The Loves of Judith (41 page)

“May I have this dance?”

His old, dead, shriveled arms reached out to me.

His feet stumbled. His cold hand sought support on my back. A trace of his brittle chin was laid on my shoulder. The sun rose, and I shook him off me, went back to bed and closed my eyes, ripe and ready for my brief sleep.

“And to the wedding, see, you know, Zayde, she didn’t come. Everybody came to the wedding I made, everybody ate the food I cooked, she put on the bridal gown I sewed, and all alone I danced the dance I learned. How did that happen, Zayde? See, she was on her way to me, so what happened?”

N
OSHUA WENT ON
searching and found the albino’s old scythe. He honed the curved blade, mowed the grass of the yard, and raked it into a pile along with the straw and the old briers that time had amassed there. Then he took a crushed cigarette out of his shirt pocket, and even though nobody had ever seen him smoke before, he lit it. He inhaled the smoke with great pleasure; and he didn’t blow out the match, but tossed it onto the pile. The fire caught with a roar and with flames, and turned a new generation of curious faces red.

“And now, food for the wedding,” he declared.

He turned up the ground with the pitchfork, inserted posts, stretched wires, dug beds, and sowed vegetables. Behind the canary house, onions and eggplant, peppers and squash quickly
sprouted. In the front of the lot grew the garlic and the parsley and various kinds of leaves and grasses whose good smell was twined with the notes of the tango and the chirps of the canaries, and a few ancient poppies, which had been waiting in the ground in violation of every law, also decided to show up among them.

Noshua instructed Jacob to fertilize the vegetables with blood, but Jacob was scared of the idea. “Why blood? Are we lacking manure here? With all the cows and chickens?”

“And why dung?” Noshua marveled. “If you were a tomato, which would you choose?”

The slaughterhouse, the small active kingdom of the butchers, and the cattle dealers, was beyond the eucalyptus forest, and the figure of Jacob, with two small jars hanging from a pole on his shoulders, was seen there three times a week.

Blow flies, lusty and ravenous, flew behind him like a greenish bridal veil of death. Martens and jackals, their eyes shut, rubbed against his legs, mad with the smell of blood rising from the jars.

At that time, Jacob gave me the observation-box, and I often hid here, watching the birds who came to eat their fill of the offal from the knives of the ritual slaughterers and the porgers.

And humans I saw, too. I saw, I heard, and I remembered.

“If Lady Judith knows that you are watering your garden with cows’ blood, you won’t ever see her again,” Globerman said to Jacob, when the two of them met on the path leading through the forest. “Please remember, sir, what Globerman says.”

Jacob didn’t answer.

“So what, Sheinfeld?” the dealer changed the subject. “You are still dancing?”

“Yes,” answered Jacob with the seriousness of lovers, that naïve seriousness that wards off all mockery.

“You’re a fool, Sheinfeld,” said Globerman. “But that’s nothing, there are a lot of other fools besides you. He who is a fool is never alone, he’s in a very big company.”

“With Judith, we’re all fools,” said Jacob, and with a sudden daring, he added: “With Judith, even you are a fool, Globerman.”

My heart pounded, shook my ribs and the sides of the box. The steel tip of the baston gently tapped the toes of Jacob’s boots.

“Yes, Sheinfeld,” murmured the cattle dealer. “With Judith we’re all fools, but only you are also an idiot. You act like an idiot and you love like an idiot and you’ll also end up like an idiot.”

“And how does an idiot end up?” asked Jacob.

“An idiot ends up exactly like a fool, but it’s an end everybody sees, period,” said the cattle dealer, and after a brief, cold pause that fell on the two of them, he added: “And because you are an idiot, I’ll give you an example that will help you, Sheinfeld, that even an idiot like you can understand. Your love is like walking around with a hundred-pound bill in your pocket. That’s a lot of money, right? You think you can make a life with it, right? But you can’t make anything with it. With a hundred pounds you can’t drink a glass of beer, you can’t eat a sausage, you can’t get into the movies, you can’t even go to a whore. Nobody’s gonna give you change for a hundred-pound bill, and nobody’s gonna sell you nothing, period. That’s exactly like your love.”

“With great love only great things work,” declared Jacob proudly. “Not small change.”

Pity and scorn were all mixed up in the cattle dealer’s voice: “I don’t know what your dancing-clowning worker is teaching you or what Menahem Rabinovitch tells you when you run to cry to him,” he said. “But love, you should know, Sheinfeld, you have to change it to pennies, not to think so big, not to talk too high, not to sacrifice your whole life all at once. All your canaries you released for her and you didn’t get nothing in return. Not her did you get and not the change from the birds did you get.”

“Shut your mouth,” said Jacob.

The cattle dealer waved his hand in well-acted despair. “Why I give you advice I don’t know. After all, I love that woman, too, and her son I want, too. But I feel sorry for you, Sheinfeld, ’cause you’re an idiot and you’re confused. My father used to say about somebody like you that God had mercy on you when He put your balls in a bag, or else you’d lose them, too. So at least know how
to use the advice I’m giving you now. You’ve got to know how to bring something small here, tell a little story there, that’s what works, Sheinfeld, something small, and many times.”

T
HE
I
SRAELI
W
AR OF
I
NDEPENDENCE BROKE OUT
. Men disappeared from the village. Shots were heard from the road and distant smoke rose beyond the hills. New graves were also dug in the village cemetery. But Noshua, with a perfect Galilean accent and with bare feet that left traces, went to the nearby Arab village and came back, bleated in the voices of ewes, and a trusting little lamb trotted behind him.

After two weeks of fattening, leaping in the field, and games of hide-and-seek, Noshua led the lamb to the walnut tree, tied its hind legs with a rope, hung it head down on one of the branches, and before the lamb understood that this wasn’t a new game, he picked up an old sickle that had lost all its teeth, stretched his victim’s neck, and cut off his head in one smooth movement.

Even before the decapitated lamb’s spasms stopped, the worker had already cut the joints of his limbs, right above the hooves, placed his lips to the pieces, and blew hard.

“Pay attention, Sheinfeld,” he said to Jacob, tapping the entire small body with both hands.

Blowing air separated the skin from the flesh, and when Noshua cut along the lamb’s belly, he stripped off the skin like a coat.

“If you know how to do this, it’s very easy, and if you don’t know, it’s very hard,” he said.

Excited by the fragrant proximity of death, the crows hovered and hopped around. Lust and impatience made them so bold they came close and pecked Noshua’s blood-soaked shoes. He
tossed them the intestines and he baked the lamb in the aromatic ashes of what once were the branches of the orange trees in Rebecca and Jacob’s citrus grove.

“Sit here, Sheinfeld,” said Noshua, picked up a small, fragrant piece of meat with his fingers, blew on it to cool it, and put it to his student’s lips. “And remember that there are rules,” he went on. “You will look into her eyes and her eyes will look at you, and then real slow they will close. That’s the sign that she trusts you, and then, real slow, the lips will open, and real careful you’ll offer it, but you won’t yet really put the meat inside. You’ll wait a minute and then there’ll be a sign: her tongue will peep out a bit, like a little hand, to accept the gift. Then you’ll touch it with the meat and she’ll open her mouth and take it. That’s great trust and that’s great love, you should know. To open your mouth like that and to eat with your eyes closed, that’s more trust than to lie together with your eyes closed.”

Jacob’s eyes closed, his jaws spread apart, his tongue peeped out. Trusting and groping and smelling the fragrance and the warmth, it took and gathered its booty into his mouth.

“Eat now, Sheinfeld, eat,” and another small piece was put in his mouth.

“After the wedding, you’ll sit together at the table, the whole village will watch and you will feed her just like this. Not a lot, not with a fork, just a bit and only with the fingers. You’ll look at her as she chews, and she’ll look at you.”

And Jacob opened his eyes wide, looked and chewed and swallowed. The scar blazed on his forehead. Saliva and tears, milder than all the other liquids of the body, made what he swallowed slide to his jaw, his thighs trembled, and his heart melted.

Noshua noted the expression of pleasure and love on his student’s lips and hurried to extract his fingers before he was bitten. He stood up and put a record on the gramophone and Jacob couldn’t decide whether the tune fit itself to the POW’s movements or whether the Italian placed his feet on the notes with the ease of a schoolgirl skipping into a jump rope.

And then Noshua turned his head to Jacob and asked: “Finished with the mouth?”

Jacob nodded.

“Now the two of you will dance.”

And he gathered him up in his arms, pressed him to his body, and together they danced the tango, the dance of restrained lust, dried saliva, and the pain of regrets of the flesh.

T
HE ENDLESS NOTES
of the dance and the scents of the vapor and the seasoning and the mixing and the thickening rose from Sheinfeld’s yard and hovered over the earth. Everybody understood what they meant and knew what their purpose was, and yet mystery surrounded the house and the tent and the two men who lived, studied, trained, and prepared there.

A thin covering, like a fabric that envelops hired killers, alchemists, and very young widows, veiled all their ways.

Many people stopped at the house and tried to crumble its walls with their looks. Others only slowed their pace and gulped the air.

“In the Land of Israel young men are killed, and those two are playing over her,” said Oded, who came on leave for a few hours. He was serving in the Harel Brigade as a convoy truck driver, and brought letters to Naomi and from Naomi into besieged Jerusalem.

Jacob announced that he intended to enlist in the war, but they told him officially that he was too old and they told him less officially that he was crazy. Relieved, he went back to his tent, his dancing, and his cooking.

The cooking smells didn’t take any account of the direction of the wind, and always came from Jacob’s house to our window. But Mother wasn’t impressed by them, never lingered to look at the tent, and didn’t lend an ear to the music. Even worse, she didn’t so much as change her normal route to avoid passing by
there. She walked by them with her erect stride, her passing profile, and her flapping dress, turned to them the armor of her back and the chill of her deaf ear.

Rabinovitch’s Judith milked Rabinovitch’s cows, laundered Rabinovitch’s clothes, cooked Rabinovitch’s meals, and received her salary from Rabinovitch. Once a week she met with Globerman and drank with him from the common bottle, and twice a week I went with her on her walks with her cow Rachel, who was a very old calf by then, and had to be shown the way home, because sometimes she forgot.

The old cowshed was now a handsome little house, with bougainvillea twined around its cheeks like colorful side curls, swallows fluttering yearnings at its windows, and a soft smell of milk rising from the cracks in its walls. Rabinovitch’s Judith raised her son there and paid no heed to anybody.

In Jacob, this behavior stirred an understandable fear, but Noshua wasn’t at all interested either in Judith or in her behavior. He acted according to rules no woman could ignore, and according to slow and calculated schedules that Chance can’t influence and Time can’t deviate from.

At the first cease-fire, the two of them went to Haifa to buy cloth for the bride’s gown, and while Jacob was feeling fabrics, Noshua was attentively observing the cutters and seamstresses who were working there.

“He’s sewing the dress for me,” he told the women, propping his elbow on Jacob, who was thoroughly embarrassed.

The seamstresses laughed and, in the high voice of the village nursery school teacher, Noshua sang:

The seamstresses applauded him, sang along with him, and enjoyed themselves so much they didn’t suspect anything and allowed him to stay with them and watch their work as much as he wanted. And at night, the POW returned to the village an expert at measuring, cutting, and sewing.

“Now we’ll start sewing the gown for the wedding, and next year everything will be ready,” he said.

“You don’t have to measure it on the bride herself?” asked Jacob.

“Enough with the bride already!” said Noshua, unexpectedly sharp. “What does the bride have to do with it? You don’t have to see the bride and you don’t have to dance with the bride and you don’t have to measure the bride!”

He spread big, rustling sheets of paper over the floor of the room.

“Now just describe her body to me in words,” he instructed.

Jacob described and the POW crawled and drew the parts of the dress with a pencil, cut out the paper with scissors, and then spread the cloth on the floor.

That whole stage, which only takes a few lines and seconds in the story, lasted many months. It started with buying the cloth and continued with preparing and calculating, and drawing and cutting, and as it went, showers fell, fruits ripened, the moon filled and waned, and birds migrated, and at the end, Jacob washed his feet and dried them with a rag and after he trod on white paper, to show Noshua there was no dirt on them, he walked on the plot of the fabric.