by Shalev, Meir
The old mule just wheezed and kept dying, too weak even to open his good eye. In the end the only thing that saved his life was Grandfather’s black tree tar, a can of which I kept in the cabin. Taking a chance, Avraham applied a whole handful of it to the deep, abscessing hole in Zeitser’s head, and within a few hours the stubborn old creature revived and my uncle went home to sleep.
I watched him from behind the trunk of the olive tree, walking slowly with his head down, the air eddying around him while the night light of the cowshed dripped shadows from his feet.
I always liked Avraham. Though he never talked much or displayed physical affection, I felt I knew what he suffered inside himself. He had added a wistfulness of his own to the yearning inherited from Grandfather and Grandmother. I haven’t seen him for years, but when I think of him today it’s still crouching by Zeitser’s big body, or bent over the milk jetting out of his cows, or crossing the yard in his yellow rubber boots and blue work clothes, his frightful forehead carving furrows in the air.
Levin never showed his face at our place again. ‘Efrayim would have put a bullet in him,’ said Yosi when he came home on his first leave from basic training. He was all for such military retaliations against Levin as kneecapping or antipersonnel- mining him, but Avraham convinced us to let the matter drop and keep his uncle’s heinous deed a secret. Eventually, though, word got around. It was the old itinerant barber who spread the tidings over the Valley, from every corner of which Zeitser’s friends came to visit him.
They were old, these last founding fathers. With their worker’s caps, grey shirts, and rheumatic, work-gnarled fingers, they all looked like Grandfather. Each having withdrawn into a shell of his own, they hadn’t had such a reunion in years. Some hadn’t seen each other since my parents’ wedding. Now they strolled about our yard and descended as one man to the fig tree, ploughed earth beneath their feet and tall skies of words above their heads. They were as tough as nails, it was said of them in the village, a generation of titans and tribal chieftains. Once, when Grandfather was alive and still his old cynical self, I remembered him saying to Pinness that his comrades’ suspicions and disputatiousness would eventually lead them to the ultimate in factional splits: schizophrenia.
After visiting Zeitser, they trooped on down to my cemetery, a single grey monolith, stopping at the graves of their friends, sniffing the flowering ornamentals, and conversing in quiet tones without rancour. I stood off to one side, not daring to approach them.
Like Grandfather, many of them had grown small and short, the first sign of their impending death. Years of loving too much, hating too long, being disappointed too often, and searching their souls too hard had burned out their cells and sapped their vitality. ‘We were the sour orange stock onto which the Jewish state was grafted,’ said Eliezer Liberson to me a few days before he died, though not wishing to sound boastful, he added at once that the sour orange was ‘a most horrible- tasting fruit’.
Half hiding behind my back, Busquilla whispered timidly, ‘You’ll see, Baruch, everything will be all right now.’ He already knew some of the old-timers well, those who had ventured to buy a plot for themselves while still alive.
The pioneers surveyed their future resting place as they had surveyed the earth of the Valley upon arriving there years before. Each step they took was met by answering vibrations from Grandfather. His old comrades did not even have to put their ears to the ground, because the broad soles of their feet conveyed his sound to the panniers of their bodies. Though I did not have the nerve to follow them, I knew from my vantage point by the hedge that Busquilla was right and that my quarrel with the elders of the Valley was nearing its end.
Once they had gone home, it became clear that Grandfather’s rotting body, Rosa Munkin’s moneybags, and the other capitalist traitors I had buried had not merely poisoned the orchard and sowed confusion. Within a few weeks, as though by mutual consent, the voice of the old pioneers was raised in lament across the Valley. Pinness, who was accustomed to painstaking observation and precise notation, was the first to understand what was happening. Once recovered from the initial fright of his own uncontrollable crying, he began to make out the sobs and snuffles of the others and to realise that he was hearing something more than the smothered threnody of cornered moles or the wailing of fruit sprayed with pesticide.
‘A voice is heard on high, lamentation and bitter weeping,’ he pronounced.
The barely audible yet all-penetrating sound of deeply cleared throats, loudly blown noses, and painfully swallowed lumps made the night air shudder. No jaw was clenched tightly enough to stop the sobs that escaped it. Softly these flowed from the wrinkled vulture throats of the founding fathers, easily overcoming the resistance of bald gums and rumpled lips. ‘They’re softening up the earth,’ declared Pinness, who told me about the amazing digging capacities of certain insects.
Soon word began to reach us from other villages, travelling as fast as a dust devil. The old itinerant barber, who came once a month on his ancient motorcycle, told us that Yehoshua Krieger, the chicken breeder from the kibbutz of Nir Ya’akov who had invented the fuelless incubator and drafted the first workers’ manifesto in Gedera, claimed to be growing roots. Krieger’s announcement was made at his ninetieth birthday party, which was celebrated by a large crowd, and would not have bothered anyone had he not planted himself by the water pipe leading to the grain fields, thus interfering with the laying of irrigation lines and the tractors finishing the autumn ploughing. Each time they tried to remove him he began to scream horribly, insisting that he was in devilish pain because his little rootlets were being torn.
In the end, said the barber, Krieger had to be dug up with a great clump of earth clinging to his feet and replanted among the cypresses by the approach to the kibbutz, where he stood waving at whoever came and went, harassing embarrassed young female volunteers from abroad, and pestering everyone with incorrect weather forecasts.
Yitzchak Tsfoni, who had ploughed the first furrow at the Valley’s eastern end, pressing down on the ploughshare with one hand while firing his gun wildly with the other, took to wandering around the centre of his village with baskets of reddish soft-shelled eggs that he said he had laid himself. Believing they would bring him eternal youth, he ate them avidly and tried to get his children and grandchildren to do so too.
‘It’s not illogical,’ said Pinness, straining to catch a glimpse of the back of his new haircut in the mirror. ‘Eating your own eggs could turn the linear flow of time into a circle.’
Ze’ev Ackerman, who had lived on the kibbutz next door, completed construction of a revolutionary new food machine with which he appeared one day in Pioneer Home, accompanied by his sheepish-looking son.
I remembered them well from my visits to Grandfather in the old folk’s home. Ackerman had been the kibbutz plumber for years and had always complained bitterly about the snobbery of the field hands. When these ‘princes of the wheat fields’, as he called them, came to the communal dining hall smelling of earth and hay, he, reeking of linseed oil, soap fumes, and sewage, would sit there watching them jealously.
Now, in the old folk’s home, he toyed with the kibbutz members who came once a month to beg him to reveal the location of the underground water and sewage pipes he had installed years before. He alone had a map of the system, and the kibbutz gardeners were forced to look on distraughtly while three whole lawns were dug up to find leaks, blockages, and the whereabouts of pipes that the angry old man kept a zealously guarded secret.
He himself devoted his spare time and vast technical knowledge to a single all-consuming project, his ‘constructivist revenge’, as he called it, a machine made of pipes, tanks, and shiny little solar receptors whose valves he had turned on the lathe belonging to the old folk’s home’s handyman.
Old Ackerman was overcome with emotion when Grandfather came to the home. ‘There was so much we could have done together if it hadn’t been for that oversexed friend of yours, Eliezer
Liberson,’ he said, reminding Grandfather of the incident of the cow.
He asked about Mandolin Tsirkin and the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle, wiped a tear as he thought of Grandmother, whom he called ‘a pioneer’s pioneer’, inquired after Zeitser, who had worked with him in Yavne’el, and then, grabbing Grandfather by the sleeve and sitting him down on his bed, began haranguing him about his machine, which would revolutionise agricultural life.
‘No more hard work and farm animals, day and night, rain or shine. My machine will manufacture food from earth, sunlight, and water. It will drink and breathe, photosynthesise and flower, store nutrients and produce fruit just like any plant.’
He filled a large pan at the bottom of the machine with earth. ‘Now I’ll add some water with the necessary chemicals at this end, while at that end the good sunshine of our Valley is concentrated by the receptors. Those are the controls over there.
‘Look, Baruch,’ he said to me when a muffled clank came from the machine’s depths. ‘We have reaped a bounteous harvest, the aubergine and radish together.’
He cranked a few handles, and indeed, with a great deal of clicking and grinding, a slow, grimy trickle of something resembling mashed potatoes flowed from the machine. The old man scooped up a spoonful of it and thrust it radiantly in my face.
‘Go on, try it,’ he urged. ‘It tastes exactly like radish. You’ll never know the difference.’
‘That’s enough, Father. Stop,’ whispered his embarrassed son.
Whenever I brought Ackerman the cakes and fruits his son sent him, he would give me a mocking smile and say that cake was bad for the system, and as for fruit, he had all he could eat from his machine, stoneless and easy to chew. Aggrieved, he told me how none of the places he had written to had taken his invention seriously.
‘Even the milk,’ he added, ‘even the milk you bring your grandfather, though it’s certainly good of you to do so, can be taken from my machine. Milk and honey too – both, if you don’t mind my putting it crudely, nothing but animal secretions. And when my machine is old, no one will put it on the chopping block or throw it into an old folk’s home. No, indeed. They will not!’
I was so upset by Ackerman that I told Pinness about him.
‘We never thought we would grow old,’ said Pinness, who had grown weak from despair and very old himself ever since Uri’s beating at the foot of the water tower. ‘Having come to this country together, and worked together, and settled the Valley together, we were certain we would die together too.’
‘It’s a fact,’ confirmed Meshulam. ‘You won’t find a single document of theirs referring to old age. They discussed everything under the sun – the proper diet for a pregnant comrade, the fairest way to divide up work clothes, whether to invest in a pair of city shoes for the village treasurer. The only subject that never came up was what to do about themselves when they grew old.’
‘The battle with old age is a very private one,’ sighed Pinness. ‘It was never a matter for the Movement. When it’s time for me to depart this world, all I ask is a clear mind to face my death with.’
Today Ackerman is buried in row six, plot seventeen of my cemetery. His food machine lies behind the kibbutz cowshed, shiny, abandoned, and silent. Some experts from the Institute of Technology who had heard of it tried to operate it and gave up. No one besides Ackerman could get it to work, just as the sour orange tree by our cabin, which had borne, so it was said, lemons, pears, apricots, and quinces, stopped yielding when Grandfather died. Green, unfriendly, and infertile, it stands in the yard with the rude nests of sparrows, impudent patchworks of straw and stolen feathers, hanging from its branches.
Only Zeitser, in whose honour the old people had come to our village, bore his suffering in silence, as if determined to live out his life with as much circumspection as possible. Now and then I untied him and took him to the cemetery, where he stood in the cool shade of the trees, unrebuked by me if he cropped the grass or trampled a flower on his blind side.
Meshulam’s swamp fever seemed to have passed too. ‘Tsirkin is down with his final illness,’ said Pinness of Meshulam’s father. Meshulam so wished to give the old man some pleasure in his last days that he even began working on the farm. And yet, said Pinness, like all revenges, Tsirkin’s too was ripening poignantly, deep beneath the fragile membranes of broad wheat fields and smooth skin.
A few weeks before his death Mandolin Tsirkin asked to see me. He still lived at home and was dead set against going to the old folk’s home. ‘I don’t need to have my fingers broken by some physiotherapist while a young intern sticks tubes up my backside.’
Irritable and grumpy, Tsirkin could barely walk. Meshulam pushed him around the village in a wheelbarrow padded with sacks.
‘Who but a good-for-nothing like him would have time to take care of his old father,’ grumbled Tsirkin. ‘At least he’s finally found something to do with himself.’
‘You’re not going to catch me riding around in one of those Odessa droshkies,’ announced Mandolin when Meshulam suggested buying an electric car like those used by old people on the kibbutzim.
He felt bone-weary. He couldn’t work any more. His rich fields with their fine fruit trees and the best hay, wheat, and cotton in the village fell fallow. Bindweed, creeping grass, and prosopis spread their wild, ominous drapery over the Tsirkin farm. Whole families of mice escaping from poison in the neighbouring fields found shelter in the abandoned soil and used it as a staging post for raids on their former territories. Although the Committee kept demanding that Meshulam stamp them out and farm his fields, this was simply beyond his capacities. The farmers consulted Liberson, who racked his brains and remembered that the village had been visited in its first years by an eccentric Egyptian agronomist who claimed that mice had a horror of broad beans. And indeed, when the fields surrounding Meshulam’s were planted with these beans on Liberson’s orders, the inexplicable magic worked its spell. The mice kept to Meshulam’s property, where they multiplied steadily until hunger, overcrowding, and internal dissension caused them to grow long fangs and turn into predators. Every night we could hear their hoarse death groans and roars of vengeance as they devoured one another. The broad- bean barrier, explained Pinness, had turned Tsirkin’s fields into an evolutionary cul-de-sac whose inhabitants could never mutate back again.
Meanwhile, their udders bursting, Mandolin Tsirkin’s cows screamed and cursed in pain while the old man sat in his wheelbarrow trying to teach his son how to milk. Never before in his life had Meshulam held a female nipple.
‘For years we milked by hand,’ thundered the old man. ‘By hand! And you mean to tell me you can’t even open the stopcock of a milking machine?’
‘She’s got an infected udder, you imbecile, can’t you see? Why are you torturing the poor thing?’
His arthritis drove Tsirkin mad. Warped like a kite’s talons, his fingers froze. The calloused skin of his palms dried and split into a network of deep fissures that caused him terrible pain. He could no longer milk, prune trees, or play the mandolin. One day he was told by Tanchum Peker the saddler that the old peasants of the Crimea cured rheumatism with bee toxin. The next morning I took him to Margulis’s grave, where he pulled off his shirt, rose with difficulty from his wheelbarrow, let down his trousers, and stood leaning against the gravestone, his body gleaming in the sun while he waited to be stung by Margulis’s inconsolable bees. Tonya gave him an angry look but said nothing. Removing what was left of her fingers from her mouth, she vanished into the trees – among which, clustered like fruit in the dense foliage, two generations of village children were hiding in the hope of getting a glimpse of a founding father’s behind.
In pain and impatient, Tsirkin shouted and waved his hands at the bees to no avail. Long years of work and music had made him smell so good that they took him for a giant flower rather than a honey thief and landed in swarms on his shoulders, crawling docilely over his back and bare bottom.
After an hour of thi
s, he asked to be taken home. The bees had left orange pollen in the wrinkles of his neck and the cleft between his buttocks. Busquilla cleaned him off carefully with a large, soft brush, helped him to put on his shirt and knot the rope belt on his trousers, and followed us back to the village.
The three of us sat on Tsirkin’s bed beneath the mulberry tree. He had taken to sleeping outside again on summer nights, because the heat brought Pesya’s damnable perfume steaming out of the walls of the house, torturing the old man’s nose and principles.
‘Listen here, Baruch,’ he said to me. ‘I’m not long for this world. I want you to set aside a good place for me next to your grandfather.’
‘It’s yours for the asking,’ said Busquilla.
‘If you don’t mind, I was talking to Mirkin’s child,’ said Tsirkin in an icy tone. He paused for a moment. Tsirkin never uttered a sentence without making sure that the sentence before it had been understood.
‘I want you to bury my mandolin with me, like you did with Margulis and his honey. Like all those little Pharaohs in Egypt with their ivory toys and dung beetles.’
‘Fine,’ I said.
‘It’s not so simple, because Meshulam took it to his museum when I stopped playing.’
Getting Meshulam to surrender a historical artifact was an impossible mission, but Tsirkin had thought of everything. ‘On top of the beam in my hayloft, in the far corner, you’ll find a little box. Bring it to me. Don’t worry, Meshulam won’t catch you. He never goes to the hayloft unless he’s forced to.’
I cleaned the pigeon droppings and spider webs off the box and brought it to him.