The Loves of Judith (44 page)

“Get up, Zayde.” She rushed to me and shook me. “Get up, here’s the snow I promised you.”

I got up, I looked, and for the first time in my life I saw snow. The ground was all covered and in the cone of light of the streetlamp big feathery flakes whirled weightlessly and aimlessly.

In the morning, the neighborhood children went out to play in the snow and Naomi said: “Go outside, Zayde, play with them.”

“No,” I said.

“They’re nice kids,” she said. “There are a few your own age.”

“They’ll laugh at me,” I said. “Did you tell them what my name is?”

“What’s your name?” She leaned over to me with a frightening expression and laughed thickly. “What’s your name, kid? Tell me fast before I grab you.”

“My name’s Zayde,” I said. “Go kill somebody else.” And Naomi held my hand and the two of us ran outside.

For a long time we played with the children. Naomi’s face was flushed with cold and happiness. The snow kept on falling and its flakes crowned her hair. Her eyes sparkled, a warm sweet vapor rose from her cheeks. Then we built a big snowman, and as Naomi was making him a nose, a small black figure appeared in the distance, came toward us, stumbled, got up, and approached.

“It’s Meir,” said Naomi, and her face turned pale until it almost disappeared.

And the figure, black and growing and stumbling, walks toward us in the expanse of the white field.

“Something happened,” said Naomi. “They certainly told him something on the phone in the office.”

And Meir appeared and approached until he came and took Naomi’s arm and led her off to the side, to the fence post, to the horror of the news, to the hoarse shout—Judith, Judith, Judith, Judith—flying, spinning, dropping, and turning dark like a crow’s wing on the snow, into the slow fall and into the steam, every single “u” in every one of those Judiths flew out of her mouth, and Meir picked her up and supported her and said to me: “Later we’ll tell you, Zayde, later.”

A
ND AT DAWN
O
DED
came in the jeep he borrowed from one of the villagers, after he had made his way for sixteen hours on the
blocked, white, hidden roads only he could guess at beneath the blanket of snow.

He slept an hour, got up and drank four cups of tea one after another, ate two chocolate bars and half a loaf of bread, and took us—among whirling, hovering, hypnotizing flakes, turned by the jeep’s headlights into a spinning and deceptive magic—back to the village, to Mother’s funeral.

O
N THE MORNING OF
F
EBRUARY
6, 1950, Rabinovitch woke up and Judith opened her eyes, which were always gray, and now they were blue and very new among the lines of their corners.

Moshe went to the stove to make her the coffee she liked, and as he boiled the milk he suddenly understood what had woke him up: the silence, the still blanket that covered the outside and swallowed up all the usual village morning sounds. Not a chick was cheeping, not a calf was bleating, not a pump was beating. And when Moshe opened the shutter he saw that a deep snow was covering the ground, a heavy and surprising and uninvited snow that had lasted all night.

Soft and white the snowflakes fell, light and hovering they amassed and heaped up. Foreign, northern angels of death, handsome emissaries of Fate that had strayed to the wrong place and anticipated the ugly deaths of that land—the snake’s venom, the sun’s blaze, the madness of the blood, and the blow of the stone.

The Valley was stunned. Mice and snakes froze in their burrows. Stiff warblers, their heads gray with cold, dropped like stones from the branches of the trees. The Arbor Day seedlings the schoolchildren had planted three days before disappeared. Next to the spring the big leaves of the prickly pear bush were broken, in the orchards trees bent, for no one had ever prepared
them to bear such a burden, and at the crest of the eucalyptus in Rabinovitch’s yard, a mighty branch counted the clock of the dropping flakes.

T
HE STORY
, I think to myself at night, requires a pattern and a channel and a way out.

A tale of pouring rain and a rising wadi and a lying Revisionist and a husband who tarries and a wife who was unfaithful and lost her daughter, and came to live and to work in the cowshed of a widower whose cows she milked and whose children she raised.

The story, I soothe myself, refuses to be fiction.

A tale of a cattle dealer who couldn’t drive, and of a child who isn’t ruled by death or lust, of fearless crows, and of paper boats, and of a braid cut off, and of an uncle whose skin smelled of semen, and of two pomegranate trees and a pitchfork whose wound is bad.

One two three four. The story assumes lines of causation.

A tale of a woman who is the most beautiful one in the world and of a white boat that bears her name, a tale of an Italian who could imitate every bird and animal, an expert in dance steps and an expert in the rules of love. A tale of a tree that waited and of a lantern that fell and of a barren cow and of a stormy night and of an albino who bequeathed birds to his neighbor and turned his world upside down.

Listen, these are the three brothers of the Fate family, laughing and making the earth quake: if not for the liar, if not for the wadi rising, if not for the selling of the cow. One two three four. One two three four. One two three four.

But the braid was hidden and the snake stung and the albino came and the liar lied and the husband tarried and the woman got pregnant, and there, in that cowshed, she lived and worked, slept and wept, and in it she gave birth to her son, the son that death does not rule, who grew up and brought her death upon her.

For man makes plans and God laughs and the rock was picked up and the braid was found and the snow fell and the crest of the eucalyptus, whose big and wide branches whose wet flesh wasn’t accustomed to the burden, bent and dropped.

Of course that’s how it was. If that’s not how it was, then how was it?

“J
UDITH
!” shouted Moshe from the window of the house.

She didn’t raise her eyes, just bent her neck a bit more, and the expectation of the blow trembled down her spine.

“Judith!” and the man’s shout passed over the white silence of the snow along with the shriek of the crow and the crack of the tree breaking like three black whiplashes.

The whole village heard him, but Mother, whose bad ear was turned to him and whose good ear was filled with the wind whistling in the leaves of the dropping branch, didn’t hear.

Like a mighty stick, the crest of the tree came down on her and struck her to the ground, and silence immediately returned to the world. It was a thin clear silence, and in the eye of the world, a lucid crystal eye, it stands and doesn’t melt away.

People rushed from all over, and came running like farmers run, who run much faster than you’d think from their heavy gait, their hearts struck dumb even before they saw the blue kerchief and the smashed crows’ eggs and the crushed brood hen and my mother’s dress sprouting from under the green-white avalanche.

The Village Papish’s gigantic mare was hitched to the broken branch. The pulley was brought from the carpenter’s shop and Oded climbed up and tied it to the root of the thick bottom branch of the tree.

The Village Papish shouted to his mare, “Giddyap, carcass, giddyap!” as if she were the guilty one. The rope stretched, the pully creaked, and the branch was raised off Judith.

No one hurried forward. Everybody stood around, eyes staring
at the thin ivory neck, whose gleam hadn’t been dulled by years or regrets or death, and at the stockings that had rolled down a little from the strong, delicate ankles.

It was cold and the dry wind played with the black-gray nape feathers and with the cloth of the dead woman’s dress—tightened it and released it against her thighs as if it were trying to bring them back to life.

For long minutes, the branch swayed above her body and no one dared to budge. Even the mare stood still, her firm feet planted in the ground, her muscles trembling with the effort, her fragrant skin steaming, and her nostrils pillars of vapor.

And then Aliza Papish approached, took hold of Judith’s elbows, and started pulling her aside, and Moshe went to the tool-shed and brought the stone and the file, and as the crows circled and shrieked revenge on his head, he started honing the blade of the big axe with the measured movements of an executioner.

A
BOUT TEN YEARS OLD
I was when my mother died, and more than anything else I remember that trip at night, on roads shrouded in white, wrapped in army blankets and big warm chenille robes, and not saying a word.

Naomi’s hand held my hand and her complaining baby screamed nonstop in the arms of his father. He was so annoying and noisy that when we came to the village, Jacob Sheinfeld came and told Naomi that he didn’t intend to go to the funeral and suggested she leave the child with him.

“And his screaming won’t disturb you to be with Judith,” he said.

“I can stay with him, too,” Meir quickly volunteered.

“You’ll come with me,” said Naomi. And she gave the baby to Sheinfeld and thanked him.

T
HE BABY SCREAMED
at the top of his lungs and Jacob tried to soothe him.

First he whistled like a canary to him, then he folded little yellow boats for him from pieces of paper that once again nested in his pockets, and finally he wrapped him in a blanket he had once embroidered for me, and carried him for a walk in the snowy field.

There, near the place where the village bus stop would be built, he walked around with him, rocked him, and gave him biscuits to suck on. And then, when the disgusting baby finally shut up, Jacob raised his head and saw the people returning from the cemetery in small groups of sadness and talk, and the cart came behind them, writing wheel strips in the snow, punctuated by the mare’s hooves.

“Come in, friends, come in,” said Jacob.

He spread his coat on the snow and put the baby on it, knelt down, and wept. A sun suddenly turned yellow through a break in the clouds and brightened the eye of the field, and when the empty cart approached, returning from the cemetery, Judith looked to Jacob as if she were slowly floating on a broad river, a gold-green river that has no banks.

One of Israel’s most celebrated novelists, Meir Shalev was born in 1948 on Nahalal, Israel’s first moshav. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages and have been best sellers in Israel, Holland, and Germany. Awards he has received include the Juliet Club’s “Writing for Love” Prize (Italy), the Prime Minister’s Prize (Israel), the Chiavari Literary Award (Italy), an award from the Entomological Society of Israel, the ADIE-WIZO Literary Prize (Italy), The WIZO-France Award for Israeli Literature, The Brenner Prize (Israel, for
A Pigeon and a Boy
), the National Jewish Book Award (U.S.A., for
A Pigeon and a Boy
), and a Pratt Foundation award (Israel) for promoting awareness of environmental issues. A columnist for the Israeli daily
Yedioth Ahronoth
, Shalev lives in Jerusalem and in the north of Israel.

Also available in eBook format from Meir Shalev

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