The Loves of Judith (26 page)

I
SAID BEFORE THAT
B
ATHSHEBA
called her husband Menahem a “decent bird.” Moshe, on the other hand, called his brother a “crazy fowl,” but he loved him, appreciated his good mind, and even revealed to Menahem that at night he searched for his braid, which Menahem remembered just as well as Moshe: that and nothing else.

The two brothers were very different from one another, but that difference brought them close together and didn’t drive them apart. Menahem, his wife, and his sons often came from the neighboring village to visit his brother, and Judith, Moshe, and Moshe’s children frequently went to visit him and Aunt Bathsheba in their village.

Oded hitched the wagon and put sacks of straw on it to cushion the jolting on the wooden boards. A sturdy and responsible boy he was, and demanded to hold the reins.

Everybody sat down in the wagon and Naomi laughed at Rachel’s worried face looking at them from the cowyard.

“C’mon-c’mon-c’mon-c’mon,” called Judith, and Rachel jumped lightly over the fence and accompanied them, striding on her long legs, lingering now and then to pick herself a bunch of clover and flax blossoms.

Lines of rage crept onto Moshe’s forehead: “Why does she follow us everywhere like a dog?”

“What do you care, Father? Nobody will talk about you. She’s following Judith and she doesn’t bark,” said Naomi.

And Judith said: “Meantime, she’ll eat a little grass on the way and that saves you money, Rabinovitch.”

“It’s undignified,” grumbled Moshe.

T
HE DIRT ROAD MEANDERED
along the old pipe that had once brought water from the spring to the village. A lot of castor oil bushes grew there in those days, and at the edge of the field was a big, chirping colony of field mice. At night, the jackals would hunt them and then come and wail in high voices, dripping blood, right under the windows of the houses. Your heart would fill with dread and cold and the village dogs, even though they were bigger and stronger than the jackals, were also terrified by the savagery of the truth evident in their wailing, and they knocked on the doors of the houses, pleading to be let in lest they be bitten or tempted.

Years later, when I dropped out of school and returned to the village, I worked here plowing the common field. Four days I sat on the old D-6 and plowed the way I like to write: back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. Falcons hovered over me, cowbirds and crows, who knew the plowing seasons by now, flocked together, and hopped behind me, gleaning worms
and insects the plow turned up onto the soil. And when I came here, I allowed myself to veer from the furrow to the edges of the field. The blades of the plow burst into the burrows of the field mice and the birds made an awful slaughter of them.

At the end of the field, bunches of nests marked the curve of the channel of the wadi. The water deposited an abundance of silt here and a lush growth flourished in it.

From the time of my childhood to this day, I have come down here. On Saturdays in autumn to gather raspberries, and in the spring to pick anemones and narcissus.

In winter Moshe didn’t let me go. The water turned gray then and rose, the mud became deep, and the riverbanks became slippery and treacherous.

“Why do you send him there alone?” he yelled at Mother.

“Nothing will happen to him,” she answered. And to me, she said: “Go, Zayde, and don’t come back late.”

I went, and sometimes I’d see them, my three fathers, peeping at me from a distance and scared about my safety.

B
Y NOW
, Moshe let Oded hold the reins even across the wadi. Silence prevailed. Moshe didn’t talk to anyone about his Tonychka, but this was the wadi, that was the water, and here was the place.

Even the horse, the horse Rabinovitch bought to replace the mule that replaced that she-ass, hesitated a bit before he crossed the channel. He went down with recoiling hooves, his nostrils expanding and his neck bristling as if he knew, too. But when he came to the water line and wanted to retreat, the slope of the bank and the weight of the wagon and Oded’s scolding would push him from behind and force him across.

The hooves sank in the shallow water and generated precise mud roses. Their reflections shuddered, riding on drops of spreading nacre, and the wheels immediately rumbled and churned up the river. The dragonflies took off and the muscles of
the horse’s big fragrant thighs were outlined under his skin as he strove to climb the opposite slope.

The back wheels came out of the water, the thin waves were absorbed in the banks, the silt slowly sank. Like the flesh of a woman, the channel returned to its previous state, and not a single trace remained in it.

For a few more minutes, thick brown drops streamed from the wheels to the dust and left clods and tears of mud in it, and Oded now shouted, “Whoa,” and stopped the horse at the railroad station, where they had once picked up Mother.

“Let’s stop here and have something to eat,” said Moshe. “It’s not nice to come hungry to people.”

Everyone got out of the wagon and stretched their legs. Naomi spread an old sheet on the grass. Rachel grazed on the side, tried to butt butterflies, ate flowers, and breathed sighs of satisfaction. Judith opened the basket and took out the egg sandwiches with green onion that smelled like a traveling family, and she was still turning out their exact copies years later, when everyone was older, and I had come into the world and would ride with them.

We sat in the shade of the mighty eucalyptus trees of the station and ate.

Rotten wooden sockets were piled up on the side. The railroad tracks had been pulled up and removed by then, had become rails for cattle pens and beams for building haystacks.

The train that had brought Mother no longer travels here, and the nearby camp, where Italian prisoners of war were once interned, has now become a gigantic melon field, and remnants from a stone chimney of an old army kitchen are all that can still be seen there.

I climbed the water tower of the station. In its days of glory it had launched steam locomotives, and now its walls were split and it had become a kingdom of lizards and owls. They looked at me with their round eyes, bowed and gurgled in a ridiculous
ceremony of intimidation whose rules I didn’t understand. I used to crumble their dry vomit and the findings are still recorded in my old childhood notebook: “Field mouse skulls, lizard vertebrae, feathers of miserable sparrows.”

From the treetops, crows watched us curiously, waiting for us to go and leave scraps. The bolder ones had already hopped onto the ground not far from us with their erect necks and their black eyes. I knew some of them, because they were among those who gathered in afternoon confabs on our eucalyptus tree, which, in those days, was still standing in the yard in its full power and height.

I
N
U
NCLE
M
ENAHEM
’
S
carob orchard, the fruit was already swollen and their green was pierced with brown, and in Uncle Menahem’s throat the vocal chords were already muted.

“Hello, Zayde, how are you?” he wrote on a sheet of his notebook, pulled it out and handed it to me.

“Fine, Uncle Menahem,” I took out the note I had written beforehand, as if I were also mute. I don’t know why, but I always called him “uncle,” even though I never called his brother “father.”

Uncle Menahem’s whole body shook with inaudible laughter, and his hands stroked my head. I knew what he would do now. He took a big handkerchief out of his pocket, folded it sideways into a triangle, folded it again, point on point, turned it over and rolled it, and his fingers were already poking the tail of the handkerchief into its folds until a kind of cloth sausage remained in his hand. Then he released the ends and tied an imaginary knot of two ears on one side.

“A mouse!” I exclaimed excitedly, and Uncle Menahem put the cloth mouse on his left wrist and with the quick fingers of his right hand, he made it jump into my face so suddenly it scared and delighted me every time as it had the first time.

His springtime muteness was so complete that not even a
shout, a laugh, a sigh, or a groan managed to escape from his throat. By now he knew how to prepare himself for the weeks of silence that were in store for him. As far as the farm was concerned, he gave his sons orders beforehand, like someone ruling his household, and ahead of time, he prepared the notebook he would use to communicate with anyone he needed. At the top of every page, in red ink, was the sentence, “I have lost my voice,” so that he wouldn’t have to apologize and explain.

Time had made him so accustomed to his allergy that he started enjoying it and even looking forward to it. It was clear to him that during the spring silence, he worked better, had time to read, listen to music, immerse himself in smells and sights. A pleasant smile often illuminated his face, a sign of wonderful thoughts, the kind that relinquish the need to ride on words.

A few weeks after Passover, Uncle Menahem’s voice returned to his throat. It was preceded by a sense of ripe fruit forming around his heart, but the return of speech itself was usually revealed to him in the middle of the day, when a thought he thought suddenly surprised him by being heard outside his skull, as if someone else had said it in a voice like his. Or in the morning, when the mirror said something to him in the middle of shaving. Or in the middle of the night, when he would turn over and wake up because he dreamed he heard himself talking in his sleep, and only when the words bounced back from Bathsheba’s back did he understand that he had really said them.

He jumped up immediately and got dressed and ran to us through the fields, hoping that one of the hoors would come out of his wife’s jealous vision, put on skin and flesh, and chance on the way and he could talk to her and melt her flesh with words.

“Moshe! Judith! Children!” he shouted as he came into our yard, and the words, which had been waiting for him all spring, flew out of his mouth in excited orbits, just like those swallows that fly and shriek at the height of their power and who never land.

R
ACHEL GREW UP
and became a cow whose masculinity was unmistakable. Her muscular shoulders were unusually high and much broader than her rump, her udders were tiny, and the rose of hair on her forehead was lower than a calf’s and made her look like a hooligan. Her ways were the arrogant ways of a young, playful bull and embarrassed Moshe to the point of open disgust.

“That’s not how a cow behaves,” he kept repeating.

He kept talking about his intention to sell her to Globerman and whenever he said that, Judith would pretend he was talking on her deaf side, but a revealing cloud of anger darkened her forehead and her eyes.

Uncle Menahem, who knew how much Judith’s soul was tied to the soul of her cow, and who, unlike his brother, recognized a person’s right to behave even in strange and amazing ways, suggested she consult his neighbor, Samson Bloch, the livestock expert I mentioned before.

“Just don’t let him ask you his nonsense,” he said.

The people of the Valley loved and appreciated Samson Bloch, but he infuriated them with his popular research on rutting seasons in cattle, which he accomplished by pestering the women of the Valley with intimate questions.

“The professor at the university operates on a mouse to know what happens in a human being, and I ask the woman a few questions to know what the cow feels,” he explained.

“A woman in love is not a cow in heat,” Bathsheba yelled at him one day.

“A female is a female and a male is a male,” said Bloch. “Balls
and ovaries, noise and turmoil. What difference does it make if they walk on four legs or on two? If they chew the cud in their belly or they chew the cud in their mind?”

He took one look at Rachel and shook his head: “A waste of time.”

He brought out a measuring tape and measured her height and the length of her body, from the shoulder to the end of the tailbone and the hoof of her front leg.

“Exactly the same,” he said. “Look for yourself, Judith, the height is exactly the same as the length.
Dos iz a tumtum. Nit a bik un nit a ku
.”

“I want that cow,” she said. “And if she doesn’t give milk, Rabinovitch will sell her to Globerman.”

“That’s the fate of cows,” said Bloch. “How much milk can come out of this udder?”

“Even a little bit, that’ll help.”

“There’s only one way,” said Bloch. “To milk her and milk her and milk her until one day maybe something will come out of there. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.”

Judith went back home and started milking Rachel.

At first the cow complained, shook, and kicked. But Judith coaxed her with words and caresses until she gave in.

Rabinovitch, who saw her doing that and knew what was said, told her she was wasting her time and energy.

Globerman couldn’t help saying: “Maybe you’ll also milk the other calves, Lady Judith, they’ll love you for it a lot.”

“This cow I’ll milk until milk comes out of her udder and blood comes out of my fingers,” answered Judith. “And you won’t get her ever.”

I
N THE BIG WOODEN CAGE
hanging on the beam of the cowshed, Jacob’s beautiful canary struggled.

At first he sang faithfully and strong, but like hired wooers, he was ashamed and fell silent when he noticed that no one admired his singing. A few weeks later, his feathers started molting at an embarrassing rate. Judith opened the door of the cage for him and he flew off—annoyed, ashamed, and happy, as far as mixed feelings can nest in the heart of a bird—and returned to his master.