Now standing before me is an entire tree bursting with peaches, and I’m spread out on Mendl the slaughterer’s roof, looking and looking, and one peach after another falls to the ground. One is yellow, almost red, and has split open, exposing its round pit. What will the doctor’s wife do with so many peaches? She’ll probably gather them up and make them into preserves, which she’ll stick away behind the furnace until wintertime, when she’ll move them to the cellar, where they’ll remain so long they turn to sugar and get covered with mold.
After the peaches come the plums, but not all at once. There are two sorts of plums in Menashe the doctor’s garden. One tree grows a kind of round, sweet, hard black plum. The other grows ordinary plums they call bucket plums, because they are sold by the bucket. They have a thin skin and are slippery and sticky and watery to the taste. But still they’re not as bad as you would think. I just wish they’d give me some. But Menashe’che the doctor’s wife isn’t one of those giving people. She’d rather make plum compote for winter. When will she ever eat so much plum compote?
G.
When cherries, peaches, and plums are finished, the apple season is here. Apples, you must know, aren’t pears. Bergamot pears may be the best fruit in the world, but if they aren’t exactly ripe, you can’t manage anything with them. You might as well chew wood! Apples can be green, the seeds may be white, but they already taste like apples. You dig your teeth into a green apple, and your mouth turns sour. And you know, I wouldn’t give you half of a green apple for two ripe ones. You have to wait a long time for them to ripen, but you can eat green ones right away, right after the tree blossoms.
It just depends on what size you want. The longer an apple grows, the bigger it gets — like with a person, pardon the comparison. But a big apple doesn’t have to be good. Sometimes a small apple is better than the biggest apple. Take the Eretz Yisroel apples — they have a winey taste but are delicious. Or take sour or pickled apples. This summer they’re so plentiful, they’ll have to be moved by the wagonload. I heard that right from Menashe’che the doctor’s wife’s mouth. She told it to Reuben the apple man when the apples were just beginning to blossom. Reuben the apple man came to look at the garden. He wanted to buy her apples and pears while they were still on the tree. When it comes to apples and pears, Reuben is an expert. All he has to do is take one look at a tree, and he can tell you how much money it’ll bring in. He’s never wrong, unless it happens that there’s a big windstorm and the apples fall before they’re ripe, or worms and caterpillars infest them. These are things no one can predict. A wind is God’s doing, and so are caterpillars. For the life of me, I can’t understand why God needs caterpillars, unless it’s to take the bread from Reuben the apple man’s mouth. Reuben says he doesn’t ask more from a tree than a little bread. He has, he says, a wife and children and needs bread for them. Menashe’che wants not only bread but bread with meat, and she wishes him luck with the trees he’s selected. They’re trees? They are gold, not trees.
“You know I’m no enemy of yours, God forbid,” Menashe’che says to him. “What I wish for you, may it happen to me.”
“Amen!” Reuben says with a little smile on his very sunburned face, peeling from the sun. “Just give me a guarantee against windstorms, worms, and caterpillars, and I’ll give you more than you want.”
Menashe’che gives him a strange look up and down and then says to him in her mannish voice, “Give me a guarantee that you’ll leave here and won’t slip and break a leg.”
“No one is safe from slipping and breaking a leg!” says Reuben, and looks at her with his kind, smiling eyes. “That can happen to a rich man even quicker than to a poor man because a rich man has the money to pay to look after himself whether he has a broken leg or not.”
“You’re a clever man!” Menashe’che answers him sarcastically. “But a person who wishes for another to break his leg deserves to have his tongue wither and not know why.”
“Why not?” Reuben says with the same little smile. “So long as it isn’t in a poor man’s mouth when it withers.”
H.
It’s a shame that Reuben the apple man didn’t inherit the garden. He would have made it much more pleasant than that witch did. You don’t know how much trouble she’s caused. Let one wormy apple fall, even a dried-out one, wrinkled like an old lady’s face, and she’ll bend down, pick it up, tuck it into her apron, and take it away. Where does she take them? Apparently to the roof, or maybe to the cellar, probably to the cellar, because I heard that last year a whole cellar of apples turned rotten. So isn’t it a good deed to pick an apple from her tree?
Yes, but how do you pick them? To sneak into her garden at night when everyone’s asleep and stuff your pockets full certainly makes the most sense. But what would the dog say about it? And this summer, as if for spite, the apples are growing one on top of the other. They plead — they’re desperate to be picked! What can you do? If only I had some spell, some magic word, to make the apples come to me! I think and think until I figure it out — not a spell and not a magic word but something else — a stick, a long stick with a bent nail at the end.
With that stick you can find the little stem of an apple and pull it toward you, and the apple is yours. You just have to make sure to hold the stick so the apple doesn’t fall to the ground. And if the apple does fall, it’s still not a tragedy — she’ll think the wind knocked it off. But you mustn’t touch the apple itself with the bent nail — that’d bruise it. I swear, I’ve never bruised an apple. Nor has an apple ever fallen. For me apples don’t fall. I know how to angle the stick when I pick apples. Most important, you can’t hurry. What’s your rush? Once you have an apple, you eat it slowly, then rest awhile and pick another. I promise you, no one will ever know!
Who could foresee that the witch would count the apples while they were still on the tree! Apparently she counts them during the day and when she wakes up the next morning, she realizes some are missing. Then she hides in the attic and watches, to catch the thief. That’s what I think happened. Otherwise how could she have found out I was lying on Mendl the slaughterer’s roof and picking apples with my stick? If she’d caught me without a witness, I could have squirmed out of it — after all, I’m an orphan, and she might have taken pity on me. But no, she decides to invite my mother, our neighbor Pessi, and Mendl the slaughterer’s wife to join her up in her attic. (What won’t a witch think of?) From the attic they look out the little window and see me at work with my stick.
“Nu? What do you have to say about that rascal of yours? Now do you believe me?”
Those words come from the doctor’s wife — I recognize her mannish voice. I turn my head toward the attic and see all four women. I don’t throw away the stick and the apple — they fall by themselves. It’s a wonder I don’t fall as well. I can’t look anyone in the eye. If the dog hadn’t been lying in the garden, I would’ve killed myself out of shame.
Worst of all are my mother’s tears. She laments and sobs and cries, “Vey iz mir! Woe is me! That I would live to see this! I thought my orphan was going to shul to say kaddish for his father, but he was lying on a roof, may thunder strike me, picking apples from someone else’s garden!”