by Shalev, Meir
The beheaded chicken, a flying fountain of blood, fell, writhed, and rose to its feet for its death dance. Grandfather moved away. He disapproved of the hypnotic way I stared at the hen doing her last little jitterbug. ‘That’s something you must have got from your mother,’ he said.
Meanwhile Shoshanna ran back and forth, staggering and stumbling as the blood burbled from her headless throat and seeped into the ground with the ghastly yet attractive silence of a soul and body now suffering separate fates.
Even when her head and throat, with their vocal cords, memories, and pain centres, were lying on the straw by the feed stall, I feared that the hen might put herself back together and walk off. To be on the safe side, I picked up the bodiless head and threw it to the cats.
Shoshanna was beginning to slow down. Her friends went back to pecking by her side as though nothing had happened. The fiery little cockscomb in my trousers was dying too. When she finally collapsed, I went to take a good look at her last gasps. There was a brief spasm and a few more short jets of blood before some pink and black froth bubbled up with a curious wheeze from her slashed white gullet. Grandfather came, stamped on the puddle of blood to mix it well with the earth, and brought Shoshanna to Aunt Rivka to be plucked. The swarm of green flies spattered across the yard by her dance did not disappear for several hours.
That evening Fanya Liberson came to make the soup. Beautiful as always, she sat watching Grandfather eat Shoshanna and read him the village charter in her mellifluous voice.
‘“Our goal is to create a community of workers that will live from its own labours without exploitation…
‘“Our path is one of integrating reality with ideology …
‘“The children of all members will receive equal and common educational opportunities …
‘“The village’s institutions will meet the spiritual and economic needs of every family …”’
‘Mutual aid’, ‘self-sufficiency’, ‘the status of women’, ‘the return to the earth’ – the comforting phrases sounded in Grandfather’s room until his suffering features softened with sudden forgiveness. A bored smile played over the corners of his mouth, and he fell asleep like a baby. His face while he slept was like his face when he died, when I took his warm, soft, white body and buried it in the earth he had wished to be laid to rest in.
24
After Shulamit arrived and took Grandfather to the old folk’s home, I went to Pinness when I wanted to hear stories. He lived by the water tower in a small house surrounded by an unusual garden of indigenous shrubs and wildflowers. In it he had planted dark corms of cyclamen and giant, colourful anemones; bulbs of oriental hyacinth brought from the hills above the Sea of Galilee; and wild lupin from the Carmel, with large poisonous seeds that produced splashes of bright royal purple. He had taken jonquils and veronicas from the swamp flora left by the spring, and his red buttercups were as shiny as if varnished by the village carpenter.
‘If I had wanted rosebushes and chrysanthemums, I would have stayed in Russia,’ he declared.
‘The orchid is a marvellous wildflower that human beings have made an invalid,’ he once said to me, scolding me for liking Peker the saddler’s stories about being sent by a Russian officer to woo ‘the general’s beautiful daughter’ with bouquets of orchids.
‘Even Luther Burbank, who cultivated roses and chrysanthemums, swore never to touch the orchid. Its fate has been like that of the poor girls in China who have their feet bound in infancy.’
Each time I opened his green gate and walked up the flagstone path to his house, I again became ‘Baruch from the fourth form’ who was sent to the old teacher once a week for hitting another child.
‘Why don’t you go to Ya’akov to calm down a bit? Maybe he can make a human being out of you.’
He was the village’s first teacher. He had taught my mother; he had taught my uncle Efrayim and my uncle Avraham; he had taught Uri, Yosi, and me. Pinness had taught everyone. Each time he started a group of five-year-olds on the alphabet you could feel a quiet sense of excitement throughout the village. People even gathered by the school fence to hear the laughter of the new pupils through the window. He never began with the letter alef but always with heh. ‘The sound it makes, children, is “ha”. Say it after me: ha ha ha ha ha!’ For a year or two he played with them, took them for walks, and cast his spell over them, until they discovered that they were saddled with his bit firmly in their mouths and accepted his authority with a love and a longing that lasted the rest of their lives.
Of all the non-farmers in the village, Pinness alone was treated with full respect. Though the children sometimes made fun of him, he never ceased to awe them even when he was a retired ex- principal who would walk into a classroom without knocking, say, ‘Don’t let me bother you,’ to the anxious teacher and excited pupils, and sit there watching the lesson with yearning and love.
No matter how many new teachers came to the village, Pinness never condemned them for their ignorance or wrong educational views.
‘It’s like tilting at windmills,’ he would say, ‘as when one doth hunt a partridge in the mountains.’
Students who got into trouble were sent to see him at home. Slowly the culprit would approach the hedge of arborvitae, open the green gate, walk up the flagstone path while being sprayed by the little sprinkler, and hesitantly open the never-locked door. Putting a friendly hand on the boy’s damp neck, Pinness would lead him to the little kitchen, make him a cup of tea from an essence that was always in readiness, and talk to him. Sometimes it was about field drainage; sometimes about the parable of the vineyard in the Book of Isaiah, or bisexual flowers and their amazing strategies for avoiding self-pollination. Long after returning to the classroom with a cracker or a piece of candy in hand, the child would still feel the old teacher’s warmth and the sweetness of the tea he had drunk.
In Pinness’s younger days he would yoke a waggon to a team of mules and take twenty pupils at a time – ‘Up you go, children, shake a leg there, my little flowers’ – for a spring hike that lasted two weeks.
Old Zeitser, who was very critical, once expressed the desire to come along on one of Pinness’s last spring hikes. Tired but excited, he returned smelling of campfire smoke and crushed wild garlic leaves to announce that ‘you don’t find teachers like that anymore’.
Pinness took us to Mount Gilboa to teach us David’s lament for Saul and Jonathan, to En-Dor when we read Tchernichovski’s poem about the witch from there whom King Saul consulted, and to the Jordan Valley when we studied the history of the Movement. He showed us the scent stations of the deer, the pollen trap of the bee orchid, and the sticky nets of the orb weaver in the rockrose. We, his little emissaries, gathered for him bits of ancient pottery from the old archaeological site, skink eggs from the fields, fossils from the limestone rocks of the hills. He sorted them, catalogued them, put them in boxes, and sent them to professors in Jerusalem and London. Beneath starry skies he took us out to the fields at night to see ‘the heavenly bodies’ and hear ‘the plainsong of the toads’.
‘Feyge died slowly,’ he told me while serving tea and biscuits. He threw me a suspicious look, as if uncertain whether I understood. ‘She was sick. She was overworked. Not everyone had the strength for those days. And she had given birth to several children in a row. Efrayim came right after Avraham, and your mother Esther a year after Efrayim. It was more than her body could take.’
I described the way I had seen Mandolin Tsirkin looking at Grandmother’s photograph.
‘All three of them loved your grandmother,’ he sighed. ‘They adored her and put her on a pedestal. They just didn’t love her as a man loves a woman.’
‘Fanya says they were like three brothers and a little sister.’
‘They were like three brothers and a little brother,’ said Pinness. ‘A little brother they were crazy about. Do you understand what I’m telling you?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
There’s somethi
ng about my big, dense body that makes people think I’m slow-witted.
‘I know how attached you are to your grandfather. He’s really an outstanding personality. And I know how hard it is for you without him. But he loved another woman, and he waited for her and fought against her all his life. That’s something you must realise by now.’
‘Then why did he marry Grandmother?’
‘My child,’ Pinness laughed, ‘it was the Workingman’s Circle’s decision. Today that sounds like one of their practical jokes, but back then such things were really voted on. When I was in the commune in the Jordan Valley, there was once a meeting to determine which women should get pregnant and when. That’s when I left with Leah and the twins in her womb. The kibbutz next door had a huge debate about whether saying “good morning” and “good evening” was a bourgeois custom or not.
‘Maybe they were afraid she would end up with someone else. Maybe they simply didn’t think it through. She never understood the relations that had formed among them either. Why, all four of them used to swim naked together in the Sea of Galilee. Today no one can understand that, not even they themselves, not even that great scholar Meshulam Tsirkin. Knowest thou the time when the wild goats of the rock bring forth? Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? Out of whose womb came the ice? And the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it?’
He patted the back of my neck. ‘You’re a strange lad,’ he said. ‘Yosi’s a little muzhik, Uri reminds everyone of Efrayim, and you’re the old folk’s boy, Mirkin’s orphan. Come, my child, let me put you to work. You can help me out in the garden.’
Efrayim disappeared with Zeitouni’s troupe, carrying Jean Valjean on his shoulders, as soon as the week of mourning for my parents was over. The bomb thrown into their house had rolled beneath my bed, where it lay hissing and smoking. The crack of the window as it shattered woke my father, but precious seconds went by before he smelled the burning fuse, realised what had happened, and switched on the light. Raking me up in his arms blanket and all, he threw me through the window like a bundle. Then he threw himself on my mother, who twined her arms and legs around him and smiled in her sleep.
The villagers heard the explosion in the meeting house, where they were holding a general assembly. On the agenda was the replacement of several main irrigation pipes, an issue they were stormily debating. Together they burst from the building and ran toward the receding echoes of the blast, the crackle of burning walls, and the smell of roasted flesh.
By the time they passed Rilov’s yard, all was quiet again. The cows had stopped screaming and gone back to chewing their cud. The smoke had dispersed. In distant Berlin I picture Daniel Liberson waking from a nightmare and wailing, ‘I want to go home!’ like a baby in a voice that could be heard far and near. He shat in his trousers, sucked his thumb, and crawled like a lizard over his bed until his buddies wrapped him in a sheet and rocked him back to sleep. In the morning two Scotsmen who knew many languages and roads arrived to escort him on the long way back to Palestine.
The leather pants from the Tyrol, the wedding dress, Efrayim’s letters to Binyamin – all went up in flames. ‘The only thing we could hear in the darkness was an infant’s hurt sobs. We searched with our torches and found you crawling half naked in the grass, covered with large moths.’
I was two years old.
‘We’ll raise him with Yosi and Uri,’ said Avraham.
But Grandfather wrapped me in a blanket and took me home with him. All night long he cleaned the soot and the charred powder of moth wings off me and tweezed little pieces of glass from my body. In the morning he dressed me and took me to stand with him by the coffins, which were already on display in the meeting house, draped in the flag and black bunting.
Rilov was there, dazed and overwhelmed by failure. ‘At least they died in their bed,’ was the best comfort he could offer Grandfather, who smiled wanly.
‘Yes, Rilov, you’re right. They did die in their bed,’ he said, patting the Watchman on the shoulder where his skin was grooved by his rifle strap.
‘That idiot,’ Uri said to me. ‘It runs in that whole family. What else can you expect from a man whose grandfather was the only Jew in Russia to rape Cossacks?’
‘Mirkin is raising another orphan,’ the villagers said. Shlomo and Rachel Levin came to make lunch and returned to offer their help. But Grandfather told them, ‘Avraham will run the farm and I’ll raise the child by myself.’
Jean Valjean rubbed up against the cypress trees that bordered the cemetery. Efrayim and Avraham shovelled earth onto my parents’ graves. National eminences and leaders of the Movement came to give speeches. Grandfather held me in his arms while Tsirkin and Liberson stood like two snapshots on either side of him.
Afterwards the crowd broke into little groups that laid the usual flowers and pebbles on the graves.
‘Come, Baruch,’ said Grandfather to me. ‘Schnell, schnell.’
‘You laughed because you knew those words from home.’ He lifted me up and put me on his shoulders.
The village got over the tragedy. ‘We were made of the toughest of cloths.’ There wasn’t a house without its dead, whether from malaria or from a bullet, from the kick of a wild mule or at the hands of the deceased himself. ‘Or of the nation we served, or of the Movement and its dreams.’
‘In the Diaspora too the Jewish people spills its blood,’ wrote Liberson of my parents in the village newsletter. ‘Yet there Jewish blood is as pointless in death as in life. Here there is meaning to both our lives and our deaths, because our Homeland and our Freedom call to us. May our determination be redoubled by our grief. We have chosen life, and we shall surely live.’
25
It was blind chance, said Pinness, concluding a conversation about the theory of evolution, that Zeitouni had returned to perform in the village right after my parents’ death.
Like the obscene shouts from the top of the water tower, the recurrent visits of the hyena, the annual arrival of the Russian pelicans, and Shulamit’s reunion with Grandfather – so the tawdry acrobat had come back to the fields of the village. Two tall, emaciated horses pulled a sorry-looking canvas-covered waggon trailing an old bear in a rusty cage. Juniper coals, pancake make-up, trompe l’oeil, and legerdemain emanated from the little caravan.
Zeitouni was a former Hasid from Tiberias who had lost his home and family in a flood. According to Rachel Levin, who knew him from then, he had shaved off his beard after the disaster, thrown his skullcap and prayer shawl into the torrents of brown water that had carried off everything dear to him, sold the Torah scrolls that were an ancient family heirloom, and begun to wander with his troupe between Damascus, Jerusalem, Hebron, and Beirut.
It was thus that he arrived in the Valley, so that his appearance among us and Efrayim’s vanishing were all the fault of the flood. Grandfather, however, who believed neither in chance, omens, nor blind destiny, but only in flight and escape, was sure that Efrayim would have disappeared in any case and that the villagers and not Zeitouni were to blame.
‘Bury me in my earth,’ he wrote on a piece of paper. He knew that I collected all his notes. He had planned his revenge with a clear and calculating precision, marking weak points and baring soft underbellies.
At first Zeitouni made a living from petty theft and ordinary miracles of the kind known to him from his Hasidic life. He sold brass amulets to childless women, cured the pox by numerology, set piles of wet wood on fire with cunning incantations, and made rain by invoking the Tetragrammaton. But though such deeds aroused fervent hopes in various places up and down the Land of Israel, Zeitouni’s pitiful wonders inspired only scorn and compassion in the Valley. ‘We saw enough of that nonsense in the Hasidic courts of the Ukraine,’ declared Eliezer Liberson to the nods of the other founding fathers.
At the end of his first appearance, which took place the year the village was founded, Zeitouni was received with less than overwhelming applause. When the troupe’s performance was
over he was approached by Mandolin Tsirkin, a merry young descendant of Hasidic rabbis himself on his mother’s side and of leading Bolsheviks on his father’s. Brandishing his hoe, Tsirkin proceeded to dig a deep ditch. The deeper he dug, the louder the earth growled, until finally, when the hoe struck the crust of the pent-up swamp, sharp blades of rushes popped up in a loathsome cloud of mosquitoes and lanced Zeitouni’s delicate skin. Muscular leeches shinnied up his skinny calves and hung on there, while pale worms sought to drag him down into the depths. He stood screaming every prayer he knew until Rilov forced him to sing the old Valley favourite ‘Friend of the Frog’ and whisked him to safety with the tip of his whip.
‘Sleight-of-hand and silly tricks, how low can you get,’ commented Pinness. ‘Here today and gone tomorrow. He’s one big non-productive vagabondish bluff.’
Efrayim had spent such a quiet week by my parents’ fresh graves on the hilltop that neither Feyge, Esther, Binyamin, nor any of the other dead noticed he was there. He did not even speak when Jean Valjean placidly cropped the juicy grass growing between the graves and lapped up the flowers on the gravestones with his long tongue. He drank from the cemetery sprinkler, ate the fruit of the big jujube tree on the next hill, and roasted partridges who never knew if what hit them was a wildcat, hawk, or polecat. At night he watched the Little Owl bow and scrape on the cemetery fence, regarding him with phosphorescent golden eyes.
On the seventh day, as my uncle rose to go home, Zeitouni’s entourage slipped out of the shadows of the eucalyptus woods, crossed the track formerly used by the British ack-ack guns, and pitched camp by the spring. It wasn’t long before small fires crackled beneath iron tureens and good smells of roast meat and potage rose in wisps of smoke that drifted up Efrayim’s mangled nostrils.