The Loves of Judith Read Online Free PDF Page A

size of the love has nothing to do with the size of the reason. Sometimes one word she says is enough. Sometimes only the line of the hip, like a poppy stem. And sometimes it’s how her lips look when she says ‘seven’ or ‘thirteen.’ Look and see, with ‘seven’ the lips are starting out like with a kiss. Then you see the teeth are touching the lips a moment to make the ‘v.’ And then the mouth is opening a little … like this … se-ven. See? And with ‘thirteen,’ the tip of the tongue is peeping out for the ‘th.’ Then the mouth is opening and the tongue is touching the top of the mouth at the end.”
    He stared at me as if he wanted to see if I caught the meaning of his words.
    “To understand that thing, hours I stood looking in a mirror. I stood there and I said all those numbers real slow, and I watched real careful how every number looks on the mouth. And once I even said to her, Tell me, Judith, how much is three and four? just to see the seven on her mouth. But she probably thought I’m nuts. And sometimes, listen, Zayde, just the eyebrows, just the eyebrows of a woman, can grab a man for a whole life.”
    He poured himself another glass of cognac, closed the bottle, and put it back in the cabinet. “You don’t get no more today, Zayde. That was only for now to taste and for a time to remember. I’m gonna leave that bottle for you, let it lay here and wait with me until our next meal. It’s good for cognac to wait. And the glasses and the dishes and everything that’s here, you’re gonna get it all from me after I die. Meantime, you go on growing up and playing and running after the crows. And the three of us, me and Rabinovitch and Globerman, we’re gonna make sure you got a good childhood. Because what does a child got except childhood? Strength he ain’t got and sense he ain’t got and a woman he ain’t got. All he’s got is love that breaks his body and his life.”

7
    J ACOB WASHED the two shot glasses, dried them carefully, and held them up to the light to examine their transparency.
    “I always had a weakness for birds, too,” he said. “And my mother died when I was a little boy, too. But me, Zayde, I didn’t get no childhood. My father married another woman and she threw me out of the house right away. Sent me off to her brother, my foster uncle. He had a workshop in the big city, far far away from home and the village. Better he should learn a trade, shesays, and not walk around the river near the laundresses. And with her brother in the workshop I worked like a slave, from morning to night. His children went to school and wore fine clothes with the gymnasium buttons, and I barely learned how to read and write and to this day I speak a broken Hebrew. So broken that all the years I’m ashamed to open my mouth at the village assemblies. Sometimes on purpose I put in a nice word to make it sound pretty. Then everybody would laugh. Once I said ‘yours truly’ instead of ‘I,’ and the Village Papish said to me, right in front of everybody: ‘Your yours truly, Sheinfeld, along with all the rest of your language, is like a pearl on a heap of garbage.’ He stinks himself from the
kvatsh
of his geese and me he calls garbage. When he would pass by here on his wagon with the garbage barrels he’d bring from the prison camp for his geese to eat, the birds would fall dead out of the sky from the stink. And me he calls garbage. So when I was a little boy, the birds was all I had to cheer me up. Why were birds created at all except to make men happy? Does the God of the Jews care if animals are flying around in the sky? There’s not enough room on the ground? In Uncle’s yard, there were poor sparrows. In the morning I’d see them freezing just like me. Little gray sparrows with their feathers all puffed up with cold. They also had little black yarmulkes on top of their heads. They also didn’t have a drop of sense inside their heads. That’s why people call a fool a