by Shalev, Meir
A week later the circumciser arrived from the city beyond the blue mountain. The villagers dressed in white, cut their hair and nails, and sat in a semicircle in front of Mirkin’s tent. A great cheer went up as Grandfather stepped outside holding his son high in the air. ‘Your uncle Avraham was truly our first fruit, because he was born before the fruits of the trees had set.’ To this day, on the holiday of Shavuot, the feast of first fruits, all that year’s children are held high in front of everyone to commemorate the occasion.
The whole village was dazzled by the beauty and fairness of the new baby, who ‘smiled with a mouth so bright that you could have sworn he had already cut his teeth. He was like a big jonquil swaddled in its calyx.’ Avraham was born without the two deep creases that now furrow his brow, and with a friendly expression on his face, which was as fresh and smooth as the peel of a large apple.
‘We formed a circle immediately,’ said Pinness. ‘Each arm found a shoulder or waist and the dance began.’ Everyone felt that it was a moment of grace for the village, which now had ‘someone to carry the torch forward in the great relay race of the generations’ and need not fear extinction with the death of its founders.
Pinness smiled softly, the pleasure of the memory etched in every line of his face. ‘The child bound us forever,’ he said, the words dropping from his mouth like the fruit of the wild plum tree on Margulis’s land – sweet, small, and precise.
‘We passed him around from hand to hand and let everyone hold him in their arms. For a sweet, awesome moment each of us felt the promise of his delicious flesh and inhaled his good smell. One by one, as if he were a ritual object, we took him and gave him our blessing, some out loud and some deep in their hearts. Each of us had a part in him.’
‘Someday I’ll show you the protocol of the circumcision,’ promised Meshulam. ‘Liberson’s wish for the baby was that he should grow up to plough the first furrow in the Negev desert. Rilov’s was that he redeem the mountains of Gilead and the Bashan. My father promised to teach him the mandolin. They imagined him sowing and ploughing, bringing faraway Jews from the Urals and the deserts of Arabia to this country, and developing new, sturdier strains of wheat. And what did he turn out to be? Your uncle Avraham.’
Still, it was a fine hour, one whose bounty helped see the villagers through many long weeks of hardship and privation. They all felt quiet and content – all except Shlomo Levin, my grandmother’s brother, who came by train from Tel Aviv. Afraid to appear in his citified white jacket, he wore a grey cap with a protective visor and a rough work shirt that made him break out in a rash.
Levin walked from the railway station through the fields, overwhelmed by the deep smell of the heavy earth that purred beneath his feet. And though Feyge threw her thin, tired arms around him, and Tonya and Margulis, who remembered him from their hike to Jaffa, smiled at him like old friends, he felt like an outsider among the excited pioneers who hugged him and plied him with drink. He even managed ‘to hold the baby wrong’, so that it bit his wrist with its sharp little teeth.
Then everyone went in search of the circumciser, who had gone out for a stroll to smell the good earth and murmur ecstatic prayers to himself. He took Avraham in his arms, clicked an appreciative tongue at the sight of his well-formed member, and relieved it of its foreskin. There was a profound hush. Even Liberson, who claimed that circumcision was a pagan custom, felt that it was no time for argument. And when the loud yelp of their firstborn son sounded over the fields, the pioneers burst into unashamed tears.
8
Efrayim, my lost uncle, was Grandfather’s favourite child. He was a handsome boy, quick on his feet, and Grandfather never tired of telling me how he went off to war, how he carried his calf around on his shoulders, and how he vanished from the village. Efrayim was born a year after Avraham and a year before my mother Esther. ‘The sight of all those children running about the village and helping out with the chores was a tonic for us all.’
Margulis’s Tonya had a daughter too, but the child’s father was Rilov. From the day of her arrival in the village Tonya had been swept off her feet by Rilov’s fierce masculine charms. The only bed she wished to die in was his, and she was maddened with passion when he asked her to smuggle rifle bullets in her brassiere. He took her down with him to the arms cache in the septic tank, their shadows jiggling to the light of an oil lamp as his fingers drew the ammunition from her breasts. Once having counted out the cartridges, however, he helped her put her clothes back on. She could feel her heart in her throat as he tightened and tied the pink laces on her back. Smiling with visionary eyes, Rilov told her how he dreamed at night of Pesya Tsirkin. ‘She has everything I need,’ he explained. ‘An automobile, the right connections, and a big bra.’ Tonya was hurt but undeterred.
Rilov soon saw that she could be counted on to keep a secret. At night she went with him to meet Arab informers in the wadis, to stow hand grenades in hideaways, and to eliminate Jewish collaborators with the British. Covered with white flakes of explosive, they embraced on crates of concussion grenades, and when Rilov, whose stock of imagery was limited, called Tonya his Schwarzlose after his favourite machine gun, she no longer felt put out.
They were married secretly, surrounded by a wall of Watchmen whose wedding gifts included a Tatar saddle, a thoroughbred horse that twitched its hide all through the ceremony, and a whining, handcuffed rabbi from Tiberias who officiated with a black blindfold covering his eyes. A year later Tonya gave birth to a daughter without ever knowing she had been pregnant, because Rilov had dismissed her morning sickness with a wave of his hand, declaring that nausea and vomiting were a common reaction to repeated contact with gelignite.
Sweet Margulis came to visit the Rilovs, as good-natured as always. Free of such follies as jealousy, grudge-bearing, and vengefulness, he arrived with a large jar of honey in his left hand and his new girlfriend Riva Beilin in his right. Riva was a pioneer from the Workers’ Brigade whom he had met on the train to Tiberias. Tonya, still aching all over from the birth, felt a rough edge of anger in her veins as she looked at her former lover and his new partner. That week she had had her first quarrel with her husband, who, true to the conspiratorial tradition he was trained in, had insisted on keeping the birth of their daughter a secret as well. This time Tonya was wounded to the point of hatred and tears.
Daniel, the son of Fanya and Eliezer Liberson, was the same age as my mother Esther. He was enamoured of her from the moment they were first laid beneath one blanket in a field, at the age of three weeks.
Grandfather, Liberson, Grandmother, and Fanya had gone to the orchard with their babies so that Grandfather could give them all a lesson in cup shaping young pear trees. The pruning shears clicked away in his hands while he scoffed at the theories of the Soviet agronomist Michurin, who claimed that the seeds of a grafted tree contained the genetic traits of both the scion and the rootstock.
Weak and pale, Feyge lay down on the ground, propped her head on Fanya’s thigh, and watched the babies to make sure no insects bit them. Just then Daniel raised his bald head, forcefully rocked it back and forth, and turned himself over to face Esther. He was only three weeks old, and his mother couldn’t believe her eyes. It never occurred to her that her son was seeking the company of her friend’s daughter. Grandmother, though, understood it at once. Her husband, she thought, could say what he pleased, but Michurin was not to be gainsaid.
That same evening Daniel began to crawl, and when Grandmother Feyge made ready to go home with Esther, he startled everyone by following them to the door like an obstinate little lizard and wailing inconsolably. Several sleepless weeks went by before his parents realised that he was not crying from hunger or teething pains but because he wanted Mirkin’s daughter. ‘You’d better believe it,’ said Uri. ‘You’d cry too if you had a hard-on two weeks after your circumcision.’
Apologetic for waking them, Fanya would bring her son, blue in the face from bawling, to Grandfather and Grandmother’s in the
middle of the night. Before Daniel could walk he had learned to shinny like a monkey up his beloved’s crib, where, clinging to Esther hand and foot like a cicada to a juicy branch, he calmed down at once and fell asleep.
He spent whole days at Grandmother’s. If Esther was taken away from him for a bath or a nap, he burst into howls that could be heard on the other side of the blue mountain. At the age of seven months he was walking and running so as to be able to follow his darling, whose name he learned before ‘Papa’ and ‘Mama’.
Grandmother Feyge regarded the two children fondly. She had always believed that every person in the world had a true love.
‘It’s just that someone usually sees to it that they’re born at opposite ends of the earth,’ she said to Fanya. ‘They cry their way through life without knowing why. It was the fate of my daughter and your son to be born in the same village.’
‘Like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden,’ declared Ya’akov Pinness, the heartbroken young widower, who was so moved by the infant love of Daniel Liberson and Esther Mirkin that he couldn’t wait to have them in his class.
‘The real moral of the story of the Garden of Eden,’ observed Pinness to the members of the village’s loyal and argumentative Bible club, ‘is not ethical but erotic. They were the world’s only couple.’
Eliezer Liberson rose to his feet. ‘What impresses me,’ he said, ‘is less Adam’s being alone with his Creator than his being alone with Eve.’
The club members smiled and nodded. Liberson was equally renowned in the Valley for his atheism and his love of Fanya. Pinness was overjoyed. As always, the Bible interested him for its human situations and natural history. He had only disdain for the scholars, preachers, and politicians who found all kinds of messages in it.
‘The only things that haven’t changed since the days of the Bible are the heart of man and the soil of this land, and both are equally long-suffering,’ he said.
Holding their oil lanterns, the club members left the teacher’s tent and sloshed through the terrible mud. ‘Every paradise has its snake,’ said Grandmother to Fanya. ‘Sooner or later it comes slithering out of the grass.’
‘And hers lives in Russia,’ murmured Fanya Liberson. ‘The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge arrives from there in blue envelopes.’
Her eyes sparkling with happiness, Feyge looked at little Daniel lying on his back sucking his beloved’s fingers. ‘He’ll never look at another woman,’ she said.
She died when Daniel and Esther were still babies, and didn’t live to see my mother jilt her first love. Her photograph, an enlargement of the one in Grandfather’s trunk, stood for years on Fanya’s kitchen cupboard: the same black braids, the same clenched little fists, the same embroidered white linen blouse, the same eyes seeming to drift off to either side of the camera. From early on I knew that this was the look of a woman ‘short of love’.
‘To my friend Fanya,’ the inscription on the photograph said.
In those days the village was little more than two rows of white tents barely visible through a miasmic veil of swamp gas and mosquito wings. A few lean-tos had gone up, there was a large trough for the cattle, and the chickens ran loose pecking at the dirt.
Eventually Grandfather planted some trees several hundred yards from his tent: a pomegranate, an olive, a fig and two rows of chasselas grapes. On them he nailed signs with such verses as ‘And the vine shall give her fruit’, ‘Thou shalt have olives throughout thy coasts’, ‘Whoso keepeth the fig tree shall eat the fruit thereof’ and ‘The pomegranates put forth their bud’.
The pomegranate aged quickly: tears of yellow sap studded its sickly trunk, and only rarely did it yield some paltry fruit. After it had been unsuccessfully injected with various remedies and pesticides, Pinness pronounced it ‘fatally infected with the moth of Doubt’. The first grapevines died of phylloxera rot, which caused Grandfather to graft the next vines on California stock despite his mixed feelings about that state, the home of his brother Yosef and Luther Burbank.
To this day, however, surrounded by gravestones, lawns and ornamentals, the fig and the olive still bear in abundance. So wildly vigorous did the fig become at Grandfather’s magic hands, in fact, that its branches ooze puddles of sharp, viscous syrup all over the ground, while the olive’s fine greenish drupes are speckled with yellow spots of oil.
Grandfather had a sixth sense for growing trees. Planters from all over the country consulted him and sent him infected leaves and pest eggs. The trees in his backyard made even the experts marvel. Every year pilgrimages of songbirds and agronomists arrived in our village to see and taste Mirkin’s fruit. I myself remember visitors coming especially to watch Grandfather harvest olives in autumn.
‘Come here, my child,’ he said, teaching me to wrap my arms around the olive tree as he did. He didn’t beat the branches with a stick as was the custom, but hugged the trunk with his face pressed against it while swaying with it gently. At first nothing happened. After a few minutes, however, I could feel the robust tree sigh and shudder, and soon, to the excited gasps of the crowd, a quiet downpour of fruit rained on my head and shoulders. I can still recall the faint drumming of those olives on my skin.
Grandfather planted the avenue of casuarinas when Avraham was born. ‘That firstborn disappointment and vain hope,’ as he was called by Meshulam Tsirkin, who was a year younger and had his own theory about why Grandfather had planted non-fruiting trees upon the birth of his first son.
When Grandmother Feyge gave birth to her second child, my uncle Efrayim, Grandfather was so happy that he grafted onto a single sour orange stock branches of orange, grapefruit, lemon, and tangerine. ‘My quadratic equation’, he called it, and once the wondrous citrus began yielding its various fruits, he went on filling the village with his mad experiments, which soon began to cross-pollinate each other. Muscat grapes rotted high on the unpickable branches of cypresses, and Iraqi dates turned yellow on plum trees. Eventually Grandfather grew alarmed by this unrestrained outburst of Michurinism, but the trees kept going strong.
The following year Grandmother had Esther, my mother and her last child, after whom her body ceased from fruitfulness and began preparing itself for death. Although these events took place but a few dozen years ago, they are already wrapped in the fibrous shrouds of time, embalmed in the black wax of mystery, as if they came straight out of Pinness’s Bible lessons, in which Deborah’s palm and Abraham’s tamarisk still burgeoned prolifically, planted by the rivers of stories – nomadic tales of earth and tents, of legendary wells, trees, and wombs.
Grandmother lived long enough to move from her tent to the cabin I later shared with Grandfather. She scrubbed the wooden floor, in which faint depressions recall her knees to this day, until it gleamed. When a glass window was installed, she sewed bright curtains for it out of pieces of old cloth. Outside, by the fig tree, she built an earthen oven that stored the good smells of baked pumpkin and bread. Two half-breed Damascene cows stood tied in the shed, and little Avraham took them out at dusk to graze on the front of our land: Rachel Yana’it was joined by more colourful Cherkessian hens who pecked alongside her in the yard. When chicks hatched they were put in a wooden box warmed by an oil lamp, and soon they tempted the old wildcat to leave his home in the blue mountain and take up residence by the spring in our fields.
‘They cooked in outdoor ovens, picked purslane for the chickens, went barefoot, and fetched water in tin cans,’ said Yosi, Uri’s twin brother. ‘In short, they were your typical Arab village.’
On the land where Pioneer Home now stands, Grandfather planted his big orchard. He dug irrigation ditches between the rows of trees, which he watered at night so as not to pester them in the heat of day. When he grew sleepy, he placed his hose at the top end of a ditch and lay down to nap at the bottom. Awakened by the slow-flowing water when it reached him, he rose, moved the hose to the next ditch, and went back to sleep. This system of his was the butt of many jokes in the village. ‘He only does it to a
void sleeping at home,’ Fanya protested to Liberson. There were farmers who voiced the fear that if Mirkin ever forgot to wake up, the orchard would be flooded and the swamp would return to the Valley.
Grandfather paid them no mind. Shaking from happiness and cold, he came home each morning vaporous with wet earth. At his hands the orchard was already bearing large fruit in its second year.
That same year Zeitser came for a visit from his commune in the Jordan Valley. He was an old friend of Grandfather’s. Though he never complained about it, ‘you could see that life in the commune didn’t suit him’. Grandfather asked him to stay on in the village, and Zeitser agreed on the condition that their friendship did not result in special treatment. He considered himself a simple farmhand and wanted to be nothing else. So modest were his needs that he did not even care to sleep indoors.
‘Why does he live in the cowshed?’ I asked Grandfather. ‘Why does old Zeitser live with the cows?’
‘Zeitser is as stubborn as a mule,’ smiled Grandfather. ‘He’s used to it and he likes it.’
He was a strict vegetarian. On the rare occasions when he accepted a piece of cake from Grandmother, who was very fond of him, he suffered pangs of remorse and indigestion.
Zeitser remained with us until his horrible death. His chief speciality, which was ploughing in a ruler-straight line, aroused great admiration. No work was too hard for him, and only on Saturdays did he take off for long walks ‘to smell the flowers and think’.
‘Take me with you,’ I called, running after him on bare feet. ‘Take me with you, Zeitser.’ I knew that long ago, when Grandmother died, Zeitser had taken care of my uncle Avraham, playing with him and carrying him around piggyback. He never played with me or my cousins, though. He had grown old, his body mortified by its own arduous reckonings, so that all he ever carried on his back any more were his own memories and conclusions.