The Loves of Judith (19 page)

Many times I have tried to make pickles like hers, and I haven’t succeeded, but I can evoke the memory of their smell in my nose and then I slide my tongue over my teeth, from right to left and from left to right, back and forth, like walking in a rut, salty salty salty salty salty salty salty ytlas ytlas ytlas ytlas ytlas ytlas ytlas——

And then, when I press it to my palate, it swims in saliva with their precise taste.

Mother wiggled her bare toes and sighed with pleasure, and with her eyes closed she slowly drank her grappa. Then she would get up and go distribute food for the cows, milk, cook, straighten up, and clean, and just before midnight her screaming rose again from the cowshed as if it were her first night there.

Oded used to wake up and grumble: “She’s crying again, looking for pity.” And Naomi breathed only in the intervals between the sobs, and imagined she stopped them because they threatened to rip her own throat, and she felt that her body was turning to stone and growing cold.

“O
NLY AFTER
she got pregnant with you did she stop screaming,” she told me many years later, in Jerusalem.

“That was the first sign that she had a baby in her belly. But then, when she came, on those first nights—how old was I then? six or something—and I remember, when Judith would scream, it would hurt me here, inside, under my belly button, and here in my chest, you feel it, Zayde? Touch it. That was my first sign that one day I would be a woman.”

We were riding on the train then, from Jerusalem to the small station of Bar-Giora, where, she told me, there was a wonderful creek and we’d stroll in it.

The locomotive sprayed sparks and steam, puffed on the slope of the track, we ate sandwiches of omelets, cheese, and parsley that Naomi had wrapped in the rustling paper from a margarine package.

She didn’t forget to take some coarse salt wrapped in newspaper and we dipped the tomato in it and laughed.

“My father loves salt, too,” she said.

“So does my mother,” I said.

“I know,” said Naomi. “I love people who love salt.”

Younger than all of Judith’s lovers, she loved her with a love that was better and deeper than all of them, the love by decision.

“The minute she got out of the train with her big funny-looking suitcase, I decided that I loved that woman, no matter what. That wasn’t love for a mother or for a friend or for an aunt. So what was it? What kind of a question is that, Zayde? A kind of blend it was. A blend of a cat and a cow and a very big sister.”

The train crossing guard said: “Watch out, there are terrorists here.”

We walked on the shady path above the channel. Naomi laughed and my heart stood still. Sixteen and a half years old I was then, and she was about thirty-two. Time, the great ripener, made her beautiful and slowed her down and deepened her voice and my love, and made her husband Meir rich and old and withdrawn.

Only two years later, when I was a soldier and went to them on leave, did I dare ask her: “What’s going on with your husband lately?” And she said: “I feel so good when you come to visit, Zayde, let’s not talk about Meir.”

The lake of her beauty had already started a retreat from the banks of her forehead and the pillar of her chin, and was now centered in her lips, in the corners of her eyes, where it was especially sweet and thick, and in the two smooth eyebrows on the sides of the bridge of her nose.

Mother and Oded hated him, but I like Meir. His wife I love, him I like, and their son I try to ignore. Even today, when I go meet with my red-haired professor—the “head rook,” as Naomi calls him—to bring him my observation journals and to get compliments and new assignments from him, I try to talk a bit with Meir. He still has the thin figure and the straight well-formed
shoulders and the thick hair, parted in the middle, and that light walk, the walk of a man who lives in peace with his own body.

N
AOMI
suddenly tilted her head, and for one moment, she put her sweet salty lips on mine.

“Tasty.” She laughed and tapped the back of my neck.

“You’ve grown up nice,” she said. “You’ve already got the shoulders and hands of a man.”

We were sitting in the shade of the mulberry tree. The warm air of her mouth gathered and trembled in the hollow of my neck. Her hand dropped gold between my shoulders. A partridge roared off with a beating of its wings.

“She used to sing to me, listen to this,
shlaf meyn feygele, meyn kleyne, lig nor shtil un her tsikh tsu
. You understand? Then she would translate, like this: ‘Sleep, sleep, my little bird. Hush, lie still and hear my word.’ ”

The red branches of the mulberry tree looked black to her against the sky above them, she announced all of a sudden.

“Her first Purim in the village she told me, ‘Come on Nomele, I’ll make you a special costume.’ I thought I was going to be dressed up as the queen of England, but all she did was sew me some plain little girl’s dress, did my hair in a brand-new way, and put a rag doll in my hand. I asked her what kind of costume that was, and she said: ‘You’re dressed up as another little girl.’ And that’s what I said in class. Everybody was dressed up properly, as kings and heroes, and when they asked me what I was dressed up as, I said just what she told me, that I was dressed up as another little girl. And proudly, you know, not ashamed, and with all the love that I decided to love her. Because that’s the most important rule of love, that it’s a matter of decision. I already told you that once and I’ll tell you again: you just have to decide—now, that’s love. Just like that. Now, that’s love. Everything I hear and smell and see and think—is love. Look Naomi and smell and touch and taste and hear real good. What’s happening now, that’s love.
And to say it aloud, when nobody hears: now, that’s love. And to talk as in love and to look as in love and to act as in love. Like our neighborhood milkman, a wonderful old religious man, once told Meir: if you, Mr. Klebanov, if you just adore the Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He all the time, and how He created the world, you’ll remain a heretic as you are, but if you curse the Lord every morning, God forbid, and at the same time put on a hat and keep kosher and honor the Sabbath for a month, that’ll make you a good Jew. Just like that. Love of commandments and rules. Touch her all the time, hug her three times, think what Judith is doing now, imagine her hands when you eat her sandwich at recess at school, here, on these slices they were, this cucumber they peeled and cut. This salt they sprinkled. Put a blue kerchief like hers on your head, and steal a small sip from her bottle and cough. Maybe, if I had decided to love Meir as I then decided to love her, my life would have been easier afterward. Sometimes I thought she loved me, too, and she really did hug and kiss, but she never stroked. The stroking she kept in her hand. You remember how the old folks in the village used to put it? Loving doesn’t cost money. I hated that saying so much. If loving doesn’t cost money, then why are they all so stingy with love?”

“I’m not,” I said.

“You’re not stingy, Zayde, you’re just stupid, and I don’t know what’s worse,” said Naomi. “But your mother was stingy. Stingy with love. Did you notice how she’d sometimes walk around with her fist clenched? At first I thought she wanted to hit somebody and then I understood that she was keeping something there. Maybe that caress I wanted so much and she kept for another little girl. Do you ever think of that half-sister of yours, Zayde? I’m also your half-sister, maybe. Only at my mother’s grave did your mother caress me. Every month she used to take me there. Father used to come with us only on the anniversary of her death, you know that yourself, Zayde, but then, in the first years, she used to take me every time, and only there, at the grave, was her hand on my back open and caressing and caressing. And I loved
most of all to sit on the cement walk my father paved for her and eat pomegranates with her. You remember how nice it was to eat pomegranates with her on the walk?”

O
NCE EVERY TWO WEEKS
, on Tuesday, they showed a movie at the town hall. Oded would bring the round flat box from Haifa, and sometimes he would go to Mother, lower his eyes, and say: “It’s a movie from America.”

She didn’t go to the town hall very much, but when a movie came from America, the two of us went. Together we looked at the pictures of an American street and American houses and American roads and trees, and together we inserted her little girl into their frame.

As will often happen, the daughter went on growing in her memories. She saw her adding height and intelligence, saw her change the way she did her hair and the way she looked, was stabbed by the buds of her ripening breasts, screamed in fear with her at her first menstrual period, and along with her, forgot her mother tongue and her mother, and one night she even dreamed her married to a man and giving birth to twins, who, to her horror, looked like that cursed man whose name I was forbidden to say then and am forbidden to remember even now.

On the way back from the town hall, she didn’t say a word, and at home she took a small sip of her drink and sighed without knowing how loud and sharp her sigh was, and then she lay down and heard the dances of the three brothers, If, What If, and What If Not, and the laughter of the
Malakh-fun-shlaf
and Moshe’s nocturnal rambling: from the kitchen cabinets to the clothes closet, door after door, and from there to the space between the beds to the floor and from there to the space between the hut and the
ground. Then he went out to the yard and gently knocked on the walls of the storehouse, moved sacks, and lifted bales of straw in the haystack. He didn’t go into the cowshed, where his entrance could be interpreted as improper, but he peeped again into the hatchery, and went back to the storehouse, because in those days, he attributed to the braid the ability to move and evade, and even thought it contained a measure of cunning.

And so he walked and searched and surveyed and came back. To the rack of his bed, to the little girls’ frocks his mother had put on him, to the bubbles of death in the cold water, to his wide-open eyes wandering in the dark.

T
HE CEMENT WALK
from the house to the cowshed, Moshe Rabinovitch paved for Judith before I was born. The little hand of big time has brought forth spots of lichen in it now and sprouted screwbeans in its cracks. But I remember as if I were there because there isn’t a day that I don’t walk on it.

“That walk, my father made for your mother,” Naomi told me. “From the house to the cowshed. That’s a nice gift, isn’t it? You should’ve seen her face when Father finished the work and said to her: ‘That’s for you, Judith.’ If he were Globerman, he would certainly have bowed and told her: ‘Lady Judith doesn’t have to get her wonderful feet dirty in the mud, period!’ And if he was Sheinfeld, he would have laid down in the mud and told her to walk on him. But my father paved her a walk. Without any fooling around and the way it should be.”

One day, at the end of Judith’s third summer here, Rabinovitch brought cement and sand and gravel and boards, built a form, inserted iron stakes, and poured squares that combined into a strip of cement from the hut to the cowshed. Then he smoothed and watered the cement and when the work was done and the walk dried, he invited Judith to come to it.

And suddenly, Mother was filled with a spirit of joy. With
one hand, she lifted the hem of her skirt a bit, gave the other hand to Naomi, and the two of them inaugurated the new walk with a few light, bouncy steps.

“And that winter we didn’t drown in the mud between the house and the cowshed. You can’t imagine how happy we were about that walk.”

“For Mother you didn’t make a walk,” Oded said to his father.

He boycotted the new walk and for two years he strode alongside it. Then he gave in and stopped, but in the ground his feet had already trodden a thin short path of orphanhood and rebuke, still visible there to this day.

B
EFORE
P
ASSOVER
, Tonya Rabinovitch’s pomegranates blossomed in a plethora of tiny leaves, then they glittered and bloomed red, and in the June
Hamsins
, the scarlet ovaries puffed up and decked themselves out in their crowns.

Judith made newspaper cones, took Naomi, and together they covered the tiny fruits, and in the autumn when that summer came to a close, the two of them sat on the new walk and ate pomegranates.

The first pomegranates, with big pink seeds, were ready to eat by Rosh Hashanah, and the dark sourish ones Judith picked after Sukkoth, squeezed them and strained their juice with the white laundered cloth they used for straining milk, and taught Naomi how to make wine from it.

Years have passed since then, but I can easily picture them sitting on the gray cement, the woman who’s dead now and the little girl who has grown up now, blue cloth kerchiefs on both their heads and their four knees bare. Their strong, bare feet are still pricked by the tiny spinning tops of the eucalyptus, which was still standing there, and by the hard little hedgehogs that kept dropping from the casuarinas.

Judith picked up a pomegranate, tapped it gently all around
with the wooden handle of the knife, and decapitated it. She peeled a bit around the stump, cut around the rind, and cracked the fruit with her fingers.

“Never cut it with a knife, Nomele,” she said. “Metal gives pomegranate a bad taste.”

With the pad of her thumb, she loosened and spilled the seeds into the palm of her other hand, and from there she poured them into her mouth.

“Those are my mother’s trees,” grumbled Oded.

“So you eat them, too,” said Naomi.

“Don’t let a single seed fall,” Judith warned her, as she warned me, too, a few years later when I was also in the world and the two of us sat on that same walk and ate pomegranates. “Don’t let a single seed fall. Anyone who drops a seed has lost.”

Even today she warns me like that in my mind, but today I don’t eat the fruit of those pomegranates. All winter they are occupied by robins and all spring they bloom red and they still ripen into a plethora of fruit. Out of a vague sense of obligation I cup them in paper cones every year, but I don’t pick them when they’re ripe.