The Loves of Judith (7 page)

T
WO YEARS PASSED
from that day to the day my mother came to work in Moshe Rabinovitch’s house, take care of his orphans, and milk his cows.

I know only a few details about those years in her life, where she was and what she did.

“
A nafka mina
, who cares,” she’d dismiss me whenever I’d ask her about it, and would immediately get annoyed. “Now hurry and sit on the right side, Zayde, you heard!” Because once again I had forgotten and was sitting on her deaf side.

When I grew up a little, I also asked my three fathers, and they gave me three different answers.

Moshe Rabinovitch told me that she had worked for a time in the winery of Rishon Le-Zion, “and there she also learned to drink her liquor,” he smiled.

The cattle dealer Globerman, who had eyes and access all over the country, told me that my mother’s parents “stayed in exile after they heard what she did in the Land of Israel, because they didn’t want to see her no more.”

And when I kept asking and wanted to know more, the dealer said that men mustn’t investigate their mother’s past.

“What went on between Lady Judith’s legs before you came out of there, Zayde, isn’t none of your business, you don’t have to know, period,” he stated in his usual coarse way, which I still had trouble adjusting to, but which didn’t offend me anymore.

And the canary breeder, Jacob Sheinfeld, my mother’s suitor and victim, served me his fragrant dishes one after another and told me simply: “Rabinovitch’s Judith from heaven she came to me, heaven, and she went back there from me.”

That’s what he said, and his hands drew circles on the table, and the white scar on his forehead suddenly turned red, which always happens when he turns pale.

“You’re still little,
meyn kind
. But you’re gonna grow up and you’re gonna learn and you’re gonna know that in love there are rules. And it’s better you learn those rules from a father, so you don’t need later on to suffer because of love itself. How come a child has a father? So he’ll learn from his father’s troubles and not from his own troubles. How come all us sons of Israel is the sons of our father Jacob? So we’ll all learn from his love. People are gonna tell you lots of things about love. First of all, they’re gonna tell you it’s something for two. No, Zayde. For good hate
you need two. But for love, you only need one person. And one little thing is enough for love, like I already told you. And someday, when you’ll fall in love with a woman because of some one little thing, her eyes, let’s say, somebody’s gonna come along and say: you fall in love with her eyes, but in the end you gotta live with the whole woman. No, Zayde. If you’ll fall in love with her eyes you’ll also live with her eyes. And all the rest of that woman is like the closet for the dress.”

He dropped his eyes under my amazed look. His hand stopped stroking the table, but his mouth went on talking: “Those things even God don’t understand. The God of the Jews, loneliness He understands real good. But love He don’t understand at all. One Lord all alone up in heaven, no kids, no friends, and no enemies, and the worst thing—no woman. In the end He gets crazy from so much loneliness. So He makes us crazy, too, and calls us whore and virgin and bride and all kinds of names a dumb man calls a woman. A woman ain’t none of those things. In the end she’s flesh and blood. It’s too bad, only now I understand all that. Maybe if I understood it back then, if I understood that love is from the brain, not from the heart, is laws and rules, not dreams and craziness, maybe I would have had a better life. But understanding is one thing and succeeding is something else. If one man is going to get the one woman he really wants, somebody’s got to run the whole world for that, and all parts of the world got to move and fall into place. ’Cause nothing goes by itself. And sometimes a person drowns in water here in the Land of Israel so that in America somebody else will win at cards. And sometimes a rain cloud comes here all the way from Europe so on a stormy night a man and a woman will be together. And if somebody commits suicide, it’s a sign that somebody else wanted him to die very very much. And when a crow screams, somebody hears that scream. And when I saw Judith coming, when I saw the wagon going real slow, and the sun shining straight down—I looked on her and I knew: this is the woman my eyes could raise from the earth. Could raise her up and take her to me. In the
land of India, there are people like that. They can move a cup on the table just by looking on it. You knew that, Zayde? In the children’s newspaper at the Village Papish’s house, I read about it. In his house they kept the old issues. Over there in India they got whatchacallit, fakirs, who don’t feel no pain. They stop their breath and their heart. And they can move a cup on the table to the left or the right just with a look. Believe you me, Zayde, with a look. Right and left. Left and right. Move the cup like that. And a cup, you should know, Zayde, it’s a lot harder to move a cup than to move a woman.”

I
T WAS
M
OSHE
’
S
older brother, Menahem Rabinovitch, whose stories and sweet carobs led Moshe and Tonya to immigrate to the Land of Israel, who knew Judith and advised Moshe to bring her to work in his house and farm.

Only after I grew up did Uncle Menahem tell me the name that was forbidden to mention, either in speaking or in writing, the name of my mother’s first husband. He said the name and told me the story.

“They were living then in Mlabes or Rishon, I’m not absolutely sure.”

My mother’s first husband was a soldier in the Hebrew Brigades, and when World War I ended, he came back to the Land of Israel and didn’t find work.

Every day he went out to the main street of the town to look for work. A proud man he was, and didn’t plead with the landlords, but rather fixed them with that soldier’s look he had acquired in the war and which had now become a stumbling block for him because he didn’t know that that look wasn’t good in peacetime.

“People use what they’ve got, even if it’s not exactly fitting,” Uncle Menahem explained. “They smile when they should cry, pull out a gun when they should give a smack, and envy their lady loves instead of making them laugh.”

Long hours that man lay in bed and kept silent. They lived in a rented room which had previously been a pen for Turkish ducks. Feathers that were already crumbled to dust turned his eyes red. The old stench of poultry droppings slapped his face like unforgotten insults.

Judith suggested he grow vegetables and sell them in the market, and the man got up and sowed a few garden beds behind the shack. But even among the sprouts he found no rest. A big tree rose in the yard and crows entered it in the afternoon for their noisy encounters, shouted and hovered over the crest of the tree like evil tidings. Their wings and their shouts blackened his hopes so much he hurried back to the room. Sometimes, he’d make a supreme effort and go sit on the banks of the Yarkon River, hug his knees, and close his eyes as if he were seeking consolation within his own body.

If not for Judith, who went on taking care of the vegetables, and raised a few brood hens in the yard, and made jam from the citrons that dropped in the landlord’s citrus grove, and was marvelous at patching and resurrecting any tattered garment, they and their little daughter would have died of pride and starvation.

At last the man said he wanted to go to America, work there for a year at the Wilmington Foundry in the state of Delaware, a metal plant that belonged to the father of an American friend he had met in the Hebrew Brigades.

“I’ll make money and I’ll come back home,” he said. “One year, Judith, two at the most.”

At the time, she was sitting at the table shelling lentils for soup, and she immediately turned her deaf ear to him. But he grabbed her shoulders and shouted, and she was forced to listen.

“Even in America there’s no work.” She was angry and alarmed. “And people will jump off roofs there.”

Two mounds piled up in front of her, a big brown one of lentils and a small gray one of splinters of dust and stone, husks and dried worms. Between her knees stood their two-year-old daughter, her eyes on her mother’s nimble fingers.

“Don’t go,” Judith implored. “Don’t go. We’ll manage. Everything will be fine.”

Her hand found the knot of the blue kerchief on her head and tightened it. Dread and prophecy were in her voice. But that man, whose name I mustn’t remember, didn’t heed her terror. The journey was already seeping into his body and sealing his skin.

Short, with blurred features, he is drawn on the inside of my eyelids: he packs a few clothes in a small wooden suitcase, takes the provisions of poor travelers—hard white cheese, oranges, bread, and olives—takes leave of his wife and daughter, and goes to Jaffa. Here’s Mother, leaning on the doorpost. Here’s the little girl, leaning on her leg, my half-sister, but faceless like her father.

In Jaffa, he bought himself a cheap, deck-passenger ticket and went down to the little ship that took Shamuti oranges and sweet lemons to England.

It was a gray day, but the smell of sun latent in the oranges rose from the belly of the ship and accompanied the passengers, intensifying their regrets and remorse.

From Liverpool the man sailed for New York. Scared and in a hurry, he walked from the docks of the Hudson to Grand Central Station, and because in a foreign land his pride was diminished, he walked around in its enormous labyrinths calling out, “Wilmington, Wilmington,” in the loud chirp of the helpless, until good people showed him the way to the ticket window and the platform.

The train slipped along in the belly of the earth for a while. Then it burst into the light, rumbled over a big river, and crossed a strip of reeds and swamps, the sort of thing the man hadn’t expected to see in America. He sat by the window, counted the electrical poles as if he were scattering crumbs to show him the way
back, and murmured to himself the names of the cities that passed by: Newark … New Brunswick … Trenton … Philadelphia … And three hours later, when the conductor shouted Wilmington, he hurried off.

He trudged from chimney to chimney and didn’t find his friend’s foundry. But he scouted and asked and found Columbus Street, where his friend had told him he lived, and he reached the house, whose number he remembered.

A fine house surrounded with a fragrant wall of trimmed finta bushes, and even though a Dutch clothing merchant lived there, the man thought it looked exactly how a Jewish foundry owner’s house should look. He hoisted his hand and knocked on the door.

Fate decreed that on that very day the Dutch merchant had made a lot of money. He was in such a good mood that, when he saw the strange guest, he was struck with generosity, invited him in, and fed him a marvelous dinner of steamed fish and potatoes, seasoned with butter and nutmeg.

I often thought how strange it was that Uncle Menahem and Oded Rabinovitch and Jacob Sheinfeld knew all those small details they didn’t witness. Did Oded hate my mother so much in his childhood that he embroidered her world with such precision? Did Jacob roll her chronicles around in his imagination so much that he created them anew? Did so much contrition fill the body of Uncle Menahem after her death? And if those potatoes had been seasoned with sour cream, coarse salt, and chopped dill, and not with that butter and nutmeg, would my mother’s life have been changed because of it? And me, would I have been born?

One way or another, the Dutch merchant and my mother’s husband drank aquavit with laurel berries, and after dinner they smoked thin cigars and played checkers. The host explained to his guest that his great-grandfather had built that house, and his grandfather, his father, and himself had been born in it, here, my good friend, in this very bed, and that in every city in America
you could find a street named Columbus, and that Jews, you must know, my dear sir from Palestine, are not likely to have anything to do with steel foundries. In short, he hinted affably and politely that his friend from the Hebrew Brigades was nothing but a liar.

And indeed, that comrade-in-arms was simply a small fabricator seeking honor, the son of haberdashery peddlers from Chicago, who had never seen Wilmington except in the atlas. Like most liars, he hadn’t investigated the falsehood, and some time later, as Uncle Menahem mocked him, he immigrated to the Land of Israel, introduced himself as “the adjutant of Ze’ev Jabotinsky in the bloody battles of the Jordan Valley,” rented a room in Tel Aviv, and made a living from dispatching articles titled “Letters of a Pioneer from the Galilee,” to revisionist newspapers in America.

At any rate, the Dutch merchant, goodhearted with drink, gave his guest some old clothes and a loaf of seven-grain bread heavy and fragrant as a baby, and put a few addresses and letters of recommendation into his hand, and after trudging around some more and pleading some more, my mother’s first husband became a guard in a department store that sold cheap goods.

There he rose to the high priesthood, from guard became a messenger and from a messenger became a salesman, and in a short time he became head of a department. Then he bought himself some brown and white shoes, became friendly with small liquor dealers, and started smoking cigarettes. Thus it happened that the one year in America, which promised not to be more than two years in a steel foundry, stretched into three years of smoking and selling.

Nevertheless, the man didn’t forget his wife Judith. Once a month he sent her a letter and a little money, and he didn’t stop this practice of his even when she stopped answering his letters. About the two women who loved him in Wilmington he didn’t write her because he knew his wife well and knew that she was graced with common sense and the power to guess. But from the
two women, the man didn’t conceal a thing. Over and over, he told them he had a wife and daughter in the Land of Israel and would be going back to them.