yourself.”
Yitzhak Maslina opened his mouth wide with shock, perhaps even intending to say that he had seen something else entirely, but Ze’ev Tavori was ahead of him. He picked up the rifle with one hand, extended it toward Yitzhak’s neck, right under his chin, lifting it so that Yitzhak’s eyes could not escape his stare.
“ ‘According to two witnesses shall a matter stand,’ ” he said. “If we testify together, you will receive a gift of a cow like my cow, a Dutch cow, pregnant by a prize Dutch bull. But if you tell a different story, you will also kill yourself, the same way. Three people have already killed themselves here; there will be one more.”
Yitzhak wanted to say that there had been only two suicides, but his body was wiser than his brain: he froze and kept quiet.
And now a brief and necessary explanation: When Yitzhak Maslina was a boy in Tiberias, he worked each summer, as mentioned above, at a shop belonging to the father of Rosa, the girl who would become his wife. First he worked as a porter and a delivery boy and then cleaning and stock sorting, and eventually accounting as well, but he was mainly engaged in thinking about Rosa, his employer’s daughter.
In Tiberias, Rosa was known as Toothy Rosa because when her baby teeth fell out they were replaced in the front of her mouth by a pair of incisors so huge she could not close her jaws, giving her a slightly ridiculous facial expression. But when she got older people started talking about “Rosa’s teeth” and also “the rest of Rosa,” because apart from the teeth she became a lovely, graceful young woman with long legs and a fine blossoming body.
Once, when Yitzhak Maslina walked into her father’s storage room, Toothy Rosa was up on a ladder and asked him to bring her a package from the floor. When he raised the package he also raised his eyes and saw a few inches of her thighs. Whenever he saw her thereafter, that picture came to mind, and always, even many years later, when she was his wife and he could no longer bear her voice or her presence or her teeth, he would feel the same longing for “the rest of Rosa.” It was enough to recall that day and that ladder and the mystery of her thighs hovering above him.
But let me return to the accounts he managed back then for her father, for these too he had not forgotten. Even now, all those years after he handled them, he still excelled at calculating profit and loss quickly and precisely and immediately understood the meaning of Ze’ev Tavori’s words, and the chilling touch of the rifle barrel under his chin enhanced his talent for calculation.
He backed off and said, “Suicide is a bad thing in every respect, a cow is a very good thing, and a pregnant Dutch cow is even better.”
“You can also have his boots,” said Ze’ev Tavori, “because they are too small for me.”
“But what will I say? That I took them off the dead man?”
“Absolutely. You took them so that a thief would not come and steal them. You took them with you for safekeeping. That’s what you say to them now, and later we’ll see what to do with them.”
Yitzhak Maslina hesitated, but excellent work boots were nothing to sneeze at. He bent over quickly and tried to remove the left boot from the foot of the murdered man. But the boot refused to be removed, and for a moment it seemed to him that the dead man was pulling away his foot, and he recoiled with fright.
Tavori chuckled and Maslina tugged and finally fell on his rear end in the mud with the boot in his hand, and the murderer chuckled again and said to him, “Now run to Kipnis and tell him everything you saw and that I am standing here in the rain guarding the body.”
Kipnis was the chairman of our committee, a tall, sharp man with a wicked sense of humor.
“At this hour? People are sleeping now.”
“When a man commits suicide you’re allowed to wake the chairman of the committee at any hour,” said Ze’ev Tavori, and
Yitzhak Maslina opened his mouth wide with shock, perhaps even intending to say that he had seen something else entirely, but Ze’ev Tavori was ahead of him. He picked up the rifle with one hand, extended it toward Yitzhak’s neck, right under his chin, lifting it so that Yitzhak’s eyes could not escape his stare.
“ ‘According to two witnesses shall a matter stand,’ ” he said. “If we testify together, you will receive a gift of a cow like my cow, a Dutch cow, pregnant by a prize Dutch bull. But if you tell a different story, you will also kill yourself, the same way. Three people have already killed themselves here; there will be one more.”
Yitzhak wanted to say that there had been only two suicides, but his body was wiser than his brain: he froze and kept quiet.
And now a brief and necessary explanation: When Yitzhak Maslina was a boy in Tiberias, he worked each summer, as mentioned above, at a shop belonging to the father of Rosa, the girl who would become his wife. First he worked as a porter and a delivery boy and then cleaning and stock sorting, and eventually accounting as well, but he was mainly engaged in thinking about Rosa, his employer’s daughter.
In Tiberias, Rosa was known as Toothy Rosa because when her baby teeth fell out they were replaced in the front of her mouth by a pair of incisors so huge she could not close her jaws, giving her a slightly ridiculous facial expression. But when she got older people started talking about “Rosa’s teeth” and also “the rest of Rosa,” because apart from the teeth she became a lovely, graceful young woman with long legs and a fine blossoming body.
Once, when Yitzhak Maslina walked into her father’s storage room, Toothy Rosa was up on a ladder and asked him to bring her a package from the floor. When he raised the package he also raised his eyes and saw a few inches of her thighs. Whenever he saw her thereafter, that picture came to mind, and always, even many years later, when she was his wife and he could no longer bear her voice or her presence or her teeth, he would feel the same longing for “the rest of Rosa.” It was enough to recall that day and that ladder and the mystery of her thighs hovering above him.
But let me return to the accounts he managed back then for her father, for these too he had not forgotten. Even now, all those years after he handled them, he still excelled at calculating profit and loss quickly and precisely and immediately understood the meaning of Ze’ev Tavori’s words, and the chilling touch of the rifle barrel under his chin enhanced his talent for calculation.
He backed off and said, “Suicide is a bad thing in every respect, a cow is a very good thing, and a pregnant Dutch cow is even better.”
“You can also have his boots,” said Ze’ev Tavori, “because they are too small for me.”
“But what will I say? That I took them off the dead man?”
“Absolutely. You took them so that a thief would not come and steal them. You took them with you for safekeeping. That’s what you say to them now, and later we’ll see what to do with them.”
Yitzhak Maslina hesitated, but excellent work boots were nothing to sneeze at. He bent over quickly and tried to remove the left boot from the foot of the murdered man. But the boot refused to be removed, and for a moment it seemed to him that the dead man was pulling away his foot, and he recoiled with fright.
Tavori chuckled and Maslina tugged and finally fell on his rear end in the mud with the boot in his hand, and the murderer chuckled again and said to him, “Now run to Kipnis and tell him everything you saw and that I am standing here in the rain guarding the body.”
Kipnis was the chairman of our committee, a tall, sharp man with a wicked sense of humor.
“At this hour? People are sleeping now.”
“When a man commits suicide you’re allowed to wake the chairman of the committee at any hour,” said Ze’ev Tavori, and
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