by Meir Shalev
In the house, there were still a few jars of jam that Tonya had made the summer before her death, and no one remembered they were there. But Moshe, in his grim search for his braid, found them in some corner and brought them to the kitchen. Oded swooped down on them and that very evening, his father discovered him in the cowshed, all smeared with jam and twitching like a poisoned jackal from so much sweetness.
“It’s good,” said Oded, and offered him a spoonful. “Open your mouth, Father, and close your eyes.”
Without thinking, like everyone who was once a child, Moshe shut his eyes and opened his mouth, and Oded stuck on his tongue a spoonful of jam that scalded his throat and pressed tears out of his closed eyes.
Naomi, who followed him into the cowshed unnoticed, looked at the two of them and shuddered.
“Want some, too?” asked Oded, and offered her the spoon. “Mother’s jam, eat some.”
But Naomi was suddenly filled with the vague, mute rage of orphanhood, and before they could stop her, she snatched the jar and smashed it on the concrete floor of the cowshed, and then fled into the yard.
20
Ess, meyn kind.”
His hand put another plate before me, and on its return, it dared to stroke my head.
Jacob never called me “my son,” but only “meyn kind,” as if Yiddish intimidated him less. As for me, I didn’t call any of my fathers “father,” not in any language.
Globerman often scolded me for not calling him father, but Jacob didn’t care. He asked me only one thing, not to call him by his last name—Sheinfeld—like everybody else, but only by his first name.
“Now I’m gonna tell you a story about another Jacob so you’ll understand,” he said. “Not about Our Father Jacob, the one all us Jacobs is named after, but about another Jacob Sheinfeld, who was the brother of the father of my grandfather. In our family, in every single generation there’s a Jacob Sheinfeld, the Sheinfeld stays and the Jacobs change. If I told you how that Jacob Sheinfeld made a living, you’ll laugh. He was a soap taster. Did you ever see how they make soap, Zayde? They got a big vat, big as this room, and they pour into it all kinds of filth and ashes and fat from dead animals, and it all stinks and boils on the fire, and bubbles come up from that porridge, bubbles big as watermelons, and if you ever saw that nauseating stuff, you’ll never want to wash with soap again in your life. And that’s what he’d taste. Again you laugh? When I was little, if a boy said naughty words, they’d wash his mouth out with soap to punish him, but in the factory they got to taste the soap porridge so they should know when to turn off the fire, or else all the soap wouldn’t come out right. How do they know? That’s a secret. It’s not written in any book. A thing like that is written only on the tongue and the memory of the specialist. He’ll smell and he’ll taste and he’ll make faces and he’ll say what’s missing, and finally he’ll say: ‘Itzt! Now!’ And then right away they got to turn off the fire. And you had to taste from the middle of the vat, not from the sides, and so that Jacob Sheinfeld would hang like this on the rope like a monkey over the boiling vat and put in a spoon, and taste on the tip of his tongue and spit it out and say whether to wait or to put out the fire. With them, the profession would be passed down from father to son, but that Jacob Sheinfeld was an old bachelor and he didn’t have no children, and when he started to get old, the owner comes to him and says the time has come for you to teach somebody how to taste the soap. See, if, God forbid, something should happen to you, who would give the sign and say the ‘Itzt’? Jacob Sheinfeld hears that and he don’t say a word. And the next day he comes to work like every day, hangs on the rope over the boiling vat of soap, tastes, spits, and says: What this needs is a little bit of fat from an old carcass, and before anybody can figure that out, he lets go of the rope and falls into the boiling vat of soap. Will you eat something sweet now, Zayde? I’m sorry I told you that story now. I maybe should have waited a few years. I maybe should have told it to you at our next meal. Now I’m gonna make you something sweet that I once learned from an Italian man.”
He stood up quickly, as if he wanted to wipe out the impression of his story.
“Very simple. Now all we got to have is an egg yolk, wine, and sugar. Come to the sink with me and watch.”
Into the palm of his hand, he broke an egg, poured the white between his spread fingers, and then bounced the yolk gently in the concave surface of his palm.
“See, Zayde?” he said. “It don’t break and it don’t spill. That’s how it is when the egg is fresh and the yolk is strong.”
He separated two more yolks like that and put them in a bowl, added a little sugar and some fragrant wine.
“What’s better than a mixture like that? The yolk is food from mother and the memory of life, and the wine is the soul and the future, and the sugar is the lust and the strength.”
The whisk was a blur and became a silver circle with so much speed, and Jacob put the bowl on the pot of boiling water and went on beating. “That smells a lot better than soap and it tastes a lot better than soap and one day I’ll teach you how to make it. You understand what I’m talking about, Zayde?” He took the bowl out, stuck a finger in it, and told me to do the same.
“That’s what the Italians do.” He licked his finger with pleasure. “You like it? Eh? Me, too. Rabinovitch gives you something sweet at home?”
“Not much,” I said.
In those days, people didn’t eat a lot of sweets. At Rabinovitch’s house, we sweetened our bread only with jam, and with our tea, we bit on a sugar cube. To this day, that’s how I drink tea, because then bitter and sweet aren’t blended with one another, but exist side by side.
Moshe, who regarded a yearning for cake or chocolate as a sign of corruption, used to tell me that in his childhood his parents’ home was so poor that when they drank tea they would hang one sugar cube on a string over the table.
“And you dipped it in the cup?” I asked.
Moshe smiled with the pride of the poor. “No,” he said. “We would drink the tea and look at the sugar.”
“Don’t believe my father, Zayde,” Naomi told me. “They had tons of money in Russia. They had forests and warehouses, and a mill and businesses, and my father, when he was a boy, ate more sweets than all his children put together, and that includes you, too, Zayde.”
21
SOFT AND PERSISTENT, the rain fell, fell without stopping. Moshe made burlap hoods for himself and his children, and he built a small wooden sled shaped like a shallow trough, with a tin-lined bottom. Every evening he put the milk cans in it and dragged it through the mud to the dairy, and every evening, after he chatted there with the other farmers about this and that and the other thing, he went to fetch his children from the warehouse manager’s house.
The kids sat with the empty cans in the sled and were dragged home. The first few times, they laughed and shouted, “Giddyap, Father, giddyap!” But they soon grew short-tempered and Moshe’s patience gave out, too. The straps of the sled cut the muscles of his shoulders. His firm, short legs got stuck in the mud and were pulled out of it with a nauseating noise. Every day he worked in the yard and the field, and in the evening, he no longer responded to his children’s pleas and didn’t play the “awful bear” with them, but lay on his belly and groaned until Naomi came and walked on his back with her little stockinged feet, kneading and soothing his flesh with her heels.
Then the children went to sleep and Moshe boiled some eggs and cooked potatoes in their skin, crumbled laundry soap into flakes, lit a bonfire in the yard, and boiled Oded’s stinking wet sheets. He cleaned and tidied up and searched for his braid, and didn’t go to bed until after midnight, his limbs languid and his spirit sullen.
That was a year of blessing, but not on the Rabinovitch farm. There were two miscarriages in the cowshed, a marten found a crack in the wall of the hatchery and murdered scores of chicks, the drainage in the orchard didn’t work, and rainy days clogged the roots of some trees.
By d
ay Moshe tramped around in the soil of his fields and at night his dreams dug through to his wife’s grave, touched her bones, brought up the wooden and mother-of-pearl box, stroked the golden braid, and drew strength from it.
Then the dreams stopped and returned to their cages and Moshe woke up, for Oded came to his bed and pressed against his body. He waited until the child fell asleep, and then he got up and took him back to the bed he shared with Naomi. But Oded would wake up again, and his father would hear the squeak of the bed again, and the jam spoon striking like a clapper against the side of the jar, and the drumming of the little feet coming back to him and climbing into his bed.
And in the morning, Moshe woke up, his skin soaked with the cold childish urine of orphanhood and neglect, and his heart entreating and shouting: Where was Tonya, his wife—his twin? And where were his embroidered little dresses? His amputated plaits of hair? The tresses of his childhood and his strength?
22
AND SO IN 1930, in Kfar David in the Jezreel Valley, there was a widowed farmer who had to plow and milk and cook and sew and play a game with his children and read them a story. And get up every night to make sure the blankets hadn’t slipped off them, and send them to school every morning, washed and combed and sated, and bury his face every day in his dead wife’s clothes, bats of fabric and memory hanging in the cave of their closet—and, great as his physical strength was, it didn’t help him at all.
And in the colony of Petakh-Tikva, or maybe Rishon Le-Zion, there was a poor, deserted woman whose little girl was taken away from her, and her heart was shriveled in her rib cage and the tears melted burrows in her flesh.
“So what’s the big deal here?” asked Jacob Sheinfeld, and cleared the big plates from the table. “See, now everything’s clear, Fate wanted that encounter.”
And indeed, from then on, it was only a question of time until my mother got to the village.
“And I ask you, Zayde: for that you take a little girl away from her mother? For that you drown another woman in the wadi?”
Encounters like that, he added bitterly, Fate doesn’t tend to leave in the hand of Chance or even in the hand of Luck. It was the hand of Uncle Menahem that was entrusted with what was going to happen.
Uncle Menahem heard about Judith and was sensitive enough and smart enough to talk to Moshe about her, to tell him what he had to know and to leave out what needed to be left out, and afterward he also took the trouble to go to her. He wanted to keep that secret, but Bathsheba raised an awful fuss in the middle of the village and shouted that her husband “is going to jump on a new hoor.”
Menahem proposed to Judith to come to Kfar David and work for his brother, where she would find bread to eat and clothes to wear and a house to live in and children to raise and cows to milk and pots to scour and a man to drink tea with, and to look into his eyes to read his brow.
“It’ll be good for both of you,” he told her.
But neither Moshe nor Judith was eager to accept his proposal. Each of them withdrew into the armor of grief and both of them said “maybe,” and “what for,” and “we’ll see,” and other such wary words, as if their hearts prophesied it but advised: “Wait!”
A YEAR HAD PASSED since Tonya’s death and it was almost Purim. Closets and trunks were opened, fabrics were pulled out, dye and trimmings were prepared. The big Purim costume contest was held, and three candidates made it to the final stage.
The first was a vague bluish figure calling itself “King of the Indian Ocean.”
The second was the albino bookkeeper, who surprised the whole village just by participating. He dressed up as “a young girl doing laundry in the river,” and mounted the stage with bare knees, whose mottled redness stood out in his white skin, clutching a laundry basket in one arm and a washboard in the other, and he never took his pink eyes off Jacob Sheinfeld.
The third, of course, was the Village Papish. Every year, the Village Papish surprised everybody with his original costume, and that year he dressed as “Siamese Twins.” He made up his eyes and wrapped himself in colorful rags, and to the great joy of the audience, he announced that his twin suffered from stagefright and had stayed home. But the ovation was immediately interrupted and the audience fell silent, for suddenly Tonya Rabinovitch also appeared and climbed up on the stage.
In simple, everyday clothes, the deceased woman thrust her way in and stood among the trio of competitors. She looked so much like herself that the master of ceremonies wanted to tell her to get off the stage because she wasn’t in costume, but everyone immediately moaned in horror and anger because they remembered that she was already dead and they understood that it was Moshe Rabinovitch, who had dressed up in memory of his wife. They looked so much alike that all the widower had to do was put on the dead woman’s dress, stick a pair of big wool balls in it, and put a kerchief on his head.
“Get down, Rabinovitch, get off the stage,” someone shouted.
“You should be ashamed of yourself!” the Village Papish scolded him between clenched Siamese teeth.
But Tonya stared at him with the fearless eyes of the dead, came close to him until he backed off; she wiped her hands on her apron with that familiar gesture neither death nor time could erase, and said in a thick voice: “Right away, I’m going to call my Moshe and he’ll make mincemeat out of you.”
“Get off! Beast!” shouted the audience. There were also whistles and a few angry men came to the front of the auditorium.
Tonya dropped a few curtsies with a bearish grace and got off the stage. Like a heavy blade, she plowed through the audience and left the celebration, and the people immediately fell apart into small, grumbling groups, who also hurried off.
At home, Moshe didn’t take off his dead wife’s dress. He searched in closets, rummaged in corners, plucked the hair off the back of his neck, and shouted at the wooden walls. The children looked at him in fear and didn’t say a thing.
At last he went out to his rock, clasped it in his arms, and picked it up, pressed to the woolen breasts and the mighty muscles underneath them, and paced with it in a circle of roars and growls, until he dropped it back in its place.
“What can I tell you, Zayde? That really was a great tragedy, because besides the mourning and the regrets, there’s also the pity they had for him here. And in human beings, the distance between pity and cruelty is very small, and so they started talking behind his back of how miserable he was, and from there to talking about how he was crazy is also very small, and here in the village everybody tries to act how the group thinks of him. So because of that I act today like a dummy and Rabinovitch acted then like a crazy man and we’ll wait and see how you’re gonna act, too, someday.”
And on one of the following nights, Rabinovitch went to the Village Papish’s yard, grabbed a goose by the neck, and carried it out of there. He wrung his victim’s neck, poured its blood on the ground, stripped off its skin, lit a bonfire of bark and twigs, which were always piled up at the trunk of the eucalyptus, and put Tonya’s big black pot on it. When the pot was heated, Moshe put the pieces of skin in it, turned them over and over, and now and then he poured the melted fat into a big bowl at the side. He did that until the strips of skin shriveled and turned a nice brown and then he sprinkled them in the bowl of hardening fat.
At dawn he ran to the bakery and brought a loaf of bread, tore pieces from it, and dipped them in the shmaltz, which hadn’t really hardened, and ate them like a maniac, with the scorched and brittle crusts of skin.
Not from hunger and not from revenge or repentance did he do what he did, but because of his grief, which refused to abate, and because of his flesh, which refused to be consoled.
The tears melted the lump in his throat, the fat mixed with the leaven of regrets in his guts, and he began wailing and vomiting. The sounds woke Naomi, who came and stood over him and she, too, began weeping with panic.
And when Oded also came, wet with urine and all stinking, and said, “I made in my bed again, Fat
her”—Moshe got up from the ground and shouted: “Why? Why? How much do I need to wash up all your stink?” And suddenly he swung his hand and slapped the little boy’s face.
The good smell of the shmaltz drew many of the villagers into Rabinovitch’s yard. They gathered around the big black kettle and understood where their dreams of the old country had come from and woke them up. Unfortunately, they also saw the awful blow Moshe had struck his son.
Everyone was astonished. Rabinovitch never raised his hand against anyone. Only once did he bring down a butcher, one of the coarse friends of Globerman the cattle trader. That butcher was known for being able to cut the thigh bone of a bull with one blow of his axe, and he came to challenge Moshe’s rock and pick it up from the ground. When he couldn’t do it, he was filled with wrath, and instead of kicking the rock and breaking his big toe, as people usually did, he tried to drag Moshe into a wrestling match and was immediately pinned to the ground.
Now that Oded was slumped against the trunk of the eucalyptus with his eyes rolled up and white and his body sagging, Moshe turned pale, hurried over to pick him up, and cradled him in his arms. But Naomi shrieked: “Don’t touch him! Don’t touch him!” And Oded came to and wiggled out of his father’s arms and clung to his sister and to the eucalyptus in turn.
Beyond the fence, the people were whispering to one another, and Rabinovitch, wanting to get away from them and from the terrified eyes of his children, ran to the haystack, pounded it with his fists and kicked the bales of hay, rummaged around among them and threw them all over until they came undone into flying packs before the amazed eyes of the cows and he himself lay supine on the ground.
