The Loves of Judith

ALSO BY MEIR SHALEV

FICTION

A Pigeon and a Boy
Fontanelle
Alone in the Desert
But a Few Days
Esau
The Blue Mountain

NONFICTION

My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner
Elements of Conjuration
Mainly About Love
The Bible for Now

CHILDREN
’
S BOOKS

Roni and Nomi and the Bear Yaacov
Aunt Michal
The Tractor in the Sandbox
How the Neanderthal Discovered the Kebab
A Louse Named Thelma
My Father Always Embarrasses Me
Zohar’s Dimples
A Lion in the Night

O
N WARM DAYS
, a soft smell of milk rises from the walls of my house. The walls are plastered and whitewashed, tiles cover the ground, but from the pores of the walls and the cracks of the floor, the smell rises to me, persists, steals in like the sweat of an ancient love.

Once my house was a cowshed. The house of a horse and a she-ass and a few milk cows. It had a wide wooden door, with an iron bolt across it, concrete troughs, yokes for cattle, jugs, cans, and milking stations.

And a woman lived in the cowshed, she worked and slept in it, dreamed and wept. And on a bed of sacks she gave birth to her son.

Doves walked back and forth on the ridge of the roof, in the remote corners the swallows were fussing over their nests of mud, and the fluttering of their wings was so pleasant I feel it even now, softening the expression on my face, smoothing the wrinkles of age and anger as it rises in my memory.

In the morning, the sun illuminated squares of windows on the walls and gilded the dust particles dancing in the air. Dew gathered on the lids of the jugs and field mice scurried over the bundles of straw like small gray lightning bolts.

The she-ass, my mother told me, because she wanted to preserve the memories in me, was wild and very wise, and even in her sleep she would kick, and when you wanted to ride on her back, Zayde, she would gallop to the door, bow down, and pass under the bar of the bolt, and if you didn’t jump off her back in time, Zayde
meyn kind
, the iron bar hit your chest and brought you down. The she-ass also knew how to steal barley from the
horse and how to laugh out loud and how to rap on the door of the house with her hoof to get some candy.

And a mighty eucalyptus tree rose up in the yard, its boughs wide, fragrant, and always rustling. No one knew who had planted it or what wind had borne its seed. Bigger and older than all its brothers in the nearby eucalyptus forest, it stood in its place and waited long before the village was founded. I often climbed it because crows nested in its crest and even then I was observing their ways.

By now my mother is dead and the tree has been cut down and the cowshed has become a house and the crows have taken off and new ones have come, returning to their dust and hatching out of their eggs. And nevertheless, those crows and those stories and that cowshed and that eucalyptus—they’re the anchors, the eternal pictures of my life.

The tree was about sixty feet high, the crows’ nest was close to its crest, and in the thicket of its lower branches you could see the remnants of the “Tarzan hut” of children who climbed up and nested in it before I was born.

In the old aerial photos taken by the British air force and in the stories of the villagers it is clearly visible, but today all that’s left of it is an immense stump, with the date it was cut down seared in it like the date of death on a tombstone: December 10, 1950. Moshe Rabinovitch, the man whose yard I grew up in and whose cowshed I live in, the man who gave me his name and bequeathed me his farm, came back from burying my mother, sharpened his big axe, and put the tree to death.

F
OR THREE DAYS
Rabinovitch chopped down the tree.

Over and over again the axe swung up, and over and over
again it came down. Around and around the man chopped, moaned and swung, groaned and struck.

A short man, Rabinovitch, taciturn and broad, with thick, short hands. Even today, in old age, the villagers call him “Rabinovitch the Ox” because of his strength and his passivity, and the third generation of children play the “awful bear” with him: in one hand, he holds three thin arms of three children, and shrieking and laughing, they can’t get out of his grip.

Chips and sighs flew, tears and sweat dripped, snowflakes swirled around, and even though differences of opinion erupt here about every memory—they don’t argue in our village about the act of vengeance, and every baby knows the details:

A dozen towels Rabinovitch used to wipe his face and the back of his neck.

Eight axe handles he broke and replaced.

Twenty-four quarts of water and six pots of tea he drank.

Once every half hour, he honed the blade of the axe with the whetstone and a steel file.

Nine loaves of bread with sausage he ate, and one crate of oranges.

Seventeen times he sank onto the snow and sixteen times he got up and went on hitting.

And the whole time, his thirty-two teeth were clamped and his ten fingers were clenched and his weeping breath steamed in the cold, until the great screech of the break was heard, along with the loud sigh of the onlookers, like the murmur that arose in the community center when the lights were turned out, but louder and more scared.

And then the shouts of alarm and the patter of feet fleeing and afterward the clamor of death, and there’s no simile for it except to say the thing itself: the clamor of the fall and death of a big tree, and everyone who heard it will never forget it—the explosion of the splitting and the roar of the fall and the whiplash of the crash to the ground.

Those aren’t like the sounds of a human being’s death, but
then the sounds of the life of a tree and of a human being are also different, and they leave behind different silences after they go.

The silence of the hewn tree is a curtain of darkness soon rent by the shouts of people, by the rippling gusts of wind, and by the cries of birds and beasts. And the quiet that filled the world at my mother’s death is thin and clear, and so, lucid and crystal, it stands and doesn’t melt away.

Here it is, with me, next to all the noises of the world. It doesn’t swallow them and they don’t blend with it.

I
KNEW THAT SONG
even before I understood what it means. It tells of a mother plucking feathers to make her son a down quilt with a pink cloth cover.

Many mothers, I imagine, sang that song to their children, and every one put in the name of her own child. “Zaydele” was me. That wasn’t a nickname that stuck to me, but my real name. “Zayde,” which means grandfather, is the name my mother gave me when I was born.

For years I’ve wanted to change it. But I don’t. At first I didn’t have the courage, then I didn’t find the strength, and finally we gave up, my name and I, and we’ve made peace with one another.

I was only a few months old when Mother sewed the cover and sang me the song, but even so, I seem to remember those nights well. Winters were cold in Moshe Rabinovitch’s cowshed, while in summer Mother negotiated with our neighbor Eliezer
Papish, who raised geese, and in exchange for his goose down, she sewed down quilts for him and his whole family.