The Loves of Judith (42 page)

His heels and big toes burned, but we can’t say if that was from heat or cold. He put the papers on the fabric and cut the parts of the dress according to them, his tongue poking out, the air held in the cage of his lungs, and only his fingers moving.

Afterward he felt a great weariness and lay down to sleep. And a few days later, Noshua went to Aliza Papish and asked to borrow her Singer sewing machine.

“Give it to him, give it to him,” the Village Papish said to his wife. “It’s prevention of cruelty to animals.”

Noshua returned, carrying the heavy sewing machine on his shoulders, and in the days that followed, he stitched together the parts of the dress and Jacob didn’t stop talking with him about Judith.

Very slowly, the dress took shape, and was white and pure and empty.

“You feel it already? You feel?” asked Noshua, and Jacob felt with his whole heart and his whole body the longing of the cloth for the skin and the fabric of the gown for the flesh, and those yearnings, which he thought only he had, to be filled and to hold.

And when the POW finished basting the dress and laughed and let Jacob measure the gown, Jacob felt his skin burning despite the coolness of the cloth, and the cry of surprise and pain that blurted out of his mouth was unintentional. Noshua didn’t let him wear the bridal gown for more than two minutes, and then he sat him down at the sewing machine and together they began the task of the final sewing.

Globerman, the only one who understood where all these things were leading and was very amused and curious, supplied Jacob with “important addresses” of food profiteers. The dealer, who had lent his pickup truck, his cunning, and his connections to the War of Independence, “for any national need that comes up,” resumed his normal procedures during the period of shortages. He made a fortune smuggling meat on the black market and selling it to restaurants, where government officials ate in the back rooms, and so he knew where you could buy groceries for a wedding.

He also promised Jacob to get him a discount, and even to lend him all the serving pieces needed for a wedding, the gorgeous Dresden and Prague dishes of the German Templars, and so he confirmed the suspicions about the legendary plunder he had made in their houses after the expulsion.

“To help you is against my own interest,” he said. “But at my age, sometimes curiosity gets the better of love.”

M
EANWHILE, ALL THE VILLAGERS
commented that they hadn’t seen Jacob in a long time, that he had stopped pestering Judith, and no longer waited across from Rabinovitch’s yard, and didn’t hang yellow notes on trees and walls, and didn’t lie in wait on the paths where she walked, and in fact wasn’t seen anywhere, because he was closed in his house and his yard and was busy with his preparations and his studies and his examinations.

All day he cooked and sewed and danced, fertilized and sowed and watered and planted, and at midnight he went to bed and lay there awake and asleep, reciting and dreaming, opening and shutting his eyes, plowing and returning back and forth, like the whisper of an ox: Judith Judith Judith Judith Judith Judith Judith Judith Judith Judith Judith Judith Htiduj Htiduj Htiduj Htiduj Htiduj Htiduj Htiduj Htiduj Htiduj Htiduj Htiduj Htiduj Judith Judith Judith Judith Judith Judith Judith Judith Judith Judith Judith Judith.

Evening smells emanated from the kitchen cabinets, delicate goblets rang on their shelves, red skillets shone on the wall in endless sunsets.

And myriads of dense tiny stiches were sewn, until the gown was completed and waited for the longed-for body to come, to accept it, to don it, and to fill it.

Noshua stroked the gown and folded it and put it in a long white cardboard box.

“Now everything is ready for the wedding.” He put the box in the closet. “All we have to do is wait for the sign.”

L
IKE ALL THOSE WHO WAIT
, Jacob asked Noshua and himself what the sign would be.

The shriek of a swallow when swallows don’t tend to shriek? Or maybe the shriek of a swallow when swallows do tend to shriek? Or maybe a crow will be the herald? Or a peach will ripen in winter? Or maybe the sun won’t set in the evening? Or maybe it will shine as usual in the morning? Or maybe the leaf of an apple tree will be the sign? A yellow leaf, that will fall in the autumn from one of the trees in the orchard, like its thousand brothers?

And how to prepare for it? To sit at home and wait? Or to come and go, to work and live?

Noshua and Jacob, like all those who wait, watched for a sign, and the sign, like all signs, tarried and didn’t come.

“Once, just because of that there used to be angels. But these days angels don’t do those things no more and you got to guess the sign all by yourself. So two people I told about my whole plan so they’d help me. Globerman I told and Menahem Rabinovitch I told. Menahem told me it was a very beautiful plan, and when I asked what was so beautiful, he said: ‘Every plan to win a woman is a very beautiful plan, and I hope for your sake that you succeed.’ He wasn’t the same Menahem anymore. After his younger son was killed in the War of Independence, he was a broken man, and soon after that he also stopped being mute in the spring and that broke him even more. ‘Here,’ he told me, ‘now I’m talking in the spring, but not a single hoor comes to hear.’ But the dealer just started laughing. I told him: ‘See, you and I want the same
woman, so maybe once and for all you’ll listen and not laugh and just tell me what you think?’ And from beginning to end, I told him the whole idea, that if I prepare everything, the wedding and the food and the dancing and the bridal gown and the rabbi and the bridal canopy and the guests, then she’ll come, too. There’s a rule like that in nature, that if everything is ready and only one piece is missing, then that one last piece has got to come, too. Oh, how he laughed, Globerman, when I told him about that plan of mine. ‘All your money you’re gonna use up on that woman, Sheinfeld,’ he told me. ‘Your money and your life and your strength and everything.’ And in that he really was right, that’s what happened and I really did use up everything. I was like that man I told you about, who figured out the money down to the end of his life. I was like the ship in the French book, I forget its name, that used up all the coal in the middle of the sea and then started burning the wood of its body and finally, when it arrived, there was nothing left of it, just iron beams like a skeleton of a carcass in the field. But in my dreams about Judith, I saw what Globerman didn’t understand—that she had no choice, that Fate had already tied the rope on her. Otherwise why, all of a sudden at night, did a person who came all the way from Italy and fought in the desert and fell prisoner and escaped and came to me—how come he shows up at my house? He came to teach me to cook for the wedding and to dance a tango for the wedding and to sew the gown for the wedding. And when I told that to Globerman, suddenly he turned white as a sheet and his lips became thin with rage, and he started hollering at me: ‘Right away you’re gonna tell me, Sheinfeld, that Hitler may-his-name-be-wiped-out started that whole war just so that parrot Italian of yours would fall prisoner and come here and make you a wedding?’ He really was furious. Maybe because in Latvia so many of his family were killed by the Germans. Like a sheet he turned white when he hollered. ‘Children weren’t burned in the ovens in that war and soldiers weren’t killed and there weren’t orphans and widows and camps? There’s only some
farkakte
Italian who came to make a wedding for Jacob
Sheinfeld and Lady Judith, eh?’ But then I wasn’t paying attention no more to such words, because not everybody who knows about livestock also knows about human beings, and besides that, what is the dealer talking about war and about life and about death? See, he himself is the Hitler of cows.”

A
ND THEN, ONE DAY
, as if some bubble burst inside him, during one completely normal afternoon nap, Noshua suddenly turned over and got out of bed. No angel appeared, but Noshua got dressed, left the house, and started walking on the road he hadn’t walked on for some time, to Moshe Rabinovitch’s rock, which he hadn’t visited for some time.

Slowly and quietly he walked, he didn’t leap and he didn’t clench his fist. His chest rose and fell with deep breaths and his small eyes were almost shut.

A few children who saw him started tramping to the village and shouting: “Noshua’s going to the stone, Noshua’s going to the stone!” And by the time the POW reached Rabinovitch’s yard, onlookers had already gathered.

Noshua didn’t wait a single minute. He went to the rock and said to it: “Please wait just a minute, right away I’ll call my Moshe and he’ll pick you up from the ground.”

Everyone was scared. Even the rock, half buried in the ground, seemed to shudder. Even Noshua was surprised because he didn’t know where the words came from or whose voice he said them in.

He wiped his hands on his pants with the dead woman’s unforgettable gesture, then knelt down and embraced the rock, and with an amazing Rabinovitchy groan, he uprooted it from its place, picked it up, and carried it like a baby, close to his chest.

Thus he walked with it in the village street, and everyone walked behind him in a procession of triumph and smiles.

“Don’t follow them. Come in the house at once, Zayde,” shouted Mother from the window of the cowshed.

I didn’t follow them and I didn’t come in the house, either, because the male and female crow dove from the crest of the eucalyptus to the rim of the deep crater left behind by the uprooted rock. I went there, too. Startled earthworms were burrowing into the wet earth, globules and moss rolled around. Potbellied ants, transparent yellow ones, were crawling. The crows started pecking and swallowing, and suddenly one of the black beaks uttered a thud, and I bent down and put out my hand to find out what it had struck.

My mind didn’t understand and didn’t imagine, but my heart was pounding even before my fingers told me what they were touching. I scraped off the damp earth and I felt the square corner of a box. I removed a few clods and I saw mother of pearl and wood.

N
OSHUA CARRIED
the rock to the middle of the village, walked around the big ficus trees near the community center, and started retracing his steps. With a shout he dropped the rock into its crater and returned to Sheinfeld’s house. Without a word to any of his stunned escorts he went in and said: “That was the sign, Jacob. The day has come.”

He kindled the wood in the oven, warmed water for washing, showered, ate, and fell asleep.

In the evening he got up, put on the old POW’s overalls, took down the tent, and picked up the white box with the bridal gown lying in it.

“Good-bye, Jacob,” he said.

“Good-bye, Salvatore,” said Jacob.

The Italian went to Rabinovitch’s house, knocked on the door of the cowshed, and handed Judith the white box and the gown inside it.

“Questo per te,”
he said. “That’s for you, Judith.”

He didn’t wait for her answer, but for her arms. And when those, against her will, rose and reached out to him, he laid the
box on them, turned around, and walked to the center of the village, and there he hung a big yellow announcement on the board, saying: “Rabinovitch’s Judith and her heart’s desire Jacob will enter into the covenant of marriage on the 14th of Shevat this year, Wednesday, February 1, 1950, at 4
P.M
. Friends are invited.”

From there, Salvatore went to the highway, left the village, and was never seen again.

S
O BY THEN
I
KNEW HOW
to dance and how to cook and the dishes were ready and the gown was ready and the Italian picked up the rock and called me Jacob for the first time, like he was promoting me, from Sheinfeld to Jacob, from just a poor simple soldier to a great general of love. And the whole village came to read the announcement he put up for the wedding. The words were so beautiful and so simple. Covenant of marriage … her heart’s desire … and the date, both the Hebrew date and the regular date, and the hour, and the day, and the month, and the year, so everything would be clear and Luck and Fate and Chance couldn’t mix in. And a few days later I took the bus to Haifa with a fine chicken to give the rabbi, to tell him also about the date and to make sure he wouldn’t forget to come, ’cause you know how it is with those pious jerks, money for a
mitzvah
he’s forbidden to take, but a fat chicken just to remind him he’s got to do the
mitzvah
—that’s all right. Then what, Zayde, all the time you kept asking me how I learned to cook and sew and dance? Now you know. And never mind what Globerman said—the world war was for that. So the English would capture Salvatore in the desert and bring him here to the prisoner-of-war camp so he’d escape and come to me and teach me all the things and all the rules. ’Cause if the war wasn’t for that, what was it for? I ask you, what
for? Doesn’t my love deserve a big war? At first I thought he would teach me to cook Italian food, with all their noodles and tomatoes and cheese, but no. He himself told me that for a Jewish wedding you also got to cook Jewish food, and he went and watched Aliza Papish to see how she cooks, and right away he cooked like he himself was born in the Ukraine, he cooked and he also taught me. And that’s how I made three kinds of herring, one with sour cream and green apples for the appetite, one with onion and oil and lemon for the soul, and one with vinegar and oil and pepper and bay leaves for regrets, with bread and butter and schnapps. And chicken soup I made with kreplach with little droplets of fat smiling at you like gold coins and with the dill cut up so thin you all of a sudden heard all the people sighing over their bowl because everybody saw his mother like a picture shaking in those little droplets in the soup. And the dough for the kreplach I also made all by myself. Because with kreplach, what’s outside is more important than what’s inside. And that chicken, the one that in Russia only the rich
goyim
in Kiev ate, the
Taganka
, that, too, I made, and the borscht of the Ukraine, with potatoes and cabbage and beets and beef. That Italian knew the rules so good he even wrote down for me not to forget to put for everybody half a clove of garlic next to the bowl of borscht to rub on the bread crust. And a salted radish salad I made, rubbed in a grater with big holes and with fried onion burned a little along with its oil. And next to everybody, a little bit of horseradish—not red, white—so strong its tears ran from your nose and not your eyes, and it goes down to your stomach not through the throat but from wherever it felt like. And to drink I put cold beet borscht with a mound of sour cream in every cup, beautiful like a mountain of snow in blood. And pomegranate juice he made before the winter, ’cause I told him how much you like pomegranates, Judith. And three kinds of preserves I made from strawberries and raspberries and black plums from that tree that grows wild on the way to the wadi. And everything was in the beautiful bowls of the Germans, may-their-name-be-wiped-out, which the
dealer gave me. What can I tell you, Zayde, a fortune all those things cost me. And I sold a lot of poor birds for that, and a lot of things the dealer gave me, ’cause under all his money and blood and scorn, Globerman is a good man, better than all of us was that evil murderer, and a lot of foodstuffs he gave me really as a gift. See, he made a fortune during the time of shortages. He had all kinds of
shtiks
to cheat in documents of the slaughter of cows, and the government supervisors knew it, but they never could catch him. Food I made for about a hundred people, but from all over the Valley they heard about it and came. A hundred people sat down to eat and the rest stood to watch and smell. And nobody complained, ’cause they didn’t come so much for the food, but for curiosity and love, and because of my seriousness about this, ’cause, when love and seriousness go together, Zayde, nothing can stand in their way. And a gorgeous winter sun shone, and for me that wasn’t no surprise, ’cause a wedding you prepare down to the very last detail, it will also have good weather. And I went to the village carpenter shop and took boards and put them on trestles, and white cloths I put on them and chairs for the guests, everything all by myself. And then I washed and I dressed and at four o’clock in the afternoon, with blue pants and a white shirt, I stood, in the lovely clothes of her heart’s desire, and to everybody I said: ‘Come in, come in, friends, we’ve got a wedding here today, nice of you to come, friends, come in.’ And everybody came in, very serious, and the smell of the food overhead like regrets, for what is food-for-the-soul like it says in the Bible, if not regrets? There is food-for-the-body like meat and potatoes, and there is food-for-the-soul, like a glass of vodka and a piece of herring. And then the rabbi also came from Haifa with the sticks and the canopy and approached the table, and the Village Papish, who I don’t need to tell you how much he likes the pious jerks, says to him, ‘Rabbenu, here everything’s not altogether kosher, here there’s heathen cooking,’ and at me he winked with both eyes. See, he couldn’t wink with one eye, two eyes used to close when he winked. I was scared if he said heathen cooking, maybe he
knew it was a
goyish
Italian and not really a worker named Joshua. But that rabbi was a clever Jew, and right away he looks at the Village Papish and says to him: “Reb Yid, I asked you if it’s kosher?’ So the Village Papish says to him: ‘No you didn’t ask.’ So the Rabbi says to him: ‘If I didn’t ask, so why do you answer?’ And he ate like tomorrow Yom Kippur and Tesha b’Av together were in store for him, he stuck his hands in and smacked his lips and cleaned his plate with a piece of bread, because say what you will about those rabbis, fools they’re not. Afterward he starts pestering, who’s the bride and where’s the bride and why doesn’t the bride come? And I says: ‘We’ve already prepared everything for her and now we hope that we are worthy for her to come.’ Well, then the rabbi looks at me and says: ‘Reb Yid’—seems he liked to say Reb Yid—‘it’s a bride, after all, it’s not the King Messiah.’ And so I says: ‘For me, that bride is the Messiah.’ That he couldn’t stand, and right away he gets up from the table, and says real mad: ‘The Messiah I don’t see here yet, but the jackass I already see,’ which is a very very old joke, and he wants to leave, but four men get up and grab him by the arm and sit him back down in the chair, and along with all the rest of us, he also waits for her to come. All of us waited and waited, and what happened there I don’t know, but Judith didn’t come. Only you came all of a sudden, Zayde. Half an hour we waited and only you came, a little boy with the white box of the wedding gown that you held in your arms like this, and you came into the yard. You remember that, Zayde? How could you forget such a thing? You came in all of a sudden, and everybody got quiet and looked at you, and you walked straight to me, so quiet you could hear both our hearts beating, and you gave me the box with the gown and right away you turned around and ran home without looking back. I yelled, ‘Zayde, Zayde, what happened, Zayde?’ like a lunatic and without any shame in front of everybody I stood up and hollered, but you ran and didn’t turn around. You didn’t hear me yelling at you? You don’t remember? How can you forget something like that? You took off and I opened the box and I took out the wedding
gown in front of everybody. So white and so long and so empty it was without Judith inside it, and a big sigh came from everybody, ’cause from the wedding gown they sigh, and it don’t matter if the bride’s in it or not, and then the four men really dragged the rabbi to me and held the four poles, and I stood under the canopy with the gown and I said to him: ‘Here’s the bride, now you can start.’ And the tears were already starting to flow from my eyes like they’re flowing now, and you, too, Zayde, they’re falling from your eyes even though I don’t understand why you should cry, too. See, nothing happened to you and for you it was even better like that. And the rabbi looked at me and said, ‘Reb Yid, don’t make fun of a rabbi and a Jewish wedding,’ and again he wanted to take off, and again the four men surrounded him in a circle and grabbed him by the arm. Then it seems he understood that the God of the Jews was for that wedding, ’cause right away he read like
Tatele
all the blessings and whatever he had to, and I put the ring on the air that should have been filled with her finger, right on the air, and without getting confused, I said, ‘Behold you are consecrated to me this day according to the ritual of Moses and Israel,’ and even though she wasn’t there, everybody knew who I was saying that to, and she, even though she didn’t come, see, she is my wife, consecrated to me, and the whole village were witnesses, and they saw that even though she didn’t come, she was there, Judith, you are there and with me and mine.”