The Loves of Judith (34 page)

“And I remember that, too,” said Naomi. “And I also remember how we used to eat pomegranates together—first we sat down on the rock and then on the walk Father paved for her. And I remember how she used to send me to catch doves and how she
used to kill them. She pulled their necks with two fingers until there was a kind of little click, and then she’d bite her lower lip between her teeth.”

We were standing next to the crows’ meeting tree in the cemetery of the German Colony in Jerusalem, and Naomi laughed and challenged me to a tree-climbing contest. “At falling you’re better, but at climbing I’ll beat you.”

And then she said: “I have to visit Meir’s mother. Will you come with me, Zayde? She lives nearby.”

Naomi called her mother-in-law “Meir’s mother” or “Mrs. Klebanov,” so I don’t know her first name. Maybe I did know it when I was five and Naomi and Meir got married, and since then I’ve managed to forget it. In her garden, she had a fabulous rosebush, a thin old almond tree, and a creeping honeysuckle.

The rosebush was unique. It was tall as a tree and had thorns like a cat’s claws. So big and sturdy it was that it didn’t need to be tended or watered, and it smelled so strong that people stopped by it, thunderstruck, and gnats swooned in the deep tangles of its flowers.

Even during the days of war and siege, when all the flower gardens died of thirst, as Mrs. Klebanov related proudly, its leaves turned green and didn’t wither.

Mrs. Klebanov was a widow, and even though she was determined to age fast, her features preserved the lines of an old beauty, the kind that waits for deliverance.

“I remember you,” she said. “You’re the worker’s son. You were a little boy at Meir’s wedding, weren’t you?”

“I was also at that wedding,” said Naomi. “Me you don’t remember?”

“You’ve got a funny name, don’t you?” Mrs. Klebanov questioned me.

“My name is Zayde,” I said.

“And how old are you?”

At that time, I was twenty-three.

“A person your age whose name is Zayde, he can only be a
liar,” Mrs. Klebanov decreed. “Tell me, please, you lived there in the cowshed with the cows, you and your mother, didn’t you?”

“Something like that,” I said. “I didn’t really live with the cows, but in a house that used to be a cowshed.”

“That sounds very interesting,” concluded Mrs. Klebanov. “I remember talking about that afterward with my husband’s relatives. A woman with a child and she lived with the cows.”

From the porch came a strange metallic banging, and the echo that answered it was even louder than the banging itself.

“That’s the birds pecking the water tank. They’re the only ones who come visit me,” grumbled Meir’s mother.

I glanced out the window. On the porch a big tank stood on four blocks. A Jerusalem water storage in case of emergency. Mrs. Klebanov would scatter breadcrumbs on it and the sparrows would gather and peck them off the tin cover. They were grateful, as befits small hungry birds who live in a cold, hardhearted, close-fisted city, and Mrs. Klebanov was pleased to see the gratitude beaming from their round eyes. The echo that answered the banging of their beaks, she said, told her how much water was left in the tank.

Sometimes a heavier and stronger beak was heard, and she knew that the crow from the big cypress had come and chased the sparrows away and was pecking at their bread.

Mrs. Klebanov didn’t like black animals bigger than her hand. She immediately burst onto the porch, justice trampling at her side and a bristling broom in her right hand. With a shout of, “Get out of here!
Kishta!
Get lost!” she got rid of the thief.

Her face flushed, she returned to the room and went to the kitchen to calm down and make us some tea. Naomi whispered to me that her mother-in-law usually shooed dogs away in Hebrew, goats in Arabic, and cats in Yiddish, but with crows, she didn’t know what nation they belonged to or what language they spoke. So she used them all.

We drank the tea, which was sweet and tasty and very hot, and we left.

•  •  •

“T
O TAKE HER TO
J
ERUSALEM
is like plucking a flower from the earth and throwing it onto the road to get run over,” Oded told me.

The time that had passed since his sister married Meir hadn’t blunted his anger. Often, ever since I was a little boy, he drove me in the village truck to visit them in Jerusalem. Sleepy and excited, I would run in the dark to the dairy. Oded allowed me to climb up onto the tank and check the lids and, as we were leaving the village, to pull the cable of the horn over his left shoulder.

Then I would fall asleep and not wake up until dawn, when Oded would maneuver the gearshift at the entrance to the yard of Tnuva, the marketing cooperative, in Jerusalem. Naomi was already standing there waving, Oded replied with a loud honk of greeting, and the supervisor rushed out of his office and shouted: “Sut up, pleesh! Don’t hong the horn! At five in the morning, people are shtill shleeping in Jerushalem!” And Ezriel, the driver of Kfar Vitkin, shouted: “Shamshon, Shamshon, you sut up your-shelf!”

Oded stopped with a mighty gasp, jumped out of the horse cabin and hugged his sister, and immediately went back to the cabin and took out the package that Judith had sent her from the village, which was always wrapped in brown packing paper cut from a powdered milk sack and tied with a rope, and in it were fruits and vegetables, pomegranates in season, sour cream and cheese and eggs and a letter.

“That’s from home, Naomi. Here, this is just for you, you heard? Eat it all up yourself and don’t give him anything. I’m serious, why are you laughing?”

“If I had been there when he came, it wouldn’t have wound up like this,” he declared. “He wouldn’t have taken her, she wouldn’t have gone with him, he wouldn’t have even gotten into the yard. Came from the fields, that lowlife, like a jackal who comes to steal
from the chicken coop. I don’t understand how your heroine of a mother didn’t catch on and throw him out of there.”

And two or three days later, on my way back to the village, I would always wake up there, when the big truck came out of Wadi Milek, and the Valley, warm and beloved and spacious, was spread out before me again. Oded told me again about the train that used to run there and about the ravenous herds the Arabs used to set loose on the village fields, “and we’d go out to them and drive them away with whips,” and about the old antiaircraft posts of the English and the adventures of Police Sergeant Shvili, and the legend about the destroyed stone chimney in the field, remnant of the Italian POW camp, whose guards didn’t do any work and smells of cooking, and how songs were always rising from there.

“You’ll write about all those things, Zayde, right?” he yelled.

J
ACOB BOILED A POT
of water on the fire, cracked an egg into the palm of his hand, slipped the white between his spread fingers, and put the yolk into the bowl. A little wine, a little sugar, and the whisk was gleaming in his hand, steam rose, and the warmth emitted the smell of wine in the air.

“The yolk of the egg,” he said, “that’s strength and that’s mother and that’s life.”

His hand, so quick and steady over the bowl, started shaking as his finger began moving in it and bringing tastes up from it.

“Don’t ever forget me,” he said suddenly.

“Of course not,” I said.

“And Globerman, too, don’t forget him, and Rabinovitch, too, don’t forget.”

“You tired, Jacob? You want me to go now?”

“Open, if you please, the door of the closet.”

I opened it.

“Take out, if you please, the box,” he said.

A white cardboard box, flat and long, was there, standing like a ghost behind the clothes hanging up. I remembered it and I knew what was inside it.

“Open it,” said Jacob.

A fog of an old white cloth filled the box.

“That’s your mother’s wedding gown.” His voice shook. “You remember it? With my own hands, I sewed it.”

My body recoiled and my eyes became moist. Even though Mother wore it for only a few minutes, the empty dress seemed like an empty skin she sloughed off in the field, waiting for the flesh of its mistress, just like me and like Jacob.

“On the way to me she was, with that dress on her, and her inside it, and something all of a sudden happened. Everybody was sitting at the tables and waiting for her, and you, Zayde, came instead of her. A little boy of ten with that box in your hand with that dress inside, you don’t remember? You came and you gave it to me in front of the whole village and you ran away without looking in my eyes. And afterward, all the guests left and I went into the house and I closed the door and I fell down on the bed with that bridal gown, and all the dishes, all the nice German china, still stayed outside on the tables for the sun and the flies. A whole week I lay like that. Not sleeping, not dreaming, and my heart was as cold as ice, and when they came back they came back right before the big snow, of February nineteen hundred and fifty. You was a little boy then, Zayde, but you must remember that snow. Who doesn’t remember the big snow of nineteen hundred and fifty? All over the country it was. Even in the Jordan Valley a few inches fell. What can I tell you, that was really some big surprise. Here in the village trees broke, chickens died, two calves froze, in the transit camp not far from here, a few new immigrants were killed because the whole roof of the kitchen fell on
their head. But for us, who came from snows fifteen feet deep and sleds with three horses and wolves as big as calves, and we’d stick our tongue on the iron handle of the well that was so cold—for us that snow was child’s play. Here there’s snow? Here there’s sleds? Here there’s wolves? Here we built sleds for mud to take the milk to the dairy, and once the Village Papish shot a wolf who came into the yard with the geese. What can I tell you, Zayde, Papish called it a wolf, but it was as big as a cat. If he hadn’t said wolf, I would have said it was a jackal, maximum. Never mind a little bit of snow in Jerusalem or in Safed, but here? In this little village? In this hot valley? Who would even dream of such a thing? Who was ready? Especially the trees weren’t ready, and especially that eucalyptus. That’s a tree for snow? I ask you, Zayde, a eucalyptus like that from Australia, is that a tree for snow? The apple tree and the cherry tree and the
beryozka
, the birch tree, them I saw standing in the snow, but a eucalyptus like that, with its wet and soft flesh, and its leaves stay in the wintertime, and it holds a lot more snow than what it can take on, it just broke. One flake and another flake and another flake and another flake, until the last flake that said:
Itzt!
Now! And the whole big branch at the top broke and fell down, and the creak they heard all over the village, and the wind whistling in the leaves when it fell down, they heard that, too, and then the blow they heard. And everybody got up and ran there. ’Cause who didn’t know Rabinovitch’s eucalyptus, with the crows’ nest in the top, you used to climb up to them when you were a little boy, and Globerman and Rabinovitch and I used to walk around like lunatics below worrying that God forbid, you’ll fall, and Judith used to laugh because a child named Zayde, nothing will happen to him. Only now you should watch out with your name, ’cause you’re not a little boy anymore, and the Angel of Death won’t forgive you for cheating him. He’s waiting and waiting and waiting until the moment comes. Everybody, I sometimes think, has his own Angel of Death. He’s born with you and he lives next to you and he waits for you all your life, and because of that, if somebody really is old, he’ll get a lot
more years ’cause his Angel of Death ain’t so young anymore, either, and he don’t see so good, either, and his own hands shake, too, and in the morning he also gets up with aches all over his body, and finally, when he succeeds at last, he dies himself one minute after he kills you, like a bee that stings and also goes
fayfn
. And here’s a woman alone, your mother, not a great beauty, but with an open, clear face, like a window looking on the garden. And the line of pain she had between her eyebrows, that’s the line of a woman whose love cut her flesh, too, and not only her skin, and if you see her milking a cow or cutting vegetables for a salad or washing a child, you right away understand how good those hands can be. And how come I fell in love with her, you ask again? What did I want from her, you want to know? And anyway what does a person like me want from a woman? So excuse me, Zayde, it’s not the
tukhis
he wants and it’s not the
tsitskes
he wants, and beauty is already starting not to be so interesting, and the electricity is already starting to run out, and not only the mind, the whole body is starting to be bored and like Globerman used to say: from most girls the
shvantz
already yawns aloud. So good hands, that’s what he wants. Good hands of a woman to caress him, to stir the scum of the basin of his soul, hands like water passing, speaking, I’m here, Jacob, I’m here, shaa … sleep now, Jacob, you’re not alone, shaa … Jacob … shaa. Sleep.”

T
HE FOURTH MEAL
Jacob made for me in 1981, a few weeks after his death.

A quiet and simple death it was. The death of someone whose soul was slowly removed, didn’t flee from his rib cage, didn’t flare up and flicker out like hemp, and wasn’t ripped out of his flesh. His regular taxicab driver found him fully clothed, lying on the sofa in the living room. He said that Jacob’s face was calm and his body was already cold but still soft, and neither struggle nor pain was obvious either in his expression or in his position.

“I’m not a young man, either,” the driver told me, “and that’s the kind of death I’d wish for myself.”

I
WAS IN
J
ERUSALEM
when Jacob died. I lay awake in the guest room of Naomi and Meir’s house, and all of a sudden the phone rang and lopped off their nighttime conversation. They always conversed at night, I always listened to their conversation, and I never managed to fish up words from the stream of quiet, bitter murmuring.