by Meir Shalev
6
JACOB DIDN’T SIT at the table with me. He fussed around me, served, watched me as I ate, talked incessantly, and now and then, if there was a space between two words in his mouth, he stuck in a piece of the omelet he had made for himself.
I was afraid he would tell me about my mother, because most of the people in the village felt a need to tell me about her or to ask me about her, but Jacob sat and told me a story; parts of it I already knew, about his childhood in the Ukraine, about his love for birds, about the river where the girls would wash their clothes and the fellows would sail little paper boats to them, with words of love written between their folds.
“Koreblik lubovi,” he said; “love boats.”
“I was a little boy then, littler even than you, Zayde. And for me, that Kodyma River was big like the sea. Children have eyes like magnifying glasses. That’s something I once heard from Bialik. He was here in the village giving a lecture, and here’s what he said: the Alps in Switzerland are really high mountains. But they ain’t as high as the garbage heap in my grandfather’s yard in the village when I was five years old. The whole thing Bialik said in much nicer language. But Bialik’s words I ain’t got, and to talk like him I can’t talk.”
Big maple trees grew on the banks of the Kodyma. In the shadow of their branches the ducks rowed, their heads shiny green. In the thickets of reeds, the wind rustled, and the peasants said it was repeating the moans of the drowned.
At the bend in the river, a heavy black slate rock canted, and a weeping willow bent over it. Here the girls knelt to wash clothes, their knees pressed to the dark stone, their fingers turning red in the icy water, and their noses running from the cold. Jacob hid behind the blossoming branches on the riverbank and peeped at them. From the corner where the little boy was hiding, the movement of the water made the girls washing clothes look as if they were sailing on a boundless yellow-green sea.
One couple after another, the storks were plucked out of the sky and landed on their old chimneys and nests. They leaned their necks back, capered in their dances of wooing and fidelity, to show that another year had passed and their love still endured. They pecked their red beaks together, exchanged gifts of spring, and their legs blushed with lust.
“Because love is love, for ugly storks just like for my beautiful canaries.”
The spring wind played with the dresses of the girls washing clothes, stuck the cloth to their thighs and then let go of it, and the sunbeams limned the bluish shadows of the veins in their wrists as they wrung out the clothes. The light, clear and fragile as porcelain, sketched the picture Jacob would call with surprisingly florid language: “The eternal picture of love.”
“A child who looks at beautiful women, he don’t want what a grown-up man wants,” he explained to me. “See, you’re still a child yourself, Zayde, and soon you’re gonna be a man, so you got to know all these things. It’s not the tsitskes and the tukhis a child wants, it’s much more than that. It’s not the beauty of this one or that one he wants, it’s the beauty of the whole world he wants. To pick the stars out from the sky he wants, to hug the whole earth and the whole life and the whole big sea he wants. And a woman, she can’t always give all those things. Once I had a worker here in the yard and I tell him what I’m telling you now. And he says to me: ‘There may be six women in the whole world who can give those things, Sheinfeld. But children don’t know them yet and grown-ups don’t meet them anymore.’ You remember that fat worker I had here?”
The love pecks of the storks were heard aloud, like periods and commas inserted by an invisible grammarian into the laughter of the laundresses. The bachelors gathered upriver to send love letters. Each one wrote something and then folded the paper.
“Here, Zayde. Like this they would fold.” Jacob took a sheet of yellow paper from one of the drawers. “Like this and like this … and now like this.… You turn it around and you open it, here and here, and again like this. And with your fingernail you make it smooth. And you got a—koreblik,” and he gave me a handsome, smooth paper boat, the boat a father folds for his little son.
Sometimes a whole letter was in a koreblik, sometimes only the sketch of a broken heart, a nightingale dripping blood, or clumsy pictures of yearning: a house, a tree, a cow, a baby.
The fellows put the paper boats on the water and let them be swept up in its flow. About two hundred feet separated them from the laundresses, and many boats absorbed water and fell apart, others capsized and sank, or were pushed to the bank and hit the thickets of nests. The few that did arrive were snatched up by the girls, who were so eager for them they would poke each other’s eyes out to get a koreblik lubovi.
“A love boat,” Jacob explained again.
You didn’t sign the love letters because everyone knew it was fate that saved the paper boat from the wrath of the water and led it to the girl it was meant for. It was fate that strengthened her hand in her war with her girlfriends. And it was the same fate that would make sure to inform her who the writer was, the boy meant for her.
The story smoothed the parched grooves of disappointment on his face and made his chin quiver.
It wasn’t until years later that I realized he was testing me, explaining to me, tempting me, and maybe apologizing for the sin he hadn’t committed and for which he shouldn’t be blamed, and he didn’t know I should.
“Maybe you’ll drink a little something, Zayde, eh?”
He also said “a little something” the way Mother and Globerman and Moshe Rabinovitch did.
“Moshe will get mad,” I said. “I’m only twelve.”
“First of all, I’m also your father, Zayde, not just Rabinovitch. And second of all, we just won’t tell him.”
He took two shot glasses out of the kitchen cabinet. They were so thin and transparent that only after the cognac was poured into them did I discern their roundish shape. Even today, when they’re mine and stand in my cabinet, I’m afraid to hold them.
I drank a little and sneezed. My shoulders shivered and a warmth spread in my bones.
“Good?”
“It burns horribly,” I groaned.
“Your mother liked to drink very much,” said Jacob. “She drank strong pomegranate liquor, and also cognac. And even more than cognac she loved grappa. That’s a kind of liquor of the Italians. Globerman would bring her a bottle sometimes, and once a week they would sit and drink together. And he would put little chocolates in her mouth there and tell her a little story. More than half a bottle they could finish like that together and then get up and go to work like nothing happened. Believe you me. Half a bottle in the middle of the day ain’t very much, but it ain’t a little either. In the beginning she hated him like poison, the dealer. If she would meet him on the street or in the field, she would want to poke out his eyes. But from that drinking, one day a week, they was once-a-week friends. Listen, Zayde, you don’t need big things to be friends. And to hate, too, very little reasons is enough, and even to love.”
Jacob’s voice cracked a moment: “See, here in the village everybody used to ask how come I fell in love with her. Behind my back they were asking it, and to my face, too. How come you fell in love with Rabinovitch’s Judith, Sheinfeld? How could you let your Rebecca go, Sheinfeld?”
He said those words as if he were repeating a question, even though I hadn’t asked it, not aloud and not in my heart.
“See, that’s what I just told you a minute ago, Zayde, you don’t need big reasons to love a woman. And the size of the love has nothing to do with the size of the reason. Sometimes one word she says is enough. Sometimes only the line of the hip, like a poppy stem. And sometimes it’s how her lips look when she says ‘seven’ or ‘thirteen.’ Look and see, with ‘seven’ the lips are starting out like with a kiss. Then you see the teeth are touching the lips a moment to make the ‘v.’ And then the mouth is opening a little … like this … se-ven. See? And with ‘thirteen,’ the tip of the tongue is peeping out for the ‘th.’ Then the mou
th is opening and the tongue is touching the top of the mouth at the end.”
He stared at me as if he wanted to see if I caught the meaning of his words.
“To understand that thing, hours I stood looking in a mirror. I stood there and I said all those numbers real slow, and I watched real careful how every number looks on the mouth. And once I even said to her, Tell me, Judith, how much is three and four? just to see the seven on her mouth. But she probably thought I’m nuts. And sometimes, listen, Zayde, just the eyebrows, just the eyebrows of a woman, can grab a man for a whole life.”
He poured himself another glass of cognac, closed the bottle, and put it back in the cabinet. “You don’t get no more today, Zayde. That was only for now to taste and for a time to remember. I’m gonna leave that bottle for you, let it lay here and wait with me until our next meal. It’s good for cognac to wait. And the glasses and the dishes and everything that’s here, you’re gonna get it all from me after I die. Meantime, you go on growing up and playing and running after the crows. And the three of us, me and Rabinovitch and Globerman, we’re gonna make sure you got a good childhood. Because what does a child got except childhood? Strength he ain’t got and sense he ain’t got and a woman he ain’t got. All he’s got is love that breaks his body and his life.”
7
JACOB WASHED the two shot glasses, dried them carefully, and held them up to the light to examine their transparency.
“I always had a weakness for birds, too,” he said. “And my mother died when I was a little boy, too. But me, Zayde, I didn’t get no childhood. My father married another woman and she threw me out of the house right away. Sent me off to her brother, my foster uncle. He had a workshop in the big city, far far away from home and the village. Better he should learn a trade, she says, and not walk around the river near the laundresses. And with her brother in the workshop I worked like a slave, from morning to night. His children went to school and wore fine clothes with the gymnasium buttons, and I barely learned how to read and write and to this day I speak a broken Hebrew. So broken that all the years I’m ashamed to open my mouth at the village assemblies. Sometimes on purpose I put in a nice word to make it sound pretty. Then everybody would laugh. Once I said ‘yours truly’ instead of ‘I,’ and the Village Papish said to me, right in front of everybody: ‘Your yours truly, Sheinfeld, along with all the rest of your language, is like a pearl on a heap of garbage.’ He stinks himself from the kvatsh of his geese and me he calls garbage. When he would pass by here on his wagon with the garbage barrels he’d bring from the prison camp for his geese to eat, the birds would fall dead out of the sky from the stink. And me he calls garbage. So when I was a little boy, the birds was all I had to cheer me up. Why were birds created at all except to make men happy? Does the God of the Jews care if animals are flying around in the sky? There’s not enough room on the ground? In Uncle’s yard, there were poor sparrows. In the morning I’d see them freezing just like me. Little gray sparrows with their feathers all puffed up with cold. They also had little black yarmulkes on top of their heads. They also didn’t have a drop of sense inside their heads. That’s why people call a fool a birdbrain. But if you can fly, what do you need a brain for? Those sparrows, they look so gray. But when the sparrow husband feeds the sparrow babies, the sparrow wife is fooling around with another guy right in front of his eyes. You knew that, Zayde? So, the piece of bread they’d give me, I’d hold it in my mouth like this and lay on the ground in the yard on my back, like this, Zayde. And the sparrows would come and stand right here on my chin and on my forehead, and they would peck the bread right out of my mouth. Give me your hand now, Zayde, help your father up from the floor.
“And once the neighbor’s little boy caught a finch in a trap, and he says he’s gonna poke out the bird’s eyes with a needle so he’ll keep on singing. You knew that, Zayde? A songbird, if you’ll put out his eyes, he sings and sings, and he don’t stop until he dies without a drop of strength. So I steal a penny from Uncle to ransom the bird. And Uncle catches me and gives me such a beating—‘Shmendrik!’ he says. ‘You want to starve us to death?’—And I run away to the river and I don’t come back for two days. For food I’m eating grass, and for water I’m drinking from the river. And I’m sitting and making paper boats and writing on them: Tateh, Tateh, kum aher un nem mikh a haym. You know what that is, Zayde? Because of your name, I forget you don’t know Yiddish. Father, Father, come and take me home, that’s what I’m writing. And boat after boat I’m putting in the water, until Uncle finds me and drags me back to the workshop. And once more he’s killing me with his smacks: ‘Such things you’ll write about me?’ he says. And he sends his own sons to chase after my paper boats, because he knows how far korebliki like those could go. What can I tell you, Zayde? You can hit and you can punish a child, but you won’t break his spirit, and you won’t murder his dream. To tell everything I went through with this evil uncle, a person really has to be Dostoyevsky. But one thing, Zayde, I’m telling you that you should know: I didn’t part from the birds. I grew up with them. And I always had a bird to sing to me. That’s just something you make up your mind about. I just made up my mind that every bird that’s flying, he’s fluttering his wings for me. And every bird that’s singing in the tree, he’s singing for me. The Uncle’s children were students in the gymnasium, and I was only a tinsmith’s assistant, a little boy with hot tin burns on my hands, and my skin white and gray like a corpse. And coughing from coal dust. And out of the window that boy sees them walking in the street in nice clothes, the uniform of the gymnasium with buttons. But the birds, Zayde, for him they’re singing. Out of the window I see them and so I says: How did you make such a thing, Lord? A bird that sings and flies? And why didn’t you make me like that, too? Here I am, Lord, here I am, answer me!
“Here I am, here I am, answer me,” Jacob repeated, as if he were savoring the taste of the words along with the omelet, and them, too, he said in the Yiddish way, tearful and captivating, just like Mother would say them.
8
AND SO I was envious and I was covetous. Oh, how jealous I was. Jealous of the children for their suits, of the birds for their wings. The water of the Kodyma River I envied because the girls dipped their hands in it. And even the black rock I envied, where their knees touched. Even today, I take nothing from nobody and I steal nothing from nobody. But I do covet, Zayde, I do covet and I do envy. ’Cause passion and desire, these are birds nobody will catch and nobody will cut off their wings. The girls were on the black rock doing their laundry, and the wind peeped under their dresses, and the fellows went down and stood in the water and sent them the paper boats with the words of love. When you grow up and become a man, Zayde, you’ll see: you can run after a girl, you can send her all kinds of little gifts, you can sing her songs at night, like the Italians do with a guitar. You can put a paper boat for her in the water, and best of all maybe do all of them. Because you never know what she really loves. For instance, the son of the miller back home once saw a carriage on the road going along the river. Just then he’s standing next to the big mill wheel and two green eyes are looking at him from the carriage with such a look that even you, at your age, Zayde, would understand. So a whole day he sits and thinks what the eyes says, until finally he goes nuts and starts chasing every cart and every wagon that goes by in the street. And once he’s running like that, chasing the coach of the mistress of a cossack officer. She was a Jew who followed her officer to every war and every place the cossack went. She had a coach and horses and all the luxuries you need for love she had there—a bed with a velvet curtain, and the silk sheets that keep a man strong all night long. Maybe you’re not old enough yet to hear stories like this, eh, Zayde? And every single kind of sausage and food and bottles she had there, ’cause love gives you a big appetite. And everything was nice and neat and on its shelf. ’Cause if a woman is loved very much she’ll also be very tidy. Exactly the opposite of a man. For a man, love comes with a mess right away. And t
errific eyebrows she had, eyebrows that men who know about such things would kill for. All you need is just one terrific thing in a woman to hold on to a man. We men need to stand like cattle in the meat market to show everything we got, outside and inside. But a woman, it’s something else. You can love the whole woman for a whole life just because of one terrific little thing she’s got. Just remember that women don’t know that, and you dassn’t tell them. Did I tell you that already, eh, Zayde? Did I already say that? Never mind. It’s not so terrible. Some things you can say twice. The first time you say it as soon as it comes into your head, and the second time you say it as soon as you understand it. And you, if you think the God of the Jews cares about our love, just imagine this: a cossack battalion is passing by, the horses are galloping, noise, dust, and then the wagon with the Jew and her officer in the silk bed. And that fool of a miller’s boy, who’s chasing after every cart and carriage because of her green eyes, he runs after that wagon, too. Well, the cossack officer didn’t bat an eyelash, and you’ll forgive me, Zayde, he doesn’t take his shvantz out of his Jew, and he leans on one hand like this. And the other hand with the sword he sticks out the window of the carriage. And right in the middle of everything, he splits the boy’s head open with one stroke, like a watermelon, and all his brains spill out on the ground. And all his love and his questions and everything inside there pours out, too. ’Cause love, like I told you, Zayde, it’s in the mind, it’s not in the heart like people your age still think and that’s where they look for it. Come on, eat now, meyn kind, eat, my orphan. Too bad your mother ain’t here to see us, father and son happy and eating together. Forgive me if maybe I ruined your appetite with such a tale. Ess, meyn kind, eat.”
