Two She-Bears (18 page)

Many, many years ago, in the wadi of Grandpa Ze'ev, there lived the Caveman. That's what they called him because in those days people didn't have names.

Grandpa Ze'ev wasn't there yet, and neither was his carob tree. But the wadi was there, and on the other side of it was a cave, and that was the Caveman's home.

The Caveman loved the cave very much. In summer it was nice and shady and cool, and in winter it protected him from the rain. But in winter there were also clouds, and the sun disappeared, and there was not only rain but snow and hail, and the wind blew in the wadi, whistled through the rocks and reached the top of the hill.

The Caveman sat in the entrance to the cave, looked out, and felt cold.

Really cold.

Terribly cold.

He hid very deep inside the cave—but that didn't help.

He wore a bearskin—but that didn't help either.

He cuddled with his wife, the Cavewoman, inside the bearskin—and that was very pleasant and it did help, but only a little and for a short while.

One day the Cavewoman said to the Caveman, “We're out of food, you need to go out and bring us more.”

“In this cold?” he asked. “It's raining outside, the winds are blowing, there's a storm.”

“There's no choice,” she said, and made a joke: “Otherwise you'll have to eat me and I'll have to eat you.”

The Caveman loved the Cavewoman. He didn't want to eat her and didn't want her to eat him.

He went out, and walked and walked and looked and looked and walked, the rain whipping his face and the wind freezing his body, but he kept looking and walking and didn't rest for a minute.

And all of a sudden, right above him, there was a flash of lightning and a huge clap of thunder, and the tree beside him caught fire and burned in a big yellow-red blaze.

The Caveman had never seen fire before. He was scared and fell to the ground, and quickly got up and shouted, “A monster…a yellow monster…no…a red monster…”

The Caveman had also never seen a monster before, but that seemed a very appropriate word.

He was so scared that he ran away from there, back home to the cave.

“Come quick!” he said to his wife. “I want to show you something.”

The Cavewoman loved hearing those words. Every time the Caveman told her he wanted to show her something—something nice happened.

“What?” she asked.

“Something really terrible.”

“What?”

“There's a monster over there,” said the Caveman. “It's enormous. It's going wild. It's red and yellow. It's eating a tree on the other side of the hill.”

“What is a monster? We don't have a word like that,” said the Cavewoman.

“I just invented it. Now there's a monster and also a word for it.”

“What does it look like, this monster of yours?”

“It doesn't look like anything at all.”

“Like a bear? Like a rhinoceros?”

“No.”

“Does it have wings? Claws? Scales? A tail?”

“Yes! A whole lot of tails and a wing and another wing and another wing.”

“Is it skinny? Is it fat? Does it have a trunk? Or just a nose?”

“What do you mean? It has no shape at all. Actually, it has many shapes. Every minute a new shape. Come on, I want to show it to you.”

The Caveman and the Cavewoman ran together in the rain and the wind and the cold and the storm, went around the hill, and reached the burning tree.

“Look,” said the Caveman, “have you ever seen a monster like this?”

The Cavewoman drew closer. Raindrops hit the burning tree and made whispering sounds.

“Be careful,” the Caveman called out. “It's very dangerous.”

“It's nice,” said the Cavewoman, “it makes me warm. You should come closer too.”

The Caveman came closer slowly. He felt nice and warm. He stuck out his hand and touched it. All he wanted to do was pet the monster, but it hurt really bad.

He jumped and shouted, “It bit me! The monster bit me!” And he ran back to the cave.

The Cavewoman stayed near the fire and enjoyed being warm.

After a few minutes a big bear showed up. He stood up on his hind legs and growled at her, but he didn't dare come close because he was afraid of the fire—and he ran away.

A few minutes later a tiger came near. He crept toward her and roared but didn't dare come closer because he was afraid of the fire—and he ran away.

A few minutes later, a pack of wolves appeared. They ran around her and bared their teeth, but they didn't dare come close because they were afraid of the fire—and they ran away.

A few minutes after that, the Caveman returned and she told him what had happened.

“You know,” she said, “if we had a yellow monster like this inside the cave, we could keep warm and it would also protect us from wild beasts.”

“True,” said the Caveman, after thinking it over. “But only if it's a small yellow monster.”

“So let's take home a branch like this with the yellow monster on it, and when it finishes eating we'll give it another branch, and then another, and that way we'll have a yellow monster like this in the cave.”

And that's what they did. They took a branch with a little monster, brought it to the cave, gave the little monster branch after branch, and called it a fire.

And at night they slept beside it, and they felt nice and warm, and no bear or lion dared to come inside.

And the fire also gave them light, and shadows danced on the walls and ceiling.

The Caveman asked, “What are these black things? They're really scary.”

And the Cavewoman answered, “They are me and you.” And she made him shadows that looked like animals—a bear and a she-bear, and a tiger and tigress.

The Caveman looked at his wife and said, “Outside it's raining and cold and stormy, and here it's nice and warm and you are so smart and capable and beautiful.”

“Really? What do I look like?” she asked. “Like an anteater? A fox? A lizard? An egret?”

“What's an anteater? There's no such animal here.”

“But there surely is someplace else.”

The Caveman laughed. “You're so sweet, you little monster Cavewoman. You don't look like anything. Every minute you have a new shape.”

The winter came to an end. Spring arrived and then summer, and one day, when the Caveman returned from hunting, the Cavewoman said to him, “Come quick, I want to show you something.”

The Caveman loved to hear that sentence. Every time his wife told him she wanted to show him something—something good and pleasant happened.

He came to her and she showed him a little tiny Caveman, wrapped in an animal skin.

“What's that?” he asked.

“This is the Cave Baby,” she said. “He's mine and yours.”

The journey was over. Dov drove the wagon to his brother's yard. Ze'ev and Ruth followed him on foot. When they got to the house the brothers hid the rifle and unharnessed, fed, and watered the cow and the ox, which like a man at the end of a mission collapsed with exhaustion to the ground. Ze'ev petted the ox on the head and asked Dov what was happening back home, and he whispered that their father had sent the message—that's what he said, “sent the message”—that he needed to begin rubbing his hands with olive oil twice a day.

“What for?” grumbled Ze'ev, who viewed such things as wimpy and feminine.

“That's what he said I should tell you and that's what you have to do.”

That night, as Dov slept a deep sleep, Ze'ev and Ruth sat and talked. Ze'ev told Ruth about his father's orders and she smiled to herself. The next night they also talked, and the following morning Dov and Ruth went back to the moshava in the Galilee. Ruth told her parents that she had met Ze'ev and that they wanted to get married, and she gave Ze'ev's parents a letter from their son.

The wedding was set for just after the Shavuot holiday, on Ze'ev's twenty-third birthday. He came to his parents' home three days ahead of time and first of all he and his father went walking through the orchard and the yard. Then he walked around in the village, met friends, told them about the new moshava where he lived, and at night, as he lay in bed, he smelled the aroma of pipe tobacco and knew his father was waiting for him in the yard.

The father cleared his throat and asked if he knew what happens on the wedding night.

“Don't worry, Abba,” said Ze'ev. “I know very well.”

“And what, for example, do you know?”

Ze'ev was embarrassed. “I know.”

The father said, “It's good that you have gained experience. And good that the bride is still a virgin and the groom is not, but that's not what I'm talking about, but rather that you have to understand and remember that this is the woman who from now on, for the rest of your life, will be with you. You will be her one and only and she will be your one and only. And therefore, Ze'ev, on this important and special night, the wedding night, you must not make her angry or hurt her or insult her or leave her a bad memory for whatever reason. You need to be gentle and patient and pleasant and polite, and everything you do to her and with her you must do with affection and tenderness.”

Ze'ev was not surprised. He father was a tough, aggressive man, but with his wife, Ze'ev's mother, he was always patient and faithful. He said nothing, and his father continued: “On all other nights we have to be tough and strong, inside and out, in body and soul, because there's not only a wife, there's also land to be farmed and livestock to tend and thieves to catch and enemies to chase away. But on this night the groom belongs only to his wife, with a good heart and soft hands and hard only in the place he needs to be.”

Ze'ev kept quiet. He had never heard his father, a man of few words, make a speech like this.

“Do you understand me, Ze'ev?”

“I understand, Abba, thank you.”

“Even the little details are important,” the father went on. “You need to be closely shaved, washed, and clean and sweet smelling in every part of your body, your nails clipped and filed, because you might touch a delicate place and you mustn't scratch it. That's why I told Dov to tell you to rub your hands with olive oil, every day, so they will be nice and soft and smooth.”

The mother of the bride had a similar talk with her daughter, but her talk was much more practical than the father of the groom's to his son. Along with similar recommendations about patience and thoughtfulness, cleanliness and fragrance, the mother gave clear technical instructions. “And if he doesn't find it, you have to take it in your hand and put it in the right place,” and made a biblical joke: “ ‘Come in, thou blessed of the Lord, why are you standing out there?' ” And Ruth burst out laughing.

Everything was thus in order. The neighbors baked bread, brought homemade cheeses; men carried boxes of fruit and vegetables. Meat was not served; several bottles of wine and schnapps were opened but were consumed at a separate table, so as not to offend the Muslim guests who came from adjacent villages bearing figs and cakes. Members of Hashomer, the Jewish militia, raced the Arab horsemen, galloping and waving sticks as if they were swords.

The wedding ended late at night. The guests who came from nearby went home. Those who came from afar took turns guarding the horses and wagons and getting some sleep, in various corners of the family home or at the neighbors', in storehouses, granaries, milking sheds. “From the firstborn according to his birthright, and the youngest according to his youth,” the elders on beds and mattresses, the latter on jute sacks filled with straw.

Neighbors and relatives came to the bride with good-night wishes, woman to woman. Two of them whispered in her ear that a baby conceived on the wedding night would be big and healthy and good. But the bride paid them no mind. The neighbors could say what they wanted, her body had already spoken the truth: in the hopeful excitement of her loins, the expectant dryness in her throat, the pleasant uneasiness of her diaphragm. She had not yet known a man and was fearful, but her fears were overcome by emotion and desire and curiosity.

She remembered: When she was about eleven and Ze'ev was fifteen, she saw him at a spring down in the wadi, bare from the waist up. The magnificent ox of the Tavori family was also there with him. Ze'ev first washed the ox with pails of water and a hard brush and combed the end of his tail, and then stripped completely naked. Ruth saw his arms and the back of his neck, bronzed by the sun, and his thighs and back, completely white. He bent over and stood straight and poured water from the pail over his body and apparently sensed that she was looking at him, even from afar, and turned around.

For a moment she saw his sparkling eyes and the dark patch of his loins. Did he smile at her? Did he get angry? He ducked into the bushes and shouted, “Go home, Ruth!” And when she didn't leave, he continued, “You already saw me, you saw. Now please go, because I'm washing up.” Then she went, but the words “you saw me” mixed love into her desire, and though she was only eleven, she knew that love and lust were mingled for him too.

The couple rose from their chairs. The invited guests looked at them with affection. They were a handsome and loving couple. Neither of them was especially beautiful, but together they were strikingly attractive. This was perhaps because they looked alike: they were both tall and broad-shouldered, their teeth were straight and white and their necks thick and strong, and both radiated the dumb luck of healthy young people. They smiled at each other, and because of their height their smiles sailed over the heads of the guests. They wanted to repair to their room, but they knew they had to play by the rules, and were also a bit abashed, because everyone would know why they were going.

The yard emptied out very slowly, and finally the bride's mother called her into the kitchen and said, “Well, we had a big long day, and you probably want to rest now.” Ze'ev and his parents and Ruth's father also entered the room, and the father said, “The guests have gone to sleep, let's also go to sleep.”

The four parents exited the kitchen. The couple was left alone.

“Ruth”—Ze'ev smiled—“I am very happy you agreed to marry me. Thank you.”

“I'm happy too,” said Ruth. “I hoped you would want me and I knew I would say yes. I knew it even when we were children and you would come to our yard, riding on your ox.”

She came closer to him and, in a gesture of the moment that would remain in their family in future generations, she extended her right hand and placed it in the center of his chest, spreading her fingers as a sign of love and faith, and he leaned a little forward to sense her soothing strength.

They entered their room, locked the door, did not turn on a light, and went to the opposite sides of the bed. A new sheet was spread upon it, and a new lightweight blanket. As a wedding gift, the mothers of the bride and groom had sewn them each a new nightshirt. Together they had bought the cloth and together had sewn the shirts, broad, white, and long, identical in pattern and different in size—the mother of the groom sewed the bride's shirt, and the mother of the bride sewed the groom's. That was the custom then.

The nightshirts were ironed and folded and placed on the conjugal bed, which also had been built—assembled—for the wedding. Most of the beds in the moshava were single beds, built by the same carpenter and therefore of uniform shape and size. And when a couple got married, the two fathers would take the groom's bed from his house and the bride's from hers and attach them one to the other with three wooden boards and large screws, at the head and middle and foot. And here in the center of the room stood the bed that Ze'ev's father and Ruth's father had put together, and on it were the nightshirts sewn by the mothers-in-law, hers on the left and his on the right.

The two of them took off their clothes and put on the shirts in the dark and immediately the bride heard the groom grumble that his shirt was too small and wouldn't fit across his shoulders. She understood that the mothers had mistakenly laid her shirt on his side and his on her side.

She laughed softly, a laugh he didn't appreciate, since she had already taken off his shirt while he was still wrestling with hers, and he knew she was totally naked, waiting in the dark, but he was afraid of tearing the stitches of her shirt. He finally worked free of it, and as they tried to exchange shirts, their hands touched. Although the darkness engulfed their blurry nakedness, they were suddenly frightened and withdrew, tossing the nightshirts to each other. White and silent, like two giant barn owls, the shirts floated past each other, landing on the correct sides of the bed. The two felt around and picked them up and put on the shirts that had been given to him and to her, sat down on the bed, the man on his side and the woman on hers, then lay down on their backs.

They lay side by side. Only the woven linen covered the skin, and the skin the flesh, and the flesh the ribs that enclosed the two hearts. They had already stolen kisses in the vineyard, as the old saying went, and the groom had once even stroked the bride's right breast over her blouse, and they had also hugged and squeezed and felt the rising heat of their loins through his clothes and hers, and his hardness and her softness, but they had not yet become one flesh, as a woman and her man.

They lay there in the darkness, until Ruth felt Ze'ev's hand looking for hers, finding it, lifting it to his lips. He sat up and leaned on his left elbow and kissed her fingers one by one, and she was pleased by his unexpected gentleness, so different from his rough conduct in the fields and on guard duty, and was happy that the words of one of her married friends—“all the disgusting stuff that awaits you”—had not materialized. “And if he attacks you like an animal,” her friend had continued, “lie there quietly. It's over quickly, in general. And if necessary, I'll explain what to do to get it over with even quicker.”

His other hand joined in, rested on her cheek and nudged her face toward him. She leaned over to him and they embraced, and kissed, lovingly taking their time, in the confident knowledge of what was to come, as if wishing to postpone it a bit, to enjoy a few more minutes of curiosity and longing.

After kissing the fingers of her other hand the groom leaned over to his bride and put his hand on her hip and pulled her a bit toward him, and she responded and drew closer, and when their bodies were pressed together he again kissed her lips and she could sense that he was smiling in the dark and hoped that he could feel her smile. The groom pulled up the bottom of his nightshirt almost to his chest, and the bride pulled hers up to her hips and lay motionless on her back, as her mother had instructed, quoting a verse from the biblical book of her namesake Ruth: “And lay thee down, and he will tell thee what thou shalt do.”

His weight was strange and new to her body. She tried to anticipate the feeling she was about to have, when he would be inside her. She held him, moved her body a bit so that their knees and ankles touched, and her breasts were pressed to his, nipple to nipple, and this was very pleasing to her body and her heart, and when she spread her thighs for him and moved her body under his, she let out a deep sigh, so loud it surprised them both, and she suddenly felt that his flesh had gone limp and soft, and a shock ran through him and through her.

She, despite her lack of experience and perhaps because of it, tried to draw him closer, to embrace him with her thighs, and he pressed his flesh to hers, but he already understood, though this had never happened to him before, that on this night his flesh would not comply. The feeling was so clear and simple that he imagined that his organ had fallen off his body, like a fruit dropping from its tree to the ground.

For a moment he touched himself, as if seeking verification, and when his fingers confirmed the feeling he slid off her, lay beside her on his back, pulled the nightshirt down to his knees, and covered up with the blanket. Very quietly, very slowly, he again sent a stealthy hand to reconnoiter the territory, to assess if it was strong or weak, small or big, and the organ was in fact there, in its usual place, but the hand felt that same strange feeling, that it wasn't part of the body but detached from it.

He was young. So young that quite often his organ would get hard all by itself, from ideas and images that went not through its owner's head but through its own. So young he didn't yet know the potential consequences of an odd glance, a teasing word, an inappropriate smile, an unpleasant body odor, a stupid remark, a lingering grudge, an uninvited memory, one drink too many—the reasons are plentiful and the result is the same.

His hand was still there, as if defending his loins, and he again gave a little squeeze—was there anything solid inside the limpness? Something to build and be rebuilt? And with horror he sensed another strange thing: that only the hand felt the squeeze, not the organ. And now he felt his hand was not alone, that his wife's hand was there too, stroking him.