The Loves of Judith (29 page)

He approached Rachel, who bent her thick neck menacingly, but retreated.

“She smells Globerman like an old man smells the Angel of Death,” said the dealer. “Did you ever see an old man a few days before he dies, Lady Judith? How restless he gets, walking around the house like a mouse, sniffing in corners, doesn’t sleep? Look at her. She’s now smelling something we can’t feel. Signs we can’t understand. That’s how an old man is before death, when he’s like an animal that wants to be alone, and that’s also how a woman is two or three days before giving birth, when she suddenly starts cleaning up the whole house, and that’s also how it is when they smell the Angel of Death.”

And suddenly the dealer took a step forward, flung out his hand, and ran it over Rachel’s back, with his hynotic
“tappen”
movement, examining how thick the flesh was between the vertebrae and the skin.

The touch of his hand set off a cold chill in the backs of both of them.

“Oy-oy-oy, that’s the best meat in the world,” the dealer chanted a chant of longing. “There’s no better meat in the world than the meat of a barren cow. Even the best chefs in Paris don’t know that. Only we, who were born on the butcher block, know that. What they don’t, all those dummies in restaurants with their
white hats. They season, straighten, soften, feed the cow with all kinds of spices, I heard that in Japan they even give the
kelbelakh
beer to drink, and in France they give them a bath with cognac. And there’s only one thing they don’t know. That that’s the meat fit for a king, period. A barren heifer, a
tsvilling
of a calf, with the body of a male and the smell of a baby that will never be in heat, and they’ll never jump on her, and she’ll never give birth.”

From the east, the big flock of starlings appeared, returning from the fields to their night’s lodging in the big trees next to the water tower.

“Here they are,” said Judith. “It’s quarter to five now. I’ve got to go.”

Like a mighty disk that measured a quarter of the sky, the flock flew and whirled, became a gigantic cloth, and turned over. A string branched out of it and pulled it into a broad ribbon that wrapped around itself and became a gigantic sail. Myriads of wings and beaks set up a wave of noise. The air shook and turned dark.

“That cow you’ll never get, Globerman,” said Judith.

“All cows come to the dealer in the end,” said Globerman.

“Not this cow,” said Judith. “This cow is mine.”

“We’re all yours, Lady Judith.” Globerman put on his hat and started bowing and stepping backward. “We’re all yours and we’ll all come in the end. Everyone to his dealer and everyone to his slaughterer.”

S
O HOW COME
I fell in love with her, you ask? Come on, ask, Zayde, and I’ll answer you. ’Cause in a village like this, where the work is always the same work, and the mud is the same mud and the same sweat and the same milk and rain, where everything is
always the same thing, so not to fall in love with her? Every year the same thing. Again the sprout sprouts and the flower flowers, and again crops and slops, and lopping and chopping, and summer and winter, and to a place like this a woman comes all of a sudden, so if you ask me how come I fell in love with her, I’ll ask you a question back: is this a life for a Jew? They took us out of the synagogue where the prayers and commandments are all the time the same thing, and they took us to the Land of Israel and to this Kfar David and here, too, it’s all the same thing, and very fast I understood the principle here, that today and yesterday and tomorrow are as alike as brothers, and like a bird I fell into the trap. Eat, Zayde, eat, you don’t have to stop eating to listen, that’s what’s good about a meal, that you can eat and also listen. It’s not the hard work that bothered me, and waiting didn’t bother me, either. I, bless God, from a very young age have been working, and patience I’ve got enough for ten men, to work for love all Jacobs know. Years are like a few days in our eyes. And somebody who waited for love like I did, he’s also got enough patience for horses and geese and trees and rain and mainly for time. ’Cause patience for time, that’s what’s important, not patience for each other and not for love and not for work and not for nothing else, just patience for time. Both for time that goes in a circle, like the seasons of the year, and for time that goes in a straight line, like a person’s age. But there will never be oranges in summer here and no rooster will ever lay eggs and no hen will ever give pears. At most, sometimes it will be a little hotter, or sometimes there’ll be a little more rain. And the Village Papish, who I never agreed with about anything, and he thinks I’m an idiot and I think he’s a sage and both of us are quite wrong, so the Village Papish, two years after we came here, he said: What’s going on here, comrades? What kind of life is this? How long can you see every year at the same season on the same tree the same yellow lemons? Like a joke he said that, but in fact it’s a very sad thing. Once Globerman told me how he saw in Nahalal two women guests from the city standing at a pen of big calves. Standing and looking,
excuse me, where in a grown calf there’s something to see. They stood there and looked and finally one of them opens her mouth and asks: And what do they do with the milk from the calves? What do you say about such a thing, Zayde? Well, after all the villagers finished laughing, the second city woman wanted to show how much she did understand, so she says to her: What a dummy you are, they don’t have milk yet because they’re still small. Funny, eh? I see you’re laughing, so I’m gonna tell you something, Zayde—you laugh, but that story is really sad and not so funny. ’Cause you can stand on your head all day long, the calf ain’t gonna give milk. And sometimes some calf is born with two heads or a chicken with four legs, and right away there’s a fuss, people come, take pictures, ask who-what-why, and the four eyes are already closed, and the two heads have already fallen, and the poor little
kelbel
is already dead, and his two little souls, poof, gone, each one from its little head, and all the visitors, too, poof, gone, and everything in its place, poof, came back safe, and what was under the sun, like what I told you, poof, it is also what it’s gonna be. So you ask me how come I fell in love with her?”

Now the other door of the oven was opened and this time a smell of baked strudel rose from it. For half an hour it had been tormenting my ability to pay attention, and now it burst in on the tunnels of my nose and entangled my senses.

Jacob stuck a toothpick in the crisp crust, took it out, licked it, and chuckled with satisfaction. Then he pulled the pan and with unexpected expertise separated the cake from it with a thin strong wire, and slid it onto a metal rack.

A wonderful smell of flaming rum and burnt sugar and lemon rind and apples and raisins rose from it.

“You see,” said Jacob, “cake you cool on a rack and not in a pan, and then it don’t stay wet underneath like a rag.”

“How do you know those things?” I asked.

“There was my worker here and he taught me all I need.”

A new tone, of false teeth, rose from his jaw. He poured the two of us a strong and very clear drink that tasted of pears.
And then he said he was tired, that I shouldn’t touch the dishes. “Tomorrow, the cleaning woman will come, Zayde, and she’ll do everything.”

He lay down, almost dropped onto the bed.

“What are you thinking about, Jacob?” I asked.

“About a wedding.” His voice shook. “About making matches. Of food and digestion, and of flesh and soul. It’s harder to make a match between the body and the soul than between a man and a woman. From a match like that, even to get excited is impossible. Only to commit suicide it’s possible, but what good is that then? Body and soul have to know how to grow together, to get old together, and then they’re like two poor old birds in the same cage, and neither one of them’s got any strength in his wings. The body is already weak and falls. The soul already forgets and regrets, and to run away from each other is also impossible. Well, the only thing left then is knowing how to forgive. That’s the wisdom that’s left after all the rest of the wise things are finished: knowing how to forgive each other. If not to forgive another person, at least to forgive yourself.”

He groaned and fell silent. I sat on the chair next to him and didn’t know whether to go on talking or not.

Jacob lay on his back with one hand crooked behind his neck. To my amazement, the other hand suddenly crept into his pants, at a depth that couldn’t be mistaken. When he noticed my embarrassed look, he pulled it out, but a few minutes later, the hand sneaked back into its nest as though it were placed there on its own.

The two of us felt uneasy and finally Jacob said: “Look here, Zayde, this is how it’s comfortable for me to lay, and please don’t be offended, that’s how we hold and comfort each other. Both of us are soft and old now and enjoy memories. How many friends does a man still have left at this age?”

And the two of us laughed.

•  •  •

“L
OOK AT HER
,” he said after he had fallen asleep for a few minutes and had woken up when I stood. “Sometimes I look at that beautiful picture and I don’t remember who it is. Her smell isn’t on the sheets anymore and the touch of her skin isn’t on my skin anymore, and her memory isn’t in the heart or the head. If I say to myself Rebecca Schwartz or Rebecca Sheinfeld, I immediately correct myself—Rebecca Green. Everything she wanted he did for her, that Englishman Green. He took her away, he brought her back, he bought her this house, and right away he died, ’cause she wanted to stay alone. In England, he was a great figure, really half a lord, but in this story, he was like a small extra from the theater. His part ends and he goes off without complaints. In a play, you’ve got one part. A little one or a big one. But in life you get to be in a lot of plays and you’ve got a lot of parts. If somebody did a play about the life of the Village Papish or about Rabinovitch, I’d have a very small part in it, but if somebody made a play about the life of your mother, there I’d have a bigger part, eh? And you can have one starring part, the big part in the play about your own life. Never, Zayde, don’t let nobody ever take the main part in the play of your life, like I did.”

“H
OW DID HE LIVE
with her? After he gave her up back then?” I wondered. “I don’t understand that.”

“I can’t hear,” yelled Oded into the roar of the motor. “What did you say, Zayde?”

And after I shouted, too, he laughed. “Don’t be a baby, what’s wrong with that? What did he have left after the canaries went and after your mother didn’t want him? In a house in Tivon, there was a beautiful room waiting for him, and good food, and the clothes of her English husband that fit him to a T, and a cleaning woman cleans his room, and a nursemaid wipes his ass, and a taxi takes him whenever he wants to sit at our bus stop, and the driver waits for him until he finishes sitting there and saying
come in come in, and in the kitchen he’s got a beautiful picture of his wife, and next to his bed he’s got a beautiful picture of your mother. So what doesn’t he have?”

“And Rebecca agreed to all that?” I said. “That he loves another woman?”

“Loves another woman, so what?” shouted Oded. “Let him love whoever he wants to. That one’s dead and this one’s alive. It doesn’t matter who he loves, the main thing is who he’s with.”

He killed the motor. A big, tormented gasp blurted out, and a big lizard of silence crept in its wake.

“When you see the end coming close you start thinking different,” Oded bisected that silence with his shout.

But Jacob didn’t see the end coming close and didn’t start thinking different, and the love didn’t fade from his body or from his soul.

“Now, at long last, they feel good together,” he told me, his hand moving slowly in his pants, doing good and forgiving, examining and consoling. “Now the soul and the body know each other real good. I know where it hurts and it knows where I hurt.”

E
VERY DAY HE GOT UP
early for his birds, changed the water and the bottom of the cages, prepared the mixtures of greens and fruits, the sesame seeds and the beets, the egg yolks and shells, gave poppies to the nervous ones, hashish to the gloomy ones, and honey to the hoarse ones.

“Should I tell you something?” he said to me. “I didn’t like their singing very much. Outside there are birds that sing much much better than them.”

It was the routine of the work that he liked, and the loneliness
and the serenity, and every day he went out to his wooing and his yellow notes, which he continued to hang on every corner of the village.

And since the notes were visible and their color stood out and attracted, and their words were clear and open, the villagers would study them and express their opinion, and they soon started hanging their own notes on the village bulletin board: anonymous sheets torn out of notebooks, fragrant wrapping paper for oranges, thick strips ripped from powdered milk sacks by hands that wanted to write and speak. First about Jacob’s love for Judith, and then about love in general.

Ultimately, the committee put up another board next to the old one because that one was loaded with so much nonsense and clichés that the various announcements of the secretary, the film projectionist, the sower, and the education committee disappeared among them.

The new board was devoted solely to the issue of Jacob and Judith, and you could always see people near it, arguing, laughing, exchanging opinions and truths about love, and sighing.

And one evening the Village Papish went into Rabinovitch’s cowshed and said to Judith: “You don’t have to give in to him, all you have to do is show up for one date, you’ll chat a little bit, explain to him whatever you have to, like a decent woman should do in such cases.”

Judith was quick to turn her deaf ear to him, but the words “decent woman” got around her, surrounded her head, and burst into her consciousness from the good ear.

The blood rushed from her face. “I am a decent woman,” she said furiously. “It’s not my fault that that man is crazy. I am a decent woman. Did I ask for that love of his? Did I separate him from his wife?”