by Shalev, Meir
The wandering players ate their meal while chatting in loud tones that carried through the clear, translucent air. Among them was a thin, top-hatted Assyrian magician who was also the bear trainer, an Arab fortune-teller whose enormous buttocks thumped together as she walked to the tinkle of the coins in her brassiere, and a strong man who had split the logs for the fire between his forefinger and thumb. Drawing the curtain on the caravan, Zeitouni took from the rear a small wooden box the size of a fruit crate, out of which wiggled a double-jointed rubber woman who snaked softly like an adder on the ground. Through the shimmering heat waves Efrayim’s sharp eye saw her brown-grey skin glitter as her boneless body, freed from its bonds, coiled and slithered with soft susurrations.
According to Uri, Efrayim had seen such a woman once before, during the war, in a port city of Algeria. Lowering themselves by ropes from the roof and scaling the walls like spiders, his commando unit had just captured the Foreign Legion fortress commanding the harbour. After tossing grenades through all the windows, they set out to clear the city of snipers.
Someone opened fire on them from one of the houses. The men stormed inside, shot the sniper, and found themselves surrounded by frightened girls dressed in see-through fabric and coughing from the dust of bullet holes and smashed powder jars. When the smoke of battle had cleared, the whores, convinced the soldiers were American, asked for chewing gum. Captain Stoves, Efrayim’s platoon commander, borrowed a lipstick from one of them and stepped outside. As he was scrawling ‘Off Limits For All Ranks’ on the front door, he was shot in the left knee and forced to drag himself back inside.
Though the girls wore heavy silk veils over their faces, Uri related excitedly, their nipples could gauge the width of each commando’s shoulders through their lace clothes. Pouring spicy perfumes on Captain Stoves’s wound, they dressed it and laid him down on a soft divan to watch their act. Its principals were two tall Senegalese whose tribal morés allowed them to copulate only standing up, in such a manner that the male partner bumped his head against the arched alabaster ceiling upon climax; a young Hungarian with a velvet-lined oral cavity and fleshy flower petals fluttering in the depths of her throat; and an Anatolian shepherdess whose armpits, perfumed with tincture of nasturtium buds, sprouted long braids festooned with coloured ribbons, while her pubic hair – as could be seen by anyone giving it a gentle tug to make sure it wasn’t a wig – fell in a dense, curly curtain from her navel to her knees. There was also a Communist from Cracow, a Jewess with thin eyebrows who demanded absolute silence in her boudoir so that she could concentrate on speaking from between her legs. ‘Not that Efrayim understood a word, because he knew no Yiddish,’ Uri rhapsodised. Each time he told the story, the marvels of the prostitutes grew greater.
They did their best to entertain the platoon, and ‘Efrayim learned in a night whatever our veterinarian’s wife still hadn’t taught him.’ Coloured fountains shot up merrily from the establishment’s bidets, and trained pornithological jackdaws cawed in all the languages they knew to arouse the young lads and ladies. One bright talent performed the dance of the rubber woman, which ended with her applauding herself by clapping the soles of her feet behind her back. Zeitouni’s rubber woman, Uri explained, reminded Efrayim of the little silver bells on the toes of this Algerian harlot, which had gone on tinkling in his ears when her dance was done, in a purple-canopied bed on the building’s second storey.
Pinness saw them setting up camp by the spring and didn’t know what to do. Normally one spoke to Rilov in such cases, but Pinness and Rilov weren’t on speaking terms. In the end he ran to tell Margulis. Margulis told Tonya, who hurried outside and knocked on the iron door of the arms cache.
She was greeted by a flashlight and the twin barrels of a shotgun.
‘What do you want?’ demanded Rilov, grabbing his bullwhip, jumping on his horse, and galloping off to the fields as soon as he was told that Zeitouni had arrived.
Like all the founding fathers, Rilov knew Zeitouni and didn’t like him.
‘Care for a bite?’ asked Zeitouni, reaching for a ladle and removing the cover from a pot as Rilov rode up.
‘What do you want here, Zeitouni?’ snapped Rilov, rearing his horse.
‘We’ll have something to eat, put on a show, and be on our way.’
‘You’ll have nothing to eat, put on no show, and be on your way!’ Rilov corrected him, adding his usual threat about out-of-bed deaths.
Zeitouni smiled. ‘This is our livelihood,’ he said in a syrupy voice. ‘And it’s all the same to me where I die.’
‘You’re not dealing with just anyone!’ Rilov threatened him. ‘I’m Committee!’
Zeitouni, however, was made of sterner stuff than train engineers and argued unperturbedly back. Rilov’s first thought was to call Mandolin Tsirkin to swamp the circus owner again. Despite appearances to the contrary, he was by no means an extremist and ‘made do with reaching for his whip, which lay folded in his saddlebag’.
Just as the strong man, reading Rilov’s mind, was about to desert the rock he had been sitting on and join the fray, men and women began arriving from the village in animated conversation, eager to have their minds taken off the oppressive atmosphere of mourning that had lain over them for a week. While Pinness ran after them, stumbling over the uneven ground as he shouted at them to come back, Zeitouni signalled his troupe to begin and shinnied up a large palm tree to direct it.
‘But why did it matter to you?’ I asked Pinness.
He still remembered all the pros and cons from the day of Efrayim’s disappearance. ‘Look here, Baruch,’ he said, calm and affable, ‘apart from the fact that we had just buried your parents, there were a few matters of principle involved. Men and woman seeking to strike roots in the earth after two thousand years of alienation from it didn’t need to see a Jewish tightrope act; that fortune-teller might have foretold a future that didn’t square with our own vision; and the fraudulence of the magician could have misled our youth into looking for easy solutions to our problems – solutions whose whiff of opportunism would only have heightened the doubts that were already undermining our resolve.’
His voice dropped to the Russian whisper. ‘Besides which, we could never have allowed that queen of the cesspool – that rubber woman, that human chamber pot – to display her lewd obscenities. Who could have doubted for a moment that her unmentionable bumps and grinds would have a bad effect on our young farmers? Yea, for a whore is a deep ditch, and a strange woman is a narrow pit.’
We were sitting on the wooden bench by Grandfather’s grave. Pioneer Home had already overrun all of Grandfather’s land. Avraham and Rivka were abroad, Yosi was a career officer rising rapidly in the army, and Uri was driving tractors for his uncle in the Galilee.
The money piled up in the cowshed, and a good smell of flowers and well-nourished earth hung in the air. A few visitors circulated among the large gravestones, pleasantly crunching the gravel under their shoes: relatives of the deceased, high- school students writing sentimental essays, and hefty female youth group leaders waddling around inhaling the fragrance of the dappled shadows. A silvery shadow herself through the glimmering wings of the bees that swarmed about her, Tonya Rilov sat in her usual place on Margulis’s grave. ‘She’s his true gravestone,’ responded Uri with surprising pathos when I wrote and told him how old Tonya sat sucking and licking her fingers without cease on the grave of her beloved.
Busquilla strolled up and down the paths with two young Americans, the sons of a cosmetics manufacturer from New York by the name of Abe Cederkin, a one-time member of the Jordan commune who had sent them to pick out his grave site. They were in a state of high emotion.
‘Wonderful,’ they kept saying. ‘Marvellous.’
Busquilla thanked them for their compliments.
‘Our father worked in Baron de Rothschild’s winery for three weeks before his mother took sick and he had to leave Palestine,’ they told Busquilla.
‘A good pioneer had
to think of his mama too,’ Busquilla beamed. He showed them a few available sites on a map of the cemetery. ‘The price varies according to the distance from Ya’akov Mirkin, may his memory sustain us,’ he explained.
‘Our father worked with Mirkin for four days in Petach Tikvah,’ said the two.
‘All Jews are brothers,’ replied Busquilla. ‘Who didn’t work with Mirkin at one time or another?’
‘Our father wants to know how Balalaika Tsirkin is doing,’ said the older son.
‘Mandolin,’ Busquilla corrected him. ‘Mandolin Tsirkin. Row five, plot seven, beneath that big olive over there. He was Mirkin’s best friend.’
‘So was our father,’ said the American.
‘We don’t give discounts,’ Busquilla declared. ‘All that matters is that your father, may he live to a ripe old age, belonged to the Second Aliyah.’
‘Naturally.’
‘You’ll give us a deposit now to reserve the place for you. The balance will be paid upon delivery. Of course, there’s no rush. This way to the office, please.’
Pinness watched Busquilla’s sales pitch with interest, then grunted and turned his back. He was a very old man. His eyesight was poor, and his cheeks and tongue moved incessantly, as if chewing an endless bowl of pabulum. He had put on a lot of weight too.
‘Yea, I’m an old man and heavy,’ he said of himself.
‘In the end Zeitouni backed down,’ he told me. ‘He agreed that only the bear and the strong man would perform.’
The show was subdued, professional, and rather disappointing.
‘It’s true that the bear could do arithmetic,’ said Uri, who liked to embellish the story of Zeitouni, ‘but any seven-year-old could have done as well.’
The strong man, on the other hand, aroused initial interest by braiding some thick nails together and smashing several bricks against his forehead. The farmers regarded him with curiosity, as if appraising a valuable work animal. Their excitement grew as he began to flex and ripple his muscles, which looked like large rats scrambling beneath his skin from his sloping shoulders to the two babyish hollows in the small of his back.
Just as he let out a mighty roar, however, all flushed and quivering with the pleasurable exertion of lifting his ‘Apollo Weights’, a pair of train wheels joined by their heavy axle, Efrayim came tripping down from my parents’ graves to see the show with Jean Valjean on his back, a ton and a half of horns, hooves, crème, and meat.
The villagers grinned. The strong man stared at Efrayim and the bull as if delirious, began to sway dangerously, dropped his dumb-bells, and tumbled to the ground. Efrayim’s green eye peered at him through the screen of his beekeeper’s mask.
‘That’s fabulous,’ shouted Zeitouni, hurrying over to Efrayim. ‘Fantastic! And I love your hat too.’ According to Pinness, he was quite out of breath ‘from avarice and the prospect of settling old scores’.
Efrayim stepped aside with a yawning Jean Valjean on his shoulders to watch the mangy bear jump through a flaming hoop, whimpering with pain.
‘How much do you want to appear?’ asked Zeitouni.
A mutter of protest ran through the crowd. Efrayim turned himself and the bull around to face it.
‘For them it’s on the house,’ he said, stripping off his mask.
There was not a peep from the audience.
‘Good afternoon, folks,’ Efrayim said.
‘We all stared at the ground in shame and horror.’
My uncle turned back to Zeitouni and his troupe. Taking one look at him, the strong man began to vomit metal screws and slabs of concrete. The magician’s doves shut their eyes. ‘I see much fire and great pain!’ screamed the fortune-teller.
‘Shut up, you moron,’ Zeitouni brayed at her.
‘So, Zeitouni, how do you like my appearance?’ asked Efrayim.
‘I couldn’t care less,’ said Zeitouni. ‘Man looketh on the outward show, but Zeitouni looketh on the heart. You’ll make a fortune with me.’
‘I don’t need it,’ Efrayim replied.
Zeitouni gave a barely perceptible eye signal to the rubber woman, who squirmed over to Efrayim like a serpent, wound her ankles around her neck, and rocked back and forth on her back like an upended turtle. Freeing one leg, she ran it all over herself. Her flat belly rippled. She laid one cheek on her mons, which bulged conspicuously.
Pinness coughed delicately. ‘That’s the word for the fatty tissue beneath the pubic hair,’ he explained with the utmost patience. ‘She was like the promise of every forbidden pleasure that the body secretly dreams of,’ he said. ‘A horrible, disgusting sight. An alley cat. A hyena.’
Since his return to the village, Efrayim had been without a woman. The wickeder gossips claimed that he got his thrills from Jean Valjean’s copulations. As a young man, they recalled, he had sometimes slept with the veterinarian’s wife, a coarse, oversexed woman who liked to watch her husband castrate colts and calves. Now he felt his stomach kink with a hot, phantasmal hate. Moist memories of purple canopies crawled up his loins. He swivelled his one eye from the rubber woman to Zeitouni.
‘I’ll be back to talk to you this evening,’ he said. ‘Wait for me here.’
And bounding Jean Valjean on his shoulders to get a better grip, he glided home as if floating on air in his soft desert boots.
‘Seen from behind at a distance, the two of them looked like a giant boletus on a tiny stem,’ Pinness said.
He rose from the bench with effort, took off his glasses, which were foggy despite the heat, and began wiping them with a corner of his blue shirt, making the same circular movement over and over.
‘Who is that over there, Baruch? Isn’t that Bodenkin?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
Yitzchak Bodenkin, one of the first settlers in the Jordan Valley, now a half-deaf old man with a mouth as limp and twisted as last year’s blade of grass, was slowly weeding the row of zinnias by the gate.
‘What is he doing here?’
‘He came a week ago,’ Busquilla explained. ‘He ran away from the kibbutz isolation ward. He walked all the way, arrived half dead, and asked permission to stay until his other half dies too.’
‘And that’s where he sleeps at night? Out in the open like a dog?’
‘Of course not,’ I said indignantly. ‘Weeding the flowers was his idea. He sleeps in the old cowshed.’
‘In the cowshed?’
‘I offered to put him up in the cabin, but he would rather be with Zeitser.’
‘Like the elephant who comes home to die,’ said Pinness.
He went over to say hello to Bodenkin. The old man didn’t recognise him.
‘Don’t keep me from my work, boy,’ he grumbled. ‘After lunch I’ll take you to the fair and buy you a lollipop.’
‘He doesn’t remember me,’ Pinness said. ‘We once worked together for a few days in a grapefruit grove near the pumphouse by the Jordan, painting tree trunks with your grandfather’s black salve. There were rats there as big as cats who had gone mad from the heat and the loneliness. They climbed the citrus trees and ate their bark. The trees had terrible wounds in them.’
He sat down again, sad and tired.
‘We never guessed what would happen,’ he said. ‘Rilov should have sent that troublemaker Zeitouni packing. He should have whipped the living daylights out of him, a whip for the horse and a rod for the fool’s back.’
26
I never go down to the public beach below my house before evening. The swimmers and surfers are gone, and there is not a soul in sight. Half-eaten sandwiches, lost sandals, and the twiggy skeletons of grape clusters litter the sand. The slowly dissolving cries of children still hang in the air like dirty rags. Out at sea a sturdy grey coastguard vessel rocks rapaciously on the foam.
David, the old beach chair man, sees me coming and puts the kettle on the little gas burner in his cane hut. I always bring him something to eat, or else a bottle of spirits from the banker’s cellars or a book from his li
brary. David devours books in both French and Spanish.
‘Just call me Da-vid and rhyme it with “read”,’ he introduces himself with a rusty laugh. His teeth are big and white. His body is burnt and shrivelled from the sun.
We drink spicy tea and chat lazily while the sand around us squirms with fine-pincered little yellow crabs.
‘They’re my beach cleaners,’ says David.
The sand crabs scuttle out of their holes and run about, their arms raised in that most moving and primeval of human gestures that is both threat and plea. So Efrayim raised his hands to his face when he stepped out of the British automobile in the village. So Grandmother Feyge raised hers, searching the skies for pelicans and rain.
Other crabs, busy refurbishing their burrows, give themselves away by little flurries of wet sand. Their tawny colour makes them hard to see when they stand still, but I, who was taught to pick out a praying mantis on a dry branch, to open the camouflaged trapdoors of spiders, and to tell the caterpillar of the geometer moth from a bare twig, am able to spot them easily.
‘You like those little things?’ David asked, following my gaze. ‘They’re not kosher.’
‘I do,’ I said. ‘I don’t eat them. But I have an old aunt who eats grasshoppers.’
‘There are grasshoppers in the desert that look just like pebbles until they move,’ chuckled David.
‘It takes patience,’ I said.
Little insects hid in the silver whitlowwort, disguised as shiny dry leaves.
‘It takes patience, Baruch,’ said Pinness. We were crouched in ambush by a shrub. ‘Some of those little white leaves swaying back and forth are insects that can mimic the motion of a leaf in a breeze. As soon as the breeze dies down, you’ll see. The real leaves will stop moving while the silly insects go on.’