by Shalev, Meir
‘Lots,’ said my mother, putting her hands on his shoulders. She was much taller than he was. ‘Tell me, Binyamin,’ she asked, ‘is it true that where you come from people would rather eat sausage than meat?’
The following Thursday she asked Efrayim to sneak into the English base and steal some sausages from the canteen, because Binyamin was coming again for dinner. ‘And now, my child, finish your dinner too, and let’s see you leave a clean plate.’
Grandfather sighed. ‘That was the start of your parents’ love affair,’ he said. The love of the barefoot girl, ‘Mirkin’s wild she-goat’, with her braids and long legs and brown eyes flecked with green and yellow, and the polite, awkward, inarticulate young man from Bavaria. My father’s blond head reached his sweetheart’s shoulders. His lumbering walk alongside her tall, merry skip amused the villagers no end. But there were also remarks about ‘incompatibility’, both ‘physically speaking’ and regarding the relationship of Mirkin’s daughter ‘with a young man who did not imbibe the values of the Movement with his mother’s milk’.
There were also more practical considerations. Raising cows had taught the farmers that romance had its genetics, and the thought of crossbreeding Mirkin’s daughter with Liberson’s son tempted them greatly.
As for Daniel, having witnessed all his life the incessant pawing of his parents, who would rise from the table with an exchange of glances and disappear for passionate afternoon naps that kept the whole household awake and so frightened the animals that the hens began to lay less, he either could not or did not want to decipher the first signs of Esther’s faltering love.
‘Nothing worse could happen to a man,’ said Uri one time when we were talking about my mother. ‘He lost both his nerve and his head – and with them all his charm too.’
Daniel was condemned to the gauntlet run by rejected lovers. It was like having a limb amputated. Pitying glances followed him as he made his way toward our house, looking lost and crushed. At first he pleaded and wept. Then he grew quiet. At night he lay in the high grass across from Grandfather’s cabin, peering through the stalks for a glimpse of his beloved’s silhouette flitting across the lit window. After a few weeks Grandfather noticed that the grass had grown higher at a certain spot, as if from a leaky water tap. Going over to it one night, he found Daniel shedding noiseless tears.
‘“You’ll never get her back like this,” I told him.’
Liberson and Tsirkin decided to have a talk with Mirkin but encountered an unexpected obstacle before they were out of the house. Standing in the doorway, Fanya announced that in matters of the heart the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle had already made one decision too many.
‘Once with Feyge was enough,’ she informed her husband and his friend. ‘Let the boys have it out between them, and let the girl make up her own mind. We’re not Arabs or Orthodox Jews who marry off their children. And the days are also over when young ladies were given away according to your constitution and hearts broken to pieces by a comradely vote.’
Liberson was enraged. He did not consider Rilov’s dumb worker fit competition for his son.
‘What a waste of an immigration certificate,’ he grumbled. Gently removing his wife from the doorway, he held her until Tsirkin was safely past. When they spoke to Grandfather, however, they heard the same refrain from him.
‘I like your son very much,’ Grandfather said to Liberson. ‘But I have nothing against Binyamin either. He’s a decent, hardworking, reliable boy, and I do believe that the girl loves him.’
Liberson and Tsirkin reminded him that Daniel had loved Esther from the age of three weeks, but Grandfather lost his temper and declared that he did not believe in such nonsense. ‘Unlike certain other things we did,’ he wrote in one of his notes, ‘love has nothing to do with the staking of claims, the planting of flags, or the ploughing of furrows.’
15
When Eliezer Liberson was still a bachelor, before Daniel was born and Hagit was bought, he owned a big, thin Damascene cow with a long neck and long horns. His relations with the animal made the whole village laugh. She ate twice as much as other cows and gave almost no milk, which made Liberson hate her in a most unfarmerly way. ‘The dregs of bovinity,’ he called her. The cow, who had a tender and unforgiving heart behind her massive ribs, felt his animosity and repaid him in kind.
Once, when Liberson came home to his humble cabin from the fields, he found the cow sprawled on the floor, ‘chewing on a bed sheet and an article by Borochov’. The table he ate, wrote, and read at, the only piece of furniture he owned, was smashed to smithereens. The cow took one look at his fury, realised that this time she had crossed the fine line between pest and menace, and ran alarmedly outside.
‘And took the wall with her,’ lamented Liberson. The next day he tied a rope around her neck and went off to sell her in the nearby kibbutz. Though the kibbutz’s new barn worker had just returned from a course in Utrecht and was full of praise for Dutch cows, Liberson scared him to death with his stories of how such animals could not adjust to hot climates.
‘They’re spoiled,’ he said. ‘They’re prone to parasites and depression.’
‘It’s not up to me,’ said the barn worker. ‘The kibbutz has to vote on it.’
‘Of course,’ said Liberson. General meetings were so much putty in his hands.
‘Your Dutch cows need a mixture of local blood,’ he told the packed dining hall. ‘They’ll supply the milk, and this wonderful animal of mine will provide the powers of endurance.’
The kibbutz members were entranced. ‘Together we’ll give the world its first Hebrew cow,’ cried Liberson.
‘And what now?’ asked Tsirkin when Liberson came merrily back from the kibbutz and sat down to eat a bowl of lupin gruel with him. ‘Those kibbutzniks will want their revenge. Are you going to leave your poultry and livestock unguarded each time you go out to your vegetable patch? You need a wife.’
Up to then, Liberson had been a conscientious bachelor. Now Tsirkin offered him Pesya with two cows thrown in for a dowry. Liberson, however, refused.
‘That would have made three cows,’ said Uri when the two of us heard the story, ‘which is really too much for one bachelor.’
Since there wasn’t a single available girl in the village, Tsirkin and Liberson decided to revive the old custom of bride snatching.
The two young men returned to the kibbutz. It was autumn, and several girls had been sent to the vineyard to pick the last grapes that were drying into raisins. Armed with a mandolin, a box of delicacies, and some kitchenware, they waited for them to arrive.
It took a great deal of pestering to get Fanya to tell me the rest. Her head nodded up and down as she spoke, her white hair a gorgeous sight.
‘I heard someone playing an instrument at the other end of the vineyard and went to have a look. Behind the last row of vines stood two boys. One, whom I didn’t know, was playing the mandolin, and the other was the nice young man who had just sold us a useless cow. He was cutting up vegetables for a salad and invited me to join them.’
‘You’d better get out of here quick,’ said Fanya to Liberson. ‘The comrades have sworn to rope you to that cow’s horns if they find you.’
Liberson just grinned, made a dressing for the salad, and started to slice bread and cheese. As he and Fanya sat eating, Tsirkin, a red gypsy bandanna around his neck, circled them ‘like a cockerel’ and played ‘the sweetest, most seductive tunes’. Then Liberson told Fanya about himself, his farm, the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle, and his trials and tribulations with the cow.
Fanya felt her heart skip a beat. In those days the Workingman’s Circle was already shrouded in a thick cloud of mystery and adulation. Legends circulated among the women of the Valley about Feyge Levin, the first female pioneer to do the work of men and to be loved by three of them, who waited on her hand and foot, immunised her with their sweet blood, and washed her dirty clothes.
Modestly Liberson confessed that he i
ndeed knew Feyge, had washed her clothes and cooked for her himself, and had even been bandaged and caressed by her hands. Showing Fanya the small scar on his bottom lip, he revealed to her that this was the exact spot where Feyge Levin had kissed him. When he saw that her face had grown soft and dreamy as expected, he made a secret sign to Tsirkin and began to hum the well-known lines, ‘I shall plough, and I shall sow, and I shall rejoice / Only when I am in Israel’s land.’ Tsirkin played along, and Fanya could not resist the temptation to join in with her high, sweet voice.
Liberson was jubilant, so much so that he made the near fatal mistake of telling Fanya about the famous Hasidic court he had belonged to as a youth in the Ukraine. Though this titbit had worked well enough with the farmers’ daughters in the colonies of Judea, Fanya was so allergic to anything involving prayers, religious ceremonies, or miracles that her exquisite face broke into a grimace when Liberson poured into her ears the names of renowned rabbis and preachers he had known.
Yet Liberson kept his wits about him. Like a falcon, the young man of the Workingman’s Circle had the knack of reversing direction in mid-flight without losing altitude or speed. ‘To tell you the truth, I’m a direct descendant of the Golem of Prague,’ he said, earning a merry laugh from Fanya.
He knew all about love’s link to laughter, which could inflame, incite, and liquefy a woman’s flesh, and quickly struck again with a sharp jest about the kibbutz ideal of equality.
‘Fanya, my angel,’ he said, ‘I took a peek at your mixed shower room the other day and saw with my own eyes that human beings are definitely not born equal.’
Fanya blushed and laughed again, her whole body rocking with pleasure. Quite unselfconsciously, she laid a hand on his knee. ‘Make me laugh some more,’ she said.
Now that he was confident that the pretty kibbutznik would be his, though he knew that years of courting and probation lay ahead of him, Liberson seized her hand and proposed to her. She came to our village straight from the vineyard.
‘It’s a lovely story, and Eliezer Liberson is a genius at such things, but that’s not how it was,’ said my cousin Uri heatedly. ‘Tsirkin went to the vineyard by himself and played his mandolin among the grapevines. No woman could resist its music, and Fanya had to follow it. Tsirkin lured her past the grapes and into the high grass, and slid down the hill with Fanya hot on his heels. He led her a merry chase as far as the big oak tree, at which she arrived to see Liberson with a mandolin in his hands. Tsirkin was hiding quietly in the tree. It was only after the wedding that she discovered that Liberson couldn’t play a note.’
‘That same year,’ said Meshulam, ‘Ben-Gurion proclaimed that the kibbutz was a higher form of Zionism than the cooperative village, while Tabenkin stated that only the lust for lucre could make a person leave a commune. You don’t have to be a great genius to understand the connection. My father and Eliezer Liberson’s irresponsible action did nothing to improve relations between the two forms of agricultural settlement.’
Fanya’s abduction led to a wave of hostility between the village and the kibbutz. Joint irrigation projects were cancelled. There were even incidents of stone throwing and fisticuffs in the wadi between us. In a comic issue of the village newsletter Fanya was referred to as ‘fair Helen’, and voices were heard to say that the redemption of the Valley should not be sacrificed on the altar of private concupiscence. And yet Eliezer and Fanya Liberson were the most loving couple ever seen on the soil of the Jewish homeland. Liberson never ceased wooing and amusing his wife, whose laughter and cries of surprise were heard all over the village. In those days, when the villagers lived in tents with nothing but a sheet of canvas to separate them from the world, everyone knew what was going on everywhere without having to creep up and eavesdrop beneath windows.
‘First of all, get her to laugh,’ said Liberson to his son. ‘Women love that. They can’t resist it.’
‘Laughter,’ said Mandolin, ‘is the blast of the ram’s horn that brings down the walls of Jericho. It is the open sesame to magic treasure caves, the first drops of autumn rain to fall on the parched earth.’
‘Well said,’ said Liberson with a startled look at his friend.
By then, though, Daniel was far removed from any possibility of laughter. His sense of humour, indeed, had been the first victim of his spurned love.
‘Flowers! Song! Music!’ declared Mandolin.
‘Enough, Tsirkin,’ Liberson said. He turned to his son. ‘What does she like most?’ he asked.
‘Meat,’ answered the sheepish Daniel.
Liberson and Tsirkin began to cook. Despite the general shortage of food in those days, Daniel began furtively visiting the Mirkin house at night with covered trays. The smell of roasted chicken, baked ribs of calf, and rare roast beef made the angry neighbours’ mouths water. They complained about the waste, which was drawing cats and jackals from all over the Valley. And yet Esther, though she wolfed it all avidly and rewarded Daniel with happy hugs, did not cease her night-time walks with Binyamin.
My father made his sweetheart a huge hammock, which was nothing more than an old box mattress welded to iron chains and a railing. He hung it from two casuarinas behind the cabin, and the needles of the trees garnished her hair. The muffled sound of their laughter, Binyamin’s quiet whistling, and Esther’s low sighs when he took her in his smith’s arms could all be heard from the cabin.
Tonya Rilov, whose rejection by Margulis had made her highly sensitive to public morality, scolded Grandfather for letting his daughter walk around holding hands with ‘that new immigrant from Germany’ and told him that the village children came to the orchard at night to peep at them.
That year Grandfather’s orchard blossomed as never before. He asked Hayyim Margulis to place a few beehives among the trees, and the honey that resulted was nearly red and so sweet that it burned the tongue. All day long Grandfather circulated among his rows of fruit trees, whose dates of blossoming and parade of scents had been calculated from midwinter through spring, tottering drunkenly home from their lush fragrance. By now Avraham was in full charge of the cows, leaving Grandfather free to enjoy his private Eden, around which he planted thick hedges of cypress trees to shield it from the winter winds that came roaring down from the blue mountain.
The white blossoms of the almonds were the first to appear, the sweetness of their petals wafting through the air as if challenging the rain and the mud. Next the peach bloomed in a fierce pink, the tall, slender stamens of its flowers lighter than its rich, dark buds. Beside it glowed the delicate apricot, whose scent was like a woman’s perfume. Soon the plums joined in, their little blossoms covering the branches with a velvety white. The apples flowered after Purim in reds and whites, their smell as full and juicy as their fruit. At Passover time came the quinces, from which Rachel and Shlomo Levin made jams and jellies, and the pears with their white flowers, winey-fumed and purple-funnelled. Finally, when the earth was hot from the ascendant sun that ruled the orchard, swelling its pregnant pistils, the orange trees brought Grandfather’s scent fest to a close with a cloak of fragrance so heavy that it enveloped the whole village.
It was in this orchard, where the meadow browns flitted freely, the bees buzzed with loud gaiety, and the birds and buprestid beetles fell fainting from the treetops, that I buried Grandfather and his friends. But in those days Esther planted gillyflowers that opened overnight and led Binyamin to wet wallows of fallen petals. Before dawn she stole back to the cabin with her sandals in her hands, though the strong, familiar scent of wet earth, pears, and gillyflowers given off by her warm skin awakened Grandfather anyway.
‘He was too happy for words. The smell of his daughter was as the smell of a field which the Lord hath blessed.’
‘What a lovely story,’ said Fanya Liberson. Her hair, I assume, was draped over her husband’s chest, and her thigh lay across his stomach then too. ‘As sorry as I feel for our poor Daniel, I’m glad for a change to see a man at Mirkin’s who is crazy in love.’<
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For the first time, love reigned supreme at the Mirkin farm. With wild shrieks the two of them re-enacted their first encounter, Esther clambering up the bales in the hayloft and grabbing hold of the ridgepole while Binyamin stood below her, watching her kick her legs.
‘I’m not letting go till you say schnell, schnell,’ she would shout.
Avraham cleaned out the cowshed, his eyes darkly on the floor, the creases pulsing in his forehead.
One night, coming back from a stroll in the fields, I took off my shoes and tiptoed quietly up to Rivka and Avraham’s window, where I heard my aunt discussing my mother.
‘I remember her as though it were yesterday,’ she rasped in her lizardy voice. ‘Hanging from the roof of the hayloft. You never looked, but believe you me, she wasn’t wearing any underpants.’
‘I think my mother was jealous. My father never looked up her dress like that, and he never whistled any off-key operas for her either.’
16
In a nearby village there was an awful incident at the time. A farmer took his own life without anyone knowing why. ‘He was buried with the secret of his death,’ said our village newsletter. His body, covered with dead buds and the broken wings of satyr butterflies, was found in Grandfather’s orchard with its skull blown off and its big toe on the trigger of an old five-round semi-automatic. It had been lying there for several days, the strong smell of the flowering fruit trees hiding the stench of the putrefying corpse until Grandfather’s suspicions were aroused by the sight of swarms of green flies, which generally found blossoms repulsive.
The suicide left behind a widow, an only son aged eight, and the rifle, which was so rusted that Rilov had to cross it off his list of useable firearms in the Valley. The child was told that his father had gone on a long trip and would bring him presents when he returned, but the children in school told him what they heard at night when their parents were gathered at the kitchen table with their friends, whispering over tea after a day’s work. The boy took to walking in his sleep, and came home every night before dawn with his feet scratched by thorns and stones.