by Meir Shalev
Several candidates hastened to offer their services, but Globerman didn’t hesitate a moment and chose Oded Rabinovitch, who was then only eleven years old, but was already known far and wide for his driving.
Naomi told me that her brother agreed to go to first grade only so he could read Motor, Car, and Tractor and write letters to the importers of Reo and International. And so, Oded read about cars and thought about motors and dreamed about transfers and compression ratios and transmissions with such concentrated yearning that he learned to drive all by himself, and without ever sitting in a car, because in his imagination he already executed and practiced every operation thousands of times: he engaged gears and released clutches and accelerated and decelerated and braked and turned, and all of it with the devotion of lovers who savor their longings and prepare to realize them.
“If you go on making car noises all the time, you’ll wind up with lips like a Negro,” Uncle Menahem warned him.
But Oded didn’t heed his warning and by the time he was eight years old, he was arguing with surprised grown-ups about air cooling as opposed to water cooling and about “V” engines as opposed to linear engines. In those days Arthur Ruppin came to visit the village and Oded took advantage of the turmoil and excitement, and while the leader was kissing the children in their crowns of wreathes and his driver was trying to make out with Rebecca Sheinfeld, he sneaked up to his long Ford, started it, and fled into the fields.
He drove it like a seasoned pro, and even circled on its axis, raised waves of dirt, did some juggling, and brought up pillars of dust. Finally he abandoned it in one of the orchards and ran away to the eucalyptus forest, returning on foot only the next morning, because he didn’t know what admiration and pride he stirred in the hearts of everyone who saw him and he was afraid they would punish him severely.
Now he tried to convey the lore of driving to Globerman, and the livestock dealer obeyed all his instructions.
“An auto isn’t a cow, Globerman!” the thin shouting voice rose from the pickup truck when the dealer veered from the road into the fields. “You don’t spin it around by the tail, it’s got a steering wheel!”
Fortunately for the dealer, the green pickup truck, with its six gigantic, slow pistons, and its three long gears, was very tolerant. The motor never choked and the thick sheet metal was strong enough to endure the many trials and collisions its new owner subjected it to.
And to his credit, we must add that after all was said and done, the dealer was a law-abiding man. He also took himself down to the Mandatory license office in Haifa. There he went to an official who was an expert in such matters and exchanged fifty pounds of fine shoulder roast for two drivers’ licenses, one for him and one for his little teacher, which included all possible vehicles: motorcycle, bus, private car, and trucks of every size and kind.
“A license for a train and for an airplane they didn’t have,” he bleated with a laugh.
And even though he already had a driver’s license, he went on studying with Oded, until the boy told him it was time to stop.
“Now I know how to drive?” asked the dealer.
“No,” said the boy. “But better than this you’ll never know.”
Still Globerman persisted, and one day Oded returned home carrying a big bouquet of multicolored roses in his hand.
“That’s for you,” he said to Judith. “It’s not from me. It’s from the dealer.”
Judith took the bouquet and saw at once that it wasn’t a bouquet of flowers, but a flowered dress. She spread it out between her hands and despite her anger, she had to admit that the dealer had good taste and wasn’t tight-fisted with his money.
At dusk, Globerman came into Rabinovitch’s yard and managed to open the door and enter the cowshed right at the very moment when Judith was standing in front of the mirror, trying on his gift.
“I ask you, Lady Judith,” he exclaimed triumphantly, “a person who can tell the weight of a cow with one look of one eye, he can’t fit a dress to a woman without measuring it on her?”
It wasn’t the coarse comparison that offended her, but the fact that the dealer was right. The dress was very becoming.
“You didn’t knock!” she sputtered.
“Here is a cowshed, Lady Judith.” Globerman pulled himself erect. “Here is my work. At the village grocery store, do you knock on the door before you go in to buy?”
“Here is not only a cowshed. Here is also my home!” said Judith.
“Rabinovitch knocks on the door of your house when he comes to milk?”
“That’s none of your business, filth.”
With a marvelous weasel step, Globerman wound around and approached her, even though his feet didn’t seem to move at all.
“All I ask of Lady Judith, who is wearing the new dress and looking so beautiful, and feeling how the fine cloth touches her whole body, that she’ll think at the same time about the one who bought it for her,” he said.
“Get out of here!” she said to him. “Nobody asked you for gifts. I’ll give it to Oded tomorrow to give back to you.”
“Not tomorrow! Now!” shouted the dealer. “Now, take it off and give it back to me.” And he leaned impudently on the wall of the cowshed.
“I’ll wash it first,” said Judith. “So you can give it to some other woman. After all, you’ve got a cow in heat in every village.”
“Don’t wash it, Lady Judith.” Globerman knelt in front of her. “Give it back to me as it is, with your smell folded in the cloth.”
Off to the side, Rachel lowered her head and a deep gurgle of rage rose from the depths of her chest. Globerman smiled. He stood up, went to the cow, and ran his hand over her neck, and from there his knowing fingers hovered, hypnotized, over her spine until he tapped the end of her tailbone.
His tongue clicked with pleasure. “He’s growing nicely. A butcher who understands will pay me a lot of money for him,” he said.
“That heifer you’ll never get, bastard,” said Judith.
“He’s registered with me,” said the dealer, taking out his notebook and going through it. “Rachel, right? A funny name for a male calf. Here he is. All taken care of. No mistake. I should have gotten him when he was half a year old, but Rabinovitch keeps postponing it.”
A sharp and wise man he was, and he sensed that he had exposed a crack between Judith and Moshe.
“A good fleysh handler has to be well organized,” he said to Rabinovitch a few days later. “Here she is. Registered and waiting in my notebook. When will you sell her to me, Rabinovitch?”
“I’m still thinking about it,” said Moshe. “It’s not so simple.”
“What’s not so simple here?” mocked Globerman. “There’s a dairy farmer, there’s a cow, and there’s a dealer, right? The dairy farmer and the cow think about the Angel of Death, but the dealer thinks about money, period. And that’s why the dealer always wins, Rabinovitch, because to lose life is easy, it’s only once and you don’t suffer anymore, but to lose money is very hard. ’Cause that can happen a lot of times and every time you suffer again.”
He looked at Moshe, and as he expected, he saw rage darken his eyes.
“A bik!” He grinned at him. He knew that people built like Moshe aren’t quick to anger, but when they are inflamed, they are harmful. Now he tapped and pinched the flesh of Rachel’s shoulder, estimated the thickness of the layer of fat and the strength of the muscle hidden underneath it. “What a beautiful kishre you’ve got here, Rabinovitch, so when will you sell me Rachel?”
“I can’t do that to her,” said Moshe.
“To who? The cow? What are you, the Humane Society?”
“To Judith,” said Moshe.
“To Lady Judith?” the dealer wondered in a loud voice. “Who’s the boss here? You or your worker?”
And Moshe’s eyes became dark with anger again.
51
ODED DIDN’T LIKE my mother while she was alive; he teased her and pestered her, and saw no reason to re
gard her death as a sufficient cause to change his attitude. Nevertheless, I’m fond of him and I feel good with him. He drives me to Naomi and takes me back from there, brings her the packages and the letters and the observations reports for the “head rook,” and keeps on telling me about his father and my mother and his sister, and sometimes also about Dinah, the woman who was his wife.
“I got married to Dinah at the age of thirty-seven and a half, and I got divorced at the age of thirty-eight. How’s that, Zayde?”
Dinah’s husband was killed in the Sinai Campaign of 1956, and Oded met her through some friends.
“Everybody’s got friends like that. They got their own crappy marriages, so they’ve got to get everybody else paired up, too.”
I remember Dinah. She was eight years younger than Oded and about an inch and a half taller, and even though she wasn’t pretty at all, the blue sparks of her hair and the copper of her skin cast melancholy and restlessness into the men who had eyes to see them.
One night, a few months after their wedding, Oded went out on his run and was suddenly filled with such a strange and painful uneasiness that he was afraid to go on driving. He braked the tanker on the side of the highway, sat and thought for a few minutes, then continued on his way, stopped again, and finally turned around and went back to the village.
At the village hall, he killed the motor and silently, like a gigantic metal marten, he slid down the slope until he stopped at his house. A strange, dusty Matchless motorcycle, its motor warm and still smelling, was parked under the tree. Oded got out of the truck, peeped in the window, and saw Dinah riding on somebody, her thin, muscular body gleaming with her special dark gleam.
A soft sponginess pervaded his joints and muscles. He stumbled back to the tanker, started it, and drove it up to the center of the village. There he got out, opened the big valve under the tank, locked himself in the driver’s cab, and hung his hand on the horn cable.
A jet of milk, terrifying and white, flooded the street. The mighty horn of the tanker and the bleating of the young calves who were jolted awake by the smell of milk telling them their dreams had come true, woke the whole village.
“That was the best moment of my life,” he told me. “That was a whole lot better than going into the room and killing the two of them. It cost me a lot of money, the milk and the divorce, and the trials and everything, but what can I tell you, Zayde, it was a real pleasure.”
“YOU WANT TO HONK THE HORN?” he asks again, as he always asks me.
Of course I want to honk. I stretch out my hand and pull, from the lap of the dewy grass the toads answer, and a waning moon accompanies us, pushes off the downy embraces of the clouds, and filters between their soft openings.
At that hour, Oded’s radio returns from its shrieking journeys in distant Yugoslavian and Greek stations, and once again speaks Hebrew. But I don’t need it. Clocks signal to me from every corner. Once again I seek and find the small hand of big time, the hand of the years and their seasons, and the big hand of small time, the hand of the hour of the day. The hues of the leaves tell me late autumn. In low places the chill of dawn is poured into invisible puddles. The lacework of the east turns pale and tells me ten to five.
“You don’t need a watch, Zayde, look how many watches there are in the world,” Mother told me.
Every farmer in the village can tell what month it is from the mute lightnings of autumn and the blooming of spring in the field, but I could tell time by the shade of the darkening old crows’ nests and by the molting feathers of their maturing fledglings.
“The village is a room full of clocks,” I wrote to Naomi in Jerusalem to remind her, so she wouldn’t forget.
And she wrote me that she had only one clock: the religious milkman of the neighborhood, who appeared every morning at six-fifteen on the dot, pushing his cart of milk cans, groaning and proclaiming his merchandise with two drawled-out, weary vowels, “Mi-ilk,” that echoed in the narrow staircase.
And just a few weeks ago, I wrote her about our ruined village hall—a mighty index of the passage of time, with the dry ivy clinging to its walls, the seven-branched lamp embellishing the roof with its destruction, the pigeons nesting in the corners of its auditorium.
Swallows fly in through the ventilator holes to feed their fledglings, and in the old projection booth owl droppings reek. That’s not a clock with hands, nor is it an hourglass. It’s a clock of strata, and it measures time by the thickness of the dried secretions, the scabs of rust on the balcony banister, and the cushions of dust on the floor, where the maggots of ant lions dig their slippery funnels of death.
Wooden boards are nailed over the openings, but here and there they’ve been broken into, and when I go inside and wait for my eyes to grow accustomed to the gloom, a thin and loathsome smell of human feces and its disgrace rises to my nose. Weariness assails me and I sit down on one of the filthy chairs and the shrill squeak of the wood rouses a great flapping of wings in the dark space.
Once I surprised the Village Papish here. He also visits the village hall sometimes, enters and tramps around in the pigeon droppings and mutters mutterings and groans old heartbreaking and body-aching groans. Only a few years ago, the final show was put on here, and Papish, as I wrote to Naomi, “gave one of his greatest performances there.” A theater troupe came from the city, and a young actress, whose well-known beauty summoned young men from the entire valley to the village—the melting beauty that doesn’t stir lust or love, but only the desire to be fruitful and die—appeared on stage and treated us like some goddess, who has an hour of goodwill and is decent enough to be revealed to those who worship her.
And suddenly the Village Papish stood up—and he is very old and heavy—and yelled furiously in a loud voice: “And we had Rebecca Sheinfeld many years ago, and she, young lady from the television, was much more beautiful than you!” And he exited.
He was angry at the village for the ruin of the village hall and he was angry at Jacob “because his love for Rabinovitch’s Judith made his Rebecca abandon the village and take all her beauty with her and it left us with nothing, wallowing in our ugly mud.”
THE HUT THAT WAS ONCE the house of Yakobi and Yakoba and afterward the house of the albino is also a ruin now. The winds and the rains have eaten its roof, worms and dews have melted its boards, and what the sun didn’t evaporate the earth absorbed. Everyone saw the hut shrinking, and after it disappeared only the anemones growing there indicated that it had once been.
But the house the albino built for his canaries and left to Jacob is still standing. No one fills the feeding troughs and basins, the cages and the door are always open, the canaries come and go as they please, and Jacob doesn’t return there to visit his past, either.
“In the morning and in the evening,” I said, “time goes most slowly.”
“It slows down at the turns,” laughed Oded, “so the world won’t turn over.”
We were approaching the turn to the village. Oded shifted down, one gear after another. His feet danced on the big pedals and the truck moaned and shook.
“There. We’re back home.” He turned in a big circle and started driving on the narrow entrance road.
Once the road had been a dirt path. In summer, wheels and hooves ground it to dust, and in winter it became thick, dark mud. Then it was covered with crushed basalt stones brought from the mountain, and when it was widened, it was paved and became a thin, straight asphalt road, about a mile long, and casuarinas amassed dust at its edges.
On the side of the crossroads is a bus stop, simply a small tin awning and an iron pole with a sign on top. On the cement bench sat Jacob Sheinfeld, a small wrinkled mummy of love, wearing blue pants and a white cotton shirt. In the shade of the trees, his regular taxi was parked, its driver asleep in the backseat.
Oded braked the truck, turned off the motor, and the silence poured into our ears. He stuck his head out the window and yelled: “What’s up, Sheinfeld?”
“Come in, come
in, how nice of you to come, friends. Come in,” said Jacob with the warm expression of a bridegroom at his wedding.
“And where’s the bride, Sheinfeld?” yelled Oded.
But Jacob’s look passed us by and wandered off.
“Look at him,” Oded repeated his diagnosis. “If he was a horse, they’d have had to shoot him a long time ago.”
A green car passed by on the road.
“Come in, come in …” Jacob said to it. “Come in, we’ve got a wedding here today.”
And he smiled, and nodded in greeting, ran his eyes over the road, and didn’t pay any more attention to us.
52
EVEN LIARS KNOW well that truth and fiction are not at odds with each other. They’re good neighbors, and each is interested in the well-being of the other, and they lend one another whatever they need.
I heard that once from Meir—apropos of what, I don’t remember—and then he smiled and added that the lie and the truth are not north and south, but rather the magnetic pole and the North Pole.
I say that to explain that I don’t want to make up or erase parts of my life. Nor do I want to explain them, to camouflage them, or to re-create them. The whole purpose of this story is to put them in order: a furrow directed for an ox’s hooves, channels for water to creep in, cement walks for footsteps.
And whenever I get disgusted with the chaos I’m doomed to hover over, and fed up with the abyss of assumptions and the wind of conjecture, I console myself with the wonderful course of small events. So, that funny character who bought the dead albino’s five black suits reappeared in the village a few months later. Without a word, he went into the secretary’s office and put on the table five notes he had found in the five inside pockets of the suits. On every one of them were the words: “The birds go to Jacob.”
Sheinfeld was called to the secretary’s office. Even though he had taken care of the canaries since the day the albino died, his heart was pounding now like a sledgehammer, hard, with fear and joy. Without a word, he went to the canary house and from there to his own house, got into bed fully dressed, and didn’t wake up until the next afternoon, when Rebecca woke him with the first shouts that had come out of her mouth since their wedding day, and demanded to know what was happening.
