by Meir Shalev
“Don’t go,” Judith implored. “Don’t go. We’ll manage. Everything will be fine.”
Her hand found the knot of the blue kerchief on her head and tightened it. Dread and prophecy were in her voice. But that man, whose name I mustn’t remember, didn’t heed her terror. The journey was already seeping into his body and sealing his skin.
Short, with blurred features, he is drawn on the inside of my eyelids: he packs a few clothes in a small wooden suitcase, takes the provisions of poor travelers—hard white cheese, oranges, bread, and olives—takes leave of his wife and daughter, and goes to Jaffa. Here’s Mother, leaning on the doorpost. Here’s the little girl, leaning on her leg, my half-sister, but faceless like her father.
In Jaffa, he bought himself a cheap, deck-passenger ticket and went down to the little ship that took Shamuti oranges and sweet lemons to England.
It was a gray day, but the smell of sun latent in the oranges rose from the belly of the ship and accompanied the passengers, intensifying their regrets and remorse.
From Liverpool the man sailed for New York. Scared and in a hurry, he walked from the docks of the Hudson to Grand Central Station, and because in a foreign land his pride was diminished, he walked around in its enormous labyrinths calling out, “Wilmington, Wilmington,” in the loud chirp of the helpless, until good people showed him the way to the ticket window and the platform.
The train slipped along in the belly of the earth for a while. Then it burst into the light, rumbled over a big river, and crossed a strip of reeds and swamps, the sort of thing the man hadn’t expected to see in America. He sat by the window, counted the electrical poles as if he were scattering crumbs to show him the way back, and murmured to himself the names of the cities that passed by: Newark … New Brunswick … Trenton … Philadelphia … And three hours later, when the conductor shouted Wilmington, he hurried off.
He trudged from chimney to chimney and didn’t find his friend’s foundry. But he scouted and asked and found Columbus Street, where his friend had told him he lived, and he reached the house, whose number he remembered.
A fine house surrounded with a fragrant wall of trimmed finta bushes, and even though a Dutch clothing merchant lived there, the man thought it looked exactly how a Jewish foundry owner’s house should look. He hoisted his hand and knocked on the door.
Fate decreed that on that very day the Dutch merchant had made a lot of money. He was in such a good mood that, when he saw the strange guest, he was struck with generosity, invited him in, and fed him a marvelous dinner of steamed fish and potatoes, seasoned with butter and nutmeg.
I often thought how strange it was that Uncle Menahem and Oded Rabinovitch and Jacob Sheinfeld knew all those small details they didn’t witness. Did Oded hate my mother so much in his childhood that he embroidered her world with such precision? Did Jacob roll her chronicles around in his imagination so much that he created them anew? Did so much contrition fill the body of Uncle Menahem after her death? And if those potatoes had been seasoned with sour cream, coarse salt, and chopped dill, and not with that butter and nutmeg, would my mother’s life have been changed because of it? And me, would I have been born?
One way or another, the Dutch merchant and my mother’s husband drank aquavit with laurel berries, and after dinner they smoked thin cigars and played checkers. The host explained to his guest that his great-grandfather had built that house, and his grandfather, his father, and himself had been born in it, here, my good friend, in this very bed, and that in every city in America you could find a street named Columbus, and that Jews, you must know, my dear sir from Palestine, are not likely to have anything to do with steel foundries. In short, he hinted affably and politely that his friend from the Hebrew Brigades was nothing but a liar.
And indeed, that comrade-in-arms was simply a small fabricator seeking honor, the son of haberdashery peddlers from Chicago, who had never seen Wilmington except in the atlas. Like most liars, he hadn’t investigated the falsehood, and some time later, as Uncle Menahem mocked him, he immigrated to the Land of Israel, introduced himself as “the adjutant of Ze’ev Jabotinsky in the bloody battles of the Jordan Valley,” rented a room in Tel Aviv, and made a living from dispatching articles titled “Letters of a Pioneer from the Galilee,” to revisionist newspapers in America.
At any rate, the Dutch merchant, goodhearted with drink, gave his guest some old clothes and a loaf of seven-grain bread heavy and fragrant as a baby, and put a few addresses and letters of recommendation into his hand, and after trudging around some more and pleading some more, my mother’s first husband became a guard in a department store that sold cheap goods.
There he rose to the high priesthood, from guard became a messenger and from a messenger became a salesman, and in a short time he became head of a department. Then he bought himself some brown and white shoes, became friendly with small liquor dealers, and started smoking cigarettes. Thus it happened that the one year in America, which promised not to be more than two years in a steel foundry, stretched into three years of smoking and selling.
Nevertheless, the man didn’t forget his wife Judith. Once a month he sent her a letter and a little money, and he didn’t stop this practice of his even when she stopped answering his letters. About the two women who loved him in Wilmington he didn’t write her because he knew his wife well and knew that she was graced with common sense and the power to guess. But from the two women, the man didn’t conceal a thing. Over and over, he told them he had a wife and daughter in the Land of Israel and would be going back to them.
15
Shlaf meyn meydele, meyn kleyne
Shlaf meyn kind, un her tsikh tsu
Ot dos feygele dos kleyne
Iz keyn andere vie du.
MY MOTHER WOULD sing that song to Naomi.
Oded would get mad. Naomi would enjoy it. Moshe was silent. I wasn’t born yet.
Earlier, I imagine, she would sing the song to her daughter, afterward to herself, and the words waited inside her until they found a new little girl.
“That means, Zayde, that you’ve got a half-sister in America,” Oded told me a few years after her death.
We were riding in the village milk truck then, on one of those night trips I went along on.
“I wish I had, too,” added Oded.
Oded dreams a lot about America and American trucks and American roads and American women, and a whole wall of his house is covered with all the road maps of the United States, which he cut out of the Rand-McNally Atlas and covered with plastic sheets. For hours he stands facing them, memorizing routes, sticking pins and flags, and preparing trips for an imaginary fleet, heavy and many-wheeled.
“You see this highway, Zayde? That’s highway number ten. In America, they call such a highway an interstate. See this stretch, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, all the way to Phoenix, Arizona? Right here is the biggest truck stop in the world. With everything you need: diesel, food, beer, and oil. As we say: fill up the car and the man. Five hundred heavy trucks come there every day.”
“So why don’t you just go to America?” I asked him.
“That’s all I need,” replied Oded, “to make my dreams come true.”
“She’s pulling to the right,” he added, stopped, and got out to check the wheels. We walked around the tanker, Oded hit the tires with a big wooden hammer and listened to the tones. He lingered at one of them, spit on his finger, poured the saliva on the mouth of the valve, and carefully examined the bubbles.
“A little bit of air is escaping,” he said. “Who needs that trouble, to make dreams come true?… What do you think, I don’t know that America’s not a hundred percent good as I imagine? At some time, every little boy wants to be a truck driver when he grows up, and a lot of grown-ups still dream of that, too. But only an idiot like me makes it come true. Remind me in an hour to stop and check that valve again.”
TWO YEARS OLD that daughter was when her father went, and by the time he came back she was five. A pret
ty little girl she was, stiff of neck and hard of eye; in her hands she grasped a rag doll and didn’t recognize the small, splendid man who came into the old Turkish duck coop, smiled, waved a bundle of money, and called out: “I came to take you to America!”
If the little girl hadn’t grown, you might think he had been gone only half an hour, since, when he came in, her mother had been sitting in the same chair at the same table and picking over lentils, which, as lentils are, were much like the lentils she had been picking over the day he left. That same deep line was still plowed between her eyebrows, and that same offensive stench of coops was in the air, and the small heaps, the gray one and the brown one, were piling up in front of her like an hourglass that had stopped.
He wanted to go to her, but Judith stood up, and with a heaviness that amazed her husband, she stood the little girl in front of her, as if to defend herself, and perhaps to be hidden behind the little body. Her fingers stroked the child’s back with scared, long strokes, and the man noticed her new, big belly which rounded before his eyes.
“You’re pregnant,” he exclaimed joyously, and suddenly his own words struck him, and the mocking awareness that he hadn’t been home in three years, and he understood the cry for help of her first letters and the coolness of the middle ones, and the lack of the last ones, and the eyes of the landlord, which were lowered to the ground when he came in, and the ugly course of the crow who landed from the tree like a black rag and croaked derisively at him.
His knees buckled, but he recovered immediately. He quickly put his money in his pocket, grabbed his daughter’s hand, and said to her: “Come, Daddy will take you to America.”
“I want to take my doll,” said the child with a quiet and a coolness that surprised both her parents.
“No need,” said the man. “You’ll have a new doll, you don’t need to take anything from here. Come, now.”
He turned to leave and the child left her doll and followed him.
Judith didn’t lift her eyes. Her stroking hand remained hanging in the air. Dread riveted her to the spot. She bent her neck a bit and the expectation of a blow trembled at the base of her spine.
Before he closed the door, my mother’s first husband turned his face, smiled with the affability of American salesmen, spat on the floor, and said to her: “Shmutzige pirde!”—a curse so abominable it can’t be translated even by someone whose mother tongue is Yiddish. Even Globerman, whose daily bread is coarseness, cleared his throat a bit before he explained it to me in its full sharpness.
The man closed the gate of the yard, crossed the neighbor’s vegetable field as the neighbor was crawling on his knees in the red loam mud and pretending to be deep in his onions and carrots, and disappeared with his daughter beyond the wall of cypresses. On the road, he stopped a little truck coming from Ras-El-Ayn, stuck a dollar bill in the hand of the amazed driver, and ordered him to take them straight to the port of Jaffa.
IN THE EVENING, Judith’s lover came and saw her white and alone, her head like a stone among the lentils scattered around.
“He came back?” he whispered.
Judith didn’t answer because the man was talking on her deaf side.
“And took her?” he shouted.
“Came back and took her,” she wailed.
“I’ll go after him, I’ll catch him, I’ll bring her back to you!” The man got excited.
Judith looked at him. The warmth of his body, the fury of his heart, which had won her and helped her in the time of her loneliness, now seemed miserable to her like a field of stubble.
“Don’t go after him, don’t catch him, don’t bring back the child,” she said. “It’s not your games, you men.”
In front of her closed eyes stretched the empty prophecy of her life. “The child didn’t recognize him,” she finally groaned. “But she went with him without a word to me. Not even good-bye.”
The man sat down next to her, put his arm around her, cradled her head in the hollow of his neck, and put his hand on her belly button.
“Now it’s us, Judith,” he whispered. “You and me, and soon we’ll have a new little girl.”
“Yes,” said Judith. “I’ll have a new little girl.”
A great cool force suddenly filled her whole body. A month and a half later she gave birth without a shout and without surprise to a big, beautiful boy who was already dead.
“We’ll go there and find her,” said her lover over the grave of the stillborn baby, and once again he started shouting. “We’ll go to court. You can’t simply take a child away from a mother like that. In America there’s a law.”
“We won’t go there, the verdict has already been passed and carried out,” said Judith. Her lover looked at her and was terrified because he saw the hardness rising from her flesh, climbing the capillaries of her body, and sinking like chalk in the cracks of her skin. He saw and knew that he had to leave her alone.
16
SO THAT’S HOW the lying Revisionist from the Hebrew Brigades changed things, and if you’re interested in questions of “if” and “what if,” as I am and as they are in me, you’ll find diversions of Chance and Fate here to respond to. For if he really did have a foundry in Wilmington, my mother’s first husband would have gone back home on time and I wouldn’t have come into the world, and if I had come, I would have had one father, and they would have given me another name and the Angel of Death would have caught up with me long ago.
Uncle Menahem, who saw my childish occupation as the irony of fate, told me a wonderful story about the three brothers, If, What If, and What If Not, who walk every night in the traces of the Angel of Sleep. “The Malakh-fun-shlof puts people to sleep, and the brothers If, What If, and What If Not wake them up, dance around them in a ring of questions, and don’t let them sleep anymore.”
But the dealer Globerman, whose nocturnal tranquillity is not injured by any issue, exertion, remorse, or regret, repeated his motto to me: “A mensh trakht un Gott lakht—man makes plans and God laughs.” That is: questions will be asked, answers will be given, the three brothers will dance over my unsleeping eyes—the same as for Judith, for she never saw her daughter again until the day she died.
SO I’VE GOT a half-sister somewhere in big America, and not even her name ever appeared on our mother’s lips. And if I asked and persisted about her, Mother’s standard line stopped me: “A nafka mina.”
The ship sailing from Jaffa took the father and his daughter to Genoa. There they stayed a few days in a cheap hotel that stank of fish, anise, and garlic, and big cats sat in geranium boxes on the balcony like nesting birds.
From there they sailed to Lisbon and from there to Rotterdam and from there to America and because of the other passengers in their cabin who lay in their bunks all day, laughed in strange languages, played cards, and reeked of vomit and sweat and filth and tobacco—they walked along the deck rail a lot.
Meanwhile, as will often happen to such men, the little girl had already changed from a plundered prize to a hindrance to him, and his anger and desire for revenge weren’t satisfied, and their murmurs even overcame the roar of the waves, and the man would smack his daughter’s face hard. Such smacks were so fast and short that no one noticed them and no one heard the ugly words that were sprayed out with them: “Punkt vi deyne mame di kurve—just like your mama, the whore.” And if I may once again be permitted to say something about the heroes of my life and the creations of my imagination, I will say that if it were up to me, we wouldn’t meet that despicable man again. If he had stayed with them, he might have become the hero of this story and another son would have told it, but since he did what he did, he exiled himself from my chronicles and spared me the need to unfurl the rest of his history.
And as for my mother’s forgotten lover, I know neither his name nor where he came from, and since three fathers is enough for me, I don’t even look for him. But once, about fifteen years after Mother died, on one of my visits to Naomi in Jerusalem, she pointed out an old m
an who was very stooped, looked like an upside down L, and was leaning on two wooden canes, stumbling down the street of BeitHaKerem in Jerusalem, not far from the teachers’ seminary.
“See that man? He was your mother’s lover,” she said.
And if the shock of such a sentence isn’t enough, that was the first and only time I understood that Naomi also knew something about Mother’s history.
How did she know that was the man? I don’t know.
Why did she decide to tell me he was the man? I don’t know that, either.
Should I have been offended? Naomi, who sensed my embarrassment, said: “Let’s go back to the house, Zayde, and make a big salad like we used to eat at home.”
I always bring her vegetables and eggs from the village, and a jar of sour cream and slices of cheese, and I always come to her at night, in the big milk truck, driven by Oded.
I’ve grown up, Oded has gotten old, yet I still love those nighttime trips with him and his stories and his complaints and his dreams, which he shouts to overcome the roar of the motor.
The roads have become wider, the trucks pass by one after another, but the nights remain cool as they were, and Oded still vilifies the man who married his sister and took her away from the village, and he still asks me: “You want to honk, Zayde?” And once again I put out my hand to the horn cord, and once again I’m jolted and softened when its bleating rises, enormous and gloomy, into the night air.
Two little children were skipping around that stooped man and a horrible hidden burden lay on his shoulders. But who would assure me that that burden was my mother? And who doesn’t bear such burdens? For against the few men who loved her is a whole world of people who didn’t know her, and every one of them tottered down his street, and every one is bent over like an upside down L, bowing under the load of his soul.
