The Loves of Judith (40 page)

M
EIR
’
S RELATIVES LOOKED AT ME
with ironic, questioning eyes, conferred in whispers at the sight of Aunt Bathsheba’s black widow’s weeds, and were scared of Rachel, who suddenly burst out of the cowshed and strode into the divided sea of terrified guests and tottering tables to where Mother was sitting.

Embarrassed giggles were heard when Uncle Menahem, whose spring muteness had struck three days before the wedding, began distributing to all the strangers his notes saying: “I have lost my voice. I am the uncle of the bride and the husband of the widow. Congratulations!”

Then he beckoned me to him. His pleasant hand tapped encouragement on my shoulder and another note of his was placed
before my eyes, saying: “What do you care, Zayde, let them look at us.”

Meir’s mother, puffed up like a brood hen, kept grumbling about the smells rising from the Village Papish’s goose yard and about the mire that stuck to her shoes. At last, Globerman grabbed her arm and took her off for a dance that made her face flush with the effort and the closeness, and because of the sudden affront to her body. His gigantic feet moved like wild animals around and between her feet, his hand investigated the stunned slope of her spine, his fingers estimated the submissive layer of fat at the bottom of her back.

“You shouldn’t believe in age, Mrs. Klebanov,” whispered the dealer. “You’re a beautiful, soft, and tasty woman, and a woman who’s got such a fine hill at the bottom of her back shouldn’t have to do such things to herself.”

Mrs. Klebanov couldn’t imagine that the strange and attractive smell emanating from his neck was the smell of blood. His hand rose up again, examined the thorns of her vertebrae through the fabric of her dress. Suddenly she sighed softly. Drops of warm and forgotten gold, annoying and shameless, rose in the most treacherous tissues of her flesh.

“Which side are you from?” She blushed.

“Rabinovitch’s,” said Globerman.

“You’re Rabinovitch’s brother?”

“No,” said the cattle dealer politely, “I’m the father of Rabinovitch’s son.” And he pointed at me. “Say hello to Meir’s mother, Zayde.”

Two children guests, or “petits bourgeois,” as Uncle Menahem called them in a mocking note, wearing dark blue berets and low shoes, pulled out a pocketknife and wanted to carve their names in the soft flesh of the eucalyptus. But Mother went to them and hissed in a voice only I heard: “Leave that tree alone, little carcasses, or I’ll take your knife and I’ll cut off your ears.”

Rachel lowed, the children fled, the crows, nervy and fearless, dove and pecked at what fell from the tables.

Two days after the wedding, the sky turned gloomy with spring clouds, a heavy late April rain fell, and the first big quarrel between Meir and Mother erupted.

I don’t remember what the quarrel was about, but at dawn, Naomi packed clothes in a suitcase and books in a fruit carton, and Oded, frozen and pale with rage, drove his sister and his new brother-in-law to Jerusalem.

E
VEN AT THE WEDDING
, Noshua watched Moshe Rabinovitch, observed, and learned. By now he had stopped his attempts to pick up the rock and concentrated solely on Moshe. That year he had already acquired most of the Rabinovitch ways, both the big ones and the small ones, but he hadn’t showed them to anyone, not even to Jacob.

And one day, after Sukkoth, when the days had grown short and the air was already laden with a smell of water and the first touches of cold, Noshua walked behind Moshe in the dark as he was returning from the dairy.

Moshe sensed something but didn’t know what. Once, twice, he turned his head around, striving to see and understand, and then he felt her all over his skin and all over his flesh, his Tonychka, his twin reflection, who had risen from the dead and was walking in his wake, and his flesh shuddered.

Noshua, who didn’t know all those ancient, concealed things and didn’t imagine that in his attempts to imitate Moshe he would also become like his dead wife, walked in his wake again the next night, too.

And then, when that feeling struck him again, Rabinovitch didn’t delay and didn’t hesitate, but turned around and ran into the gloom behind him, grabbed the stunned worker by the neck, and shouted at him: “Where’s the braid? Now you’ll tell me where’s the braid!”

Noshua almost collapsed. Moshe was a head and a half shorter than him, but his grip was like the grip of an iron vise.

“If you had told me, you’d still be alive today,” shouted Moshe.

And his hands, suddenly despairing and weak, slackened and dropped. Noshua fled, choked and triumphant, laughing and coughing, to the house of his student.

M
EANWHILE
, J
ACOB STARTED
learning the next stage, the very difficult one, of the tango: while dancing, Noshua posed riddles to him, told him stories, asked him questions, and argued with him, so his brain would be busy and leave his body to itself.

At first it was very complicated. If, for instance, the POW asked him what was two hundred thirty-five less one hundred seventeen, Jacob’s body grew stiff and his knees were startled and got tangled up in each other. And things had come to such a pass that, one day, when he asked him, while dancing, the well-known logical conundrum about the man who meets at a crossroads the man who always lies and the man who always tells the truth—Jacob’s legs gave out and he fell facedown.

But his legs quickly acquired experience and were now confident enough to give up the contact with his brain and his thoughts. Within a few months, he had succeeded in reciting the six laws of overlapping triangles while doing the “Paso Doble” of Buenos Aires, and in carrying on a heated argument, even with some mockery, about the unity of the body and soul while doing the most vigorous turns of “Jealousy.”

B
Y THAT TIME
, I was in school, and all the children there, both big and small, used to make fun of me, my name, my three fathers, and my mother. Because of their pestering and their cruelty, I sought shelter in the crests of the village cypresses and eucalyptuses,
at heights that people with regular names didn’t dare scale. That’s how I discovered the crows, their nests, and their children.

“Well, Zayde”—Jacob Sheinfeld grabbed me in the street—“maybe you’re gonna find with the crows some gold jewelry and bring it to your mother as a gift.”

I told him, with the seriousness of children, that there was no scientific proof that crows steal jewelry. And he burst out laughing and declared: “The crow isn’t a scientific bird.”

“You want to come in?” he asked when we reached the gate of his yard.

His worker was cooking in the kitchen, and when I entered he bowed to me comically and barked like a dog. Jacob poured tea and told me that in his village, the village on the banks of the Kodyma, there was “one
shaygets
” who rode the train to the city every year, “for there were very, very rich people there.” In the city, the
shaygets
searched and found abandoned crows’ nests and took jewels and precious stones from them which the crows had stolen from rich women who left their windows open.

“Thieving from a thief is not a theft,” declared Noshua from the stove.

“Only male crows steal jewelry,” explained Jacob. “And they don’t hide it in the family nest. Only in an old nest or even in the ground, ’cause they don’t trust nobody, not even Mrs. Crow and certainly not baby crows. And when nobody sees, they come all by themselves to look at their treasure, to play and enjoy. And that
shaygets
, you should know, Zayde, he used to ride to the city without a ticket on the roof of the train, but coming back to the village, he rode first class, with a case full of gold and two gypsy women on his lap.”

I
N THE MIDDLE
of winter, when the rain was still falling, but the days were already starting to get longer, the crows started breaking dry branches off the trees and building their nests with them. On the rough skeleton, they placed thinner twigs and the concave
surface they padded with straw and strings, ropes and feathers. They were so firm and bold that I frequently saw them swooping down and plucking off strands of hair from an angry cow. They didn’t use their old nests anymore and those remained strong and stable, and falcons and owls often took possession of them.

Then the female crow started hatching the eggs, and the male crow guarded her from his lookout point on one of the nearby trees.

By now I could distinguish the revealing direction of his look as well as the tail of the mother, sticking out like an oblique black stick over the rim of the nest. When I climbed up to the nests to look, the male crows would surround me furiously and would take off to a nearby tree and make do with loud protests. Once I discovered two fledglings thrown into the tree trunk, two victims of a cuckoo. They were small and ugly, their eyes were blue, and their pinion feathers were only just beginning to sprout on their wings.

Two grades ahead of me was a child who pestered and abused me a lot and called me names. I told him it was possible to take a fledgling like that home, raise it, and make it into a tame crow. The minute he picked up the fledgling, the crows swooped down on him in flaming fury, beat him with their wings, and pecked his head until he fled home crying and yelling. That whole year, they lay in wait for him in the schoolyard and in his parents’ yard, and tried to wound him every chance they got.

That has nothing to do with the story of my mother’s life, and so I shall make do with a brief and parenthetical statement, that that was the first and the last time I took revenge on anybody, and I discovered that even though I value and respect the instinct of revenge, satisfying it doesn’t give me any pleasure.

S
OMETIMES WE
’
D STAND
around Jacob’s yard and hope the worker would come outside, put on a little show for us, or resume his war with Rabinovitch’s rock. Our eyes tried to penetrate the
sheets of the colorful tent and our nostrils tried to pick up the lids of the pots. The smells of the dishes Noshua cooked were different and better than everything that was cooked in our own houses, and his ways were distinct and attractive. We knew he was a foreigner, but none of us suspected that Sheinfeld’s worker had been an escaped Italian prisoner of war. The war was over by now, the camp was dismantled and plowed up, the worker spoke our language, dressed like all of us, and only later did we find out that Globerman had arranged all his necessary documents and papers, at Jacob’s request.

Suddenly Sheinfeld came out to the yard, spun around, and walked with strange steps, and the children stared at me, as if they were trying to see what I thought about my mother’s obstinate suitor. Their parents also looked at me like that, for they, too, wanted to know what I thought about my mother. But I had no opinion, and Mother didn’t tell me anything about her three loves, and I didn’t ask her.

“S
O MAYBE YOU
, Zayde, maybe you know whose you are? Maybe now, so many years after she’s gone, somebody will say at long last? Maybe you’ll make a test in a hospital to know? I heard they got a special microscope for that. But in you, they see everything even without a microscope. Here, look at yourself and you’ll see what inheritance means. You got big feet like Globerman, blue eyes you got like Rabinovitch, drooping shoulders you got like me. Too bad, if it were the other way around, it would be much better. Even in a normal family a child don’t always look like father or mother, sometimes he looks like an uncle and sometimes like a brother of the father of the grandfather. Back home, one woman once gave birth to a daughter who looked just like her husband’s first wife. What do you say about something like that, Zayde? If she would have given birth to a daughter who looked like her first husband, that’s not so nice, but it’s not so hard to explain, either. But such a thing? Where does it come from? Interesting,
Zayde, the whole business of looking alike. See, they say that it’s not only children and parents, husbands and wives also come to look like each other over the years. Maybe it’s their blood that gets mixed? Maybe it’s his semen she gets and is absorbed in her inside there? Maybe it’s from her liquid that he absorbs? See, with both of them that’s very delicate skin there, and with some women it’s just like a sweet river there, believe you me, and you even have to hang the sheets outside to dry afterward. There was a
goya
back home like that, and the whole village used to count how many times a week they’d hang up the wet sheets, and the clowns in the synagogue used to say about her and her husband ‘the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea.’ Moths used to come and die on those sheets in the dark, and dogs, even from villages very far away, used to always come there to wail and go nuts. So, Zayde, what if I had stayed with Rebecca all the years, maybe today I would look like her and be a handsome man, eh? Moshe and his Tonychka really did look like each other, but that was even before they met. From birth they looked alike, and that it seems is why they fell in love, ’cause with a man there’s nothing that attracts him more than a woman who looks like him. Right away he wants to get into that body without knocking on the door. Right away he feels like he’s got permission from God to do everything. I wish I also had such a simple and good answer to my love. What can I tell you, Zayde, those matters of looking alike, they’re very complicated. And here, with Rabinovitch, something even more interesting happened. Judith and Tonya’s little girl came to look alike. The little girl got Judith’s walk, and her face, don’t tell me you didn’t see how much they looked alike. Real slow it came, that looking alike, until in the end, you’d look and swear that Judith and Naomi are really mother and daughter.”

T
HE SUN BROKE FORTH
. I opened the closet. The big mirror looked at my yellow hair, my drooping shoulders, my big feet.

In fact, I said aloud to myself, there really aren’t any answers in me. Just more questions.

The sand pouring out of her eye sockets, the cypress shadows creeping over her grave, the white of her bared bones.