Two She-Bears

Cover

Also by Meir Shalev

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One: The Telephone Call

Chapter Two: Getting Organized

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six: Murder and Suicide

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight: The Magnificent Ox, the Wagon, and the Mulberry

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen: Insomnia

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen: The Shot

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty: A Woman and a Rifle and a Tree and a Cow

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five: The Caveman and the Fire

Chapter Twenty-six: The Wedding Night

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty: Travels with a Goat

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two: The Proof

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five: Neta and the Angel of Death

Chapter Thirty-six: The Birth

Chapter Thirty-seven

Chapter Thirty-eight: This Is Revenge

Chapter Thirty-nine: The Shed

Chapter Forty: The Summer That Came After That Winter

About the Author

About the Translator

How harsh the revenge would be, and how simple it was to prepare. The avenger's wife, standing behind him, saw and understood every detail, which reminded her of preparations for a hike, like the ones they had made together years before. Vigorously shaking out the backpack, which was glad to emerge from storage. Checking the laces on hiking boots that had all but abandoned hope. Roll call of buttons on the work shirt.

She also saw the differences: instead of the delicacies he took along to please her on those hikes of theirs, he now took a modest amount of simple food—slices of bread, hard-boiled eggs, unpeeled cucumbers, a container of sour cream. The word “ascetic” came quickly to mind.

And she noticed other details: He peeled the eggs here, in the kitchen of their home, lest telltale bits of shell be left in the field, revealing human presence. He paid no heed to the salami, a constant companion on those hikes, which yearned to come along. Its aroma would likely attract dogs, and after the dog its owner would likely appear. He's making the Turkish coffee here at home, she observed, and pouring it into the old thermos. A campfire, a gas cooker, fresh coffee boiling, would be seen and heard and smelled from a distance.

And she remembered: Back then, on those hikes, he'd cook up the coffee on his tiny, meticulous fires. He boiled, stirred, and poured, served her with the gestures of a flirty waiter. They had a little coffeepot, with a long funny handle, which came with them on every hike. But now this too—Where is it? she suddenly wondered, twelve years since last seen—didn't go into the pack.

She knew: Something big and terrible was about to happen. Revenge would be taken, blood would be redeemed, someone would die, maybe more than one. Nevertheless a smile dawned on her face, as if in sympathy with the coffeepot: Sooty and snubbed, he's not taking you along? No big deal. He's doing the same to me. Like David in the Bible leaving two hundred men behind as he unsheathed his sword, boiling with vengeance, to confront Nabal.

She drew a bit closer. Did he sense her? Did he still have that eerie ability to sense what was going on behind his back? Whether he did or not, he did not turn around, did not look at her. She came closer, keenly and pleasantly aware of the two-centimeter difference in their height, and smiled inside: There is no other husband in the moshava who is shorter than his wife, and surely no other who loves her for it.

Once, before the disaster that befell them, when they still walked together in the street—What a beautiful couple, everyone said—he would lean his head on her shoulder, in a role reversal that embarrassed people who watched them, but pleased and amused her. “It's very important,” he kept saying back then, “to make your lover laugh.” In their Ten Commandments, which he wrote out and hung on the bedroom wall, the Third, Fourth, and Ninth were identical: “Entertain thy wife.”

Where'd he get that? she wondered when she first saw the words, and again now, in retrospect. Several years ago, on a particularly bad morning, she tore the commandments from the wall, ripped them up, and threw them in the trash. He did not write her new ones, and she did not forget the old ones—they still hang on the walls of her heart.

His back got so broad, she said to herself now.

On those hikes of theirs, they always walked side by side, but when the road narrowed to a path, she slowed down, so he could go first. She would look at his back, thin and boyish, and he would turn around and say to her, “Why're you walking behind me? You lead.”

“I don't know where.”

“Go with the trail, it'll take you.”

“It's not marked.”

“It is marked, but not by trail signs. It's marked by footprints, trampled grass, stones moved from their normal place, shiny patches on the rocks. You just have to look and see. And it's also marked by its own logic, that's the most important thing. Trails have logic. If you comprehend it, you find the trail.”

“I'm on vacation today. I have no will to comprehend and no head for logic. You do the comprehending and I'll enjoy the scenery.”

“Not a chance. I'll walk behind you and look at your butt. It's much more beautiful and I also deserve enjoyment.”

Though he was her husband, she gave him a look that mothers give to their adolescent sons: a look of puzzlement, hope, anxiety diluted by amusement and curiosity. She never had an adolescent son, and ever since the disaster she has known she won't have one. But for many years she has been a teacher at the local high school and she knows the look that mothers give their young sons and she now gives her husband.

I feel fluttering inside. Have I any more sons in my body? Is there hope for me?

The beautiful biblical words tug the womb and the heart: “Could I have a husband tonight and bear sons?” A husband? My man? You?

They had done a lot of hiking. At first the two of them alone, later on with their son. First when he floated and tossed in her belly, later on wrapped in a homemade snuggly, dozing on her shoulder and breast, then in a baby carrier improvised by his father at the workshop of his army reserve unit. He stitched it together and bore it on his back, on this very back that now faced her.

Her tearful eyes were flooded with pictures. The son, a tiny cavalryman, riding on his father's back. The father galloping, neighing like a horse, the mother hurrying after them: “Be careful! Please. He's scared. He'll fall. Be careful!”

But her prophecy did not come to pass. True, the child was frightened, but he enjoyed his fright, as children do. He laughed. He grew. Stood on his feet. Took his first steps. Fell as babies fall and got up again. His parents' agility was apparent even then—in his step, his stance, his stumbles, his smile.

In the beginning they hiked with him nearby, in the scrubland of poppies and chrysanthemums east of the moshava and the patches of pink flax on the hill beyond the avocado grove. Later to the little pond, hidden from the world, where they would head on a hot summer's day and where her older brother had taught her to swim and dive when she was a girl. And when the son began to walk confidently they also took him to Grandpa Ze'ev's wadi, which is what they called the wadi where his big carob tree stood—Grandpa's big carob, to be precise.

There, in that wadi, she and her brother had hiked with their grandfather when they were children. There he taught them to identify wildflowers, to locate and gather their seeds. Under that carob tree he told them a story that later on she would write down for her son: the story about the prehistoric man who lived in the nearby cave, the one with the deep pit, where sometimes a wandering sheep or goat would fall in, and afterward there'd be an awful stench.

And from that wadi she would later hike with her husband to the gullies beyond, climbing and descending—“We hauled ass north,” he would say in his army slang—and go where they would not see another soul. They loved to make love outdoors and had their favorite secret places. And from there onward and upward to the top of the hill where they could see down the other side, which for them was a pleasantly familiar view, and for their son a strange and distant and inviting and wonderful world: Come closer, touch and smell, come and fill the cabinet of your memory.

And then the two of them, just the father and son, began to take hikes without her. “Hikes for guys,” he would say, and one day he even added: “Girls not invited.”

That's what he said, and I just laughed. I didn't imagine what was coming. I never had that famous intuition, the foreknowledge attributed to women, especially to mothers. Even on the day of the disaster itself I didn't sense a thing.

Hikes for guys. Just the two of them together. The little guy has to learn from the big guy all the nonsense that a father has to teach his son—how to light a campfire, to know which leaves could be used for tea, to walk barefoot on the ground—and girls were likely to get nervous: “What if he steps on broken glass?” And “What if there's a snake?” And “Even Grandpa Ze'ev always walks in his work boots.”

“If a snake shows up we'll deal with it, right, Neta?”—that's what we called him, our son, who grew up complaining: “They laugh at me in kindergarten. Why did you give me a girl's name?”

“Laugh back at them.”

And how to find the North Star and drive the old pickup truck—Neta on his father's lap, his three-, four-, five-, and six-year-old hands gripping the wheel with excitement—and how to tie a hitch knot, and improve night vision by looking to the side, and to identify and recognize everything the ear hears and the finger feels and the nose smells and the eye sees: “This is a porcupine quill, and this is a snakeskin, feel how delicate and thin it is. Touch it, Neta, don't be afraid, it's just his skin, he's not here, he shed his skin and slithered away. And even if he were here—I'm here, protecting you.

“You hear that, Neta? Listen carefully—that's the cawing of a jaybird and that's the trilling of a falcon and that's the wailing of a curlew and that's the chirping of a finch and that's the tsk-tsking of a robin redbreast. Every year a redbreast like that comes to our yard, always to the same tree. We planted the tree, that's true, but in his opinion it's his tree. Now smell: this yellow flower is called inula. Your mother thinks it stinks. Smell it and tell me what you think. It's like camphor, not bad. Close your eyes. You should smell things with your eyes closed. Just with your nose. You can remember smells better than what you see and what you hear. This smell is inula, this is common rue, this is the mastic tree, this is thyme, and, best of all—sage. Sage is our friend. If you can remember all the names, I'll tell Grandpa Ze'ev and he'll be really happy. Maybe he'll take you to the big carob tree in his wadi and the cave next to it, and he'll also teach you the names of plants and tell you about the caveman that once lived there and make a wooden club for you too, in case a bad dog might come or a poisonous snake or a bad person. And when you get a little bigger, he'll teach you to shoot his old Mauser and hit the bull's-eye.

“And these are the tracks of a hyena, it looks like a big dog, with a low butt and high shoulders. Look, Neta: the footprints of the front legs are bigger than the footprints of the back legs. What are you laughing about? Daddy said ‘butt'? You say ‘butt' too. We'll say it together: Butt. Butt. Butt. Butt.

“And here's another thing, really interesting: this stone. Every stone in the field has an upper side and a lower side, the side of the earth and darkness and the side of the sun and light. You see? The underside is smooth. There's only a little dirt on it and a bit of spiderweb. And the top, the sunlight side, is rough. Touch it, feel this. This is called lichen. If a stone has lichen on the bottom it means that somebody turned it upside down. Somebody picked it up and didn't put it back the right way.”

“Nature looks like one big mess,” he told her more than once, “but it's not. Everything in nature is in its place.” And she smiled to herself as she remembered, because that's what he would say when they were making love: “What a mess in this bed! One leg there, one leg here, and this little friend, what's he doing here? Let's put him in place. Here. Much better when everything's organized.”

“So come, Neta, let's put the stone back in its place. Here, the way it was. You see these little sprouts? How here they're totally white and only their tips are green? They sprouted underneath, crawled sideways to escape, and only when they got into the light did they become green. Everything white was under the stone, and everything green was outside. And that tells us one more thing—that it was moved recently. This is interesting, right, Neta? We're like police detectives.”

“Hikes for guys,” he told her. He looked at their son, their son looked at him, and the two of them—like generous winners—at her. Who could top a pair of guys like this, a father and son, smiling at each other, sharing secrets and schemes? Hikes for guys on hills in the south, hikes for guys in the big cornfields north of the moshava, where they picked fresh ears of the sweet corn she loved so much.

“We'll roast them for Mommy on the fire. Come here, I'll show you how.”

“I brought you this, Mommy, is it yummy?”

“Eat, just for you.”

I ate. I enjoyed. I got angry.

And hikes for guys along the rocks on the seashore, and over the rocks behind the Crusader fortress, where at Hanukkah time the cyclamen are already in bloom. “Lookee here, what a miracle,” Grandpa Ze'ev told me when he was alive and I was a girl. “These flowers are blooming, and their green leaves haven't even pushed through the dirt. This only happens here, by us. So close to the village and nobody knows. Just you and me.”

And a hike for guys in the desert, for the first and last time, twelve years ago exactly, the hike after which they never hiked again, not the guys alone or me with them—and to tell the truth, we never did anything together again. Twelve years have passed, which for me seem like a hundred.

I see him getting ready to go. I know him and don't know him. I again take note of the changes in him. Were it not for the disaster that caused them I could happily smile inside. Despite the time gone by and everything that happened, I still look young, as I see reflected in the mirror and the eyes of my students and their parents, the misty gaze of men and women in the street. And he, you, my man—that's what I called you then—became a different man, you lost your looks.

I know: It can't just be dismissed as aging. Aging is slow, always preserving some youthful features, which is gratifying at first and, later—when it's clear that they linger only to remind us and taunt us—is annoying. Whereas in your case the change is complete, like an insect's metamorphosis.

And I look at him and again count the ways: His smile is erased. His fire, his eternal flame, is extinguished. His golden skin, the delight of my fingers and eyes, has paled and chilled and lost its luster. His good smell, the myrrh of early manhood, has evaporated. His body—once the body of a youth—became thick and clumsy. He didn't get fat and weak; he actually got stronger. His arms, once shapely and nimble, became the heavy arms of a bear with a fearsome hug.

My man, my first husband, golden and lean, has disappeared. A second husband—white and thick and different—has taken his place. His thickness is pure power. His whiteness is the whiteness of death. The eye of the sun does not tan him, and human eyes are averted.

I remember: One day he cut himself, and blood flowed from his finger. He didn't even look at me when I bandaged it, but I was filled with joy: He's alive. His blood is as red as ever. If only I could, I would have taken that second white and strange husband and cut him open, birthing my other husband from inside him.