by Shalev, Meir
‘I hear my father calling,’ he told everyone.
Pinness was furious. The children of the dead man’s village attended our school. Every day they arrived in a cart pulled by a team of horses, their shoes wet from the dewy weeds by the roadside. ‘How can a child be lied to like that?’ he screamed in the teachers’ room. ‘How can anyone contaminate such a tender sprout?’
Though he realised at once that it was the work of the hyena, it was high spring and no one paid heed to his warnings. Man and beast wanted only to stretch out in the grass and take in the sun and warm earth. The cowsheds and rabbit hutches were full of the squeals of calves and babes. The young primiparous heifers came down with spring fever and ran wildly about with their tails sticking up, kicking the air. The deep winter mud was drying out, and the ground was no longer sticky and treacherous but soft and springy underfoot. The snorts of the wildcat cubs, scrapping playfully as they practised their murderous arts on carpets of grass and daisies, could be heard down by the spring. Hayyim Margulis’s bees growled softly among the flowers as they transported their sweet cargo, while flocks of bee-eaters freshly returned from the tropics wreaked havoc among them. Male doves strutted atop the cowsheds, their bright, swollen crops and their sheeny breasts slicing the sunshine like prisms. Great flocks of pelicans passed overhead, bound northward for there, the land of wheat, wolves, and birches. On their way they flew low over Liberson’s house and screamed mockingly at Fanya. The spring doubled its flow, and the last winter jonquils gave off such a powerful scent that Avraham broke out in long riffs of tears and sneezes.
Anxious and tense, Pinness took the children out to the fields for a look at the flowers.
‘The month of Nisan is the month of our Movement,’ he told his pupils, his eyes combing his surroundings for the enemy. ‘It’s then that Nature lifts high her red flags in memory of our liberation from bondage in Egypt: the poppy, the anemone, the red buttercup, the pheasant’s-eye, the mountain tulip, and the everlasting.’
‘And then, as I was standing there listening to their laughter in the field, the green wall of young corn suddenly parted like a curtain, thrust aside by the shoulders of the hyena.’
Every spring the hornet queens emerged from their winter hideaways. Weak and frozen, they searched for a place to build their nests. Within a few weeks each had hatched a regiment of brigands. When summer came their black-and-yellow forms flashed through the air with a fierce, menacing rasp, raiding the grape clusters, descending on fruits and milk cans, biting men and animals, decimating beehives, and terrorising the whole village. The Committee paid the children a small bounty for every dead hornet, and every spring Pinness took them out to the field to trap the queens before they could establish a new generation of ‘rapacious Midianites’.
‘It isn’t easy for me to ask you to kill a hornet queen,’ he told them. ‘It’s not our way to kill living things. But the field mouse, the hornet, the viper, and all tree pests are our mortal enemies.’
The vipers emerged early that year, unwinding their thick bodies in the sun and waiting for a careless mouse, hoof, or bare foot. In the mornings we found their limp bodies hanging from the chicken wire that had trapped their broad heads at night while they were trying to steal eggs and baby chicks. Binyamin, who was scared to death of snakes, never went out to the fields without boots and a long hoe on his shoulder.
‘My daughter just laughed at him, skipping barefoot through the clover no matter how he screamed at her to stop.’
‘A big strong boy like you,’ said Esther, ‘and such a coward!’
They sat in a field overlooking the British air base.
‘I steal a plane and fly to my old home,’ said Binyamin.
‘When my mother was still alive,’ Esther revealed to him, ‘we had a little donkey. Every night she spread her ears and flew off to Constantinople to meet the Turkish sultan.’
Esther lay on her back while Binyamin regarded her sceptically. He checked the lush grass, took off his shirt and boots, and lay down pleasurably beside her. Two minutes later Esther nudged him in the stomach and pointed to a large viper, as thick as a man’s forearm, that was crawling slowly toward them. She could feel Binyamin stiffen and start to shake, every pore of his skin gushing sweat.
‘Don’t move,’ she said. ‘If I haven’t eaten you, it won’t either.’
But the viper kept coming toward them, sniffing the ground with its tongue. Esther pinned Binyamin down with her hand to keep him from moving. When the snake neared her foot, she picked up one of his heavy work boots and clubbed it on the neck. It lunged and writhed while she struck it again and again till its head was as flat as a wafer.
‘What a stupid idiot you are!’ she said to Binyamin. ‘What a stupid fatso! Killing a snake is nothing. Efrayim once killed a viper with a shoe brush.’
Across the fields they saw Pinness and his children by the corn patch, far from the houses of the village. But they could not see the hyena, which was hidden up to its shoulders in the thick corn.
Pinness knew it would not attack. Hyenas rarely did, and even then only when they found a single weak, tender victim.
‘But I recognised it,’ he gasped. ‘It made me feel murderous. I wanted to run at it, kill it, choke it. It recognised me too, though, and disappeared back into the thick foliage. The children never even saw it.’
He gathered the children around him, flapping his arms like a mother hen, and returned with them to the village, where he worriedly related his fears to the Committee head.
‘The hyena must have been attracted by a carcass that somebody threw in the corn,’ said the Committee head, who was reminded by Pinness’s fears of ‘some idiotic Arab superstition’. It couldn’t possibly be the same beast that had bitten settlers and struck them down during their first years in the Valley, he argued. Pinness left more upset and worried than before.
He hurried to the teacher from the neighbouring village and urged him to set traps and post guards, but no one there had seen the hyena or even come across its tracks.
‘Just as years later no one heard those obscenities in the middle of the night,’ he said to me angrily.
The sleepwalker disappeared every night in search of his father. Without waking he loosed the ropes tying him to his bed and set out, vanishing under the noses of his pursuers as if he had dissolved into little flakes of darkness. Once the night watchmen saw his sleeping figure emerge from the shadows and cross right in front of the breeding horse, a splendid but violent stallion that had already trampled a calf and a hired hand to death. Not only did it do him no harm, it rubbed against the fence of its corral and whined as fearfully as an abandoned puppy.
‘On the seventh night the hyena called again, and the blond little boy, thinking it was his father, was tricked into rising from his mother’s bed and going out to the fields with his eyes shut, in nothing but a white nightshirt.’
Three days later the little body was found with a splintered neck bone, next to the jujube tree in the dry bed of the wadi. It was old Zeitser on one of his pensive walks who discovered it lying beneath the familiar, accursed green blanket of necrophiliac flies. He ran all over the Valley to tell the founders.
Pinness, who was not exactly ‘a fire-breathing warrior’, stood by the little coffin before the open grave, weeping and swearing revenge.
‘It’s no accident that it strikes at the smallest and weakest of us,’ he said. ‘The hyena is Doubt and Despair, the loss of faith and the sowing of confusion. But we shall be of good cheer and continue to build and plant, to sow and water, until the ploughman shall overtake the reaper and the treader of grapes him that soweth seed.’
The villages were in a state of panic. The broken neck and savaged chest of the little boy struck terror in all hearts. Children were no longer allowed out at night to turn off sprinklers or check that the barnyard gate was shut. And yet the springtime went its merry way.
‘Before long the dead boy sank into the sediments of the Valley
’s painful memory. Along with the victims of malaria and of Arab bandits, the suicides and the fallers by the wayside, he too became a fable in our textbooks and a black-framed picture in the teachers’ room. Each time I looked at his little face, I cursed the fates in my heart.’
The spring earth had dried out and cracked, the stalks of grain turned yellow, and our new Marshall thresher was brought to the fields. The harvest was a particularly good one that year, ‘as if the earth had accepted our sacrifice’. Binyamin came to help out after finishing work at Rilov’s, and my mother brought his meals to the field, poking fun at his sensitive skin that blistered in the sun, hissing like a snake behind his back, tripping him among the sheaves, and wrestling with him in the smothering dust of chaff that covered their faces and clothes.
The Mirkins were preparing for a double wedding – Binyamin and Esther’s, Avraham and Rivka’s. No one had the slightest inkling of the cunning ambushes of Time or the tubers of evil swelling in its furrows. My parents’ death, Efrayim and Jean Valjean’s disappearance, Zeitser’s gruesome end, Pioneer Home – all these were not even the tiniest cloud on the horizon. In honour of the occasion Pinness and Tsirkin composed a short musical comedy on the history of threshing floors from the days of Ruth to the present. Some of the village women volunteered to make the food, and the Committee saw to the tables and tablecloths.
Two wedding canopies were set up between Mirkin’s fig and olive trees. Grandmother and Grandfather’s friends came from all over the country, embracing each other gaily and tramping over the pliant earth. Their fingers were arthritic from too much prying and milking, many were bald, and not a few carried reading glasses in their white shirt pockets.
‘The shoulders,’ said Eliezer Liberson, ‘the shoulders that an entire people had leaned on were a bit stooped, but the eyes had a fiery glow.’ Leading politicians came too. ‘When the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle married off a son and a daughter in one day, even the shirkers who preferred Zionist congresses to working knew they had better appear.’
Firstborn sons from all over the country came to Mirkin’s double wedding. Posed in a group, they were a moving sight. Among them were military commanders, teachers, heads of villages and kibbutzim, inventors of agricultural machines, and philosophers – ‘but all,’ said Pinness, ‘had the same clear eyes and proud bearing’.
My uncle stood solemnly beneath the canopy in blue trousers and a white shirt, a silent, searching groom who made everyone remember that Liberson once said of him, ‘He’s like an olive stone that lies in its husk for years before opening and sprouting.’ The wedding guests scrutinised him, looking for the promise that had yet to be fulfilled. Rivka, the daughter of Tanchum Peker the saddler, stood by his side, frowning with envy at Esther’s wedding dress. Her father, who had downed quantities of schnapps, walked among the guests in shiny boots redolent of leather, reminiscing about the wild officers’ parties in his days in the Russian cavalry, the cooks and servant girls he had cornered in pantries among smoked meats and straw-cushioned bottles. Bowing his knees as though on horseback, he clucked to old steeds that he alone remembered, flushed with nostalgia and pride.
Under the second canopy Esther stood laughing. Now and then she spun around giddily, her Bavarian wedding dress flying up like a dish of white foam. Far away in the eucalyptus woods Daniel Liberson crawled among wet tree trunks, beside himself with anguish, his throat so dry from crying that all he could do was wheeze. The week before, when he had been awarded the contract to plough the village grain fields, which amounted to nearly a thousand acres, Tsirkin and Liberson had decided to launch an unprecedented last-minute offensive. Following their orders, Daniel took the D-4 and the disc harrow and ploughed the name of his beloved in a field of stubble. Half a mile high and half a mile wide, the word ‘ESTHER’ ran outlined in rich brown earth against a background of yellow straw. But since no one whose two feet were on the ground was elevated enough to see it, the desperate love note went unnoticed by everyone except some British pilots, ‘and they couldn’t read Hebrew’.
‘And my father?’
‘Binyamin smiled at the guests but didn’t say much, because he missed his own father and mother.
‘When the ceremony and the presentations were over, a space was cleared for the two couples to dance. Tsirkin struck up the mandolin, and your father and my son Efrayim stepped into the circle and danced a cheek-to-cheek waltz. Tonya Rilov had a fit, and the whole village split its sides with laughter.’
‘And then?’
‘Then, my child, a war broke out and Efrayim went off to it.’
17
Grandfather sensed the approaching disaster and took Efrayim to the orchard, hoping to divert him with new projects. Most pears and apples, he explained to him, just as he did years later to me, develop on special short branches that bear annual fruit and must never be pruned.
Next to these, Grandfather showed Efrayim, are tall, upright branches that grow more quickly but are less fruitful. Although all the experts agreed that these infertile shoots should be cut back, Grandfather showed Efrayim how you could bend them outward and back on themselves like a taut bow and tie their tips to their bases with twine. The village was astounded to see how much fruit these bound branches gave. ‘He realised it during his first years in the country,’ Pinness told me admiringly. ‘Your grandfather discovered that not only men and horses but trees too can be harnessed and reined.’
Several years later, when an enthusiastic agricultural instructor appeared in the village to demonstrate the new ‘Caldwell method’ of branch bending developed in America, he was informed that we had been practising it for years without the fancy name. Moreover, Grandfather’s method was still unique in its periodic freeing of the bound branches, which repaid such thoughtfulness by increasing their yield even more.
But Efrayim did not care about trees and was so overwrought that his skin began to quiver and twitch like a horse’s hide. Every evening he went to Esther and Binyamin’s cabin, on one wall of which hung a large map with pins and flags that were carefully moved about.
Men had already signed up and disappeared from the village. The first to go were our two smiths, the Goldman brothers. Since the day the village was founded they had shod its workhorses and tempered its pickaxes and ploughshares to make them strong. ‘Like Jachin and Boaz, the two mighty pillars of the Temple, they stood over their hearth with their tongs in their left hands and their trusty hammers in their right, a red glow suffusing their chests.’
‘One day when Zeitser and I came to the smithy,’ Grandfather told me, ‘the two brothers weren’t there. The coals were cold and grey, the bellows silent, the smoke gone. Only their two big hammers were still floating in the air above the anvil.’
Next to go was Daniel Liberson, who stayed on in Europe after the war with a band of anti-Nazi avengers. Though his curt, angry letters to Esther never mentioned my father, the hatred expressed by his ardour for killing blond Germans blew like a chill wind through all his words and deeds.
At night Binyamin sat with Rilov and various strangers who arrived in the village disguised as fertiliser consultants or egg salesmen. Together they prepared arms caches and time fuses, used irrigation pipes to cast mortars, and agreed on a system of nocturnal voice signals ‘that drove the owls and crickets of the Valley crazy’.
There was worry in the air. The war was far away, but there were times at night or in the quiet hours of the autumn afternoons when the villagers fell silent, gazing to the north and west as if they could see and hear what was happening. ‘The blood of our distant brothers was calling and crying out to us.’
Efrayim begged Grandfather for permission to join the British army, but Grandfather wouldn’t hear of it.
‘A boy of your age can make his contribution right here. You’re not going off to any war.’
‘My handsome wanderer in foreign fields,’ he wrote on a piece of paper torn from a notebook.
Efrayim went on working
with his father. With a haunted expression on his thin, tense face he bound branches and kept his thoughts to himself. Pinness, who could predict the impending migrations of animals by their movements and expressions, warned Grandfather what lay ahead.
‘I can’t chain him down,’ said Grandfather.
‘Keep an eye on him,’ Pinness urged.
‘Did anyone ever manage to stop us?’ asked Grandfather. ‘Was your father glad to see you run away from home for this country?’
Over dinner he watched his son hungrily attack the vegetable salad. He looked at his strong, wirey arms and the green eyes that had lost their focus, and knew that deep down Efrayim had already spread his wings.
After the meal Efrayim jumped up from his chair and announced that he was going out to check the water taps.
‘Goodbye, Efrayim,’ said Grandfather.
‘I’ll be right back,’ Efrayim said. And he was gone.
A week later his heavy Hercules bicycle was found chained to the fence of the British army base at Sarafand. By then he himself was aboard a naval vessel bound for Scotland. Though he wasn’t seasick, his face was coated with skeins of foam. His noiseless feet were shod in stiff army boots, but even when he stamped on the vibrating iron deck, the sound was drowned out by the boom of the thrusting waves.
At night, listening to the sea pound and foam as it sprawls outside the windows of my white prison, I think about all the sounds that never stopped, though you had to concentrate to hear them: the wind in the casuarina trees, the ticking of the sprinklers, the burble of the spring, the cows chewing their cud, the scratchy slithers beneath the cabin floor. Pinness explained to me how Efrayim could walk so silently. ‘He wasn’t actually that silent. He just knew how to make his footsteps sound like one of the world’s steady noises.’