it’s mainly because of Rebecca that he’s mad at me. To this day he’s mad at me because of her. He comes, sits here and looks at her picture, and sighs. Once he said: ‘Do me a favor, Sheinfeld, maybe you’ll describe to me that beauty how she looked with no clothes on.’ Believe you me, that’s what he wanted. Everything I should describe to him, every point, every line. Shameless he asked.”

I felt a slight, strange tension pulling at the corners of my mouth, as if a baby’s fingers were touching me there, and even though no baby ever touched my lips, I knew I was smiling.

“Well, Zayde, if you’re lucky, this is gonna be our last meal and no more father of yours will pester you no more, eh?”

He stood up with a great effort and walked to the big black oven which had been slowly rustling all the time, and when he opened the heavy door, the warm swallows of rosemary and wine, olive and garlic soared out of there, and their wings fluttered over my nose until I grew dizzy with pleasure.

“What did you make there, Jacob?” I asked.

“A poor lamb. There’s an old blind man in the village of Illut who I once knew, and he sent me the lamb with his grandson.
You wouldn’t believe. All of a sudden some Arab boy is knocking on my door, and says, ‘This is for you,’ and he goes away. And I see a lamb standing there. All by myself I slaughtered him behind the house and all by myself I hung him up on the tree and skinned him. Would you believe it? Slaughtering and skinning a lamb here on Oak Street in Tivon? Here, if you throw a candy wrapper in the street they look at you, but nobody noticed it. Not even the lamb. That’s an interesting thing. Sheep and goats don’t notice it when they go to slaughter, but cows do notice it and become sad and weak. Someday I’ll teach you how you skin a lamb. It’s like a lot of other things a child needs a father to teach him, ’cause if you know how to do them it’s very easy and if you don’t it’s very hard. A pure lamb. You never tasted such a thing. So soft you can eat it with a spoon.”

He smiled to himself and set the table. He served me the lamb and the seasoned rice and himself his omelet and his salad with olives and cottage cheese.

“Ess, meyn kind.”

The meat really was very tender and good. A gamut of colors and tastes, an embroidery of field and springtime.

“If you want, Zayde, I’ll feed it to you from my fingers, like you was a baby or a woman.”

“No need, Jacob.”

“Feeding a person from your fingers is like seeing him without no clothes on. Someday watch a person when they give him food like that. The eyes look, the nose opens. Saliva comes in his mouth. His lips separate, his chin drops down a little bit, his tongue comes out a little bit to get the food, and if you ever feed a woman like that, remember to pull your fingers back fast because after all that the bite comes all by itself. Take, Zayde, take.” And a small, fragrant, bewildered piece of meat was brought to my lips.

I flinched and Jacob sighed and put the meat back on the plate.

“You like it?” he asked.

“A lot,” I said. “Like a peacock’s tail spreading out in your mouth.”

“That’s a very beautiful thing, what you just said. It’s like the beautiful words the Village Papish says about the beauty of the woman. May you be healthy and enjoy.…”

And those pleading words—“my son”—that also wanted to be said, remained unuttered, fluttering in the air of his lungs, stifled in his throat.

O
NCE, THE OLD PEOPLE SAY
, a paper boat disappeared on the slope of the river.

“That’s the worst thing. A fellow whose boat sails off far and disappears will never have peace again. Even if he gets married to somebody, he’ll never have peace. That boat will go on sailing in his head all his life and every night it’ll come to another woman.”

Sixty years later, a young woman nobody knew came to the village and went straight to the house of a farmer named Nozdryov, who was about eighty years old and no woman wanted him anymore.

“Ever since his paper boat disappeared, four times he got married and four times his wife died right after the wedding. If a thing like that happens it’s a sign that God is trying to tell you something.”

The woman pulled the bell cord a few times, but old age had dimmed Nozdryov’s hearing. She knocked and yelled and finally she opened the door and went inside. When she touched the old man’s shoulder, he turned to her with a smile that spread over his face even before he understood why, and only then did he recognize the handsome young woman who had been residing in his
dreams for so many years and so many times now he had seen her expelling strange women from them.

Tears rose in his eyes. He knew he would wake up right away and the woman, as usual, would melt away and vanish. But the guest wrapped two very fragrant and real arms around his wrinkled neck and pressed his meager body to the warm lust of her breast that made him weep.

Her tongue didn’t find a single tooth to strum in his mouth, but that very day, the two of them appeared in church and the woman showed the flabbergasted priest the paper boat that had been thrown into the river many years before she was born, and had come to her, with sharp folds and clear letters, a journey of sixty years and two hundred miles east of where it was put in the water.

“And ever since then, I’ve been walking here, to him,” she said, pointing to the old man. “Walking and searching along the river.”

“And she had a little branch in her hand,” said Jacob. “People who search walk with a little branch like that. There are people who know how to find water in the ground like that, you knew that, Zayde? They walk along like everybody else walks and they search. They wait for the branch to bend, for a little boat to come, wait for our heart to yell at last, for our
shvantz
to point, for our eyes to see deep in the ground. Your mother used to walk like that in the field. She’d put on a beautiful dress and walk from the path in the field to the road and disappear in the hills for half a day. She didn’t take food along or a stick. And she didn’t take Naomi, either. Only her calf Rachel she took. The little girl used to run after them until Judith used to tell her to go back home and Rachel used to push her with her head, go home, Nomele, go on, go. That cow, she was like a male calf, by the time you knew her she was already old, but back in those days, all the time she used to jump and play and bleat like a
tsigele
, and if you just tried to put a hand on her teat, she could kill you. She had the body of a bull and the sense of a calf, but with your mother, she was soft
like butter. Once Judith even hitched her up to a cart. Believe you me, Zayde. Hitched her up to a cart and went down to the field with her to bring clover. And at sundown, they’d come back, with a bottle or two she bought. See, you know she loved to drink a little bit sometimes, see, that’s no secret. There were some people that didn’t look kindly on that, but she knew her limit and she never got drunk. For our wedding, when I prepared everything, I even searched and found where she got her grappa, it was from a monastery in Nazareth, where an Italian man used to make the drink, and only the devil knows how she found him. She used to go with the cow on foot from here to Nazareth, through all the mountains and the villages, without no fear, and all anybody had to do was get close to her. To make a long story short, the dealer, the minute he found out she loved to drink a little, he right away started bringing her some drink now and then. Like a mole who sees some crack and attacks it to make it wider. They used to sit and drink in the cowshed, but she left the doors wide open so people wouldn’t talk and mainly so the guest wouldn’t get ideas, you understand? She really hated him with a mortal hatred, Globerman, and he, behind all his evil instincts and coarseness and greed, he was in mortal terror of her, but they did drink together. Real slow, not much, but it was a little bit like a contest. Not a contest of who would get drunk first and fall down like the
goyim
do, that they didn’t do. That was a contest of who would look first at the other one and smile. It’s only now I understand that he was the smartest one of us all, the dealer, that he was the only one who knew that love isn’t just giving but is also a lot of taking, and he was the only one who knew that you dassn’t show how much you love, ’cause for one moment of weakness in love a person will pay afterward all his life. On the table between them there was always a little something to eat that he used to bring with the drink. ’Cause somebody who drinks—you need to know that, Zayde—knows how to give every drink its own food, the companion that goes hand in hand with it. The companion of cognac is something sweet, the companion of schnapps is something
salty, and vodka is everybody’s companion. To make a long story short, it’s good to have something next to the drink, ’cause then you drink slow, take more time, you don’t spill every glass into your mouth like that. You understand that, Zayde? You drink slow, you smell, you breathe, you taste a little something, you talk, you chew, you think what to say next. Sense he never lacked, the dealer, and of course he knew all those little
shtiks
, that if you eat a little and drink a little, real real slow, then you stay more time together. And then the words start coming out, and you can talk, think, and once I even saw them making
‘le-khaim’
to each other, glass against glass, and the dealer said: ‘May the ears of Lady Judith also enjoy,’ and the glasses rang with a sound the village wouldn’t hear at all ’cause, here in the village, the most delicate ring is a cow’s horns on the iron yoke. And she smiled at him all of a sudden like I never saw her smile. I would have fallen down and cried from such a smile, but the dealer, that bastard, just looked at her and didn’t budge. If he fell down from that smile, it was only inside his body he fell down, and if he cried, it was only inside his soul that he cried. Meat dealers—you need to know this, Zayde—they’ve got a special way to act with women. Back home, they used to say: a
fleysh handler
knows when to cry with the widow and when to dance with her. Not like us, that if, let’s say, the sun was in another hour, and if I wasn’t in the citrus grove when she came, and I saw her, let’s say, only a week later in the street, or in the morning at the supply warehouse—everything would have been different. But I did see her there sailing in the field on the wagon, in the yellow-green sea of flowers, and right away I knew: here’s what God sent me, here comes my boat, my bird, here’s the woman who will give me wings. Just stretch out your hand and take, Jacob, that’s what I said to myself, stretch out your hand and take, so you won’t punish yourself afterward all your life, ’cause a woman you loved and you let her go, that’s the most awful thing that can happen.”