by Shalev, Meir
‘Rice,’ he announced, ‘is an important and nourishing food whose cultivation had been neglected in this country.’
By now, however, no one believed a word he said. It was obvious to everyone that behind his white beard and show of ploughmanship and filial bereavement, Meshulam had swamps on the brain. It was decided to discuss the matter at the next general meeting, where it would share the agenda with new contracts for the fodder dealers, the acquisition of some old railway track for the construction of additional cowsheds, and also, I was extremely happy to hear, the request of my cousin Uri to visit the village.
He had now been in exile for several years, and tempers had cooled. Bearing a quiet halo of proud reconciliation and new ideas from the city, Ya’akovi’s wife had returned long ago, and when Uri wrote to ask the Committee’s permission to come home for the autumn holidays, I was sure his petition would be granted.
The general meeting was never held, however, because Meshulam struck sooner than expected. The night before it was to take place he set out for the fields, wearing his father’s work boots and carrying a new ten-pound pick he had bought in the village store. Never in his life, not even when he discovered letters to Liberson from Slutzkin and Berl Katznelson in a cardboard box in the Committee office, had his heart pounded so loudly as it was pounding now, as he walked along the main irrigation pipe smashing the large water taps one after another without stopping once to look back.
Fountains shot up and kept jetting. At first the water sank into the soil, but then, gluing the thin particles together, it turned the field into a huge basin of mud in which it slowly began to rise.
Meshulam did not go home. All night he sloshed around the field, climbing up to perch on the earthen wall when the water reached his boot tops. By the time worried cries rose from the cowsheds and poultry runs, waking those responsible for noticing a drop in water pressure, the Tsirkin farm was flooded and the village had lost three weeks of its national irrigation quota.
In the morning we all turned out to have a look, unable to believe our eyes. The silt had sunk to the bottom, and the new lagoon lay sparkling in the sunlight, the shimmering reflection of the blue mountain visible in its calm water from the angle at which I stood. Apart from an inexpressible fear, we all felt the hidden passion of the farmer for whatever is cool and clear, flows and bubbles, and mirrors the images of clouds. Pinness was the first to realise what had happened. After years of sowing and reaping, of tears, joy, and mockery, the floodgates of the earth had been sprung.
‘I stood there thinking of the day Avraham Mirkin recited his poem,’ he testified much later before the Movement commission of inquiry that investigated the events. ‘Then too not everyone sensed the approaching disaster.’ The commission members looked at him, looked at each other, thanked him politely, and told him he could go.
Even after the crowd had dispersed, I couldn’t bring myself to leave the Tsirkin farm. The longer I stood watching, the more stagnant the clear water grew, forming a green nightmare of slime before my eyes. Lured from their lairs by the odour of legend and doubt, sedge and loosestrife sprouted alongside great snails that had waited all their lives for such wet tidings.
From his place atop the earthworks, armed with his father’s gypsy bandanna and a curved papyrus sickle that he had removed from the walls of Founder’s Cabin, Meshulam proclaimed: ‘A swamp is born!’
‘There’ll be mosquitoes!’ shouted Ya’akovi the Committee head, who was close to collapse from the late summer busy season and the cost of the lost water.
Meshulam raised a hand. ‘So there will,’ he called out. ‘The Jews of this country have forgotten what a swamp is. The time has come to remind them.’
Ya’akovi did not wait to hear the rest. Shouting, ‘You’re out of your mind!’ he ran for the digger and started up the engine. With a thud the steel scoop rammed the earthen breastwork and battered a two-yard breach through which Meshulam’s lake began to flow, flooding the neighbouring fields.
‘Mend your ways!’ cried Meshulam, consciously adopting the hortatory tone in which Pinness declaimed the jeremiads of the prophets during Bible lessons. ‘Drainage ditches must be dug! Clay pipes must be laid! Our comrades from the press must be invited to see us plant eucalyptus, sing, catch malaria, and die!’
There were loud guffaws. And yet Pinness, Tonya, and Riva, I saw, were standing off to one side, apprehensively holding hands. I knew that in the old folk’s home Eliezer Liberson must have stopped chewing his breakfast as he caught his poignant first whiff of the forgotten old smell. ‘I don’t feel well,’ he said to Albert, and vomited up a glob of oozy green muck onto the tablecloth.
‘The thin crust has burst, the abyss has opened its jaws,’ said Pinness, thinking ‘circularly’ about the inundation of his own brain by the stroke that had swamped it in a cloud of forgetfulness. Only the top of the blue mountain remained, protruding like a lonely isle of memory. Ravenously hungry, the old teacher summoned up the last of his strength to go home and drown his worries in a pot of squash with rice and tomato sauce.
Tonya Rilov stuck two fingers in her mouth and resumed her vigil at Margulis’s grave. By now the skin around her fingernails was as white and porous as a wrinkled crust of boiled milk. Riva, whom the swamp had caught scrubbing windows, went back to work. Meshulam was in high spirits. His knowledge of Visionary Pioneering’s practical fine points was a sure guide to the future, and Ya’akovi’s assault on his earthworks had only strengthened his resolve.
From then on everything happened according to the ineluctable laws of cause and effect. Meshulam’s water flooded an adjacent patch of clover, decimating the shoots, and malignantly washed away a corn field, reducing it to spongy splotches of foam. Huge, gurgling, atavistic bubbles formed and burst, releasing a horrible stench. With a great squish, a cloud of high-bellied mosquitoes flew up from the bog and circled over it.
Only now did I understand that none of this was accidental, and that the secret, invisible skeins tying us to the earth ran far deeper than I had imagined, intertwined fathoms down with rootlets, corpses, and hoofprints. I thought of poor Levin wringing his blue fingers while insisting that ‘this land never gives the slightest strength to anyone who walks on it but simply suffuses the soles of your feet with its madness.’
Grandfather’s flight from Shulamit, Efrayim’s vanishing, Uri’s banishment, Avraham’s going abroad, Daniel Liberson’s undeciphered love furrows – all these were merely the fissures through which the never-clotting venom could circulate.
Pinness, I told myself, was wrong. He had plugged the wrong holes with his fingers. We were not the products of accident – not unless you considered Pesya Tsirkin’s breasts two random cornucopias whose effect on Mandolin Tsirkin brought their addlebrained son Meshulam into this world.
That afternoon a few unemployed men Meshulam had hired in the nearest town arrived on the scene. Smiling sheepishly in the old peasant’s blouses and Russian worker’s caps he had dressed them in, they looked pathetic and ridiculous. Meshulam gave them sickles and hoes and took them to his swamp, where to our astonishment they burst at once into the old swamp drainers’ song:
A friend of the frog,
Of the frog
Am I,
And just like the frog,
Like the frog
I cry:
Give me water,
Or I die.
Though at first they were embarrassed, little by little their voices gathered strength and their arms began to move in sweeping motions. Within an hour, however, several big tankers appeared on Ya’akovi’s orders, sucked up Meshulam’s swamp water, and drove off to dump it in the nearby wadi. On their heels came dumper trucks loaded with earth that they spread over the wet fields. Before the day was out the fresh soil was firmed down by angrily vibrating rollers and the entire bill for the water, labour, materials, and heavy equipment was presented to the Tsirkin farm with a strongly worded threat of seizure in case of non-payment. By
the time I drove to the railway station that evening to pick Uri up, the morning’s events seemed simply one more story I had heard, a nightmarish figment of my imagination.
I drove the farm truck through the fields. I don’t have a licence and only drive on the tractor paths around the village.
Uri jumped down from the train, and we gave each other a big hug. As I embraced him I could feel how much stronger and older he had grown.
‘You’re crushing me, you big ox,’ he groaned, half laughing. ‘You don’t know your own strength.’
He looked good, as slim, sardonic, and handsome as always. As we drove back, he stared at the farmed fields. White beards of cotton were flowering all around, and the first pomegranates were turning red on the trees, taking over from the last Somerset peaches. Far in the distance a big red International was beginning the autumn ploughing. We turned into a path that ran along the wall of Pioneer Home. Uri kept silent as he looked in amazement at the gravestones, the greenery, the flowers, and the ornamentals.
‘What do you do with all the money you make?’ he asked as we entered the cabin. ‘Nothing has changed here.’
I still slept in my old bed and dried myself with Grandfather’s soft old sheet after showering. Grandmother Feyge’s glass plates and big tin spoons were still in use in the kitchen.
We drank tea and ate some good cake Uri brought me. I suggested that he sleep in Grandfather’s bed, since at the request of the Committee I had put his parents’ house at the disposal of the cantor who had come to the village to lead the High Holy Day services.
We stayed up talking all night.
‘Tomorrow,’ Uri said, ‘we’ll go and see Pinness. And maybe we can visit Eliezer Liberson in the old folk’s home.’
That surprised me, because when Grandfather was in the home Uri had rarely bothered to visit him.
‘Working on the bulldozers has given me a lot of time to think,’ he said. ‘Of all the old folk in this village, Liberson is my man. More than Pinness. More even than Grandfather.’
‘Everyone’s looking for a model,’ I answered him. ‘Busquilla still thinks that Pinness is a holy man, and Pinness wrote in the village newsletter how special you are.’
‘All I am for Pinness is an exotic species of mammal.’
His laughter in the darkness made my skin tingle pleasantly.
‘I’m sorry about it,’ he said after a few minutes. ‘I’m sorry about that whole water tower business. I was a kid and they seduced me. I was just a toy for them to have fun with or to help them get even with the village. I should have gone straight to Eliezer Liberson as soon as the whole thing started.’
‘He would have chucked you out,’ I said. ‘Especially after you screwed Daniel’s daughter.’
‘He would have done no such thing,’ replied Uri. ‘He would have talked to me. But it doesn’t matter any more. In the end I learned the hard way. You’re talking to the most monogamous man not only in the Valley but in the whole world.’
‘Not everyone can find a woman like Fanya who’s worth devoting a lifetime to,’ I said.
‘You don’t know a damn thing about it,’ said Uri. ‘Every woman is worth devoting a lifetime to. It has nothing to do with her. It’s just a matter of deciding. The only thing special about Fanya was Liberson’s love for her. She was just a mirror he kept polishing to do his jetés and pirouettes in front of. He danced and he sang and he thought a great deal of himself. That’s all most women ever are.’
‘And Grandfather and Shulamit?’
Uri lifted his head. ‘Grandfather also decided that Shulamit was worth a lifetime’s devotion,’ he said deliberately, as if he had thought it through long ago, in the same tone Grandfather used to give his they-drove-my-son-from-the-village speech. ‘Not that she was worth two minutes of it. But he went ahead, even if it meant killing Grandmother and living his whole life hardly seeing Shulamit at all.’
‘You sound just like your mother,’ I scowled.
Uri laughed. ‘You and my mother didn’t get on very well, but I want you to know that she’s not a stupid woman. Far from it. She got my father out of here in the nick of time, just before he blew his fuse.’
He switched on Grandfather’s reading lamp and sat up in bed, baring his thin, splendid torso. A single broad scar was all that was left of the boot mark above his left nipple. ‘I got a letter from them,’ he smiled, producing some photographs of a large white house surrounded by palm trees. Rivka, in a yellow dress, was sitting on a wooden veranda sipping a reddish iced drink from a huge glass, her round eyes shining happily over the rim. Avraham, in shorts and a grey undershirt, the creases in his forehead soft and damp in the tropical sunlight, was instructing a group of blacks in a barn that looked like a cross between a laboratory and a palace.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘So she did. I don’t blame her. You’re lucky you didn’t have to see your father coming back from Yehoshua Ber’s interrogation.’
I can picture her perfectly, looking as grimly determined as any dim, obstinate hen on its eggs. She had her whole birdlike brain set on it. Convinced by her husband’s collapse in the cowshed that he had to leave the village at once, she hurried off to see her brother, who was on good terms with earth-moving contractors, arms dealers, invisible middlemen who were perfectly transparent, and secret entrepreneurs whose tentacles spread all over the world. ‘My brother will think of something,’ she kept telling me, unexpectedly arousing my sympathy. ‘I’m going to talk to him. Is there anything you’d like me to tell Uri?’
She went, came back, and kept mum. A few days later three strangers came to visit the farm. Cool and reserved, they walked around the yard at a fixed distance from each other, like the little flies in the hayloft. They made measurements, took an inventory, and talked at length with Avraham, observing him for hours as he worked in the cowshed, their Dacron suits as shiny as the breasts of preening pigeons. Not a speck of dust or a wisp of straw stuck to their well-groomed hair or the mirror-bright tips of their shoes. If you could have bred Rosa Munkin’s lawyer with a Scottish commando, that’s what their children would have been like.
One of them photographed the milkshed while jotting down numbers and charts, and a month later the lorries and dealers arrived. Avraham sold all his cows and his electrical and pneumatic equipment, left me his blue Fordson-Dexta, and took off for the Caribbean with his wife, four pregnant heifers who kept mooing apprehensively and stretching their necks to look back, and a few dozen test tubes of frozen sperm. Awaiting him there were a government contract, ‘milk-starved natives’, unlimited budgets, and simple, high-spirited soil that had never been cursed by the bones of saints or the poisonous salts of long-awaited redemption.
I stayed in the cabin even though they left me the key to their house. Now and then I went to have a look at it, opening taps to keep the pipes from clogging and windows to air the place. Thick cobwebs covered the milking stalls in the cowshed, jumping spiders and geckos hunted midges in the wall cracks, and at night I could hear the faint tinkle of floor tiles shattering all by themselves.
It was a few weeks before the last music of milking and the last chomping of hay stopped echoing in the feed stalls and the whistle of compressed air and the soft plop of dung faded away. The cascades of milk dried into a thick layer of yellowish powder that covered the floor and felt good beneath my bare feet.
The village smithy, I thought, must have looked the same way when the Goldman brothers walked out of Grandfather’s stories and off to war.
‘He only waited for Shulamit to get back at her,’ I told Uri.
‘My child,’ Uri said, ‘you don’t understand a thing. Do you remember when Pinness wanted to teach us about oxygen and the lungs and stood you in front of the class with a bag over your face?’
‘You bet I do,’ I said. ‘I passed out.’
‘That’s because you were such a good boy and Pinness forgot to tell you when to stop,’ Uri grinned.
‘So?’ I felt hurt.
&nb
sp; ‘Grandfather lived all his life with a stupid bag named Shulamit over his face, breathing the poisoned air of hopeless love. That’s what made him ill, that’s what drove him mad, and that’s what killed him when she came. Why do you think he died so soon after and even knew that it was going to happen?’
‘He was old,’ I said. ‘That’s what he told Doctor Munk.’
‘I never believed Grandfather like you did, and I screwed Doctor Munk’s wife the month he came to the village,’ said Uri disdainfully. ‘Take my word for it, he doesn’t know anything either. Not about love and not about how ill you can become from it.’
* * *
That night the square in front of the dairy was flooded. Pinness was not in when we went to visit him in the morning, because he had gone to watch the workmen who had been rushed to the village centre. Rotting, ice-cold liquids seeped up from the cracks that yawned in the concrete. Arriving in the morning with their milk, the disgruntled farmers found Meshulam dancing with his red bandanna and crooked sickle while singing ecstatically. This time Ya’akovi had no qualms. He had had enough, and hit Meshulam in the face.
‘Just let me catch you near a water tap once more,’ he said, looming over him ominously, ‘and you’ll end up in that stupid museum of yours with your belly full of absorbent cotton.’
Despite the blood that ran from his nose and stained his white mourner’s beard scarlet, Meshulam merely smiled. The workmen cleaned up the mess, made forms for pouring new concrete, sealed the cracks, and sprayed everything with insecticide.
When Pinness hobbled to the office to explain to the weary and furious Committee members that this was one swamp that public works could never drain, Ya’akovi screamed at him so loudly that a crowd formed outside the windows. ‘What the hell swamp are you talking about? We have a madman who goes around opening water taps, and it’s about time you stopped talking at us. We’re not your students anymore.’