by Shalev, Meir
Rilov kept mum.
‘He murdered my cat Bulgakov,’ said Riva Margulis.
Since her cat’s death she had made a bastion of her storage shed, stocking it with cleaning supplies, Lysol, detergents, and thousands of rags while talking constantly about the price she had paid for the Jewish people’s return to its land.
Armed with brooms and rags, all the women of the village fought a daily battle against the dust from the cart wheels. Riva, however, was an exceptional advocate of cleanliness, and after Bulgakov’s death when the dirt drifting in through the windows stained even her purest memories, her obsession grew worse. To the three rooms in her house that were off limits she now added the bathroom, having discovered that drops of water from the shower left tiny white spots on the floor when they evaporated. ‘Tile leprosy’, she called it, sending her family to the laundry room or the cattle trough when anyone needed to wash.
The whole village saw that she was losing her sanity, but Margulis and his sons, nourished by the purest and most fragrant of all natural substances, were by nature equable and forgiving. Their lives with the bees had taught them to respect all hard workers, and they not only failed to reprimand the mad Riva but gave in to her every demand. Indeed, on the anniversary of Bulgakov’s death Margulis bought his wife an American vacuum cleaner to assuage her grief and give her something new to live for.
When Riva opened the big cardboard carton with its strong smell of still remembered luxury, her heart skipped a beat from pure ecstasy. For the rest of the evening she almost forgave her husband for putting Efrayim up to killing Bulgakov. Her whole body throbbed to the powerful motor that sucked up the dirt and left clean pathways behind it, but when she opened the machine a blissful week later, she saw that the filth was now inside. Hurt and indignant, she realised that Margulis had tricked her. Far from getting rid of dirt, the vacuum cleaner simply transferred it to another, better-concealed place. ‘Riva discovered the Law of the Conservation of Crap,’ said Uri when he heard the story.
After scrubbing the vacuum cleaner inside and out, Riva wrapped its disassembled parts in clean, soft linen, locked them in the bathroom, and went to scream at her husband in his bee shed.
‘Your machine just sweeps everything under the rug,’ she yelled. ‘I know that’s your system. It’s the way you do everything!’
One look at his wife was enough to convince Margulis that not even pure pollen could calm her.
‘Don’t come any closer,’ he said. ‘The bees might attack you.’
He himself could move among the hives without rippling the air. Through a curtain of angry worker bees prepared to defend him against all comers, he scrutinised his wife. Never before had he noticed the thick, flabby wattles that had developed on her knees from years of vigorous floor scrubbing, or the stubbiness of her fingers, which had shrunk to half their length from wielding too many rags dipped in ammonia.
‘Leave me alone, Riva,’ he said. ‘You’re not in your right mind.’
That night he went to Tonya’s, waiting outside in the dark until he saw Rilov head for his septic tank with a flashlight and a machine gun. As soon as the little trapdoor with its disguise of earth and straw shut behind him, Margulis entered the house, his dripping hands staining the doorknobs with myrrh. Extending two sweet forthright fingers to Tonya, he told her that he was agreeable.
I don’t remember Efrayim at all. Sometimes I try dredging my memory for a masked head leaning over my bed, its green eye protruding at me through the holes of a net. The mind-boggling picture of a man with a bull on his back is nowhere to be found in me either.
Nor do I remember my mother and father. I was two years old when the Mirkins were struck their double blow, the death of my parents and the disappearance of Efrayim with Jean Valjean. That’s when Grandfather took me to live with him.
Voices, mostly women’s, were heard to say in the village that an old widower was incapable of giving an infant ‘the proper home environment’, but Grandfather paid them no heed. He had raised children before, and now he simply added me to his mixture of olives, bereavement, and sugar cubes.
My loneliness and longing blur his image in my mind. Although sometimes I can conjure up a full portrait of him, pale and precise, mostly all I glimpse are scattered details that suddenly shine in a strong light, like a winter field when a sunburst pours through the clouds. A white arm resting by a glass of tea; the movement of a shoulder; a cheek and moustache leaning over me; the thin trunks of his legs, gnarled by work and years.
But I do remember a few things clearly and completely, even from my first year with him.
One is being weighed. Grandfather made sure to weigh me every month. I was still a baby when he began enriching my diet with various seeds and Margulis’s royal bee jelly. As he dressed me each morning he gently pinched my thighs and shoulders to gauge the meat on them, happily noting my phenomenal growth. It was only years later that I understood that I was being checked against his plans for me.
The weigh-in was a ritual I loved dearly. Other babies were weighed in the village clinic, and later on, as they grew older, by the nurse in school, but I was weighed by Grandfather in the village feed shed. I remember myself in cotton shorts, proudly standing barefoot on the smooth, cool metal plate of the large scales while the powerful workers who carried the fodder sacks stood laughing around me. After adjusting the sliding weights in their grooves, Grandfather took out a battered notebook, contentedly jotted down some numbers, and patted me on the back of my neck. I shut my eyes as the grizzled skin of his palm grazed my flesh.
I remember him handing me a wooden hammer and sitting down by my side to crack olives for curing. The stinging juice squirted in my eye and I ran away crying for my mother.
I remember him washing me each night with a rough pad and a bar of laundry soap, scrubbing my elbows while describing swims in a big river, large geese, and a white-breasted heron in a clump of papyrus reeds, as lovely as a bright, beckoning woman.
I remember our breakfasts well. By the time I was three he would leave my food on the table and go to work. The same things always awaited when I awoke: two slices of bread with ‘the hard part’ (which was his name for the crust) removed for me, a wedge of my favourite farmer’s cheese, some scallions, a sliced tomato sprinkled with rock salt, a hard-boiled egg, still warm, and a glass of milk mixed with colostrum from Avraham’s cows.
I would sit down to eat slowly by myself, taking pleasure in the fresh tastes and smells coming from my plate and through the window, and in my small boy’s independence. Then, wearing only my white nightshirt, I opened the screen door and skipped into the unsullied day that streamed outside. There was no one in sight. Barefoot, on soles that were already strong and tough, I crossed the black gravel to the kittens basking in the sun.
From all around came the soft bustle of the village, a dull cascade of purring engines and sprinklers, thumping hoes, rustling leaves, and the deep slurping of cattle. Even today I can hear it, like a curtain rising inside me to swaddle my ears. Looking around, I saw pigeons on a roof, ripening sunflowers, and Grandfather running toward me from the cowshed with Efrayim’s sharp pitchfork in one hand and his open trousers clutched in the other. He had been peeing behind the manure pile when he suddenly saw the hyena slinking from the fields into our yard, tail curled between its haunches and mouth slobbering with hunger and cupidity.
‘You were just sitting there teasing the kittens, throwing dust on them as they warmed themselves in the sun.’
As soon as the hyena appeared the kittens ran to hide beneath a pile of old cans while our watchdog Manya began to bark in terror. She was so frightened that she jumped onto the roof of the cowshed like a squirrel and lay there trembling on the tiles.
It was such a clear, bright day that I will always remember its bravery as being drenched in light. The hyena bared its teeth in a seductive smile, pointed its dry snout in my direction, and headed straight for me, its quivering butt so close to the ground
that it stained the ground with its smells. I wasn’t afraid of it, so I was told, because I was used to animals. Just then, however, it recoiled with a look of hardened cunning because it saw the old man running with trousers and pitchfork in his hands.
Grandfather’s white face, tense and concentrated, floated toward me through the warm air. Still on the run, he drew back his arm and flung the pitchfork at the beast, missing his mark. The hyena, a sticky slaver of anger trickling from its mouth, looked from me to Grandfather, unsure whom to deal with first. Grandfather kept on running, sobbing and groaning under his breath, threw himself on the hyena, and wrapped his bony arms around its matted chest.
The hyena screeched and wheezed, squirming and thrashing its legs, its wet teeth scraping Grandfather’s shoulder and ripping the sleeves of his grey cotton shirt to shreds. I remember the crack of snapping ribs in the clear air as Grandfather’s white arms, used to hard work, opening letters, waving goodbyes, and grafting trees, crushed the animal’s body. I didn’t even bother to stand up. Cosy and confident, or maybe just curious, I watched the struggle go on until Grandfather rose from the ground, cursing in Russian through clenched teeth, with a large, spread-eagled carcass dangling from his hands.
‘You … you … you …’ he kept moaning until the neighbours arrived and prised the corpse loose from his grip. ‘No one is going to take another thing from me. No one is going to take another thing from me,’ he said over and over as he hugged me and carried me home. For a few speechless minutes he said no more – and then, as the hyena’s poison began to course through his veins, he uttered some ancient verses to a mournful chant, rocked strangely back and forth, and was rushed to the clinic.
The neighbours’ son speared the dead hyena with the pitchfork, carried it to the manure pile behind the cowshed, doused it with oil from a yellow can, and set it on fire. The rancid smoke that rose from the corpse hung over the village for several days.
‘What a lack of historical foresight,’ Meshulam said to me years later. ‘That hyena could have been in my museum.’
It was a great deed, the villagers agreed, and a small account of it appeared in the Movement newspaper under the headline ‘Second Aliyah Man Saves Grandson’s Life.’ Once I was old enough to read, I would sit rummaging through Grandfather’s drawers, reading the clipping until I knew it by heart.
‘Ya’akov Mirkin, a Second Aliyah veteran and Valley of Jezreel pioneer, saved his little grandson Baruch Shenhar from the jaws of a marauding hyena by their house this week. Mirkin was working in the cowshed when he saw the dangerous beast, which had already attacked several residents of the Valley, approach his grandson, who was playing in the yard. With unhesitating courage he threw himself on it and choked it with his bare hands. Mirkin was bitten and taken to the clinic of the General Trade Union of the Workers of the Land of Israel Health Plan for a series of rabies shots. The little boy, Baruch Shenhar, age three, is the son of Esther and Binyamin Shenhar, who were killed last year when Arab raiders threw a bomb into their house.’
23
‘But you did so pee,’ I said to Grandfather years later, when I was older. I had asked about the story so often that I knew its every detail.
We were walking in the orchard. Grandfather was teaching me to notch the branches of the quince trees, which needed shaping because they had grown long and wild without forking properly.
‘Now tell me, my child, where do you want this branch to fork?’
I looked at him disbelievingly. I didn’t know that making branches fork was routine work in an orchard. Grandfather studied a straight branch, selected a developed bud on it, and made a crescent-shaped incision above it. The next time the tree leafed, each such bud would put out a side branch, and Grandfather would then prune the tree.
When he was a blind widower in the old folk’s home, able to see only the shades of his love for Fanya, Eliezer Liberson once told me how Grandfather made his reputation as a planter.
‘I can picture him right now with that sour orange stock of his,’ he sighed with pleasure. ‘It made a great impression. It wasn’t every day that a little socialist from Russia showed up the orange growers of the colonies.’
I knew that Grandfather had quarrelled with the citrus growers after discovering that some of them were selling bud sticks ‘irresponsibly’ and compromising the quality of the Shamouti oranges.
‘And then came the gummosis blight and wiped out whole orange groves,’ Liberson told me. ‘The trunks rotted, the leaves turned yellow, and the trees died. All the ointments and disinfectants and copper oxides and liming didn’t help. Every time a hoe was used, it was sterilised as though in a hospital, but that didn’t do any good either.’
Grandfather asked to be given an infected grove for experimental purposes, and the desperate growers, most of whom had their doubts about the young pioneers, decided to let him have what he wanted and put an orange grove, money, and workers at his disposal. Grandfather brought sturdy sour orange stock and planted it alongside the sick trees. When it was doing nicely, he peeled a strip from the trunk of each sour orange, cut a matching patch in the bark of each sick orange, tied the two trees together so that their exposed piths were in contact, and wrapped them in dry sacking for protection.
‘The dying oranges recovered as if they had received a blood transfusion,’ said Liberson.
‘The pioneers made a big ideological fuss over it,’ said Meshulam. ‘It wasn’t just a question of agronomy or botany for them. It was a symbol. The unspoiled new blood of the sour orange curing the rot in the decadent colonies – you can imagine how they went to town with it! You didn’t know? Why, it was written up in all the newspapers.’
‘Pioneers who pee don’t make the newspapers,’ joked Grandfather. But if with a child’s peevishness I liked the truth better, which was that Grandfather had been urinating in the sewage ditch, not working in the yard, when he saw the hyena, that was because it made a difference. Anyone could understand that it was easier to throw down a pail of fodder or a bundle of hay than to stop peeing in midstream.
After the incident, I would sometimes go to the cowshed in the afternoon hours when Grandfather was napping in the cabin or under a tree in the orchard. Zeitser would be leaning wearily against a wall, perusing an old newspaper that Shlomo Levin had left lying in the yard; the cows would be drowsing in the cowshed; and even the exhausted flies would be resting on dusty piles of sacks in the corner or curled up in the fodder sweetly asleep on a piece of carob. Going behind the manure pile to pee, I would suddenly force myself to stop with a round, violent squeeze, grab a pitchfork, and run back with it to the yard. After many such practice sessions, I could do it without spilling a drop.
Grandfather returned from the clinic groaning from the painful injections. The first thing he did was summon Manya, our delinquent watchdog, and give her a dressing down. Hurt and disgraced, she slunk away, taking her food bowl with her, and was never seen again. Liberson, who was the village treasurer at the time and often went to Tel Aviv, claimed to have seen her there hanging around the boardwalk cafés and toadying up to the English. ‘She was so embarrassed that she pretended not to know me,’ he guffawed.
I pulled up an armchair for Grandfather to sit in. I was, so they say, a strong child even then. No one thought me particularly bright, but I was considered ‘sturdy, responsible, and good-natured’. Grandfather sat down and told me a story of which all I remember today are the words I didn’t understand – bacillus, anthrax, hydrophobia – and a vague something about a Ukrainian peasant boy who was bitten by a rabid wolf and brought to Paris to have his life saved.
‘Yes, indeed, my child,’ said Grandfather. ‘Like Burbank, Louis Pasteur was the farmer’s friend.’
Riva Margulis and Tonya Rilov came to visit, their faces furrowed with worry. When Grandfather looked at them in astonishment, because the two of them were never seen together, they explained that the Committee had recommended that Comrade Mirkin be given chicken soup as a
restorative, and that they were volunteering to make it. Grandfather thanked them but said it wasn’t necessary. He told me to bring the hatchet and the hook, and we went to catch a chicken ourselves.
At the far end of the cowshed we found Pinness measuring the teeth and skull of the charred hyena and jotting down the results in a notebook. Serene but excited, he hurried over to us when he saw us.
‘I’m sure it’s him,’ he said. ‘I’m absolutely certain.’
He began to cut the hyena’s head off, inserting his knife deftly between the spines of the vertebrae and severing the large neck and shoulder tendons with practised strokes. A week later the animal’s white, shiny skull was on display in the glass cabinet of the nature room. As was his custom, Piness did not remove the flesh with chemicals but simply buried the carcass with the eggs of the greenbottle fly. Within a few days the newly hatched maggots had picked the hyena’s bones clean.
As soon as the anxious hens roving around by the hayloft saw Grandfather and me approach with the short hatchet and the long hook, they knew what we had come for. While Grandfather sharpened the hatchet, first honing it on a grindstone that spun around in a basin of water with a flurry of sparks and spray, then filing it down with a sickle, they ran around the yard beating their wings and screeching to one another. Grandfather, who was traditionally the family chicken killer though not much of a meat eater himself, brandished the hook, which was no more than a rusty reinforcing rod a yard and a half long and twisted at one end, swept our speckled hen Shoshanna off her feet with it, bent down with a grunt of pain because his stomach still hurt from the injections, and grabbed her by the throat.
The cows shut their horrified eyes. With a movement so lightning fast that it made me want to study it in slow motion to see how it was done, Grandfather laid Shoshanna’s neck on the concrete partition of a feed stall and brought the sharpened hatchet down on her throat. Contorted beak opened wide, her combed head dropped on his black rubber boots as he flung her startled body over his shoulder in a parabola so perfect that he did not even bother to glance at the familiar curve.