Free Two She-Bears by Meir Shalev

the beadle said that for the time being the rabbi would make do with the simple marker that was there, because in the near future he would move his son’s bones to the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, to the family plot where his mother and father were buried and his elder brother, and there he would erect a permanent stone.
    “And there I buried Nahum’s mother,” said the rabbi, adding that when his time came he too would be buried there.
    He gestured to the beadle. Everyone could tell he intended to deliver words of farewell.
    “ ‘I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me,’ ” he began, but the words, though they came from his mouth and left his body, offered him no relief. Nothing lightened the terrible weight of agony and guilt, the “if” and the “if only” that tormented him like whips and scorpions. Again he faltered, almost collapsed, and the beadle again wrapped his arms around him and carried him to the car.
    The driver rushed to the front of the car and turned the ignition crank, put on his cap, and got in his seat. The visit was over. The children from the area, who had waited for hours for this very moment, shouted joyfully and clapped their hands. The car drove off, vanishing in the distance as the children chased it, and reappeared after three years that seemed like only a day: same driver, same cap on his head, and the very same passengers, the rabbi and the beadle, the former of short stature and teary eyes, the other with the rock-solid body and blue-blackness of his square beard and the red shoes, the span of his shoulders, his strong embracing arms.
    In that year, a new synagogue was built in our moshava, to replace the shack used for prayers in the early years, and Rabbi Eliyahu Natan had brought with him a Torah scroll in memory of his son, Nahum, to assure the ascent of his immortal soul. The Torah was too heavy for the elderly, grieving rabbi to lift, and the beadle carried it just as he had carried the rabbi himself, hugging it to his chest like a baby.
    The people of the moshava were delighted by this precious and important donation, and happier still about its meaning, for if the rabbi had suspected that one of them had harmed his son, he would not be revisiting the place and certainly not bearing such a gift.
    Rabbi Eliyahu Natan brought the Torah scroll into the synagogue with joy and sorrow, prayer and tears, and then asked to see his son’s house once more. In the meanwhile it had been sold to another man, who received him with respect and invited him in, but the rabbi said that going inside would be hard on him and he only wanted to meet the buyer, about whom he had heard through the beadle who arranged the sale, and to wish him success and well-being.
    As he walked from his son’s house to the home of the chairman of the committee, the rabbi tried to remember the name of the witness who took his son’s boots and wondered if he had worn them as he had permitted him to do. Even as he searched his memory, he saw a faraway figure in the field, and as he wondered who it was, his feet already knew and began to lead him to that person. When he drew closer he saw that this was the same woman, just as he thought, the young woman he had seen on his earlier visit in the yard adjacent to his son’s home, and whose face had not strayed from his memory and indeed inhabited his dreams.
    He now saw that she was carrying a baby boy, about a year old, in her arms. It had been three years ago that he had seen her pregnant, and he wondered, Where is the child who was then in her womb?
    The woman stood beside a farmer who was digging a drainage ditch at the edge of his vineyard, her eyes fixed on the shovel that pierced the ground and threw off clumps of dirt.
    The digger quickly climbed out of the ditch and bowed courteously and said, “Welcome, Honorable Rabbi, all of us here are still very sorry about your son, Nahum,” and came closer and said, “The poor woman. Every time someone