by Shalev, Meir
Little by little the adult cicada emerged from its baby suit. Still moist and weak, it wriggled its legs slowly while the damp robe of its wings began to harden. We sat watching for three hours as the sunlight and air filled its veins and its yellowish hue turned green and then grey-brown. Suddenly it let go of the shrub and flew off, and all at once – drunk with the pride of accomplishment, the passion for life, and its own existence – it joined its loud, exhorting voice to the chirps of its comrades.
Pinness grew pensive. ‘You’ve seen something today that few people ever see,’ he said to me as we walked home. He took my hand.
‘All his days he eateth in darkness,’ he quoted. ‘For four years he burrowed in the ground, and now he has four weeks to sing in the sweet light of the sun. Is it any wonder that he’s so lusty and loud?’
Those words impressed me greatly. When I related them to Grandfather, however, he dismissed them with a wave of his hand. ‘Pinness knows a great deal,’ he said, ‘but he spins a lot of tall tales around his insects. How does anyone know that the larva in the ground is sad? Or that the cicada in the tree is happy? Pinness takes human feelings and gives them to insects.’
But back then, in the fields of my childhood, my teacher looked at me and smiled, happy to give, to educate, to influence. Young though I was, I understood that he was doing his best to make something of me. I knew that he and Grandfather sometimes argued about me, and I stretched out my neck like a big calf to be lavishly petted by both of them.
‘Isn’t being an orphan enough without your burdening him with all your tragedies?’ Pinness asked over a nocturnal bowl of olives.
I lay in bed with Fabre’s insect book on my chest, a loan from Pinness, feeling blissful when I heard Grandfather reply:
‘He’s my child.’
It was only years later that Pinness admitted his entomological rhapsodies were baseless and had been uttered simply for their effect on me, to win me over to the study of nature. ‘The magic spell animals cast on human beings is nothing more than a form of egotism that confirms our own prejudices. We domesticate cattle, train birds, and dress monkeys in top hats to reassure ourselves that we are the crowning act of Creation.
‘Curiously,’ continued Pinness, ‘the biblical creation myth and Darwin’s theory of evolution have a similar attraction. Both portray Man as the ultimate achievement. And yet, my child, what right have we to assume that Nature is purposeful and has goals? Is it not just as likely to be an accidental chain of developments that automatically eliminates its own mistakes?’
He opened his big Bible and showed me ‘an important verse’ from the Book of Ecclesiastes. ‘“For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them; as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast.”’
‘None of the commentators ever understood this verse,’ he said, slamming his Bible shut. ‘The key word in it is not “dieth” but “befalleth”. It’s not death that best expresses the equality between man and beast, it’s the randomness of life.’
He watched me carefully, as pleased as punch to see that I was looking back at him attentively.
‘“For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts”,’ he declaimed. ‘Both are the products of accident, and both are subject to the quirks of Chance.’ He burst out laughing. ‘To say nothing of the work animals in our village, who are our social equals as well.’
‘Does the cicada remember its four years underground?’ wondered Pinness out loud beneath the apple tree. ‘Or the pretty swallowtail – does it recall having been a clumsy caterpillar on leaves of rue?
‘The pupal period,’ he explained to me, ‘is not just a stage of maturation and quiet readying for a new life. It is also one of forgetting and oblivion, an impenetrable screen between the larva and the imago, those two so contradictory life phases of a single creature.
‘Whereas we,’ he lamented, ‘have been given this most terrible of gifts. Not only must we bear on our backs the camel’s hump of memory, we are not even recompensed with a brief life of flight, song, and love unburdened by the constant urge to eat, accumulate, and grow fat.’
I watched entranced as the stream of marauding ants attacked the cicada, drove it off, and plundered the juicy well it had dug. Pinness studied me to see if I was ripe for his final peroration. ‘Why, then, did Solomon praise the ant?’ he asked. ‘Because he was a king, and kings have always preferred ants to cicadas and bees to dung beetles. Just like that stinker Michurin. They have always thought of us as a huge, blind mob of slaves whose acquired submission to servitude is genetically transmitted.’
Bringing me back to the cabin, he took the volume of Burbank from Grandfather’s bed and read aloud to me from it.
‘“Nature takes just as much cognisance of the deadly snake as of the greatest statesman.”’
‘Why? Why?’ Grandfather roused himself from the kitchen table. ‘Why must you put such things into the boy’s head?’
And so I never heard the end of Pinness’s lesson until I was grown up and the ailing old teacher had lost all inhibition. ‘It’s better to roll your own ball of shit than to eat the higher-ups’ honey,’ he informed me, chuckling as he champed on Mrs Busquilla’s Moroccan treats.
45
Now only Rilov, Pinness, Tonya, Levin, and Riva were left in the village. I asked Busquilla to drive them to the old folk’s home now and then to visit blind Eliezer Liberson, and he was ‘honoured to do it’. Liberson, however, did not show much interest in them. It took Levin’s attack on Zeitser to get him to react in his famous article, while when Rilov’s septic tank blew up, he heard the explosion, knew at once what it was, and came for the funeral.
Rilov was very old. Sometimes he emerged from his arms cache to get a breath of air, go for a ride in the fields, take in the sun, and see what was new in the village. Visitors came from all over the country to see the Watchman, who was as tough as an old boot and could still sit in the saddle for hours. ‘They don’t understand that the poor old codger climbs up there and rides around for two days at a clip because he’s embarrassed to ask for help to climb back down again,’ wrote Uri in reply to a letter from me about Yehoshua Ber and Rilov’s suspicions.
Most likely, I imagine, the uric acid fumes that penetrated the cache’s sealed ammunition crates also ate their way into the chemical time fuses. The blast shook the whole village. Thousands of old Mauser cartridges and percussion grenades and tons of TNT and dynamite sticks blew sky-high in a great tidal wave of sewage, milk, mangled earth, and twisted Sten guns.
When the yellow vapours had settled, it emerged that half of old Rilov’s farmyard was now a canyon. His son Dani’s calf pen had become a ruin of blackened posts and veal cutlets. Nothing was left of the hayloft but a few foul-smelling brands of charcoal hissing and sputtering beneath the endless drops of rain that started to fall. ‘Fourteen milk cows went to their deaths without disclosing the whereabouts of the hidden arms,’ was Uri’s journalistic summation. Rilov himself was scattered over a radius of hundreds of yards. Trained in the conspiratorial tradition of their family, his son Dani and his grandson Uzi managed to convince the police investigators that they were confronted with a work accident caused by mixing large amounts of red phosophorus with potash and sulphur salts used for fertiliser.
The search for Rilov’s remains went on all over the village for several days, but the old man was never found. It was months before the horrid smell of ammonia, roast meat, and smoke dissipated and the old Watchman’s spiked army boots turned up, each with a rotting lump of flesh inside it. The right boot was discovered in the bushes by the spring, while the left was found in the bougainvillaea vine twining up the columns of the water tower. Both were put in a plastic bag and buried in my cemetery in the presence of a large crowd.
The funeral of Rilov’s boots was attended by the last surviving Watchmen, veterans of the Haganah, and hundreds of palli
d, unknown old men who emerged from airtight compartments and underground cellars and chambers. Once the grave was filled in, they gathered beneath the shade trees to update passwords, synchronise watches, and trade secrets.
We had always known that Rilov continued to stow arms away for the defence of the village and the Movement even after the establishment of a Jewish state, but no one had had any notion of the quantities he had managed to secrete. ‘Rilov could have armed two whole divisions,’ proclaimed one of his eulogists, fixing his yellow eyes on the assembly. ‘We weep for you, Comrade. We weep for your arms cache. We weep for Tonya, your partner in subterfuge. We weep, ah, bitterly, for so many good weapons gone forever.’
Having learned from her life with her husband that death is no excuse, Tonya walked away from his fresh grave, went straight to Margulis’s tombstone, and sat down in her usual place in sight of the mourners. The shape of her body was waiting for her there in the swarm of hovering bees, and she quickly slipped into it, licking and sucking her decomposing fingers.
Liberson too remained in the cemetery after the funeral, groping up and down among the graves with his cane of sour orange wood. He ran a hand over my face and shoulders when I approached and recognised me at once. ‘How big you are,’ he said. ‘You have your father’s strength and your mother’s height.’ Asking me to lead him to Fanya’s grave, he sat down on the white stone and took a deep breath of air. ‘So Rilov’s gone too,’ he said. ‘That madman. It’s a great loss. Pinness and Mirkin couldn’t stand him, but if not for him and his friends, we wouldn’t be here today. His type is needed also, indeed it is.’
He was glad to smell the flowers and ornamentals. ‘You should plant vegetables too,’ he said to me. ‘Vegetables would do well here.’ In Russia, he told me, there was a Crimean farmer who planted squash, onions, watermelons, and potatoes between the rows in the village graveyard with fabulous results. His potatoes were as big as melons, his watermelons were unusually red and sweet, and ‘he once grew a pumpkin weighing six poods – nearly as much as you, Baruch – that was taken by troika to the summer home of Czar Nikolai.
‘The blood of the dead ran in its veins,’ he explained. ‘I want you to plant roses and aubergines on my grave, and I’ll nourish them with my old body. Verily, I shall blossom in the Land of Israel.’
Liberson took his wooden-handled grafting knife from his pocket. It was just like the one Grandfather had and sometimes used for whittling. Cautiously I sat down beside him, afraid of his wrath if he sensed me on his wife’s grave. He began to peel an apple that he also produced from his pocket. The skin came off in a red ribbonlike strip that kept getting longer until it was all peeled and he commenced to chew with his corniculate gums.
‘Over there in the kibbutz,’ he said, ‘where the factory is now, there used to be a lovely vineyard. That’s where I met Fanya.’
Toward evening Busquilla drove us to the old folk’s home. Frail and faded, Liberson sat between us in the black farm truck. ‘Next time,’ he said, ‘I’ll be in a box in the back.’
When we arrived I took him gently by the elbow and led him to his room. The old Bulgarian lay in bed in his silk shirt and black bow tie and smiled up at his friend.
‘Good evening, Albert,’ said Liberson.
‘Back so soon?’ Albert asked.
‘It’s all over.’
‘After a Bulgarian funeral, everyone goes to the dead man’s house for a huge meal,’ said Albert longingly. ‘Pastelikos, apyu, cold beans. And of course a drink or two.’
‘After a funeral in the village, we just go on eating hay,’ said Liberson.
The two old men laughed. ‘I once had a girlfriend in Varna,’ Albert declared. ‘You should have seen her breasts. They weighed seven pounds each. They’re pushing up the daisies now.’
Liberson signalled me to go home, and I did.
46
As if they had planned it together, the old folk were dying off one by one. A great deal was said at their graves about ‘the vacuum left behind’, but although Pinness had taught us in school that Nature abhors a vacuum, nothing rushed in to fill this one.
One night I went to spy on Meshulam. Through his window I saw him bent over his documents, his face lined with contrition and framed with the new white fuzz of a mourner’s beard. His visitors heard him regret having shortened his father’s life with his shirking, denounce his own petty-mindedness, and list the principal differences between the anopheles and the house mosquito as smoothly as if humming a melody. Whereas the larva of the latter has a long breathing tube and lies in the water diagonally, the larva of the former has a short breathing tube and lies in the water horizontally. The house mosquito has short antennae and a drooping stomach, the anopheles has long antennae and an arched stomach. Asked why he should bother to recite basic facts that every schoolboy in the village knew by heart, Meshulam answered modestly that the memory of the Jews of Israel was going soft and some things needed to be saved from oblivion.
When the month of mourning was over, Meshulam looked in the mirror and decided to keep his beard. ‘It’s the first crop he ever managed to grow, so of course he can’t stand ploughing it under,’ wrote Uri, who kept asking me to send him news of the village.
As sometimes happens with beards, Meshulam’s flourished splendidly and gave him a sense of his own rectitude. Every day he came with new queries to his father’s grave, where his appearance caused a stir among the visitors. With Mandolin Tsirkin’s old work clothes and rope belt and his own great shock of salt-and-pepper hair, Meshulam was the spitting image of Hankin, Gordon, or the prophet Isaiah. American tourists and visiting schoolchildren looked at him admiringly and asked to have their pictures taken with him. Busquilla suggested paying him ‘a modest salary’ to hang around Pioneer Home all day ‘with a worker’s cap and a hoe’, and even wanted to sell picture postcards of him. As far as I was concerned, though, Meshulam was nothing but a pest. Since Avraham and Rivka had gone abroad, he had become more obnoxious than ever. He even insisted that ‘we must’ – we, no less! – put Hagit’s stuffed body by his father’s grave. Now that Grandfather and Avraham were gone and the farm was mine, I had no more patience for him.
‘I don’t need that mangy cow of yours in my cemetery,’ I told him. ‘If your father had wanted her next to him, he would have told Liberson.’
Busquilla was poised to recite our usual disclaimer about the candidate not meeting admission requirements, but Meshulam, his face limned by the golden aura of swamp drainers and desert blossomers that he had managed to acquire from a prolonged study of old photographs, chose not to argue.
For several weeks he tried to make a farmer of himself, getting some Rhode Island broilers for his yard and even attempting to plant vegetables. Bashfully approaching Rachel Levin, whose greens were famous throughout the village, he tendered her one of his prize exhibits, a book by a farmer named Lifshitz entitled Vegetable Growing in the Land of Israel. Rachel, however, looked doubtfully at the old paperbound volume, on the cover of which two fat children and a huge lettuce graphically symbolised the bounty of the land, and pointed out to Meshulam that the book was older than the village and badly out of date in its advice.
Nevertheless, Meshulam was smitten by Lifshitz’s prose style. ‘“Your aubergine delights in light and well-mannered soil”,’ he read aloud to me, his lips curling as though tasting the aubergine’s delightful nourishment. The two sentences he found most spellbinding were: ‘“The most suitable of radishes for the Land of Israel gardener is the Giant White of Stuttgart”,’ and ‘“The smaller the animal, the finer its manure: sheep droppings are finer than cattle droppings; songbird droppings are finer than pigeon droppings; but finest of all are the droppings of the silkworm”.’
‘He must dream of giant Nazi radishes getting fat on protozoa shit,’ wrote Uri, adding that Meshulam would go down in history as ‘the first farmer in the Valley to manure his crops with a tweezers and a magnifying glass’.
Mesh
ulam got hold of some silkworms, and Rachel, patient and good-natured as ever, showed him how to feed the little creatures fresh leaves from the mulberry tree in his yard. But not even their magic guano could do any good. The timidity of Meshulam’s touch made the earth go into spasms and vomit up his seed, while his starving chickens called him names behind his back.
Meshulam did not give up. Filled with the great deed for which he was preparing himself, he went around with a pregnant expression. The villagers knew that look well from their cows and their wives but failed to recognise it on a face with a beard, misinterpreting it as grief.
The product of his father’s obstinacy and his mother’s shamelessness, Meshulam was now abetted by these two qualities. He hired Uzi Rilov to give his land a good ploughing, borrowed the village’s chain mower and heavy harrow, and uprooted the rank carpet of wild carrot, mignonette, and yellowweed from his property.
The last carnivorous mice, snakes, centipedes, and ichneumons fled in panic from the land that had been their home ever since Mandolin Tsirkin’s last illness. The green John Deere tractor crushed the burrows of the voles, splattered the eggs of the lizards, and bared the angry mole crickets to the depredations of the sun. Uzi piled all the weeds in a big heap at the field’s far end, and Meshulam set them on fire and stared at them, mesmerised by the tidings of the great, all-purifying flames.
‘So Meshulam’s decided to be a farmer at last,’ said the farmers to each other at their evening meetings by the dairy. They would have been happy to give him advice, because he knew absolutely nothing about agricultural equipment except for the ancient Kirchner and Zirle mouldboards pictured in 1920s farming journals, but Meshulam was not looking for help. On his own initiative he had the district digger build a five-foot wall of earth around his land, the purpose of which, he explained to his startled neighbours, was to plant an experimental rice paddy.