by Shalev, Meir
We walked on in silence. Slowly Daniel’s breathing grew calmer and the tremor left his cheeks.
‘The only one who ever helped me was your grandfather,’ he said at last. ‘I got over her the night he heard me howling like an idiot outside your cabin. He stepped outside with those bow legs of his and said, “You’ll never get her that way.” That’s when I, the son of Eliezer Liberson, Daniel Liberson the athlete, the dancer, the romantic lover, picked myself up off the ground and thought, “But that’s the only way to get her that I know of!”’
We fell silent again.
‘I dug her out of me the way you dig out a weed. I left nothing in the ground and I burned all the pieces. She wasn’t worth a minute of my love.’
‘I don’t know much about all that love stuff,’ I murmured.
‘That night on the mountain,’ said Daniel, ‘is the only memory I cherish. We were children. It’s hard to believe, but we were little more than babies. There were wildcats around. The jackals came up to sniff our feet. She kept talking all night. I was so afraid that I kept hugging and kissing her. I could hear her talking through my mouth.’
My mother’s vocal cords had made the air vibrate around her. The nine-year-old Daniel had had no idea that from then on his life would skid downhill on the terrible slope of disillusionment.
‘What did you say?’
‘Nothing,’ I answered. ‘Forget it.’
‘I didn’t mean to tell you all this,’ Daniel said. ‘I just happened to be passing by. I know you were very close to my parents as a boy. They loved you too. Up to a point, of course. Believe me, I never meant to tell you all this.’
‘You didn’t tell me that much,’ I said. ‘I already knew most of it anyway.’
‘You always have to know better, haven’t you?’
He regarded me curiously.
‘When you were a boy, I used to watch you a lot. I’m sure you never noticed. Once Pinness asked me to come along on a class hike of yours. I never took my eyes off you. If anything happened to you, I was sure I would be blamed for it. You were a strange boy, always tagging after Pinness. You carried his chloroform bottles and butterfly nets, and you even moved your lips when he spoke.’
‘Pinness was like a second grandfather,’ I said.
‘At their wedding and afterward everyone went around feeling sorry for me, as though I were some kind of charity case. You can’t say our village has no principles. You help a comrade in distress even if he’s young and stupid. The only one who thought it was funny was that goddess of love, my mother the field nymph.’
‘You see,’ he added after a brief pause, ‘it only happened because my mother had this thing about your poor grandmother Feyge. That was the only reason.’
‘All the loves and hates and feuds in our village are like a siphon,’ he remarked as we walked back. ‘You squeeze one end and all the crap comes out the other. In the end everything evens out and quietens down. It was me who paid the price of your grandfather’s eternal love for that woman in Russia. Meshulam killed Hagit because Pesya Tsirkin wouldn’t work on the farm. And your grandmother, poor Feyge Mirkin, paid for everyone. I still remember her, even though I was only a baby when she died. I do. My parents’ only fights were over her.’
‘Before coming to the village I saw your grandmother only a few times,’ Fanya Liberson told me when I was a child, ‘and always from a distance. The first time was near Migdal. The Workingman’s Circle was camped on a hill above us, and the effect on our commune was electric. Everyone whispered and pointed. Feyge was wearing what Jewish farmhands in the Galilee wore in those days, a white blouse with red Arab shoes. You could almost see the strings tying them to her.’
Fanya smiled. ‘I never ploughed or sowed or crushed stones. My commune was full of big idealists who talked a lot about equality and sharing and made the women work in the kitchen. The night before I had burned the lentils, and I’ll never forget what I had to put up with. The men took the full plates, banged them on the table, passed them from hand to hand, and finally dumped them on the floor. I cried all night long. Among us women, Feyge Levin was a legend.’
When Fanya arrived in the village, she asked Liberson to introduce her to Feyge. ‘I walked up to her bashfully and looked her in the eyes.’ It was then that she noticed that Grandmother’s eyes went off to either side. Without believing she was doing it, Fanya laid her hands on Feyge’s temples. ‘They were cold and damp. Her forehead always felt like frost.’
Grandmother brought her eyes into focus, and the two women became best friends. While Grandmother was having three children one after the other, Fanya had a stillbirth followed by Daniel, who was an only child.
‘You should either have married all of them or none of them,’ Fanya told Feyge. She knew that Ya’akov Mirkin’s relations with his wife were affectionate but loveless.
‘Ten years of being together had made them like three brothers and a sister,’ Fanya said whenever people swapped tales or spun theories about the Workingman’s Circle. She never forgave her husband and his two friends. From the day of Grandmother’s death she went about in a perpetual rage.
‘I saw her sitting and crying on a big black rock by the Sea of Galilee,’ Fanya told Rachel Levin. ‘It was evening, and the three of them were combing her hair. I’ll never forget that scene.’ The two old women were sitting in Rachel’s spice garden, whose etheric smells enveloped me too as I crouched in its hedges.
Daniel smiled. ‘Everyone knew you eavesdropped,’ he said. ‘Personally, I didn’t give a damn.’
We were sitting on my rooftop. ‘This is my observation post,’ I told him as I set the table.
‘I still remember your grandfather as a young man, and your grandmother, and Efrayim when he was a boy.’
‘Your grandfather was the wisest person I ever knew,’ said Daniel the next morning. ‘The wisest and the wickedest.’ He was in good spirits. Stepping out into my little garden, he picked a green pepper from a bush and ate it with relish.
‘That,’ he said, ‘was a terrific pepper. No one grows vegetables in the village any more except for Rachel Levin. We buy them in the shop like city folk. They taste that way too.’
‘I always wondered why people came from all over the world to be buried next to him,’ I said.
‘It became the fashion, I suppose. But he was certainly someone everyone looked up to. Even my father felt like a worthless so-and-so beside him. To say nothing of Tsirkin …’
‘You know,’ he added, ‘when I was a boy – and I hung around your cabin all the time, as you know – people came to him from all over to ask about their fruit trees. The whole country knew he had found the cure for gummosis in the orange groves.’
‘I guess he was thought of as a saint,’ he added a few minutes later. ‘Mirkin underneath his palm tree. Saint Mirkin of the Green Thumb, with a halo of longing over his head.’
21
A great love bound Efrayim and Jean Valjean. Before a few weeks had gone by, in the course of which the calf gained several pounds a day, his appearance on Efrayim’s shoulders was considered routine. Despite the burden, Efrayim felt as light and happy as if the calf were his own flesh and bone. By now ‘the fat Frenchy’, as the Charolais cow was called in the village, knew that her son would come home safely from his walks and had no qualms about Efrayim taking him. The calf too thought it a fine notion and waited for his master in the yard, skipping toward him with youthful coquetry and butting him playfully with his flanks and hard head as he begged to be taken out. According to my calculations, Jean Valjean must have weighed over twenty stone at the time. Though the calf did not seem heavy to Efrayim, his odd habit of carrying it around with him had its share of critics and opponents. No doubt there was grumbling among the livestock too, and certain villagers feared an insurrection among them.
Naturally, there were also jokers and spoilsports who poked fun at Efrayim and his lap calf. ‘Before you know it our cows and donkeys will demand similar
transportation,’ wrote an anonymous contributor to the village newsletter.
Wickeder tongues wagged about ‘les Misérables, Jean Valjean and his master Quasimodo’. Hearing such epithets, Grandfather turned white as a ghost and stayed that way. Esther and Binyamin hoped his colour would return with the spring, but he remained as pale as milk until his dying day. Beneath that white skin he had begun to hate with a cold and calculating passion that was already spinning threads of revenge. After a thorough investigation revealed that it was Rilov’s son Dani who had come up with the label ‘Quasimodo’, Binyamin went over to him, laid a heavy hand on his shoulder, and said, ‘You’re not safe in your own bed either, because for my part you’re kaput, got it?’
My unfortunate uncle, who had hoped that ‘his love for Jean Valjean would win him friends again in the village’, retired once more to the straits of his solitude. Silent and alone, as if thrusting aside unseen barriers, he strode along with the huge, magnificent calf on his back. Putting the streets of the village behind them, they tramped through the orange groves, orchards, and broad fields. Farmers avoided them when they saw them, and only the children still ran after them, begging to pet Jean Valjean.
Uncharacteristically, Grandfather went to his friends and demanded that his son be restored to society despite his disfigurement, lest he turn into a cattle-carrying madman. But Efrayim’s hideous, masked visage and unconventional ways were too much for the frightened villagers.
‘Our constitution made no provision for defaced children of charter members who went around with young bulls on their shoulders,’ said Grandfather bitterly. ‘And meanwhile Jean Valjean kept getting bigger and my poor son kept carrying him around.’
Upon reaching maturity, Jean Valjean weighed two hundred stone of ungovernable meat. The strength hidden in my uncle’s body inspired awe and trepidation. But since Jean Valjean was the only bull of his kind in the entire country, the villagers were soon lining up outside Efrayim’s door to seek a match for their heifers.
At first Efrayim turned them down indignantly. In the privacy of his thoughts, I imagine, the bull’s surging masculinity disturbed his peace. In the privacy of my body, I can understand that well. Efrayim had been without a woman for a very long time. I daresay he may have preferred it that way, although I know nothing about such things. But Jean Valjean wanted a mate. Anyone could see that his virile powers needed an outlet, because often his pointed member crawled out of its sheath and groped in the air like a blind man’s red cane.
At about that time a letter arrived from the Charolais district of France. I asked Busquilla, who shook with laughter, to translate it. The woman farmer who had sold her cow to the motorcycle repairman from Dijon was writing to inquire ‘whether the bull has already become frisky’, adding that ‘each drop of his crème is worth its weight in gold’. Efrayim’s English and Scottish friends were quick to point out too that the animal was no mere symbol of the fellowship of former fighting men but a practical expression of the wish to see an ex-comrade-in-arms make a go of it.
The farmers of the village were willing to pay handsomely for the enormous bull to frisk with their cows, and eager cattle raisers began turning up from neighbouring villages too. One glimpse of Jean Valjean was enough to take their breath away with the promise stored in his great bulk.
Thus Efrayim became a man of means. Rising each morning, he curried Jean Valjean’s coat, washed his short horns and hooves until they gleamed in the sun, slapped his mighty hide, and rasped affectionately, ‘Come on, you big brute, let’s get to work.’
Jean Valjean shut his eyes, tucked in his stomach, and spread his stout legs wide, and Efrayim knelt and lifted him off the ground, gripping the huge forelegs in such a way that his horrid face was almost hidden by the panting, bright, mountainous belly of the bull. In their smooth pink sac, the two heavy testicles that were now his meal ticket bounced against his chest like exotic fruit.
By the time Jean Valjean and his master disappeared, the bull’s lusty progeny were a common sight in all the cow pens of the village. Even today, on a visit, I sometimes spot a particularly bright-coloured calf, broad-headed heifer, or stout yearling with a great curly neck. Jean Valjean’s crème still bubbles in our cowsheds, foaming like white cataracts of unmentionable rebuke.
Although the village children ran after my uncle and his bull in the hope of seeing it perform, Efrayim behaved with the utmost discretion. ‘When he reached the cowshed of the heifer, he demanded that every man get out.’ Unloading his burden in a corner, he checked to see that the floor was clean and dry so that the bull would not slip and break its shank bone and stretched a curtain of jute from wall to wall before leading Jean Valjean to the cow. Outside the shed you could hear Efrayim’s soft rasp and the pounding of huge hooves, followed by the cow’s loud moan as the great weight descended on her flanks, and the heavy breathing of the ejaculating bull.
Afterwards Efrayim would lift his mask a crack, poke out his still hidden head, bashfully announce, ‘We’re finished,’ and wipe the bull’s damp groin with a special disinfectant. Within a few months he had salted away enough money to build Jean Valjean a sumptuous private barn, buy himself a radio, a gramophone, and some records, and construct a large, suspicious-looking antenna on his roof. Afternoons he spent lying in bed listening to Scottish bagpipe music or Binyamin’s records. Sometimes he had his British soldier friends over, closely watched by Rilov.
All this time Shlomo Levin continued to work on our farm. He was never anything but a rotten farmer, but his love of the soil persisted, and Grandfather was grateful to him for helping with the children and the housework when Feyge died. Now, however, Levin, reminding Grandfather that he had been ‘practically the boy’s mother’, came out against ‘Efrayim’s shenanigans’ and argued that only ordinary farm chores could help get him back to normal life. Grandfather responded bluntly.
‘Anything that makes Efrayim happy is fine with me,’ he said.
Meanwhile, Jean Valjean’s fat French mother fell ill. Having never got used to the Land of Israel, she died one day from eating castor beans. Now her huge orphan’s attachment to Efrayim grew even greater. Zeitser, who pitied the motherless bull and had a soft spot for it, as he did for anyone who stuck to one thing and did it well, got hold of Levin in the yard and told him curtly that ‘farm animals are part of our national renaissance too’.
‘If he’s strong enough to carry a bull on his back,’ retorted Levin, ‘he’s strong enough for other work. It’s not good for him to lie in his room all day long living off fornication.’
But Efrayim’s war injuries had in fact weakened him greatly. He had strength for Jean Valjean alone. Lesser burdens were too much for him. My father Binyamin, for example, could carry two fodder sacks on his back from the cart to the cowshed without even losing his breath, while Efrayim staggered under one. No one understood how he could lift a bull except Pinness, who claimed in the village newsletter that ‘the case of Efrayim and Jean Valjean is not amenable to physical or biological analysis. The phenomenon is a psychological one of friendship, willingness, ecstasy, and great hope.
‘Every man,’ wrote Pinness, ‘has a bull that he must lift. We are all flesh, seed, and a great bellow in the heart that will not rest until it is let out.’
22
One night I heard Rivka talking to Avraham.
‘Are you sure that cow was really poisoned and not slaughtered by your sister for roast beef?’
I ran anxiously to Pinness’s house. His door was never locked, and his old body, sprawled on its back with arms and legs outspread in childish trust, bespoke the faith and understanding inspired in him by all things.
‘Rivka was a bad student,’ he comforted me. He didn’t even scold me for barging in and waking him. Since Grandfather’s death I had adopted Pinness in his place, and he was now even more patient with me than usual.
‘Don’t you believe all those stories,’ he said severely. ‘There are even rumours that Ef
rayim was driven from the village because he passed secrets to the British. Major Stoves was a good friend of his, and there are people around here – I don’t have to mention any names – who took a dim view of that.’
At the time there appeared in the village a consultant on chicken breeding who spent longer than was advisable in the vicinity of Rilov’s yard. Several days later he was found in the eucalyptus woods with a dark, clotted red flower between his eyes and a page from the Bible pinned to his chest.
‘That’s nonsense,’ said Pinness. ‘Efrayim left because of your parents. He was very attached to them. Binyamin was like a brother to him. He loved him with all his heart.’
Others said that Efrayim ran away with a rubber woman who performed in the village with a man named Zeitouni, and still others that he had simply despaired of being able to ‘rejoin society’.
‘How long can a man go on keeping company with a bull?’ asked Grandfather, who spoke of his son’s fate with venomous anger.
‘Don’t bury me in their cemetery,’ he instructed me again before his death. ‘Those hyenas drove out my son. Bury me in my own earth.’
‘What did they want from us?’ asked Rivka. ‘No one could bear to look at him. He was a monster, and a crazy one at that. What did they want from us?’
‘I know Efrayim. He did it for revenge,’ said Major Stoves, who spent a whole day ransacking the Rilov place with his men without ever suspecting that the arms were cached in the septic tank.