The Loves of Judith (30 page)

“About such things, Judith, you don’t talk logically,” the Village Papish answered her. “Because now it’s only a matter of good manners, but in another two weeks, God forbid, it will be a matter of saving a life.”

•  •  •

“S
TOP PESTERING
Judith, Sheinfeld,” Moshe Rabinovitch warned Jacob. “She came to work here and not for your craziness.”

The articles in the leaflet and the announcements on the board didn’t bother him. But the yellow notes swooped down on him from every corner and pierced his eyes. His heavy fists clenched and his forehead shook and wrinkled.

One day such a note appeared nailed to the big eucalyptus tree in the yard, and Moshe didn’t even bother to read it. Its place and its color were enough for him. He tore it down and ran to Jacob’s canary house, pounded the door with his short, thick hands, and it was torn off its hinges and knocked down.

The canaries were startled. They started fluttering and struggling in the cages. Feathers and shrieks flew and Jacob looked back at Moshe with pure and innocent eyes and said to him: “Stand quietly, Rabinovitch. You’re scaring the poor birds.”

Moshe was amazed and stood still and didn’t say a word. Jacob calmed the canaries, and since he knew that the shouts would make them hoarse, he started preparing the appeasing mixture of lemon juice and honey for them. Moshe was embarrassed and hurried to repair the hinges of the door, and after he left, Jacob bathed and shaved, changed his clothes, and went out for another one of those meetings in the field that Judith didn’t come to and they all ended with “ch.”

T
HAT WHOLE TIME
, despite Rachel, and in spite of the harsh words exchanged in the field, Judith and the livestock dealer went on meeting once a week for an hour or two of sitting and drinking together.

The bottle of liquor and the glasses Globerman left in the cowshed, and once, when Judith told him that she didn’t drink from that bottle except when he was there, his heart was filled with unexpected delight.

“That’s our bottle,” he said in a soft voice. “Just for the two of us. Here’s to us, Lady Judith.”

“To us, Globerman,” she said.

“You want me to tell you some tale about my father?”

“Tell me about whoever you want to.”

“Everything I know I learned from my father,” declared the dealer. “And mainly the most important rule for a
fleysh handler
is that principles and livelihood you mustn’t put in the same drawer.”

“I already noticed that, Globerman,” said Judith.

“To buy a cow I learned from him, to check, to haggle, to cheat, and to win. When I was ten years old, he used to send me to sleep in the owner’s cowshed, to see that he didn’t give the cow salt so she’d drink a lot before the weighing, and to watch that he didn’t make money from her shit. You know how they make money from shit, Lady Judith? The night before the weighing, they give the cow something for constipation and so all the shit stays in her belly and is weighed like meat.”

Globerman senior would buy cattle from the Arabs of Kastina and Gaza.

“He was a great dealer. He sold to the Turkish army and then to the English, too. Every time he would buy twenty, thirty head from the sheikh from Gaza, pay him a few pennies in advance, and the rest, he would tell the sheikh, he would give him when every cow arrived safely. That sheikh had a stupid herder, and he would bring the cows from Gaza to Jaffa, walking with them along the shore. Every time with five cows in case, God forbid, robbers or wild animals or a flood would come, the whole herd wouldn’t be lost.”

When the first group of cows came, Globerman senior received the herder with great honor, served him food and drink, and took care to put a small chilled bottle of Lebanese arak aside.

“What’s that? The herder wondered, running a knowing and delighted finger over the tiny dew drops thickening on the side of the bottle.

“Cold water,” said Globerman senior, who was familiar with the prohibitions of his guest’s religion and the weakness of his faith.

He poured him a generous drink, and the herder swallowed it and almost choked on the flame and the sharpness.

“Good water,” he groaned with pleasure.

“From our well,” said Globerman senior.

“A good well,” said the herder.

“May you be healthy.” Globerman senior touched his forehead. “Ashrab, drink some more,
ya-sahab
, you’re thirsty from the road.”

He tossed slivers of ice into the liquor glasses, he served olives, peeled cucumbers, and fresh bunches of parsley stems, he speared and roasted pieces of meat on a
canoon
of coals made of sour orange wood, and when the two of them finished eating and drinking and groaning from the good taste of the water, Globerman senior took a sooty firebrand and scratched five vertical lines on the wall of the butcher shop and a horizontal line going through them all.

“Those are the five cows you brought today,
habibi
,” he said to the herder. “Now go and come back with five more, and we’ll eat some more meat together and we’ll drink some more good water from the well together, and we’ll write another five lines here on the wall. And so you’ll bring all the cows here and on the last round, the lord sheikh will also come, and see with his own eyes and make the account himself.”

They dipped their hands in ashes and stamped their signs on the wall to confirm the group of cows, and the herder parted from his host with words of gratitude and peace, treated himself to one last sip of water before he set out, and returned to his city.

A week later, he came with the second group. Once again he
ate and drank his fill, and once again Globerman senior made five charcoal lines on the wall of the butcher shop and the two of them confirmed the group by stamping their handprints.

With the last five cows, the sheikh who owned the herd also came to get his money and discovered—here the dealer thumped his boot with his stick and cackled a choking laugh—“and discovered something awful.”

“Well, you tell me, Lady Judith.” He winked. “What did he discover?”

“What?”

“He discovered that that week, Father plastered the butcher shop.… Three layers of whitewash over the signs and over the stamps and over everything, and now go and argue with somebody who was born on the butcher block about how many cows he got.” Globerman roared with laughter.

Judith sipped from her glass and smiled. She untied the blue kerchief and her hair dropped onto her shoulders.

Outside, the afternoon wind began blowing. The rustle of the eucalyptus grew stronger and the dealer knew that in a little while, Lady Judith would get up and say: “Well, Globerman, it’s now half an hour to five and I’ve got to go to work.” He stood up, put on his hat, and touched the fingers of his right hand to its brim in farewell.

“I better go now, and that way you won’t have to throw me out afterward,” he said. “And another story I’ll tell you next time.”

He went out into the yard, glad that he had succeeded in having a conversation without saying “period” even once, and he shouted, “Oded, Oded!” so the boy would come and maneuver his pickup truck out of the yard for him.

“If it wasn’t for our eucalyptus tree, he would have gone straight into Papish’s geese,” said Naomi. “Look how many marks he left on it.”

When I look at the scarred stump that was once a tree—crows nested in its crest and Oded built himself a house and Jacob
stuck love notes on it and the dealer’s pickup truck braked at its flesh and Moshe sits on it today and straightens nails—my imagination makes its lopped-off past flourish. The branches bloom again, thicken and split, the foliage rustles again, the branches grow long, and I already hear the premonition of that cracking, and bend my neck and wait for the smash of the break, the roar of the fall, the dread of the blow, and nothing shakes me out of my dream and wakes me from her death.

It would have been good if he had uprooted that stump from its place and burned it, so it wouldn’t stand here like a tombstone. But Moshe loves the lopped-off trunk, a memorial to his vengeance, as he loves his rock, the testimony to his strength. Sometimes he goes to the rock and taps it with the affection of old-time foes, and on autumn days and in late summer, when a cool afternoon wind comes down from Mount Carmel and blows in the open haystack, he comes to the eucalyptus stump, with a strong hand he rips off every new branch and growth from the edges of the cut, and once again he tells the eucalyptus that this is its punishment: “To die you won’t die, and to bloom you won’t bloom.”

Then he sits down on the trunk and starts working. His wooden board is on his lap and on it is a pile of crooked nails. A pile of straightened nails quickly rises next to it, and as the one declines, the other grows.

He is an old man. He’s short of breath and his face is always red, as with an invisible effort. Senescence distorts his lips and makes him look like a child who can’t understand the world. But yearning for his braid still fills his heart and his awful strength still bubbles in the muscles of his arms, and even though I have known him for many years now, I still find it hard to believe my eyes when I see him straightening nails between his thick fingers as if they were metal wires.

“It calms him,” says Oded.

After Rabinovitch finishes the job of straightening, he polishes
the nails with sea sand and used motor oil. When they shine new and gleaming, a smile of pleasure rises to his face.

He was always fond of sparkling things, that’s what Uncle Menahem told me, and when he was a little girl, he would modestly raise the hem of the frock his mother dressed him in, kneel down, and insert nails in the wooden floor of the house with precise hammer blows.

The mother, who feared for the floor, but knew that little girls have longings that mustn’t be dammed, scratched a square on the floor of the kitchen, a yard square, and allowed Moshe to pound his nails only there. Within a few weeks, the whole area was filled with dense nail heads that were polished until they gleamed and were smooth as glass.

“Moshe was a very nice little girl,” Uncle Menahem concluded that story about his brother. “And a boy who was a girl and wore a dress and had a braid, will beat every other boy in every contest of love.”

O
NE DAY
, Aunt Bathsheba came striding up vigorously from the fields, her face white from rage and her body black from her dress. The sight was so bold and bizarre that no sooner had people peeped out of the windows than they came out of the houses and followed her.

“What happened?” Moshe rushed to his sister-in-law. “What’s that dress?”

“That’s a widow’s dress,” Aunt Bathsheba announced. “You don’t see? Menahem died and I’m a widow.”

“What do you mean, died?” yelled Moshe. “What are you prattling about? Lunatic!”

With a fearful heart, he climbed up onto the horse’s back and galloped to the next village. His brother, safe and sound, came out to meet him, wiped the horse, made sure he didn’t drink too much, and poured some water for Moshe, too. Then he told him that he did indeed sometimes cheat on his wife, but despite her jealousy, suspiciousness, and sleuthing, Bathsheba never managed to catch him in the act.

“That was a mistake on my part,” said Menahem. “I should have given her a chance to catch me once with a ‘hoor’ or two and she would have calmed down. If a woman has only suspicions and no proof, she just goes crazy.”

One day Bathsheba questioned him until he broke down and admitted that he had a “hoor” from time to time.

“Where?” asked Bathsheba.

“In my dreams,” said Menahem, and burst out laughing.

He thought that she’d laugh, too, because dreams are a legitimate and acceptable haven and even tyrants don’t impose their rule over them, but Bathsheba set up such a ruckus that Menahem’s soul revolted against her and her jealousy. This time he took an unexpected act of revenge against the force of her gall: he started meeting with his “hoors” in the most annoying place—in her own dreams.

“You didn’t leave me any choice.” He smiled when she accused him of that. “If you’d let me meet them in my own dreams, we’d get out of yours.”

“Absolutely not,” said Bathsheba, and in the following days she discovered that her dreams were starting to invent for her husband not only places to meet, but also new “hoors” to satisfy his passions.

She tried to stay awake, but then her defiant husband expanded the scope of his activity and also started cheating on her in daydreams, too. And this time—she saw it clearly, for daydreams are illuminated by daylight—Menahem was also making love with Shoshana Bloch, one of the only women she had never suspected.

“I saw you with Bloch’s ‘hoor’!” she yelled.

“Maybe you’ll describe to me what we were doing.” Menahem was astounded, and when Bathsheba took a deep breath and opened her mouth wide, Menahem put a gentle hand on it and blocked it and requested: “But very slow, so I’ll enjoy it, too.”

Bathsheba went outside, looked directly at the sun, and blinked a few times, and since she couldn’t get the adulterous couple out of her eyes even like that, she rode on the bus with them to Haifa, went into Kupershtok’s clothing shop, and asked for a black dress.

“When did your husband pass away?” asked the salesman, sympathizing with her grief.

“He didn’t pass away, I’m passing away from him,” said Bathsheba.

“I don’t understand,” said the salesman.

“For me he’s dead and I want a widow’s dress!” declared Bathsheba. “What don’t you understand?”

The dress fit her very well and gave her great pleasure. She returned on the three o’clock bus, got off in the center of the village, made sure to show off her black to everyone, and after a long walk and a stop at every one of the neighbors’ houses, she reached her husband’s carob orchard.

Menahem, still emanating the revealing smells of the semen of his trees, was pruning dry branches on one of the treetops, and suddenly noticed his widow standing under the tree.

She raised her eyes to him, twirled around, and asked venomously: “It suits me?”