The Loves of Judith (33 page)

The blanket slid off his body and he fell on his back into the frozen dung heap. Once again the pitchfork was aimed at him in that efficient and practical way of thrusting into a pile of hay, and this time he didn’t manage to get out of the way and one of the tines pierced his arm.

The wound was deep and surprising and Moshe yelled in pain, but Judith’s face remained calm and chill. She extracted the pitchfork from the flesh of his arm and when she brandished it a third time, Moshe rolled aside, stood up naked, and fled the cowshed.

In the house, he locked the door, collapsed onto the floor,
and then crept and washed the blood and mud and dung off his body, and poured alcohol on his wound. It wasn’t weakness that shook his body, but the novelty of it. He bandaged his arm, lay down in his bed, and slowly understood that the fingers choking his throat when he wanted to swallow or sleep were not anger or fear, but the simple stroking of jealousy. An alien and strange feeling was this envy, which he had never felt in his life, either.

Once again he fell asleep, and once again he woke up, because he didn’t hear Judith’s wailing and wondered why, and wanted to get up and go back to the cowshed, but the pain in his arm and the pounding swelling under it reminded him of what had happened and told him that he better stay in his bed. He closed his eyes and started dreaming that he was choked by something pressing on his chest, but there wasn’t anything there, only the hands of the angel and the dream of his strong thighs clasping his body, and his nipples searing his chest with a double brand of possession, and his finger that was laid on his face and said to him, “Shaa … shaa … sleep now, shaa …”

Lips whispered in his neck, “Sorry,” and a warm wet silk grazed and beat and stroked his flesh pleasantly, and the delight was so great that the dream went on even after he opened his eyes, and now the pain in his wounded arm became unbearable and his fever rose high.

A good, heavy smell, forgotten and remembered at the same time, covered his face like a spread-out dress.

“Who are you?” he asked, and no woman answered.

Outside, the storm had stopped now and robins began the chirping of night’s end. One from Tonya’s pomegranate tree and his foe from Papish’s yard. Rabinovitch knew he was left alone and could sleep another hour. But when he woke up the second time, the sun had already crossed the windowsill and the sparrows and crows had already stopped singing the dawn song and the doves had already returned from the mash warehouse of the village and were now humming the hum of the full gullet, and the air was already clear and warm and dry and only the wet smell
of the earth wafting from his body and from the open window testified to him.

Judith served him a big cup of tea with lemon in bed, examined his wound, and said: “Don’t get out of bed today, Moshe, I’ve already milked for you.”

“All by yourself?” asked Moshe.

“I went at dawn to Sheinfeld and he came and helped me,” she said.

F
ROM THAT NIGHT ON
, Judith’s wailing was no longer heard.

“There are women who feel it the minute they get pregnant,” Naomi told me. “And I’m sure that’s how it was with her. Like an animal she was in those kinds of things. Even the time of ovulation she knew exactly to the second. She told me that herself, when I got my first period and she gave me a woman’s talk. So, if she slept with the three of them that night, or if she got pregnant without sleeping with anyone, only she knew exactly how that happened. But now, Zayde, it really doesn’t matter anymore. That secret of hers she also took with her to the grave. It’s very crowded, Zayde, in your mother’s grave, with so many secrets.”

One way or another, the wailing wasn’t heard anymore. There were those who heard laughter rising from the cowshed and there were those who didn’t hear anything, but everyone understood that something had happened, and in the village they started talking.

As usual with us, you don’t know if reality nourished rumors or vice versa, but the proof increased and became clear: the whites of Judith’s eyes grew turgid, her breasts rose, her waist hadn’t yet swelled, but several women saw her gathering and eating wood sorrel.

And one morning, about two and a half months after that night, when Moshe entered the cowshed and saw her leaning over Rachel’s neck and throwing up in the runnel, he knew that all the gossips were right.

A few weeks later, Globerman and Sheinfeld came to him, as if they had agreed on something, and said: “It can’t be, Rabinovitch, that Judith will bring up a baby among the cows.”

The three of them went to the cowshed to talk with her, but Judith said she felt good and comfortable in her corner there, close to her beloved Rachel. So the three men looked into one another’s eyes, went into the house, and started arguing and measuring and drafting plans. And the next day, Globerman and Sheinfeld went to the city in the pickup truck and Moshe Rabinovitch went out and started digging ditches for foundations.

In the afternoon, the pickup truck returned, bowed down under a burden of sacks of cement and sand and gravel and loaded with rubber bags and tools and boards for casting, and Globerman went into the cowshed, took out his and Judith’s bottles of grappa and cognac—“It’s not good for our child in the belly”—and filled the closet with flowered maternity dresses, dried fruit, his
pettitt furs
and sausages.

Construction of the new cowshed went on for about two months, and after the cows were transferred there, Rabinovitch took the twenty-pound hammer and destroyed all the concrete stalls and troughs in the old cowshed, Sheinfeld and Globerman cleared out the shards, and in the next weeks, they built new internal walls that created two rooms and a kitchen and shower, broke out some more windows, and stretched a net for a new ceiling.

Finally, the owner of the store who had sold them all the building material appeared, and thus the City Papish, the alleged brother of the Village Papish, was revealed and confirmed and went from a joke to reality right before the eyes of the whole village. The City Papish had shouted arguments with his brother about every subject in the world and meanwhile he floored and whitewashed and plastered the walls and stretched electrical cables and water pipes, which breathed life into the structure and made it a house, the house I was born in, and in it my mother
brought me up, this is the house that was once a cowshed, whose bricks subdue its memories, and a soft smell of milk rises from its walls.

That whole time, the men didn’t talk much, but in the shrunken space of the cowshed, the three of them were very close to one another. Sometimes their shoulders touched, sometimes their hands, and when the dealer brought a cast-iron stove from the Druze village on the mountain, he called Moshe, who carried it in his arms from the pickup truck to the cowshed, and Jacob went and cut down two trees in his abandoned citrus grove and brought a full load of heating logs.

“That’s for you, Judith,” he said. “Oranges burn strong and give a good smell.”

W
HO GOT HER PREGNANT
?” Naomi asked Oded.

“Her? All of them!” answered Oded.

“Who got her pregnant?” Naomi asked her father.

“Nobody,” said Moshe.

“Who got you pregnant?” Naomi asked Judith.

“A
nafka mina
,” said Judith, and when Naomi persisted and kept investigating and wept, she finally said to her: “I got pregnant by myself, Nomele, by myself.”

“Y
OU REMEMBER THE
day you were born here? You remember, Zayde?”

“Nobody remembers the day he was born.”

“I remember. I was here.”

“I know.”

“Maybe I’ll stay with you here and not go back to Jerusalem?”

“You’ve got a child, Naomi, and you’ve got a husband in Jerusalem.”

Warm smells of a village night rose in my window. My heart soared from my rib cage and a rustle of clothes taken off was heard in the dark.

“Don’t turn on the light,” she said, because she didn’t know that my eyes were closed.

She got into my bed and asked: “What’s your name?”

“Zayde,” I said.

Outside, the blackbirds started chanting, their voices melting the chill of dawn and painting the east with the orange of their beaks.

“Your eyes have become blue, Zayde,” said Naomi. “Open them and you’ll see yourself.”

An old grief looked out of her eyes. Her tears gleamed. She got out of bed, gleaming in the dark of the room.

“In the middle of class, I got up and ran here. She was already on the floor and that smell was in the air, like the smell of Uncle Menahem in the fall, but it was from Judith’s water, which had already broke. The smell of that water only women and doctors know.”

“Don’t be scared, Nomele,” said Judith. “Don’t call anybody, go to the house and bring clean sheets and towels.”

Her face was contorted with pain.

“Don’t die,” shouted Naomi. “Don’t die!”

And the smile turned Judith’s lips pale.

“You don’t die from this,” she said. “You just live more.”

And she started laughing and groaning: “Oy, how much I’ll live now, Nomele, oy, how much I’ll live now.”

In their mud dwellings in the corner of the roof, the swallow fledglings shrieked and gaped the red of their jaws. Rachel, in the cow yard, bleated and butted the iron door.

“And now,” said Judith, “the
kurve
will give birth to a new little girl.”

Lying on her back, she rolled her dress over her belly, dug her heels into the floor, spread her thighs, and raised her behind in the air.

“Fast!” she ordered. “Put the sheet under me.”

Naomi looked terrified into her gaping groin, which seemed to be shouting.

“What do you see there, Nomi?” asked Judith.

“Like a wall inside,” said Naomi.

“That’s her head, right away she’ll start coming out and you’ll help her very very slow. Just don’t worry, Nomele, in just one more little minute she’ll come out. It’ll be an easy birth. Just wait for her with your hands and you’ll catch her.”

“It’s a boy,” said Naomi.

“And then she simply tore her dress,” she told me, her words and her lips in my neck and the warmth of her thigh on my belly, “and the buttons flew into the air, and she said: ‘Fast, Nomele, fast, I can’t anymore, put him on my chest.’ And I put you on her chest, the white chest of a dove she had, and then she wailed.”

Naomi wanted to flee from the cowshed, for until that moment, Judith was cool and very decisive, while now, the final night wailings were extracted from the depths of her belly and came out of her mouth.

She stepped back, wiping her sticky hands on one another until the wall supported her back, looking at the woman twisting in the swamp of straw and blood, her scream running out of her throat and her son clasped in her arms.

S
HEINFELD
, R
ABINOVITCH
, and Globerman came to the circumcision in their best clothes and didn’t leave me for a minute.

Jacob, who didn’t know how to sew then, bought me some baby layettes.

Moshe Rabinovitch built me a cradle that could be stood on legs and also hung from the rafter.

And Globerman, true to his way and his values, brought a
big bundle of bills, wet his finger with saliva and started dividing them into five small piles, and called out to the guests: “One for the child, one for the mother, one for the father, one for the father, one for the father …” Until the Village Papish and the City Papish stood up and shouted at him: “Give the present already and shut up!”

I
F THE
A
NGEL OF
D
EATH
comes and sees a little boy named Zayde, he understands at once that there’s a mistake here and goes to somebody else.”

And I, with complete faith in the name she gave me, grew up and became a man, convinced that on the day I became a grandfather and justified my name, the Angel of Death would come to me, his patience run out, his face flushed with the wrath of the deceived, would call me by my right name and pour out my life on the ground.

I
REMEMBER SMALL
, very clear pictures, pictures of infancy.

Once I woke up at night and saw her lying on her back. It was a hot summer night, the sheet had slipped off of her, her
arms were spread out, her chest was bared. The severity of her face had departed. Even the line on the bridge of her nose was softened.

I got up to cover her, and when the sheet hovered over her body, she stretched and relaxed and smiled in her sleep and waves seemed to pass over her naked flesh. I fluttered the sheet again and let it drop onto her until a soft sigh escaped from her throat and when I raised the sheet a third time, her eyes suddenly opened. They were hard and clear, just like her voice, which said: “Enough, Zayde, go to sleep.”

I said: “But I want it nice for you.”

I remember how Mother got up and took my arm and led me firmly to my bed and went back and lay down in her bed and both of us knew that we were both awake.

And I remember that Jacob taught me to read and write when I was three and a half years old, after I complained that I was the only one who couldn’t read Uncle Menahem’s springtime notes.

And I remember that Globerman gave me thin, salted, very tasty slices of raw meat to suck.

And I also remember the game of the “awful bear” with Moshe and the first time I fell out of the eucalyptus tree. Everybody, including me, was sure I was dead, and when I opened my eyes and sought God and the angels, Mother said to me: “Get up, Zayde, nothing happened.”

Her stories penetrated my memories and were decanted into them. The she-ass, for instance, died of old age even before I was born, but I clearly remember how she was clever enough to steal barley from the horse: when the horse gathered a mouthful of barley, she bit his neck. He tried to bite her back and the seeds fell out of his mouth and the she-ass gathered them up from the floor.