The Loves of Judith by Meir Shalev Read Free Book Online Page A

pink and delicate as the skin of baby mice turned up onto the earth by a plow. He was swathed in an old black suit and protected by sunglasses just as black. Old suede patches shone on his sleeves, and in the back of the truck, spacious cages full of canaries singing with tremendous excitement, like children on their annual outing, were bumping up and down.
    Jacob put his hand on my shoulder and said: “Fate, Zayde, don’t make surprises. It makes preparations, it makes signs, and it also sends out spies, but only a few people have eyes to see these things and ears to hear and a brain to understand.”
    The strange stranger went straight to the forsaken hut of the Yakobis like someone who knew where he was headed. When he arrived, he put a broad-brimmed straw hat on his head and got out of the truck. The noise and agitation that always came from the tangles of the hedge and the high grass stopped all at once.
    For a brief moment, the guest took off his sunglasses, revealed the two pink eyes of an albino and fringes of darting, ragweed lashes, and immediately hid them again behind the black lenses. He was short, with a double chin; his smile was pleasant and his looks were terrifying.
    He took one cage and then another, and vanished with his birds into the hut. Even before the sound of the closing door had died out, startled caravans of centipedes, wolf spiders, and small angry vipers began leaving the yard and disappearing into the fields as if on command.
    “Because,” said Jacob, “animals sense more than human beings. Someday I’ll tell you about your mother’s cow, and how much she could sense.”
    Only after sundown did the albino come back out to the yardand survey the task that awaited him. He immediately took a sickle out of the back of the truck and a file from the toolbox, and honed the curved blade with unexpected expertise. With long, smooth movements you wouldn’t have guessed possible from his appearance, he mowed the grass and stacked it at the edge of the yard. Then he took a tin pack of Players from his shirt pocket, lit a cigarette, inhaled the smoke with great pleasure; and he didn’t blow out the match, but tossed it onto the pile. The straw, the grass, and the thorns burned, as they do, noisy and enthusiastic, and tinted the faces of the onlookers with their red glow.
    Then everybody went away and the albino went on working all that night and the nights that followed. He trimmed the hedge, pulled up the passionflowers, cut down Yakoba’s rosebushes, and grafted new strains onto the stumps. He turned over the soil of the yard with a pitchfork, and when dawn broke, he scurried into the shelter of the house. The crows, to whom every excavation and hoeing prophesies a plethora of plunder, hurried to land in his yard, hopping around and searching for the earthworms and mole crickets brought up to the surface of the earth by the pitchfork’s teeth.
    “And that,” said Jacob, “that’s how it all started. Nobody knew, even my wife Rebecca didn’t know. And Rabinovitch the Ox didn’t know. And Globerman the dealer didn’t know. And I myself, I certainly didn’t know. Only later on I understood that was how it started.”
    He got up from the table, went to the window, and spoke with his back to me.
    “The coop burned down, and the albino came. And Tonya Rabinovitch drowned and your mother Judith came. And Rebecca went, and the canaries flew off, and Zayde was born, and the worker came, and Judith died, and Jacob stayed. There’s something simpler than that? That’s how it always happens at the end of every love. The beginning is always different and the middle is always complicated. But the end is always so simple and so much the same. In the end, there’s always somebody who comes andthere’s somebody who goes and there’s somebody who dies and there’s somebody who stays.”

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    B LACK CLOUDS GATHERED , a wind blew, the wadi overflowed, and Tonya and Moshe didn’t sense anything and