by Shalev, Meir
‘No one’s going to blame you for some horny young ass,’ said Grandfather sharply. ‘You’ve given the village and the Movement a splendid generation of youngsters.’
‘I can picture every one of them,’ said Pinness softly. ‘They come to the first form as tender as baby rushes, like flowers that I weave into the brocade of our life.’
Pinness never spoke of ‘years’, only of ‘forms’. I smiled to myself in the darkness, knowing what would come next. Pinness liked to compare education to agriculture. When talking about his work, he was prone to expressions like ‘virgin earth’, ‘an unpruned vine’, ‘irrigation holes’. His pupils were saplings. Each form was a furrow.
‘Mirkin,’ he continued emotionally, ‘I may not be a farmer like the rest of you, but I too sow and reap. They’re my vineyard, my orchard. It only takes one rotten apple …’ He almost choked on his own despair. ‘Yea, and it brought forth wild grapes.… Screwing! The issue of horses and the flesh of asses!’
Like all his pupils, I was used to his quoting from the Bible, but I had never heard verses like these from him before. Unwittingly I moved in my bed and froze at once. The floorboards creaked beneath the weight of my body, and the two of them fell silent for a minute. At the age of fifteen I weighed close to sixteen and a half stone and could grab a large calf by the horns and wrestle it to the ground. My size and strength were marvelled at in the village, the farmers joking that Grandfather must be feeding me colostrum, the vim-giving first milk of nursing cows.
‘Not so loud,’ said Grandfather. ‘You’ll wake the child.’
The child; that’s what he called me until the day he died. ‘My child.’ Even when dark hair had sprouted all over my body. Even when my voice had changed and my shoulders had grown broad and beefy. My cousin Uri couldn’t stop laughing when our voices began to crack. I was the only boy in the village, he said, whose voice went from baritone to bass.
Pinness uttered a few sentences in Russian, the language the founding fathers switched to for angry whispers, after which I heard a metallic pop that was the sound of Grandfather opening a can of homemade olives with a screwdriver. Now he would place a full saucer of them on the table. As soon as Pinness, who had a great liking for anything hot, sour, or salty, began to devour them, his mood would lighten at once.
‘Do you remember, Mirkin, how we stepped off the boat, a bunch of yokels from Makarov, and ate black olives in that restaurant in Jaffa? And that pretty blonde girl with the blue kerchief who waved to us in the street?’
Grandfather didn’t answer. Words like ‘Do you remember …’ left him cold. Besides, I knew he couldn’t talk because he had an olive in his mouth and was sucking on it slowly as he sipped his tea. ‘Either you eat or you remember,’ he once said to me. ‘There’s only so much you can chew on at once.’
It was a habit of his to keep a cracked olive in his mouth while he drank his tea and nibbled gingerly at the sugar cube hidden in his palm, enjoying the soft, bittersweet combination. ‘Tea and olives. Russia and the Land of Israel.’
‘These olives are good,’ said Pinness, growing affable. ‘Wonderful. How few are the pleasures left us, Mirkin, how very few indeed, and how few are the things that still excite us! Can thy servant taste what I eat or what I drink? Can I hear any more the voice of singing men and singing women?’
‘You seemed excited enough when you walked in,’ Grandfather remarked.
‘What gall!’ spat Pinness. I could hear the olive stone shoot from his mouth, bounce off the table, and fly into the sink. Then there was silence, in which I knew that a new olive was slowly being crushed between Grandfather’s false teeth, releasing its subtly bitter juice.
‘And Efrayim?’ asked Pinness suddenly. ‘Have you heard anything of Efrayim?’
‘Not a word,’ replied Grandfather with predictable aloofness. ‘Nothing.’
‘It’s just you and Baruch, eh?’
‘Just me and the child.’
Just Grandfather and me.
The two of us. From the day he carried me in his arms from my parents’ house to the day I carried him in my arms to his grave in the orchard.
Just him and me.
2
My eyes clouded over with longing for Grandfather. I rose from the big leather armchair and wandered through the rooms of my home, the big house I bought after growing up, burying him and his friends in the orchard, becoming rich, and leaving the village. ‘Just me and the child’ – I could not get these words to disappear back into their drawer. I went out to the mowed lawn and lay down facing the shore and the booming surf.
I had bought the house and everything in it from a banker who had to leave the country in a hurry. I never knew why, just as I never knew anyone of his ilk and was never inside a bank in my life. The money I received from the families of the deceased had been stashed away in some fertiliser sacks in the cowshed, next to the bedding of old Zeitser, who slept with the cows on principle.
‘In the old days in Sejera I slept with the livestock too,’ he declared.
Zeitser’s large ears stuck out on either side of his old Russian worker’s cap. He was able to wiggle them, and sometimes, when in a good mood, he gave in to the pleas of us children and showed us how he did it. Zeitser had unshakeable principles and a platform that bent reality like a clover stem. ‘Zeitser,’ Grandfather once wrote, ‘is the only workers’ party that never split into factions, because it never had more than one member.’
Busquilla, the manager of my cemetery, Pioneer Home, brought me to my new house in the same van we used for transporting coffins from the airport and old folk’s homes, and headstones from old stone carvers in the Galilee.
It was a spacious white residence surrounded by a fragrant hedge of pittosporum. Busquilla surveyed it with a satisfied look before ringing the buzzer on the electronic gate. As soon as I told him that the last of the pioneers was dead, that there was no room for even one more grave, and that I wanted to shut down the business and leave the village, he went and found me a new place to live. He bought it on his own, haggling with the agents and wearing down the lawyers with his poisonous good nature.
Standing there with him in front of the big gate, I realised that I had never lived in a real house in my life. My only home had been Grandfather’s wooden cabin, the likes of which the other farmers in the village had long ago turned into sheds or chopped into firewood.
I was wearing my blue work clothes. Busquilla, in a light linen suit, was carrying a sack in one hand. The banker hurried out to us, a plump, agile man propelled by flabby muscles along the polished floor tiles.
‘Ah,’ he called out. ‘It’s the undertakers.’
Busquilla said nothing. Years of ideological warfare with our village and the Movement had taught him that our cemetery was resented by whomever was not buried in it. He untied the sack and dumped the dusty banknotes on the rug, sending up a noxious cloud of ammonium sulphate. Then, stepping up to the gasping banker, he slapped him hard on the back with one hand while shaking his hand with the other.
‘Busquilla, Mordecai, director,’ he announced. ‘It’s all in cash, as agreed. Please be so kind as to count it.’
Busquilla is my right-hand man. He’s a good friend too, though he’s a generation older than me. A short, sharp, thin-haired, thin-bodied man who always gives off an agreeable smell of green soap.
While the banker gathered up the notes, Busquilla showed me around the large house, leading me over entrapping rugs, past fancy crystal and a collection of silver goblets. Sketches and portraits peered down at me in anger and astonishment from every wall. Busquilla stuck his head into a walk-in cupboard where dozens of suits were hanging, and fingered the fabrics with an appraiser’s expertise.
‘What will you do with all this?’ he asked. ‘His clothes will be small on you.’
I told him to take whatever he liked. He put on a record, flooding the white interior with the soprano screech of an opera singer. The banker rushed furiously
over.
‘Can’t you wait to have your party until I leave?’ he snapped.
‘The faster you count, the faster that will be,’ smiled Busquilla. ‘It’s for your own good.’ He put an arm around the banker’s portly waist, spun him around in a dance step, and steered him gently back toward the pile of money.
Soon the lawyers arrived with the papers to sign. The banker took his luggage and made a quick getaway, and Busquilla, a drink already in his hand, went to wish him bon voyage from the terrace. Returning, he saw I looked depressed.
‘Maybe I should leave?’
‘Stay,’ I said. ‘You may as well sleep here. We’ll have breakfast together, and then you can go.’
The banker’s large bed was the first in my life that my legs did not stick out of. My body was not used to the submissive mattress, the black feel of silk perfumed with degeneracy, the redolence of fancy women who had left their prurient crinkles in the sheets. And yet the walls built in me by Pinness and Grandfather were impregnable. The calloused soles of my feet shredded the soft fabric, and the scent of leather and wood panelling left no more trace on my skin than the glitter of chrome and crystal.
It was a quarter of an hour before dawn when I fell asleep, and then only for a few minutes. Grandfather’s schedule was branded in my flesh like a tattooed clock. He always woke before me, put my breakfast on the table, gave me a quick, rough shake, and went out to work in the orchard. ‘It’s best to catch the pears before they’re wide awake,’ he explained to me.
Busquilla was still sleeping. I opened the large glass door and stepped outside. The banker’s garden was too sweet-smelling, full of pompous flowers I had never seen before. Pinness had taught us to be experts in wildflowers and field crops exclusively.
‘Dahlias and freesias are bourgeois plants,’ he told us. ‘Our ornamentals are the jonquil and the burnet, our gardens the vineyard and the clover patch.’
‘That Burbank of yours,’ he jeered at Grandfather, ‘wasted good time growing chrysanthemums.’
Looking about me, I saw the sea for the first time in my life. It had always hidden behind the mountain, though I knew of it from Grandfather’s stories, because its waves had borne him and my father to this country and sprayed the handsome face of my lost uncle Efrayim as they carried him off to war. Half an hour later I was joined on the lawn by Busquilla, wearing a dressing gown and carrying a tray full of toast and tall glasses of juice.
We sat at one end of the garden, where my eyes, peering into the bushes, immediately picked out a balloon spider’s web still shiny with dew. Busquilla guffawed while I crawled over on all fours to search for the spider itself. It was hiding in a little tent of dry leaves stitched together with filaments, lying in wait for its prey. It was Pinness who first showed me a balloon spider, in Grandfather’s orchard. Early that summer he had taken me often to ‘the School of Nature’ to look for insects and spiders. With astounding agility, his old hand trapped a fly on a leaf and cast it onto a web.
‘Watch closely, Baruch,’ he said.
The spider came running down a radial strand, wrapped the fly in white shrouds, flipped the tiny mummy this way and that between its hairy legs, gave it a little poison kiss, and carried it off deftly to its hideaway. I stood up and walked back to Busquilla.
‘Well, do you feel better now?’ he asked, amused. ‘You’ll be all right here? I had the insects especially ordered for your new garden.’
When I was five, Grandfather and Pinness took me to Eliezer Liberson’s almond grove. Grandfather strode over to a tree, dug a little by its roots, and showed me signs of chewing and tunnelling beneath its bark. He ran his fingers over the trunk, pressing gently until he found what he was looking for, and then took out his grafting knife and cut an exact square in the bark. The large grub that appeared was a good four inches long, pale yellow in colour, with a broad, hard head that was much darker. Struck by the sunshine, it began to wriggle and curse.
‘Capnodis,’ said Grandfather. ‘The foe of the almond, the apricot, the plum, and every stoned fruit.’
‘Whose work is done in darkness,’ quoted Pinness.
Grandfather pried the grub loose from its burrow with his knife tip and flung it to the ground. I felt a wave of anger and disgust.
‘We brought you here,’ Pinness said, ‘because your grandfather’s trees don’t have pests like this. Mother Capnodis stays away from trees that are healthy and well kept. She looks for the sickliest sheep in the flock and deposits her eggs there. Let her but see a robust tree bubbling with juices and she will straightaway seek another victim that is bitter, dry, and despondent. There she lays her eggs of doubt, which soon ravage the tormented soul from within.’
Grandfather turned away to hide his smile while Pinness kept me from crushing the grub with my foot.
‘Let it be,’ he said. ‘The jays will put it out of its misery. If the thief be found breaking in and be smitten so that he die, there shall be no bloodguilt for him.’
We went home, Grandfather holding me by one hand and Pinness by the other. Both were named Ya’akov. Ya’akov Mirkin and Ya’akov Pinness.
On another such outing Pinness showed me a capnodis beetle strolling on the branch of a tree.
‘She disguises herself as a black, rotten almond,’ he whispered.
When I reached for it, it tucked in its legs and fell like a pebble to the ground. The old teacher bent to pick it up and dropped it in a jar of chloroform.
‘She’s so tough,’ he told me, ‘that it takes a little hammer to drive the pin into her.’
The two old men drank a dozen glasses of tea, ate a pound of olives, and at 3 a.m. Pinness announced that he was going home and that if he ever found the Casanova, ‘he’ll rue the day he was born’.
He opened the door and stood facing the darkness for a moment. Then he turned around and said to Grandfather that he felt heavy at heart because he had just thought of the hyena.
‘The hyena is dead, Ya’akov,’ said Grandfather. ‘No one knows that better than you do. Relax.’
‘Every generation has its enemies,’ said Pinness darkly as he left.
He made his way home through the warm thicket of the night, treading upon ‘the thin crust on which our life has been established’, and thinking, I knew, of the menacing creatures of havoc that hatched and swarmed ceaselessly around him, bursting in his sombre nightmares like the bubbles of a foul, unruly past. He could sense the silent squat of the mongoose and see the blood-spotted face of the wildcat padding on its silken-pawed rampage of murder and plunder. Mice gnawed at the farmer’s labours in the fields of grain, and beneath the chequered carpet of ploughed field, stubble, and orchard, waiting for the first signs of Doubt, growled the most legendary beast of all, the great swamp imprisoned by the founders. Far in the west he saw the orange-glowing lights of the big city beyond the mountain, with their seductive glitter of exploitation and corruption, of easy money, carnal baubles, and lewd winks.
It took Grandfather a few minutes to clean up in the kitchen. Then he turned out the light and came into the bedroom. He leaned over me for a moment, and I shut my eyes to make believe I was asleep.
‘My little child,’ he whispered, his moustache tickling my cheeks and mouth.
I was fifteen years old, over sixteen stone of raw muscle and bristly black hair, but Grandfather still made sure to cover me every night. He had done so on the first night he brought me home, and he did so now. Only then did he take his pyjamas from the linen chest under the bed. I watched him undress, undiminished and untarnished by the years. Even when I buried him in our orchard in the middle of the night, taking off the new pyjamas he had requested before dying, his body still gleamed with the same mysterious whiteness that had enveloped it all his life. All his friends were deeply bronzed, their skin cracked and crisped by molten years of light and labour. But Grandfather had never gone out to his trees without a wide-brimmed straw hat and long sleeves, and his face was still pale as a sheet, unmarke
d by the whip lines of the sun.
He opened the window and got into bed with a sigh.
3
Meshulam Tsirkin shook his head at the end of each sentence, sending a handsome ripple through his mane of grey hair and splaying the bitter lines in his cheeks. Even as a child I had never liked this master-of-no-trades who lived at the other end of the village. ‘Who gave you such a big body and such a small brain?’ he used to ask me with a slap on my back, breaking into his cackling laugh.
Meshulam was the son of Mandolin Tsirkin, who, together with Grandfather, Grandmother Feyge, and Eliezer Liberson, organised the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle. Mandolin was a good farmer and a wonderful musician, and today he is buried in my cemetery.
Pesya Tsirkin, Meshulam’s mother, was a functionary in the Movement and spent little time at home. Though Meshulam was fed by charitable neighbours and had to do his own and his father’s washing, he adored his mother and was proud of her contribution to the cause. The most he saw her was once or twice a month, when she arrived with her big breasts and important visitors, who were always ‘comrades from the Central Committee’. All of us children saw them too. My cousin Uri would be the first to spot the grey Kaiser parked by the Tsirkin house and to inform the rest of us, ‘They’re here again to smell the cow shit and have their pictures taken with the calves and the radishes.’
In a world in which his mother came and went, Meshulam was always on the lookout for a tolerable niche. He stayed clear of the imaginative mazes in which other children lost their way. The old pioneers wove a different web for him than for me. He devoted his keen memory and thirst for knowledge to research, documentation, and the collecting of historical artifacts, and found solace in perusing old by-laws, deciphering correspondence, and thumbing through papers so ancient that they fell apart at a touch.
Already as an adolescent he displayed several proud exhibits, each with a handwritten card: ‘Liberson’s Hoe’, ‘Milk Can, c. 1924’, ‘The First Plough (a product of the Goldman Bros. Smithy)’, and of course, ‘My Father’s Original Mandolin’. As he grew older he removed his father’s old spray cans and rusty cultivator blades from the toolshed, retiled its roof, filled its two little rooms with broken kitchen utensils and decrepit furniture, and renamed it ‘Founder’s Cabin’. Rummaging through houses and farmyards, he found corroded flour sieves and washboards, copper pots that were green with age, and even an old mud sled.