Fields of Exile. Nora Gold
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and seems to resonate with depth. Yet she keeps feeling that she almost understands what he’s talking about, but never 100 percent. As if he were an ad for his own product: Elusive Language. After ten minutes of increasing frustration, she asks herself what Moshe, if he were here, would say.
“Bullshit,” comes his immediate answer. Judith suppresses her laughter and looks down at the arm of her chair. Of course he’d say that: to Moshe, language was a simple matter. He spoke without thinking about the words he used. But she found them fascinating because they were Hebrew. Moshe was a man of Hebrew words. A “real Israeli,” a sabra. This was his language, his and Bialik’s and the Bible’s — this language she had just borrowed, acquired through painful study, “breaking her teeth” on it, as the Hebrew expression goes. And which even now she knew — though unusually well for an immigrant — in only a fractured way. It was still for her a second, “other,” language, like being the “other” woman, someone’s second love. Yet this language, this holy tongue, belonged in Moshe’s mouth. Sometimes when he kissed her, she imagined thousands of Hebrew words, tiny as sperm, being transferred from him to her, along with his saliva and desire. Planting themselves within her, taking root, and then blossoming inside her into a tree, with hundreds of Hebrew words hanging off the branches, instead of pink flowers. Making her a “real Israeli,” too.
She looks at the postmodern guy. No — words for Moshe didn’t shape-shift. They each had a meaning that was constant and clear. She used to ask him for words, and his answer was always unhesitating.
“How do you say this in Hebrew?” she’d ask him, scooping a palmful of soil from the ground.
“Karka.”
She held up a pine cone.
“Itztrueball.”
She pointed to a pink wildflower.
“Hotmeet.” A hot meeting, she thought. Hot meat.
She was like Helen Keller asking Anne Sullivan to tell her the names of things. Moshe always told her. But he couldn’t understand her hunger for words. He’d say to her, tenderly joking, “What do you need all these words for, Judith? What will you do with them once you have them? When are you ever going to have a conversation about pine cones?”
But she kept asking. Earlobe. Spider web. Cum. (T’nuch. Kurei akavish. Shpeech.) Which, written, looked to her almost like Speech. Slurred speech — shpeech — like when you come. When Moshe asked her halfway into their relationship what she wanted for her birthday, she told him “a word.”
“A word! What word?”
“Any word. As long as it’s one I don’t already know.”
“But how am I supposed to know what words you don’t know?”
She just shrugged.
“Crazy girl,” said Moshe.
But the following week, when she turned twenty-five, he gave her two presents. First a plastic, imitation-alligator-skin purse — the kind of thing she’d never be caught dead with. Then he gave her the word ta’ava. Craving, or longing. Because, he said, she seemed so much to want, and to want so much. “Greedy girl,” he chided her gently. “You must learn to be satisfied with less. L’histapek b’m’at.” Which she realizes now was probably his way of reminding her he was married, and she shouldn’t hope for too much from him. He concluded his little birthday speech by quoting from Ethics of the Fathers, disconcerting her since he was so staunchly secular: “Who is rich? He who is content with his portion.”
He … his, she thought. That male language doesn’t include me, so I don’t have to be content. She said this out loud to Moshe, half-knowing he wouldn’t understand. And he didn’t. But that’s okay, she thought. L’histapek b’m’at.
Now at the front of the room, there has been another changing of the guard: a skinny woman with wild hair like a cavewoman is talking. From postmodern to premodern, or even prehistoric, thinks Judith, and listens for a few moments. Blah blah blah. She returns to Moshe. Yes, he was married. He had two young daughters who adored him, and a wife who didn’t like sex. And who he in turn didn’t seem to much like, his lip curling involuntarily whenever he mentioned her. What Zahava did like, though, was lampshades. Apparently she had over a hundred of them, and bought a new one at least once a month. Judith pictured a small house crammed full of lampshades, all tawdry and vulgar, and Zahava as tawdry and vulgar too. But actually it was thanks to Zahava that she met Moshe. It was only because he had to keep up with the cost of Zahava’s wild shopping sprees that he started moonlighting and took the six-month part-time contract in the town where Judith worked. He was hired as a contractor to renovate this small, run-down development town. In the thirty-ninth year after the town’s founding, and in anticipation of the fortieth-year festivities, a group of leading citizens had convinced the municipal council the place needed some sprucing up. So, twice a week, Moshe wandered in and out of decrepit abandoned shacks, houses missing half their roofs, and never-used “community centres” with all their windows broken — donated by well-meaning but naive Jewish communities abroad — as he chewed thoughtfully on a piece of straw, considering what to do. She watched him and thought, This is a man who fixes things. Takes that which is broken, and makes it whole again. Perhaps he could do this for people, too.
She soon discovered, though, that he didn’t work alone. He had a Moroccan guy helping him, a skinny younger man named Koby, who measured everything in sight, listened to Moshe weigh the pros and cons of various repair plans, acted as his sounding-board, and helped him come up with price estimates that were neither too high nor too low. Once Judith came with Moshe to visit one of his sites. Koby looked with surprise at her, then questioningly at Moshe; Moshe just smiled and shrugged. For the next fifteen minutes, she watched the two men work together and saw how heavily Moshe depended on Koby: he couldn’t have managed this project without him. But that didn’t stop Moshe from saying when they were alone again back in the van: “Never trust a Moroccan, Judith. You’re not from here, you don’t know what they’re like. They’re lazy, and primitive, and they’ll rob you blind the second you turn your back.”
She looked sharply at him to see if he was joking, but he wasn’t. She felt nauseated, and couldn’t think of anything to say. Other than, “But Koby —”
“Koby’s okay — he’s a good worker,” Moshe said. “But he’s the exception. Most Moroccans aren’t like him. And even he sometimes says very primitive things.”
Not like you, she thought, but didn’t say it. She stared straight ahead at the road as they drove through the town, and her nausea steadily increased. She couldn’t believe she’d been intimate with this man — she’d let him inside her body — and he was a racist. She was disgusted by his comment, and by him and his body, calmly arrogant in the driver’s seat next to her. Yet she also half-admired, or anyway envied, him. She wished she had his male self-confidence, his unquestioned assumption that it’s his God-given right to say whatever he feels like. She was always worrying about sounding nice or not-nice, saying the right or the wrong thing. But Moshe just talked. He didn’t know about political correctness, and even if he had he wouldn’t have cared. He’d have felt it was his right to express, to expel, whatever words had collected in his mouth. Not just the “nice” ones, but all of them. She can see his mouth now: his sensual mouth, full of words. Full of words like the mouths in the Shabbat morning prayer:
Even if our mouths were as full of poetry as the sea is full of water, and our tongues sang your praises like the roaring waves … we could never thank you, God, for even one thousandth of your countless gifts and miracles.
Moshe’s mouth was like a sea. And his red lips like the banks of the Red Sea. She remembers the first time he kissed her. His kiss was careful, exploratory, tentative, like dipping a toe into the sea. She’d just gotten off the train from Jerusalem, he was at the station picking up a small shipment of building materials that had been delivered there, and even though they didn’t know each other, he offered her a lift up the hill to the centre of town. It was a long, hot, dusty walk, and that day there was a hamsin, a burning, dry desert wind. She looked up the hill doubtfully,