The Loves of Judith (16 page)

“And as soon as you smelled Judith’s food, you rushed right down from the tree,” said Naomi.

They ate and went to school, and Moshe went back to the cowshed and stuck two nails in the walls where Judith had showed him. She asked where she could get curtain rings, and she immediately saw him pacing around the yard, his body bent over and his eyes searching for rusty nails. After he straightened and polished them, he went to the cowshed and asked her how many rings she needed.

Before her amazed eyes, Rabinovitch rolled the nails between
his fingers one after another, and a dozen rings were quickly strung together and threaded on a wire he stretched, the curtain was hung and spread, and a sort of isolation chamber was created between the cement wall and the cloth wall, and the good smell of lemons already rose from there, made its way in the dense air and the heavy smell of manure.

She spread a cloth cover on the iron bed, and at noon Naomi came home from school holding a pink-purple bunch of wild clover and storksbill. She put the flowers in a can and put the can on the case in the cowshed, and added a brief note: “For Judith.”

“A
ND WHAT WILL
they say in the village?” Moshe argued after dinner. “That I sent you to live in the cowshed?”

“And what will they say in the village if I live with you in the hut?” said Judith.

Naomi was collecting bread crumbs from the table, and Oded didn’t budge. Rabinovitch was silent and wondered if Judith knew he had heard her scream at night.

“Explain to them whatever you want, Rabinovitch,” she added. “I don’t have to explain anything to anyone.”

She finished washing the dishes, shook the drops off her hands with two decisive waves, and wiped them on the cloth apron around her waist with a gesture all women had in those days and now they don’t have anymore, a gesture that disappeared along with the apron.

“Come show me how to untie the cows.” She went out.

And when the embarrassed Moshe followed her, arguing once again, “It looks bad,” she turned to him and said: “You’re a good man, Rabinovitch. I wouldn’t have counted on any other man, but here is where I’ll live.”

They untied the iron yokes and Moshe tapped the rumps of the milk cows and shouted, “Get out! Get out!” to chase them out into their dark yard.

Judith did the same and then took the blue kerchief off her
head, quickly moved the curtain aside, and the decisive rustle of the electric sparks of her hair and the metal rings on the iron wire said, Done.

Moshe shouted again, “Get out, bagobones! Get out!” even though that wasn’t necessary anymore.

One more minute, he waited on the other side of the curtain, and then he returned to the hut, lay down on his bed, and waited.

R
EBECCA
S
HEINFELD
was the most beautiful of all the beautiful daughters of the Schwartz family of Zikhron Ya’akov.

She had suitors not only from her own hometown and from the villages of the Galilee, but also from distant villages in Judea, from Haifa, and from Tel Aviv, and men gathered in Zikhron Ya’akov because of her, “like thirsty wanderers to an oasis.” There were horsemen and winegrowers, young teachers and farmers’ sons. At night they ate roasted grains they took from the barn and drank wine they stole from the winery, and played their ocarinas and mandolins.

Women would also come there because that was how they met men returning at dawn, the softest, most vulnerable time, after longing and fatigue melted their legs and the shining sun illuminated their disappointment. And quite a few couples, they said in the colony, made matches there because of Rebecca.

Every night, her father locked her in her room, climbed up onto the flat roof, and sat down there, an earthenware jug of water at his side, the head of the palm tree rustling next to his own head, and a hunting rifle loaded with grains of salt in his hands.

Rebecca looked at her suitors from the window and was filled with pity for them and for herself. But one afternoon when she went to the butcher, near the line of Washingtonia palm trees
of the village, she met Jacob Sheinfeld, a laborer who had immigrated to Eretz Israel a week before, and had come to Zikhron Ya’akov not knowing anything at all about its most beautiful girl.

“Listen to an experienced woman and live in the city,” said her mother when Rebecca announced her intention to marry him and go with him to a new place named Kfar-David. “There’s no worse fate than the lot of a beautiful woman who lives in a small place.”

I asked the Village Papish to interpret that statement and he explained to me that every settlement can include and digest only a certain amount of beauty, that it depends on its size and the number of its inhabitants.

“Jerusalem,” he said, “can bear a dozen beautiful women, Moscow seventy-five, and the village barely one.” And he added that it was like the ability of an animal to absorb snake venom, which depends on its size and its weight. “The horse will live and the dog will die,” he said.

A bitter and quarrelsome old man was the Village Papish, as often happens to people with lust and humor who live beyond their allotted time. Now he claimed that it would be better for beauty itself if it were divided up among many women, but happily it didn’t tend to dissolve and spread out equally and fairly in all the daughters of Eve.

Rebecca married Jacob and went with him to Kfar David, and within a few days, her mother’s words proved to be right. She didn’t find peace in either her marriage or her new place. As soon as she came to the village, the men stopped sleeping because their dreams of her were more exhausting than insomnia, and the fantasy was easier than the looks they gave her when they were awake.

And Rebecca, who also knew that she was more beautiful than all the women of the village, remembered her mother’s words and didn’t leave her house very much. She gave herself the hardest and ugliest work to do, she didn’t comb her hair, and when she did have to go into the center of the village, she wore her husband’s work clothes. But that only increased her charm because, said the Village Papish, you can’t blur beauty like they blur the truth here, and Rebecca’s walk was the walk of a beautiful woman, and the fluttering of her eyelashes was the fluttering of a beautiful woman, and the way the consonants “p” and “m” were launched from between her lips and the capering clapper of the “l” on the tip of her tongue was the way they yearned to be uttered in the mouth of a beautiful woman.

And when she strode, the coarse gray cloth flapped on her limbs like the wings of birds never seen in the village. And the wind pasted it to the shape of her hips and breasts and to the little hill of her groin, as it can delineate only the shape of flesh of a beautiful woman.

But Rebecca refused to know all those simple things, and when she saw her husband looking at the woman on Rabinovitch’s cart, her weary body bent forward, the wind playing with her clothes, and the light nestling in the shadows of her veins—Rebecca said in her heart that maybe she had been so cautious that she had undone her charm with her own hands.

Things, in their hinting way, began to take shape in her mind. Lines began to be drawn and to connect the dots. Tonya in the wadi, the albino and his birds, the fire, the poppies, the woman cruising on the sea of chrysanthemums. All those, Rebecca knew, were merely the onset of evasiveness, like the emerging heads of buds, just the modest onset of what was coming, but after them
what would she be? her heart asked her. After them what would she be and who would behold her?

She was a wise woman and could imagine the future and sense what was coming before it was completely clear. In dread mixed with curiosity, she waited for what was going to happen.

S
OMETIMES AN ELEGANT
English officer appeared in the village, dressed in a white navy uniform, driving a rattling wood-plated Morris Minor. He went to the albino bookkeeper and bought birds from him.

One day another guest came: a blind goldfinch hunter from the Arab village of Illut beyond the eastern hills. No one noticed his blindness because his confident steps led him straight to the hut of Yakobi and Yakoba.

The Arab knocked on the door, and the albino opened it immediately, something he usually didn’t do.

“How did you find the way?” he asked.

“As a man goes up a river until he comes to the source, that’s how I came to the birds,” said the blind man. And with a happy grin, he added: “And I didn’t fall down, not even once.”

He savored the sound of the canaries’ song and told the albino that the fellahin feed their finches and their
bandooks
on
umbuz
.

“That’s hashish seeds,” he explained. “The
bandook
takes the hashish in his mouth, forgets he’s in a cage, and then he’s happy and sings like a bridegroom, doesn’t give a damn about the whole world.”

On his next visit, the goldfinch hunter brought a few
bandooks
—hybrids of wild goldfinches and canaries—along with the hashish seeds that were good for their singing.

Like mules,
bandooks
can’t produce offspring either, and so
their wild blood doesn’t get thinned out in generations of domestication and prison. Their breeders can’t boast of pedigrees and hereditary titles, but the colors of the
bandooks
and their song are always loud and fresh, and the enchanted albino decided to feed them nourishment even more inspiring than hashish.

He sowed poppies in his yard and began extracting the sap from their stems. The big flowers quickly turned red at the top of their stalk, rose up, and set fire to the yard with a sinful splendor, and as poppies will do, they moved slowly even in the gustiest winds.

Jacob looked at the poppies, listened to the
bandooks
and the canaries, and couldn’t get his mind off the woman who came to work on Rabinovitch’s farm.

Poppies have an amazing quality: they don’t disappear from the eye of someone who looks at them, even after he turns his eyes away from them. Red and black, they look at him even if he closed his eyes. And Jacob stared at them, blinked long and short blinks, and didn’t know how dangerous were the experiments he was making.

One night, a few months after Judith came to the village, the old green pickup truck returned to its stable in a straight, sure line, and the albino, sober and fresh as a baby, got out and unloaded sacks of cement and plaster, bricks and boards, and iron scaffolding from the back.

Behind the fence, Jacob heard the sounds and looked into the darkness. The fair head gleamed like a buoy in the dark air, and the rhythmic noise of the work told Jacob that the bookkeeper was an experienced builder and could see in the dark like a cat.

For a few days, he followed the construction, and it seemed to him that the albino was watching him and even paying attention to him. And indeed, one evening, when the bookkeeper sat down to rest in his garden, leafed through his book, sighed, and sipped his drink, he suddenly took off his dark glasses and gave Jacob a long, reddish look that ended in a smile.

Excitement assaulted Jacob’s torso, and fear nailed his feet to the spot.

“What are you doing there all day at the fence?” asked the most beautiful woman in the village.

There was no anger in her voice, not even any wonder, just fear and worry.

“Nothing,” said Jacob.

At night she heard the pounding of his heart, the prattling of the snakes that whispered longings inside him, and by day the birdsong prophesied ill to her. She was alone, wrapped in the fabric of her beauty and in the mantle of her dread, and now she understood what her mother had told her years before: beautiful women don’t have real women friends.

The Village Papish told me that in her first days in the village, the women sought Rebecca’s friendship. Some stood at a safe distance and observed her, and some dared to approach and touch her arm and open their mouths a bit, unaware that they were trying to gulp the air she exhaled.

“And after they saw that beauty’s not a contagious disease, they kept away from her,” he said.

But even he couldn’t prophesy the full force of the love that gripped Jacob’s heart or all the wild sprouts and branches that would grow up.

The Village Papish sang his song to Rebecca, his fingers drumming on my knee and his voice growing louder.

N
OBODY KNEW WHAT
R
ABINOVITCH
’
S
worker carried in her heart or what she had up her sleeve.

Everybody watched her with their own eyes, observed things that usually hint and reveal a secret: smells of new dishes, a strange perfume, an unfamiliar and revealing garment waving on the clothesline.

But only the scream rose from the cowshed at night, and it certainly didn’t solve anything.

Soft agreed signals of warning were exchanged among the women, like the choked whistles of spring that field mice exchange when the jackal cleaves the tall grass.

But there was nothing predatory about her. There was some mystery, unintentional, and there were brief, fragrant movements of her hands as she worked, and touches she exchanged with Naomi; and that stubborn shell of hers, sometimes opaque as plaster and sometimes transparent as a grape skin, carried with her and around her.

Obviously, the pitchfork and the reins, the needle and the ladle weren’t strangers to her hands, and she quickly learned how to milk. At first she milked like a beginner, only between the finger and the thumb, and when the cows got used to her touch, and she got used to their closeness, Moshe taught her how to milk with four fingers pressing the teat one after another, from the index finger to the pinkie. Her arms ached from the effort and her fingers shook, but then her muscles grew strong and from the melody of the streams of milk in the bottom of the bucket, you could hear the milking of an experienced hand.