The Loves of Judith

by Meir Shalev

  “The yolk of the egg,” he said, “that’s strength and that’s mother and that’s life.”

  His hand, so quick and steady over the bowl, started shaking as his finger began moving in it and bringing tastes up from it.

  “Don’t ever forget me,” he said suddenly.

  “Of course not,” I said.

  “And Globerman, too, don’t forget him, and Rabinovitch, too, don’t forget.”

  “You tired, Jacob? You want me to go now?”

  “Open, if you please, the door of the closet.”

  I opened it.

  “Take out, if you please, the box,” he said.

  A white cardboard box, flat and long, was there, standing like a ghost behind the clothes hanging up. I remembered it and I knew what was inside it.

  “Open it,” said Jacob.

  A fog of an old white cloth filled the box.

  “That’s your mother’s wedding gown.” His voice shook. “You remember it? With my own hands, I sewed it.”

  My body recoiled and my eyes became moist. Even though Mother wore it for only a few minutes, the empty dress seemed like an empty skin she sloughed off in the field, waiting for the flesh of its mistress, just like me and like Jacob.

  “On the way to me she was, with that dress on her, and her inside it, and something all of a sudden happened. Everybody was sitting at the tables and waiting for her, and you, Zayde, came instead of her. A little boy of ten with that box in your hand with that dress inside, you don’t remember? You came and you gave it to me in front of the whole village and you ran away without looking in my eyes. And afterward, all the guests left and I went into the house and I closed the door and I fell down on the bed with that bridal gown, and all the dishes, all the nice German china, still stayed outside on the tables for the sun and the flies. A whole week I lay like that. Not sleeping, not dreaming, and my heart was as cold as ice, and when they came back they came back right before the big snow, of February nineteen hundred and fifty. You was a little boy then, Zayde, but you must remember that snow. Who doesn’t remember the big snow of nineteen hundred and fifty? All over the country it was. Even in the Jordan Valley a few inches fell. What can I tell you, that was really some big surprise. Here in the village trees broke, chickens died, two calves froze, in the transit camp not far from here, a few new immigrants were killed because the whole roof of the kitchen fell on their head. But for us, who came from snows fifteen feet deep and sleds with three horses and wolves as big as calves, and we’d stick our tongue on the iron handle of the well that was so cold—for us that snow was child’s play. Here there’s snow? Here there’s sleds? Here there’s wolves? Here we built sleds for mud to take the milk to the dairy, and once the Village Papish shot a wolf who came into the yard with the geese. What can I tell you, Zayde, Papish called it a wolf, but it was as big as a cat. If he hadn’t said wolf, I would have said it was a jackal, maximum. Never mind a little bit of snow in Jerusalem or in Safed, but here? In this little village? In this hot valley? Who would even dream of such a thing? Who was ready? Especially the trees weren’t ready, and especially that eucalyptus. That’s a tree for snow? I ask you, Zayde, a eucalyptus like that from Australia, is that a tree for snow? The apple tree and the cherry tree and the beryozka, the birch tree, them I saw standing in the snow, but a eucalyptus like that, with its wet and soft flesh, and its leaves stay in the wintertime, and it holds a lot more snow than what it can take on, it just broke. One flake and another flake and another flake and another flake, until the last flake that said: Itzt! Now! And the whole big branch at the top broke and fell down, and the creak they heard all over the village, and the wind whistling in the leaves when it fell down, they heard that, too, and then the blow they heard. And everybody got up and ran there. ’Cause who didn’t know Rabinovitch’s eucalyptus, with the crows’ nest in the top, you used to climb up to them when you were a little boy, and Globerman and Rabinovitch and I used to walk around like lunatics below worrying that God forbid, you’ll fall, and Judith used to laugh because a child named Zayde, nothing will happen to him. Only now you should watch out with your name, ’cause you’re not a little boy anymore, and the Angel of Death won’t forgive you for cheating him. He’s waiting and waiting and waiting until the moment comes. Everybody, I sometimes think, has his own Angel of Death. He’s born with you and he lives next to you and he waits for you all your life, and because of that, if somebody really is old, he’ll get a lot more years ’cause his Angel of Death ain’t so young anymore, either, and he don’t see so good, either, and his own hands shake, too, and in the morning he also gets up with aches all over his body, and finally, when he succeeds at last, he dies himself one minute after he kills you, like a bee that stings and also goes fayfn. And here’s a woman alone, your mother, not a great beauty, but with an open, clear face, like a window looking on the garden. And the line of pain she had between her eyebrows, that’s the line of a woman whose love cut her flesh, too, and not only her skin, and if you see her milking a cow or cutting vegetables for a salad or washing a child, you right away understand how good those hands can be. And how come I fell in love with her, you ask again? What did I want from her, you want to know? And anyway what does a person like me want from a woman? So excuse me, Zayde, it’s not the tukhis he wants and it’s not the tsitskes he wants, and beauty is already starting not to be so interesting, and the electricity is already starting to run out, and not only the mind, the whole body is starting to be bored and like Globerman used to say: from most girls the shvantz already yawns aloud. So good hands, that’s what he wants. Good hands of a woman to caress him, to stir the scum of the basin of his soul, hands like water passing, speaking, I’m here, Jacob, I’m here, shaa … sleep now, Jacob, you’re not alone, shaa … Jacob … shaa. Sleep.”

  FOURTH MEAL

  70

  THE FOURTH MEAL Jacob made for me in 1981, a few weeks after his death.

  A quiet and simple death it was. The death of someone whose soul was slowly removed, didn’t flee from his rib cage, didn’t flare up and flicker out like hemp, and wasn’t ripped out of his flesh. His regular taxicab driver found him fully clothed, lying on the sofa in the living room. He said that Jacob’s face was calm and his body was already cold but still soft, and neither struggle nor pain was obvious either in his expression or in his position.

  “I’m not a young man, either,” the driver told me, “and that’s the kind of death I’d wish for myself.”

  I WAS IN JERUSALEM when Jacob died. I lay awake in the guest room of Naomi and Meir’s house, and all of a sudden the phone rang and lopped off their nighttime conversation. They always conversed at night, I always listened to their conversation, and I never managed to fish up words from the stream of quiet, bitter murmuring.

  That was no longer the small apartment in the housing project where I had visited them in my childhood, but the handsome, spacious stone house where they live now. Once Naomi and Meir used to sleep on one twin bed in one room, then in one double bed in one room, then in two twin beds in one room, and now they sleep in two double beds in two separate rooms. That’s also a way to measure the passage of time.

  As is always my habit, I lay and watched the door that won’t open anymore and a triangular blade of light that won’t come from it, won’t slice and won’t serve up to my eyes the golden slice of a body and a corridor.

  Whenever Jacob would describe the young girls doing laundry in the river and would declare proudly that that was “the eternal picture of love,” I thought of that eternal picture of mine, of the woman at night, her cheek moist, her waist cut out and her skin glowing. I wanted to return to that room and whistle to that time to come back, and to see again that naked body glowing in the dark that will never return.

  But innocence has already left my flesh, youth has forsaken her flesh, and anyway—there’s nothing more miserable in the world than restoring. Better than that is imagination, and better than imagination is fiction, and better than all thre
e of them is memory.

  Meir picked up the phone. “Yes,” I heard him say, “he’s here.” And he immediately called out: “It’s for you, Zayde. And please tell whoever it is that it’s four in the morning.”

  “I’m here at Tnuva Jerusalem,” said Oded on the other end of the line. “I thought you might want to know. Sheinfeld died.”

  “When?” I asked, surprised by the sharp pain that stabbed me in the stomach.

  “Yesterday morning.”

  “Why didn’t they tell me? Why didn’t they call before?”

  “Who is this ‘they’? Who exactly should they have called?” asked Oded sharply. And then he said: “They already buried him. Yesterday afternoon.”

  “When are you going back to the village?”

  “Wait for me at the exit from the city. I’ll be done here in half an hour.”

  ALL THE WAY I thought about that one thing. About the secret only we knew, only she and I, the secret of her final refusal of his love. Ever since the day she died, I had been trying to work up enough strength to reveal it to Jacob. I told him as I walked in the street, my lips moving and my voice inaudible, I whispered it into the old observation-box I had already outgrown, I shouted it into the distant forest, my mouth wide open and my voice horrible, but the deed itself I couldn’t perform.

  Oded, who sensed how repentant and agitated I was, didn’t talk to me all the way back.

  Even when I suddenly said aloud, “It’s better this way. If I had told him, he would have died a long time ago,” he pretended that the roar of the motor swallowed up my confession, and didn’t respond.

  A few days later, I was summoned to a lawyer’s office in Haifa and informed that the beautiful house on Oak Street in Tivon, its garden, its kitchen, and everything in it belonged to me.

  “What will you do with the house?” the lawyer asked me.

  “I’ll rent it out,” I said.

  “I’d be glad to rent it from you.”

  “In ten days you can move in.”

  The lawyer lowered his eyes and cleared his throat. “In the kitchen, there’s a picture of a woman on the wall,” he said in embarrassment. “I’d be grateful to you if you could leave it hanging there.”

  “Did you know her?” I asked.

  “Mrs. Green? Not in her youth, unfortunately, but in her old age,” he said. “I was their lawyer, hers and Mr. Green’s. Years ago, when she passed away and I summoned Mr. Sheinfeld here and gave him the keys to the house she had bequeathed him, he told me that he was her first husband. I must admit I was surprised. And now you’re inheriting that house, Mr. Rabinovitch. Excuse me, please, if I ask you a personal question: how are you related to that family?”

  THAT NIGHT, Mr. Rabinovitch slept in his new house.

  As usual, he fell asleep only at dawn and didn’t have any dreams.

  The next day, there was a loud knock on the door.

  “Who’s there?” asked Mr. Rabinovitch.

  “From the store.”

  A young man who smelled of bay leaves and sausage came in. He seemed to know the place well. He headed straight for the kitchen, put a few wrapped packages in the refrigerator, vegetables and fruits in their bins, the bottles rang in their places.

  “No charge for this,” he announced, and on the table he left the store’s business card and a sealed white envelope with my name on it.

  At the door, he turned to me, took a deep breath, and said: “We’re very sorry, Mr. Rabinovitch Zayde. Mr. Sheinfeld Jacob was a good man and he really knew a lot about food. He couldn’t say the names of wine, but his frying pan laughed and his knife danced in his hand. My boss used to go just to smell the air near this house whenever he would cook, and then he would come back to the store and say: It’s an honor for us to sell groceries to Mr. Sheinfeld Jacob, because he’s a person who can cook even with three copper pots at the same time. My boss also asked me to tell you that if you, Mr. Rabinovitch Zayde, stay to live here, we’ll be glad to serve you, too.”

  The fellow concluded his speech, which was delivered in one breath, and left.

  Mr. Rabinovitch Zayde started searching and rummaging around.

  In the envelope was a recipe for preparing the fourth meal.

  In the drawer of the nightstand next to the bed waited Mother’s blue kerchief.

  Her splendid wedding gown hung in the closet, outside the shell of its box. White, smooth, and odorless.

  Mr. Rabinovitch Zayde took it out of there, spread it on the bed, sat down in the big easy chair, and fell asleep.

  71

  HOW CLEAR THE MEMORIES ARE: the maple leaves turned yellow and dropped, and like amputated hands were swept up in the water. Farmers dismantled the net trap for geese and collected from the roofs the fruit they had placed there to dry.

  How regular things are: a wind came from the north, thin sheets of clouds, a first snow fell, and in the morning wolf tracks came very close to the village houses.

  The earth revolved. The winter ended. How obedient are the spring birds: the nightingales of the reeds sang, the apple blossom wafted its train and bridesmaid bees caught it, right in front of Jacob’s eyes white butterflies moved to and fro, drunk, caught in the webs of his memory.

  Gold and green prevailed. The sun ascended, and already—how familiar, how handsome are the pictures—a tiny kingfisher hovered over its reflection, a wind capered in the leaves of the birches, the girls came out to launder clothes and bedsheets on the rock at the bend of the channel.

  Then, Jacob told me, the basic colors of love were painted in his heart, for in the love of a little boy, he stated, wonder is greater than lust, amazement is greater than jealousy, and greater than all the loves that will come, for it is as strong as the whole body and as heavy.

  In those childhood days, he added, he loved not only one woman, but all women, and he loved the earth that bears the yearning of their weight, and the sky that forms a canopy over the splendor of their heads, and the One God of the Jews, who put them on his doorstep.

  He lusted for their knees bent on the black slate. Their breasts sang to him from the cages of their blouses. The shining eddies of water kept on getting entangled in his heart. The place and the angle made it look like the girls were floating on great expanses of water gilded by the sun. The wind played with the dresses, tightened, softened, outlined.

  “The eternal picture of love,” Jacob repeated to me, enjoying not only the memory but also the expression his clumsy tongue had managed to shape.

  72

  I HAVE NO PENCHANT for cooking and no special interest in food. Like everybody else, I, too, enjoy a good meal, but I don’t delve into the mysteries of how it’s made, I don’t wonder about its ingredients, I won’t travel especially for it. I believe in Globerman’s decree: “Good food is food you clean your plate afterward with a piece of bread, period.”

  The table awaited me, flat and patient. The big white plates that were now mine were gleaming on it. The copper pots reddened like suns setting on the wall. In the cabinet the knives held their breath. Which of them will be chosen by the new hand that will open the drawer?

  I hung Jacob’s recipe in front of me, and I tied his apron around my waist.

  At first I was afraid because all I knew about cooking, as I said, was summed up in Moshe’s and my simple meal: scrambled eggs, salad, mashed potatoes, and boiled chicken. But Jacob’s instructions were simple, the meat was obedient, the seasonings and vegetables were arranged and ready. The ladles moved in my hands by themselves, the skillet and the pot responded to me, and I quickly felt confident enough to control more than one burner at the same time.

  Joy and mourning were not blended in my heart. The steam and the drops of oil didn’t touch one another. One next to another, things happened, neighbors in the same box of time. I cut while I fried, I stirred while I squeezed, I smiled in time of grief, I steamed, I mixed, I sprinkled, I boiled, I remembered, I cried, I seasoned.

  And when I finished, I finished w
ith a measure of ceremony, which people allow themselves when they’re all alone. With a spin on my heels, I untied the apron, bowed, and turned off the burners.

  From the wall, Rebecca looked at me with a curiosity whose meaning I didn’t understand until I recalled that I was now much older than she.

  “Ess, meyn kind,” I said to her, mocking, and served myself the last meal.

  73

  WHAT DID SHE HAVE INSIDE HER, what was under the skin, what are the secrets a woman remembers not in her head but in her flesh—that nobody knows? Even you, Zayde, don’t know nothing about your mother. What do you know? That she came on a train and raised Rabinovitch’s kids, and cooked and laundered and washed and rinsed and milked and did everything a woman does in the village, but she lived by herself in the cowshed and at night she wailed. That’s all you know. Sometimes I thought she came here to atone for something. And her calf she also raised, how come a person raises an animal like that and calls her Rachel, if not for forgiveness? But never did you hear a word from her and nothing did you see on her face. Her face was open like a window looking on the garden, but on the other hand it didn’t reveal nothing to you. That was her way of hiding. She was hiding a lot back then, and I’m still hiding a lot for her today. What did you think, that I told everything? Rabinovitch maybe knew something, but he’d never rummage around in such things, and he also lived for so many years inside his own disaster that other people’s disasters didn’t interest him no more. Only once, when somebody came to the committee complaining about her wailing in the night, Rabinovitch came to the secretary’s office and this is what he said: ‘Do those screams dry up your cows? No? So what do you care and what business is it of yours? Everybody screams, Reuben screams loud and Simon screams quiet.’ That’s what he said and then he turned around and left. At first I didn’t understand who was that Reuben and that Simon, until the Village Papish explained to me that those are names you give for example. And then I thought to myself that a name like Jacob is never gonna be an example for nothing. And every night she’d cry like that until your heart would break. And sounds at night, those are things you can’t hide. It’s not like some Zayde that you can’t tell who his father is. It’s not like a woman’s secrets—where did you come from? Who do you love? All those secrets that if they don’t leave signs on the flesh, so where do they leave them? On the soul? What sign can you leave on the soul? Sounds like that wait all day to be heard for night. She used to lay in the cowshed, next to her cow, one chews the cud of clover and the other chews the cud of memories, and that wailing … every night … like the soul of a wolf it flew over the village, rising, and falling, and seeking … and seeking … what can I tell you, Zayde—there were people here, no need to mention names, who said: if Rabinovitch’s Judith goes on wailing like that, the jackals will come to the village to look for their relatives. And stories were going around, one nicer than the next. One said it was some woman’s thing, pains men can’t possibly understand in places they don’t have. One said it was matters of love, one said it was just regrets in sleep, see, everybody regrets all kinds of things, big things or little things, and there are people who regret quietly and there are people who regret with screams and there are people that all they do in life is just regret. I once knew a goyish carpenter who sometimes regretted something he ate and sometimes he regretted somebody he loved, and sometimes what he said, and sometimes what he did. Is there any lack of reasons for people to regret? Sometimes he would come to people’s houses to redo some commode he made them a week before, and twice they caught him in the cemetery digging ’cause he regretted the wood he made the coffin out of, and two or three times a year he would change his name, and leave the old name to deal with all the old problems, like a snake sheds its old skin in the field. See, Zayde, you always used to complain about your name when you were a child, so how come you didn’t change it? See, you could have gone to the government, too, and said: Don’t want to be Zayde no more. Want to be Gershon, want to be Solomon. Want to be Jacob. It would be great if you were Jacob. But that’s very dangerous, ’cause names like mine and yours are Fate. With names like ours you don’t fool around.”