The Loves of Judith (38 page)

“Here,” he said. “That’s the tango. To touch.”

He tightened his hold. “From here it comes and for here it goes.”

Jacob felt his behind scared and shriveling and his breath fleeing from his rib cage.

“Not with the brain,” said Noshua at the back of his neck. “If
you had a brain, you wouldn’t have called me, Sheinfeld, and I wouldn’t have come.”

Jacob wanted to say that he hadn’t called him at all, but as if from his belly came the knowledge that that was pointless. The POW’s hands held him, his legs led him. A lot of water, yellow-green springtime water, flowed around him and didn’t cover him.

T
IME PASSED
. The world war came to an end. Jacob pondered the possibility of keeping that from Salvatore. But ultimately, he took pity and told him.

The POW took a deep breath and said, “I’m going for a little walk,” and an hour later he came back and said he wanted to stay.

“I thought you would want to go back home, to your little village in Italy,” said Jacob.

“Someone whose father and mother are dead, and no wife is waiting for him and children he will never have, doesn’t have to go back to any home,” said the POW. “They call me Joshua. I make repairs and I heal wounds and I cook and sew and clean and dance. Now, Sheinfeld, we’ve got work to do.”

T
HE END OF THE WAR
returned home the sons who had been mobilized into the British army. They brought new ways to the village: they drank beer, they sang songs in English, and told stories of regrets and alienation. Now and then guests appeared in the village, army buddies, and so one day a fellow from Jerusalem showed up, one Meir Klebanov.

That day, Oded was on the road, Judith was cooking in the house, Moshe was in the mash storehouse, and Naomi was sitting
on the roof of the cowshed replacing broken tiles. When she straightened up and wiped her forehead, the sun gleamed on the body of a distant car, glanced off it, and made it shine like an eye, opening and shutting as it moved.

A car wasn’t a common sight in the Valley in those days and Naomi looked at it and saw it stop next to the old police station on the highway.

A tiny dot got out of the car and moved in a straight line in the lot, and Naomi looked at it and didn’t know that within fifteen minutes, the dot would arrive from the fields to the yard, and that a few months later that dot would marry her and take her to Jerusalem. From the distance she couldn’t even know if it was a man-dot or a woman-dot.

The little figure made its way along the edges of the sorghum field, advanced and grew bigger along the row of old pomelos in the citrus grove beyond the wadi, crossed the channel, and slowly became a young man whose name was not yet known, but whose features became clear and whose walk became light and carefree.

Even though Naomi couldn’t hear, there was in his stride a hint that he was whistling, and now she already figured out that the route of his walk would bring him to the yard. And indeed, the soft whistling was soon heard and even grew louder, and Naomi recognized one of the soldier’s songs brought back by those who came home from the war.

Now the walker was close enough for Naomi to see a fellow of about twenty-seven; his hair was thick and smooth and combed like city boys did with a part in the middle, his skin was thin and fair, his features were neither handsome nor ugly, and the crease in his khaki trousers was sharp and precise.

“Are you looking for somebody here?” she asked when he passed the cowshed.

The whistling stopped. The fellow’s eyes searched all around. His crepe-soled shoes were polished so hard they shone even though he had been walking in the dust of the fields.

“This is a private yard,” said Naomi.

Now the stranger understood that his interlocutor was standing on the roof and he raised his eyes.

“Excuse me,” he said, “I’m looking for the Liberman family.”

He had a pleasant baritone and he articulated clearly. A wind suddenly blew and Naomi’s hands clasped her skirt to her thighs.

“Go out of the yard to the street, turn left, and it’s the sixth yard from here.”

“Thanks,” said the fellow, and after a few steps he stopped, turned back, and asked: “When will you come down from there?”

“Later.”

“I’d come up to you, but I’m scared of heights.”

“So you really better stay below.”

“What’s your name?”

“Esther Greenfeld,” answered Naomi.

The fellow took a notebook and fountain pen out of his pocket, wrote down something, tore off the page, and laid it on the ground. He put a small stone on it so it wouldn’t fly off in the wind, and he straightened up: “Left and the sixth yard from here, Liberman,” he said and left.

Both of them knew she couldn’t help coming down from the roof to see what he wrote her, and both of them knew she would wait until he left the yard and disappeared, and wouldn’t see how she jumped from the roof to the bales of straw and leaped down from them and rushed to the note.

“Too bad Esther Greenfeld will get all the letters I’ll send you,” was written there.

Two hours later, when the fellow came back to the yard, he searched and looked in all directions and walked around the cowshed with his face turned up, Naomi said: “Now I’m here.”

She had already finished repairing the roof tiles and now was sitting and eating pomegranates in Oded’s old “Tarzan hut.” The branches of the eucalyptus hid her from the guest. Between the leaves she saw him approach the mighty trunk, walk around it, and look up.

“Do you have any hours when you come down to earth?”

And then Judith came out to him and asked angrily who he was looking for.

“Esther Greenfeld.”

“There’s no Esther Greenfeld here,” said Judith. “There’s no Esther Greenfeld in this village. Go look for your Esther Greenfeld someplace else.”

Naomi was surprised at her flinty voice, for Judith was usually generous to passersby and always offered them a glass of cold water.

“Did you hear? There is no Esther Greenfeld here!” the fellow shouted up, and his voice was high and jolly. “You’re Naomi Rabinovitch. I asked at Liberman’s who was the girl on the sixth yard to the right of there, and they told me. You’re Naomi Rabinovitch and I’ll send you letters.”

And as he talked he walked backward, and Judith walked up to him as if she were pushing him with her eyes, her hands moving back and forth over her apron, with firm wiping movements hinting that she was ready for war.

“I’ll come back,” cried the fellow. “My name is Meir Klebanov, and I’ll come back.”

And that’s how he made the whole long way to the road, a backward walk that pulled behind it an invisible and unbreakable web, waving his hand and stumbling a bit and throwing kisses that got farther away and smaller, until they gathered together again in that dot, which crossed the wadi and retreated along the line of old pomelos in the citrus grove and on the edges of the sorghum field behind it, reached the road, and was swallowed up in the three o’clock bus.

Two days later came the first letter from Jerusalem, a pioneer at the head of a long blue nonstop caravan of envelopes. In the village they started saying that Naomi Rabinovitch had a “fellow in Jerusalem,” and a few weeks later Meir returned for a visit.

Once again Oded was on a trip and Judith, clearly angry and
hostile, said, “That fellow, he’s not for you, Nomele,” and she didn’t allow her to let him into the house.

Naomi brought food for her and Meir out to the yard and the two of them ate in the shade of the eucalyptus.

“She’s a character, your mother,” said Meir.

“She really is a character,” said Naomi, “but she’s not my mother.”

Meir enjoyed the food and didn’t ask or demand anything. Afterward, Naomi accompanied him to the highway and kissed him under the dusty casuarinas.

“And one minute after that, I came from Tel Aviv with the Mack,” laments Oded. “And on the other side of the road stood some fellow hitchhiking. But Naomi wasn’t there anymore and I didn’t understand what or who it was. Here’s what one minute can do.”

T
HERE
’
S SOMETHING NOT GOOD
here in the house,” Noshua grumbled again.

He sniffed and searched and found the collection of yellow notes that had once been addressed to Judith. His face contorted and he demanded that Jacob burn them.

“You see, Sheinfeld?” He warmed his hands over the small bonfire. “Look and you’ll see by yourself. Love letters burn like any other paper.”

Before noon, Noshua worked in the yard a little, and sometimes he hired himself out to other farmers. But most of the hours of the day, the two of them spent together. And at twilight, Noshua went to Rabinovitch’s house to try to pick up Moshe’s rock.

Back then I was about five or six and I remember the picture
very well: the worker would emerge from Sheinfeld’s house, rub his big hands together, and give himself roars of encouragement. He walked real fast until he started running toward Rabinovitch’s house, and all the village children hurried at his heels. He had broad, springy steps, which no one would have expected in his lumbering body, and as he ran he bowed amusingly and clenched his fist in the air at imaginary rivals.

“Max Schmeling,” said the Village Papish. “The spittin’ image.”

When he reached the rock, Noshua didn’t delay even one second. He bent over, he grabbed, he groaned. He flushed and panted and clasped and moaned, but Rabinovitch’s rock, which had already defeated Jewish butchers and Circassian blacksmiths, loggers from Mount Carmel and Salonikans from the port of Haifa, knew how to distinguish between genuine effort and imitation effort, and didn’t move one single tenth of an inch.

The villagers expected that Noshua would also kick the rock and break his big toe, but Noshua didn’t get angry, didn’t kick, didn’t break, and didn’t limp.

“You mustn’t get mad at a stone,” he said. “The stone doesn’t understand and isn’t to blame. That’s the whole issue of intelligence. In the end, I’ll pick it up just like Rabinovitch.”

And he went back to his tent, to his student, to his records, and to his dances.

“A
LL DAY LONG
all I do is dance,” Jacob complained. “We also talked about cooking and sewing.”

“Soon, soon,” said Noshua.

They were walking in the field and Noshua said: “This little citrus grove, you don’t need it anymore, Sheinfeld.”

And indeed, grapefruits and oranges were already dropping from their branches, fruit flies buzzed on the trees, and weeds were growing up between them.

“Orange trees make good wood for cooking,” Noshua went on. “They’ve got hot coals and a good smell. The time has come
for us to chop down these trees and after they dry, we’ll learn how to cook the wedding food on them.”

In the warehouse, Jacob bought two axes and a big saw, the kind that’s made for two people, and he and Noshua chopped down the citrus grove, the same citrus grove that years before he and his wife had planted, where he had stood the day Judith arrived in the village, and underneath the third tree in the third row Rebecca had discovered the blue kerchief of her rival.

All his muscles ached. Blisters rose on the palms of his hands. His eyes were scorched by the pungent oils from the stumps of the citrus trees. Noshua looked at him and laughed. “Do what I do,” he said. “Imitate a person who doesn’t get tired.”

He lopped off the branches and arranged them in tight piles. “Here, Sheinfeld,” he said, “now you don’t have a citrus grove to go back to anymore.”

I
STOOD UP
, boiled a little water in a pot, and cracked two eggs into the palm of my hand. I spread my fingers and let the whites slip between them into the sink. I mixed and beat the yolks with sugar and wine and the sweet reflections that awaited them in my memory.

Without stopping even for a minute, I placed the bowl on the pot of boiling water and went on like that for another two minutes. The yolks warmed up, absorbed the wine and their own liquid, turned into a smooth froth, and all at once the rich fragrance of zabaglione rose in the air. When I finished sucking my finger, I stood up and slid my tongue over my top teeth, from right to left and from left to right sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet teews teews teews teews teews teews teews teews teews teews teews teews teews teews.

And then I stuck my tongue to my palate and drank the saliva that filled my mouth.

I sat down at the table again, my belly full and my head light. Then I put the dishes in the sink and washed them.

The windowpanes above the sink were very clean and a soft sun of already-seven-in-the-evening-soon-I-will-set healed the garden. Bubbles of memory burst one by one, exposing and caressing, and Jacob’s face beyond the transparent light in the glass was softer than regrets.

“How come I fell in love with her, Zayde?” He smiled as if to himself, because I hadn’t asked the question, or at least, I hadn’t asked it aloud.

“Not only me,” he went on. “Globerman loved her, too, and Rabinovitch loved her and Naomi also loved her. All of us together, every one of us in his own way, we loved her, and that’s how she raised you with three fathers but without one father, and from the day you was born three men think you’re their son and they watch over you, and so each one watches over the others. When Globerman died, I went to his funeral not only because of custom and grief, but also to see that this time he really was dead and not trying to lower the price of a cow. And you think Rabinovitch wasn’t there for exactly the same reason? We watched each other and the whole village watched us. Everybody talked and asked whose child it was, and I was the only one who didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. See, when there’s love, even in a dream you can get pregnant. But just to make sure, one day I waited for her in the street and I grabbed her by the hand, and these are the words I said to her: ‘Judith, maybe you came to me in the night? And I didn’t notice it? Back then, the night Rabinovitch sold the cow?’ You know that sometimes a woman, when she wants a child a whole lot, can do things like that. At night she comes, and the man don’t even feel and don’t know, or he thinks he’s having a dream and he’s scared to wake up, like what happened to me a lot of times, I’m laying with my eyes open and dreaming she comes, and she’s with me, and her hands I feel, here, and here, and her lips on mine, and, excuse me, Zayde, her
nipples right on mine. See, they always ask why men have nipples on their chest, and there’s all kinds of answers to that. First of all, they say it’s to remind us of where we come from, and B, they say it’s to remind us of what we could have been, and C, they say it’s so we can make a miracle and give milk. See, sometimes, Zayde, you want to make a miracle, but you’ve got nothing to make it with, so the God of the Jews already thought of that and that’s why He gave you nipples. If He brings water out of the rock, so He won’t bring milk out of a man? And I’m telling you, Zayde, all of them are just stories. Nipples on a man, it’s only to line himself up right, across from the woman. If his mouth is on her mouth and the nipples are touching one across from the other, then the eyes is also gonna open one into the other and all the rest of the body fits to a T. So maybe in a dream like that you really came to me? See, with my eyes open I was dreaming that you were with me, and also around the neck, Judith, around the waist you hugged me, with all the arms and legs, all of you, Judith, you were with me. A lot of times I dreamed like that, but that night I shut my eyes and I saw it was real and everything was facing everything: chest facing chest, and mouth facing mouth and eyes facing eyes and her hands caressing my whole body, like in water, passing and saying: ‘I’m here, shaaa … Jacob … shaaa … shaaa … I’m here … you’re not alone, sleep now, Jacob, sleep.’ And from all that shaa and that Jacob and that sleep, I finally got up and went with her to the cowshed, and half awake and half asleep I helped her milk there. Then, afterward, facing that whole belly of hers that grew, I thought maybe it was true, maybe it really was with me, ’cause you know that: in the end you wake up, and then on the one hand she wasn’t there no more, but on the other hand you feel, excuse me, that you were wet with a layer of semen and the smell of autumn you feel filling all the air. And that, for somebody who understands, is a sign that the time of love has come. That’s what Menahem Rabinovitch told me. The autumn, when the animals search for food to get fat for the winter, that’s the time for human beings to search for somebody to
sleep together with them in the cold, and in the spring it’s only to jump and be happy and make children. That’s why, in the spring, people take their own lives, ’cause they don’t all want to take part in all that joy. It’s like how they used to sing here at Purim, ‘you’ve got to be happy,’ until once Rabinovitch, dressed in his Tonychka’s clothes, the one who died and he looked just like her, got up on the stage and showed everybody what it means to have to be happy. So why were we talking about autumn, Zayde? Because of that smell of carobs? Well, so is there better proof that you were with me? Does a layer of semen come out of a person all by itself? All that I told her there in the street, and she pulled her hand out of my hand really hard and said to me: ‘Sheinfeld, don’t make yourself a laughingstock. I didn’t come to you, not at night and not by day, and in this belly you don’t have any part or parcel and don’t even think about such a thing.’ ‘So who does have a part and parcel? Come on, you tell me, Judith, who does?’ And my whole body was shaking. ‘Nobody you know and nobody you think,’ she told me. ‘And don’t think that if at night I came to you and in the morning you helped me milk, that you’ve got any rights.’ But I didn’t let her alone, ’cause the belly and the anger they were hers, but the dream and the semen they were mine. So I used to come see her and she used to throw me out. Once she said: ‘You see this pitchfork, Sheinfeld? If you don’t stop talking about my belly, in one more minute, you’re gonna get it in
your
belly.’ I couldn’t bear it that she called me Sheinfeld. Only three times she called me Jacob and not Sheinfeld: once when I let all the birds fly off for her, and once when she was with me then at night, and the third time I’m gonna tell you about in a little while. You think I was scared? Right away I opened my shirt and I said: ‘Come on, stick in the pitchfork, Judith!’ Because a pregnant woman’s got crazinesses and you got to take them into account. She wants to eat something, let her eat it, she wants to fight, let her fight, she wants to stab you with a pitchfork, let her stab you with a pitchfork. And then she laughed. Like a lunatic she laughed. ‘What will be the end of you, Jacob?’ And like that, with the
pitchfork in her hand, that was the third time. And a few days before the birth, I went and bought things you need, and a wooden yellow bird I also made, so you’d have something to play with, and after you were born again and again I came and again and again I told her: ‘I’m gonna forgive you, Judith, just tell me, whose baby is it?’ Until one day she raised her hand and smacked me: ‘You
noodnik
! I don’t need your forgiveness, not yours and not nobody’s.’
Noodnik
is a very offensive word in a situation of love, and my question she didn’t answer. Until the end she didn’t say. We came there and saw half the eucalyptus already on the ground, and the poor crows’ eggs broken in the snow all around, and the black feathers and the blue kerchief, it was all there, but there was no answer. And Rabinovitch stood there already sharpening the axe, like that would help, like the tree did it on purpose. And then I thought, Zayde, maybe it wasn’t Fate, maybe it was his bad brother Chance. I already told you that once? Two brothers Fate has. The good brother is Luck and the bad brother is Chance. And when those three brothers laugh, the whole earth quakes. So it was Luck that she came, and it was Chance that she died, and it was Fate that she was on her way to the wedding I made for her, wearing the bridal gown I sewed for her, and on the way something happened. So a eucalyptus like that in the Land of Israel, that’s not Chance? Snow like that in the Land of Israel, that’s not Chance? And that you, Judith, came to me at night, that’s by Fate or by Luck? And a paper boat like that which reaches this girl, is that on purpose or by Chance? Well, what can I tell you, Zayde, all that don’t matter now,
a nafka mina
, like she always used to say. The whole village came to her funeral, and I was the only one who didn’t go. Come on, ask me why I didn’t go. Let’s put it like this: ’cause I felt that if that funeral was a wedding, me they wouldn’t invite. You understand? So I didn’t go. And the heart of this old man, who all his life was alone, is gonna be alone a little while more. It’s already used to being alone, so let it be alone a little while more.”