The Loves of Judith (9 page)

A
T FIRST
M
OSHE
R
ABINOVITCH
’
S
catastrophe was the property of the whole village. During the weeklong mourning period, his friends mobilized, milked his cows and picked the fruit left in the citrus grove. And in the next few weeks, until his broken leg healed, they came to give him a hand and a shoulder, and lent him a mule or a horse for the day until he found a new work animal. The orphans were invited to eat by all the neighbor women, and Aliza Papish, the wife of the Village Papish, showed up to glorify the floor of the hut, to do the laundry, and to clean.

But time passed, the helpers dropped off until they stopped altogether, and the neighbor woman’s husband told Moshe he couldn’t afford to feed the children.

Rabinovitch, who was still encased in plaster from his chest down to his ankle, got very angry. After all, from the start he had offered to pay the neighbor for the meals, and when he now asked him again how much money he’d want, the man blurted out a sum that could support an army brigade. Moshe threw him out and arranged with the wife of the manager of the village warehouse, and from that day until Judith came to his house, Oded and Naomi ate dinner there for a reasonable price. Sometimes a few English officers also ate there; and the albino bookkeeper, who dared come out of Yakoba and Yakobi’s old hut only after sundown, also dined there.

T
HE NARCISSUS BULBS
Moshe pulled up from the bank of the wadi and buried in the earth of Tonychka’s grave bloomed quickly.
New baby crows were noisy in the nest at the top of the eucalyptus tree. The world went on as usual, moved and revolved in its orbit, bore its dead and its living like a ship in search of a port.

The sun climbed up, the air grew warm, and every afternoon, Moshe wallowed like a calf in the emptied field, chewed grass and bared his wounded flesh to the spring.

Lapwings drummed near him on long legs, presenting their splendid, ever-clean suits. Chirps of bliss of the field mice, those who were saved from the wrath of the winter, were heard rushing under the grass. A smell of blooming assaulted from the fields, quickening the blood in the veins, and downed the deformed finches in their flight.

From that custom of lying naked in the field and absorbing the beams of spring, Moshe isn’t yet weaned. Years later I would see him come to the field, take off his clothes, and stretch out in the high grass. And once, when I stationed my observation-box behind the field and watched the larks dancing, Moshe came, stripped, and lay down right next to the box.

His thick short body breathed slowly, his hand smoothed the hair on his chest and belly, and when the heat rose, the hand moved his testicles from side to side.

Two big flies walked around on his face and he didn’t brush them off.

So close and exposed and innocent he was, and he didn’t sense that I was there at all, for the branches and the grass hid the box even from the birds, and although I was almost baked by the heat of the sun, I didn’t dare move, for Moshe suddenly began saying to himself, “My Moshe, my Moshe,” leaned on his side a bit, and a smell like the smell of Uncle Menahem rose in the air, but I was too young to understand it, and I thought they smelled alike because they were brothers.

R
ABINOVITCH
’
S BROKEN THIGH
mended fast, but when he asked the doctor to take off the cast, the doctor claimed it wasn’t time
yet. Moshe didn’t argue with him. He returned home, went into the cows’ big trough, and lay there until his bonds melted and the water in the trough turned as white as milk. A few days later he hitched up the wagon and went to the next village with his children for the Seder with Uncle Menahem and his wife Bathsheba.

Uncle Menahem and Moshe were different from one another. Menahem was tall and thin, and even though he was older than his brother, he looked younger. He had long fingers, whose delicacy wasn’t damaged by working the land, and thick brown hair, and a warm, pleasant voice, and a trimmed mustache the family called an “American mustache,” even though no one knew precisely what that was.

And he also had the biggest farm of Cypriot carobs—the juiciest and lushest carobs. I remember how he would proudly break such a carob and let it drip dark honey.

“If Bar Yokhai had a tree like this in the clearing, he would have been satisfied with one single carob from one Sabbath eve to the next,” he said.

Uncle Menahem talked about his carobs the way a dairy farmer talks about his livestock. He had a lush “herd,” a few “bull” trees, and a few score “cows,” and he said that if he could, he would take his trees out to pasture, walk behind them, and pipe on a flute.

“One day, Zayde, we’ll invent trees without roots. When we go for a walk or to work in the field, we’ll whistle at them and they’ll run behind us, and we’ll always have shade,” he told me.

He also had a tale he loved to tell and I loved to hear, about a
goyish
farmer who wandered around the Ukraine with a gigantic, blossoming apple tree, which he planted in a big wagon, full of soil, drawn by four oxen, and bees flew behind it.

At any rate, Uncle Menahem didn’t rely on the wind to carry the bull carob pollen to the cow carob flowers, but fertilized them himself. In late summer, he climbed the male trees, shook the fragrant pollen into paper bags, and quickly scattered it among the female branches. Because of that, the heavy, dusty, ineffable smell of sperm stuck to him, embarrassed the neighbor women,
amused the neighbor men, and drove his wife, Aunt Bathsheba, out of her mind.

Aunt Bathsheba loved her husband to distraction and was sure that all the women in the world felt the same way about him. Now she feared that the smell of sperm, which didn’t leave his body even after she shoved him into the shower and scrubbed him with a brush until he turned red and shouted in pain, would attract strange women to him. So every woman who got within sight of Uncle Menahem was called a “hoor” by his wife, and since the village was small and the jealousy was great, the hoors multiplied and Aunt Bathsheba’s anger rose.

“A husband like Menahem has to be quiet in the spring,” she explained. “It would be better if he were quiet all year, but it’s especially good for him to be quiet in the spring and not start doing everything he knows—telling tales, lying lies, and confessing confessions.… All those things are very dangerous to do near the hoors in the spring.”

And thus it happened that in the third year of his marriage, Uncle Menahem was afflicted with a strange allergy, which would attack him every spring and was not expressed in the usual way, with sneezing and itching and tearing, but with a complete silence of his vocal cords.

Tonya once said that Bathsheba put a curse on Menahem, but the aunt denied it: “A wife shouldn’t do such things. That’s why there’s a God in heaven.” She smiled with the righteousness of someone whose task is done by others.

One way or another, every year, one morning between Purim and Passover, Uncle Menahem would wake up with his voice gone. The first words he said on the first morning of his muteness misled him into thinking he had gone deaf, but later he understood that his lips moved, but his voice didn’t emerge.

At first, his forced muteness turned him into an irritable, short-tempered man, and turned Bathsheba into a quiet and satisfied woman. But in later years, Uncle Menahem calmed down and got used to it and learned to use notes to talk with those around
him, while Aunt Bathsheba was once again filled with her jealousy and dread. Now she feared that the spring that muzzled her husband’s throat would impel him to run after the hoors in new ways.

“After all, he’s a decent bird,” she kept saying.

And once, when I was six or seven years old, I told Uncle Menahem that I knew what was the difference between him and Jacob Sheinfeld.

“What’s the difference, Zayde?” asked Uncle Menahem in a note.

“Both of you are birds,” I told him, “but you’re a decent bird and Sheinfeld is a strange bird.”

Mother smiled, Naomi laughed, Menahem’s body quivered with pleasure, and his hand wrote me a note: “Ha ha ha.”

“A man who doesn’t have words will jump around and put on an act like monkeys in the woods,” said Bathsheba, who was frightened herself by the mighty result her jealousy could produce.

Uncle Menahem didn’t jump around and didn’t put on an act, but was silent and withdrew into himself, with that kind of withdrawal thin men experience at the end of summer, when the days begin to grow short.

He also developed the defiant humor of the mute. “I don’t need to recite your boring Haggadah,” he announced in a big formal sign he waved in front of everybody at that Passover Seder.

Oded and Naomi and the three sons of Bathsheba and Menahem laughed. And so did Moshe, who hugged his brother when he came in that year; he wept and said: “This is the first Seder without a wife and without a mother, Menahem,” and he smiled.

“Menahem thinks you should get married again right away,” said Bathsheba and Menahem nodded.

But Moshe wasn’t even willing to talk about that, and certainly not, as he said, in front of the children.

Moshe and Bathsheba sang with the children all the songs they remembered from the old country, Menahem drummed them on the table, and Oded found the
Afikommen
and asked for “Mother to come back.”

Moshe was shocked and turned pale, but Menahem tapped the boy on the back of his neck and wrote: “That’s a fine wish, Odedi, but in the meantime, you’ll get a pocketknife.”

S
OMETIMES
, M
OSHE
wanted to grieve, to be weak, for he felt that a flourishing body didn’t suit a mourning soul.

He wanted to collapse, but he couldn’t. On the contrary, after Tonya’s death his body seemed to grow even stronger. As if the muscles that despaired in her neck grew strong in his, as if shoots of green life sprang suddenly from the ashes of mourning and—shameful as it was—glimmers of relief, and explicit and embarrassing twigs of a flourishing of widowers; no one admits that, but everyone discerns it and knows what it means.

Moshe’s speech, which was generally heavy, became fluent and faster, his slow peasant’s gait started dancing sometimes, and thin new hair sprouted on his smooth head—not a thick new mane of youth, but an infant down that darkened his bald pate.

His body had healed by now and grew so strong that he went back to work as if nothing had happened. He harvested and picked and hoed and plowed, and in the evening, after milking, he once again hung the four milk jugs on a pole he had made from a two-inch pipe, loaded it on his thick shoulders, and took it to the dairy.

From there, he went to fetch his children from their supper. The empty milk jugs dangled at the ends of the pole, clanged with a hollow gloom, and Moshe’s thoughts echoed them in his heart.

He entered the warehouse manager’s home. The albino bookkeeper said hello and Moshe growled some reply. He despised everything outside the normal order of the world, and the bookkeeper, with his owlish life, the hues of his hair and eyes and skin, made Moshe uneasy.

But the albino didn’t want to endear himself to him or to anyone else. He tended to his birds and did his work and didn’t bother anybody. Once a week, the treasurer brought a wheelbarrow full of receipts and papers to Yakobi and Yakoba’s old shack, and knocked on the door. The bookkeeper, with his pink eyes and his black suit, opened the window a crack and whispered: “Please come in quietly so you don’t frighten the poor birds.”

After the treasurer left, the albino would swoop down on the papers, calculate accounts, sharpen pencils, and weigh the balance sheet of the outside world, which was flooded with light.

The song of his birds and his closed shutters protected him from the wrath of the sun, and only at dusk, when his enemy declined, looking weary and yolklike, to rest for a moment on the horizon before departing from the world, did he come out of his shelter to stretch his bones and inhale some fresh air.

First the door would open. An arm in a long sleeve, terrified and quivering like a mole’s muzzle, sniffed the light and the air, slowly turned over, assessed the ire of the dying sun and the dissolving heat of the earth. And when the hand was assured, the rest of the albino came out behind it, his sunglasses looking up and his step hesitant. He retreated inside immediately, and came right back out again, carrying canary cages, as if he were taking his dogs for a walk.

After he hung the cages on the tow chain of the pickup truck, which stretched from the corner of the house to the trunk of the nearby cedar, he sat down in a chaise longue and set out a tray of peeled cucumbers cut lengthwise, white pepsin cheese, herring, a bottle of beer, and a worn-out book that wrung bloody tears from his eyes and soft groans of pleasure from his throat.

Meanwhile, the children began showing signs of their orphanhood. Oded wet his bed every night and Naomi lost weight.

“Nominka doesn’t eat,” the warehouse manager’s wife said to Moshe.

“Her food isn’t any good,” Naomi said later as they walked home.

“Tell me what you like to eat,” said Moshe after a long silence. “And I’ll tell her.”

“It’s Mother’s food we want,” said Oded.

“We all want Mother’s food,” said Moshe.

The summer was hot and fragrant as always. The darkness of the village surrounded them with the silence of owls’ wings. Tiny slivers of straw flew from the barn floor and scratched the skin of Moshe’s neck like last summer, when his Tonychka was still alive and went with him to the threshing.

Three more times the moon would fill up and empty out and then, Moshe knew, his firm body would soften and fill with autumn. Storks would glide in the sky, a dewy wind would come from the mountain, the squills would feel it and rise up at the edges of the fields.