by Shalev, Meir
The calf was the talk of the village. Two days later the British veterinarian returned for a check-up and swabbed Jean Valjean’s navel with disinfectant. He and our own vet gave Efrayim some good advice on raising him.
Every day Efrayim took Jean Valjean out for walks in the yard and orchard, and every night, after cleaning out the cowshed, he came to check that he was safe and sound and that his straw mattress was dry. Only then did he lie down blissfully in bed, his one eye glittering in the dark. Binyamin teased him, calling him ‘the Minotaur’, but Efrayim did not mind. Having never seen him before he was wounded, he said, the calf accepted him as he was.
When Jean Valjean was a month old my uncle hoisted him onto his shoulders and went out in the street for the first time since his return.
‘I’m taking him on a tour of our village,’ he announced in his splintered voice.
A few astounded glances were sent his way, but Efrayim merely croaked from underneath his mask that he was showing the calf his future home. With self-conscious smiles the villagers followed after him, petting Jean Valjean and stroking his fine limbs. Several greeted Efrayim in a friendly fashion, causing new hope to spring in his heart. His relations with the village, he decided, were looking up – and so, when Hayyim Margulis came to ask for his help in hunting down Bulgakov, he was happy to agree.
Bulgakov was Riva Margulis’s big pet cat, which had run wild and become the most dreaded killer in the area.
‘Margulis’s cat was the only animal I ever knew who killed for pleasure rather than from hunger,’ said Pinness, who devoted a special nature lesson to him. ‘It was the bad influence of human society on him.’
Having once been a pet, he explained to us, the animal had acquired human habits and forgotten ‘the laws of the jungle’.
Bulgakov was a dazzlingly long-haired silver Persian who had jumped out of the city-bound bus that stopped every day in the village, and headed straight for the Margulises’ as if he had lived there all his life. The splendid cat stepped inside and rubbed against Riva’s calves until the two of them shut their eyes with pleasure. Riva Margulis had never seen such a beautiful creature. Bulgakov leaped onto the table, lapped up some milk, and surveyed the rows of jars there with a smile. Years later Riva still swore that he had read their labels aloud: ‘Alfalfa Honey, Wildflower Honey, Pomelo Honey.’
The guest tapped a manicured claw on the Leek Honey to let Riva know that she should open it. When he was finished licking his whiskers and had curled up in her lap, she sat dreaming of her trousseau sent in a steamer trunk from Kiev, of its thick rugs confiscated by the Committee to be traded for Dutch cows and machine guns, and of the Limoges china and Steuben glass smashed in the wheat fields, where slivers of them still gleamed every autumn when the ploughshares turned up the earth.
The Persian cat arrived at the Margulises’ exactly twenty years after the last cut-glass goblet had been shattered. ‘It was the only cat in the Valley that wouldn’t drink milk with a skin on it.’ Riva was sure that it too was a gift from her parents and called it Bulgakov in honour of a young Russian cat lover she had once met at the writers’ club in Kiev.
‘I don’t care if you smear me with a hiveful of honey,’ she told her husband. ‘This cat is mine, not the village’s. It’s not going to plough or pull carts or be milked by anyone.’
She tied wine-red ribbons around Bulgakov’s neck and put out a wooden box of fine white sand for him. At lunchtime the handsome beast ate his first meal with the family.
The next day Riva Margulis took him to the village shop with her.
‘You’re making a big mistake, Riva,’ said Fanya Liberson, who noticed the cat’s crestfallen look at the sight of the poorly stocked shelves. ‘That’s no cat for a village like this. Either he’ll suffer or we will.’
In answer Riva simply petted Bulgakov. His soft fur restored the smoothness to her blistered hands and turned her husband’s dusty hayloft into a Ukrainian manor house festooned with golden ivy.
Margulis had nothing against it. ‘Just make sure he keeps away from the hives,’ he said. ‘And he’d better not touch my Italian bees.’
Riva was a fiend for cleanliness, and Bulgakov was the only member of the Margulis household who was allowed to enter every room and sit on the antimacassars. As soon as the cat snuggled up on the sofa cover, every particle of dust disappeared and the air was filled with the subtle smell of berries in sour cream and the swish of serving girls’ legs. Bulgakov shunned the hives, never climbed trees or hunted mice in the hayloft, and stood his ground when attacked by Rilov’s dogs, studiously raising a large paw at the offender while baring his sharp claws one by one like a series of lightning bolts.
Three years passed in this fashion until, strolling through the fields one night with a lordly expression of boredom on his face, Bulgakov found himself in the thicket by the spring and soon met the wildcat, the eagle owl, and the mongoose. Although no one knew exactly what transpired there, his lifestyle underwent a drastic change. First he altered his meow to a hoarse, raucous screech; next he lost his good manners and became brusque, short-tempered, and violent. But though everyone noticed it, no one guessed what it would lead to. As always in our village, the warning signs were ignored. Had not the villagers already seen dogs run off to howl with the jackals, farmers’ sons abscond for the city, calves elope with water buffalo? ‘To say nothing,’ added Uri, ‘of the time one of Rilov’s carrier pigeons flew away to nest in the cliffs with the wild rock doves and gave away all his military secrets.’ No one suspected for a moment, however, that such would be the fate of Bulgakov, not even when he cropped his magnificent fur to an evil crewcut, grew tufts of savage black lynx hair on his ears, and finally ran away from home, leaving an amazed Margulis and a shocked Riva behind.
Riva went to look for him, scattering fried livers, beloved cream dishes, and piles of pure kitty sand in the fields – all in vain. Sometimes she saw him flit like a shadow among the fruit trees. Once she ran after him, begging him to come home. But Bulgakov merely bared his fangs at her and hissed. An overwhelming smell of rotten meat and digestive acids seeped from his gullet. Riva went home in tears and spent the night scrubbing door handles with lemon juice and brass polish.
His lust for murder caused Bulgakov to strew the chicken coops with hundreds of slit-necked, blood-spangled birds. Like all born-again evangelicals, he observed the commandments of his new life with uncompromising zealotry. So ferocious was he that the chickens, who generally made an insane racket at the slightest danger, were struck dumb when his handsome face appeared outside the wire fences of their homes. Ravaging whole coops of young Anconas, he wreaked the greatest havoc on his ex-masters. Try as they might to trap and ambush him, the farmers met with no success. They even brought a Druze hunter from the mountain, but when the devilish beast leaped on his neck and ripped his shirt and cap, the man turned pale and went home muttering prayers.
Desperately Margulis turned to Rilov, who summoned two old Watchmen from the Galilee. And yet their riding boots, old Arab cloaks, Mauser pistols, and secret passwords did not impress the cat at all. Slippery and clever, he knew the ways of men too well to be fooled by traps and poisoned meat. And he was as noiseless as a cloud.
‘I’m sure he has the chickens so scared that they actually open the gate for him,’ said Margulis to Grandfather and Efrayim.
Efrayim borrowed a rifle and a single cartridge from the British, waited for the sun to set, and took up a position amid the bales in Margulis’s hayloft. I can picture his good eye peering through the wisps of hay. When Bulgakov appeared he crept out of his hiding place and stalked the cat quietly from the rear, smiling to himself behind his beekeeper’s mask.
Margulis and Grandfather were hiding in the storage shed. ‘We looked out of the window and saw the beast and the hunter go by like two apparitions.’ Three green points, two low and one high, glowed in the dark. By the entrance to the brooding coop Efrayim called to the cat, ‘Hands up!’
/> Bulgakov froze. ‘Less from fright than from astonishment,’ Grandfather explained. The hairy tufts bristled on his ears as he spun around to see who had bested him. But when Efrayim stripped the mask from his face, the cat dropped his jaw in horror. Into his open mouth flew the single bullet, the copper nose of which Efrayim had filed almost in two beforehand. The dumdum splintered in Bulgakov’s skull, blowing his brains to wicked smithereens that went on squirming on the ground and walls.
‘Now the two of us look the same,’ said Efrayim to the mangled corpse, which was still twitching and secreting sticky poisons, and then he went back to his room.
20
Sometimes visitors from the village drop by: a hungry soldier on his way home from his base, or the village treasurer or a crop manager whose business has brought him to the metropolis on the coast. They walk through the large house in amazement, stepping out on the lawn to look at the female bathers on the beach. The younger ones shyly ask to borrow a swimming costume, which I don’t happen to own, while the older ones find the panorama too much for them and stare down at the ground or into the nearest hedge, seeking the reassurance of familiar boundaries and limits.
I’ve had my fill of the sea. I don’t even hear the sound of the surf any more unless I make an effort to listen. The waves too have lost their hypnotic effect on me. Close up, the sea is stripped of its intrinsic menace. Soft and lazy, it wallows fastidiously in the sun, and even in winter, when it turns grey and bitter and is pimpled by rain, there is something clownish about it. I don’t swim in it and it doesn’t scare me.
‘How are you doing?’ they ask.
‘Just fine.’
I do my best to play the host. The not baseless rumours of my wealth have got around. Perhaps they expect me to serve prime beef and lamb chops, but I still wear the same old clothes and eat what I ate in the village. I just don’t drink colostrum any more, because I’m big and strong enough as it is, exactly as Grandfather wanted me to be. At one end of the lawn I mixed eight cubic yards of soil from the village with the sand of the garden. Busquilla brought it in the black farm truck, and I grow a few tomato plants and some scallions, cucumbers, and peppers. My hens, which used to run loose, now lay their eggs in captivity because the neighbour’s children threw stones at them and I was afraid I might retaliate too savagely.
‘It’s very nice,’ say the guests, circulating through the rooms with the same careful steps they once took past the graves of Pioneer Home. Subdued and uncertain, they look for secrets and explanations.
I entertain them in the kitchen, where I make a salad, hard-boil some eggs, mash potatoes with yoghurt and fried onions, and slice a herring.
‘What’s going on in the village?’
They tell me about Rachel Levin, whom the years have not touched; about the wife of Ya’akovi the Committee head, who started a drama society; about the arguments over who is supposed to sign for whose debts; about Margulis’s son, who defied our co-operative marketing system and created mayhem at a general meeting by opening a private roadside stand for the produce of his bees.
‘A lot of it has to do with you,’ said Uzi, Rilov’s grandson, who appeared suddenly one day, several months before he was killed in a war, as if he had quite forgotten jumping on my back and pulling my ears or his father Dani calling Efrayim nasty names. I don’t blame him for it. I know now that there are people who don’t remember like I do, and it no longer surprises me. Like Meshulam, after all, I used the memory lanes of others to train in.
‘A lot of it has to do with you,’ Uzi accused me. ‘You ruined something basic in our life.’
‘I did what Grandfather wanted,’ I answered wearily.
Uzi gave me an annoyingly shrewd smile. ‘You can tell an old pal like me the truth,’ he said. ‘Stop pretending to be so stupid. Everyone knows by now that you’re smarter than they thought and a hell of a lot smarter than you look.’
One day I opened the door to find Daniel Liberson standing there.
‘I happened to be in the neighbourhood,’ he said sullenly.
‘Come in,’ I said.
Daniel was the first visitor who did not make a detour around the Chinese carpet in the living room. He trod over it in his work boots straight to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, and peered inside.
‘Don’t you have any cold water?’
Almost apologetically I showed him the little device in the door that spewed ice cubes.
He smiled. ‘I can see there’s been progress since your grandmother sat crying in our house because she couldn’t have your uncle’s refrigerator from America.’
I could easily picture him crawling in nappies toward my mother’s cot. He still had the same loving devotion in his face and the same murderous itch in his fingers.
He looked out of the window and took a deep breath.
‘The air is so different here,’ he said. ‘Come, Baruch, let’s take a walk on the beach.’
Daniel walked slowly, the intervals between his footprints as exact as if spaced by a ruler. I waved to the distant figure of David, the old man who rents out beach chairs.
‘So what do you do all day?’ Daniel asked.
‘Nothing special.’
‘Sometimes, on the anniversary of my father’s or my mother’s death, I visit your old place. Uri is doing a good job. He’s a good farmer. Serious. He’s changed a lot, your cousin. For the better.’
Daniel looks like neither of his parents. Eliezer Liberson had a head of curly hair until he died. Daniel is almost entirely bald, more rugged and quiet than his father.
‘Sometimes, too, I go to visit your mother’s grave on the hill.’
If that’s what he wants to talk about, I thought, let him talk. I wouldn’t stop him. I was bound and chained just like he was. The same ring of earth and memories led us both around by the nose.
‘It doesn’t upset me any more,’ he continued. ‘Today I think that I fell in love with her at the right age and that it broke off at the right age too.’
There was a sudden roar behind us. A boy and girl on a blue motorcycle were riding by the water’s edge, spraying wet sand in a flare of golden limbs and toothy tyre marks.
‘To this day, even when I have grown children with the woman I married, there are people who look at me with Esther in their eyes.’
I don’t know Daniel’s wife well. She’s a small, sturdy, hardworking woman who reminds me of a donkey. He brought her to the village, nervous and excited, from an immigrants’ settlement where he worked as an agricultural adviser. The news on her in the village is that ‘for a Romanian, she’s all right’.
‘They still remember Esther and me when we were children. Meshulam says that our love was seen as an opportunity, a prophecy straight out of Pinness’s Bible lessons. Liberson’s son and Mirkin’s daughter. And if it weren’t for my mother and your grandfather, it would have come true.’
‘How is Meshulam?’
He fumbled for words. ‘You could have been my son,’ he murmured. ‘You would have been different then.’
‘I would have been someone else,’ I said.
‘It was puppy love,’ said Daniel. ‘At the age of eight, when all the boys hate all the girls, Pinness put us next to each other in the school choir and I fell in love with her.’
‘There are more versions of what happened in our Valley than there are people it happened to,’ Meshulam once said to me.
‘When we were about eight or nine years old she made me go to the mountain with her. “There are pheasants there,” she said. “I want to catch some and pick flowers to dry.” We roamed around all day, and when the sun went down she said, “Let’s stay and sleep between the rocks.” Nothing scared her. And yet, you know, even then she made me feel I was protecting her. A nine-year-old girl …
‘We spent all night among the rocks, and it was then that she told me she could never marry me because I was too serious. Too loving and dependent. At the age of nine! All that meat made her think
like a woman, even if she still looked like a little girl.’
‘What happened?’
‘Zeitser found us in the morning. The village was out looking for us all night. Rilov brought Bedouin shepherds down from the hills and horsemen from Tel Adashim, but the only one who ever managed to find lost children was Zeitser. He brought us home.’
‘I meant what happened between the two of you.’
‘What happened?’ His voice rose to a bellow. Two fishermen who came to the beach every evening turned to stare at us. ‘You want to know what happened? Are you making fun of me? You mean to tell me you don’t know?’
I didn’t answer. Comparing versions of old stories always left me disappointed.
‘She chose your father instead of me because he was such a big, solid, dumb animal that he gave her the most marvellous feeling of masculine apathy.’
‘He saved her life,’ I shouted. ‘When you and Efrayim went running for a ladder, he caught her in his arms.’
‘What?’ roared Daniel. ‘That’s what they told you? That he saved her life?’
I said nothing.
‘They were a very interesting couple, your father and mother. Very interesting. The village is full of wild stories – that I courted her with pots of roast meat, that I ran shouting through the eucalyptus woods instead of coming to her wedding, that I ploughed her name in letters a mile wide …’
‘You didn’t?’
‘Tell me,’ said Daniel, turning toward me belligerently, ‘do you think that at ploughing time, when you’re racing to get the grain sown, anyone has time to make mile-wide letters? What the hell world do you live in, I’d like to know! Do you have any idea what’s happening in the village? Do you have any idea what’s happening in the country? Do you know that the Movement is in big trouble? That the young people are leaving and everyone is up to their necks in debt? That farmers are selling their cows and tearing out their orchards? Has anyone told you that men have been getting killed in wars, or do you think that the dead soldier’s memorial gravestone is just one more fossil Pinness dug up from the earth?’