by Shalev, Meir
He looked at me sadly when I came to visit him in his garden. The day before he had attended Bodenkin’s funeral in Pioneer Home, and now he was upset and mournful. All his life he had been a great believer in education, and he held himself partly to blame for my lapse. ‘Did I go wrong on that hike to Beth-She’arim, or was it those carrion beetles?’ But I knew that his anger was halfhearted, like his response to the nocturnal cries he still heard. He had stopped turning livid when telling me about them, cursing in Russian and waving his arms. Indeed, the look on his fat face was more one of baffled curiosity. The swamp of blood awash beneath his cranium could no longer be kept down.
‘Well now, Baruch,’ he smiled. ‘It seems I’ve gone through some kind of mutation. I just don’t have anyone to pass it on to.’
He was very old. Every week I brought him his clean laundry and changed his sheets and tablecloth.
‘Why are you doing this for me?’ he once asked me shrewdly. ‘What are you plotting?’
‘Neither of us has anyone else,’ I answered. ‘I have no grandfather, and you have no grandson.’ Despite his sorrowful smile, I could see he was pleased by what I said.
He had few friends left in the village. Grandfather, Liberson, Fanya, and Tsirkin were all dead. Even Rilov. Every morning Tonya paid a brief visit to her husband’s grave to make sure he hadn’t found a secret escape hatch, and then, supported by an aluminium frame, pulled herself along the gravel paths to Margulis’s tombstone, on which she sat senilely licking her fingers. I buried Margulis as per his request, perfectly embalmed like a Hittite monarch. His sons coated him with a black layer of bee glue and put him in a coffin filled to the top with honey and sealed with beeswax. In midsummer, when the white-hot earth turned so dry that it cracked, orange-coloured fumes rose from the grave, and Margulis’s bees, maddened by so much sweetness and longing, buzzed around it with loud melancholy. Tonya never budged from there. ‘Like Rizpah the daughter of Aiah by the corpses of her sons,’ whispered Pinness admiringly. ‘That’s the difference between us and you,’ he added. ‘We did it with sacred devotion. You do it with obscenities from water towers.’
Meanwhile, Riva was at home, scrubbing the last sticky stains left behind on the floor by her husband and dreaming of lace tablecloths, lacquered Chinese furniture, angora cats, and vacuum cleaners.
‘If Riva knew that Chinese lacquer is nothing but the secretion of certain aphids,’ Pinness said, ‘she wouldn’t make such a fuss over it.’
His blood carved out new channels, shooting the gaps between nerve endings and the chasms of memory. ‘It’s as though I was born an eighteen-year-old on the day I arrived in this country,’ he said. ‘My father could have been the hotel owner in Jaffa. He’s the first person I remember after birth.’
He had forgotten the names of his parents and sisters, his native landscape, the yeshiva, religious school, in Nemirov where he had studied before running off to the Land of Israel.
‘Every bit of it has been wiped out.’
For the first time, he revealed his old hatred of Rilov in public. No one understood why, because Rilov himself was already dead. ‘A he-man, a coachman, a flea-man,’ he called the dead Watchman. ‘A gentile’s brain in a Jew’s body.’
He piled his plate with more than it could hold and stuffed himself with huge mouthfuls, wolfing his food as if hungry jackals were waiting behind him to pirate it. Half-chewed, slobbery shreds tumbled out of his mouth and ran down his glistening chin. Little mounds piled up on the table around the rim of his plate.
‘I put it away like Jean Valjean, eh? As the ox licketh up the grass of the field.’
He felt so fatigued upon finishing a meal that he fell into bed at once.
‘Rest is vital for the digestion,’ he announced. ‘The body must not be asked to do more than one thing at a time. A time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing.’
I wasn’t the only one in the village concerned for the childless old teacher. His food was delivered from the co-op to keep him from having to carry baskets. Rachel Levin brought him cooked meals, slipping into his house on her silken old soles and startling him with the sudden clink of cutlery as she set the table.
‘I want fresh food, not meat from the fleshpots,’ he told her biblically. ‘Bring me of the fruit of your garden, a banquet of greens and quietness therewith.’
Once a week I brought him vegetables from the patch I kept near the cabin. It was alarming to watch him gulp them down. Busquilla came with pots of home cooking from the nearby town where he lived. In his old age Pinness had fallen in love with Mrs Busquilla’s couscous. Though he didn’t touch the meat, he ate the steamed vegetables and semolina ravenously, yellow morsels clinging to his bottom lip.
‘Thou hast tempted me and I have succumbed,’ he quoted to Busquilla. ‘Your wife should have run the workers’ kitchen in Petach Tikvah. No one would have dumped her food on the floor.’
‘Enjoy it, Mr Pinness,’ said Busquilla. He liked Pinness, was afraid of him, and sometimes furtively kissed his hand, dodging back to avoid a swat from the other hand, which could still be as quick as a jumping spider. Despite Busquilla’s explanation that ‘it’s just a Moroccan custom’, Pinness disapproved of such manners.
I offered to pay Busquilla for his wife’s food.
‘Shame on you, Baruch,’ he said. ‘Pinness is a saint, a holy man. We’re nothing but his servants. You don’t understand it because you can’t read the signs. Do you think those white pigeons that are always on his roof are just a lot of birds? And what about that snake that guards the gate of his garden?
‘God forgive me for even mentioning his death,’ said Busquilla with a heavenward glance, ‘but on that day light will flash from his grave, or perhaps water will flow from his gravestone. It’s an honour to bring him food, because it’s serving God.’
Uri scoffed at Busquilla’s beliefs and called the old teacher ‘Saint Pinness’ behind his back.
‘Let’s go and visit the saint,’ he would say to me. But our conversations with Pinness were monotonous. Once again we were his pupils, to be lectured on Shamgar the son of Anath who routed six hundred Philistines with an oxgoad or on the life cycle of the great titmouse. He even tried to give us homework.
Every few months he still heard the cry of the brazen fornicator from on high.
‘I’m sure he does it on the water tower,’ he told Uri and me through a mouthful of sweet peas. ‘One difference between Homo sapiens and birds is that men don’t copulate in the treetops.
‘He’s already, you should excuse the expression, screwed half the village,’ he winked slyly. ‘Married women too. Last night it was the wife of Yisra’eli’s oldest grandson. I don’t get it. Why, they were just married two months ago, and she seemed such a lovely young lady!’
It baffled him that no one else heard the cries. ‘How can it be?’ he asked. ‘It’s been going on for several years. There are night watchmen in the village who are supposed to keep their ears open. There are farmers who get up in the middle of the night to help a cow calve or prepare a shipment of turkeys. There are early-morning sprayers and the drivers of the milk lorry, which never leaves before midnight – why does no one hear it but me?’
He paused to consider. ‘I’ll bet it’s poor Daniel Liberson. He never did get over it. Or maybe it’s Efrayim, coming back at night to take revenge.’
Uri and I glanced at each other uncomfortably, wondering in what damaged lobe of his brain the old man was weaving such fantasies.
‘I’ll get to the bottom of it if it’s the last thing I do,’ declared Pinness. ‘I’ll climb the water tower and wait there for him.’
I smiled and did not try to talk him out of it. The old teacher, I felt sure, was too fat, sick, and weak ever to climb the ladder of the tower. With his usual scientific pedantry, however, Pinness was determined to solve the mystery. He sprawled for hours in his armchair, going through old notebooks in the hope of finding so
me childhood deviancy or telltale clue. He had kept a special journal of the best poems and cleverest remarks of his pupils, selections from which he sometimes sent to the village newspaper. These items invariably aroused the wrath of his ex-students, some of whom were already in their fifties or sixties. Once the publication of a poem of Dani Rilov’s had the whole village in stitches.
Chick-chick-chickina
Eats semolina.
Poor little hen,
She’ll get old and then
Off with her head
And she’s dead!
Forty years after the composition of this lyric the compassionate poet was a calf breeder whose best friends were brutal meat merchants and coarse butchers. But Pinness merely smiled when told that Dani Rilov was furious, and went on tending his many nests and keeping a kind eye on his fledglings. Meshulam, too, was enraged by this poem, which he considered a gross fabrication.
‘Who had money in those days to feed his hens semolina?’ he fumed. ‘It’s disgraceful how some people will rewrite history just for the sake of a rhyme!’
Pinness noticed that I was prowling around his house at night to protect him from the vengeance of the Rilov clan.
‘Go to sleep, Baruch,’ he said, stepping outside. ‘I’ve already scattered my spore to the winds. Childless old teachers are indestructible. The seeds I planted won’t sprout till after I die.’
In a second, more secret notebook he had jotted down over the years various comments on his pupils’ families. Although he had always exhorted the schoolchildren to help their parents with chores, he knew that some of the farmers overworked them.
He told me about his first years as a teacher. The school had only a few students and was poorly and cheaply equipped. In summer the children sat on reed mats, and each morning he examined them ‘as the shepherd surveyeth his flock’, running his eyes over the classroom to see which of his pupils had been petted, fed, and kissed, and which had been dragged out of bed before dawn to do chores. More than once Riva Margulis’s daughter, who was awakened at 5 a.m. every day to scrub the paving-stones outside the house, came late to school, since her mother kept turning back the hands of the clock until the strip of pavement gleamed. There were no milking machines then in the village, and some children came with fingers so stiff from milking that they couldn’t write a word. Pinness made no comment when sleepy children shut their eyes and let their heads sink onto their chests, but everyone knew that he would have a private talk with the parents that evening.
‘Every child was a world in itself. I never tired of observing them.’
He made a point of arriving in the classroom before his pupils to hang pictures and posters on the walls, and then he sat down to wait for them. Avraham once told me that the year of Scott and Amundsen’s race to the South Pole, Pinness kept the children posted on their daily progress. When terrible mud covered the village in winter, he carried his little charges on his back or hitched himself to one of the legendary mud sleds and pulled them home, barking like an Antarctica-bound husky.
Avraham and Meshulam were in his first class, which had only seven pupils. While Avraham was quiet, neat, hardworking, and uncommunicative, Meshulam was lively, resentful, and argumentative. He was fascinated by Pinness’s stories about the old pioneer days, but the nature lessons left him cold.
‘Your uncle had no mother at home, and neither for that matter had Meshulam.’ Pinness noticed that Meshulam did not bring a sandwich to school like the other children but only a plain slice of bread. He knew too that Tsirkin raised the boy on baked pumpkin and hard-boiled eggs, the only dishes he could prepare, which were sometimes supplemented by good-hearted neighbours who brought Meshulam hot meals or invited him to eat with them.
‘Meshulam could have been our pride and joy,’ he said. ‘He had a good head and a steadfast character, but his childhood diverted him into a world in which torn clothes and baked pumpkin were lofty ideals instead of signs of neglect.’
He knew that Meshulam’s laziness had turned the whole village against him. ‘Still,’ he said to me, ‘I would have expected you to be more understanding of him.’
‘Grandfather couldn’t stand him either,’ I said.
‘Your grandfather couldn’t stand anyone,’ said Pinness. ‘Except, sometimes, me, and that too for debatable reasons. You see the village and the whole world through your grandfather’s eyes. You’re still tied to him by the apery strings.’
He chuckled at his own pun and told me in a near whisper how Meshulam had celebrated his bar mitzvah. Since Pesya was never at home and Mandolin Tsirkin was always tired from the farm work, Meshulam had to prepare the party for his schoolmates on his own. Finding a few dried tortes left over from a visit by the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, he cut them into thin slices and brought them to the classroom early that morning. Pinness arrived at 6 a.m. to find the frantic boy wetting the desiccated cakes with tears and drops of sweet wine in the hope of bringing them back to life. Retreating silently, he went home and came back with a tray of crackers spread with jam.
‘Your mother left these with me for your birthday,’ he told Meshulam, who said nothing though he knew it was a lie.
All these things were recorded by Pinness in his notebook, which he referred to as his ‘barn log’. There, in the old teacher’s handsome hand, you could find whatever failed to appear on his pupils’ report cards. His handwriting was so elegant, and his concern for penmanship so great, that all the children of the village learned to write exactly like him. In fact, they still do, which has led to the misattribution of anonymous love letters and the crediting of cheques to the wrong accounts. Once, when the poet Bialik came to visit, Pinness presented him with an album of poetry composed in his honour by the schoolchildren. The great writer was so struck by the sameness of the script that he joked that the teacher must have written everything himself. Pinness was too insulted to respond, but that very week he took his students to the foot of Mount Gilboa to study the verse of Bialik’s rival Tchernichovski.
I watched him open his green gate and hobble up the street to Levin’s house. Tonya and Riva were the last of the village’s female founders, while he, Zeitser, and Shlomo Levin were the three surviving males.
‘Zeitser was never much of a conversationalist, Rachel stuffs me with food, and Levin, who couldn’t learn to farm a plot of land, now does nothing but cultivate plots all the time,’ he said after returning one night to find me sitting by Grandfather’s grave.
31
Every year Zeitser participated in two festive events. On the anniversary of the founding of the village he was invited by the culture committee to join the founding fathers on the stage, an honour reserved for him and Hagit alone among the animals, and on the holiday of Shavuot three neatly combed boys in white shirts came to take him to Meshulam’s yard, where he was hitched with a great to-do to ‘the first cart’, which was then piled high with fruits, milk cans, garlanded sheaves of wheat, screaming infants, baby chicks, and calves. It was the only day of the year on which Zeitser agreed to doff his old Russian worker’s cap with its specially made earholes and don a wreath of flowers that gave him a slightly Dionysiac appearance.
When an irate Shlomo Levin was reminded of all this, however, he raved and ranted even more, labelled Zeitser ‘an old parasite’, and related with loud shouts how he had left his newspaper in our cowshed the night before and had returned there to find Zeitser squatting hoofishly on his haunches against the fig tree, perusing by moonlight the paper spread out in his lap. His, Levin’s, newspaper!
This argument raged not far from the mule himself, who was tethered to the fig tree beside his food and water, delicately being deloused by two devoted cattle egrets who had come especially from the Jordan Valley. The earth packed hard by his hooves described an exact circle around him. Dipping his big jaws into his barrel, Zeitser stood smacking his lips over a mouthful of the best barley. A thin smile flitted over his face, and he pricked up his ears through his
battered cap as though listening. Levin, angrier than ever, stepped up to the mule’s water barrel and kicked it over. Avraham lost his temper and chased his uncle from the yard.
The next day the old man returned to apologise and went back to work. Meanwhile Avraham, who was equally contrite, came to talk things over with me.
‘We owe both Zeitser and Levin a great deal,’ he said. ‘Obviously we can’t send Zeitser to the glue factory, but we mustn’t hurt Uncle Shlomo’s feelings either. He may be no great shakes as a farmer, but my father would never have managed without him.’
Yosi hated Levin, and Uri was for sausaging both him and Zeitser, which was why Avraham asked me to keep an eye open. Before long I discovered that old Levin, hoping the mule would die of thirst before anyone noticed, was secretly moving Zeitser’s water out of reach.
Now and then, while weeding the gravestones, I waved to the old mule to let him know that I was keeping a protective eye on him. Zeitser never waved back. Since Grandfather’s death he had lost the last of his old verve, and Levin’s harassment made him nervous and irritable. The appearance of the store manager’s thin shadow in the yard caused him to stiffen tensely, and though his big head remained hidden in his barrel of expensive barley, his rear end shifted back and forth in carefully calculated movements to ensure that he had a leg to kick with.
He had become a crusade for Levin. An excellent bookkeeper, Grandmother’s brother came to Avraham one evening with ‘an exact cost accounting’ of every penny that had ever been spent on ‘that pompous, freeloading ass of yours’.
It was a hot night, full of buzzing crickets. Through the open windows I could hear the whole angry debate. Levin read ‘the mule sheet’ out loud in a level, venomous voice. ‘Eighteen pounds of ground barley per day, plus three and a half pounds of vetch hay, plus six pounds of straw.’ He went on and on until Avraham told him to stop making a fool of himself.