The Loves of Judith (36 page)

One way or another, a hasty and pleading finger knocked on
the door of his house, and when he opened it, a fat and ugly giant stood there in the dark, his sparse hair pulled back and his eyes small and scared like the eyes of a mouse.

The man wore blue overalls which Jacob recognized immediately as the clothes of the Italian prisoners of war, from the camp the English had set up not far from the village. The POWs in their blue garments were often seen strolling in the fields. They had a breach in the fence that everybody knew about, and through it they went out, picked some herbs for seasoning, and romped like children.

But the eyes of that POW scurried about in their sockets and his skin was flooded with sweat. He knelt down and, puffing and scared, said in Hebrew: “They’re after me. Hide me here, please.”

“Who’s after you?” asked Jacob.

“Hide me, sir,” the POW repeated. “Just one night, please.”

“Who are you? Are you a Jew? How do you know our language?” asked Jacob suspiciously.

“I can speak any language I hear,” said the man, and Jacob was amazed because now the POW was speaking to him in his own voice. “If you like, I’ll teach you, too. Just let me come in and close the door and I’ll tell you everything inside.”

“Can’t just let a person in like that,” Jacob persisted. “I’ve got to inform somebody.”

The man straightened up to his full height, pushed Jacob inside gently but firmly, followed him in, and closed the door.

“Don’t inform, don’t tell,” he pleaded.

“And you know, Zayde, how come I felt sorry for him? Not because he escaped from the POW camp and not because he suddenly spoke in my voice. But because he sat down at the table and three fingers he put into the bowl of salt and put some for himself on the palm of his other hand and from there he licked the salt with his tongue just like a cow from her stone in the trough. I knew that very well. A person who does that is really weak and in despair. My mother used to do that in her last year before she died. She always had a small stone of salt on the table and another
smaller one in her pocket. People like that, when they feel weak, like other people need sugar, they take a little salt in their mouth, otherwise their knees buckle. I always dreamed how one day I’d make so much money I’d buy my mother some thin, white salt like the rich people have, and not a gray stone to lick like a cow. And when I saw the poor Italian doing that, I understood that he really needed help.”

Jacob sliced some bread and cheese for the escaped prisoner, fried him an egg, watched him as he ate, and then took him to the old canary hut.

He brought him two old bags of sawdust from the hatchery and said: “Lay down here. Tomorrow morning we’ll talk.”

T
HE NEXT DAY
, Jacob woke up earlier than usual because the canaries were singing at the top of their lungs. For a few minutes he lay awake and at last he got out of bed. A thought that was half decision and half desire had taken shape in his heart and didn’t let him fall back to sleep.

He went to the canary house and saw that the Italian POW was already awake and lying with his eyes wide open on the sacks of sawdust, conducting the birds with two fingers as big as rolls.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Salvatore.” The POW stood up and bowed.

“Salvatore what?” asked Jacob.

“Just Salvatore. Someone whose mother and father are dead, who has no wife, and who will never have children, doesn’t need a last name.”

“Salvatore,” said Jacob, “sit down, please. It’s not nice that you’re standing.”

The POW sat, but even so, he filled the room.

“Where do you live in Italy?”

“In a little village, in the south, in Calabria.”

“So you know, Salvatore, how it is in a little village, that it’s impossible to hide anything from anybody and everybody knows
what’s cooking in everybody else’s pot? To hide you here even in the ground I can’t. But you speak our language, you look like everybody else here, we’ll give you one of our names, we’ll dress you in local clothes, and we’ll say that you’re my worker.”

S
O, FROM AN
I
TALIAN
POW with no last name, Salvatore became a Jewish worker named Joshua Ber.

No one knew who he was because Salvatore was a marvelous imitator, and aside from his mother tongue, he spoke fluent Hebrew, German, English, Russian, Yiddish, and Arabic. With Jacob he spoke only Hebrew and addressed him only as “Sheinfeld,” and when Jacob mentioned that to him, he answered that he didn’t dare call him by his first name, “because, after all, I’m your worker, and also because of the name itself.”

Jacob bought Joshua work clothes so he wouldn’t go out in the blue POW overalls. He knew how to milk, prune vines, pour cement, mow with a scythe, exterminate tree parasites, and fix the plumbing, and within a few weeks, everybody in the village knew that Sheinfeld’s new worker had golden hands. Now and then they would call him to work at one of the farms for a few pennies.

He was grateful and wanted to serve Jacob and help him any way he could. He cooked, washed the dishes, cleaned the house, and tended the garden. He found the remnants of the roses the albino had put up near Yakobi and Yakoba’s hut, rescued them from the deadly embrace of the ivy, and grafted new strains on them.

Everybody was amazed when he demonstrated his ability to kill mole rats, which he could slay in their burrows with a blind thrust of a pitchfork. They thought he had a rich agricultural and technical experience, and they didn’t understand that it was his talent for imitation, the talent that helped him learn languages, that provided him with those skills, too. All Salvatore-Joshua had to do was spend one minute watching a person milk, trim, build,
or mow, and he could carry out the same activities and movements with surprising skill. Even difficult and professional work, like leveling tiles on a new floor or hoofing cows, he learned with a look and carried out like an old hand.

Only Naomi Rabinovitch suspected something. One day she said Sheinfeld’s worker was “funny,” and when they asked her what she meant, she said: “He doesn’t look like a Joshua, he looks like a Noshua.”

Ever since then, that nickname stuck, “Noshua,” and that’s what everybody called him.

O
NCE
N
OSHUA
MANAGED
to anticipate Globerman and say in Yiddish and in the dealer’s voice the exact weight of a cow for sale.

“How did you do that?” Jacob asked him afterward when they were home alone.

“I imitated his face when he looks at the cow, and then it came out, period,” said Noshua.

“Don’t do things like that no more,” Jacob told him. “Globerman is a dangerous person. He’s not a little boy. He’s got a lot of sense and hasn’t got no compassion at all. If he’ll suspect you of something, it’ll end up very bad.”

But he himself kept questioning Noshua over and over about his talent for imitation. Finally the worker laughed and answered that he himself didn’t have any real talent for imitation, and in fact, he imitated the talent for imitation from his father, who was a “great artist” and had a traveling puppet theater.

The POW was a sensitive man, and the tears that flowed from his eyes when he mentioned his dead father were so big they overflowed onto his cheeks and dripped onto his thighs.

“My height I also inherited from him, but he was thin and I’m so fat.”

Jacob asked him how he got so fat, and Noshua told him that once, when he was young, he had a lover.

“Every night I would make him and me zabaglione, for strength and for love. Later we broke up, but I went on making zabaglione every night for the memory and to eat it for the regrets. And that’s how I got fat.”

Jacob was embarrassed. Never had he heard a man talk about loving other men and he didn’t know what the word “zabaglione” meant, it sounded ridiculous to him, both rude and strange. And then Noshua brought two eggs, found a little bit of sweet wine, separated the yolk in the palm of his hand, added sugar, boiled water, stirred it up, and gave it to Jacob to taste.

“That’s good,” said Jacob, excited and amazed. “How is it that such simple food and so little work ends up in such a splendid result?”

“If you had good wine here, Sheinfeld, it would taste even better,” said Noshua.

“Tell me some more about your father,” Jacob asked.

And Noshua told him that his father was so inundated with imitations that he had forgotten his own voice and would always speak in the voice of the last man he had talked to. And that was how his wife found out about all his carousings and love affairs, for he would come home late at night and talk in his sleep in the voices of his best girlfriends.

“He wasn’t like me,” he said. “He loved women and women loved him, because he could imitate any man they wanted.”

“Who did he imitate for them?” asked Jacob eagerly, expecting an answer that would shine and dissipate the fog over his own love.

“You surely think, Sheinfeld, that he imitated Casanova for them. No, they all wanted him to imitate their own husbands.”

Jacob didn’t understand why.

“They hoped he wouldn’t succeed so well, that he would be only a little like him and not really the same thing,” laughed Noshua. “Every woman loves her husband, she just wants a few small improvements.”

“And what did he die of?” asked Jacob.

“A nafka mina,”
answered Noshua and his voice was the voice of Jacob. “One day he came back from a friend’s funeral, didn’t talk to anybody, got into bed, and died himself. At first nobody believed it, they thought he was imitating the friend and didn’t disturb him, and it was only when he started to stink that we knew that this time it was for real.”

A
BOUT THREE OR FOUR YEARS OLD
I was in those days and I remember him vaguely. Sometimes Sheinfeld’s worker would come to the kindergarten, cut out little figures and paper dolls for us, imitate the silly chorus of turkeys, the instructions of the kindergarten teacher, and the war honks of the geese in the Village Papish’s yard.

By then everybody knew about his talent for imitation. Some were happy about him and others asked him to demonstrate his ability, and for some his imitations broke out of the fences of their world and they were enraged.

The imitations were so authentic they even surprised the livestock and the poultry. Noshua scared the chickens with the hungry meowing of cats and put them to sleep with the long
Hamsin
lament of swooning brood hens. He dried up the milk cows with perfect quotations from Globerman. He excited heifers in heat with an imitation of the rutting of both Gordon and Bloch. And he reached the pinnacle when he started calling like the jays, the noisiest and nerviest of all winged creatures.

It had been ten years since the jays had come from the forest to the village in their blue and shrieking flight of gypsies. They easily adapted to the new place, stole food, watched and learned, and quickly assumed a monopoly of all pranks and imitation and deception: they uttered terrified cries of mothers; they whistled whistles agreed upon by lovers, and shouted “giddyap” and “whoa” at the horses at the wrong times.

Now came the Italian POW and repaid them in kind: he mixed up their ways of life with calls of wooing and seduction,
which he uttered right in the middle of the laying season, in the afternoon he pestered them with the dull hollow death rattle of the owl, and at the height of coupling he frightened them with screams of distress from the nestlings.

O
DED STILL KEEPS
his driver’s license from the time of the British Mandate, and when he showed it to me in the middle of the trip and told me again how he had gotten it from Globerman when he was still a child, joy stirred in me along with a strange regret for the cattle dealer, whom I, like Mother, loathed and liked at one and the same time.

“He was a big bastard, that
drek
. Too bad you got only his feet and not his head,” shouted Oded.

At one-thirty in the morning, when I get to the dairy, Oded is there already, detaching hoses, closing valves, leaping onto the roof of the tank and tightening the covers.

Then we set out. The pungent smell of toothpaste and shaving cream fills the cab. Oded’s cheek is flushed from his midnight shave and I wonder to myself if his left cheek is also like that. For so many years I have been riding on his right that his other profile is as much a mystery to me as the other side of the moon.

He isn’t as strong as his father—few men are as strong as Moshe Rabinovitch—but he did inherit a few hints of his structure, and as often happens in a father and son, the observer can’t know if the son is an improvement and refinement of his father or if he hasn’t come up to his level. Oded excelled in Indian wrestling contests in the village, but he never succeeded in picking up Moshe’s rock. He kept trying, and after people began making remarks, he shifted his attempts to the night hours, before he set out on his run.

And once Sheinfeld’s worker saw him and asked what he was trying to do.

“To pick up this rock,” said Oded.

“A person can’t pick up a rock like this,” said Noshua.

Oded showed Noshua his mother’s faded sign, which was still stuck to the rock, but since the talent for imitation doesn’t extend to the science of reading, and the Italian POW was afraid to give away his secret, he ran home and asked Jacob what was written there.

Jacob recited the sentence that every person in the village knew by heart—“Here lives Moshe Rabinovitch who picked me up off the ground”—and Noshua got excited and said that if that was so, he would also pick that rock up off the ground.

“You haven’t got a chance,” Jacob told him. “Many have tried and all have failed.”

Noshua returned to the rock, tried a few times, and he failed, too, but that didn’t affect his good mood. His new life was already blessed with the daily routine of a villager, and now he added to it the daily attempt to pick up Rabinovitch’s rock. In the morning he got up, drank a raw egg and a cup of chicory, put on his work clothes, and went out to the field and the yard, and at noon he put on a dress he had sewn himself from Rebecca’s old clothes, tied an apron around his waist, and cooked lunch. In the afternoon, he put his work clothes on again, went out to work in the yard again, and at dusk he drank another egg, went to the rock, and didn’t succeed in picking it up.