by Meir Shalev
ALSO BY MEIR SHALEV
FICTION
A Pigeon and a Boy
Fontanelle
Alone in the Desert
But a Few Days
Esau
The Blue Mountain
NONFICTION
My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner
Elements of Conjuration
Mainly About Love
The Bible for Now
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
Roni and Nomi and the Bear Yaacov
Aunt Michal
The Tractor in the Sandbox
How the Neanderthal Discovered the Kebab
A Louse Named Thelma
My Father Always Embarrasses Me
Zohar’s Dimples
A Lion in the Night
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Translation copyright © 1999 by Barbara Harshav
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Schocken Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. This translation originally published in hardcover by Ecco Press, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, New York, in 1999. Originally published in Israel as Ke-yamim Ahadim by Am Oved Publishers, Ltd., Tel Aviv, in 1994. Copyright © 1994 by Meir Shalev.
Schocken Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shalev, Meir.
[Ke-yamim ahadim. English]
The loves of Judith / Meir Shalev;
translated from the Hebrew by Barbara Harshav.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-8052-1252-5
1. Mothers and sons—Fiction. 2. Israel—Fiction. 3. Jewish fiction.
I. Harshav, Barbara, [date] II. Title.
PJ5054.S384K413 2012 892.4′36—dc23 2011050478
www.schocken.com
Cover photograph by Mark Owens/Arcangel Images; bird details, iStock photo
Cover design by Chin Yee Lai
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
First Meal
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Second Meal
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Third Meal
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Fourth Meal
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
About the Author
FIRST MEAL
1
ON WARM DAYS, a soft smell of milk rises from the walls of my house. The walls are plastered and whitewashed, tiles cover the ground, but from the pores of the walls and the cracks of the floor, the smell rises to me, persists, steals in like the sweat of an ancient love.
Once my house was a cowshed. The house of a horse and a she-ass and a few milk cows. It had a wide wooden door, with an iron bolt across it, concrete troughs, yokes for cattle, jugs, cans, and milking stations.
And a woman lived in the cowshed, she worked and slept in it, dreamed and wept. And on a bed of sacks she gave birth to her son.
Doves walked back and forth on the ridge of the roof, in the remote corners the swallows were fussing over their nests of mud, and the fluttering of their wings was so pleasant I feel it even now, softening the expression on my face, smoothing the wrinkles of age and anger as it rises in my memory.
In the morning, the sun illuminated squares of windows on the walls and gilded the dust particles dancing in the air. Dew gathered on the lids of the jugs and field mice scurried over the bundles of straw like small gray lightning bolts.
The she-ass, my mother told me, because she wanted to preserve the memories in me, was wild and very wise, and even in her sleep she would kick, and when you wanted to ride on her back, Zayde, she would gallop to the door, bow down, and pass under the bar of the bolt, and if you didn’t jump off her back in time, Zayde meyn kind, the iron bar hit your chest and brought you down. The she-ass also knew how to steal barley from the horse and how to laugh out loud and how to rap on the door of the house with her hoof to get some candy.
And a mighty eucalyptus tree rose up in the yard, its boughs wide, fragrant, and always rustling. No one knew who had planted it or what wind had borne its seed. Bigger and older than all its brothers in the nearby eucalyptus forest, it stood in its place and waited long before the village was founded. I often climbed it because crows nested in its crest and even then I was observing their ways.
By now my mother is dead and the tree has been cut down and the cowshed has become a house and the crows have taken off and new ones have come, returning to their dust and hatching out of their eggs. And nevertheless, those crows and those stories and that cowshed and that eucalyptus—they’re the anchors, the eternal pictures of my life.
The tree was about sixty feet high, the crows’ nest was close to its crest, and in the thicket of its lower branches you could see the remnants of the “Tarzan hut” of children who climbed up and nested in it before I was born.
In the old aerial photos taken by the British air force and in the stories of the villagers it is clearly visible, but today all that’s left of it is an immense stump, with the date it was cut down seared in it like the date of death on a tombstone: December 10, 1950. Moshe Rabinovitch, th
e man whose yard I grew up in and whose cowshed I live in, the man who gave me his name and bequeathed me his farm, came back from burying my mother, sharpened his big axe, and put the tree to death.
2
FOR THREE DAYS Rabinovitch chopped down the tree.
Over and over again the axe swung up, and over and over again it came down. Around and around the man chopped, moaned and swung, groaned and struck.
A short man, Rabinovitch, taciturn and broad, with thick, short hands. Even today, in old age, the villagers call him “Rabinovitch the Ox” because of his strength and his passivity, and the third generation of children play the “awful bear” with him: in one hand, he holds three thin arms of three children, and shrieking and laughing, they can’t get out of his grip.
Chips and sighs flew, tears and sweat dripped, snowflakes swirled around, and even though differences of opinion erupt here about every memory—they don’t argue in our village about the act of vengeance, and every baby knows the details:
A dozen towels Rabinovitch used to wipe his face and the back of his neck.
Eight axe handles he broke and replaced.
Twenty-four quarts of water and six pots of tea he drank.
Once every half hour, he honed the blade of the axe with the whetstone and a steel file.
Nine loaves of bread with sausage he ate, and one crate of oranges.
Seventeen times he sank onto the snow and sixteen times he got up and went on hitting.
And the whole time, his thirty-two teeth were clamped and his ten fingers were clenched and his weeping breath steamed in the cold, until the great screech of the break was heard, along with the loud sigh of the onlookers, like the murmur that arose in the community center when the lights were turned out, but louder and more scared.
And then the shouts of alarm and the patter of feet fleeing and afterward the clamor of death, and there’s no simile for it except to say the thing itself: the clamor of the fall and death of a big tree, and everyone who heard it will never forget it—the explosion of the splitting and the roar of the fall and the whiplash of the crash to the ground.
Those aren’t like the sounds of a human being’s death, but then the sounds of the life of a tree and of a human being are also different, and they leave behind different silences after they go.
The silence of the hewn tree is a curtain of darkness soon rent by the shouts of people, by the rippling gusts of wind, and by the cries of birds and beasts. And the quiet that filled the world at my mother’s death is thin and clear, and so, lucid and crystal, it stands and doesn’t melt away.
Here it is, with me, next to all the noises of the world. It doesn’t swallow them and they don’t blend with it.
3
Flikt di mame federn,
federn un pukh,
zaydelen—a kishele
fun helln-roytn tukh.
I KNEW THAT SONG even before I understood what it means. It tells of a mother plucking feathers to make her son a down quilt with a pink cloth cover.
Many mothers, I imagine, sang that song to their children, and every one put in the name of her own child. “Zaydele” was me. That wasn’t a nickname that stuck to me, but my real name. “Zayde,” which means grandfather, is the name my mother gave me when I was born.
For years I’ve wanted to change it. But I don’t. At first I didn’t have the courage, then I didn’t find the strength, and finally we gave up, my name and I, and we’ve made peace with one another.
I was only a few months old when Mother sewed the cover and sang me the song, but even so, I seem to remember those nights well. Winters were cold in Moshe Rabinovitch’s cowshed, while in summer Mother negotiated with our neighbor Eliezer Papish, who raised geese, and in exchange for his goose down, she sewed down quilts for him and his whole family.
By the way, we called Eliezer Papish the “Village Papish” to distinguish him from his rich brother, who sold tools and building supplies in Haifa and was called the “City Papish,” and maybe I’ll tell about him, too, later on.
SO, MY NAME IS ZAYDE, Zayde Rabinovitch. My mother’s name is Judith, and in the village they called her Rabinovitch’s Judith. A good smell of lemon leaves wafted from her hands and a blue kerchief was always wound around her head. She was hard of hearing in her left ear and she got mad when anyone talked to her on that side.
My father’s name nobody knows. I am illegitimate, and three men claimed me as their son.
From Moshe Rabinovitch, I inherited a farm and a cowshed and yellow hair.
From Jacob Sheinfeld I inherited a fine house, fine furnishings, empty canary cages, and drooping shoulders.
And from Globerman the cattle dealer, I inherited a knipele of money and my gigantic feet.
And despite that complication, my name was crueler for me than the circumstances of my birth. I wasn’t the only child in the village or the Valley sired by a father who was unknown or a father that wasn’t his; but in the entire country, maybe even in the world, there wasn’t another child whose name was Zayde. In school they called me Methuselah and “Gramps,” and every time I came home and complained about that name she gave me and wanted to know why, Mother explained simply: “If the Angel of Death comes and sees a little boy named Zayde, Grandfather, he understands right away that there’s a mistake here and he goes to someplace else.”
Since I had no choice, I was convinced that my name protected me against death and I became a child who knew no fear. Even the primeval dreads that reside in the heart of every human being before he’s born were eradicated in me.
Fearlessly, I would hold out my hands to the snakes nesting in the crevices of the chicken coop, and they would watch me, winding their necks inquisitively, and didn’t hurt me.
Often I climbed up on the roof of the cowshed and ran along the steep slope of shingles with my eyes shut.
I engaged my heart to approach the village dogs who were always tied up and had become thirsty for blood and revenge, and they wagged their tails amiably at me and licked my hand.
And once, when I was an eight-year-old grandfather, a pair of crows attacked me as I climbed up to their nest. A hard black blow landed on my forehead and I spun around and lost my grip on the branch. Swooning with delight, I dropped down and down. Soft embraces of branches slowed my fall, and my landing was padded by the expected bed of leaves, the soft ground, and my mother’s superstition.
I got up and ran home and Mother applied iodine to my scratches.
“The Angel of Death is an orderly angel. He’s got a pencil, he’s got a notebook, and he writes down everything,” she laughed, the way she laughed whenever I was saved; “but you can’t count on the Malakh-funshlof. That Angel of Sleep never writes down anything and never remembers. Sometimes he comes and sometimes he falls asleep himself and forgets.”
THE ANGEL OF DEATH would always pass by me, and I felt only the hem of his cloak grazing the skin of my face. But once, in the autumn of 1949, a few months before my mother’s death, I also saw him face-to-face.
I was about ten years old. The Village Papish’s enormous mare was in heat, our stallion heard her neigh in her rutting and started running wild inside our fence. He was a good-natured chestnut-colored horse. Moshe Rabinovitch, who did everything “just right,” and therefore didn’t fraternize with his livestock more than was acceptable and proper, indulged him with caresses and carobs, and once I even saw him plaiting the horse’s tail into a thick yellow braid, with blue ribbons woven in as decoration.
He even refused to geld the stallion despite all demands and advice. “That’s cruelty to animals,” he said.
Sometimes the stallion would get an erection and bang his member against his belly. Hour after hour he would do that, with great and desperate persistence. “Poor soul,” Globerman the cattle dealer then said; “his balls they left to him. A female they don’t give to him. And hands he ain’t got. So what can he do?”
That night, the stallion leaped over the fence and mated with the mare
, and in the morning, Moshe gave me his halter and sent me to bring him back.
“You’ll look him straight in the eyes,” he said, “and tell him c’mon-c’mon-c’mon-c’mon. But if he makes eyes at you, don’t have nothing to do with him—you hear me, Zayde? Leave him alone at once and call me.”
It was early in the morning. The bleating of hungry, impatient calves was borne on the air. The scolding of farmers at their dreamy milking was heard. The Village Papish was already running around the pen, shouting and cursing, but the couple didn’t pay any attention to anything. Their eyes were misty with love, their loins were dripping, their horse smell was enriched with new tones.
“You came to take the stallion?” exclaimed the Village Papish. “Rabinovitch has maybe lost his marbles? To send a little boy?”
“He’s milking,” I said.
“Milking? I could be milking now, too!” the Village Papish’s voice was loud enough to reach our yard so Moshe would hear it.
I went into the pen.
“Get out of there fast!” cried the Village Papish. “It’s very dangerous when they’re together.”
But I had already lifted the halter and was intoning the magic words.
“C’mon-c’mon-c’mon-c’mon …” And the stallion approached and even let me put the straps on his muzzle.
“He’s gonna go nuts right away, Zayde,” called Papish. “Leave him right now!”
Just as we were leaving the yard, the mare whinnied. The stallion stopped and pushed me to the ground. His eyes bulged and turned red. A loud snort erupted from the depths of his chest.
“Drop the rope, Zayde!” shouted the Village Papish. “Drop it and roll out of the way fast!”
But I didn’t let go.
The stallion rose up on his hind legs, the rope grew taut, and I was lifted up and dropped supine on the ground. His front hooves kicked the air and tamped the dirt next to me. A heap of dust rose and beyond it I saw the Angel of Death, his notebook in his hand, his eyes fixed on me.
“What’s your name?” he asked me.
“Zayde,” I answered, not letting go of the rope.
The Angel of Death recoiled as if stunned by an invisible slap. He moistened his fingertip and leafed through the notebook.
“Zayde?” he fumed. “How can you call a little boy Zayde?”
