The Loves of Judith (43 page)

T
HE WEDDING OF
J
ACOB
S
HEINFELD
and Rabinovitch’s Judith is still inscribed on the memory of the people of the village and the nearby villages, and also on the memory of the children who were babies then, and it lives in the memory of their grandchildren, who hadn’t yet been born then. There are still people who
talk about it, and whenever they see me, they stare at me in wonder and curiosity as if I bear the answer in my flesh.

But there is no answer in me, only a memory.

I was about ten years old then, and despite what Jacob accused me of, I remember very well. I remember how Noshua picked up Moshe’s rock, I remember that he came to our cowshed and gave Mother the big white box. He told her something in a language I didn’t understand and in a voice I didn’t recognize, and he left.

I remember the tremor of her hands, guessing and straying over the white box. Her body, weak as a condemned person when she sat down on one of the sacks. The glow that lit up the whole cowshed when the gown was spread out.

And I remember how she got up and stripped and put the gown on her naked flesh. Her eyes shut, her lips trembled, she hovered in the space of the cowshed, but she didn’t go outside.

In the following days, she wore it again and again. For a minute, a few minutes, a quarter of an hour, an hour, and more than an hour. And in the middle of the night, she sneaked to the yard in it and I saw her walking around along the trough like a distant nebula of the stars. She was pondering, shrouded in her gown, and she didn’t talk with anyone. Not even with me did she exchange a word.

And three days before the date that Sheinfeld’s worker wrote as the date of the wedding, when the whole village was preparing and was covered with clamorous smells of laundry basins and cooking pots, Mother went to Moshe and told him that things were ready, that she was about to stop working in his yard and his house, that she had decided to enter into the covenant of marriage with Jacob Sheinfeld, her heart’s desire.

T
HAT AFTERNOON
, Judith kindled wood and corncobs in the stove to heat water.

“I want to wash now, Zayde,” she said. “You run off and see what’s going on in Jacob’s yard.”

I ran, I came back, and I told her that Sheinfeld had put up the tables, spread white cloths, and set out dishes. “It looks like he’s making some party,” I added, pretending I didn’t understand and didn’t know.

Mother sat in the big tub and steam whispered on her skin. She told me to soap her back and pour water on her head. I did everything she asked and then I waited for her with a towel spread out and with my eyes shut and my heart cold and hating and worrying and heavy.

She got up slowly from the bath, wrapped herself in the towel, sat down and combed her hair, and for a long time she examined her face in the mirror.

“Come here, Zayde,” she said.

I went and stood near her.

“I’m going to get married to Jacob today,” she said.

“All right,” I said.

“He’ll be your father.” She took hold of my chin. “Only him.”

“All right,” I said.

“And we’ll stay here in the village. You won’t have to part from anybody.”

She got up and held my head to the drops of water between her breasts, and then she turned aside and put on the white bridal gown.

“You wait for me here,” she said.

And when she turned and left the cowshed and started walking away there, the cold hard hand hit my shoulder and I fell down.

“What’s your name?” asked the familiar, abominable voice.

“Zayde!” I shouted. “I’m a little boy named Zayde! Go kill somebody else!” And I got up and pushed him off me and assaulted the sacks of mash and pulled out the box I had hid among them and ran after her.

Silence reigned in the village. No one was seen. Everybody
was waiting for her in Sheinfeld’s yard. Everybody except me, and I was running in the street, and except Moshe Rabinovitch, who stayed home. The few sounds that sawed in the air were very small and clear. Side by side in the transparent air moved: the beating of my heart, the pounding of my steps, the tempest of my breathing, the shriek of a distant crow.

I didn’t call to her to stand still because I knew that her deaf ear and her white gown sheltered her now from the whole world, that she wouldn’t hear and wouldn’t stop and wouldn’t turn around. I ran after her, I caught up with her, I ran around her, I stood facing her, and stretching both hands, I held out the small dirty box to her glance.

The mother-of-pearl and wooden cover was locked, but when Mother stuck her hairpin into the keyhole, it came up obediently, and for a moment the box seemed to hold only her expectations and nothing else.

She put her hand inside it and felt something soft and desired. Moshe Rabinovitch’s braid, long and thick, was pulled out, and when Mother lifted it up to her eyes, the ancient ribbons came untied and the golden cascade poured between her fingers.

“He sent you?” she asked.

“No.”

She understood immediately, of course, that that was what Moshe had been searching for all the time. But I assume she didn’t yet take in the fact that this was his braid, and she assumed it was a woman’s braid, Tonya’s or some other lover’s. And nevertheless, her hands already felt the pleasant deep warmth that hands feel when they touch the truth itself.

“Where did you find this, Zayde?”

“Under Moshe’s rock,” I said. “When Sheinfeld’s worker picked it up.”

We stood in the middle of the empty street. Mother put the braid back in the box, took a few steps aside, turned her back to me, buried her face in her arms, and her shoulders shook.

“Under the rock.” She laughed. “Under the rock … A wise woman she was.… Why did you look there?”

“The crows from the eucalyptus found it.”

She came back to me. Her fingers covered her lips and hid the quivering of her chin. Her eyes roved around, hunting shelter.

And suddenly she leaned her full weight on me. “Who could have known, who could have thought … under the rock … And that’s what he’s been searching for all the time.…”

I held out my hand to her and supported her with my ten-year-old body along the silent street of the village, until we returned to our cowshed.

Moshe was walking around between the walls there, as pale and hard as they were, and Mother held the box out to him.

“Is this what you’re searching for?”

Her voice was low and firm. She opened the box and without taking her eyes off his, she picked the tresses up from it. Her movement was slow, calculated, like the wave of a fabric merchant’s arm, presenting the most expensive silk in his shop.

Moshe’s right hand first went up to the back of his neck, with a gesture that Judith knew well but only now understood, and from there, it covered his neck, descended, and kneaded the big muscles of the chest, where he should have sprouted breasts if he had fulfilled his mother’s wish, and from there it descended and groped his groin, examining and proving and confirming. And all with a gesture that had no trace of coarseness and with a face that took off all its manliness for a moment.

Only then did Judith understand that the braid wasn’t the braid of a mother or a sister or a wife, but was the lost braid of men, the braid of Moshe himself.

“It’s yours, Moshe …?” she whispered, half asking and half stating. “It’s yours, Moshe?”

“It’s mine.”

I stood there, in the corner of the cowshed, but they didn’t notice me.

“Make me your wife, Moshe,” said Mother, “and I’ll give you your braid.”

Small and white were the words in the cold air. Warm and sparkling her tear rolled down her cheek.

“And the boy?” asked Moshe, and his mouth was dry. “Whose boy is he?”

The boy, hidden among the sack of mash in his dark corner, heard and saw and didn’t say a word.

“Make me your wife, Moshe, and give the boy your name.”

She gave him his braid and no sooner had he smelled the hair and put it against the skin of his face than Mother had taken the bridal gown off her flesh.

Her body was very white. Only the tanned triangle of the open collar of her work shirt and her arms were brown. She had a body younger than her years, delicate and strong. Her breasts were small and gleaming, two merry, surprising dimples laughed in the small of her back, and her thighs were long and solid.

She put on her work clothes, leaned down to the floor, picked up the white cardboard box, and put the gown in it.

“Take this to Sheinfeld now, Zayde,” she told me. “Give it to him, don’t say a word to anyone there, and come right back home.”

A
LL THAT NIGHT FOOTSTEPS
of people returning from Jacob’s wedding were heard in the street. They walked back and forth across from Rabinovitch’s house in a kind of silent demonstration until at last they went off.

The next day, Oded brought Naomi and her baby from Jerusalem. She was happy, worried, and surprised. She called Mother “Mother,” and the two of them wept.

And at night Moshe came to sleep in the cowshed, and Naomi
took me to sleep with her and her son in the house, and in the morning, she woke me up for the milking.

“They went to be alone a little, Zayde,” said Naomi. “And we’ll spend a few days here and take care of the cows.”

Mother and Moshe went to a small boardinghouse in Zikhron Ya’akov, with stone walls, gravel paths, and an avenue of waving Washington palms leading to its gates. Ten years later, on one of my leaves in the army, I went there, but I didn’t go inside.

“Here, Judith,” said Moshe, “in a place like this we should have lived all those years, you and I, with carriages and servants.” And he held her fingertips and bowed a polished and amusing bow, whose presence in his clumsy body couldn’t have been imagined.

Judith stroked the back of his neck with her hovering fingertips. Dim, trembling notes of a cello and a violin hummed in the air. A girl and three boys were playing there in the music room of the boardinghouse.

A mensh trakht un Gott lakht
, no one knew and no one deciphered. Not the quick drumming of the woodpecker on the tree trunks, not the soaring of the vulture, who moved over the sky like a tiny glaziers’ diamond.

They were there four days, in early February 1950, and Naomi and I took care of the yard and the cowshed.

A dry strong cold prevailed then all over the country, and when they returned on the bus, Moshe told Judith it was the kind of cold he remembered from the winters of his childhood in the Ukraine.

And at the feet of Mukhraka Mountain, when the bus turned left and climbed and turned right and the Valley was opened and its fields spread out before their eyes, Judith sighed and clung to him and said: “Here, we’ve returned home, Moshe, it’s better at home.”

T
HAT NIGHT
, when Oded came to take Naomi and her baby back to Jerusalem and Mother woke me up to tell her good-bye, Naomi
suddenly said: “Why shouldn’t Zayde come with me to Jerusalem for a few days? On the radio they said we might get some snow.”

“He’s got to go to school,” said Moshe.

“It’s an opportunity,” said Naomi. “Here in the village snow will never fall. You’ll have a little more time alone and Zayde will see some real snow.”

“He’ll miss the Arbor Day party,” said Mother.

“There are enough trees here even without him,” said Naomi.

Mother laughed and made a few more egg sandwiches for the road and packed a small bag for me, and Naomi held my hand in one of hers and carried her baby in the other one.

“Oded has to leave, come fast,” and the two of us hurried to the tanker.

“I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye to Moshe and to give Mother a kiss,” I blurted out as we ran.

“Tell him when you get back,” she laughed. “And as for the kiss, give it to me.”

All the way, I slept. When I woke up I discovered that Oded had changed his habit and had gone right into the neighborhood with the tanker, disturbing the dawn peace with the roar of his motor.

“Want to honk, Zayde?” he asked, and before Naomi could get a word out, I had already pulled the rope and the great bleating had shaken the air.

“Because of you two, I’ll fight with the whole neighborhood,” she growled.

“Just don’t come back to us a city boy, eh, Zayde?” Oded said to me, honked again, and left.

I was about ten years old then and never in my life had I felt such strong cold. The next day it was even colder. Naomi wrapped my neck in a red wool scarf and Meir took me for a glimpse of the Old City over the border.

We rode in a shaky bus that looked like a cow and was called “Chausson.” Meir asked if I wanted to give the money to the driver, and I got some funny change, a paper penny I had never
seen before in my life. From Zion Square, we walked until we came to a big cement wall and we peeped through the holes in it and climbed up to a big house with a statue of a woman on the roof and chilly nuns hastened along its enormous corridors.

A man of about fifty, with red eyes and white bristles, stood next to us, winding tefillin on his arm, looking at the city and at us and humming a monotonous tune with a strong smell of licorice emanating from its lines: “For Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and for the memory of King David for a blessing, help me Lord, bring salvation from the Heavens, help to us, and remember the righteous ones, Our Teacher Moses and Our Teacher King Solomon and Our Teacher King David, peace upon them, their repose in Paradise.”

“Parasite,” grumbled Meir, but he told me to give the man the paper half-penny.

S
O MANY THINGS
happened to me that week for the first time.

For the first time I drank hot cocoa in a café.

For the first time Naomi kissed me on the neck and the lips and not only on the cheek.

For the first time I was in a bookstore.

For the first time in my life my mother died.

At night Meir and Naomi’s baby screamed. I heard her get up to feed him and I heard her shout of surprise and amazement when she glanced out the window.