The Loves of Judith (24 page)

He stood up and walked around the room and I felt his pain in my throat, but I went on eating, chewing, swallowing.

“All your life you’ll punish yourself for it afterward. A thing like that is even worse than a boat that disappears. That’s even more loneliness than Robinson Crusoe’s. You understand what I’m saying? Zayde, these words about loneliness? Alone I was on the River Kodyma, alone in my uncle’s shop, alone I immigrated to Eretz Israel, and even with Rebecca I was alone. Who can be together with beauty like that? So beautiful she was that even I already forgot how she looked. For Judith I just have to close my eyes and I’m with her, but with Rebecca I was, like they wrote in the Bible, like a sparrow alone on the top of the house. And I wasn’t a child no more, Zayde, every time I used to say the
‘she’ma,’
I used to think that only the God of the Jews is more alone than I am, and that’s why they call Him the one God. Hear O Israel, the Lord our God the Lord is alone. Poor soul. How much one God and how much He’s alone. And once I said that ‘Hear O Israel’ of mine and my uncle raised his hand to me. But by then I wasn’t a child no more. Then I was already a man and right away I gave as good as I got, one and another one and another one. For all the times he hit me. That was the first time I hit a man and the last time, too. He fell on the ground, and I got up and went, and before I immigrated to Eretz Israel, I never went back to him. But one Purim back home a drunk clown climbed onto the stage and said that Moses made up the one God so it would be easier for the Jews in the desert. Just imagine trudging in the desert like the Philistines and the Greeks and all the other
goyim
, with forty stone idols on your back,
shlepping
like that with all the statues in a
Hamsin
. Like this, you got one Ark of one God, a little Ark with handles, and two Levite guys dragging it and angels’ wings shading them from the sun on their heads, and also you don’t need to remember all the names of all the gods and what each one hates and what each one loves.

“The God of the Jews,” Jacob summed up, “loves lambs, sometimes a dove or fine flour maybe, and something sweet for dessert He don’t eat at all, ’cause the God of the Jews loves everything salty.”

And suddenly Jacob burst into loud singing:

F
OR A TIME
, the dealer left the pickup truck in Yakobi and Yakoba’s yard, and whenever he came to the village, he would visit it.

“It needs to get used to me,” he explained, because he didn’t want to admit that he couldn’t drive.

When everybody started making fun of him, the dealer steeled himself and started teaching himself to drive on the dirt roads, and water jets soon began appearing in the fields, marking the pipes he fractured. After he killed a donkey, annhilated a field of watermelons, and broke three apple trees, he was warned that
the village council would outlaw him if he didn’t get a driving instructor.

Several candidates hastened to offer their services, but Globerman didn’t hesitate a moment and chose Oded Rabinovitch, who was then only eleven years old, but was already known far and wide for his driving.

Naomi told me that her brother agreed to go to first grade only so he could read
Motor, Car, and Tractor
and write letters to the importers of Reo and International. And so, Oded read about cars and thought about motors and dreamed about transfers and compression ratios and transmissions with such concentrated yearning that he learned to drive all by himself, and without ever sitting in a car, because in his imagination he already executed and practiced every operation thousands of times: he engaged gears and released clutches and accelerated and decelerated and braked and turned, and all of it with the devotion of lovers who savor their longings and prepare to realize them.

“If you go on making car noises all the time, you’ll wind up with lips like a Negro,” Uncle Menahem warned him.

But Oded didn’t heed his warning and by the time he was eight years old, he was arguing with surprised grown-ups about air cooling as opposed to water cooling and about “V” engines as opposed to linear engines. In those days Arthur Ruppin came to visit the village and Oded took advantage of the turmoil and excitement, and while the leader was kissing the children in their crowns of wreathes and his driver was trying to make out with Rebecca Sheinfeld, he sneaked up to his long Ford, started it, and fled into the fields.

He drove it like a seasoned pro, and even circled on its axis, raised waves of dirt, did some juggling, and brought up pillars of dust. Finally he abandoned it in one of the orchards and ran away to the eucalyptus forest, returning on foot only the next morning, because he didn’t know what admiration and pride he stirred in the hearts of everyone who saw him and he was afraid they would punish him severely.

Now he tried to convey the lore of driving to Globerman, and the livestock dealer obeyed all his instructions.

“An auto isn’t a cow, Globerman!” the thin shouting voice rose from the pickup truck when the dealer veered from the road into the fields. “You don’t spin it around by the tail, it’s got a steering wheel!”

Fortunately for the dealer, the green pickup truck, with its six gigantic, slow pistons, and its three long gears, was very tolerant. The motor never choked and the thick sheet metal was strong enough to endure the many trials and collisions its new owner subjected it to.

And to his credit, we must add that after all was said and done, the dealer was a law-abiding man. He also took himself down to the Mandatory license office in Haifa. There he went to an official who was an expert in such matters and exchanged fifty pounds of fine shoulder roast for two drivers’ licenses, one for him and one for his little teacher, which included all possible vehicles: motorcycle, bus, private car, and trucks of every size and kind.

“A license for a train and for an airplane they didn’t have,” he bleated with a laugh.

And even though he already had a driver’s license, he went on studying with Oded, until the boy told him it was time to stop.

“Now I know how to drive?” asked the dealer.

“No,” said the boy. “But better than this you’ll never know.”

Still Globerman persisted, and one day Oded returned home carrying a big bouquet of multicolored roses in his hand.

“That’s for you,” he said to Judith. “It’s not from me. It’s from the dealer.”

Judith took the bouquet and saw at once that it wasn’t a bouquet of flowers, but a flowered dress. She spread it out between her hands and despite her anger, she had to admit that the dealer had good taste and wasn’t tight-fisted with his money.

At dusk, Globerman came into Rabinovitch’s yard and managed to open the door and enter the cowshed right at the very
moment when Judith was standing in front of the mirror, trying on his gift.

“I ask you, Lady Judith,” he exclaimed triumphantly, “a person who can tell the weight of a cow with one look of one eye, he can’t fit a dress to a woman without measuring it on her?”

It wasn’t the coarse comparison that offended her, but the fact that the dealer was right. The dress was very becoming.

“You didn’t knock!” she sputtered.

“Here is a cowshed, Lady Judith.” Globerman pulled himself erect. “Here is my work. At the village grocery store, do you knock on the door before you go in to buy?”

“Here is not only a cowshed. Here is also my home!” said Judith.

“Rabinovitch knocks on the door of your house when he comes to milk?”

“That’s none of your business, filth.”

With a marvelous weasel step, Globerman wound around and approached her, even though his feet didn’t seem to move at all.

“All I ask of Lady Judith, who is wearing the new dress and looking so beautiful, and feeling how the fine cloth touches her whole body, that she’ll think at the same time about the one who bought it for her,” he said.

“Get out of here!” she said to him. “Nobody asked you for gifts. I’ll give it to Oded tomorrow to give back to you.”

“Not tomorrow! Now!” shouted the dealer. “Now, take it off and give it back to me.” And he leaned impudently on the wall of the cowshed.

“I’ll wash it first,” said Judith. “So you can give it to some other woman. After all, you’ve got a cow in heat in every village.”

“Don’t wash it, Lady Judith.” Globerman knelt in front of her. “Give it back to me as it is, with your smell folded in the cloth.”

Off to the side, Rachel lowered her head and a deep gurgle of rage rose from the depths of her chest. Globerman smiled. He stood up, went to the cow, and ran his hand over her neck, and
from there his knowing fingers hovered, hypnotized, over her spine until he tapped the end of her tailbone.

His tongue clicked with pleasure. “He’s growing nicely. A butcher who understands will pay me a lot of money for him,” he said.

“That heifer you’ll never get, bastard,” said Judith.

“He’s registered with me,” said the dealer, taking out his notebook and going through it. “Rachel, right? A funny name for a male calf. Here he is. All taken care of. No mistake. I should have gotten him when he was half a year old, but Rabinovitch keeps postponing it.”

A sharp and wise man he was, and he sensed that he had exposed a crack between Judith and Moshe.

“A good
fleysh handler
has to be well organized,” he said to Rabinovitch a few days later. “Here she is. Registered and waiting in my notebook. When will you sell her to me, Rabinovitch?”

“I’m still thinking about it,” said Moshe. “It’s not so simple.”

“What’s not so simple here?” mocked Globerman. “There’s a dairy farmer, there’s a cow, and there’s a dealer, right? The dairy farmer and the cow think about the Angel of Death, but the dealer thinks about money, period. And that’s why the dealer always wins, Rabinovitch, because to lose life is easy, it’s only once and you don’t suffer anymore, but to lose money is very hard. ’Cause that can happen a lot of times and every time you suffer again.”

He looked at Moshe, and as he expected, he saw rage darken his eyes.

“A
bik
!” He grinned at him. He knew that people built like Moshe aren’t quick to anger, but when they are inflamed, they are harmful. Now he tapped and pinched the flesh of Rachel’s shoulder, estimated the thickness of the layer of fat and the strength of the muscle hidden underneath it. “What a beautiful
kishre
you’ve got here, Rabinovitch, so when will you sell me Rachel?”

“I can’t do that to her,” said Moshe.

“To who? The cow? What are you, the Humane Society?”

“To Judith,” said Moshe.

“To Lady Judith?” the dealer wondered in a loud voice. “Who’s the boss here? You or your worker?”

And Moshe’s eyes became dark with anger again.

O
DED DIDN
’
T LIKE
my mother while she was alive; he teased her and pestered her, and saw no reason to regard her death as a sufficient cause to change his attitude. Nevertheless, I’m fond of him and I feel good with him. He drives me to Naomi and takes me back from there, brings her the packages and the letters and the observations reports for the “head rook,” and keeps on telling me about his father and my mother and his sister, and sometimes also about Dinah, the woman who was his wife.

“I got married to Dinah at the age of thirty-seven and a half, and I got divorced at the age of thirty-eight. How’s that, Zayde?”

Dinah’s husband was killed in the Sinai Campaign of 1956, and Oded met her through some friends.

“Everybody’s got friends like that. They got their own crappy marriages, so they’ve got to get everybody else paired up, too.”

I remember Dinah. She was eight years younger than Oded and about an inch and a half taller, and even though she wasn’t pretty at all, the blue sparks of her hair and the copper of her skin cast melancholy and restlessness into the men who had eyes to see them.

One night, a few months after their wedding, Oded went out on his run and was suddenly filled with such a strange and painful uneasiness that he was afraid to go on driving. He braked the tanker on the side of the highway, sat and thought for a few minutes, then continued on his way, stopped again, and finally turned around and went back to the village.

At the village hall, he killed the motor and silently, like a
gigantic metal marten, he slid down the slope until he stopped at his house. A strange, dusty Matchless motorcycle, its motor warm and still smelling, was parked under the tree. Oded got out of the truck, peeped in the window, and saw Dinah riding on somebody, her thin, muscular body gleaming with her special dark gleam.

A soft sponginess pervaded his joints and muscles. He stumbled back to the tanker, started it, and drove it up to the center of the village. There he got out, opened the big valve under the tank, locked himself in the driver’s cab, and hung his hand on the horn cable.

A jet of milk, terrifying and white, flooded the street. The mighty horn of the tanker and the bleating of the young calves who were jolted awake by the smell of milk telling them their dreams had come true, woke the whole village.

“That was the best moment of my life,” he told me. “That was a whole lot better than going into the room and killing the two of them. It cost me a lot of money, the milk and the divorce, and the trials and everything, but what can I tell you, Zayde, it was a real pleasure.”