WHO GOT HER PREGNANT?” Naomi asked Oded.
“Her? All of them!” answered Oded.
“Who got her pregnant?” Naomi asked her father.
“Nobody,” said Moshe.
“Who got you pregnant?” Naomi asked Judith.
“A nafka mina,” said Judith, and when Naomi persisted and kept investigating and wept, she finally said to her: “I got pregnant by myself, Nomele, by myself.”
“YOU REMEMBER THE day you were born here? You remember, Zayde?”
“Nobody remembers the day he was born.”
“I remember. I was here.”
“I know.”
“Maybe I’ll stay with you here and not go back to Jerusalem?”
“You’ve got a child, Naomi, and you’ve got a husband in Jerusalem.”
Warm smells of a village night rose in my window. My heart soared from my rib cage and a rustle of clothes taken off was heard in the dark.
“Don’t turn on the light,” she said, because she didn’t know that my eyes were closed.
She got into my bed and asked: “What’s your name?”
“Zayde,” I said.
Outside, the blackbirds started chanting, their voices melting the chill of dawn and painting the east with the orange of their beaks.
“Your eyes have become blue, Zayde,” said Naomi. “Open them and you’ll see yourself.”
An old grief looked out of her eyes. Her tears gleamed. She got out of bed, gleaming in the dark of the room.
“In the middle of class, I got up and ran here. She was already on the floor and that smell was in the air, like the smell of Uncle Menahem in the fall, but it was from Judith’s water, which had already broke. The smell of that water only women and doctors know.”
“Don’t be scared, Nomele,” said Judith. “Don’t call anybody, go to the house and bring clean sheets and towels.”
Her face was contorted with pain.
“Don’t die,” shouted Naomi. “Don’t die!”
And the smile turned Judith’s lips pale.
“You don’t die from this,” she said. “You just live more.”
And she started laughing and groaning: “Oy, how much I’ll live now, Nomele, oy, how much I’ll live now.”
In their mud dwellings in the corner of the roof, the swallow fledglings shrieked and gaped the red of their jaws. Rachel, in the cow yard, bleated and butted the iron door.
“And now,” said Judith, “the kurve will give birth to a new little girl.”
Lying on her back, she rolled her dress over her belly, dug her heels into the floor, spread her thighs, and raised her behind in the air.
“Fast!” she ordered. “Put the sheet under me.”
Naomi looked terrified into her gaping groin, which seemed to be shouting.
“What do you see there, Nomi?” asked Judith.
“Like a wall inside,” said Naomi.
“That’s her head, right away she’ll start coming out and you’ll help her very very slow. Just don’t worry, Nomele, in just one more little minute she’ll come out. It’ll be an easy birth. Just wait for her with your hands and you’ll catch her.”
“It’s a boy,” said Naomi.
“And then she simply tore her dress,” she told me, her words and her lips in my neck and the warmth of her thigh on my belly, “and the buttons flew into the air, and she said: ‘Fast, Nomele, fast, I can’t anymore, put him on my chest.’ And I put you on her chest, the white chest of a dove she had, and then she wailed.”
Naomi wanted to flee from the cowshed, for until that moment, Judith was cool and very decisive, while now, the final night wailings were extracted from the depths of her belly and came out of her mouth.
She stepped back, wiping her sticky hands on one another until the wall supported her back, looking at the woman twisting in the swamp of straw and blood, her scream running out of her throat and her son clasped in her arms.
SHEINFELD, RABINOVITCH, and Globerman came to the circumcision in their best clothes and didn’t leave me for a minute.
Jacob, who didn’t know how to sew then, bought me some baby layettes.
Moshe Rabinovitch built me a cradle that could be stood on legs and also hung from the rafter.
And Globerman, true to his way and his values, brought a big bundle of bills, wet his finger with saliva and started dividing them into five small piles, and called out to the guests: “One for the child, one for the mother, one for the father, one for the father, one for the father …” Until the Village Papish and the City Papish stood up and shouted at him: “Give the present already and shut up!”