The Loves of Judith Read Free

my mother’s life andher death, and stories, unlike reality, have to be preserved from all excess and addition.
    A slight melancholy may be woven into my way of talking, but it isn’t evident in my life. Like every person, I create moments of grief for myself, but the pleasures of life aren’t alien to me, my time is my own, and as I said before, three fathers showered their benefits on me.
    I’ve got a
knipele
of money and a green pickup truck bequeathed to me by Globerman the cattle dealer.
    I’ve got a big beautiful house on Oak Street in Tivon, the house bequeathed to me by the canary breeder, Jacob Sheinfeld.
    And I’ve got a farm in the village, Moshe Rabinovitch’s farm. Moshe Rabinovitch still lives there, but he’s already registered it in my name. He lives in his old dwelling, facing the street, and I live in the pretty little house in the yard, the house that was once a cowshed, where bougainvillea twine around its cheeks like colorful sideburns, where swallows flutter yearnings at its windows, and a soft smell of milk still rises from the cracks in its walls.
    In bygone days, doves hummed in it and cows gave milk. Dew collected on the covers of the jugs, dust in dances of gold. Once a woman lived in it, laughed and dreamed, worked and wept, and in it she brought me into her world.
    That, in fact, is the whole story. Or, as practical people say in their deep, loathsome voices: that’s the bottom line. And everything that will sneak in above it from now on are details with no purpose but to satisfy that pair of small, hungry beasts—curiosity and nosiness—who nest in all our souls.

4
    I N 1952, about a year and a half after her death, Jacob Sheinfeld invited me to the first meal.
    He came to the cowshed, his shoulders drooping, the scar on his forehead gleaming, and the moss of solitude darkening the wrinkles of his face.
    “Happy birthday to you, Zayde.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “You’ll please come to me tomorrow for dinner,” he said, and turned and left.
    I was then exactly twelve years old, and Moshe Rabinovitch made me a birthday party.
    “If you were a girl, Zayde, we’d make you a bat-mitzva today.” He smiled, and I was surprised because Rabinovitch didn’t tend to talk in “if” and “what if.”
    Oded, Rabinovitch’s older son, who was already the village truck driver, brought me a silver-plated Bulldog model of a Mack diesel. Naomi, Rabinovitch’s daughter, came specially from Jerusalem and brought me a book titled
The Old Silver Spot
, with pictures of crows and the notes of their calls. She kept kissing and crying and hugging and stroking until I was filled with embarrassment, desire, and dread all together.
    Then the green pickup truck appeared, collided, as always, with the mighty stump of the eucalyptus where big scars, mementos of all the previous collisions, could be seen in its flesh, and another father burst out: Globerman the cattle dealer.
    “A good father doesn’t never forget a birthday,” declared the dealer, who never failed to fulfill any parental obligation.
    He brought some premium cuts of beef ribs and bestowed a sum of cash on me.
    Globerman brought me money for every event. For birthdays, holidays, the end of every school year, in honor of the first rain of the season, on the shortest day of the year in winter and on the longest day of the year in summer. Even on the anniversary of Mother’s death, he would thrust a few shillings into my hand, which horrified and disgusted everybody, but it didn’t surprise anybody because Globerman was known throughout the Valley as a greedy, coarse man. And in the village people said that five minutes after the English expelled the German Templars fromnearby Waldheim, Globerman showed up there with his pickup truck, broke into their abandoned houses, and looted the crystal and porcelain dishes they had left behind.
    “And by the time we got there with the wagons”—the narrators were enraged—“there