by Shalev, Meir
‘There is no such earth,’ concluded Pinness, who had clearly been saving up his punchline. ‘And there is no such lover, either.’
Old and frail, Grandfather stood facing me and Shulamit.
‘I’m going to live with her from now on,’ he told me. ‘Please understand me, my child. At my age it’s the only thing I can do. But I can’t do it here. Not in this house.’
I heard familiar steps approaching the cabin. Pinness knocked and entered, followed by Liberson and Tsirkin.
Breathing heavily and embracing, they all burst into horrible sobs. I was so dumbfounded by the emotion gushing from their old Russian hides that I turned around and left. That night I slept among the bales in the hayloft with no Grandfather to cover me. Even when his friends left after midnight, the lights stayed on in the cabin. When I returned in the morning he was slowly making himself breakfast and the Crimean whore was fast asleep in his bed.
‘I never showed you this picture,’ said Grandfather. He ran his fingers over the paper lining of the trunk, fumbling gently until he found what he was looking for. Taking out his grafting knife, he slit and peeled back the paper, reached inside with two fingers, and drew out an old photograph.
‘This is her,’ he whispered, nodding toward the bed. ‘Back there, when we were young.’
The photograph had been slashed nearly in two from top to bottom, as though with a sickle stroke. It was held together by some old brown masking tape stuck to its back.
In a dark blouse with a round collar and a narrow tie of black velvet, Shulamit was seated on a carved chair. Her eyebrows arched like proud crescents in her vertically severed young face. Her hands, snipped by the hateful scissors, were crossed with an infinite calm, with all the radiant confidence of a beautiful woman.
‘When we went swimming in the river at night, in our little nook of reeds and rushes, Shulamit glimmered like a heron.’
She slept with all the officers, I told myself, and with all the old Red Army generals. Everyone knows she did. She was the reason you couldn’t sleep at night. She was the reason Grandmother died.
Grandfather rose, stretched himself painfully on tiptoe, and hit me in the face with his fist. He was so old and weak that it didn’t even hurt, but I broke into a sweat like a mule ploughing in autumn, and my eyes filled with tears.
Then Shulamit awoke and I ran out. Half an hour later they emerged for a walk around the yard. I followed behind them at a distance. Grandfather showed her Avraham’s milking shed, the hayloft, and old Zeitser, who was munching his pensioner’s breakfast. The mule regarded her with equanimity. At his advanced age he knew well that the beast hath no advantage over the man and that the life of both is nothing but one long tug at a stuck cart that never breaks free of pitfalls, sand traps, and bogs. They passed the remains of Grandmother Feyge’s old earthen stove, whose ruined walls still smelled of bread, pain, and baked pumpkin, and headed for the orchard. From afar I saw Grandfather’s long sleeves flap as he showed Shulamit the different trees. I knew that he was waving goodbye – to the peaches, to the pears, to the almonds, to me.
‘Just look at them,’ said Uri, coming up and standing by my side. ‘Straight out of the pages of a Russian novel.’
A month later the two of them moved to the old folk’s home. Until his dying day Grandfather retaliated with a deliberate, calculated, and relentless love whose heartless skill and soft old movements of pleasure made Shulamit shed her grey leafage, scratch at the walls, and stamp her feet as hard as her rheumatic old joints would permit.
* * *
And then, as Uri later wrote me, Grandfather died and everything began to fall apart. Rivka’s screams grew ten times louder, Avraham’s silences and crease lines deepened, and I myself all but stopped eating, because a great tuber of yearning was swelling and sprouting in my stomach. The news that Mirkin had left home got around quickly, racing through the pens and sheds and flying over the fields. It took no more than a few days for weeds to overrun the vegetable and flower gardens by the cabin. Black ants, their high abdomens arched almost to their backs, scooted madly across the floor. Three despairing almond trees, their hollow interiors claimed by the bright sawdust of Doubt, collapsed in the orchard. Ruthless cattle flies descended on the yard, and their strong, stout beaks drilled through the skin of man and beast, leaving bloody puncture marks and testy animals who couldn’t keep their minds on their work.
When thorny prosopis plants burst through the floor of the cabin, their ugly fruits distended like cancerous glands before my eyes, I rose from bed and called for Yosi. Armed with hoes, we went to the garden and began rooting out the long, tough nodules that had spread beneath the earth as the malediction of branches grew above it. Yosi had had enough after a day. His hands were blistered, and he couldn’t straighten his back that night.
‘It’s hopeless,’ he said to me. ‘Cut them back above ground once a week, keep dousing them with petrol, and maybe you’ll get rid of them.’
But I wanted to go for the jugular, for the hidden body that had waited for Grandfather to depart before reaching out its tentacles and creeping up at me from the earth.
The deep trench I had dug crossed the yard and ran out to the fields. I extended it now towards the orchard, sending clods of earth flying with great whacks of the hoe as I cut through acres of corn and clover and worked my way through the ruins of the British ack-ack positions, to the consternation of moles and centipedes and the dismay of unearthed pot-shards and mole crickets. I rooted out every side shoot I could find, and four days later I straightened up to find myself down by the spring.
Here, by the blackberries where the infant Avraham lay glowing in the dark and Pinness met the old Arab walking behind his plough, there was still a strong sulphurous stench of Bulgakov. His silken hairs floated in the air, and the venomous, spittley breath of the hyena condensed on the elecampane leaves. It was here that I traced the mother plant to its lair.
Suddenly the stubborn root thickened and dived down into the bowels of the earth. I wrapped it around my waist, dug in my heels and began to pull. I was in great shape, nineteen stone of meat and gristle, as tall as my mother and as strong as my father. Slowly the earth lifted as the yellowish root came to light, raising great clumps of soil, rat corpses, buried owl turds, large pewter beer mugs, and crushed tin toys still warm from the hands of the German children who had gone clutching them to their malarial deaths.
I toppled backwards when the rootstalk came out, its white rootlets wriggling like parasitic worms as they looked for something to grip. A great hole remained in the ground, and from it rose a milky, pestilent vapour thick with swarms of mosquitoes. Peering down into it, I saw the dense, murky water of the past swirling slowly, little grubs clinging to its surface and breathing patiently through their short air tubes. Like any old pupil of Pinness’s, I could have identified the larvae of the anopheles mosquito with my eyes closed.
A deep gurgle sounded from the hole. Shut up by the founders in the bowels of the earth, imprisoned in the trunks of the eucalyptus trees they planted, the soughing swamp began to surge toward me as it was touched by the sun’s rays.
I was seized by fear. All the horror stories I had heard from the old pioneers until they were flesh of my flesh now came to life. As fast as I could I hoed the earth back into the hole, stamping on it insanely with all my weight and strength.
I came home to find the feathery prosopis leaves wilted and moribund, tore what was left of them out of the ground with my hands, and went to sleep. I stayed in bed for days, breathing the smell of the spring, the sappy odour of the cabin’s wooden walls, and the fragrance of Grandfather. It was then I first realised that my own life, overpowered in his body’s huge shade, had grown like a low fern, mere mould of the forest floor.
Long night after night I lay without a blanket, listening to tiny footsteps on the roof and tremulous chirps of yellow-plumed chicks, until Avraham came to me with a full pitcher and told me that Grandfather had aske
d for milk.
At about that time I was informed that as an orphan I was exempt from the army. In the village it was rumoured that I had been found psychologically unfit.
‘What else could you expect from a child who adopted a mad grandfather as his mother?’ asked my aunt Rivka.
Never an easy woman, Aunt Rivka had loathed me openly since Grandfather’s departure for the old folk’s home. She was so worried he might will the farm to me that she kept begging her sons to visit him. Yosi, though, said he was too busy with the cows, while Uri didn’t give a damn.
‘I couldn’t care less about trees, and I don’t intend to be a farmer,’ he announced. ‘Who wants to live in a place like this? There’s nothing to do here but blabber about cows all day long.’
Still, everyone watched his step with me. I was the strongest teenager in the village. At the age of fourteen I was already anchor man on our tug-of-war team. Before each match Grandfather would say to me, ‘Just dig your heels in and stay put, Baruch. We’ll show ’em!’
I had no one except Pinness, who liked to chat with me, trying out new ideas and answering my questions. Sometimes Zeitser looked in my window and nodded, but he too was very old and hardly spoke any more.
In the mornings I rose feeling weak from the smell of Grandfather, which lingered in the cabin. The olives I cured didn’t taste like his. They grew mushy and rotten in no time because I never managed to get the salt right. The fresh egg either sank to the bottom like a rock or jumped out of the barrel as if shot from a catapult.
I was, as Uri put it, ‘a lone bird on a roof’. Until he was made to leave the village he came to see me every morning, bringing two pieces of cake stolen from his mother’s pantry, one for me and one for Zeitser.
‘How can you live like this?’ he asked.
Swallows nested in the corners of the ceiling, and grey lichen pocked the walls.
‘You can’t let the cabin go to pieces like this,’ said Meshulam. ‘It’s one of the last artifacts left from the village’s first years.’ He had come to borrow Grandfather’s old hat for one of his exhibits. It was a grey floppy-brimmed thing that I sometimes liked to wear to the fields.
Alone in the cabin, pacing the floorboards between the rotting walls, I groaned for the grandfather who had abandoned me, for the father and mother who had died, for the uncle who had disappeared, for the stars above to save me from my loneliness and sorrow. My only friends were the spiders jiggling in the corners and the translucent geckos who scaled the walls with their hands and looked at me with black innocent eyes. By day I tended Grandfather’s orchard. From the heights of his love nest he had instructed Avraham to put me in charge of it.
‘The child needs something to do,’ he said. ‘And he has a good pair of hands.’
I pruned, notched buds, tied branches, smeared tree tar on wounds, and let the fruit ripen and fall like Grandfather had. Now and then Avraham asked for a hand in the cowshed, which I was always glad to lend. I liked unloading heavy bales from the cart and stacking them in the hayloft, cleaning the sewage ditch, and dragging the giddy, excited young heifers to their first tryst with the inseminator.
Whenever things seemed so hopeless that I felt my bones begin to rot, I would go and wrestle the calves in the feed pen. As I playfully grabbed a half-ton yearling by the horns, Zeitser would raise his wrinkled head from his pile of old newspapers and give me a quizzical look. The calves, gargantuan crossbreeds of Brahma, Angus, and Charolais, let out glad, chesty bellows when they saw me coming, pulling off my shirt as I drew near. They loved me for being the one bright spot in their brief, nasty lives.
Raising beef cattle was a highly profitable business in those days, but the sight of the meat dealers pulling up in their lorries always made my uncle Avraham glower. Wrapping a calf’s tail around a fist, they would twist it painfully back and forth while leading the big animals to the lorry ramp. Avraham couldn’t bear it. For two or three days after the teary-eyed calves were taken to the slaughterhouse, his muscles were so tense that he staggered stiffly around the yard like a mechanical doll.
Although he never said anything about my horseplay with the calves, a small, slow smile of approval spread over his face when he watched it, smoothing the furrows in his brow. Sometimes, stepping sweaty and bare-chested out of the pen, the veins bulging under my skin, I spied Aunt Rivka hiding behind the thick trunk of a eucalyptus tree.
‘Why don’t you find yourself a girl instead of laying bulls in their own shit?’ she shouted angrily before hurrying off.
In Grandfather’s drawers I found old papers and documents, flowers dried by my mother, and letters from all over the country requesting agricultural advice. ‘I have such heavy soil that the water stands after a rain,’ wrote Aryeh Ben-David of Kfar Yitzchak. ‘Do you think I should plant peach trees?’
Grandfather attached a copy of his answer to each letter. He advised ‘Dear Aryeh’ to plant a hundred and forty-four trees to an acre and to graft them on myrobalan plum stock.
I found bits of gnawed, infected leaves that were sent to him for diagnosis and a note in his own hand that said, ‘Shimon, my friend, what I said about pruning back branches does not apply to a new vineyard. At this stage, no shoots from the graft should be touched. Just make sure to remove any suckers coming up from the stock.’
There were other finds too. ‘I’m living in a rented room with several other workers,’ wrote Shlomo Levin from Jerusalem to his sister in the Galilee. ‘Every day I come home with my hands so raw and swollen from cutting stones that I can’t touch a thing. Not far from here are a few old olive trees that I go and lean my head against and cry like a small child. Will I ever make a working man? Or am I just a mummy’s boy?’
Rain drummed on the roof of the cabin, the slow, full rain of the Valley which turns the earth into a quagmire and a man’s flesh into a sponge. I enjoyed walking in it like the old-timers, with an empty sack rolled up over my head and shoulders like a huge monk’s hood. Once a week I went to see the film showing at the meeting house, more for the sake of seeing Rilov bounce some trespasser from his regular seat than anything else. Sometimes I walked to the spring, where I lay on my back looking up at the sky through the bushes. It was here that Grandfather had come with his firstborn son, baby Avraham, the night the whole village climbed the water tower to see his magic halo.
‘I kept a small campfire going all night,’ Grandfather told me. ‘It drove off the jackals and made the blackberries and papyrus reeds glow yellow. Avraham slept, and I sat there and thought.’
Three times a week a woman comes to clean my house. At night I sit drinking tea and thinking in my spotless kitchen, picturing the village in the dark.
Our village is shaped like an H. The farmers’ houses run along the two vertical arms, their farmyards backing off to either side. The Mirkin farm is in the north-eastern corner, and the school, the meeting house, the breeder, the dairy, the clinic, the store, the feed shack, and the post office are in the village centre. The non-farmers live here too, their homes surrounded by small gardens and auxiliary barnyards.
It’s hard to imagine that it was all a wilderness once. The old photographs in Meshulam’s boxes – tents in a treeless landscape, poorly dressed men and women, skinny chickens, cows as meagre as those in Pharaoh’s dream – look like they were taken elsewhere. Lofty avenues of cypresses and casuarinas now line the entrance to every farmhouse. Slender-trunked Washingtonia palms, planted in those first years, shake their wild heads of hair in the sky.
I planted a dozen such palms myself in a handsome boulevard by the entrance to Pioneer Home. By then the only Mirkins left in the village were Avraham, Rivka, and Yosi. Every Saturday they went to visit Uri. Sometimes they invited me along.
Yosi drove the old Studebaker. Although he didn’t have a licence, he was an excellent, careful driver. You could see the road running into his eyes as if his brain were endlessly digesting it. Avraham kept silent, and Rivka, after trying to make small talk about th
is or that, gave up and sat there like the scolded calf she was so good at imitating.
Her brother, with whom Uri was now living, had left the village after his discharge from the army and become a successful earthmover. He had tractors working for him all over the country and businesses in Africa and Latin America. A small, rich, jovial man, he was immensely fond of me and liked to challenge me to wrestling matches. Slapping me on the back as hard as he could, he asked if I wanted ‘a job as a bulldozer’ with him.
‘I hear you’re making money, young fellow,’ he said shrewdly, planting his little fist in the great wall of my stomach. ‘If you’d like a little power shovel for those graves of yours, just let me know.’
‘All I need is a pickaxe and a hoe,’ I said.
‘Before you know it he’ll be buying you and all your power shovels out,’ said Rivka.
Although the story of his relocation, which arrived together with him, had made Uri the local girls’ dream boy, he led a life of monkish abstinence.
‘Do you know what I’ve been thinking about?’ he asked when we were left alone at last for a few minutes. ‘I’ve been thinking about your parents – about your father, who looked up and knew that a woman would fall on him from above, and about your mother, who died hugging him in her sleep, dreaming of meat.’
36
After departing with Shulamit, Grandfather returned to visit only once. I remember how my heart skipped a beat when I came home from the fields and saw the ambulance from the old folk’s home parked in the yard. Entering the cabin, I found Grandfather lying in bed, with Avraham and the village doctor seated by his side. I was good and frightened, but Grandfather explained that he missed the cabin so much he had to see it again. By the door, the doctor asked to have a word with me.
Doctor Munk was new in the village. Grandfather was already in the old folk’s home when he came. He had an amiable blonde wife who made friends with everyone and sometimes substitute-taught in the school, a woman who smelled as clean as a cat and wore summery dresses perfumed with crushed lemon leaves. A month after her arrival, Pinness and all the women heard the cry, ‘I’m screwing the doctor’s wife.’