Free The Loves of Judith by Meir Shalev Page A

half-sister somewhere in big America, and not even her name ever appeared on our mother’s lips. And if I asked and persisted about her, Mother’s standard line stopped me:
“A nafka mina.”
    The ship sailing from Jaffa took the father and his daughter to Genoa. There they stayed a few days in a cheap hotel that stank of fish, anise, and garlic, and big cats sat in geranium boxes on the balcony like nesting birds.
    From there they sailed to Lisbon and from there to Rotterdam and from there to America and because of the other passengers in their cabin who lay in their bunks all day, laughed in strange languages, played cards, and reeked of vomit and sweat and filth and tobacco—they walked along the deck rail a lot.
    Meanwhile, as will often happen to such men, the little girl had already changed from a plundered prize to a hindrance to him, and his anger and desire for revenge weren’t satisfied, and their murmurs even overcame the roar of the waves, and the man would smack his daughter’s face hard. Such smacks were so fast and short that no one noticed them and no one heard the ugly words that were sprayed out with them: “
Punkt vi deyne mame di kurve
—just like your mama, the whore.” And if I may once again be permitted to say something about the heroes of my life and the creations of my imagination, I will say that if it were up to me, we wouldn’t meet that despicable man again. If he had stayed with them, he might have become the hero of this story and another son would have told it, but since he did what he did, he exiled himself from my chronicles and spared me the need to unfurl the rest of his history.
    And as for my mother’s forgotten lover, I know neither hisname nor where he came from, and since three fathers is enough for me, I don’t even look for him. But once, about fifteen years after Mother died, on one of my visits to Naomi in Jerusalem, she pointed out an old man who was very stooped, looked like an upside down L, and was leaning on two wooden canes, stumbling down the street of BeitHaKerem in Jerusalem, not far from the teachers’ seminary.
    “See that man? He was your mother’s lover,” she said.
    And if the shock of such a sentence isn’t enough, that was the first and only time I understood that Naomi also knew something about Mother’s history.
    How did she know that was the man? I don’t know.
    Why did she decide to tell me he was the man? I don’t know that, either.
    Should I have been offended? Naomi, who sensed my embarrassment, said: “Let’s go back to the house, Zayde, and make a big salad like we used to eat at home.”
    I always bring her vegetables and eggs from the village, and a jar of sour cream and slices of cheese, and I always come to her at night, in the big milk truck, driven by Oded.
    I’ve grown up, Oded has gotten old, yet I still love those nighttime trips with him and his stories and his complaints and his dreams, which he shouts to overcome the roar of the motor.
    The roads have become wider, the trucks pass by one after another, but the nights remain cool as they were, and Oded still vilifies the man who married his sister and took her away from the village, and he still asks me: “You want to honk, Zayde?” And once again I put out my hand to the horn cord, and once again I’m jolted and softened when its bleating rises, enormous and gloomy, into the night air.
    Two little children were skipping around that stooped man and a horrible hidden burden lay on his shoulders. But who would assure me that that burden was my mother? And who doesn’t bear such burdens? For against the few men who loved her isa whole world of people who didn’t know her, and every one of them tottered down his street, and every one is bent over like an upside down L, bowing under the load of his soul.

17
    T HAT WAS A GREAT tragedy with Tonya,” said Jacob. “A very great tragedy. We had a few other catastrophes, but a thing like that? To drown like that in the wadi?