The Loves of Judith (6 page)

The viper’s venom kept on bubbling in his veins. All day long, he dragged around behind her, sang his nonsense to her,
and doted on her with the pesky persistence and desire of four-year-old children wooing a beloved kindergarten teacher.

After two years of torments, Yakoba locked up the house and went to the fields without turning to look back. Yakobi toddled along behind her, humming his song, and trying to lift her dress. Thus the two of them reached the highway, crossed it, vanished among the oaks on the northern hills, and were never seen again in the village.

F
OR MONTHS THE
Y
AKOBIS
’ hut stood empty and waiting, and no one knew what for.

The rosebushes went wild and turned into prickly vines, their flowers grew smaller and stank, and shrikes impaled the carcasses of mice and lizards on their thorns.

Passionflower shoots crawled on the floor of the porch, choked the gutters with the clasp of tendrils, and finally pried the windows open and crept into the rooms.

Weeds and screwbeans flourished in the yard, as in every abandoned place, until they covered the remnants of the burned coop. The hedge turned into a tangled wall, where black snakes hissed and cats dragged their prey.

Gangs of tiny murderers—geckos and spiders, praying mantises and chameleons—lurked in the wild bushes. There was always rustling and quivering among the leaves, and more than once, when a child’s ball fell there and someone put a hand in to get it out, he got a bite or a sting or both.

Some people suggested burning down the yard along with its inhabitants, and then, one summer day, at dusk, the distant and strange sound of a songbird was heard approaching the village.

Man and beast stopped, raised weary heads, cocked amazed ears.

The sound, so foreign, so attractive, wonderful, and sweet, kept growing louder.

Then it was joined by the squeak of tortured springs, the
rattle of pistons, and the gasps of an aging motor that had lost the compression of its youth. Out of distant mists of dust, a rickety green pickup truck burst forth, big and swaying as a ship, and slowly rose from the fields.

In the driver’s seat was a fat man, about forty years old, his hair white as snow, his skin pink and delicate as the skin of baby mice turned up onto the earth by a plow. He was swathed in an old black suit and protected by sunglasses just as black. Old suede patches shone on his sleeves, and in the back of the truck, spacious cages full of canaries singing with tremendous excitement, like children on their annual outing, were bumping up and down.

Jacob put his hand on my shoulder and said: “Fate, Zayde, don’t make surprises. It makes preparations, it makes signs, and it also sends out spies, but only a few people have eyes to see these things and ears to hear and a brain to understand.”

The strange stranger went straight to the forsaken hut of the Yakobis like someone who knew where he was headed. When he arrived, he put a broad-brimmed straw hat on his head and got out of the truck. The noise and agitation that always came from the tangles of the hedge and the high grass stopped all at once.

For a brief moment, the guest took off his sunglasses, revealed the two pink eyes of an albino and fringes of darting, ragweed lashes, and immediately hid them again behind the black lenses. He was short, with a double chin; his smile was pleasant and his looks were terrifying.

He took one cage and then another, and vanished with his birds into the hut. Even before the sound of the closing door had died out, startled caravans of centipedes, wolf spiders, and small angry vipers began leaving the yard and disappearing into the fields as if on command.

“Because,” said Jacob, “animals sense more than human beings. Someday I’ll tell you about your mother’s cow, and how much she could sense.”

Only after sundown did the albino come back out to the yard
and survey the task that awaited him. He immediately took a sickle out of the back of the truck and a file from the toolbox, and honed the curved blade with unexpected expertise. With long, smooth movements you wouldn’t have guessed possible from his appearance, he mowed the grass and stacked it at the edge of the yard. Then he took a tin pack of Players from his shirt pocket, lit a cigarette, inhaled the smoke with great pleasure; and he didn’t blow out the match, but tossed it onto the pile. The straw, the grass, and the thorns burned, as they do, noisy and enthusiastic, and tinted the faces of the onlookers with their red glow.

Then everybody went away and the albino went on working all that night and the nights that followed. He trimmed the hedge, pulled up the passionflowers, cut down Yakoba’s rosebushes, and grafted new strains onto the stumps. He turned over the soil of the yard with a pitchfork, and when dawn broke, he scurried into the shelter of the house. The crows, to whom every excavation and hoeing prophesies a plethora of plunder, hurried to land in his yard, hopping around and searching for the earthworms and mole crickets brought up to the surface of the earth by the pitchfork’s teeth.

“And that,” said Jacob, “that’s how it all started. Nobody knew, even my wife Rebecca didn’t know. And Rabinovitch the Ox didn’t know. And Globerman the dealer didn’t know. And I myself, I certainly didn’t know. Only later on I understood that was how it started.”

He got up from the table, went to the window, and spoke with his back to me.

“The coop burned down, and the albino came. And Tonya Rabinovitch drowned and your mother Judith came. And Rebecca went, and the canaries flew off, and Zayde was born, and the worker came, and Judith died, and Jacob stayed. There’s something simpler than that? That’s how it always happens at the end of every love. The beginning is always different and the middle is always complicated. But the end is always so simple and so much the same. In the end, there’s always somebody who comes and
there’s somebody who goes and there’s somebody who dies and there’s somebody who stays.”

B
LACK CLOUDS GATHERED
, a wind blew, the wadi overflowed, and Tonya and Moshe didn’t sense anything and didn’t worry.

The rain played its cold songs on the roofs and hummed in the tin gutters. In the shelter of the sheds the livestock huddled together. Sparrows with puffed-up feathers and narrowed eyes entrenched themselves in lattices. A pair of crows, creatures who have no fear in their heart but only curiosity, practiced hovering and climbing in the gusts of wind against the piercing downpour.

At three o’clock, Tonychka got up and Moshe emerged from his brief afternoon nap, they ate, as usual, a few oranges and a few thick slices of bread with margarine and jam, drank, as usual, a few cups of boiling-hot tea, and when the rain stopped they hitched the mule to the cart and went to bring grapefruit and pomelos from the citrus grove.

A sharp, cold wind, painful as a wet canvas sheet, came down from Mount Carmel and slapped their faces. The mule’s hooves sank in the deep mud and were extracted from it with a sticky noise, leaving slushy pits in it. In the fields were the outline of new little channels which the water, in its endless downward affinity, cuts in the earth every year.

Tonya and Moshe passed the vegetable patch and the vineyard, crossed the wadi, and came to the citrus grove. Together, they loaded the heavy crates, and when they turned to go back, Tonya grabbed the reins and Moshe pushed the wagon from behind and helped the mule get it out of the black mire. Tonya turned her head around to look at him. Steam rose from the skin of his face, which was flushed with the effort.

She loved her husband’s strength and was proud of it. “Please just wait a minute, right away I’ll call my Moshe,” she would declare whenever one of the neighbors had to struggle with a heavy sack or a recalcitrant animal. Near their house, next to the wicket in the fence, lay a rock that weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds, and Tonya made a florid sign on it that said: “Here Lives Moshe Rabinovitch Who Lifted Me Up from the Ground.” Wags said that such a sign should have been put on Tonya herself, but the rock was famous in the area and now and then some fellow would show up from one of the towns or the English army camp or the Druse villages on Mount Carmel and try to lift it up. But Moshe was the only one who was strong enough and Moshe was the only one who knew how to kneel down and embrace the rock with his eyes shut and Moshe was the only one who knew how to groan as he lifted it and how to carry it like a baby against his chest. Everyone went back to his place downcast and limping—downcast because of the failure, and limping because everyone, without exception, kicked the obstinate rock furiously and broke the big toe of his right foot.

T
HE RAIN BEGAN
coming down again. When they returned to the wadi, Rabinovitch saw that the water had risen a lot. He climbed onto the wagon, took the reins from Tonya, retreated, and guided the mule so that it would cross the riverbed at a right angle. But the moment its hooves trod on the steep, slippery bank, the mule groaned in a voice that sounded surprisingly like a woman’s, and stumbled.

From now on, things moved in the horribly familiar course of catastrophes:

The mule sank down between the shafts. The wagon tipped onto its side and turned over with a slow but very determined movement. Rabinovitch fell under it and his left thigh was trapped and crushed.

He yelled in pain. The broken kneecap tore the flesh and the
skin and was exposed to the cold touch of the water. He almost blacked out, but dread—one of those dreads that is clear even before its reason is understood—turned his eyes to Tonya.

Most of her was lying beneath the overturned wagon. Only her head and neck were sticking out. Her skull and the back of her neck were sunk in the mud, her hair was clogged with water, the skin of her face, which always looked ruddy and healthy, turned gray all at once.

In the water, so close to her head, grapefruits and pomelos bobbed around as innocently as toys in a bathtub.

“Get me out of here,” she whispered.

She was hoarse with fear. A tongue of blood poured from the corner of her mouth, bright and thin. Only her eyes moved and looked at him.

Moshe, his crushed leg pinning him to the mud, thrust his hands under the side of the wagon and estimated the load.

“Get me out, my Moshe.…”

Her voice was choked, it wanted to be a scream but didn’t succeed.

“Listen to me, Tonychka,” said Moshe. “I’ll raise the platform a little, and you’ll crawl out.”

Now the head also moved, nodded slowly, and the eyes opened wide in understanding and agreement.

“Now!” groaned Moshe.

His face grew dark with the effort. Veins and sinews stood out in the thick joints of his hands. The wagon creaked and was raised a little, and Tonya twisted, struggled, and gave up.

“I can’t,” she moaned. “I can’t.”

The pain cut Moshe’s trapped leg and the wagon came back down.

Some say that, in moments like that, time stands still. Others say that it passes doubly fast. And even others say that it is broken into a thousand tiny splinters that won’t ever be put together again. But on that rainy day, on the fall of the overturned wagon in the wadi, time didn’t pay attention to those hackneyed conjectures—it
didn’t slow down and it didn’t speed up, it just passed by in its path, huge and nonchalant, wings beating and hovering as usual over the world.

A thin mist dripped, dotting the surface of the water with pockmarks, the wintery sky grew dark, and meanwhile the wailing of the mule and the scent of fear wafting from its body attracted a few jackals, and they recoiled from Moshe’s shouts and the clods of mud he pitched at them.

One jackal leaped and sank its teeth in the mule’s hind legs, and Moshe, who had managed to pull out one of the posts of the side of the wagon, hit him and broke his back. The others were frightened and retreated, but later on they understood that the man couldn’t get up, and since they’re clever and hunger sharpens their intelligence and makes them brave, they approached the mule from the head, where the pole was too short to reach, and they leaped and tore pieces from its muzzle and lips.

“The pomelos are floating,” Tonya said suddenly.

“What?” Moshe trembled.

“The grapefruits are sinking,” Tonya explained. “And the pomelos are floating.”

“The villagers will come soon and save us. Keep your head out of the water, Tonychka, and don’t talk.”

It rained harder, the wadi rose, the grapefruits turned yellow like tiny faded moons under the water. Tonya, who lay on the other side of the wagon, now had a hard time keeping her head above water. Moshe tried to support the back of her neck with the pole, but couldn’t.

The sweat of fear bathed his bald scalp. He saw how the water was rising, how the nets of muscles on the side of his wife’s neck were trembling, and he understood what was going to happen.

Suddenly the head sank and immediately floated up again, as if kicked by the dread of death.

“Moshe …” a little girl’s voice was heard. “My Moshe … 
der tsop …
the braid in the box …”

“Where?” shouted Moshe. “Where’s the braid?”

The water climbed and the head was covered, and rose up once again, and this time the voice returned and was Tonya’s voice.

“My end has come, Moshe,” she murmured.

Rabinovitch turned his eyes and squeezed his jaw and his eyelids shut until the air bubbles stopped slipping out of her mouth. Then the sun also declined, yellowish gray beyond the clouds, and only after she disappeared, and the twilight and the rain wiped out the memory of the horrible sounds of her death, did Moshe once again look at the dark place where his wife’s head had vanished. He was attacked by a horrible coughing. Tears of grief and failure flowed from his eyes. Lizards of regret, quicker and more slippery than any feelings, were already mining burrows in his body.

Out of horrible anger he once again clutched the edge of the wagon and hurled and roared—“Get out now, get out, Tonya!”—to the astonished jackals and the dying mule.

The wagon slipped out of his hands onto his broken leg and Moshe fainted, came to, and fainted again, and a few hours later, when his own shouts woke him up, he saw as if in a dream the hurricane lamps approaching and heard the shouts and barking of the search party. But by then he had already been so struck by night and sadness and cold and pains that he didn’t have the strength to call to them. It was only the mule’s groans of distress that showed them the way.