by Shalev, Meir
The doctor played the cello and even gave a few amateur recitals. One of them was attended by Tsirkin, who announced afterward that if he held his mandolin upside down between his legs, ‘it would howl like that too’.
‘Grandpa thinks he’s dying,’ said Doctor Munk with the fake intimacy he cultivated, as his revolting little dog tried to nip my heels. ‘I’ve examined him and there’s nothing wrong with him. It’s something that happens to people his age, and so we have to try to calm Grandpa down.’
Grandfather’s wanting to visit the village had aroused no suspicions in the old folk’s home. No sooner did he arrive, however, than he sent Avraham for the doctor.
‘I’m dying,’ he told Doctor Munk, ‘and I’d like to know what it will feel like.’
The odd thing was that Grandfather had never had the slightest use for doctors. He trusted only nurses and medics and couldn’t stand our former physician, a strange supervegetarian who had come to us from Scotland long before Efrayim’s letters and had been dead for several years. Far in advance of the discovery of penicillin he smeared infected cuts and drippy penises with bread mould, and included in his diet baked bulb of autumn crocus, mesocarp of mandrake, and ground walnut bark. He also made sure to sunbathe every morning, and his guests were offered such refreshments as mallow leaves picked by the roadside and purslane filched from the chickens’ feedboxes. His language was a source of general amusement. One of his more famous diagnoses was, ‘The cow kicked Rilov in the head, and for half an hour he lay in manure with no sense.’
So healthy and balanced were the foods the Scottish doctor ate that he never aged at all. When as a man of eighty he crumbled to a yellow powder, the last of his cellulose consumed by bostrychids and weevils, there was not a wrinkle in his skin.
Doctor Munk was acquainted with the stories told about Ya’akov Mirkin in the village.
‘I’ve heard a lot about you, Grandpa,’ he said, leafing through the clinic’s medical file. ‘I’m glad to get to know you.’
He phoned the doctor at the old folk’s home, took Grandfather’s pulse and blood pressure, and performed a cardiogram to be on the safe side.
‘Grandpa,’ he said, ‘you’re as healthy as a horse. I wouldn’t send you to the Olympics, but you’re in fine form.’
‘Let’s get this right,’ said Grandfather, the chill in his voice cheering me. ‘In the first place, I’m not your grandfather. And in the second place, I didn’t ask for your medical opinion. Don’t call me Grandpa, and don’t send me to the Olympics. Just tell me what it feels like to die.’
‘To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t know,’ said the offended physician. ‘I suppose it depends what you die of.’
‘Old age,’ said Grandfather. ‘I intend to die of something as banal as old age.’
I was up all that night. I was so glad to have him back in the cabin and so scared by the way he talked that I was too tense to fall asleep. He himself, after laboriously rising to cover me and returning to bed, fell asleep like a baby.
As soon as the sun was up I made him breakfast. After we had eaten, Grandfather asked me to take him to the fields. I pushed him along the ruts of the tractor path in his wheelchair. The old milk cows sighed happily to see him as we passed the cowshed, but some of the young calves and heifers didn’t know who he was.
‘You need to put a salt lick in the feed stalls,’ Grandfather said to Avraham, who had just arrived.
‘Nowadays there’s already salt in the concentrate, Father,’ said Avraham.
‘Any cow would rather lick her own salt,’ insisted Grandfather stubbornly.
We passed the fig tree and the olive. Grandfather gave Zeitser a hug and patted him on his nose, which was as smooth and soft as a colt’s despite his great age.
We reached the orchard, which looked wild and healthy.
‘Very nice,’ said Grandfather, fingering the leaves and branches. ‘Go and bring me some fruit.’
He sniffed the Methley and Vixen plums, varieties no one grew any more, and declared that the soil needed nitrogen. Next autumn, he suggested, I should enrich it by sowing sweet peas among the trees.
‘Listen to me, Baruch,’ he said all of a sudden. ‘That doctor knows nothing. I’m dying and I want to be buried here, in my orchard.’
I could feel my face twitch. A frightened smile struggled for a foothold at one corner of my mouth.
‘But Avraham wants to keep up the orchard. You yourself asked me to look after it,’ I said.
‘And so you will,’ said Grandfather. ‘Don’t you worry. I won’t take up much room.’
‘Listen to me carefully, my child,’ he added after a while. ‘I didn’t come here to visit. I came here to die. I want to do it at home, because it will be easier to bury me here if you don’t have to ask anyone’s permission or snatch my body from the freezer at the old folk’s home.’
‘But why, Grandfather?’ I stammered.
‘They drove my son from the village,’ Grandfather declaimed. ‘I don’t want to be in their cemetery. I don’t want any part of them. I’ll stand their earth on its head.’
He looked at me sternly. ‘You’ll bury me here. This land is yours and mine. And after me you’ll bury Shulamit, and perhaps there will be others. Don’t let anyone move us from here. I’m counting on you, Baruch. You’re the only one who can do it.’
Grandfather watched me slowly taking it all in. Suddenly it dawned on me why he had fed me all those vegetables, raised me on stories and colostrum, saved me from the hyena, weighed me so carefully.
‘And now take me back to the cabin,’ he ordered.
I wheeled him back, my heart heavy. Never before had I realised what a stupid idiot I was. I felt like an animal that doesn’t understand a thing.
After I helped Grandfather into bed, he told me to go back to work. ‘I’ll rest for a while,’ he said.
At noon a hen came out to the field, importantly flapping her wings, and I followed her back to the cabin. Grandfather was getting impatient. He wanted me to go to the co-op and ask Levin for a new pair of pyjamas.
‘At my age I can afford to indulge myself,’ he smiled.
‘Maybe he’d also like some silk sheets for the mule?’ Levin jeered.
I returned carrying a pair of soft grey flannel pyjamas with light blue stripes. Grandfather asked me to light the old wood-burning stove and bring his trunk to the bedside.
While the stove’s chimney purred, Grandfather picked his way through the old vellum of his papers, arranging them: letters, documents, photographs the colour of earth. Then he walked about the cabin a bit, hobbling from corner to corner. I followed him around instead of going back to work, all but clinging to his tiny body. My big bulk must have bothered him, because suddenly he turned around and scolded me. But even then I didn’t leave him. I was afraid that if I looked away for a second he might vanish into thin air.
Towards evening I brought him some milk from the cowshed, but he vomited it all up, lost his temper, and yelled at me to mop the floor. Afterward he apologised and asked me to help him to the shower and sit by his side while he washed. I had kept his old milking stool there, its wooden seat sanded white by the rough cotton weave of his work clothes. He sat on it to keep from slipping on the wet tile floor, running the water so hot that his white skin turned pink and steamy and drops of vapour trickled down the windowpane. He soaped his body and took care to cleanse it well, fussily wielding the scouring pad behind his ears and in between his toes and buttocks while I sat and waited, crouched against the wall beneath a hanger that held my sour work clothes. I could tell when Grandfather wanted to be alone with his thoughts and didn’t bother him.
When he was finished I helped him to his feet, wrapped his body in the big old soft sheet he liked to dry himself with, and carried him back to bed like a nurse carrying a baby. He slowly put on the new pyjamas I had bought him, asked me to button up the shirt, and said, ‘Bury me in my earth, among the trees.’ Then he lay down, placed his glas
ses on the little night table, pulled the blanket up to his chin, and fell into a deep sleep. It took me six hours to admit to myself that his lost consciousness would never be regained.
Rivka and the doctor wanted to rush him to the hospital, but Avraham said that his father had made up his mind to die and should be allowed to do so. At 1 a.m., when Doctor Munk declared that such a comatose state could last for days, Rivka and Avraham went home to sleep. Grandfather’s body went on breathing and quivering and secreting brown, dry, foetid earth.
For three whole days I sat by the wooden wall of the cabin without sleeping a wink. People went in and out, and I was so delirious by then that I no longer knew who came via the door and who via Grandfather’s trunk. On the third night, when my body was limp and porous from lack of sleep, there was an end to the eddy of dreams in the room and I knew that Grandfather was dead. I went over to his bed and picked him up. He was small and light.
‘The earth, the earth,’ he said all at once. ‘The earth will lift up its voice.’
I held him in my arms and headed for the fields. We passed the hayloft and the pens of nodding calves. By Efrayim’s old hut we stopped to take a pitchfork, a pickaxe, and a spade. Soundlessly we glided past Zeitser, whose twitching body was in the middle of an argument with itself. A jackal yelped far away, startling the turkeys. A heavy layer of dew covered the earth, the blades of grass, and the Fordson tractor parked nearby.
‘Here,’ said Grandfather.
I broke the earth with several blows of the pickaxe and dug down with the pitchfork, flinging up the heavy clods and then evening out the sides with the spade. I did this over and over, and since I’m strong and was in a frenzy, it took me exactly twenty-five minutes to dig a square pit a yard and a half deep among the pear and apple trees.
I took off Grandfather’s pyjamas and laid him in the grave. His smooth white body glistened in the darkness. I covered him with dirt, packed it down with my feet, and marked the site with some heavy stones gathered from the borders of the property. Then I lay down on the damp ground and fell sound asleep.
It was 7 a.m. when I awoke, my eyelids struck by the sunlight filtering through the foliage of the pear trees. Uncle Avraham was calling my name. Doctor Munk stood wanly off to one side while Ya’akovi, the Committee head, gave me a kick in the shoulders and demanded to know what I thought I was doing.
Doctor Munk plucked up his courage and flung himself on me, screaming like a madman as he tried pathetically to shake my body.
‘How can I fill out a death certificate? How do I even know he’s dead? What’s going on here?’ He went on asking his idiot questions. Ya’akovi picked up Grandfather’s pyjamas with a strange look on his face, as though expecting to find in them a clue to the mystery.
‘Put those pyjamas down!’ I yelled in a voice I had never used before.
He just stood there. I pushed Doctor Munk out of the way, rose to my feet like a bull, and slapped Ya’akovi in the face so hard that his lips split open like a plum. Hurt and incredulous, he staggered backward like a ludicrous mannequin and sat down on his rear. With two flying steps I was on him, snatching the pyjamas from his hands.
‘That’s for Grandfather and for Efrayim,’ I said.
Supporting himself on his knuckles, he started to rise.
‘And no funny stuff,’ I warned him.
Though shorter and lighter than me, he was well built and a veteran of several wars, like most of the men in the village. He got to his feet, wiped his bloody chin with his hand, and said dryly: ‘We’ll be back in an hour to open the grave. We’ll bury him in the village cemetery, in founders’ row, next to your grandmother. If I were you, Baruch, I wouldn’t make any more trouble.’
They left. A short while later Avraham came back by himself, carrying the heavy tow chain from the tractor and a length of two-inch metal pipe. He laid them on the grave without a word and returned to his cows.
He was back again in half an hour. This time there were several men with him, including Ya’akovi, whose face had been cleaned and bandaged, Pinness, and Dani Rilov. By then I had already dug holes for the ornamental bushes I planned to plant around the grave.
I straightened up and braced myself.
‘My grandfather asked to be buried here,’ I told them.
‘We know you were very attached to him,’ said Pinness in a friendly tone, ‘but this is no way to do things. There’s a cemetery, Baruch, and that’s where people are buried.’ He thought he would outsmart me as the farmers outsmart a calf bound for slaughter, sweet-talking himself close enough to lay his hypnotic hand on my neck. But I knew all the tricks of teachers and cattlemen and jumped back to the pile of rocks on the grave, where I stood without a word.
‘Don’t waste your time, Pinness, this isn’t a civics class,’ said Ya’akovi. ‘We’ve had enough trouble from this family.’
He made a hand motion. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the lanky form of Dani Rilov begin moving towards me with his arms out. The heavy tow chain with its wicked hook at one end whistled through the air, whirling over my head in a dark, glittering circle. Dani backed off and the group retreated.
Pinness, who more than once had seen me roll away heavy rocks to look for velvet ants and galeodes, went over to Ya’akovi. So did Avraham, whose angry whisper everyone could hear.
‘I don’t want any scenes now,’ he said, his forehead crawling and contorting. ‘Don’t forget that we’re in mourning. My father is dead, and we want to mourn him in peace.’
Ya’akovi took fresh stock. ‘We’ll go now,’ he said. ‘But take it from me, you haven’t heard the last of this from the Committee.’
To this day I don’t know who was right – Uri, who said that Grandfather had prophetic powers, or I, who argued that he simply had planned the future so long and so exactly that it was forced to flow in the ditch he had dug for it until it reached me and woke me up.
Grandfather knew that no one would move his body. He knew that no one would dare challenge the monster of a grandson he had raised. He knew that I would bury more ticking corpse- bombs and menacing sacks of gold after him.
He knew he would not be dug up because the village never unearthed anything embarrassing. We keep our scandals to ourselves. It takes something pretty grim or horrible for the police to be called in. We have never had a single case of rape or murder, while robbery, assault and battery, and other such irregularities are dealt with by our elected officials, loyally abetted by public pressure and the village newsletter.
I stood guard over the grave for a month. Avraham did nothing to encourage me, but neither did he try to dissuade me. Yosi and his mother seconded the general opinion that I was mad. Uri was amused. Pinness was horrified.
‘I can’t believe that this hideous dream is taking place right under my nose,’ he said.
‘Grandfather told me to do it,’ I answered.
‘It’s unspeakable!’ Pinness said.
‘Grandfather told me to.’
‘And such violence – flying chains, iron rods. You’re like Cerberus guarding the gates of Hell.’
‘Grandfather told me.’
Pinness looked at me sternly. Little by little, however, as though in an abstraction of surrender, he backed down. Grandfather knew that the perplexed old teacher would try to convince me and fail. Out on his long evolutionary limb, Pinness belonged to a generation whose necks were adapted to nooses of words. ‘Buried in His Own Earth’ or ‘Here Lies the Farmer in the Soil He Tilled’ were irresistible phrases for someone like him.
‘And he died and was buried in the garden of his own house,’ he quoted with open envy from the Bible.
Nor did he protest when I buried Shulamit. Fanya had a fit for a few days until she realised it was useless and calmed down. It was only when Rosa Munkin’s coffin arrived several months later and her pink tombstone was unveiled next to Grandfather’s, marking my professional début as an undertaker, that Pinness was shaken to the core.
The or
chard was in its last days then. Despite Uri’s prediction that the trees would flourish manured by Grandfather’s body, the ones nearest his grave were as quick to die as if poisoned, while those farther away became ill and nervous: they crawled with aphids, rustled their branches in breezeless weather, dropped their fruit before it was ripe, and were mined by the shafts of every conceivable pest. They also flowered fitfully, their blossoms reeking of dead bees and flies killed by their toxic nectar and pollen. Margulis took his hives elsewhere. The wind rolled up the carpet of petals, leaving behind a hard layer of earth. Now and then I picked the fruits that hung from the dead branches, but they tasted and felt like meatballs. At night the owls and the polecats gnawed at them, and Grandfather’s orchard soon died and rotted away.
Avraham had Grandfather’s name carved on his tombstone with the dates of his birth and death and the verse that had served as the caption of the first tree he had ever planted.
‘A green olive tree, fair, and of goodly fruit.’
37
During the first spring after Grandfather’s death, the earth around his grave began to stir. Red beetles with black-spotted backs crawled out of it, awaiting the tread of more dead. Soon enough they arrived. Pioneer Home was a fact and the village was in an uproar. I refused to appear before the Committee for a hearing, from which Busquilla returned in high spirits to read me what he thought to be the protocol’s most entertaining passage.
‘“Comrade Liberson: Comrades, for the past year Comrade Baruch Shenhar has been burying dead people on the Mirkin farm. Comrade Shenhar started with his grandfather, whose will he claimed he was executing, without requesting permission from the authorities. A few months later he buried Shulamit Motzkin, a recent immigrant from Russia, whom you all know as the woman Ya’akov Mirkin lived with during his last months. Subsequently he began burying on a commercial basis, even importing the corpses of ex-émigrés.