Free The Loves of Judith by Meir Shalev Page B

Is a wadi to drown in? In the Kodyma River you drown, in the Black Sea you drown, but in our wadi? In how much, twelve inches deep? A catastrophe like that doesn’t just happen. Eat, Zayde, please eat, you can eat and listen at the same time. Once I thought maybe because they looked so much alike and there was rain and fog there, so the Angel of Death made a mistake and Tonya died instead of Moshe. But she died and he remained with all that failure and regretting, and that’s really something, Zayde, ’cause you got to know how to miss a dead woman. That’s not like missing a live woman. Those two regrets I know real good and I know exactly what I’m talking about ’cause I missed your mother both when she was living and when she was dead. How old are you today, Zayde? Exactly twelve and you’re also an orphan yourself, so maybe you can understand these things even without me confusing you. What can I tell you, Zayde, like a black shadow fell over the village. A young widower, two little orphans … and nothing matters to the God of the Jews. At the end of the winter she died and a month later spring came with joy and dancing. Buds flower, larks sing, cranes call. Kroo-kroo … kroo-kroo … you know the sound of the cranes in the fields, don’t you, Zayde? Their voice isn’t loud, but you hear it far, far away. Once, during World War II, I saw an Italian prisoner of war from the prison camp dancing there in the field with three cranes. Birds immediately feel that Italians aren’tlike other men. From far away, I thought it was four people, they was so tall and have a kind of royal crown on their head. And when I started coming close, the prisoner of war picked up his feet and took off for the camp and the cranes opened their wings of nine feet across and started flying. A
yener
prisoner-of-war camp … you remember it? You were a little boy then. They had a hole in the fence and they would come out like my poor birds from the cage I’d leave open, and they’d run around here in the fields, and nobody guarded them because they didn’t really want to escape. Have another helping, Zayde. Come on, open your mouth,
meyn kind
. I remember how my foster uncle’s youngest son would eat. From the day he was born his mouth was always open and his first word was ‘more.’ Not ‘mother,’ not ‘father,’ but ‘more.’ At the age of six months, he pointed to the pot of food and said,
‘Nokh!’
Anybody who can say ‘more’ don’t need many other words to get along good in life. There are people who get along real good all their lives with just two words, the word ‘that’ and the word ‘more.’ That boy would eat to gobble up a bull like they say, like a bottomless barrel, and his mother really loved to see him eat and say more and more, and he grew and grew so much that she was scared of the evil eye, and would call him to the table only after everybody else had already finished eating, and then she would stand in front of him with a big sheet spread like this in her hands, to hide him while he was eating, so nobody would see him and, God forbid, give him the evil eye. So eat now, Zayde, open your mouth big and eat and I’ll sing you a little song for your appetite:
    At the window, at the window
,
    Stood a bird today
,
    A boy ran up to the window
—
    Pretty bird has flown away
.
    Weep, child, such dismay
,
    Pretty bird has flown away …
”

18
    A T FIRST M OSHE R ABINOVITCH ’ S catastrophe was the property of the whole village. During the weeklong mourning period, his friends mobilized, milked his cows and picked the fruit left in the citrus grove. And in the next few weeks, until his broken leg healed, they came to give him a hand and a shoulder, and lent him a mule or a horse for the day until he found a new work animal. The orphans were invited to eat by all the neighbor women, and Aliza Papish, the wife of the Village Papish, showed up to glorify the floor of the hut, to do the laundry, and