Free The Loves of Judith by Meir Shalev

so abominable it can’t be translated even by someone whose mother tongue is Yiddish. Even Globerman, whose daily bread is coarseness, cleared his throat a bit before he explained it to me in its full sharpness.
    The man closed the gate of the yard, crossed the neighbor’svegetable field as the neighbor was crawling on his knees in the red loam mud and pretending to be deep in his onions and carrots, and disappeared with his daughter beyond the wall of cypresses. On the road, he stopped a little truck coming from Ras-El-Ayn, stuck a dollar bill in the hand of the amazed driver, and ordered him to take them straight to the port of Jaffa.
    I N THE EVENING , Judith’s lover came and saw her white and alone, her head like a stone among the lentils scattered around.
    “He came back?” he whispered.
    Judith didn’t answer because the man was talking on her deaf side.
    “And took her?” he shouted.
    “Came back and took her,” she wailed.
    “I’ll go after him, I’ll catch him, I’ll bring her back to you!” The man got excited.
    Judith looked at him. The warmth of his body, the fury of his heart, which had won her and helped her in the time of her loneliness, now seemed miserable to her like a field of stubble.
    “Don’t go after him, don’t catch him, don’t bring back the child,” she said. “It’s not your games, you men.”
    In front of her closed eyes stretched the empty prophecy of her life. “The child didn’t recognize him,” she finally groaned. “But she went with him without a word to me. Not even good-bye.”
    The man sat down next to her, put his arm around her, cradled her head in the hollow of his neck, and put his hand on her belly button.
    “Now it’s us, Judith,” he whispered. “You and me, and soon we’ll have a new little girl.”
    “Yes,” said Judith. “I’ll have a new little girl.”
    A great cool force suddenly filled her whole body. A month and a half later she gave birth without a shout and without surprise to a big, beautiful boy who was already dead.
    “We’ll go there and find her,” said her lover over the grave of the stillborn baby, and once again he started shouting. “We’ll go to court. You can’t simply take a child away from a mother like that. In America there’s a law.”
    “We won’t go there, the verdict has already been passed and carried out,” said Judith. Her lover looked at her and was terrified because he saw the hardness rising from her flesh, climbing the capillaries of her body, and sinking like chalk in the cracks of her skin. He saw and knew that he had to leave her alone.

16
    S O THAT ’ S HOW the lying Revisionist from the Hebrew Brigades changed things, and if you’re interested in questions of “if” and “what if,” as I am and as they are in me, you’ll find diversions of Chance and Fate here to respond to. For if he really did have a foundry in Wilmington, my mother’s first husband would have gone back home on time and I wouldn’t have come into the world, and if I had come, I would have had one father, and they would have given me another name and the Angel of Death would have caught up with me long ago.
    Uncle Menahem, who saw my childish occupation as the irony of fate, told me a wonderful story about the three brothers, If, What If, and What If Not, who walk every night in the traces of the Angel of Sleep. “The
Malakh-fun-shlof
puts people to sleep, and the brothers If, What If, and What If Not wake them up, dance around them in a ring of questions, and don’t let them sleep anymore.”
    But the dealer Globerman, whose nocturnal tranquillity is not injured by any issue, exertion, remorse, or regret, repeated his motto to me: “
A mensh trakht un Gott lakht
—man makes plans and God laughs.” That is: questions will be asked, answers will begiven, the three brothers will dance over my unsleeping eyes—the same as for Judith, for she never saw her daughter again until the day she died.
    S O I ’VE GOT a