by Meir Shalev
And I ate.
9
MOSHE RABINOVITCH, the father who gave me his name and left me his farm, was born in a small town not far from Odessa. He was born late in his parents’ life, the youngest of their seven sons.
His mother, whose hope for a girl was disappointed, dressed him in little girl’s clothes, grew his hair long, plaited it into a golden braid, and wound blue ribbons in it, and Moshe didn’t protest.
He grew up in the kitchen, enveloped in women and smells, and the years of sewing and knitting, listening to the intimate conversations of the maids and the cooks, and playing with lace dolls, made him into a muscular, quiet little girl, who was marvelous at embroidering loops and who knew she was bound to disappoint her mother.
And indeed when Moshe was eleven years old, she rolled up the muslin sleeves of her dress, knocked down her big brother, and beat him to a pulp because he had pulled the braid her mother had plaited and called her Maydele. And when she was twelve, when other girls are already sprouting breasts, her chest grew only reeds of hair. A fair masculine down budded on her cheeks, her Adam’s apple and voice grew thick, and her manhood was obvious to everyone.
At first the mother resented her daughter for her betrayal, but one morning, when she saw her observing the behind of the servant girl who was leaning over the well, she understood that her anger was illogical and her expectation in vain. The night before her bat-mitzvah, the mother sneaked into her sleeping daughter’s room and cut off the glory of her braid. Next to the bed she put a boy’s suit and ordered one of the carters to teach Moshe to urinate standing up.
That night Moshe dreamed a dream little girls don’t dream, and the next day he woke up earlier than usual because of the chill at the back of his neck. He put his hand there and the feel of the stump of braid filled him with awful panic. From there, he brought his hand down and felt his groin, and the smell that stuck to his fingertips was so strange and frightening that he jumped out of bed naked. Since he didn’t find the dress he had put out in the evening, but the new trousers of a strange boy, he hid his manhood with his other hand and with bare buttocks, he ran to his mother.
But a stocky female servant was planted in the kitchen door, a black frying pan upside down in her hand, and the naked boy was driven away, attacked again and was hit, fell and got up, until he accepted the verdict and withdrew. And like all short men with broad shoulders, his weeping turned into growling and his regrets into strength. His purloined braid wasn’t returned to him, a new braid he didn’t grow, and to the kitchen of his childhood he didn’t return except in his dreams.
That week, a teacher was brought to the house to teach Moshe to pray and to read a book and all the things he hadn’t had to know as a girl. He didn’t become a great scholar, but a few years later, by the time his father died, he was an expert and experienced fellow, taking care of the family business.
Only two things remained from his childhood: he didn’t bless God for not making him a woman, and he didn’t forget his golden tresses. Sometimes, with a gesture even he himself didn’t sense, his hand went up to his scalp and came down to the back of his neck, and explored, hoping and wanting, just as he gropes around there to this day.
And sometimes he was beset by a fever of searching and would rummage in the cellar and the attic, the pantry and the linen closet, just as he searches to this day.
But the severed beautiful golden braid he didn’t find.
One day, Moshe went on family business to the wheat market in Odessa. And here, in a Greek restaurant on the street of the port, he saw a Jewish girl who was so much like him in her looks and her gestures that she seemed to have emerged from his mother’s old hopes.
Moshe understood that he was standing before his female reflection, the famous twin imprisoned in every man’s body, the twin sister every man dreams of and talks with, but only a few get to see her and even fewer to touch her.
For a whole day he walked behind her, stroked in his imagination the plaited gold of her hair, and breathed the air her body passed through, until she noticed him and laughed at him and sat with him on a park bench.
Her name was Tonya. Moshe peeled roasted pumpkin seeds and gave them to her, he pulled out his penknife and sliced Astrakhan apples for her which he had bought for the two of them, and cut her strips of the hard cheese his mother had given him for the road.
“Sister,” he told her with an excitement that didn’t suit his heavy build; “my sister that I never had.”
It was summer. The fragrances of the market were borne on the air. In the port, seagulls and ships blasted. Tonya’s face beamed with love, with sun, and with joy.
Moshe told her he wanted to bring her to his mother as a gift, and Tonya laughed and said she’d come.
A week later, Moshe returned to Odessa with two of his older brothers and took her, accompanied by her two older brothers, to his mother’s house.
When the mother saw the girl, she was flabbergasted. She called her “my daughter” at once, and six clouds immediately darkened the faces of her six daughters-in-law, for she had never called any of them “daughter.”
The widow laughed, then she wept, and finally she said that now at last she could be gathered to her husband.
And indeed, seven days after the wedding, she took leave of her sons and her daughters-in-law, and died, as was customary in the Rabinovitch family, in a bed that was taken out and set up under the linden tree in the yard. She divided her fortune and property fairly and honestly among her sons, her jewelry among her daughters-in-law, and to Tonya she bequeathed a locked wooden box, inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
Moshe, who knew what was in the box, trembled but didn’t dare say a word.
On the thirtieth day after her mother-in-law’s death, Tonya went off to a corner and there, all alone, she opened the box. The splendid childhood tresses of her husband dazzled her eyes and filled them with tears. So smooth and gleaming were the locks that they seemed to be crawling and moving by themselves.
Tonya was frightened and closed the box, and when she caught her breath, she cautiously opened it again.
“Hide his braid from him,” instructed a vague note floating on the shining waves of hair, “and give it to him only if necessary.”
WHEN THE YEAR of mourning ended, so did World War I, and Menahem Rabinovitch, Moshe’s oldest brother, came to visit with his wife Bathsheba. Menahem had immigrated to the Land of Israel before the war. He had worked in the agricultural settlements of the Galilee and Judea and ultimately settled in the Jezreel Valley. His stories and songs were so exciting, and the gigantic Cyprian carobs he brought in his bag were so plump they dripped honey on the floor and enticed Tonya and Moshe to follow him.
They immigrated to the Land of Israel and bought a house and a plot of land in Kfar David, near Menahem’s village. A gigantic eucalyptus tree stood next to their hut and Moshe wanted to cut it down immediately. But Tonya, in the first and only quarrel that broke out between them, clung to the trunk, shouted, and hit, until she repelled her husband’s axe.
In Kfar David, too, people were amazed at the resemblance between the two of them. Everybody said they looked like they were born to the same mother. Both of them were short, strong, and ravenous as bears, broad of face and neck. They were distinguished only by Moshe’s premature baldness and Tonya’s breasts.
The Rabinovitches, the neighbors added, never got tired, not even of things that everybody else was weary of—work and expectations and communal life. Moshe was equal in strength and diligence to three men and immediately acquired the nickname of “Rabinovitch the Ox.” And Tonya raised a flock of chickens; in the citrus grove, she grafted a row of fragrant pomelo trees, a fruit that wasn’t yet widespread in the country in those days; and in the yard, she planted two pomegranate trees: the sourish “Wonderful,” and the sweet “Mule’s Head.” Moshe built a baking oven in the yard and she heated it with corn husks and the bark that peeled off the big eucalyptus.
In the
good times, the villagers called them “my Tonychka” and “my Moshe,” for that was what the two of them called each other. They had a son and a daughter, Oded was the firstborn and then came Naomi, and on that rainy day, in the winter of 1930, that day when Moshe and Tonya went down to the citrus grove beyond the wadi, Oded was six and Naomi was four, and they didn’t know that by sundown they would lose their mother and their world would turn dark.
10
SOME SAY THAT the purpose of every story is to give order to reality. Not just chronological order, but also degrees of importance. Others say that every story comes into the world only to answer questions.
In school, the teacher once told us that the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden explains why we hate snakes. At the time I thought: Why make up a big story with such weighty matters as the creation of the world, the Tree of Knowledge, man, and God, simply to explain such a trite and trivial issue as hating snakes?
One way or another, my story isn’t a story of the Garden of Eden, but a small, true story. My Tree of Knowledge, big and rustling as it was, has already been cut down and is no more. The animals of my garden are cows and canaries, and the only snake I can find in it is the viper that stung Simha Yakobi in the great fire, and I’ll tell about that in a minute. His strike, too, was evil, but he didn’t have the malice or cunning of his ancient forefather.
“For me, that fire at Yakobi’s is the beginning of love,” said Jacob Sheinfeld, counting off events on his fingers; “after all, for everything you need a starting point, Zayde, even for love.
“For instance, Zayde,” he went on, “when you’ll grow up and get married, and you’ll want to give the woman you love a wedding gown, you can go to the dress shop and buy her a gown there, or you can plant a mulberry tree and grow silkworms on it, and spin the threads by yourself and weave the cloth by yourself and dye it by yourself and cut it out by yourself and sew it by yourself. You see, you decide where it all starts. You understand that, Zayde?”
I didn’t, but Jacob saw the smile of curiosity spread over my face, bent down to me, and asked again: “You like the meal?”
I looked at him. His eyes were smiling, but the terrified corners of his lips were trembling, waiting for my answer.
A child I was, a child with three living fathers and one dead mother. An illegitimate child whose belly was full of delicacies and whose heart was empty of answers.
I looked at him, I smiled, but I guarded my guilt in my heart of hearts.
11
SIMHA AND YONA YAKOBI came to the village and left it many years ago.
Simha Yakobi immigrated to Israel from St. Louis in America. There he was a locksmith and a bachelor, and here he got married and became a poultry breeder. His wife was a girl from the Galilee named Yona. Incidentally, that phrase—“a girl from the Galilee”—made quite an impression on me in my childhood, and to this day I feel a special excitement whenever a girl from the Galilee crosses my path, either in story or in fact.
It was soon evident that the first names “Simha” and “Yona” confused the villagers because both names are used for men and women, and people often called Yakobi by his wife’s name and his wife by her husband’s name, and I may be mixed up, too, maybe Simha was the girl from the Galilee and Yona the locksmith from St. Louis.
Since they kept making mistakes, they decided to call the two of them by their last name; more precisely, they called Simha “Yakobi,” and Yona “Yakoba,” or maybe vice versa. One way or another, in that great fire, the viper stung Yakobi. But the real thing, the thing that concerns Jacob Sheinfeld, was done by the fire and the snake, many years after the one was put out and the other fled.
The Yakobis’ big poultry coop was the pride of the village, and one of the attractions shown to guests. In a time when spotted Arab hens ran around in farmyards laying one tiny egg every three days and poking around in the garbage, the white American brooders of Yakobi and Yakoba sat in splendid wooden cages, lay on chutes that robbed them of their eggs with a cunning slope, and enjoyed tin basins, hanging feeding troughs, and immaculate breeding boxes.
Tragedy, as always, wasn’t impressed by all that, and swooped down on its prey by surprise. One night, terrified clucking came from the coop. Yakobi lit the kerosene lantern and rushed outside. As he entered the coop, he trod on the viper who was scaring the hens and who immediately bruised his heel.
It was spring, the season when vipers are overflowing with the venom and evil they amass throughout the winter months. Yakobi fell flat on the ground, the lantern slipped out of his hand, smashed, and set fire to the coop. Feathers and walls caught fire, clucking and smoke rose to heaven, and the snake, in the sneaky way of his kind, immediately fled.
“He did and he went away,” explained Jacob. “What other business did he have there?”
The neighbors were summoned to help, but in the raging turmoil, no one knew what had happened. Instead of looking for Yakobi, they all tried to put out the flames and rescue the brood hens. Only after it was all over did Yakoba find her husband lying among the smoldering firebrands and the singed carcasses of the birds. By some miracle, only his hand and leg were seared, but smoke had gotten into his lungs and the snake’s venom almost killed him.
His size, his strength, and his good fortune saved Yakobi from death. But he never really recovered. He lost his power and his energy, refused to work, and all day long he hummed a children’s song whose monotonous tones irritated the entire village.
Yakoba, determined and diligent, tried to run the farm on her own, but weeds and thorns grew in the garden, the yard became a garbage pen, the four cows stopped giving milk and were sold to Globerman one after another, and the afflicted man didn’t leave his wife alone.
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.
FOR MONTHS THE YAKOBIS’ 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 bla
ck 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.
