The Loves of Judith Read Free Page B

village.
    “What do you mean, all the women in the village?” the Village Papish amended. “All the women in the Valley! All the women in the country! One of the most beautiful women in all the world and in all times!”
    The Village Papish was one of those admirers who are devoted to female beauty, and in his house he had splendid art albums he used to leaf through with washed, caressing hands, and sigh: “
Sheyner fun di ziebn shtern
—more beautiful than the seven stars.”
    Like a distant, glowing nebula, Rebecca was sealed in his memory and in the common memory of the village. To this day—even after she had gone off and remarried and come back in old age, and managed to bring Jacob back to her before her death—they still talk about her here. And whenever a handsome woman comes to visit or a new baby is born who is very beautiful to behold, memoryimmediately compares her with that reflection of the beautiful woman who once lived here, whose husband was unfaithful, and who went off and left us all behind, “wallowing in ugliness and desolation and the black soil,” as the Village Papish said.
    I WAS TWELVE YEARS OLD THEN , and in the way whose beginning is hazy and whose end is painfully sharp, I understood that I was responsible for Jacob’s catastrophe and for his solitude. I knew that, if not for me and the deed I did, my mother would have granted his suit, given in to his pleas, and would have married him.
    As in a box, I hid from my three fathers the secrets concerning them and her. I didn’t reveal to them why she behaved as she did or why she chose the one she did. I didn’t tell them that, sitting in my observation-box, camouflaged with branches and grass, I saw human beings, too, and not only crows.
    Nor did I tell them about the mockery and scorn, my lot in school.
    “What’s your name?” laughed the little children.
    “What’s your father’s name?” teased the big children, guessing aloud which of the three was my real father.
    They were scared of Rabinovitch and Globerman, so they clung to Jacob Sheinfeld, whose isolation and mourning made him an easy target. He also had a strange custom which stirred pity and disgust in everyone’s heart: he would sit at the village bus stop on the highway, saying either to himself or to the dusty casuarinas or to the cars passing by, or maybe to guests visible only to him: “Come in, come in, friends. How nice of you to come, friends, come in.”
    Sometimes he seemed to greet them. He stood up formally, and as if he were reciting an ancient slogan, he said: “Come in, friends, come in, we’re having a wedding today.”
    Often, when I went on a trip in the village milk truck with Oded Rabinovitch, we’d see him sitting there.
    “Look at him how he looks,” said Oded. “If he was a horse, they would have shot him long ago.”
    But not to Oded, and not even to his sister Naomi did I reveal what evil I had done to Jacob in my childhood.
    T HE NEXT EVENING , after I finished my homework and helped Moshe with the milking, I washed, put on a white shirt, and went to Sheinfeld’s house.
    I opened the small gate and was immediately wrapped in strange and wonderful smells of a meal. They slipped out of the house, but didn’t go over the hedge, and stayed in the yard.
    Jacob opened the door of his house, and when he told me his “Come in, come in,” the smells grew stronger, winding around my neck and ankles, bearing me from the yard inside the house and filling my mouth with the saliva of excitement.
    “What were you cooking there, Jacob?” I asked.
    “Good food,” he said. “A gift for you on a plate.”
    Jacob’s gifts weren’t frequent or public like the dealer’s gifts, but they were more interesting. When I was born, he gave me a pretty yellow wooden canary that was hung over my crib. When I was three, he folded yellow paper boats for me and we’d sail them together in the wadi. For my eighth birthday, he prepared a surprise that made me