The Loves of Judith by Meir Shalev Read Free Book Online

feeding troughs, and immaculate breeding boxes.
    Tragedy, as always, wasn’t impressed by all that, and swooped down on its prey by surprise. One night, terrified clucking came from the coop. Yakobi lit the kerosene lantern and rushed outside. As he entered the coop, he trod on the viper who was scaring the hens and who immediately bruised his heel.
    It was spring, the season when vipers are overflowing with the venom and evil they amass throughout the winter months. Yakobi fell flat on the ground, the lantern slipped out of his hand, smashed, and set fire to the coop. Feathers and walls caught fire, clucking and smoke rose to heaven, and the snake, in the sneaky way of his kind, immediately fled.
    “He did and he went away,” explained Jacob. “What other business did he have there?”
    The neighbors were summoned to help, but in the raging turmoil, no one knew what had happened. Instead of looking for Yakobi, they all tried to put out the flames and rescue the brood hens. Only after it was all over did Yakoba find her husband lying among the smoldering firebrands and the singed carcasses of the birds. By some miracle, only his hand and leg were seared, but smoke had gotten into his lungs and the snake’s venom almost killed him.
    His size, his strength, and his good fortune saved Yakobi from death. But he never really recovered. He lost his power and his energy, refused to work, and all day long he hummed a children’s song whose monotonous tones irritated the entire village.
    Yakoba, determined and diligent, tried to run the farm on her own, but weeds and thorns grew in the garden, the yard became a garbage pen, the four cows stopped giving milk and were sold to Globerman one after another, and the afflicted man didn’t leave his wife alone.
    The viper’s venom kept on bubbling in his veins. All day long, he dragged around behind her, sang his nonsense to her,and doted on her with the pesky persistence and desire of four-year-old children wooing a beloved kindergarten teacher.
    After two years of torments, Yakoba locked up the house and went to the fields without turning to look back. Yakobi toddled along behind her, humming his song, and trying to lift her dress. Thus the two of them reached the highway, crossed it, vanished among the oaks on the northern hills, and were never seen again in the village.
    F OR MONTHS THE Y AKOBIS ’ hut stood empty and waiting, and no one knew what for.
    The rosebushes went wild and turned into prickly vines, their flowers grew smaller and stank, and shrikes impaled the carcasses of mice and lizards on their thorns.
    Passionflower shoots crawled on the floor of the porch, choked the gutters with the clasp of tendrils, and finally pried the windows open and crept into the rooms.
    Weeds and screwbeans flourished in the yard, as in every abandoned place, until they covered the remnants of the burned coop. The hedge turned into a tangled wall, where black snakes hissed and cats dragged their prey.
    Gangs of tiny murderers—geckos and spiders, praying mantises and chameleons—lurked in the wild bushes. There was always rustling and quivering among the leaves, and more than once, when a child’s ball fell there and someone put a hand in to get it out, he got a bite or a sting or both.
    Some people suggested burning down the yard along with its inhabitants, and then, one summer day, at dusk, the distant and strange sound of a songbird was heard approaching the village.
    Man and beast stopped, raised weary heads, cocked amazed ears.
    The sound, so foreign, so attractive, wonderful, and sweet, kept growing louder.
    Then it was joined by the squeak of tortured springs, therattle of pistons, and the gasps of an aging motor that had lost the compression of its youth. Out of distant mists of dust, a rickety green pickup truck burst forth, big and swaying as a ship, and slowly rose from the fields.
    In the driver’s seat was a fat man, about forty years old, his hair white as snow, his skin