The Loves of Judith by Meir Shalev

Author:Meir Shalev [Shalev, Meir]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8052-1252-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-08-27T16:00:00+00:00

49

ONCE, THE OLD PEOPLE SAY, a paper boat disappeared on the slope of the river.

“That’s the worst thing. A fellow whose boat sails off far and disappears will never have peace again. Even if he gets married to somebody, he’ll never have peace. That boat will go on sailing in his head all his life and every night it’ll come to another woman.”

Sixty years later, a young woman nobody knew came to the village and went straight to the house of a farmer named Nozdryov, who was about eighty years old and no woman wanted him anymore.

“Ever since his paper boat disappeared, four times he got married and four times his wife died right after the wedding. If a thing like that happens it’s a sign that God is trying to tell you something.”

The woman pulled the bell cord a few times, but old age had dimmed Nozdryov’s hearing. She knocked and yelled and finally she opened the door and went inside. When she touched the old man’s shoulder, he turned to her with a smile that spread over his face even before he understood why, and only then did he recognize the handsome young woman who had been residing in his dreams for so many years and so many times now he had seen her expelling strange women from them.

Tears rose in his eyes. He knew he would wake up right away and the woman, as usual, would melt away and vanish. But the guest wrapped two very fragrant and real arms around his wrinkled neck and pressed his meager body to the warm lust of her breast that made him weep.

Her tongue didn’t find a single tooth to strum in his mouth, but that very day, the two of them appeared in church and the woman showed the flabbergasted priest the paper boat that had been thrown into the river many years before she was born, and had come to her, with sharp folds and clear letters, a journey of sixty years and two hundred miles east of where it was put in the water.

“And ever since then, I’ve been walking here, to him,” she said, pointing to the old man. “Walking and searching along the river.”

“And she had a little branch in her hand,” said Jacob. “People who search walk with a little branch like that. There are people who know how to find water in the ground like that, you knew that, Zayde? They walk along like everybody else walks and they search. They wait for the branch to bend, for a little boat to come, wait for our heart to yell at last, for our shvantz to point, for our eyes to see deep in the ground. Your mother used to walk like that in the field. She’d put on a beautiful dress and walk from the path in the field to the road and disappear in the hills for half a day. She didn’t take food along or a stick. And she didn’t take Naomi, either.

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