by Shalev, Meir
‘I’ve come back,’ said Uri.
‘And you’re all healed,’ added Liberson. ‘Everything is all right now.’
‘Yes,’ said Uri. ‘I’m all right now.’
‘And your French calf?’
The touch of horror made my heart a tight fist. The blind man had peeled Uri like a fruit and put his finger on the poisonous, sore kernel.
‘I’m Uri Mirkin,’ my disconcerted cousin whispered.
The old man’s hand jumped back as if burned by a live coal.
‘Uri Mirkin,’ he said. ‘Of the water tower?’
I glanced back and forth from the ugly old man who had held one woman in thrall to my handsome cousin who had slept with every woman in the village.
‘I came to say I’m sorry,’ said Uri hoarsely.
‘Who isn’t?’ Liberson asked.
‘Did he do you wrong?’ asked Albert.
‘Oh, no,’ said Liberson. ‘He’s just a wild shoot that sprang up in the village fields.’
‘He is a fine-looking boy,’ Albert said.
‘If I had his looks,’ said Liberson, ‘my life would have been unbearable. The girls would have thrown themselves at me like ripe fruit falling off a tree.’
‘Non tiene busha,’ said Albert. ‘He has no shame.’
‘That’s not how it was,’ Uri said.
Liberson rose and asked us out to the terrace. He walked up and down the balcony, the light breeze picking up from his skin its mossy old farmer’s smell of steamer trunks, dried dung, clover, and milk. His sturdy cane and grey work trousers lent him a presence that had not been passed on in his genes, Michurin notwithstanding.
Lifting the cane, he pointed towards the horizon.
‘Do you see that wadi way out there? That’s where we came from, Tsirkin and I, with your grandmother and grandfather, to have a look at the Valley. That good-for-nothing brother of hers was a bank clerk in Jaffa at the time.’
Though he paused to make sure we hadn’t missed the dig at Levin, we said nothing. Eliezer Liberson viewed the Valley as a relief map of his memories, its co-ordinates given by the smells and shadows that reached him. And yet, despite their confident precision, the movements of his cane in the darkness that shrouded him filled me with sorrow.
‘The roads were full of bandits,’ he continued. ‘The Valley was one big vale of tears. Here and there pus-eyed sharecroppers worked tiny patches of land. Jackals and hyenas walked around in broad daylight.’
He ran his cane over the landscape like a master of generations. ‘And over there by those two oak trees, do you see? That’s where Jael had her tent, the wife of Heber the Kenite. But we only got as far as the Germans’ abandoned site and then left by train.’
‘King Boris stood outside the railway station and said, “You’re not taking my Jews.” That’s what he told the Germans. They didn’t scare him.’ Albert’s voice sounded huskily from inside the room, strained with gratitude.
‘That’s the same Boris who cooled his heels while Katchke was talking to the King of England,’ said Uri.
The blind man gave us a loving and compassionate smile. ‘Albert tends to daydream,’ he said. ‘The Balkan Jews aren’t like us.’ He resumed the thread of his discourse. ‘We worked by the Sea of Galilee and on the road to Tiberias, and at night we swam in the sea. We were already bare-bottomed in the water, splashing your grandmother, when she took off her dress and stood on the shore tall and naked, like a beautiful heron on the rocks. We swam back to her and climbed out.’
‘Seven pounds each,’ said the soft voice within the room.
‘What is he talking about?’ whispered Uri.
Liberson went to the door. ‘Shhh, Albertiko. Shhh,’ he said.
We continued to sit on the terrace. The earth underneath the garden of the old folk’s home was alive. Seeds waited. Cicada larvae nursed. Earthworms and carrion beetles laboured over putrefaction.
‘We were no better than you are,’ said Liberson. ‘The time and place made us what we were. Many of us couldn’t take it and left. That’s something you know about, Baruch, because now they’re coming back to you.’
‘Tell us a story, Eliezer,’ I said all of a sudden. ‘Tell us a story.’
‘A story,’ said the old man. ‘All right, I will.’
‘A few days after we arrived in this country,’ he began in the old familiar tone, ‘before we met your grandfather, Tsirkin and I found work digging holes for new saplings in an almond grove near Gedera. It’s awful work. You feel your spine is splitting, your hands are full of blisters, and the Arab coolies beyond the acacia hedge are waiting for you to break so they can get their old jobs back again. Just then one man threw down his hoe and said he was going for water, and another went along to help him. They came back with a jug and poured everyone a drink, and when they had finished that they said they would count the holes.’
He sniggered. ‘Did you hear that, Albert? We dug and they counted.’ Since Albert said nothing, he continued. ‘Every group of workers had its hole counters. First they went for water, then they poured it, then they counted the holes. Soon they were counting people, and before long, party members. Within a year they were travelling to Zionist congresses in Europe, and from there to raise money in America, which gave them even more to count.’
Liberson laughed. ‘Tsirkin hated them. The hole counters became big-time politicians and never gave us enough money. We were always on the verge of making it, on the verge of getting in the harvest, on the verge of starving to death.’
‘Non tiene busha,’ repeated Albert from his bed.
‘Once,’ continued Liberson, ‘Pesya brought home some member of the Central Committee. Meshulam was a little boy. He sat there hypnotised all evening, asking all sorts of questions. The man, whose name I won’t mention, was thrilled by how much the boy knew. After he had gladly answered all his questions, Pesya took him to the cowshed to see Tsirkin milk the cows. Tsirkin took one look at him and recognised him at once.
‘“Well, look who’s here,” said Mandolin. “It’s just like the good old days. I’ll milk and you can count the cows.”’
Liberson turned back towards the Valley. He moved his hands and cane slowly, feeling his way across the map of his longings. ‘We came to build a village. A place of our own. There, that big green blotch way out there – that’s the eucalyptus woods we planted. The trees sucked up the swamp. Cut them down and it will be back, as far as the eye can see.’
He did not know they were gone already. The big, sappy trunks had been felled the year before, and nothing had happened. The stumps were rooted out, and cotton was planted in their place.
‘Beyond the woods is the wadi where Pinness ran to kill himself when he found Leah with Rilov. Who would have believed it? A pregnant woman! We ran after him and brought him back, and only found his gun a year later during ploughing. It was rusted and useless, and Leah was dead by then too. She came down with some rare cave fever that even Doctor Yoffe had never seen.’
He drew a quick stroke in the air with his cane, from west to south. ‘There, on that far mountain, Elijah saw the little rain cloud and ran before the chariots of Ahab. He raced the king’s horses all the way to Jezreel, over there, and reached it before them.’
We went back inside. The room smelled of the sweet crimson perfume of overripe Astrakhan apples, Liberson’s approaching death, and Albert’s sheets.
‘You’ve caused quite a rumpus, you two boys, eh? You with your graves, and you with your girls.’
‘I drive a tractor now,’ said Uri. ‘I’m a working man.’
Stripped of his sense of humour, Uri was alone and defenceless against Liberson. The old man sat wearily on his bed. I felt bad about taking up so much of the small room and making him huddle against the wall.
‘The Movement likes to think of us as one big happy family,’ he said. ‘The tribe of pioneers. Together we came, together we redeemed the land, together we farmed it, together we’ll die, and together we
’ll be buried in a nice photogenic row. In every old photograph there’s a row sitting and a row standing, and two more of them on a crate in the back, looking over the others’ shoulders, and two more lying down in front, propped on their elbows with their heads touching. Three rows out of four eventually left the country. In every photograph you have the three rows, the heroes, and the zeroes.’
‘Grandfather once said something like that too,’ said Uri. But enveloped in darkness, Liberson was not listening. Only the memory of love could still catch his light-deprived eyes. He faced the window. I knew what he would say. ‘Over there, where the kibbutz has its factory, there was once a lovely vineyard. That’s where I met Fanya.’ He turned toward, me with tears in his white eyeballs. ‘You did right, Baruch, to let me go there by myself. Anyone else would have tried to help me.’
I told him about Meshulam’s swamp. ‘How silly can you get,’ he sighed. ‘Who cares about all that any more? It’s just a big waste of water.’ The details didn’t interest him.
‘I hate this place,’ he said to us. ‘They make me weave lampshades out of raffia and eat supper at four o’clock.’
Uri wanted to hear more about Liberson’s adventures with Fanya, but Liberson’s mood had taken a turn for the worse. He was already somewhere else. He had left us and dived back into a world in which we did not exist.
‘The old geezer,’ raged Uri on our way home. ‘He doesn’t give a damn. I planned this meeting for so long, and the two of you had to go and ruin it – you with your nonsense stories and him with his textbook memories. Lecturing us with that cane. Even when they’re blind, those founding fathers of yours, they have to see more and know better than anyone.’
‘What do you want from him?’ I asked. ‘His wife is dead, his friends are dead, and Meshulam’s swamp, if you ask me, scared him more than he let on.’
‘I’d rather he did chuck me out than treat me so condescendingly. They were always blind. They stood up to their knees in mud with earth in their ears and never saw more than one thing.’
‘But why should he give a damn about your problems? What did you ever do for him?’
‘I suppose it’s just as well,’ Uri said. ‘Maybe all my feelings of guilt just came from missing this place.’
‘He only thinks about Fanya,’ I said. ‘That whole performance on the terrace was just to show us that he remembers where the vineyard was.’
‘He’s a sick man,’ Uri said. ‘He’s demented. He could easily have an operation to remove those stupid cataracts. He wants to be blind. I swear he does.’
‘What’s left for him to see?’
‘My mother was right,’ Uri said. ‘All those crazy people really drove you mad.’
I didn’t answer him.
‘You can’t imagine how much I missed this place,’ Uri said. ‘In spite of the scandal. In spite of being beaten and made to leave. Twice I even came secretly at night, but both times I left right away.’
He looked at me for a moment and laughed. ‘What a waste for you to walk around like this. You should be hitched to a cart or a plough.’
‘Suppose I carried you in my arms,’ I suggested.
‘Fat chance,’ he said.
‘It’s no problem for me.’ I smiled with forlorn hope. ‘I could easily carry you home from here.’
‘What’s wrong with you?’ he asked. ‘Why don’t you find a nice bull to lay instead of picking up boys?’
Uri can be as vicious as a weasel.
‘I can carry you in my arms, on my back, on my shoulders, any way you want,’ I persisted.
But he wasn’t having it. ‘Stop it, will you!’ he said, and now his voice sounded jagged and scared.
We walked on in silence. As we approached the village, we saw a crowd of men by Ben-Ya’akov’s pear orchard. We could hear shouting in the distance, and when we came closer we saw that it was Meshulam again with his sawtoothed sickle and sickening bandanna.
‘What am I supposed to do?’ Ya’akovi was yelling. ‘Station a guard by every water tap?’
The earth moved like jelly around him. Squishily it threw up from the depths dark refuse, sludge, bones, and thick, pale worms that coiled around the pear trees and dragged them down into the pestilent muck. In their place sprang up reeds and rushes as tall as a man, which Meshulam charged brandishing his sickle. An old Arab he had hired ploughed lazily by the swampside, mumbling familiar words. A small herd of wild boars came grunting out of Grandfather’s stories. There were several large males, some brutish-looking females, and a dozen or so bristle-haired piglets with stiff, erect tails. Trotting up to the swamp, they sloshed in to wallow in the deepening mire. I glanced at the sky. Black dots soared overhead and swooped closer. Shrieking madly, they circled above me.
I looked at the hysterical Ya’akovi, at Uri, at the crowd of angry farmers. Through the thin veil of their work clothes, sun-parched skin, and strong bodies, I could see the great mud fossils that had been waiting these many years in the earth.
Now the ponderous water buffalo approached, their deep, moist nostrils flaring excitedly at the first signs of human apostasy. They didn’t scare me. I was used to animals. A huge blond bull strode among them. The girth of its shoulders, the thickness of its hooves, and the hot vapours blowing from its wet muzzle made my heart beat faster. I began running towards them, and as I drew near I saw the young man in khaki trousers and a beekeeper’s mask supporting a stumbling old man who carried a decrepit pack. Yet soon the whole drove crossed the field and vanished beyond the distant cypresses, and when I returned to the flooded orchard and the questioning looks, I realised that no one else had seen a thing.
49
After Rosh Hashana Yosi came home on leave. I heard the tyres of his jeep screech to a stop, the loud crackle of a two-way radio, footsteps running and climbing stairs, and last of all, a loud girlish scream from Avraham and Rivka’s house.
The cabin door swung open. Standing there in his uniform with his officer’s bars and paratrooper wings, Yosi demanded to know the identity of ‘the pious bombshell in my parents’ house’.
Uri burst out laughing. The twins laughed. I could feel my gorge rise at the affection they displayed despite the differences between them. Yosi had also received mail from his parents, and now the two of them sat down to compare letters and photographs.
‘It’s about time Father got some fun out of life,’ smiled Uri, though Yosi thought that ‘instead of teaching all those darkies’, Avraham should have found work as an adviser in some new settlement on the Golan Heights.
I stood by the sink, slicing vegetables for a salad. First the onion and tomatoes, then the cucumbers and green pepper. Perhaps their fresh tang would be wafted far away, as far as the ends of the earth.
I liked being with Uri, and Yosi’s appearance annoyed me. I knew I would have to put him up in the cabin and regretted having agreed to give Avraham and Rivka’s place to the cantor.
‘Why don’t you two take a walk,’ I said. ‘Supper will be ready in half an hour.’
‘What’s the matter, Baruch?’ asked Yosi. ‘Don’t you like being with your cousins? Or are you afraid we might sting you for a loan?’
‘I’m not afraid, and I’ll be glad to get out of here as soon as either of you wants the farm back,’ I said.
‘Who said anything about wanting the farm back or you leaving it?’ asked Uri. ‘Why do you always take everything so seriously?’
‘It would take a heavy infantry company to get you out of here,’ said Yosi in the clipped military tone he had learned from Uzi Rilov. He began chuckling too loudly with that wrong-way laugh of his, breathing in instead of out in spasmodic, infuriating jerks. The muscles in the back of my neck tensed.
‘If Uri wasn’t here now,’ I told him, ‘you’d go flying out the window, right back into that damn jeep of yours.’
‘Comrades,’ said Uri, ‘suppose we all calm down, okay? My dear Baruch and Yosi, in these difficult times when the entire Movement is looki
ng for new horizons, let us not waste our energy on sterile disputes. The three of us haven’t been alone like this for years. The three grandsons of the one and only Ya’akov Mirkin, pioneer, swamp drainer, and desert blossomer. Let’s give him a hand, people!’
‘Two grandsons and one Jean Valjean,’ corrected Yosi.
‘I’d rather be Grandfather’s calf than your mother’s son,’ I shot back.
Yosi rose, said he was going to remove the radio from the jeep, and left the cabin.
‘Just what was that brilliant Chinese proverb of yours supposed to mean?’ asked Uri.
‘At least you have a mother,’ I answered.
‘Stop the dramatics,’ he said crossly. ‘This isn’t the first time I’ve heard you talk crap, but I know you well enough to know when you mean it.’
‘Why don’t you call your brother,’ I said. ‘The salad is ready, and I’ll make the eggs when you’re at the table.’
Uri went out and came back with Yosi half an hour later.
‘We were at the cemetery,’ Yosi said. ‘God Almighty, what have you done to our father’s farm?’
‘It was your father’s decision to go abroad,’ I answered him. ‘And since you both announced that you weren’t coming back, you have no right to complain now.’
‘Enough,’ said Uri. ‘Either we eat or I leave you here by yourselves and find someone to climb the water tower with.’
When supper was over and we had calmed down, we went to wrestle in Meshulam’s abandoned hayloft, since the Mirkin farm was out of hay.
‘It’s the Twins versus the Monster!’ panted Uri, riding my back and trying to strangle me while Yosi bobbed, weaved, butted, and punched me. The three of us couldn’t stop laughing. The straw stuck to us, getting in our hair and all over us, until at last I threw Uri down on it and pinned him with my foot while lifting Yosi in the air by his belt. This time he did not cry. His mouth opened wide and he shouted battle cries, choking on his laughter.