by Shalev, Meir
The philanthropists from America were agog at the sight of the earnest, motherless boy, whose radiant complexion brought home the full significance of the enterprise they were supporting. He smiled at them, and then, without being asked, knelt on the ground, dug a small hollow, placed a seed of corn in it, and covered it with earth. ‘This symbolic act, which expressed the meaning of our lives so well, moved everyone greatly.’ Two of the philanthropists immediately proposed bringing the boy back with them to America, where he would be sent to the best schools before returning to his homeland as an all-round Renaissance man. At this point, however, Pinness intervened to explain tactfully that a firstborn son’s virility came from contact with his native soil, taken from which ‘he will lose his strength like Samson and be like any other man’. And so the guests had to content themselves with asking the child to speak a few words to them about the Jewish people’s return to their ancestral land, the village’s ties to the earth, and so on and so forth.
Just then the young beauty approached. Seeing the firstborn son, she reached out unthinkingly to stroke his head. Avraham rose from the ground without a word and brushed the dirt from his hands and knees.
There was a sudden premonition of disaster in the air. Everyone who felt it realised at once that something terrible was about to take place.
The firstborn son turned his bold stare from the crowd of guests to the beautiful lady and said to her:
And when a heavy dust falls from the ceiling
and the remembrance of my body strikes,
what will you say to appease the fire in your soul?
A blossom, warm and hard,
will bud in your flesh.
Your lover entrapped in the bonds of his words,
silent, at bay,
what will you say in your dream as his hand
like a creditor’s soft palm descends on your skin?
The towering gourd of love above your head
refuses to wilt.
Then you will know the scorching east winds,
the sands’ obstinate will.
Our backs we gave to the smiters,
your memory stifled and kept.
Ah, from the depths, the tenacious depths,
weeds of longing enwrap our heads.
So spoke Avraham, touching off a great uproar. ‘What did he say?’ asked the young lady in English, her perfect limbs ablaze. ‘What did he say?’ A reporter from the Movement newspaper who was travelling with the group took furious notes. Meshulam Tsirkin showed me the article he wrote: ‘The village’s first child, Avraham Mirkin, recited a poem of uncertain nature having no clear relevance to our national situation or goals.’
The comrades were in a state of shock. Fanya Liberson buried her cheek in her husband’s neck with a movement that would become second nature and murmured that the thirst for love had passed from poor Feyge’s tormented body to the child in her womb, driving him out of his mind.
‘Now you see your fruit,’ she whispered angrily. ‘It wasn’t blood and it wasn’t sweet. It was poison. Never-clotting venom. And don’t you dare tell me any jokes now.’
Pinness, who felt greatly sorry for Avraham and his father, tried to demonstrate that the child had merely ‘linked together verses from the Book of Jonah by a process of free association’, but Rilov snapped at him to shut his mouth if he wanted to die in his own bed.
Avraham alone paid the commotion no mind. He simply looked at the beautiful woman, who began to tremble, her flesh insidiously lanced by the child’s stare. A strong oestrous smell known to every farmer cleaved the veils of her perfume, and the Dutch bull was heard to bellow dully as it charged the fence of its corral. The beautiful visitor laughed with an embarrassed stamp of her foot. Then, her hips and thighs stirring the air, she stepped up to Avraham, took a glittering coin from her purse, and waved it in front of his eyes.
‘She gave him money,’ said Grandfather to Pinness during one of their night-time talks. ‘Money! That’s what Pesya taught them to redeem land and souls with.’
The woman from abroad placed the coin in Avraham’s shirt pocket, where it lay like a written anathema, and took a step back, waiting anxiously to see what would happen.
The firstborn son’s face turned dark all at once. Two terrible furrows creased his brow from the bridge of the nose to the hairline, as though at the stroke of a pickaxe.
12
I lay on a bed of jonquils, staring up at the sky. Flocks of migrating storks soared overhead, circling like tiny water insects on a clear, transparent pond. Back in the Ukraine, two storks had nested in the chimney of Grandfather’s house. ‘I knew that they visited the Land of Israel each year and came back with a bellyful of the frogs of Canaan,’ Grandfather told me. Were the grandchildren of those storks flying over me now?
Each spring and autumn Grandfather stepped out of his cabin and stared up at the storks and pelicans with his hand shading his eyes, full of the sorrow of great rivers, of vast fields of grain, of snowy steppes and forests of birch trees. ‘Here I am among the blackberries,’ he wrote, ‘in the land of the grasshopper and the jackal, of the olive and the fig.’
I thought of Shifris. Was he still alive? Would he be able to find the paths that his comrades had long since built over? Where was he now? Killed by border guards and buried beneath snow or sand? Fallen like ashes from the sting of some electrified fence? Did he know that the swamps had already been drained and the wilderness made to bloom? That Grandfather had gone to live with Shulamit in the old age home?
Shifris would come, and I would let him have Grandfather’s bed. He would cure olives, smoke in the kitchen at night, plant olive trees, pomegranates, vines, and figs. He would be a frail old man with a battered hat on his head, a rod of an almond tree in his hand, and a backpack containing mouldy bread, a canteen, olives, cheese, a Bible, and a couple of oranges. Sometimes he walked singing quietly, sometimes piping on a reed he had cut along the way. Slowly he crossed mountains and deserts and followed rocky coastlines, his lips dry and cracked, his shoes clouted like the Gibeonites’.
‘We should make Shifris a little swamp to drain,’ said my cousin Uri. ‘And plant a bit of crabgrass so that he’ll have something left to weed. And find him an old pioneeress with white braids to gallop over him at night on the threshing floor.’ His eyes shone. He was a boy who hunted sensations, mocked memories, and cared only for love stories.
Like a small dot, Shifris would detach himself from the blue mountain and draw nearer, until he reached Grandfather’s cabin and said, ‘Go, my child. Go tell Mirkin that I’m here.’ Weary from his long journey, he would fall on Grandfather’s bed, wanting nothing but a glass of water. How light he would be, how thin and emaciated, as I carried him over the fields of the Valley to show to Grandfather!
I will go now to the spring to lie down in the thicket beside it. Coming back, I will pass through my family’s fields, the same fields in which water buffalo once grazed, green rushes prospered, and the larvae of the anopheles mosquito multiplied in the execrable waters. Before they were dried and ploughed. Before Grandfather grew his blossoming trees in them, and Avraham pastured his cows in their meadows, and I planted them with my ornamentals, my flowers, and my dead.
Unlike ‘that boy of Tsirkin’s’, Mirkin’s children helped their father with the farm chores. They were hard workers. Avraham had a great talent with the cows. At the age of twelve he conceived the idea of introducing artificial insemination, which was only impractical, the veterinarian explained to Grandfather, because there was no good semen available in the country. Scientifically, Avraham was often ahead of the scientists.
‘Semen could be frozen,’ he announced in the middle of lunch one day, the furrows in his forehead contracting in concentration. ‘It could be frozen and brought to the cowshed instead of bringing the cows to the bull. We could get it from the best-bred bulls abroad. Think of all the time and work it would save.’
Ever since the episode of the ‘
American beauty’, however, Avraham’s ideas were received with suspicion. He was an introverted, unspontaneous child. Occasionally he would disappear for a day at a time, turning out to have been at the grave of his mother, whom he told all about himself.
Efrayim, having stealthily followed him, heard him talking to her.
‘We have a raised floor for the chickens now, so that the manure drops down below. It’s the best fertiliser there is.’
‘Why don’t you also tell her about the ice cream you’re going to make from bulls’ balls,’ his brother called out behind his back.
Avraham spun around and went for him. Efrayim, quick and agile, dodged. Noiseless as a barn owl, he skimmed over the field, his bare feet kicking up little dust clouds. Avraham ran after him, sobbing all the way to the village, a distance of three miles. Now and then he bent to pick up a stone or clod and threw it at his brother.
At night Grandfather told the children stories from his childhood. He told them how his brother Yosef, the capitalist traitor, had been kidnapped by gypsies when he was three.
‘The Czarist police found him in a sack in the Kharkov railway station. The gypsies had wanted to make an acrobat and a thief out of him. He was only with them for four days, but we had to teach him to talk again. He had forgotten all the words he knew, crawled around on all fours, and picked pockets.’
Grandfather told them how he had built a hothouse for myrtle bushes when he was ten. ‘On the Feast of Tabernacles I sold myrtle branches to the Hasidim, every one of them ritually perfect. It was the first hothouse in Makarov. My father was very proud of me.’
‘Tell us about our mother,’ begged Avraham. Grandfather told them how Grandmother Feyge had thought of setting a male turkey on chicken eggs. The turkey was so big that it could sit on fifty eggs at a time. The problem was that it squashed all the eggs when it stood up. And so Grandmother gave it wine, and the drunk bird, its flushed wattles red as fire, sat happily smiling at the eggs and never stirred.
‘All the women in the village switched to turkeys,’ laughed Grandfather, ‘even though Liberson wrote in the newsletter that “a Hebrew poultry run isn’t a bar”.’
I thought of those days with envy. They seemed to me a sort of dream, though Yosi said they had in fact been quite awful.
‘They were three orphans and one father who had no idea how to run a farm,’ he said. ‘When everyone else was buying new double-bladed ploughs, Grandfather was busy hugging olive trees. They had no money for boots in the winter, they did all their milking by hand, and they shared their work animals with the neighbours, whom they were always quarrelling with. Today we have electric incubators, and soon we’ll be inseminating the turkeys too.’
Yosi was proud of the new breeding coop he had built for his turkeys. It was an enclosed lightproof structure covered with tarpaper, in which the young females sat waiting to get good prices for their fertilised eggs. Blindly groping for their food, they were prevented by the darkness from thinking, hoping, or wanting sex. As soon as an order came in from the National Turkey Council, we hurried to bring them to the males. They staggered out warily on feeble legs, blinking the watery, sun-split lenses of their eyes. Five minutes in the sun was all it took to put them in heat. Kowtowing in the hot dirt with palsied wings, they summoned the males with shrill voices and the red flowers that pulsed beneath their tails.
‘Stupid randy birds,’ said Yosi. The turkey hens squatted in the middle of the yard and turned up their rumps, too much in heat to walk to the breeder. Yosi and Avraham had to kick them inside and strap canvas saddles on their backs to keep the heavy males from tearing their flesh when they mounted them.
‘Just look at that,’ Uri said to me. ‘That’s what falling in love is like. It lets in the light.’
The males squabbled near the impatient hens, pushing and shoving each other. As soon as one succeeded in doing his duty, his consort rose with smug languor, shook out her wings, and went off to her friends in a chatter of show-offy silence.
‘She’s running to tell them it was worth waiting for,’ said Uri.
‘The thought of spending two months in the dark just to be screwed by a turkey!’ sneered Yosi.
But I was thinking of three children beneath Grandfather’s sheltering wings, sitting down to a winter supper of potatoes cooked in their jackets, hard-boiled eggs, a bowl of homemade herring marinated in lemon juice and onion rings, and bright slices of radish. I was thinking of my dead mother; of her long braids and legs catching fire; and of Efrayim. To this day I sometimes whirl around suddenly, thinking he is behind me with his great Charolais bull on his shoulders, laughing at having startled me.
‘No one understood how my son Efrayim could pick up a bull,’ Grandfather told me with a smile.
No one understood and no one saw what was coming. Not even Pinness foretold the embryonic evil as it ripened. ‘An orphan growing up with his grandfather is one big barrel of stories,’ he said of me. I myself no longer know what I have heard and what I have seen myself. Was it Avraham who ran to his mother’s grave, or was it me? Did I leave the village, or did Efrayim?
The large gravestones gleam brightly in Pioneer Home. ‘Stones to stop the well of dreams with,’ Pinness called them. At night I wander through the banker’s big house, the bull of memory heavy on my shoulders.
13
‘Your mother was a sentimental tomboy, a Tom Sawyer with a soul.’
Her carnivorousness, though, was more than Pinness could fathom.
‘She was a good student. She knew the poetry of Tchernichovski and Lermontov by heart. And yet halfway through a lesson she would suddenly take a piece of meat from her schoolbag and tear into it with her teeth.’
Not only the teacher but the entire village watched the children hopefully. As healthy and quick as wild asses, they worked alongside their parents. The local air could not scorch their lungs, and their bodies soaked up the sun as if made of the local chalkstone.
‘Mirkin’s three orphans did all the jobs.’ At dawn Avraham woke his brother and sister to help with the milking before going off to school. Before supper they found time to cut and load a cart of alfalfa and bring it to the yard, their pitchforks thrust into the rear of the tottering green bale on which Efrayim and my mother stood wrestling while Avraham, who practically speaking was already running the farm, taciturnly gripped the reins. The deep furrows of anger crawled like lizards up his forehead and disappeared into his bushy hair.
Shouting with merriment and anger, my wiry mother and her brother tumbled in each other’s arms. Sometimes they fell off the cart and went on fighting by the roadside while their father watched them from the branches of his orchard.
‘That girl is a greater menace to the chickens than the wildcat down by the spring,’ said Grandfather to Zeitser. ‘The way she eats meat, there soon won’t be a hen left.’
My mother began climbing trees and roofs to catch starlings. She made Daniel Liberson come along on these safaris, and the love-stricken boy followed her through the fields, watching her remove birds from her traps. Because of her the migrating quail began overflying our fields, and vegetable gardens lost their rabbits. Calves froze with fright if she patted them on the back.
Once she clambered onto the roof of the village feed shed with Efrayim to ambush doves. A wooden plank broke beneath her. She skidded, grabbed hold of the rain gutter, and was left dangling by her arms twenty feet above the concrete pavement. Efrayim tried to pull her back up but couldn’t manage.
‘Hold tight,’ he shouted. ‘I’ll run and get Daniel.’
He vanished while my mother gritted her teeth and held on to the gutter for dear life. Just then Benjamin Schnitzer, ‘that idiot worker of Rilov’s’, passed by below.
‘Benjamin!’ the girl called down through clenched jaws.
Rilov’s worker glanced up and looked down again in embarrassment, ‘because,’ as a bright-eyed Uri told me, ‘your mother was wearing a flared dress and kicking her legs.’ Benjamin
had already been the butt of more than one practical joke in the village and suspected that this was another.
‘Don’t be so shy, Benjamin,’ called my mother. ‘It’s all right, you can look.’
He was standing directly beneath her, and as he glanced up again he felt his throat constrict at the splendour of her thighs, which swung like warm clappers in the bell of her dress.
‘Your father Benjamin arrived in this country in the thirties with a group of Jewish boys from Munich. He came to the village for agricultural training and was sent to work on Rilov’s farm.’
He was a short, blond, powerful young man. In the album of the village war dead my father appears standing in smartly cuffed blue work trousers and a clean white undershirt beneath Rilov’s date tree – the same tree whose fruit, according to Uri, exploded on contact with the ground. Blinking in the sun, his boyish, coarse-featured face stares out above rounded shoulders. The hands are thick and unshapely, like my own, and the arm, wrist, and palm look like a single two-by-four. He has a big, round barrel chest.
‘You’ll be as tall as your mother and as strong as your father,’ I was always told. As I grew older, everyone was pleased to see the prophecy come true.
Benjamin held out his arms.
‘You lets go, quick,’ he said. His Hebrew was still rudimentary.
My mother hesitated.
‘Schnell, schnell, quick, quick,’ said Benjamin. ‘I catch.’
The farmers of our village can guess a calf’s weight at a glance, predict the winds from the colour of the moon, and tell you the nitrogen content of the soil by tasting an onion. My mother took a good look at Benjamin’s calm eyes and solid shoulders, let go, and plummeted, her dress flying over her face and her stomach soaring up into her ribs. Eyes tightly shut, she felt herself cradled in his huge hands.