by Shalev, Meir
‘There are some borderline cases,’ he admitted. ‘Take the bee-eater. On the one hand, it kills wasps, but on the other, it eats Margulis’s bees. The mongoose preys on both voles and baby chicks.’
‘Whenever you see an insect, bird, mammal, or reptile, ask if it is friend or foe,’ said Pinness to me on one of our first outings, when I was five years old.
‘Someday I’ll leave you this collection,’ he informed me. ‘You deserve it.’
He often consulted with Grandfather, who was an expert on tree pests, and together the two taught me to identify and eradicate them. Taking me to the orchard, they put their hands on my shoulders and pointed me at a pear tree.
‘Watch carefully,’ said Grandfather.
The two men, both in grey work shirts, one wearing a worker’s cap and one a floppy-brimmed straw hat, looked down at me ceremoniously. I could feel their emotion, although I did not understand the cause of it.
‘I don’t see anything,’ I said.
Grandfather knelt and showed me a round hole, about a quarter of an inch in diameter, in the trunk of the tree. Directly beneath it on the ground was a little pile of sawdust.
‘Such a predator can eat a whole tree,’ Pinness said.
Grandfather took out a long, thin piece of wire that was coiled like a spring at one end.
‘The planter’s fishing rod,’ he said. Slowly but surely, he inserted it into the caterpillar’s tunnel. A yard and a half of wire disappeared gradually up the tree as Grandfather sighed quietly, realising the extent of the damage.
‘Damn you!’ he swore when he felt the tip of the wire pierce the caterpillar. He gave it a twist, corkscrewing it into the grub’s flesh, and gently began to retract it. The caterpillar let out an eerie squeal and a soft, repulsive whistle as its jaws and nails tore loose from the pith of the pear tree, scraping the sides of its wormhole on its reluctant journey to the sunlight.
‘Aha!’ exclaimed Grandfather, pulling out the last of the wire. Impaled on its tip was a soft, black-spotted, yellow-orange blob that squirmed and wriggled as Grandfather held it up to me. I felt a wave of nausea and hatred.
‘Take a good look, my child,’ said Grandfather. ‘This is the enemy. The tiger moth.’
That was my first lesson in agriculture. Thenceforth I was sent to the orchard twice a week to look for the telltale sawdust at the base of the fruit trees.
I can still remember fishing my first caterpillar out of a Rennet apple tree. The feel of the monster writhing and gnashing its teeth inside the tree trunk ran along the steel wire into my fingers and up through my wrist to my spine.
‘Don’t be afraid, Baruch,’ said Grandfather. ‘You’ve got him where you want him.’
I dashed the grub to the ground and stamped on it with my foot.
When a tiger moth murdered one of Liberson’s apricots, Pinness chopped down the dead tree and tunnelled in its trunk with a little axe until he found one of the caterpillars.
He cut off a section of tree trunk with the caterpillar in it. ‘We’ll add you to our collection,’ he smiled, ‘and burn the rest of your comrades at the stake.’ We dragged the tree’s carcass out of the orchard and set it on fire.
‘So long, you scoundrels,’ said Pinness as the screeches and death coughs rose from the burning branches.
He took me home with him. Removing the caterpillar with a pair of padded pincers, he wrapped it in blotting paper. ‘Some larvae secrete a staining substance when they die,’ he explained.
He put the still wriggling caterpillar in a test tube, added some petrol-soaked absorbent cotton, told me to have a seat, and gave me a biscuit and a lecture.
‘This is the true test of every collector,’ he said. ‘Nothing is harder than preserving a caterpillar. It’s so juicy that it decomposes easily, and there’s no exoskeleton to keep its shape.’
When the caterpillar had been gassed to death, Pinness took it from the test tube, laid it on a glass slide, and made an incision near its anus with a sharp little surgical knife. ‘I stole this knife from Sonya in the clinic,’ he confided, his body shaking with suppressed mirth. Rolling a pencil down the grub’s body until the intestines were squeezed out through the opening, he severed them and tossed them out the window.
‘For the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the earth,’ he intoned.
He took a small straw, inserted it into the caterpillar’s hollow corpse, and blew gently, his eyes blinking behind his concentration-fogged glasses. As the caterpillar slowly expanded, Pinness rose carefully and bent over the table lamp, rotating the larva above the hot bulb while continuing to blow softly.
‘A hot iron will do the job too, but not an open fire.’
Within a few minutes the caterpillar’s skin was dry and hard.
‘The purists coat it with clear varnish,’ Pinness said, pouring a drop of diluted glue into the cut in the caterpillar’s rear.
He took the section of the apricot tree, sawed it lengthwise to expose the tiger moth’s tunnel, blew away the sawdust, and restored the now immortalised pest to its former residence. After writing down the date and site of its capture on a slip of paper, he opened a little box, took out a large, hairy adult moth with spotted wings, and placed it on the tree trunk still pierced by its pin.
‘It’s important to exhibit them in their natural habitat,’ he declared with a sigh of contentment.
30
Towards the end of his life Levin grew cross and insufferable. Grandfather, the only man he had ever deferred to, was already dead, and in a moment of weakness I gave him the old work boots Grandfather had worn in the orchard. Levin sat on my bed, thrust his thin legs into them, stood up, and walked around as happily as a child with his first pair of grown-up shoes, shaking his head like a giddy colt each time he looked down at the battered toes.
‘What did you give him Grandfather’s boots for?’ grumbled Yosi. ‘Now he thinks he’s somebody.’
Inspired by the boots, Levin began poking his nose into the running of the farm and grew careless with the co-op books. He also yelled at Rachel, went for long, booted walks in the fields, stopping to look at his reflection in every puddle, took to calling himself ‘Sweet Levin’, made his wife go around in a blue kerchief, and developed a grasshopper phobia.
Unable to control myself one night, I went to peek through the window of his house and saw him take out a black notebook and wave it angrily beneath Rachel’s nose.
‘All the sins of the Workingman’s Circle,’ he hissed. ‘They’re all written down here!’
‘I wish you’d calm down,’ said Rachel wearily. ‘Tsirkin and Mirkin are dead. Poor Liberson is blind in an old folk’s home. Who are you still out to get?’
‘It was the way she laughed,’ replied Levin. ‘She went out with them every night, laughing. They purposely put funny words to Hasidic songs to make her laugh and insult me.’
Feyge’s laughter, the stains of stolen chocolate, Zeitser’s mocking glances – all left their mark on Levin’s thin skin like the voracious teeth of locusts. He recalled how Liberson had pestered him a whole night over whether the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle should play a more active role in the Chinese workers’ movement. ‘The FLWC is coming, O ye yellow masses,’ the young pioneer called out into the darkness. Feyge burst into giggles and embraced him, pressing her body against his. Levin didn’t sleep a wink that night, convinced that his sister could no longer tell reality from revolutionary fantasy.
In Petach Tikvah Mirkin smoked publicly on the Sabbath and started a row with the local religious farmers. In Jaffa Tsirkin told stupid anti-Hasidic jokes to two Hasidim they happened to meet. In Rishon-le-Tsiyyon Liberson was apprehended in the vineyards with his hands inside the blouse of the school principal’s daughter. All three of them regularly dressed and undressed in Feyge’s presence.
In a little black notebook Levin began to record secretly all the misdeeds of his sister’s corrupters. One evening he produced it and read the list out loud to t
hem.
‘You forgot about the time Mirkin stole oranges in Jaffa,’ said Liberson.
‘I didn’t forget a thing,’ Levin told Rachel. ‘They humiliated me and killed my sister, and they got off scot-free except for Mirkin. He’s the only one who was punished.’
He began asking Meshulam about suicides in the early days of the Second Aliyah. Every graveyard in the old villages and kibbutzim had its pioneers who had taken their own lives, leaving behind gravestones carved with guilt and remorse. Most of these had been transferred to my keeping, and Levin walked up and down among them, reading the inscriptions. ‘Died at His Own Hands’, ‘Overcome by His Suffering’, ‘Drank the Hemlock’, ‘Put an End to His Own Life’. Dreamly, he murmured the awful words.
Now and then he ran screaming out of his house with a can of green insect spray in his hand, Rachel hurrying after him. Though she was younger than he was, his madness made his grey limbs strong and spry. Once she found him lying in a field, waiting to die from the spray can he had drained. But long years spent in the store amid fumes of ammonia, DDT, parathion, and benzoic acid had immunised him against all chemicals. Two hours of lying in the sun was enough for him, and rising despairingly, he went home with Rachel walking wordlessly by his side.
Even after Grandfather’s death, Levin kept coming to look for odd jobs in our farmyard. My uncle Avraham, who remembered how his kind hands had fed, bathed, and clothed him as a little orphan, put up with him and had him collect the old wires scattered among the bales of hay. Not that they were worth anything, but it was just as well not to have them getting into a feed stall and killing a cow. Levin even made himself a little work corner in the cowshed, where he sat for hours drawing coloured charts of milk production and straightening old nails for re-use. Now and then the blows of the hammer were accompanied by a groan of pain that was taken up by a merry chorus of turkeys. ‘I think your uncle must have straightened more fingers than nails,’ I once heard Uri say to his father over lunch. Yosi complained that the clouds of thick dust billowing up from the old fodder sacks Levin kept shaking out and folding were giving the poultry laryngitis. Stepping into the yard, he bawled him out rudely, assisted by juicy imprecations from his mother Rivka standing on her porch.
Enraged and humiliated, Levin went home to plot his revenge. The mockery of the Workingman’s Circle resounded again in his mind. One day he surprised Avraham during his afternoon nap.
‘Me you treat like an animal, but Zeitser you keep on!’
‘Zeitser worked with my father back in the old days,’ said Avraham. ‘We won’t throw him to the dogs just because he’s become old and weak.’
‘Zeitser is an extra mouth to feed,’ snapped Levin. ‘He’s a sponger.’
‘Zeitser,’ replied Avraham, ‘is the best mule in this village. He was always more than just a draught animal to my father and me. He’s worked and sweated for us his whole life. A lot of two-legged pioneers never did half as much.’
‘He may have been the best mule in this village,’ said Levin, personally affronted by the reference to sweat, ‘but I never heard of a mule getting a pension. Why don’t you sell him to the Arab sausage factory or the glue works in Haifa bay? No one keeps an old mule in stock who can’t pull a cart any more.’
‘Don’t force me to choose between the two of you,’ said Avraham. ‘Zeitser isn’t stock and never was.’
Most of the mules in our village were English or Yugoslavian. Two were German, left behind at the end of World War One. Zeitser, I was told, was the only mule from Russia, whence he immigrated with a group of pioneers whose home was a place called Mogilev. They bought him the day they set out for Odessa. Seeing him on sale at a market, one of them joked loudly to his friends, ‘I know that mule. He’s a direct descendant of the mule of the Baal Shem Tov.’
‘Unbelievers!’ scolded the Hasid who was holding Zeitser’s tether. ‘Since when do mules have descendants?’
‘Are you questioning the Baal Shem Tov’s powers?’ answered the pioneer to the laughter of his comrades. ‘If the holy rabbi wished, even a mule could have sons.’
The Hasidim of Mogilev nearly came to blows with them, but the clink of roubles had a calming effect. The pioneers bought the mule, and Zeitser gratefully carried their belongings to the wharf. When they boarded the steamship Kernilov and saw how sad he looked, they chipped in for an extra ticket, ‘hoisted him on deck in a huge net that hung from a crane’, and brought him to the Land of Israel.
‘They never regretted it for a minute. No job was too hard for Zeitser.’
It was Meshulam Tsirkin who discovered that Zeitser had worked in Sejera with Ben-Gurion. He read one of Ben-Gurion’s letters to me, a document he had got from the Movement archives in a swap.
Sejera
April 2, 1908
Before the sun is up, at half past four, I rise and go to the cowshed to feed my animals. I sift hay into the feedbox for the oxen, sprinkle some vetches over it and mix them, and then make myself tea for my breakfast. With the first rays of the sun I take my herd, two teams of oxen, two cows, two calves, and a donkey, to drink from the trough.
It was one of the few times I saw Meshulam laugh.
‘A donkey!’ he roared, slapping his knees and his stomach. ‘A donkey! That donkey was Zeitser. But fat chance that some socialist fresh off the boat from Russia would know the difference between a donkey and a mule!’
Zeitser belonged to the Mogilev commune for several years. Now and then he ran into Grandfather and his friends, and for a while they even worked side by side. When his commune found a piece of land to settle down on, however, he began to have second thoughts. The main problem, as Grandfather put it, was that ‘Zeitser’s penchant for solitude and private initiative clashed with the rigidly communal framework’. Zeitser hated meetings and debates, and such questions as ‘the status of pregnant comrades’, ‘the latest news from the workers’ movement in Latvia’, and ‘improving the nutrition of field hands’ did not concern him in the least. Most of all he loathed the public confessionals in which the commune members bared their hearts to each other.
One day, according to Uri, when a female communard who was cleaning out the cowshed laid a soiled baby in his stall, Zeitser decided that his notion of family life was incompatible with that of the kibbutz. That same day he picked himself up and went to inspect a co-operative village.
‘Zeitser was an unusually good worker,’ Grandfather told me when I was a small boy. ‘He always knew what field to go to and never had to be steered.’
Zeitser ploughed and cultivated our fields, uprooted dead trees, pulled loaded carts, and was as thrilled as the rest of us by each new sprout and can of milk. When his shoes needed adjustment or replacement, he went on his own to the Goldman brothers’ smithy. He was the only draught animal in the village not to wear the leather blinkers Peker made against worldly temptations, because ‘nothing ever tempted him but work’. Only once did he succumb, when he mistakenly ate some Jimsonweed flowers growing by the manure pile. He got high, walked around in circles for two days, made eyes at the young female calves, and behaved like any hot-blooded numbskull.
With the passage of time, his strength faltered. Grandfather, who was personally acquainted with the ravages of old age and could easily discern them in the mule’s wasted body, tried easing up on his work, but Zeitser refused to acknowledge his decrepitude until one day he collapsed in the traces.
Generally, I remember what I am told better than what I have seen, but that day, like the day of my rescue from the hyena, sticks in my memory. Grandfather, Zeitser, and I had gone to fetch fodder and had loaded some twenty sacks of it on the cart. On the short uphill before the last bend Zeitser suddenly stopped with a queer, high-pitched snort, and the heavy cart began to roll backwards. Grandfather had never whipped Zeitser in his life, and now too he merely urged him on with shouts and slaps of the reins. Quivering all over, Zeitser managed to brake the slipping cart and braced himself to pull it up
the hill, his haunches sinking nearly to the ground and his iron horseshoes striking sparks on the paved road. When his laboured panting turned to deep wheezes, Grandfather threw down the reins and climbed out of the cart. Anxious veins made an alarming wreath on his bald scalp as he tried to calm the mule and free him from his harness. Gathering his strength for one last mighty effort, however, Zeitser let out a huge fart, lost his balance, and collapsed. There was a loud crack from up front as the longpole snapped, leaving the traces hanging from the mule’s neck. Grandfather quickly slipped off the hames and grabbed Zeitser’s head in his hands. For a while they remained there, weeping soundlessly together.
Zeitser returned home without the cart, his head bowed with shame. I walked alongside him, not knowing what to say.
‘He’s a work animal,’ Grandfather said. ‘At least sit on his back so he’ll feel he’s doing something.’
I rode him home, feeling the twitching and damp breathing of his mortified hide in my thighs. Tsirkin’s horses Michurin and Stalin brought the cart to our yard, and that evening Grandfather and Avraham decided to start putting Zeitser out to pasture. It was then that we bought our first oil-fuelled Ferguson, which Grandfather never learned to drive, leaving Zeitser only the milk cans to haul. A few years later, when the phlebitis in his forelegs and the strongyles parasites in his intestines had depleted his remaining strength and even the simplest words, like ‘giddyup’, escaped him, Grandfather tethered him to a long rope in the shade of the big fig tree. Beneath the tree Avraham set out both halves of a sawed barrel, one for water and one for barley, and now and then Grandfather took Zeitser for a leisurely walk, just the two of them, to meditate and smell the flowers.
Unlike most old men, who forget the present and remember the distant past, Pinness had forgotten his childhood and youth entirely.
‘I know who I am and where I’m going, I just have no idea where I’ve come from,’ he explained to me, to himself, and to everyone.