The Loves of Judith (35 page)

That was no longer the small apartment in the housing project where I had visited them in my childhood, but the handsome, spacious stone house where they live now. Once Naomi and Meir used to sleep on one twin bed in one room, then in one double bed in one room, then in two twin beds in one room, and now they sleep in two double beds in two separate rooms. That’s also a way to measure the passage of time.

As is always my habit, I lay and watched the door that won’t
open anymore and a triangular blade of light that won’t come from it, won’t slice and won’t serve up to my eyes the golden slice of a body and a corridor.

Whenever Jacob would describe the young girls doing laundry in the river and would declare proudly that that was “the eternal picture of love,” I thought of that eternal picture of mine, of the woman at night, her cheek moist, her waist cut out and her skin glowing. I wanted to return to that room and whistle to that time to come back, and to see again that naked body glowing in the dark that will never return.

But innocence has already left my flesh, youth has forsaken her flesh, and anyway—there’s nothing more miserable in the world than restoring. Better than that is imagination, and better than imagination is fiction, and better than all three of them is memory.

Meir picked up the phone. “Yes,” I heard him say, “he’s here.” And he immediately called out: “It’s for you, Zayde. And please tell whoever it is that it’s four in the morning.”

“I’m here at Tnuva Jerusalem,” said Oded on the other end of the line. “I thought you might want to know. Sheinfeld died.”

“When?” I asked, surprised by the sharp pain that stabbed me in the stomach.

“Yesterday morning.”

“Why didn’t they tell me? Why didn’t they call before?”

“Who is this ‘they’? Who exactly should they have called?” asked Oded sharply. And then he said: “They already buried him. Yesterday afternoon.”

“When are you going back to the village?”

“Wait for me at the exit from the city. I’ll be done here in half an hour.”

A
LL THE WAY
I thought about that one thing. About the secret only we knew, only she and I, the secret of her final refusal of his love. Ever since the day she died, I had been trying to work up enough strength to reveal it to Jacob. I told him as I walked in the
street, my lips moving and my voice inaudible, I whispered it into the old observation-box I had already outgrown, I shouted it into the distant forest, my mouth wide open and my voice horrible, but the deed itself I couldn’t perform.

Oded, who sensed how repentant and agitated I was, didn’t talk to me all the way back.

Even when I suddenly said aloud, “It’s better this way. If I had told him, he would have died a long time ago,” he pretended that the roar of the motor swallowed up my confession, and didn’t respond.

A few days later, I was summoned to a lawyer’s office in Haifa and informed that the beautiful house on Oak Street in Tivon, its garden, its kitchen, and everything in it belonged to me.

“What will you do with the house?” the lawyer asked me.

“I’ll rent it out,” I said.

“I’d be glad to rent it from you.”

“In ten days you can move in.”

The lawyer lowered his eyes and cleared his throat. “In the kitchen, there’s a picture of a woman on the wall,” he said in embarrassment. “I’d be grateful to you if you could leave it hanging there.”

“Did you know her?” I asked.

“Mrs. Green? Not in her youth, unfortunately, but in her old age,” he said. “I was their lawyer, hers and Mr. Green’s. Years ago, when she passed away and I summoned Mr. Sheinfeld here and gave him the keys to the house she had bequeathed him, he told me that he was her first husband. I must admit I was surprised. And now you’re inheriting that house, Mr. Rabinovitch. Excuse me, please, if I ask you a personal question: how are you related to that family?”

T
HAT NIGHT
, Mr. Rabinovitch slept in his new house.

As usual, he fell asleep only at dawn and didn’t have any dreams.

The next day, there was a loud knock on the door.

“Who’s there?” asked Mr. Rabinovitch.

“From the store.”

A young man who smelled of bay leaves and sausage came in. He seemed to know the place well. He headed straight for the kitchen, put a few wrapped packages in the refrigerator, vegetables and fruits in their bins, the bottles rang in their places.

“No charge for this,” he announced, and on the table he left the store’s business card and a sealed white envelope with my name on it.

At the door, he turned to me, took a deep breath, and said: “We’re very sorry, Mr. Rabinovitch Zayde. Mr. Sheinfeld Jacob was a good man and he really knew a lot about food. He couldn’t say the names of wine, but his frying pan laughed and his knife danced in his hand. My boss used to go just to smell the air near this house whenever he would cook, and then he would come back to the store and say: It’s an honor for us to sell groceries to Mr. Sheinfeld Jacob, because he’s a person who can cook even with three copper pots at the same time. My boss also asked me to tell you that if you, Mr. Rabinovitch Zayde, stay to live here, we’ll be glad to serve you, too.”

The fellow concluded his speech, which was delivered in one breath, and left.

Mr. Rabinovitch Zayde started searching and rummaging around.

In the envelope was a recipe for preparing the fourth meal.

In the drawer of the nightstand next to the bed waited Mother’s blue kerchief.

Her splendid wedding gown hung in the closet, outside the shell of its box. White, smooth, and odorless.

Mr. Rabinovitch Zayde took it out of there, spread it on the bed, sat down in the big easy chair, and fell asleep.

H
OW CLEAR THE MEMORIES ARE
: the maple leaves turned yellow and dropped, and like amputated hands were swept up in the water. Farmers dismantled the net trap for geese and collected from the roofs the fruit they had placed there to dry.

How regular things are: a wind came from the north, thin sheets of clouds, a first snow fell, and in the morning wolf tracks came very close to the village houses.

The earth revolved. The winter ended. How obedient are the spring birds: the nightingales of the reeds sang, the apple blossom wafted its train and bridesmaid bees caught it, right in front of Jacob’s eyes white butterflies moved to and fro, drunk, caught in the webs of his memory.

Gold and green prevailed. The sun ascended, and already—how familiar, how handsome are the pictures—a tiny kingfisher hovered over its reflection, a wind capered in the leaves of the birches, the girls came out to launder clothes and bedsheets on the rock at the bend of the channel.

Then, Jacob told me, the basic colors of love were painted in his heart, for in the love of a little boy, he stated, wonder is greater than lust, amazement is greater than jealousy, and greater than all the loves that will come, for it is as strong as the whole body and as heavy.

In those childhood days, he added, he loved not only one woman, but all women, and he loved the earth that bears the yearning of their weight, and the sky that forms a canopy over the splendor of their heads, and the One God of the Jews, who put them on his doorstep.

He lusted for their knees bent on the black slate. Their breasts sang to him from the cages of their blouses. The shining eddies of water kept on getting entangled in his heart. The place and the angle made it look like the girls were floating on great expanses of water gilded by the sun. The wind played with the dresses, tightened, softened, outlined.

“The eternal picture of love,” Jacob repeated to me, enjoying not only the memory but also the expression his clumsy tongue had managed to shape.

I
HAVE NO PENCHANT
for cooking and no special interest in food. Like everybody else, I, too, enjoy a good meal, but I don’t delve into the mysteries of how it’s made, I don’t wonder about its ingredients, I won’t travel especially for it. I believe in Globerman’s decree: “Good food is food you clean your plate afterward with a piece of bread, period.”

The table awaited me, flat and patient. The big white plates that were now mine were gleaming on it. The copper pots reddened like suns setting on the wall. In the cabinet the knives held their breath. Which of them will be chosen by the new hand that will open the drawer?

I hung Jacob’s recipe in front of me, and I tied his apron around my waist.

At first I was afraid because all I knew about cooking, as I said, was summed up in Moshe’s and my simple meal: scrambled eggs, salad, mashed potatoes, and boiled chicken. But Jacob’s instructions were simple, the meat was obedient, the seasonings and vegetables were arranged and ready. The ladles moved in my hands by themselves, the skillet and the pot responded to me, and
I quickly felt confident enough to control more than one burner at the same time.

Joy and mourning were not blended in my heart. The steam and the drops of oil didn’t touch one another. One next to another, things happened, neighbors in the same box of time. I cut while I fried, I stirred while I squeezed, I smiled in time of grief, I steamed, I mixed, I sprinkled, I boiled, I remembered, I cried, I seasoned.

And when I finished, I finished with a measure of ceremony, which people allow themselves when they’re all alone. With a spin on my heels, I untied the apron, bowed, and turned off the burners.

From the wall, Rebecca looked at me with a curiosity whose meaning I didn’t understand until I recalled that I was now much older than she.

“Ess, meyn kind,”
I said to her, mocking, and served myself the last meal.

W
HAT DID SHE HAVE INSIDE HER
, what was under the skin, what are the secrets a woman remembers not in her head but in her flesh—that nobody knows? Even you, Zayde, don’t know nothing about your mother. What do you know? That she came on a train and raised Rabinovitch’s kids, and cooked and laundered and washed and rinsed and milked and did everything a woman does in the village, but she lived by herself in the cowshed and at night she wailed. That’s all you know. Sometimes I thought she came here to atone for something. And her calf she also raised, how come a person raises an animal like that and calls her Rachel, if not for forgiveness? But never did you hear
a word from her and nothing did you see on her face. Her face was open like a window looking on the garden, but on the other hand it didn’t reveal nothing to you. That was her way of hiding. She was hiding a lot back then, and I’m still hiding a lot for her today. What did you think, that I told everything? Rabinovitch maybe knew something, but he’d never rummage around in such things, and he also lived for so many years inside his own disaster that other people’s disasters didn’t interest him no more. Only once, when somebody came to the committee complaining about her wailing in the night, Rabinovitch came to the secretary’s office and this is what he said: ‘Do those screams dry up your cows? No? So what do you care and what business is it of yours? Everybody screams, Reuben screams loud and Simon screams quiet.’ That’s what he said and then he turned around and left. At first I didn’t understand who was that Reuben and that Simon, until the Village Papish explained to me that those are names you give for example. And then I thought to myself that a name like Jacob is never gonna be an example for nothing. And every night she’d cry like that until your heart would break. And sounds at night, those are things you can’t hide. It’s not like some Zayde that you can’t tell who his father is. It’s not like a woman’s secrets—where did you come from? Who do you love? All those secrets that if they don’t leave signs on the flesh, so where do they leave them? On the soul? What sign can you leave on the soul? Sounds like that wait all day to be heard for night. She used to lay in the cowshed, next to her cow, one chews the cud of clover and the other chews the cud of memories, and that wailing … every night … like the soul of a wolf it flew over the village, rising, and falling, and seeking … and seeking … what can I tell you, Zayde—there were people here, no need to mention names, who said: if Rabinovitch’s Judith goes on wailing like that, the jackals will come to the village to look for their relatives. And stories were going around, one nicer than the next. One said it was some woman’s thing, pains men can’t possibly understand
in places they don’t have. One said it was matters of love, one said it was just regrets in sleep, see, everybody regrets all kinds of things, big things or little things, and there are people who regret quietly and there are people who regret with screams and there are people that all they do in life is just regret. I once knew a
goyish
carpenter who sometimes regretted something he ate and sometimes he regretted somebody he loved, and sometimes what he said, and sometimes what he did. Is there any lack of reasons for people to regret? Sometimes he would come to people’s houses to redo some commode he made them a week before, and twice they caught him in the cemetery digging ’cause he regretted the wood he made the coffin out of, and two or three times a year he would change his name, and leave the old name to deal with all the old problems, like a snake sheds its old skin in the field. See, Zayde, you always used to complain about your name when you were a child, so how come you didn’t change it? See, you could have gone to the government, too, and said: Don’t want to be Zayde no more. Want to be Gershon, want to be Solomon. Want to be Jacob. It would be great if you were Jacob. But that’s very dangerous, ’cause names like mine and yours are Fate. With names like ours you don’t fool around.”

I
T WAS THE END
of the world war, and one night a strange and bizarre man appeared at Jacob Sheinfeld’s house.

“That was a very weird guest, but a guest who couldn’t come by chance. Right away I understood that he was sent. Like her and like the viper and like the albino accountant. And just like them, he came from the fields and not from the highway.”