The more profound layers of this relationship were evident in the serenity of Moshe’s movements when he was with Grandpa Lolek. Only Brandy reached deeper levels of influence. But Grandpa Lolek came first.
When we enthused over Brandy’s accomplishments, Grandpa Lolek would repeatedly remind us, “I was the first.”
It was true, but we betrayed him unflinchingly, increasing our excitement over Brandy. Grandpa Lolek did not give in. Hero of the battle at Monte Cassino, the man for whom Joyce-the-American-dancer had danced with two umbrellas on the rainy dock at Portsmouth kept up his fight.
“With me he really talks,” he stressed.
“With her too, sometimes,” we replied, defending Brandy.
“With me he explains what hurts!” he boasted.
“With Brandy nothing hurts!” we struck back.
Grandpa Lolek and Brandy were in a race to reach the Moshe Pole. It was a dead heat. The opponents had a lot in common — stubbornness, depth of thought, a shirking of kitchen duties. But there were differences, and most of them favored Brandy. In the race to the Moshe Pole, Grandpa Lolek felt like Sir Robert Scott left behind in the snow while everyone admired the winner, Roald Amundsen — licking Moshe as he stomped his paws and rubbed up against him. But we had to concede that it was only with Grandpa Lolek that Moshe spoke in charmingly complete, if somewhat clumsy, sentences and desires. As if the painful disarray inside Moshe managed to find its shattered hands and feet, and from the newly assembled fractures even table manners flowered.
Grandpa Lolek’s approach to Moshe lacked the restraint we all embodied. The hesitation and the caution which, even when barely perceptible in the kindliest of people, was still real enough to shut Moshe behind a screen. Grandpa Lolek crossed the wilderness of Moshe alone, hugging him with ease, asking as he would ask anyone, “How are you doing?”
A blushing reply, struggling somewhat through his lips, crossed Moshe’s dark throat: “Better today.”
This was not his own phrase, but a plagiarized version of his mother Feiga’s routine response. She always started with, “Better today,” carefully maintaining the literary structure of the idyll, which first provides the reader with reassuring content, only to surprise him with imminent tragedy. “Better today” was directed at the past and hinted heavily at yesterday’s sorrows. “Better today” also addressed the future. The persistence in this reply forced us to estimate a consistent improvement in Feiga’s condition from day to day, going forth to some imaginary day in the future when she would reach Venus-like perfection, approaching the likes of Diana, goddess of hunters, whereupon she would kiss Rhea, Mother of the Gods. And then on to great Zeus.
Moshe’s human voice filled anyone who witnessed it with admiration for Grandpa Lolek. They stared at him with glistening eyes. Grandpa Lolek sanctimoniously brushed off the respect, mumbling modestly. He hoped to plant the impression that if Moshe had been in his care from a young age, today he would have been, at the very least, a goalkeeper for the Israeli soccer team.
“Don’t forget that Moshe is the only one who never asks him for pocket money,” Effi noted, attempting to explain the wonderful relationship between the two.
Vested with this responsibility, Grandpa Lolek altered his manners and behaved carefully around Grandpa Yosef, even abandoning his tea bag Selektion ritual out of consideration. When pushed, he would go so far as to buy candy for Moshe, or preferably something they could share, like a poppy-seed cake. After recovering from the novelty of it all, Grandpa Lolek began to ponder out loud if perhaps there was a profit to be made from this relationship, some sort of respectable circus act. Of course, he unfettered his tongue only at a safe distance from Grandpa Yosef or from anyone who might inform on him to Grandpa Yosef — namely, us.
Until he dared propose his commercial ideas out in the open, the relationship between Grandpa Lolek and Moshe was exploited purely for medical purposes. Moshe suffered greatly from his adenopathy, and the doctors informed Grandpa Yosef that the disease had damaged his internal organs. His body was bound up in pain. Even if it was only slightly visible on the outside, his suffering was great. They prescribed pills to dull the pain, but they could not give Moshe sedatives every time his face contorted with pain. The spasms might be simply the outcome of some internal rustle in the nervous system, or they might be due to intense pain. Grandpa Lolek would be called in to interpret. He would sit at Moshe’s side and slowly decipher the complex language of his brow. “It hurts? Everything okay?” Based on the diagnosis, the pills were either administered or saved for the next onslaught. He drove without a grumble from his house in Haifa’s Achuza neighborhood all the way to Kiryat Haim, sometimes at three o’clock in the morning, to ask Moshe, “It hurts? Everything okay?”
Grandpa Yosef used him sparingly. Fearfully.
But despite the language barrier, despite the four legs and the tail, the deepest reach of all was made by Brandy. Sometimes all that was needed was the presence of her clinging canine body to banish the pain and spasms. Not the pills, not Grandpa Lolek, but the maternal bodily warmth, the courage contained in those jaws.
Brandy.
One day when Grandpa Yosef walked home from synagogue, he had been joined by an unsightly little dog, panting and stubbornly trotting in the steps of her newfound master. Grandpa Yosef and Brandy walked on together, moderately aware of one another, he contemplating a Talmudic conundrum, she the hibiscus beds. After concluding their respective digressions, they returned breathlessly to the narrow path. Grandpa Yosef clucked his tongue. Finally, they arrived home, where Moshe was sitting by the fence. Grandpa Yosef wiped away a strand of saliva hanging from Moshe’s mouth. Brandy joined in. She licked Moshe’s face lovingly with her gentle puppy tongue. Grandpa Yosef did not object, amazed at her lack of aversion, at the simple way her paws rested on Moshe’s knees and, moreover, at the ease with which Moshe’s hand reached out to her, surprising, gentle, not recoiling, running five fingers over her furry head. Adoption was declared.
Brandy had been reared with no clear plan for her future. Her body had prepared itself for an ownerless life amidst the trash, a slow implementation of her original blueprints. The newfound bounty of food and rest necessitated constant repairs and improvements. Faulty supervision over this accelerated and architecturally unsound project impelled her tail to grow twice as long as her trunk and then, when it stopped, to give her legs exaggerated prominence over her tiny body. Her ears, never flattering, sailed like leaves in the wind. Her hips, destined to broaden due to the tendencies toward harlotry she was secretly harboring, first accumulated some meager flesh, small in comparison to her bulky chest, and then leapt forward like a canon muzzle, even gaining a pair of fleshy cheeks that protruded from her bottom like an extra face. No architect, no contractor, no accountant would have authorized these plans. But Brandy managed herself, willfully ignoring supervision and criticism, growing limbs that fought for precedence over one another, unregulated, working on requests from relatives, winks from patrons, kickbacks from thugs. This entire corrupt mess, a scandal that occurred against the public good and without any accountability (where were all the sausages, the chicken, the cheese, the kishke, the gorgele, the wings, the vitamins, and Feiga’s pills — the latter were our own initiative — being invested?) eventually worked out for the best. Quicker than one could have guessed, a new persona emerged from the orphaned puppy. Brandy became a large, comfortable dog with only one thought in her mind: Moshe. Even for mating purposes, she refused to stray far from him, and the male dogs accepted her rules without argument. Many dogs sought the favors of the bitch owned by Grandpa Yosef the Tzaddik, whose reputation traveled far and wide. They came to her from the northern neighborhoods of Kiryat Bialik and the industrial zones near Kiryat Ata. Brandy, a modest soul, deprived no seeker of her body. Miraculously, this vast celebration of semen produced no puppies, most of the time. Brandy had trouble conceiving. Sometimes, a few months after being in heat, a passing dog would give her a questioning look, as if to ask, how much? But still, these creditors did not despair. Again and again, when the season arrived, they returned to her.