Two She-Bears (19 page)

There was something clinical in her touch, chilling. He recoiled.

“What are you doing?” he whispered furiously.

“I just wanted to take your hand in mine,” she said. “To lie hand in hand. What's the matter?”

Confused, she tried awkwardly to embrace him. He froze and pulled away.

“Leave me alone,” he said. “You don't need to hold my hand like I'm a little boy.”

And after a minute or two he said, “Go to sleep now.”

“And you?”

“I have to check the water by the cowshed. My father drank too many
l'chaims
and undoubtedly forgot, and the cows are not to blame that there was a wedding.”

“Don't go. Your father didn't forget, and Arieh and Dov are here too. Stay with me, we'll doze off and sleep together. You also had quite a bit to drink. It will pass. It's nothing.”

Ze'ev did not reply. Ruth sat up in bed and again put her palm to his chest with her fingers spread out, but he shrank from her and her touch. She lay down on her back and closed her eyes. After a short while, without checking if she was asleep or awake, he got up and took off the wedding nightshirt, dropped it on the floor, put on his pants, and opened the door.

The moon had already moved to the west and shone so brightly that his body in the doorway was a huge, masculine silhouette. She saw him walk out and close the door after him. His feet felt the dirt of the yard, his bare chest felt the wind, its warmth and chill interwoven, typical of the spring month of Sivan.

For a moment he felt good, but then he smelled his father's pipe and followed the scent and saw him sitting on a chair and smoking beside the grape arbor, a bottle of schnapps in his hand.

He tried to withdraw into the shadows, but his father felt his presence.

“Why aren't you sleeping?” he asked him.

“I couldn't fall asleep.”

“Usually you fall asleep afterward, but sometimes all that love and excitement can keep you awake,” the father said and gave his son a look that invited an exchange of manly smiles, but quickly realized that this was not the case.

“Was everything all right?” he asked worriedly.

“It wasn't.”

“What wasn't?”

“It wasn't.”

“What wasn't? You weren't together?”

“We almost were. But suddenly not.”

“What happened?”

Silence.

“She rejected you? She was scared? Wouldn't open?”

“It was me. Suddenly I didn't want to.”

“What do you mean you didn't want to? You're a young guy. At your age it's not you who does or doesn't want. Your body does the wanting. At your age it always wants.”

“At first my body wanted and suddenly didn't want.”

The father puffed on his pipe and fell silent. Then he said, “These things happen to everyone once in a while.”

And after a moment, which seemed very long to the son and short to him, he took a swig from his bottle and probed. “She said something to you? She did something that wasn't right?”

“No. She didn't say or do. She lay there and waited.”

“Go back to her,” said the father. “You hear? Now go back to bed. If you don't do it tonight, that's very bad.”

He took apart his pipe and blew into the mouthpiece to remove the tobacco juice that was burning his tongue.

“Tonight it won't happen, Abba. We'll do it tomorrow. Tomorrow night.”

“Go to her now. Get into bed and lie next to her.”

“I already lay next to her.”

“Touch her the way you dreamed of touching a woman.”

Ze'ev was silent.

“Think of a different woman and the things she did to you.”

“How can you talk that way, Abba. This is my wife. I love her.”

“Love? Love is a luxury. Only a small part of the life of a man and woman. You need to think about your whole lives now. If you don't do it tonight, she will think that you're not a man. Then she will consult with her mother and her sisters and their friends, and they will tell their mothers and sisters and friends. This story must not start to go around here in the moshava.”

“She already went to sleep, Abba. Tomorrow will be fine. Maybe I drank a little too much, I'm not used to it like you are.”

The father sighed.

“I'll go check if there's water for the cows,” said Ze'ev.

“I already checked,” said the father.

“Just to be sure,” said Ze'ev and went and checked, and when he got back his father was no longer on his chair, but someone else was on guard duty, who flashed him a gap-toothed smile.

He went back to Ruth, worried she was still awake and afraid she had fallen asleep. He lay beside her, listened to her breathing, hoping she would touch him and hoping she wouldn't, and eventually fell asleep and did not dream.

In the morning they awoke. At first they lay side by side in silence and then got up and put on their clothes with a mixture of embarrassment and hostility. Ze'ev joined his father and brothers in the vineyard. Ruth, to his dismay, joined the women in the yard and kitchen.

The next night was reminiscent of the first, and the third was reminiscent of the previous two, and on the fourth night, when Ruth didn't put on the nightshirt in total darkness but instead lit a candle and got into bed as naked as the day she was born and caressed his genitals first with one hand and then with two and then also with her tongue, he was shocked: Where did she get this expertise? Had she been with another man before him? Or maybe she had spoken about his failure and gotten advice from one of the women in her family, and even now the story was going around with winks and whispers? His father was right. The whole moshava would know, and so terrified was he that his whole body shriveled.

A few days went by, and Ze'ev told his father that he wanted to take his wife and return to his new home in the new moshava. The father asked that he stay two more days, because he wanted him to come with him to Tiberias and help him with something.

They rode to Tiberias, chatted a bit on the way, mainly about horses and farming and pruning and grafting, and the British attitude toward Jewish settlement versus their attitude toward the Arabs. On the way they stopped at a Bedouin encampment, where they were served coffee and the father conversed with a few male acquaintances. Ze'ev sat on the side and listened. He was proud of his father, who spoke good Arabic and knew how to behave according to local custom. They then bade farewell to their hosts and traveled northeast along the mountain ridge.

The Sea of Galilee, languid and milky, lay before them, with Tiberias on its shore. Most of its houses were then built of black basalt, and only a few sat on the slopes west of the lake. They drove down toward the town and turned north onto a spit of land with several handsome homes. In one of these dwelt a wealthy Arab, a friend of the father. They sat in his garden, the older men ate and drank and talked, and Ze'ev ate a little and drank a little and kept quiet. More people came, some sort of contract was signed, paper money changed hands, and then the father whispered something into the ear of the host, who whispered something back and signaled with his fingers.

A little boy darted from the shade of a tree, ran off at great speed, his heels raising dust. A few minutes later he returned, beaming proudly, seated beside the driver of a carriage drawn by two horses. Ze'ev and his father left their horses in the host's garden and got into the carriage and rode to a filthy alley near the lakeshore, south of the fishermen's pier.

The driver came to a halt beside a house with pink window curtains and two large flowering pinta trees in its yard, and opened the carriage door. Ze'ev had never been to such a place, but understood at once what it was. The father told him to wait a moment in the carriage, went to the mistress of the house, and gravely explained to her that his son had gotten married a few days ago and there were problems.

“How many days?” inquired the lady.

“One week exactly.”

“You should have come the very next day,” said the proprietor, a fat Jewess, a speaker of German and Arabic and French and English and the sign language of the deaf and Yiddish and Ladino and Hebrew, “but not to worry. I have just the girl for him.”

“I would like a clean and healthy lady for him, good and patient,” said the father, adding: “Not too young and not too old, not too beautiful and not too ugly.” And he explained that everything about her should be middling and average, so that she would not later reappear to his son as either nightmare or the object of longing, haunt his nights or suddenly shimmer before him in the heat of the day, and must not leave marks on his body or his soul and should be experienced without flaunting it.

The madam smiled and said that he was not the first father ever to bring her his son, “and you, sir, I can see from your hands, the wrinkles near your eyes, and the way you walk, that you are a
fellah,
a man who works the land, so you need to know that my girls know a lot about agriculture, how to plant and water, to grind and pluck, to pick grape after grape or eat the whole cluster, and most important, sir, the virginity that young men lose here will never again be found, even if hunted with a lantern.”

“All well and good,” said the father, “but planting is enough, and only in the hole, and everything should be normal, as God made us. She shouldn't scare him with special things, which your girls, I have heard, do with their eyelids and fingers.”

On the wall behind the madam, four tassels, yellow and blue and red and green, dangled at the ends of ropes that disappeared into the ceiling. She nodded with understanding and asked if he would like an Arab lady or a Jew.

“I have heard,” said the father, “about a Circassian woman you have here.”

“The Circassian isn't appropriate,” said the proprietress. “She is exactly what you said not to give him. But I have already decided who will take him.”

“Who?” asked the father.

“If you like, you can see her first.”

The father was shocked. “See her? Certainly not! I rely on you.”

“And in the meantime?” asked the madam. “Perhaps the gentleman would also like some small service?”

Absolutely not. The gentleman will wait at the café next door. He turned around, heading for the street, then paused on the third stair and turned back to the madam and asked if she happened to know how to use her fingers to whistle too.

Most men do not take their sons to whorehouses, and such a question would seem odd to them, but the madam nodded: Of course she knows how. She will pay attention and keep an open ear and eye, and if something happens, she will whistle at once, loud and clear.

“You can hear me from here to Damascus and from here to Jaffa,” she promised him, “and not just you—all the fathers who worry about all the sons will hear, from the Nile to the Euphrates. There's just one more small matter: I generally get paid in advance.”

The father paid her and summoned his son. Ze'ev came from the carriage, fairly embarrassed. The madam looked him up and down the way a man looks at a woman, reached out to the wall, and tugged the blue tassel.

The joyful ding-dong of a distant bell descended from the upper floor, and the madam told Ze'ev to climb the stairs, where he would see a yellow door and blue door and red door and green door, and knock on the blue one and wait for it to open.

Ze'ev glanced at his father, who indicated with his chin and eyebrows that he should go upstairs, and he did. The landlady listened, counted silently till four, the number of seconds that young men like him hesitate at the blue door, and then heard him knocking and it being opened and heard his steps—confident steps, she privately noted.

The prostitute who was there, not young and not old, not ugly and not beautiful, not skinny and not fat, greeted Ze'ev by taking his two hands in hers and stepped backward toward the bed. She lay down on her back, leaned against the wall on a big round pillow, and undid the belt of her robe. Ze'ev feared she would expose herself completely, that her nakedness would instantly eclipse his imagination. To his relief she was not naked but wearing a flimsy shirt, and when she stretched backward the fabric oscillated in breaking waves that augured excitement.

“All yours,” she said, and instructed him to get undressed behind a screen while she got up and closed the heavy drapes, leaving the room almost totally dark, for she knew that he would likely be abashed by his naked arousal. He emerged and sat beside her, and she stroked his head and hugged him a bit, and after a moment removed his hand from atop his loins, gave a good look, and said, “They said a little bird was coming for its first time and they sent a warhorse.”

About half an hour later, as he left there and went downstairs to the café, Ze'ev saw his father studying his walk and facial expression, trying to determine what happened. The two got into the carriage, returned to the home of the Arab where their horses were tied, and on the way said nothing to each other. When they rode up to the ridge from Tiberias and saw the valley below, the father asked, “So what do you say, Ze'ev?”

And Ze'ev smiled and lied. “Everything is fine now.”

Another day went by, and the father asked him again, and Ze'ev again lied, and on the third day he and Ruth traveled to their home in the new moshava and apart from necessary banalities did not converse the entire way. They entered the house, Ruth began organizing her new kingdom, Ze'ev went out to the field, and at night they went into their new bedroom and found that changing their place was not enough to change their luck.

How does a man know that his wife has slept with another man? Sometimes she herself tells him, sometimes someone else does, sometimes she looks at him with new disdain, and sometimes with unprecedented fear. Sometimes she denies herself to him, or the opposite: desires and demands him in a way she had not desired and demanded him before.

If our man is endowed with brains and sensitivity, he will understand that all of these are evidence that testifies to nothing. Not to her loyalty or her betrayal, her indifference or her lust, old impatience or new patience, not to anything else or its total opposite. And if he is not endowed with brains and sensitivity, he will understand the very same thing. These things are elusive. One moment someone looks you in the eye and the next moment their eyes are averted, one moment you pierce them with your gaze and the next moment you're knocking on shuttered eyelids, and the truth doesn't shine out but sinks inward, where the worm of suspicion crumbles the soul and burrows tunnels in the body.

Night after night, day after day. There are those who do nothing, but there are those who investigate and clarify: surveillance, searches, sniffing clothes, emptying pockets, cross-examination, digging through the trash bin, and inspecting the bedsheets. I haven't included phones and computers, since these didn't exist in those days, but then as now, all the troops are lined up: ears are attuned, eyes alert, trackers pick up the scent—commandos of memory, platoons of logic, battalions of deduction.

As for Ze'ev Tavori, he was exempt from all that, for he did not suspect his wife until the truth hit him full force in the face. At first he observed that she made a greater effort than usual to cuddle close to him and initiate intercourse, but he didn't understand the real reason. Then he noticed a new habit: she would get up suddenly and leave the house, sometimes in a great hurry, and when he followed her one day, he saw her heading for the cowshed, or beyond it to the vineyard, and when he drew nearer he saw her bending over and vomiting between the grapevines. He almost hurried after her to ask if she needed help, but withdrew and went away. And then, one day, one of the local women approached him, her face bright and happy, and congratulated him on his wife's pregnancy.

He was shocked. His anxiety now had a name and a meaning. But he quickly recovered and thanked the woman, who gave him a strange look and said, “Your wife is young, this is a first pregnancy, it's possible she hasn't told you yet, but other women don't need to be told. They know what they see.”

Indeed, Ruth's figure had not yet thickened, but her eyes glowed with the beautiful glow of a first pregnancy, something that few men notice but was apparent to the women of the moshava. In the ensuing days other women congratulated him and extended their good wishes. He did not know if they approached her too or what they said or what she answered, but his heart was heavy and dark and his gut convulsed with terror, for only she and he knew that she was not pregnant by him. How long could they pretend? And how could he watch her belly swelling beside him? An alien sperm had invaded her womb and his home, a fetus not his was growing inside her, multiplying cell upon cell, declaring its existence to others.

Ruth said nothing to him, and he was afraid to question her and considered the possibility of pretending he was the father and responded to well-wishers with an odd mixture of smiles and gloom. They attributed this to the fact that not all men adjust quickly to a first pregnancy, and there are those who are upset by second and third pregnancies too; and he feared the truth would come out and therefore did not confide his agony to anyone. He merely looked at every man in the moshava, trying to find the answer in a gaze or downcast eyes, laughter or fear. He imagined a crushed neck in his hands, a pulverized chin under his fist, gurgling lungs, and the snap of broken bones.

And he saw her that way too, beaten, strangled, stoned to death as an adulteress, buried alive. He pictured the foreign, fleshy battering ram pounding within her, spilling its seed at the lip of her womb, the tiny bastard growing in there, floating in its fluids. What would he do at the moment of the birth? And afterward? As he pondered this, all he could see was a curtain with nothing behind it.

A few weeks passed, and Ruth began to sense that the fetus was female. Another womb, small and pure, she felt, was growing within her, in that perfidious, lustful womb of hers, as she described it in her heart. If she could kill this fetus by the sheer power of her mind, she would do it. If she could, she would rip it out with her fingernails, but the mind does not always control the body. A little daughter grew inside her, very slowly, with the calm confidence of someone who knows nothing about her mother. A little daughter. A baby. A girl.

She did not yet have good friends in the new moshava to talk with about her worries and fears, and she was afraid to write a letter to her mother, because in every moshava there are eyes that read letters even in sealed envelopes. As for Ze'ev, he was never inclined to candid conversations with others. And though he searched the eyes of neighbors and relatives for sparks of derision, or at least of suspicion, he did not find them, but reality has its own ways of showing itself, and when his wife's belly began to protrude under her clothing, men too began smiling at him and congratulating him on the pregnancy, which was the first pregnancy of the moshava, and Ze'ev responded with gloomy smiles and nods of greeting. His father, who came for a visit, said, “Well, well, I knew everything would be all right,” and then, as if unable to contain his joy, clenched his fists and declared, “Now here's a real man. Hands of iron, brow of basalt,
shvantz
of copper!”

But Ruth, who knew her husband, realized that something terrible was going to happen. Unlike Ze'ev, who had not understood the signs of her pregnancy until he was congratulated by the local women, she understood his pregnancy: the revenge and the rage swelling in the placenta of his fury, joined umbilically to his soul and nourished by its dark arteries, and she knew that this birth would come sooner than the birth of the fetus in her womb.