by Meir Shalev
“How much do you want for this carcass?” he asked at last, and they grasped each other’s wrist and the ceremony began.
“Seventy pounds?” shouted Globerman, and hit the butcher’s hand hard.
“Thirty-five!” twanged the butcher, and hit Globerman’s hand.
“Sixty-eight!” exclaimed Globerman, and struck the butcher’s hand.
“Forty!” exclaimed the butcher, and his hand whipped the dealer’s hand.
“Sixty-five!” replied the dealer with a loud smack.
Those sounds were very loud. Small grimaces of pain crossed the faces of the two hagglers.
“Forty-three and a half!”
“Sixty-four!”
“Forty-six!”
There was a brief silence. The two of them looked at one another; their hands were red by now and wanted to part.
“Benemones Parnussa?” asked Globerman.
“Benemones Parnussa,” the butcher agreed.
They dropped their hands and rubbed their tormented palms.
“Fine,” said the butcher. “May you have seven pounds from it, you thief.”
“Fifty-nine pounds,” said Globerman.
The butcher paid, Globerman took his rope off the cow and put it back in its regular place on his shoulder, and said to me: “The minute he said ‘and a half,’ I knew it would end with Benemones Parnussa,” and we left.
“You understood what happened here?” he went on. “You know what Benemones Parnussa is?”
“No.”
The soykher nodded his head at me: “Listen. Benemones Parnussa means a decent living. If the butcher and I can’t agree on the price, he says how much I deserve to make on the cow. If I bought it for fifty-two pounds, and he says Benemones Parnussa, seven pounds, then he’s got to give me fifty-nine pounds.”
“So why didn’t you tell him you bought it for fifty-five?”
“No. Lying is forbidden.”
“Lying is forbidden? That’s what your father taught you back then and you’re teaching me now?”
“Fleysh handler un fish handler un ferd handler, those are professions without much honor, but they are passed down from father to son,” said Globerman. “And if you want to be a dealer, you should know that we also have principles in life. You can lie about everything. Cheat about the weight, cheat about the health, cheat about the age. We give it water and feed it salt and starve it and fatten it and loosen its bowels and stick a nail in its leg and make it glatt on our own tukhis. But with Benemones Parnussa we are forbidden to lie, period.”
25
I ENJOYED THOSE LESSONS and stories and trips, but I didn’t want to be a cattle dealer.
I read books, I worked on the farm with Moshe Rabinovitch, I went back to observing the crows, and I struck up an affectionate relation with a girl from the nearby agricultural school, who worked at fattening geese for the Village Papish and looked so fertile and dangerous that I didn’t let her touch me below the belt.
In those days, I started to suffer from insomnia. I didn’t understand where it came from, from inside my body or from outside it, but I did remember what Mother used to say—that the Angel of Death is orderly and very careful, and the Malakh-fun-shlof, the Angel of Sleep, is forgetful and lying and you can’t count on his promises.
I took advantage of the insomnia to prepare for the university. I spent many nights lying and reading and reciting—my yellow wooden bird hanging over me, hovering eternally, and a small lamp at the head of my bed.
And at dawn, when at last the book dropped onto my face and I fell asleep, Rabinovitch would come into my room, grope in the dark, explore and seek, and I would wake up.
He paid no heed to me, peeped in the closets, rummaged in the kitchen shelves, opened cans and jars.
“What are you looking for there, Moshe?” I finally asked him, even though I knew what the answer would be.
“Der tsop,” he replied. “The braid.”
In his voice, the force repressed in the hard fibers of his flesh and the feeblemindedness that was to attack him in old age were embroidered together, and even then were twined in his voice like a thin prophecy.
“Der tsop,” he repeated in that voice which was many years older than its owner’s body. “Where is the braid Mother cut off me? My Tonychka didn’t tell you where it is?”
I shuddered. I knew, of course, that the living miss their dead, converse with them, and weep for their loss, but I didn’t know that the dead also act like that with their live loved ones.
Even today, when the braid has been found, he again comes to me at night and again I am terrified by his words. Nothing has changed: I am still lying there and reading, and the Malakh-fun-shlof still tarries, and Rabinovitch still comes in, mutters, “Der tsop … der tsop …” and seeks the braid that “Mother cut off me.”
IT’S STRANGE TO SEE such an old man saying “mother.” But I don’t tell him that and I don’t remind him that I didn’t know his mother and that I was born years after his Tonychka died. He’s an old man, and why should I disturb his last days with inane details? So old that I don’t bother to hide the braid from him. First his mother hid it, then his wife, and now, when it is out in the open, it’s his own forgetting that conceals it from him.
Jacob is dead now, Globerman is dead now, Mother is dead now, and Moshe is still alive. His memory has grown weak, his legs are heavy, but his arms are still as strong as an iron vise.
Every day, like a hunter returning to the carcass of the lion, he goes off to the gigantic stump of the eucalyptus he cut down in the yard, walks around it and examines it carefully, and plucks out every green shoot that has sprouted from it.
“That’s your punishment, murderer,” he mutters to the tree trunk. “Not to die completely, you won’t, but not to sprout again, either, you won’t!”
Then he sits down on the stump, puts a wooden board across his lap, and on the board he heaps up crooked, rusty nails he gathered in the yard and on the street. And even though I’m used to that sight by now, I still don’t believe my eyes when old Rabinovitch straightens the nails by pressing them with his thick fingers and then puts them in another pile. Afterward, he polishes them with sand and used motor oil until they gleam again as on the day they were born.
I GET OUT of bed, take the wood and mother-of-pearl box from its usual, open place on the shelf, and open it.
“Here’s the braid.”
The gold of the hair glows in the dark. Rabinovitch puts out a coarse, shaking hand and says: “A shayne maydele, eh, Zayde?” And strokes his own tresses.
Then he tells me: “Close the box, Zayde, and don’t hide it from me no more.”
Zayde closes, and Rabinovitch goes, and silence reigns once again.
26
THE INVITATION TO the second meal came to me from Jacob’s taxi driver, who used to take him wherever he wanted to go. The driver came to the Rabinovitch farm, knocked on the door of the cowshed, and handed me an envelope.
In those days, Jacob was living outside the village, on Oak Street in nearby Tivon, in the big house that is now mine. We often saw his taxi waiting in the shade of the casuarina on the highway, and him sitting there at the village bus stop, saying his “come in, come in” to people and cars. He didn’t go into the village anymore.
I decided to walk to him. I left the village in the morning, after milking and breakfast, so I could take my time, linger on the way to my heart’s content, and get to him before sundown.
It was an early autumn day. On the taut electrical wires along the road, hundreds of swallows were strung, like notes in a music book. The dust of the road had been tamped down by a thousand summer wheels, and bundles of flying stubble were borne in the air.
The first rain hadn’t yet fallen and the water in the bed of the wadi was so low that fish skeletons were already emerging in the dry mud of the banks. The few that survived gathered together in some hollows and were so easy to catch that the crows and cowbirds pecked them as adro
itly as kingfishers. Raspberries grew in abundance here, winked black, ripe end-of-summer eyes at me, and I, in my enthusiasm, ripped my shirt on the hooks of their thorns.
I walked along the wadi to the experimental farm near the village. At that time, the agronomists there were busy growing spices, and tantalizing smells of food frequently rose from there.
I crossed the small valley beyond the farm and climbed north on the path between the big oaks, remnants of the forest that once covered the hills. Under one of them I lay down to rest and drink the water I had brought along.
The place wasn’t strange to me. Two forests accompanied my childhood. The forest close by was the forest of eucalyptus that came between us and the slaughterhouse. A few pairs of crows nested in it and before dawn, the warbler sang there. I learned to follow the rusty red signs of its tail, and so I discovered its nest on an old stump of eucalyptus. New branches, that grew under the cutting and that hadn’t been pulled out, rose and formed a hidden, greenish cone which is the best thing for birds who seek isolation. Vultures and bustards were also seen in the skies of the forest, hunting carcasses of cattle that were dragged here, and I also saw Uncle Menahem there a few times, showing his spring notes to laughing women, some I knew and some I didn’t. I imagined that those were the famous hoors, but Naomi’s order prevailed with me and I didn’t tell Aunt Bathsheba a thing.
The second forest, the one farther away, was a forest of oaks where I walked now to Jacob. I used to visit it in my childhood, too, but that forest was too far for me to drag my observation-box there. I loved to lie on a bed of dry leaves and look up.
Jays with principles lodged here, those who chose to give up the refuse from man’s table. They were as bold and curious as their brothers who moved to the villages all around, but they seemed smaller, the blue of their wings looked less splendid, and their young creatures appeared veined and wild. They hid acorns, flew less, and preferred secret hopping among the branches. The males, as I often saw, still maintained the practice their brothers in the village had already abandoned, of building a few nests and letting the female choose one of them.
My old friends the crows didn’t reside here, but blackbirds were seen and heard, the males all fitted out in their black raiment and orange beaks, and the females modest and camouflaged in gray and brown.
“The boy’s in the forest again?” Rabinovitch would shout.
“There are wild animals there!” Jacob Sheinfeld scolded. The river of his childhood still flowed in him and the howling of the hungry wolves and the dread of northern forests hadn’t yet vanished.
“Come on, take the truck fast and go look for him,” Globerman urged Oded.
And Mother laughed: “If the Angel of Death comes and sees a little boy named Zayde,” she reminded my three worried fathers, “he’ll understand at once that there’s some mistake here and he’ll go someplace else.”
A QUIET, busy murmur of leaves and birds, small animals and wind rose from the forest. But as soon as I reached its border, the ringing warning shouts of woodpeckers were heard, and everything immediately fell silent.
I sat down on the ground and stretched back. The sheet of silence fell from the tops of the oaks and covered my body.
Spiderwebs gleamed, beetles plodded along, a damp warmth rose from under the layer of leaves on the ground, testimony of the slow fermentation of mulch. Slowly my ears grew accustomed to the silence and now I could make out the cracks between its layers: the constant rustle of the dry oak leaves, the gnawing of a worm in the trunk, and the grating of the seeds in the throats of the turtledoves, who stuff themselves in this season and strengthen themselves for their winter journey to Africa.
A few minutes of terror and observation passed until the creatures of the forest grew used to my presence and calmed down. The woodpecker resumed his role of town crier, with a rapid drumming that ripped open the silence. Then the titmice raised the angry metal of their voice, and all the rest of the forest creatures immediately followed suit. The world split into a thousand thin noises, spilling out of a torn sack.
All the wheels of nature were clicking around me as in a clock store. The small hands of the seasons showed late summer with the last shouts of the cicada, the warm arid smell of the dust of the plowed fields, the beating of the wing of young partridges whose colors, boldness, and size numbered the days that had passed since they hatched. The big hands showed the hour with the sun that was beginning to decline, and the west wind that whispered It’s-already-four-in-the-afternoon-and-I-will-soon-grow-strong, and the shriek of the swallows seeking provisions and heralding the approach of evening.
I REMEMBER the first time Mother taught me to read those hands. I was six years old and I asked her to buy me a watch.
“I don’t have money for a watch,” she said.
“I’ll ask Globerman and he’ll buy me one,” I said. “He’s my father and he’s got as much money as he wants.”
Despite my young age, I already had a good understanding of the position of the three men who took care of me, brought me presents, and played games with me.
“You won’t ask anybody for anything,” said Mother in a hard, quiet voice. “You don’t have a father, Zayde, you’ve only got a mother, and what I can, I will buy for you. You’ve got food to eat, you’ve got clothes to wear, and you don’t go barefoot.”
Then she softened, took my hand, led me outside, and said: “You don’t need a watch, Zayde. See how many watches there are in the world.”
She showed me the shadow of the eucalyptus that said nine in the morning with its size, its direction, and its chill, the little red leaves of the pomegranate that said mid-March, the tooth that wiggled in my mouth and said six years, and the small wrinkles in the corners of her eyes that capered and said forty.
“You see, Zayde, this way you’re inside time. If they bought you a watch, you’d only be next to it.”
A SUDDEN RUSTLING was heard, crawled into my ears, and seemed to open my eyes from inside. It was a cat. A house cat that slipped past me, one of the cats who withdraw for a time from human society and test their strength in forest and field. He was very big, truly gigantic, and his coat was black and white. Despite the murderousness that forest life had already restored to the shape of his back, you could still discern the grace and laziness and stuffed softness of a thousand years of domesticity.
I, who even got around nesting crows, didn’t budge, and the cat didn’t notice me until I called him with a tempting “psst … psst … psst.”
He froze on the spot, turned green eyes to me, and barely kept from coming to me and surrendering to my caresses.
“C’mon—c’mon—c’mon …” I chanted to him in a whisper, and at the sound of my voice, a human voice, the cat reconsidered, leaped up, and disappeared.
I got up and walked away, too.
27
YOU GOT BIGGER.” Jacob opened the door for me.
We had exchanged a few letters when I was in the army, but it had been more than three years since we had met.
“You got bigger, too, Jacob,” I said.
“I got old,” he corrected me with a smile, and immediately uttered his line: “Well, come in, come in.”
His new house was handsome, big and roomy, with a small lawn in front and a big garden in back. But it was the kitchen I liked most. A big table sat in the center, pots and skillets hung on shelves and weren’t hidden away in closets. Here I sat down. I’m one of those people who like to sit in the kitchen, both in my own house and in other people’s houses.
“I worried about you when you was in the army. You didn’t answer the letters I sent.”
“You don’t need to worry about me. I’m a little boy named Zayde, did you forget, Jacob?”
He looked at the rip in my shirt from the raspberry thorns.
“Fast,” he said. “Take it off and I’ll mend it for you. A person can’t walk around the street like that.”
Despite my protest, he didn’t relent until
I took off my shirt. He threaded a needle, and in a few minutes he stitched the rip with tiny, nimble stitches that were even and regular, and that amazed me.
“Where did you learn to sew like that?” I asked.
“When you have to, you learn.”
The big white plates I remembered from our first meal were already set out, reflecting the light of the big lamp with a round green card-player’s shade hanging above them.
“Food, Zayde, you serve only in a white plate, drinks—water and tea and juice and wine—you pour only into a colorless glass,” Jacob stated resolutely. “There’s rules for those things. If you see a restaurant with candles, you dassn’t go in. Candles is not for romance, it’s a sign that the cook’s got something to hide. A person’s got to see real good what he puts in his mouth. He sees, he smells, he gets saliva. There are six little faucets of saliva in the mouth and they start working right away. Saliva is a really wonderful thing, Zayde, even more than tears, more than any other liquid in the body. With food it’s longing and with a kiss it’s love and with spitting it’s hate.”
While I ate his treats, Jacob stood at the sink and went on talking, fussing with the next course, or tasting his own food standing up—that vegetarian meal of an omelet and a green salad with a lot of lemon, black olives, and cottage cheese—which somehow made me jealous, despite the delicacy he put on my plate.
“You remember our first meal? It’ll soon be ten years.”
“I remember, but I don’t know what we ate.”
“Poor cook, eh?” said Jacob. “You can’t whistle the courses he cooked or recite the meat or dance the soup.”
“You can’t whistle a book, either, and you can’t eat a tune,” I tried to console him.
“Yes, you can,” said Jacob.
Then he added: “And a tune is always a new thing that never was before in the world, and from the violin and the flute comes sounds even birds can’t make, and the painter, like God, he can paint things that ain’t in the world at all. But food? Even without the cook there’s food. And a whole day he’ll stand and cook, and in the end the first cucumber after Passover will always taste better than his roast, and a black Santa Rosa plum with a little crack in the skin is better than his sauce, and even just a thin slice of raw meat is better than all his dishes.”
