The Loves of Judith by Meir Shalev

albino came out behind it, his sunglasses looking up and his step hesitant. He retreated inside immediately, and came right back out again, carrying canary cages, as if he were taking his dogs for a walk.
    After he hung the cages on the tow chain of the pickup truck, which stretched from the corner of the house to the trunk of the nearby cedar, he sat down in a chaise longue and set out a tray of peeled cucumbers cut lengthwise, white pepsin cheese, herring, a bottle of beer, and a worn-out book that wrung bloody tears from his eyes and soft groans of pleasure from his throat.
    Meanwhile, the children began showing signs of their orphanhood. Oded wet his bed every night and Naomi lost weight.
    “Nominka doesn’t eat,” the warehouse manager’s wife said to Moshe.
    “Her food isn’t any good,” Naomi said later as they walked home.
    “Tell me what you like to eat,” said Moshe after a long silence. “And I’ll tell her.”
    “It’s Mother’s food we want,” said Oded.
    “We all want Mother’s food,” said Moshe.
    The summer was hot and fragrant as always. The darkness of the village surrounded them with the silence of owls’ wings. Tiny slivers of straw flew from the barn floor and scratched the skin of Moshe’s neck like last summer, when his Tonychka was still alive and went with him to the threshing.
    Three more times the moon would fill up and empty out and then, Moshe knew, his firm body would soften and fill with autumn. Storks would glide in the sky, a dewy wind would come from the mountain, the squills would feel it and rise up at the edges of the fields.
    He loved the circles of memory the storks sketched in the sky, the devotion of the squill in its earth and the vibrating longings of its twigs. Never was he an eloquent speaker, and those two, the squill and the stork, defined for him—one with its wings and the other with its bulbs—the passing of time and the eternity of place that words can’t describe.
    T HE LAST HORNETS assembled on the young grapes of the vineyards, new clouds piled up, the robin, the tiny fighter, returned from the north. He came back and took charge of the pomegranate tree, and his furious battle chirps were heard from the thicket, delineating the borders of his estate and his tolerance.
    Cold, damp winds moved the cypresses, small, supple acorns dropped from them and bounced on the roof of the shed. The wadi overflowed again, and every day, like a wounded animal seeking a cure, Moshe searched his house and his yard for the box with the braid, that braid the dead women of his life had hidden from him.
    In the village sky, clouds of starlings rose up like smears of enormous brushes, in flocks that met, spread out, merged, and separated. In the morning they flew east over the valley and atnight they came back. They landed for the night on the canary pines near the water tower so fast that the big trees seemed to suck them into their foliage. Only the quiet chatter was heard among the branches, the chatter of birds and children before they fall asleep, until that, too, fell silent.
    In the house, there were still a few jars of jam that Tonya had made the summer before her death, and no one remembered they were there. But Moshe, in his grim search for his braid, found them in some corner and brought them to the kitchen. Oded swooped down on them and that very evening, his father discovered him in the cowshed, all smeared with jam and twitching like a poisoned jackal from so much sweetness.
    “It’s good,” said Oded, and offered him a spoonful. “Open your mouth, Father, and close your eyes.”
    Without thinking, like everyone who was once a child, Moshe shut his eyes and opened his mouth, and Oded stuck on his tongue a spoonful of jam that scalded his throat and pressed tears out of his closed eyes.
    Naomi, who followed him into the cowshed unnoticed, looked at the two of them and shuddered.
    “Want some, too?” asked Oded, and offered her the spoon. “Mother’s