The Loves of Judith (25 page)

“Y
OU WANT TO HONK THE HORN
?” he asks again, as he always asks me.

Of course I want to honk. I stretch out my hand and pull, from the lap of the dewy grass the toads answer, and a waning moon accompanies us, pushes off the downy embraces of the clouds, and filters between their soft openings.

At that hour, Oded’s radio returns from its shrieking journeys in distant Yugoslavian and Greek stations, and once again speaks Hebrew. But I don’t need it. Clocks signal to me from every corner. Once again I seek and find the small hand of big time, the hand of the years and their seasons, and the big hand of small time, the hand of the hour of the day. The hues of the leaves
tell me late autumn. In low places the chill of dawn is poured into invisible puddles. The lacework of the east turns pale and tells me ten to five.

“You don’t need a watch, Zayde, look how many watches there are in the world,” Mother told me.

Every farmer in the village can tell what month it is from the mute lightnings of autumn and the blooming of spring in the field, but I could tell time by the shade of the darkening old crows’ nests and by the molting feathers of their maturing fledglings.

“The village is a room full of clocks,” I wrote to Naomi in Jerusalem to remind her, so she wouldn’t forget.

And she wrote me that she had only one clock: the religious milkman of the neighborhood, who appeared every morning at six-fifteen on the dot, pushing his cart of milk cans, groaning and proclaiming his merchandise with two drawled-out, weary vowels, “Mi-ilk,” that echoed in the narrow staircase.

And just a few weeks ago, I wrote her about our ruined village hall—a mighty index of the passage of time, with the dry ivy clinging to its walls, the seven-branched lamp embellishing the roof with its destruction, the pigeons nesting in the corners of its auditorium.

Swallows fly in through the ventilator holes to feed their fledglings, and in the old projection booth owl droppings reek. That’s not a clock with hands, nor is it an hourglass. It’s a clock of strata, and it measures time by the thickness of the dried secretions, the scabs of rust on the balcony banister, and the cushions of dust on the floor, where the maggots of ant lions dig their slippery funnels of death.

Wooden boards are nailed over the openings, but here and there they’ve been broken into, and when I go inside and wait for my eyes to grow accustomed to the gloom, a thin and loathsome smell of human feces and its disgrace rises to my nose. Weariness assails me and I sit down on one of the filthy chairs and the shrill
squeak of the wood rouses a great flapping of wings in the dark space.

Once I surprised the Village Papish here. He also visits the village hall sometimes, enters and tramps around in the pigeon droppings and mutters mutterings and groans old heartbreaking and body-aching groans. Only a few years ago, the final show was put on here, and Papish, as I wrote to Naomi, “gave one of his greatest performances there.” A theater troupe came from the city, and a young actress, whose well-known beauty summoned young men from the entire valley to the village—the melting beauty that doesn’t stir lust or love, but only the desire to be fruitful and die—appeared on stage and treated us like some goddess, who has an hour of goodwill and is decent enough to be revealed to those who worship her.

And suddenly the Village Papish stood up—and he is very old and heavy—and yelled furiously in a loud voice: “And we had Rebecca Sheinfeld many years ago, and she, young lady from the television, was much more beautiful than you!” And he exited.

He was angry at the village for the ruin of the village hall and he was angry at Jacob “because his love for Rabinovitch’s Judith made his Rebecca abandon the village and take all her beauty with her and it left us with nothing, wallowing in our ugly mud.”

T
HE HUT THAT WAS ONCE
the house of Yakobi and Yakoba and afterward the house of the albino is also a ruin now. The winds and the rains have eaten its roof, worms and dews have melted its boards, and what the sun didn’t evaporate the earth absorbed. Everyone saw the hut shrinking, and after it disappeared only the anemones growing there indicated that it had once been.

But the house the albino built for his canaries and left to Jacob is still standing. No one fills the feeding troughs and basins, the cages and the door are always open, the canaries come and go as they please, and Jacob doesn’t return there to visit his past, either.

“In the morning and in the evening,” I said, “time goes most slowly.”

“It slows down at the turns,” laughed Oded, “so the world won’t turn over.”

We were approaching the turn to the village. Oded shifted down, one gear after another. His feet danced on the big pedals and the truck moaned and shook.

“There. We’re back home.” He turned in a big circle and started driving on the narrow entrance road.

Once the road had been a dirt path. In summer, wheels and hooves ground it to dust, and in winter it became thick, dark mud. Then it was covered with crushed basalt stones brought from the mountain, and when it was widened, it was paved and became a thin, straight asphalt road, about a mile long, and casuarinas amassed dust at its edges.

On the side of the crossroads is a bus stop, simply a small tin awning and an iron pole with a sign on top. On the cement bench sat Jacob Sheinfeld, a small wrinkled mummy of love, wearing blue pants and a white cotton shirt. In the shade of the trees, his regular taxi was parked, its driver asleep in the backseat.

Oded braked the truck, turned off the motor, and the silence poured into our ears. He stuck his head out the window and yelled: “What’s up, Sheinfeld?”

“Come in, come in, how nice of you to come, friends. Come in,” said Jacob with the warm expression of a bridegroom at his wedding.

“And where’s the bride, Sheinfeld?” yelled Oded.

But Jacob’s look passed us by and wandered off.

“Look at him,” Oded repeated his diagnosis. “If he was a horse, they’d have had to shoot him a long time ago.”

A green car passed by on the road.

“Come in, come in …” Jacob said to it. “Come in, we’ve got a wedding here today.”

And he smiled, and nodded in greeting, ran his eyes over the road, and didn’t pay any more attention to us.

E
VEN LIARS KNOW
well that truth and fiction are not at odds with each other. They’re good neighbors, and each is interested in the well-being of the other, and they lend one another whatever they need.

I heard that once from Meir—apropos of what, I don’t remember—and then he smiled and added that the lie and the truth are not north and south, but rather the magnetic pole and the North Pole.

I say that to explain that I don’t want to make up or erase parts of my life. Nor do I want to explain them, to camouflage them, or to re-create them. The whole purpose of this story is to put them in order: a furrow directed for an ox’s hooves, channels for water to creep in, cement walks for footsteps.

And whenever I get disgusted with the chaos I’m doomed to hover over, and fed up with the abyss of assumptions and the wind of conjecture, I console myself with the wonderful course of small events. So, that funny character who bought the dead albino’s five black suits reappeared in the village a few months later. Without a word, he went into the secretary’s office and put on the table five notes he had found in the five inside pockets of the suits. On every one of them were the words: “The birds go to Jacob.”

Sheinfeld was called to the secretary’s office. Even though he had taken care of the canaries since the day the albino died, his heart was pounding now like a sledgehammer, hard, with fear and joy. Without a word, he went to the canary house and from there to his own house, got into bed fully dressed, and didn’t wake up until the next afternoon, when Rebecca woke him with
the first shouts that had come out of her mouth since their wedding day, and demanded to know what was happening.

Jacob looked into her eyes, whose transparent color became rough and opaque as plaster, and with complete calm, he announced that the albino had bequeathed him the poor canaries and from now on they were his.

F
OR ONE MOMENT
, the most beautiful woman in the village wanted to fall down on the floor and scream, but she immediately felt an invisible arm supporting her back and strengthening her knees. All at once, all the mysteries she had solved long ago were clear to her: her husband’s insomnia, his sighs, his devotion to those silly canaries whose song, let’s admit it, is not so pleasing to the ear.

And Judith’s journey in the green and yellow springtime field, and Jacob’s trembling, and his talk in the rare, brief slumbers he managed to get, and the days when the colors changed in the irises of his eyes—riddle after riddle, they were all deciphered for her, and a third eye seemed to be opened in her forehead; she walked straight out behind the hut, stretched a precise hand, and pulled out of the space between the floor and the ground the yellow wooden canary hidden there, and threw it away.

From there she carried the picking ladder to the canary house, propped it up and climbed it, once again stretched her hand, and from the space between the ceiling and the roof, she heaved up the small notebook where Jacob had written with the ox’s back-and-forth movement: Judith Judith Judith Judith Judith Judith Judith Htiduj Htiduj Htiduj Htiduj Htiduj Htiduj Htiduj Judith Judith Judith Judith Judith …

And from there, she walked with complete confidence to the citrus grove, where the rustle of the leaves was associated with such clear sighs, Judith Judith Judith Judith, and she went past the rows of trees one after another, back and forth, Judith Judith Judith … Htiduj Htiduj Htiduj Judith Judith Judith …

And there, at the third tree in the third row, she dug and found the blue kerchief of Rabinovitch’s worker, stolen on a dark night and with a pounding heart off the clothesline in the yard.

A smile spread over Rebecca’s lips, cleared her brain, and stretched the lines of the solution between all the dots that had punctured it.

“And beautiful as she was, she was seventy times more beautiful then. All of us were dazzled,” said the Village Papish.

That very same day, Rebecca left the house and the village, with her dress and her hatred and her beauty and her wisdom on her back, and returned to the home of her mother, Mrs. Schwartz of Zikhron Ya’akov. The Village Papish followed her out of the village, coaxing her in vain to stay and let him remove all obstacles, no matter what they were.

“One fine day she went off and disappeared,” he said. “Nobody knew where, nobody understood why.”

The Village Papish recited the poem sadly and solemnly, his thin lips took on the precise shape of the words, and his eyelids marked the yearning of the rhyme at the end of the lines.

M
RS
. S
CHWARTZ
—practical, wrinkled, and active—didn’t rest for a single moment. Letters came and went, messengers and carrier pigeons appeared and disappeared, and then a chauffeur-driven
car climbed up to Zikhron Ya’akov and took Rebecca and her mother to the ancient port of Tantura.

A small ship, well-shaped and white, with the name
Rebecca
golden on its rib, emerged clearly from the warm mist rising from the sea. A boat was put down and approached. Two sailors took Rebecca from the shore.

Haim Green, a wealthy English merchant, who had once been a young English lieutenant and had waited whole nights at her house in Zikhron Ya’akov, was waiting for her on deck.

Rebecca
spun around, spewed two clouds out of her two chimneys, and slowly went off. Mrs. Schwartz waited until it vanished, and then she got in the car and returned to her village.

For twenty-five years neither
Rebecca
the ship nor Rebecca the woman returned to the Land of Israel, until one day a picture of “Sir Haim and Lady Green,” who were “immigrating to our Land to build and be built in it,” appeared in the newspapers. The two of them were photographed on the dock of the port in Haifa, both with striped collars, gleaming smiles, and captain’s hats, and the Village Papish, who had never forgotten those features, went shouting into the surprised street of the village: “She came back, she came back, she came back!”

And Lady Green was indeed Rebecca, and Sir Haim was her husband, whom the years had changed from a young and wealthy English merchant into an old and rich English banker.

“He was an important man and a courteous man,” said the Village Papish. And indeed, Sir Haim contributed money to schools, established laboratories in universities, supported poor students, and bought the beautiful house on Oak Street in Tivon. And by virtue of the polite generosity that characterized all his ways, he also hurried up and died so his widow could bring back her first husband and live with him, an old winner, indulgent and tearful as she was, in the last year of her life.

But on the day Rebecca abandoned the village, “and we all looked like a face with a gouged-out eye,” Jacob was the only one who didn’t pay any attention to her departure. He closed himself
in the storeroom, busy building a gorgeous wooden cage, painted sky blue and gold, with an enamel trough and basin and two seesaws.

In the evening, when he came out of the storeroom and went into the house, he called out, “Rebecca … Rebecca …” a few times, and when there was no answer, he made himself a cup of tea and went to sleep, and before dawn, he got up and went out without noticing the emptiness and the chill that had lain next to him all night long.

He hastened to his urgent romantic affairs, and that evening, when Judith returned from watering the calves, she found a wooden birdcage hanging on the central beam of the cowshed. A big friendly roller, who could sing short fragments of operetta and was the most beautiful of all the male canaries the albino had left behind, hopped and sang, and on the wall gleamed a note that said, or maybe quoted, a hackneyed saying of lovers: “The birds sing what a human can’t say in words.”