by Shalev, Meir
Human beings and insects, he explained to me, were polar opposites in their methods of adaptation. The former, poorly equipped and vulnerable, depended on their inventiveness and ability to learn, while the latter, rugged and prolific, were incapable of learning a thing. They were born with whatever they had. Even behaviour as complex as that of Margulis’s bees, said Pinness, had nothing to do with learning or experience.
Grandfather watched us stand on two milk cans by a wall of the cowshed, examining the mud daubers’ houses in a corner of the ceiling. Pinness took a blade of straw and poked a hole in the bottom of one of the little juglike structures, showing me how the wasp continued to work on her roof without bothering to repair her ruined floor.
‘She’s obeying inherited patterns of behaviour,’ he said, immediately adding the question: ‘Which is better, the small but precisely programmed intellect of the insect or the capacious and unconcentrated mind of man?’
‘Take Rilov and his son,’ he said to me another time. ‘They were born total morons and that’s all they’ll ever be. No more than five per cent of the volume of their brains is even useable. But unlike all the scatterbrained geniuses, they utilise that five per cent with single-minded efficiency.’
I told David about the giant long-horned grasshopper that Pinness brought from the Galilee. Pinness’s eyes sparkled when he added it to his collection, fearsomely impaled on a pin.
‘Just see how perfectly camouflaged it is, Baruch,’ he said. ‘It’s green and looks like a long leaf when it stands perfectly still. When its prey approaches, it leaps on it and embraces it in a death hug, crushing it against the spines on its chest. So Joab took Amasa by the beard to kiss him while shedding his bowels on the ground with the sword in his other hand.’
‘You had a good teacher,’ said David.
‘It even eats small birds, mice, and lizards,’ I said, proud of my erudition.
David was incredulous. ‘A grasshopper that eats mice?’ he marvelled. ‘The little devil!’
‘Small snakes too.’
David proposed a toast to grasshoppers. Then, tactfully, he began to ask me about myself and my family.
‘You’re an odd one,’ he said. ‘If you live here, you must have money, but you’re not like the others who have it.’
‘I’m an off-duty farmer,’ I answered. Off from the village. From my family. From the earth.
Later, when I return to the banker’s house, I like to look at Grandfather’s letters and notes and at the volume of Luther Burbank he left me.
‘No man, in death, ever presented a countenance more beautiful, peaceful, or serene. He was like a child asleep …
‘We laid Luther Burbank to rest under a cedar in the garden of the old farmhouse in which he lived for forty years and in the grounds of which he did most of his revolutionary and incalculably valuable work for his fellow man.
‘He used to go there, often, where the drooping limbs of the great tree sweep down to touch the earth and to form about the stalwart, friendly trunk a little quiet house of coolness with the sweet balsam of the needles …
‘That is why he was laid there for his long rest, … blanketed with flowers.’
In an old issue of Field, where I found some dried cyclamens and crocuses left for my prying fingers by my mother, Grandfather had underlined in blue a eulogy for his hero written by a certain A. Feldman. ‘He was seventy-seven when he died in his humble home in Santa Rosa among his plums, roses, grapevines, and prickly pears.’
‘Grapevines, prickly pears, thorns, and the narcotic henbane,’ wrote Grandfather in the brittle margin. These were the plants that had welcomed him to Palestine.
‘Blanketed with flowers’, I repeated out loud to myself. ‘Blanketed with flowers.’ But though he too fled from the woman he loved and planted good fruit-bearing trees, Burbank, that happy, prolific, and contented man, never cultivated his garden in the mud of Sisera, or was buried in the land promised to his forefathers, or had a constitution or someone to avenge.
Zeitouni watched Efrayim grow smaller in the distance. Then, having scented an easy windfall and a quick come-uppance, he rubbed his hands and turned away.
‘Move yourself,’ he shouted at the strong man. ‘Go and clean out the big pot. Move, you bloody woman, you!’
The villagers rose uneasily and began to disperse. On Rilov’s insistence, Zeitouni and his troupe left the spring and spent the night outside the borders of the village.
‘Next morning we had a visit from Hussein, the old Bedouin from the Mazarib tribe, who had gone out at the crack of dawn to calm his dogs.’
Through the tatters of mist that still lay upon the fields, Hussein had seen the caravan and its bear cage heading east, followed by Efrayim with his soft, indefatigable, steady stride. Jean Valjean squatted on his shoulders, still asleep. Though the old Arab’s first thought was that Efrayim was taking the bull somewhere to mate, he felt uneasy all day. Deciding to inform someone, he went to see his old friend Rilov that evening.
‘Your bull man is gone,’ he called, knocking on the door of the secret arms cache. ‘Your bull man is gone.’
But Rilov was not in, because he was out driving a small truck over a secret back road to the village, taking the downhills with the engine cut and the headlights off, towing a new Czech combine full of dynamite. Hussein knew, of course, that Tonya could be found draining the last lees of sweet passion with Margulis among the hives in the orchard, but loath to upset the bees, he went to the Committee office. A search party was sent out at once, but Efrayim, Jean Valjean, Zeitouni, and his troupe were nowhere in sight.
‘I never saw my old pupil again,’ said Pinness. ‘And that was the last Mirkin saw of his son too.’
He wiped his glasses again. ‘How could a bull that weighed a ton and a half, the only one of its kind in the country, and someone who looked, so help me, like Efrayim, have disappeared? How could it have happened?’
‘Efrayim could have walked through a cave full of bats without being noticed,’ I said to him. ‘You yourself told me the story of Margulis’s cat.’
Pinness began to walk up and down among the graves.
‘When you first started this horrible business, I was dead set against it,’ he said, his false teeth slobbering in his mouth. ‘You may recall that I was even present at the Committee meeting you sent that crook of a lawyer to.’
I said nothing.
‘Don’t think I changed my mind because of the poppycock he talked there. A cemetery is a legitimate business … a branch of agriculture … a way of making a living from the earth … You should have been ashamed of yourselves! I was when I heard him. I was mortified. Who could have imagined that a grandson of Mirkin’s would ever say such things!’
‘And now?’
Pinness laughed. ‘I’m a different man now. The dykes are down. As a matter of fact, I’m saving up my pennies for you to bury me.’
‘What are you talking about, Ya’akov,’ I exclaimed heatedly. ‘How can you believe I’d take money from you?’
‘You’ll bury me for nothing, eh?’ said Pinness.
Though I could tell from his face that I had said something wrong, I couldn’t work out what it was.
‘My child,’ Pinness said, patting me on the cheek. ‘My child.’ Its skin smoothed by chalks and ethers, its grip shaped by flutes and pens, his soft hand brushed my face and curled around my neck. I shut my eyes.
‘You can be proud of what you’ve done here, Baruch. Sometimes we do the right things for the wrong reasons. But I’ll find myself a grave somewhere else.’
He walked slowly, his hand outstretched as though still on my head like Grandfather’s. Like the music of Mandolin Tsirkin. The icy touch of Grandmother’s forehead. The downy fuzz of the baby doves on the roof of the village feed shed.
Thirty-eight years old and weighing twenty stone, the owner of a seaside villa, I am still Pinness’s pupil and Grandfather’s child. I still wait for the feel of Grandfather’s moust
ache on my neck, for his stories, for the sliced tomato with rock salt that he put on the table for my breakfast.
The thin, ticklish warmth of soil against my toes. The sweet blood that saves from malaria and depression. The poison that never loses its potency. Shifris will appear, ragged and mouldy, to the pied piping of the symphonies of Mahler. Storks on the chimney of the old house in Makarov, dreaming of the frogs of Zion.
The boom of the surf through the window of my big house. The rustle of money sacks. Two hundred and seventy-four old men and women, one mandolin, and one old mule are buried in my graveyard. Pioneers, practising idealists, and capitalist traitors.
27
Uri and I could read at the age of five. Yosi refused to learn and sat silently beside us while Grandfather drew words for us on paper. Grandfather did not teach us each letter separately like Pinness but started with whole words. ‘They’ll learn to recognise the letters on their own,’ he said. ‘Single letters don’t mean a thing. They only come alive when joined to others.’
In nursery we played in the sandpit Efrayim and his Gang built after the great chocolate robbery and rode on the old iron-wheeled Case tractor that was donated to us rather than to Founder’s Cabin over Meshulam Tsirkin’s objections.
Sometimes Levin came from his nearby shop with cold juice or fresh rolls for us. We took the rolls to the woods behind the meeting house where the wild garlic grew – a last remnant of the days when anopheles mosquitoes warred on us and the water buffalo stuck out its tongue at us – and ate them with the long, odorous leaves sandwiched in.
‘Nature’s bread spread,’ our nursery teacher Ruth called the wild garlic. ‘Now let’s go and have Nature’s bread spread.’
Wearing shorts, white cotton hats, and identical crude sandals that Bernstein the shoemaker stitched for us, we all trooped off singing to the woods. Every year before Passover Bernstein received us in his cabin. Placing weights in our hands to keep our excitable feet glued to the strips of leather he stood us on, he sketched our soles with a rough pencil that tickled our big toes.
‘No talking, children,’ he warned us through clenched teeth, because his mouth was full of nails. At least once a week we heard him screaming from pain in the bathroom behind the shoe shop.
‘In the days before you were born, we didn’t have such footwear. Avraham went around in sandals cut from old tyres, while your mother and Efrayim went barefoot.’
We walked to the woods in single file. Because I was the biggest, I was always at the end. Yosi kept straying out of line moodily, looking for round pebbles for his catapult, and Uri skipped along beneath Ruth’s dress with nothing showing but his calves and feet, which resembled the hind legs of a bee inside a big, sweet flower. Ruth, a placid look on her broad face, called to mind a quadruped with two large, unshod forepaws and two little rear ones in sandals.
‘There’s more to that boy than meets the eye,’ jested Pinness affectionately at the sight.
‘I want you to stop it!’ shouted Rivka at her son. ‘You’re the talk of the whole village. What kind of business is this?’
Not even a five-year-old, though, likes to be deprived of his pleasures.
‘I like it,’ said Uri.
‘But no one walks that way,’ Avraham butted in.
‘You mind your own business,’ said Rivka. ‘We know all about the poems you recited when you were nine. The child is a chip off the old block.’
‘Ruth lets me,’ said Uri.
‘I’d like to know what she’ll be letting you do two years from now,’ snapped Rivka.
‘Ruth smells nice,’ said Uri.
It was because of Uri that the Committee ordered Ruth to come to work in trousers. My cousin was reduced to coming to her after the ten o’clock break, taking off his shirt, slouching against her solid thighs, and asking her to ‘make my back feel good’.
On the first day of school Grandfather took a half-day off from his trees to escort me, Yosi, and Uri to our classroom. Yosi stepped up to the front wall, regarded the big poster that Pinness had hung above the blackboard, and slowly read from it out loud.
‘Not the soldier’s sword, but the farmer’s plough, conquers the land.’
Grandfather burst out laughing. ‘You completely fooled us,’ he said to Yosi, who was blushing with pleasure. ‘All the time you sat there quietly understanding everything!’
Being a head taller than anyone else, I was placed in the last row. I put down my schoolbag, a leather briefcase from Germany that had belonged to my father Binyamin, and watched Pinness enter the classroom. This was not my first lesson with him. When I was five he once took me out to the orange grove to show me a roofed oval nest with a round entrance on one side.
‘This is the nest of the graceful warbler,’ he said. ‘Its fledglings are gone already. You can stick your hand inside it.’
The inside of the nest was lined with soft, warm down and groundsel seeds.
‘The warbler is our friend because it eats harmful insects,’ said Pinness. ‘It has a little body and a long tail.’
He took me home with him. From the hundreds of hollowed- out birds’ eggs he kept in boxes, he produced a warbler’s egg to show me. It was pale and tiny with red speckles at the ends. A few days later we dodged through thick undergrowth, listening to the male warbler’s mating chirp and watching him balance with his tail. His long, sharp bill was indeed perfectly adapted to catching insects.
‘Good morning, boys and girls. My name is Ya’akov.’ Pinness’s spectacles swept over the room and paused to smile at me and my briefcase, which had once been filled with classical records. It had been in his house the night of my parents’ death and so had survived the fire. Before the start of the school year he brought it to me. ‘Tomorrow you’re starting school, Baruch. This is your father’s briefcase. I kept it for you.’
Every year he came to the first-year classroom to greet the new pupils. Generally, he took advantage of the opportunity to tell a story. This time it was about the mighty Samson. The school walls shook when he roared like the mangled lion.
‘Now tell me, children,’ he asked when he had finished, ‘what made Samson a hero?’
‘’Cause he killed the lion,’ said Rilov’s granddaughter Ya’el.
‘’Cause he knocked down the Philistines’ house,’ said Yosi.
‘He wasn’t afraid of bees. He took the honey with his hands,’ said Margulis’s grandson Micha.
‘I never thought of that before,’ Pinness commented excitedly.
After school he held a teachers’ meeting.
‘I have been young and now I am old,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen generations of children come and go, and still I am filled with wonder by their wisdom. This morning a boy in the first year told me that the heroism of Samson was more a matter of mental courage than of physical strength, as evidenced by the fact that he was not afraid to reach bare-handed into a wild beehive for its honey.’
He eyed the teachers one by one.
‘You are the custodians of a rare treasure, of the tenderest, most beautiful saplings that this village has planted in its earth. You must water and fertilise and enrich them, but be careful how you prune them.’
That night, while I lay eavesdropping on them from my bed, Pinness told Grandfather about Margulis’s grandson and his talk with the teachers.
‘You see, Ya’akov,’ said the teacher, ‘Hayyim Margulis’s little grandson sees his father and grandfather put on masks, gloves, and protective suits and smoke the bees from their hives. But Samson stepped up with no protection at all and took the honey as easily as bread from a baby. In that boy’s eyes no deed could be more heroic.’
‘That’s marvellous,’ said Grandfather. ‘But ripping apart a lion bare-handed is a tall order for anyone, beekeeper’s mask or not.’
I could hear his voice choke. He grimaced as though from pain.
‘What’s that got to do with it, Mirkin?’ asked Pinness. ‘What does it matter if the boy was righ
t or not? What matters is the sweet freshness of these children’s pure, innocent minds. You, as a planter, should be the first to realise how difficult it is to cultivate such a thing.’
‘It’s time you stopped making all those comparisons, Ya’akov,’ said Grandfather. ‘There’s no connection whatsoever between planting and education. Or between human beings and animals. Or between a Capnodis caterpillar and the way a man thinks.’
After school I had lunch with Grandfather. Sometimes, though, if he had work to do or was feeling below par, I ate in Rachel Levin’s house. Her thick, tight curls were already streaked with grey. All day long she went about in a green work smock.
I was fascinated by the bottoms of her feet gliding soundlessly across the floor.
‘Would you like to learn to walk quietly?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I said enthusiastically. I had heard stories about my uncle Efrayim and had already begun my own prowling.
‘Come, I’ll show you how it’s done.’
She took me out to her garden. The Levins kept a few chickens and a rabbit hutch near their house, beside rows of vegetables and spices. Levin had tried growing vegetables on his own when he first came to the village, but he possessed a grey thumb that made plants wilt on the spot. He ate his sallow tomatoes and pallid peppers with relish and even tried convincing the experts that they were new varieties he had developed, yet it was only after his marriage, when Rachel took over the garden, that Levin, who had always dreamed of being a farmer, enjoyed the fruits of his land at last. Rachel Levin planted vegetables and flowers and brought boxes and cans of basil plants from her parents, and at night man and beast came to stand outside her fence and imbibe the good smell.
Rachel broke a few dry twigs from the hedge and scattered them over the path.