HE STIRRED with a wooden ladle, put his face close to the pot, and sniffed.
“What’s the secret of the taste, Zayde? That everything will be fresh. That everything will be delicate. Just to touch. Just to put one on top of the other. Just to show the food its seasoning: nice to meet you, I’m potato. Nice to meet you, I’m nutmeg. Please meet Mr. Soup, nice to meet you, Mrs. Parsley. Seasoning, Zayde, it ain’t a smack in the face, seasoning’s got to be like a butterfly’s wing touching your skin. Even in simple Ukrainian borscht, the garlic shouldn’t change your expression, just give you the feeling of a smile. Once I told you a story so you’d eat my food, and now I make you food so you’ll listen to the stories. That means you ain’t a little boy no more, Zayde, so pay attention to your name, start being careful.”
TIME, indifferent, mighty, and benevolent, bore away the initial curiosity on its stream. Gossip and guessing started boring even those who invented it. The sense of danger also passed on.
By now everybody had learned that you didn’t approach Rabinovitch’s Judith on her left side and you didn’t ask her anything about who she was or where she came from.
Oded and Naomi came to school clean and neat. The movements of Moshe’s body were once again calm and confident. The blessing, that blessing inspired only by a woman’s hand, returned to his farm.
Each of the three men who were to be my fathers was tending to his own business.
Jacob Sheinfeld, who bequeathed me his drooping shoulders and his house and his dishes and the wonderful picture of his wife, meditated on Judith and learned how to breed canaries.
Moshe Rabinovitch, who bequeathed me the color of his hair and his farm, listened to her screaming and searched for his braid.
And my third father, the cattle dealer Globerman, who bequeathed me his money and his enormous feet, started placing cunning little gifts in the cowshed: a small bottle of perfume or a new blue kerchief or a mother-of-pearl comb for her hair.
“For Lady Judith,” he would repeat.
The dealer was a tall, thin man, his hands were stronger than they were thick, and his face concealed intelligence. Winter and summer he wore a big, worn leather jacket, and on his head was always an old beret that looked like he also used it to blow his nose. In those days he didn’t yet have the pickup truck. He always walked and sometimes he sang strange songs to himself, and their language sounded foreign even if they were sung in Hebrew. Some of them I remember well:
Two horses, on they came
one is blind
one is lame
on one’s back rides a cat
his tail is plucked
his whiskers flat
and he’s pursued by a little mouse
wearing trousers and a blouse.
He covered enormous distances on foot, his pockets full of bills and coins that were heavy enough to keep him from flying away in the late summer wind, with a notebook full of cows’ names that kept him from forgetting anything, and with boots full of gigantic feet big enough to keep him from sinking in the mud.
Sometimes he walked alone and sometimes along with a cow, who had a rope tied to her horns, dread in her heart, and whose bleating jolted the air. East of the village, the old forest of eucalyptus turned blue, and in it was the path where traces of cloven hooves and big boots were clearly marked. Beyond it waited the butcher, the knife, and the meat hook. Every hoofprint, Naomi showed me, turned in one direction, and the traces of the boots went back and forth. On that path, the cows walked their final road. Except for one cow, the cow Rachel, who walked the path one night and then came back on it. Because of that night and that cow, I came into the world and I shall tell more about her later.
The cattle dealer always had a filthy rope wound around his shoulder, and he had his “baston,” a thick walking stick with a steel tip. He used to lean on it as he tramped around the yards, and he also used it as a cattle prod and as an index finger and as a weapon against vipers and dogs. They would run after him in the fields, crazed by the smell of blood and terror of the cows that stuck to his clothes and even wafted from his skin.
The cows also sensed this smell, the smell of their own death, coming from the body of the dealer like vapors rising from the underworld, and when Globerman appeared in one of the yards in his hat and with his rope and his notebook and his stick, a quiet snort of warning and dread rose in the air, and the cows would huddle together, their spines tense with fear, their bodies clutching one another, and their horns lowered menacingly.
LIKE EVERY CATTLE DEALER, Globerman could estimate the weight of a cow with one furtive look, but he was too smart to offer to state the weight to the farmer.
“First of all, Zayde,” he taught me the mysteries of give and take, “this way he’ll think he’s cheating you, and second of all, the farmer always gives less weight than there really is there. Because buying a cow is theater, and in this theater the farmer wants to be the saint and the dealer don’t care if he’s the sinner. Because of that, even if the owner thinks a thousand pounds, he’ll say nine hundred, maximum nine hundred fifty, period. So, if he loses money and enjoys that, too, who are we, Zayde, to disturb him?”
Until his dying day, he kept hoping to bring me into his business.
“A soyd, Zayde, a secret.” He bent down to me. “You’re the only one I’ll tell it to because you’re my son. Every dealer knows you got to check out the cow, but only somebody like us Globermans who was made on the Klots knows it’s even more important to examine the dairy farmer, period. You got to know what he thinks about the cow, and it’s even more important to know what the cow thinks about him.
“Love and trade are alike but they’re also the opposite. Because love isn’t just heart, it’s mainly sense, and trade isn’t just sense, it’s mainly heart,” he explained. “When a farmer sells me a bik, a bull, it’s only flesh without a soul, at his price only weight and health are important. But when a farmer sells me a kuh, a milk cow, well, Zayde, that’s another story. To sell this cow is like selling your mother, period. Oy oy oy, how bad to part from her, Zayde, how their eyes talk. Oy meyn kind, oy mamenu—oh how can you let me go, oh how she looks at him.”
“How come you’re selling such a beautiful cow?” he would ask the farmer venomously.
It wasn’t an answer he wanted, but rather to hear the tone of voice and to see how the face turned yellow with disgrace.
“Walk her,” he would demand. “Let’s see, maybe she swallowed some nail.”
Theoretically, this examination was designed to discern a limp or a pain that would indicate an internal injury, which could make the cow declared unkosher after it was slaughtered, but in fact what the dealer wanted was to see how the farmer approached his cow and how she responded to his presence and his touch.
“If he loves her, Zayde, he’s got some regret, and if he’s got some regret, he won’t haggle over the price. That’s how it is. You won’t tell that to nobody. If you ask a trader where he makes a profit, he’s got only one answer: you buy a cow on the hoof, you sell the hoof and you’re left with the cow. Period.”
“I BROUGHT LADY JUDITH a little something,” he declared.
“Lady Judith” was my mother and “a little something” was the general name for all the gifts the dealer gave her. At first he just happened to leave them on the ledge of the trough in the cowshed, and when Judith told him, “You forgot something here, Globerman,” he answered her: “I didn’t forget.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
“A little something for Lady Judith,” the dealer repeated the definition, and then bowed and retreated three steps, turned aside, and left, because he knew that Lady Judith wouldn’t touch the gift in his presence.
Sometimes he added something like: “Lady Judith is alone among the cows and needs a little something to remind her that she’s a woman.” And on days when he was in an especially romantic mood, he said: “You need a man to make you the queen you really are, to carry you in his arms like they carry a baby, period.”
But Lady Judith, who loved her cows, loathed the cattle dealer’s manners, his gifts, his smell, and his periods.