by Shalev, Meir
‘He was one of the few Palestinian Jews to serve with the British commandoes,’ said Meshulam when Efrayim was already a memory that not everyone cared to believe in or carry the burden of. He began pulling papers and envelopes from an orange crate on which he had written ‘Sons Who Served’.
‘Fifty-three members of farming families signed up, among them two older men, thirty-eight boys born in the village, and thirteen girls. Four sons and two daughters of non-farming families joined too. Sixteen failed to return. I have the letters home of quite a few soldiers, but none of Efrayim’s. Your family, for some reason, refused to let Founder’s Cabin have them.’
When Meshulam said ‘your family’, he meant me. Grandfather was dead already, Yosi was in the army, and Uri was operating a tractor for an uncle of his in the Galilee, moving soil and firming sand. Avraham and Rivka were preparing to go to the Caribbean, where they had been offered the management of a large dairy farm, and the family farm was left in my hands, prospering nicely around Grandfather’s gravestone.
‘I don’t want to be buried with them,’ he told me, stating his will over and over. ‘They drove Efrayim from the village. Bury me in my own earth.’
It took more than just a little nerve, I thought, for Meshulam to demand Efrayim’s letters for his idiotic museum.
‘I’ll take my revenge where it hurts them the most,’ said Grandfather in the words he repeated like a menacing slogan during the last years of his life. ‘In the earth.’
And it was I who carried it out. The body of the old tree wizard poisoned the ground and stood the founders’ vision on its head. The graves on Mirkin’s land burned in the flesh of the village like open abscesses of mockery and chastisement. Spiders built their thick funnels in Avraham’s modern milking stalls. Mossy lichen bruised the concrete walls, wiping out the last traces of bounty and blessing. Mud daubers constructed great colonies out of paper and mud in the chinks of the hayloft.
Neglect was everywhere, but the money kept pouring in. Sacks of it piled up in the old cowshed while my field of graves flowered. Pioneer Home made time stop like a great wedge thrust in the earth, shattering by-laws and ways of life, breaking the vegetative cycle, flouting the seasons of the year.
Two months after Efrayim’s induction his letters began to arrive. They were short and uninteresting. Sometimes I reread them. Amphibious landings under live fire. Rock climbing. A boy from New Zealand who ‘kept wanting to know about our breeds of milk cows’ drowned during an exercise in fording rivers at a camp called Achnacarry near Inverness. I turned the strange syllables around in my mouth, seeking a taste of Efrayim’s life there. Forced marches in full battle gear, a sapper’s course in Oban. A snapshot of a night on the town, Efrayim in a Scottish kilt and a funny leopard-skin hat, a hairy sceptre in one hand. A letter of thanks to Rachel Levin for teaching him the art of silent walking.
‘His Majesty’s royal commandoes don’t know the first thing about creeping up on anyone,’ he wrote. ‘They waddle like the porcupines in the rushes by our spring.’
He was caught, so I learned, poaching deer with a knife in the royal preserve at Van Kripsdale, sentenced to a week in the brig, and fined forty pounds. Later he received a Distinguished Service Cross for his part in the raid on Dieppe, when in hand-to-hand combat he wiped out a German gun crew that was inflicting casualties on Lord Lovat’s commandoes. I read these letters out loud because I’m used to oral history. ‘Dieppe,’ I say to myself. ‘Kripsdale. Lovat.’ The foreign words make the air flow in unfamiliar ways through the cavities of my mouth and throat.
Time passed. The sun rose each morning on the foxholes of the soldiers in Russia, on Shulamit in the Crimea, on Shifris somewhere along his way, until it lit up our Valley, falling on Grandmother Feyge’s grave, on Grandfather’s straw hat, on Avraham’s cloven forehead, on my father and mother. Only then was it seen by Efrayim far to the west. Round and round it went for a whole month, until Grandfather received word that his son had been wounded in the battle of the el-Guettar Range in Tunisia.
For six long months after Efrayim’s injury not a single letter arrived from him. Grandfather was beside himself with worry. One night he set out with Zeitser to climb to the top of the blue mountain, where you could see the sea.
Like a huge wall, the mountain screened us from the city, from the sea, from all vanity and seduction. Every year the village turned its eyes toward it and studied the clouds that formed among its ridges, filling and marshalling themselves before beginning their great journey over our fields. ‘The clouds are the children of the mountain,’ Grandfather told me when I was small. We were walking in the fields, waiting for the rain, my hand shading my eyes just like his. He crumbled some soil between his fingers and gazed straight ahead at the mountain.
‘Once, when the rain clouds didn’t come, we decided to go and see what had happened to them. The entire Circle was there – Tsirkin, Liberson, Grandmother Feyge, and myself. We spent a whole day climbing to the top over rocks and thorns, and a whole night looking for the Rain Cave, until we heard the clouds muttering and grumbling. A big rock was blocking the cave and keeping them from getting out. We began to tug at it, raz dva, raz dva – one two, one two – as hard as we could, pulling from one side while the clouds pushed from the other, and at last the rock rolled loose and out they burst. Tsirkin managed to hitch a ride on one of them and came down with the rain by his house.’
They stood looking into the distance until Zeitser coughed, catching a whiff of far-off smoke and explosives, and Grandfather, glimpsing the carmine flush of battlefields and hearing the screams that skipped like pebbles across the waves, buried his head in his knees.
They had already returned home when an English automobile drove into the village in the morning. The children ran to tell Rilov that Major Stoves had arrived and that the septic tank entrance should be camouflaged. Major Stoves was a tall, limping Englishman who had been wounded in North Africa and transferred to Palestine with his uniform and black walking stick. He descended from the automobile, hobbled to the far door, opened it, and saluted. Efrayim was home.
Wearing the soft yellow desert boots and winged-dagger insignia of a commando, and his ribbons, decorations, and sergeant’s stripes, in his pocket a lifelong pension certificate from His Majesty’s government, Efrayim stepped out of the car and smiled at the villagers gathered there.
The cry that went up at the sight of him was not soon forgotten. Mouths opened wide, retching with horror and consternation. Men came running from the green fields, from the leafing orchards, from the cowsheds and the chicken coops to stand before Efrayim and howl. The veterinarian’s wife, whom he had slept with on and off, screamed for a full minute and a half ‘without stopping to catch her breath’. Children he had taught to throw a knife and built kites for whimpered in high, terrified voices. Ya’akov Pinness emerged from the school and loped heavily toward his former pupil, then stopped in his tracks as suddenly as if he had run into a wall. Shutting his eyes, he bellowed like a slaughtered ox. The cows, the calves, the horses, and the chickens made a hideous racket in their pens and runs.
A phosphorous mine planted by the Italian army, ‘the Chicken Corps’, as Uri called it, had turned my uncle’s handsome face into a burned pudding of skin and flesh that glittered, ‘How can I describe the horror of it, my child, like a squashed pomegranate, in every shade of red, purple, and yellow. You’re lucky you don’t remember him.’
One of my uncle’s eyes had been torn out, his nose was in the wrong place, his lips were gone, and a crooked, wine-red gash ran diagonally across his face from the forehead to the hollow of the throat, disappearing in the collar of his shirt. His charred, mangled skin hung loosely from his cheekbones. A single green eye, sole testimony to the doctors’ attempt to restore his human visage, peered out from all that devastated tissue.
Efrayim, whose beauty had drawn curiosity-seekers from all over the Valley and made the startled birds swoop low overhead, had become a monster
whom no one dared look at. The crowd pressed together in fear, ‘a whole village standing and shrieking’.
My uncle’s ghastly smile faded. He spun around as if wishing to vanish again. Major Stoves had already opened the door of the car with a muttered oath when the crowd suddenly parted to make way for Binyamin, who had elbowed his way through it like the solid blade of a ploughshare. Fighting to get to his brother-in-law’s side, he looked at him without flinching, hugged him in his thick arms, and kissed the shiny, minced flesh that had once been a cheek.
My father’s Hebrew had improved greatly. ‘Welcome home, Efrayim,’ he said, leading him away amid the silence that had collected like a puddle in the street.
For supper Efrayim asked for ‘the house vegetable salad’ and even told Esther how to make it. His voice was weak and throaty because his vocal cords were injured too.
‘First cut the onion and salt it a bit, then the tomatoes, and salt them too. The green pepper and cucumber come last. Mix well, season with black pepper, lemon juice, and oil, mix again, and let it breathe for a while.’
For the past two years, he said, he had dreamed of our salad, which ‘no one else in the world knows how to make’.
He shoved a heaped spoonful of it into his gullet and sighed with pleasure. As his horrid face made chewing motions and his flesh moved like a thousand crushed pellets, Avraham burst out crying and fled the table. But Binyamin remarked, ‘He must have forgotten to shut the water tap in the alfalfa,’ and went on talking with Efrayim about such subjects as the war, German submachine guns, a general named Rommel, commando training, and British military decorations.
‘I couldn’t speak,’ said Grandfather. ‘They had destroyed my beautiful boy. Before going to bed he said, “Goodnight, Father,” and turned away at once to spare me from hugging or kissing him.’
‘Every kiss not given him is a piece cut out of my heart,’ I found written in one of Grandfather’s notes.
All night Efrayim paced up and down in the yard, the silence of his feet keeping everyone awake. In the morning Binyamin arrived and sat down with him at the table, and the two sketched some plans on several large sheets of paper. Then Binyamin asked Zeitser to lend a hand. They took a cart through the fields to the English air base, where they were met by the lame Major Stoves, two lean, quiet Scottish commando officers who gave Efrayim an embrace, and an Indian quartermaster whose heart thumped loudly at the sight of the medals on my uncle’s chest. When they returned to the village, followed by an army truck loaded with construction rods, sand, cement sacks, and gravel, the two Scotsmen, Binyamin, and Efrayim took off their shirts and began digging a foundation hole by the cowshed. Over it they built a brick room with windows and a door that faced away from the house, out toward the cowshed and the fields.
Binyamin hooked the hut up to water and electricity, built a wonderful wood-burning stove that heated the room and the boiler, and made brown wooden shutters with copper clasps in the shape of dwarves that turned green with the years and wept ugly stripes on the plaster.
‘That’s the shed I keep my tools and plant medicines in now.’
Efrayim moved into his new home and never left it.
‘I circled the walls, which smelled of fresh, moist lime and plaster, waiting for my son to step out. Your mother put food in front of the door and pleaded with her brother to show himself. But he wouldn’t.’
Pinness came, knocked on the door, and asked to see his old pupil.
‘You screamed when you saw me,’ rasped Efrayim from within, refusing to open the door.
‘“I’m only human,” I told him. “No one knew you were wounded so badly. Open up, Efrayim. Open up for an old teacher who would like to apologise.”’
But Efrayim did not.
Grandfather and Pinness told me about it dozens of times, as if asking me to forgive them for Efrayim.
Binyamin came to visit him each evening. After a few weeks he advised him to start working in the cowshed at night.
‘The cows are afraid of me too,’ Efrayim said.
If he didn’t put himself to work, said Binyamin, he would grab him by the belt again and throw him in the cow trough.
‘But only at night,’ said Efrayim, stepping out of his room.
‘At half past nine I would see a strip of light as the door opened and the shadow of my son’s legs slipped off to the cowshed. He shovelled the manure, rinsed the milk cans, and put feed in the stalls for the morning milking.’
His heart ‘breaking into little pieces’, Grandfather lay paralysed in the cabin, listening to the rumble of the manure cart on the metal ramp, the scraping of the shovel in the sewage ditch, and the lowing of the cows crowding together in the pen and glancing surreptitiously at his son with sad whispers.
After four nights of this, Ya’akov Mirkin rose from his bed and went to the cowshed. He stood outside in the darkness and called to his son.
‘Don’t come in, Father,’ whispered Efrayim in a choked voice. ‘Don’t come into the cowshed.’
‘I have to,’ said Mirkin, stepping inside.
Efrayim managed to pull an empty feed sack over his head a second before he felt his father’s hands on his shoulders. Mirkin kissed the coarse jute, grinding the last of the fodder between his teeth until it melted thickly in tears and saliva. Gently, he removed the sack from his son’s head. Old Zeitser saw the two of them from his corner, where he pretended to be asleep.
‘The next morning I went to Margulis, asked him for an old beekeeper’s mask, and brought it to my son so that he could come and go among men.’
Efrayim’s handsome looks became a forgotten shadow, a configuration that came to life only before the shut eyes of those who cared to remember. But the life of the villagers was harder without such beauty to contemplate.
‘In a place so dependent on the laws of the earth and the weather, on the genetic quirks of animals and the acquired vagaries of men,’ Pinness explained to me, ‘Efrayim’s radiance was like the cold of snow in the time of harvest, like rest for the weary, like a lake of water in the wilderness.’ Only now did the villagers grasp what they had lost, which made their estrangement from him grow even greater.
Once a week my uncle ironed his khaki trousers and went to the military air base to chat with Major Stoves and the two laconic Scotsmen and drink beer with the British and Indian gunners stationed there. Sometimes he walked through the fields, waiting until he had left the orange grove to strip off his mask before the eyes of the startled bees who had followed him out of curiosity. Sometimes the base commander sent a car for him.
‘Your son is spending too much time with the British,’ said Rilov.
‘The village threw Efrayim to the dogs. The British know how to honour their heroes,’ snapped Grandfather.
‘Those Indians are used to seeing monsters in India,’ said Rivka.
Efrayim drank beer, ate sausages, and bought candy bars for the cows in the same canteen he had once stolen tins of bully beef from. My uncle Avraham complained mildly that the candy bars were giving the cows worms, but they loved Efrayim because of them. His friendship with the British, on the other hand, became a public bone of contention, especially since he angrily refused to help the village defence force. Though all of the old Gang was active in the Palmach, the underground Jewish army, Efrayim would not agree to give them lessons in demolition, sniping, topography, or any of the other things he had learned in the British army.
‘Who does he think he is?’ grumbled Rilov, who knew how well versed Efrayim was in all the techniques of guerrilla warfare.
‘I would only frighten the poor boys,’ said Efrayim.
One day when the war had ended and Uri, Yosi, and I were already in our mothers’ wombs, a British army car drew up at our house. In it was Major Stoves, the two lean Scotsmen, and a red-haired sergeant with curly blond arms and the command insignia. Moving with the quiet efficiency of night fighters, they took a clinking case of beer and some tins of Players from their Land Ro
ver, carried them to Efrayim’s room, and spent the night with him there. In his report to the Committee Rilov mentioned that the commandoes hardly spoke, communicated by prearranged winks and grunts, and departed totally drunk, the sergeant shouting, ‘You’ll have the cow in two months.’
18
Like Grandfather, I too drink my tea while drawing sustenance from the bitter olive in my mouth and imbibing strength from the sugar cube between my fingers. Like him, I stand staring into the distance to see Efrayim and Jean Valjean return and Shifris finally arrive. From the rooftop of my large house I look out at the sea. White boats bob on the waves, combs bulge in the bathing suits of trim men, and burly women crouch on windsurfers, guiding their sails with distant hips while their short, stippled hair bristles in the breeze.
Once a great wave drove one of the surfers onto the rocks. I put down my binoculars, hurried to her, slung her over one shoulder and her surfboard with its sail over the other, and carried them to the safety of the sand, leaving her there in a prone position. Back on my roof again, I watched her get to her feet and look dazedly around, studying her bloodstains and my footprints on the sand.
So Grandfather stood atop the hayloft and on the terrace of the old folk’s home, looking out over the Valley for his returning son.
The old folk’s home is eleven miles from the village, a tall building that rises high above its surroundings. I went there every other day, taking a shortcut through the fields and furiously covering the distance in three hours with a pitcher of milk from the cowshed.