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

didn’t worry.
    The rain played its cold songs on the roofs and hummed in the tin gutters. In the shelter of the sheds the livestock huddled together. Sparrows with puffed-up feathers and narrowed eyes entrenched themselves in lattices. A pair of crows, creatures who have no fear in their heart but only curiosity, practiced hovering and climbing in the gusts of wind against the piercing downpour.
    At three o’clock, Tonychka got up and Moshe emerged from his brief afternoon nap, they ate, as usual, a few oranges and a few thick slices of bread with margarine and jam, drank, as usual, a few cups of boiling-hot tea, and when the rain stopped they hitched the mule to the cart and went to bring grapefruit and pomelos from the citrus grove.
    A sharp, cold wind, painful as a wet canvas sheet, came down from Mount Carmel and slapped their faces. The mule’s hooves sank in the deep mud and were extracted from it with a sticky noise, leaving slushy pits in it. In the fields were the outline of new little channels which the water, in its endless downward affinity, cuts in the earth every year.
    Tonya and Moshe passed the vegetable patch and the vineyard, crossed the wadi, and came to the citrus grove. Together, they loaded the heavy crates, and when they turned to go back, Tonya grabbed the reins and Moshe pushed the wagon from behind and helped the mule get it out of the black mire. Tonya turned her head around to look at him. Steam rose from the skin of his face, which was flushed with the effort.
    She loved her husband’s strength and was proud of it. “Please just wait a minute, right away I’ll call my Moshe,” she would declare whenever one of the neighbors had to struggle with a heavy sack or a recalcitrant animal. Near their house, next to the wicket in the fence, lay a rock that weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds, and Tonya made a florid sign on it that said: “Here Lives Moshe Rabinovitch Who Lifted Me Up from the Ground.” Wags said that such a sign should have been put on Tonya herself, but the rock was famous in the area and now and then some fellow would show up from one of the towns or the English army camp or the Druse villages on Mount Carmel and try to lift it up. But Moshe was the only one who was strong enough and Moshe was the only one who knew how to kneel down and embrace the rock with his eyes shut and Moshe was the only one who knew how to groan as he lifted it and how to carry it like a baby against his chest. Everyone went back to his place downcast and limping—downcast because of the failure, and limping because everyone, without exception, kicked the obstinate rock furiously and broke the big toe of his right foot.
    T HE RAIN BEGAN coming down again. When they returned to the wadi, Rabinovitch saw that the water had risen a lot. He climbed onto the wagon, took the reins from Tonya, retreated, and guided the mule so that it would cross the riverbed at a right angle. But the moment its hooves trod on the steep, slippery bank, the mule groaned in a voice that sounded surprisingly like a woman’s, and stumbled.
    From now on, things moved in the horribly familiar course of catastrophes:
    The mule sank down between the shafts. The wagon tipped onto its side and turned over with a slow but very determined movement. Rabinovitch fell under it and his left thigh was trapped and crushed.
    He yelled in pain. The broken kneecap tore the flesh and theskin and was exposed to the cold touch of the water. He almost blacked out, but dread—one of those dreads that is clear even before its reason is understood—turned his eyes to Tonya.
    Most of her was lying beneath the overturned wagon. Only her head and neck were sticking out. Her skull and the back of her neck were sunk in the mud, her hair was clogged with water, the skin of her face, which always looked ruddy and healthy, turned gray all at once.
    In the water, so close to her head, grapefruits and pomelos bobbed around as innocently as toys in a