by Shalev, Meir
‘I want everyone to know how people once lived here,’ he declared. ‘I want them to know that before the road was paved the carts sank into such deep mud every winter that the milk had to be brought to the dairy on sleds.’
He was especially proud of the gargantuan stuffed figure of Hagit, Eliezer Liberson’s half-Dutch, half-Lebanese cow, who was once national champion in milk production and fat content. When Hagit grew old and Liberson’s son Daniel decided to sell her to the glue factory, Meshulam was up in arms. Calling for an emergency session of the village Committee, he protested that ‘so dedicated a comrade’ could not possibly be converted into sausages and gelatin. ‘Hagit,’ claimed Meshulam, ‘is not just an agricultural phenomenon. She is the definitive proof that pure Holstein cows were not suited for conditions in this country.’
The Committee paid Liberson to deed the cow to Meshulam and even offered to give her a small pension. That very day, however, Meshulam dispatched the dedicated comrade with a generous portion of rat poison and stuffed her huge frame with the help of the veterinarian.
For years Hagit stood stinking of embalming fluids on the front porch of the Tsirkin house, her famed udders dripping formaldehyde while alfalfa stems dangled from her mouth. Meshulam regularly brushed her coat, which had large bald spots from the rat poison, polished her bovine glass eyes, and sewed up her cracked hide to keep the sparrows from stealing blades of straw and tufts of cotton wool for their nests.
The stuffed cow revolted the entire village, and especially Zeitser, who had been most attached to Hagit and her prodigious flow of milk, which he considered to be ‘a symbol of our national renaissance’. Sometimes he stole from our yard for a look at her. Each time he was face to face with her, he told us, he was seized by a combination of ‘horror and longing’.
‘The poor cow,’ he murmured to himself. ‘Meshulam Tsirkin stuffed her with more straw than Liberson ever gave her to eat in her whole lifetime.’
My irreverent cousin Uri, however, who looked down on the village from his mockingbird’s-eye view, was sure that the stuffed cow had nothing to do with Meshulam’s historical research.
‘Hagit’s udders reminded him of his mother,’ he said to me. ‘It’s that simple.’ And I looked at him as I do to this day; with love and with envy.
Our village has many visitors. Busloads of tourists and school-children come to see the flourishing creation of the founding fathers. Excitedly they stroll the village streets, oohing and aahing over every pear and chicken and breathing in the smells of earth and milk. Their tours always end in my cemetery on the old Mirkin farm.
Meshulam demanded that no tourist buses be allowed into the village and Pioneer Home unless they also stopped at Founder’s Cabin for a look at Hagit and the gold medal from the British High Commissioner that hung around her stuffed neck.
Pioneer Home was anathema to the whole village, but Meshulam Tsirkin hated it especially. The buses that rolled up to it, the wide-eyed children, the enchanted tourists who strolled agog among its freshly washed headstones and rosebushes, reading in whispers the legendary names in copper letters and drinking the cold fruit juice that Busquilla’s younger brother sold them from a pitcher at the entrance gate – all this made his blood boil.
Meshulam Tsirkin hated my cemetery because I refused to bury his mother. I buried only Grandfather’s friends of the Second Aliyah.
‘I’m very sorry,’ I said to him when he waved the Trade Union Yearbook in my face with an article about his mother’s contribution to the Workers’ Co-operative Credit Fund. ‘Your mother came to this country after the First World War, when the Second Aliyah was over.’
‘The deceased does not comply with our entrance requirements,’ explained Busquilla.
When Meshulam threatened to appeal to the institutions of the Movement, I reminded him that he had already done so after old Liberson put out The pioneers’ album, in which he refused to publish a photograph of Pesya for reasons similar to ours.
‘Besides which,’ said Busquilla, ‘your father couldn’t stand to have her near him when she was alive either.’
What most got Meshulam’s goat were the lead coffins I brought from the airport. He knew that every new casket from America filled my old sacks with tens of thousands of dollars.
‘By what right do you bury traitors who left this country, and not my own mother?’ he screamed at me.
‘Whoever came to this country with the Second Aliyah can buy a plot here,’ I replied.
‘You mean to tell me that any little fart who came here from Russia, chucked it all after two weeks of hoeing crabgrass, and went traipsing off to America can be buried here as a pioneer? Just look at that!’ he shouted, pointing to one of the headstones. ‘Rosa Munkin, the archfiend in person!’
Rosa Munkin, who had known Grandfather back in Makarov, was my first customer.
‘Shall I tell you about Rosa Munkin?’ asked Meshulam contemptuously after the outcry that arose when her pink headstone was unveiled beside Grandfather’s grave. ‘Rosa Munkin came here from the Ukraine, worked for a week in an almond grove in Rehovot, didn’t like what the country did to her lily-white hands, and bombarded the whole world with SOSs. A brother of hers who had emigrated to America, a little bandit who became a pioneer Jewish gangster in Brooklyn, sent her a ticket to join him.’
Meshulam planted a foot on the pink marble slab in a gesture of patronising disdain.
‘During the First World War, when your grandparents and my father and Eliezer Liberson nearly starved to death and Zeitser was conscripted into the Turkish army, Rosa Munkin bought her fourth corset shop in the Bronx. When the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle was settling this village, Rosa Munkin saw the light, married a Rabbi Shneour from Baltimore, and began publishing anti-Zionist advertisements in the papers. During the Second World War, when your poor uncle Efrayim was wounded with the British commandoes, she was widowed, leased a suite in a Miami hotel, and ran her brother’s casinos from there. In the files of the FBI she’s known as “the Red Queen” to this day.
‘And now,’ he yelled, ‘she’s buried in your ground. In the earth of this Valley. A pioneer. A builder. A founding mother.’
‘God rest her soul,’ said Busquilla. He went over to the stone, politely removed Meshulam’s foot, took a flannel rag from his pocket, and wiped the ‘a’ in ‘Rosa’.
‘You shut up, Busquilla,’ said Meshulam, turning white. ‘Shits like you should snap to attention when the founders are being discussed.’
‘The deceased paid one hundred thousand dollars,’ said Busquilla, to whom such slights meant nothing.
‘Mafia money,’ sneered Meshulam.
‘Meshulam, what do you want from me?’ I said. ‘She came with the Second Aliyah.’
‘And Shulamit?’ screamed Meshulam. ‘Did she come with the Second Aliyah too?’
‘Don’t be a wise guy,’ I shot back angrily. ‘Shulamit is a private family matter.’
When Rosa Munkin’s letter arrived from America, Grandfather and Shulamit, his old love who came from Russia half a century after him – ‘the Crimean whore,’ as Fanya Liberson called her – were the only people buried in the orchard. Busquilla, who was the village postman at the time, came galloping up on Zis, the post office donkey, shouting, ‘An aerogram! An aerogram! A letter from America!’
I was watering the year-round Burbank roses I had planted by Grandfather’s and Shulamit’s graves.
Luther Burbank had also left home because of a tragic love affair. And though Grandfather often told me about Burbank’s fruit trees, prickleless prickly pears, and light-skinned potatoes, it was to my uncle Avraham’s twin sons Uri and Yosi that he read the passage about Burbank’s unrequited love, which made me so jealous that I almost burst into tears.
I slammed the door of the cabin and went outside, where through the window I heard Grandfather continue to read as if oblivious to my torment: ‘“The truth is that I was very deeply fond of a beautiful young lady who seemed
to me, I remember, less ardent than I was. A trifling disagreement, two positive natures, probably hasty words – and I determined that my heart was broken. To be frank, I think I gave that affair to many as my reason for coming West.”’
‘Don’t shout,’ I scolded Busquilla. ‘This is one place where I won’t have any shouting.’
He handed me the envelope and stood waiting by my side.
Busquilla arrived in the village in the early fifties, when Grandfather was still alive and I was still his child. Walking into the village co-op, he stood by the till where Shlomo Levin was seated. Busquilla, who was wearing loafers and a funny blue beret on his head, glanced down at the counter while pleasureably slurping a bottle of grapefruit juice. Levin was mumbling numbers as he added up a customer’s bill.
‘Two pounds fifty-four,’ said Busquilla over Levin’s shoulder before the storekeeper’s pencil had finished the first column of numbers.
Levin’s personal history had made him highly sensitive to kibitzers, people who advised you without being asked. There was nothing he liked less than feeling he was under surveillance, and turning around, he gave the uninvited guest an angry stare. The man, he saw at once, belonged to the transit camp for new immigrants that had been hastily erected on the hill beyond the eucalyptus woods, where it aroused the village’s scorn and compassion. The villagers volunteered to help the newcomers, gave them surplus farm produce, and showed them how to use their work tools, but once back in the village they regaled each other with tales about the little men in blue berets who did nothing but drink, play cards, and shoot craps all day while ‘longing for their caves in Morocco and wiping their rear ends with stones’.
The affront was so great that Levin sat there open-mouthed. He said nothing, however, and turned to the next customer.
‘One pound seventeen,’ announced Busquilla before Levin had even drawn a line beneath the numbers he had written down.
Shlomo Levin, who had managed the village store for decades, rose, doffed his cap, and demanded to know to whom he was speaking.
‘Busquilla, Mordecai,’ said the amazing newcomer. Sucking up the last of his juice, he added, ‘Newly arrived from Morocco and looking for work.’
‘So I see,’ said Shlomo Levin.
In Morocco Busquilla had taught arithmetic and written letters in three languages for the courts and government offices. Now he was seeking a job as a book-keeper, a teacher, or a worker in the poultry incubator.
‘I have a soft spot for baby chicks, children, and money,’ he explained.
Though Levin was taken aback, he told Liberson, who was then the village treasurer, about the new immigrant.
‘The man’s got cheek, but he knows his arithmetic,’ he said.
Busquilla’s request was received sympathetically, although his weakness for money was held against him by most of the Committee members. ‘Not to mention the beret,’ said Uri. ‘No one with any principles would ever wear anything but a worker’s cap.’
‘We discussed the matter in terms of our values, the overall needs of the new immigrants, and Busquilla’s areas of competence,’ Eliezer Liberson told me, ‘and decided to try him out at onion picking.’
After two years, in the course of which Busquilla was indentured to the earth in such menial jobs as spraying insecticide, thinning corn, hoeing weeds, and picking fruit, the village postman heard the hyena laughing in the fields, lost his mind, bought a black crayon, and appointed himself censor of outgoing mail. The Committee fired him and gave his job and donkey to Busquilla. Busquilla planted Moroccan herbs around the post office, brewed spicy tea that had a maddening aroma, and won general approval by introducing home mail pick-up, thus saving the inhabitants the bother of betaking themselves to the village centre.
I opened the envelope. Since Shulamit’s arrival from Russia, there had been no letters from abroad.
‘What’s in it, Baruch?’ asked Busquilla discreetly.
‘It’s private,’ I told him.
He backed off a few steps and leaned against Shulamit’s gravestone, waiting to be asked to translate the letter.
‘It’s from some old lady in America,’ he informed me after a glance at it. ‘Her name is Rosa Munkin. She’s from your grandfather’s hometown. She was here many years ago, worked with him in Rishon-le-Tsiyyon and Rehovot, and thought the world of him. Someone wrote to her that you buried him at home, and she wants to be buried here too when she dies, right next to him.’
He handed me back the envelope. ‘There’s more in it,’ he said.
Inside was a cheque made out to me for ten thousand dollars.
‘This is just the down payment,’ Busquilla said. ‘She’s a very sick woman and won’t live much longer. Her lawyer will bring the rest of the money with her.’
‘What am I supposed to do with this?’ I asked, confused. ‘It isn’t even real money.’
‘You’ll need help, Baruch,’ said Busquilla softly. ‘We’re talking big money. We’re talking foreigners. We’re talking English. We’re talking lawyers and the Committee and income tax. You’ll never manage it by yourself.’
With ten thousand dollars, I thought, I could plant the most fabulous trees around Grandfather’s grave, Judas trees, flame trees, white oleanders. I could lay a path of red gravel from Grandfather to Shulamit. I could go looking for my lost uncle Efrayim or pay to have old Zeitser’s stomach complaints taken care of.
‘Don’t breathe a word of this to anyone, Baruch,’ said Busquilla. ‘Not a soul. Not even your cousin Uri.’
That evening Busquilla came to the cabin with a black typewriter and wrote a letter for me in English. Rosa Munkin answered it, and three months later, in the middle of the night, she arrived personally in a shiny coffin, chaperoned by a lawyer with a headful of hair, a slick suit, and a smell of aftershave lotion such as had never perfumed the air of our village before. Vile and elegant, he stood watching me dig the grave.
‘Just look at him,’ Busquilla whispered. ‘I know the type. This isn’t the first corpse he’s buried in the middle of the night.’
The lawyer sat in the dark on Grandfather’s grave, dangled his polished shoes, and chewed on a blade of straw while disgustedly sniffing the odours of the village that came wafting on the warm night air from the cowsheds and chicken coops.
We lowered Rosa Munkin into the soil of the Valley. The American took a slip of paper and a skullcap from his pocket, recited a brief prayer in an incomprehensible Hebrew, instructed me to make a square concrete base for the headstone, and reached for a black attaché case in the back of his huge estate car. Busquilla counted the banknotes with a quick, moistened finger and made out a receipt.
A few days later the lawyer returned with a fancy stone of polished pink marble. To this day, among the grey and white stones chiselled out of local rock, Rosa Munkin’s grave resembles a big box of candy.
I stashed the money away in the cowshed. Zeister was asleep there, covered by the old army blanket that had been in his possession since the Great War, dead to the world. Then I returned with Busquilla to the cabin, where we sat at Grandfather’s table drinking tea and eating bread with olives.
‘I’m sure you’ll want to tell your uncle Avraham and Pinness,’ he advised me. ‘Don’t do it just yet, though. Wait a little while.’
The next day Busquilla quit his job at the post office and put himself at my disposal.
‘I’ll manage the business, and you can pay me what you think I’m worth,’ he said.
That was the beginning of Grandfather’s vengeance, which was carried out with the prophetic exactitude of a good planter, filled my sacks with money, and wreaked havoc on the most sensitive nerve centres of the village.
‘They drove my son Efrayim from here,’ he repeated to me and Pinness one last time before his death. ‘But I’ll get them where it hurts the most: in the earth.’
We didn’t know then what he was talking about.
The Committee considered several candidates to fi
ll Busquilla’s position at the post office and finally settled on Zis. The donkey already knew every house in the village, and now that it was riderless, could carry packages too. Zis was the grandson of Katchke, a charter member of the village who had hauled water from the spring every day until he was murdered by a snake.
Zis, however, did not even last two years. ‘The old-timers discovered that he was licking the stamps off the envelopes,’ said my sardonic cousin Uri.
The Committee appealed to Busquilla to return to his old job, but by then he had a business card that said ‘Manager, Pioneer Home’ in Hebrew and in English, plus ‘a herd of one hundred corpses’, as old Liberson sarcastically put it until the death of his wife Fanya, his first and only love, who became the hundred and first.
4
The Mirkin farm was one of the most successful in the village.
So everyone said enthusiastically whenever Grandfather’s fruit trees broke into stormy bloom; so they said when my uncle Avraham’s cows gushed floods of milk; so they said, upset and envious, when the cowshed filled with dusty insect moults and bulging sacks of money while the orchard went to ruin and was sown with bones and graves.
The graves ran in rows on either side of red and white gravel paths. Scattered among them were green benches, flowering shrubs, trees, and shady corners for meditation, and in the middle was Grandfather’s white gravestone. The whole village shook its head at the sad fate of earth that was meant to bring forth fruit and fodder but had become a great field of revenge.