by Shalev, Meir
A oil lantern approached us from the direction of Founder’s Cabin, bobbing up and down in the dark. Frightened and angry, Meshulam stepped into the hayloft.
‘Attention!’ cried Yosi.
Uri jumped at Meshulam and snatched the lantern away. ‘Are we back from a rendezvous with a water tap?’ he asked. ‘Or have we come to set fire to the hayloft?’
‘What do you think you’re doing here?’ demanded Meshulam furiously.
Touchingly wrapped in Pesya’s wet black slip, he looked like a little baby crow.
‘Moron!’ said Yosi.
‘We were just having a little fun, Meshulam,’ I said. ‘Let’s get out of here, boys.’
Uri walked out backward, his sardonic face toward Meshulam. ‘You know the rules,’ he said. ‘You have to count to a hundred before you can look for us.’
My high spirits had faded. We started back for the cabin, but halfway there Yosi asked to go to the cemetery. ‘It must be awfully nice there at night, with all those white flowers and gravestones.’
I opened the gate. The gravel crunched beneath our feet. Crickets sang all around. The twins leaned on Grandfather’s grave while I sat on Rosa Munkin’s pink tombstone.
‘How much do you charge for a grave?’ Yosi asked.
‘That depends. For a rich old American it’s about a hundred thousand dollars. Busquilla could tell you exactly.’
‘That makes you a millionaire,’ said Yosi in a voice that was higher than usual. ‘You’re a millionaire, do you know that?’
‘I’m not anything,’ I said. ‘I’m just keeping up the farm. I’m doing what Grandfather wanted.’
‘It is nice here,’ said Uri. ‘It’s awfully nice.’
He rose and went over to the wall. We heard him peeing there.
‘Didn’t the army teach you how to take a leak quietly at night?’ called Yosi. ‘Wag it.’
‘I’m trying, but all my life it’s wagged me,’ came Uri’s voice from the darkness. ‘I’m going to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.’
‘What a character,’ said Yosi. ‘He’s a character, that Uri.’
Now that we had fooled around and it was too dark to see his mother’s face looking at me from his own, I felt more comfortable with him.
‘So what’s going to happen with you?’ he asked.
‘What’s worrying you? Didn’t you say I was a millionaire?’
‘Why are you always so edgy with me?’
‘Because you get on my nerves.’
‘And you don’t get on mine? You’re a pain in the neck. You made the whole school laugh at us. To this day everyone in the village thinks there’s something wrong with you.’
‘Let them,’ I said. ‘They’re just jealous. They drove Efrayim away from here. It’s time they realised.’
‘Stop quoting Grandfather all the time,’ said Yosi. ‘And if you ask me, it’s a bit odd that no one but you ever heard Grandfather make such a strange request.’
‘What are you getting at?’
‘That if that was his will, you didn’t do badly by it.’
‘Pinness heard it too,’ I said.
‘Pinness,’ snorted Yosi. ‘Well, well.’
For some reason I was enjoying the conversation.
‘This is the first real talk you and I have ever had,’ said Yosi.
He rose, about-faced, bent to smell the flowers, studied Shulamit’s grave, walked back and forth, and sat down beside me.
‘Why did you bury her here? Who the hell was she?’
‘It was Grandfather’s wish,’ I said.
‘Grandfather’s wish, Grandfather’s wish! Don’t you ever get tired of it?’
‘It’s what he wanted.’
‘So you just went and took her?’
I went and took her. Her coffin was the only one I never opened before the funeral.
‘She was all alone in this country. She had no one else.’
‘You’re making me cry,’ he said. ‘Tell me, you saw the two of them together in that old folk’s home. What was there between them?’
‘I don’t know anything about those things,’ I answered, thinking of Grandfather’s wrinkled neck and bald head in the flesh of Shulamit’s dead thighs.
‘What did you say?’
‘Nothing.’
He looked at me suspiciously. ‘But you must have spied on them like you did on everyone.’
He waited for an answer, then went on. ‘You think we didn’t know that you snooped and peeked through windows?’
‘Suppose you did. So what?’
‘When we were little, my mother once said that if she ever caught you at it again, she’d give you a licking. My father told her that if she so much as laid a finger on you, he’d break her arms and legs.’
I said nothing. I thought of the looks Rivka gave me when I wrestled with the big calves and of her hatred for my mother, whose wedding dress and flawless bell-clapper legs went on ravaging my aunt’s life even after they had gone up in flames.
‘I always envied your living with Grandfather,’ Yosi said suddenly. ‘You were his child.’
‘I thought so too,’ I said, swallowing a dry dungball of mucus in my mouth. ‘I’m not so sure any more.’
‘I envied your being an orphan,’ he said. ‘Once, when we were six or seven, I told Uri that I wished our parents would die so that Pinness would take us for hikes too and Grandfather would bring us up.’
‘But neither of you would have buried him like I did,’ I said. ‘Ya’akovi would have made you back down, and Uri couldn’t care less.’
‘You were always so strange, always hanging out with the old folk, with Pinness and Grandfather and Tsirkin and Liberson. You frightened everyone from the time you were six. Do you know that no one ever dared pick on me or Uri because of you? They were scared of you.’
He slipped off the grave and sat on the ground, running his hand over the soil and rolling some between his fingers, which were short and stubby like his father’s. It was a habit the pioneers had picked up in the Valley and passed on to their children. Their grandchildren were born with it.
‘I would have stayed on here,’ he said after a pause. ‘I swear I would have, and you know I could have made a decent farmer. It was only these graves that made me decide to leave home, and Uri will never come back. In the end you’ll be the only one left. You’ll show the village and the world, and you’ll make more money than the old folk ever dreamed of in their wildest visions.’
‘Why does everyone keep talking about the money?’ I asked. ‘You can see for yourself that I don’t spend it. Have I bought anything for the cabin? Clothes? Built a swimming pool? I’ve never even been abroad.’
‘That shows you’re a real farmer,’ chuckled Yosi. ‘No one in this village knows how to enjoy life, including myself. Farmers don’t like to spend money. They’re too afraid of drought, locusts, mice. They’ve got their feet on the ground and their heads in the clouds, looking for rain – because that’s the one thing that’s free. Uri is the only one who was able to outgrow all that.’
‘I’m just a watchman,’ I said. ‘I’m watching Grandfather. I promised I wouldn’t let anyone take him from here.’
‘My favourite story was the one about his saving you from that rabid jackal,’ murmured Yosi. ‘Our father made a bedtime story out of it. You were sitting in the yard throwing earth at some kittens, and Grandfather jumped on the jackal and broke all its bones.’
‘It was a hyena,’ I said. ‘It even said so in the newspaper. Its skull is in the nature room at school.’
‘If you feel that strongly about it, fine,’ said Yosi. ‘The point is that Grandfather saved your life.’
‘I was in the yard by pure chance,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think he would have saved yours?’
‘If it had been me, there would have been no hyena. Don’t you see that? Do you think it just happened to come along?’
I was flabbergasted. It never occurred to me that he might look at it that way.
>
‘Sometimes, when we’ve been lying in ambush along the border night after night until I get so sleepy I hallucinate, I’m afraid that Shifris will turn up. I worry that he’s going to set off a mine, or that some soldier will yell “Halt!” and that idiot who never halted in his life will keep on going and get himself shot.’
‘He won’t,’ I said. ‘He’s just somebody Grandfather made up.’
‘Grandfather was quite something,’ said Yosi. ‘He must have been a real heavyweight. Why else would they come from all over the world to be buried next to him?’
‘That day with the hyena was a clear, bright summer day,’ I said. ‘Pinness made me remember everything by seasons.’
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ he said. ‘I’m getting cold.’
‘Your father was born in early summer,’ I told him. ‘The double wedding was in the autumn. Grandmother died in the spring, and Rilov blew himself up in winter. That’s when Tsirkin died too, but Fanya died in summer and Grandfather in autumn.
‘I sat up with him for three days and three nights,’ I said. For the first time in my life I was telling a story too. ‘Your father kept coming and going. So did the doctor. Grandfather’s friends were there too – Tsirkin, Liberson, Shifris, and Pinness. I was so tired I didn’t know what I was doing.’
He lay in his bed, on his prickly mattress of seaweed, his pale skin clothed in new pyjamas. I rose heavily and stepped outside, onto the earthen paths that never failed me.
Autumn had descended on the village with the usual downpour of fallen leaves and the anxious, mournful cries of baby swifts baulking at their first migration. I followed the cart track to the fields, trampling the last yellow grass sticking up in the centre ridge. The titmouse and warbler nests were unravelling in the orchards and in the drainpipes of the cowsheds. Behind the stud pen I spied the cattle dealers’ loathsome six-wheel lorry loaded with three dejected, stricken-tailed calves as it made its way among horse-drawn carriages and American limousines never seen in our village. Elegantly dressed men and women in high, round collars and children in shiny black shoes were walking up and down. I wondered who had told all these strangers about Grandfather’s death, but I continued along the avenue of carob trees, whose heavy white smell embarrassed the visitors. ‘The date and the carob are unisexual fruit trees. One male can pollinate dozens of females,’ said Pinness in my ear.
I heard the whirr of the spring as it laboured to cool its late-summer trickle, and the fragrant fizz of delicate, ripely fallen fruit that lay rotting on the ground with soft drunken eructations. Every summer we stored yellow pears in bales of hay, where they gave off sweet fermenting fumes as they stewed. The fruits’ flesh dissolved inside the peel, and by autumn they had turned into soft egglike lozenges swollen with intoxicating cream. Removing them gently from their hiding place, we pierced their skin with our teeth and sucked out the alcoholic nectar.
‘I remember that,’ said Yosi. ‘It tasted like a liqueur.’
Dryness and finality were everywhere. The cicadas were long gone. The fierce, confident buzzing of heat-propelled wasps and beetles had subsided, and little piles of pebbles and chaff were the only signs of the dwellings of the harvest ants. And yet in the green groves the pistils of the oranges were swelling with a slow murmur and the grapefruits were fattening on their stems. Cells divided in the turkey eggs. Frozen sperm thawed in the wombs of cows. Milk and honey, sap and semen, were gathered up by the autumn.
There was a smell of watered earth in the air. The soil had been turned for autumn ploughing. It always smelled of rain before the first rains came. ‘That’s how the earth gets the clouds to water it,’ said Pinness, who was walking by my side.
I felt a terrible sadness. For Grandfather, dying of his own incurable volition. For my own life. For the House of Mirkin, on whose windows love had stealthily tapped but once to die with my mother and father.
The blackberries were blooming by the spring. A baby bleated poems in their brambles. Strong as an ox, a barefoot boy with coarse features came towards me swinging cans of milk. ‘Straight from the cow,’ he bellowed, shutting his eyes for me to pat his neck.
‘Let’s get out of here, my child,’ said Pinness, pushing me aside with uncharacteristic strength. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
It was autumn, and flocks of storks and pelicans were already wandering southward overhead, darkening the skies of the Valley with their giant wings. I knew that soon the robin would return to nest in the pomegranate tree, defending its home with loud, rosy- hearted clicks. Next would come the starlings, their thousands of spotted breasts spinning and whirling in great flocks, descending to blanket the earth of the Valley with their excrement.
My bare soles felt the huge snails stirring in the ground, waiting to be awakened by the first rains and tilt at each other with their siliceous blades. The bulbs of the autumn crocuses made bubbles in the surface of the earth. ‘Soon the plover will arrive in our fields, wagging its pretty plumes and following the furrows,’ called out Pinness behind me. I headed on into the hills, along the orphaned paths leading to the mountain. The farther I walked from the village, the stronger became the unruly smell of elecampane and the woodier the pads of thorny burnet. On the blue mountain where I had never been, the rubbery sceptres of the squill were already in bloom, and the speckled white blossoms of the caper plants hid sharp hooks that would tear at my flesh.
Green plains stretched beyond the mountain. (Not the sea, said the wind, not the sea, said the rustle of grain.) A wide river flowed there. White-breasted women bathed in its waters, and on its banks nestled little villages. Farther off the earth tilted and vanished with a motile, nebulous glow. It might have been white tundra wolves that howled there, or the wind tousling the birch trees. The land was broad, so vast it never met the horizon, which quivered high above it.
I turned and ran like a child who has opened a forbidden trunk.
And then the visions stopped rising from Grandfather’s body and I knew that he was dead.
‘That’s an interesting way to determine clinical death,’ said Yosi. ‘Did you ever tell Doctor Munk about it?’
‘Grandfather died when he had no more dreams,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t everyone?’
50
After a few days Yosi went back to the army. When I shook his hand as he climbed into the jeep, it still prickled with wary suspicion. Uri stayed on and helped me out with some jobs. Tonya Rilov died that week, and when Uri and I lifted her up from Margulis’s gravestone, there were not enough bees to fill the space she had left. Dani Rilov stood to one side, whimpering in a strange, high voice. ‘Listen to him,’ Uri said. ‘He doesn’t know how to cry. His father never taught him.’
The days that followed kept us digging all the time. Dani Rilov’s little insect brain had hatched an unexpected problem – should his mother be buried next to her husband’s boots or next to Margulis? He was so dense that he even went to ask Riva, who wrung out the cloth she was holding, pushed him off her freshly mopped stairs, and said that for all she cared we could open her husband’s coffin and ‘throw your mother and your father’s filthy boots into it together’.
Each morning, confused and tearful, he came to tell me he had changed his mind. Surprised by such inner turmoil in a crude fattener of calves like Dani, I dug Tonya up and moved her back and forth five times despite the stench and the stings of angry bees. Even Uri, who normally could not have passed up a quip about this underground shuttle, remarked that Tonya deserved the utmost consideration ‘for her devoted finger-sucking among the bees, rain or shine for so many years’.
Fortunately, Busquilla lost his temper in the end and said to Dani, ‘That’s enough! It’s time to put an end to this farce. Who do you think you’re dealing with here, a dead cat? Where’s your respect for your parents?’
To me he said, ‘What does he think he’s doing? It’s almost Yom Kippur!’
He invited Uri and me to spend the day with his family in the nearby town where he
lived.
‘You can come with us to the Moroccan synagogue,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t hurt you to see that there are real Jews in this country.’
‘Let’s do it,’ said Uri. ‘It might be fun.’
‘You go,’ I said to him. ‘That stuff isn’t for me. When did we ever make a thing about Yom Kippur?’
‘I’m not going without you,’ said Uri.
We stayed at home. That afternoon we were visited by Weissberg’s little twins. Like two black-capped nightingales, they stood bashfully but proudly in the doorway of the cabin. ‘You’re invited to the meal before the fast,’ they said, flying off with matched movements as if each were the other’s shadow.
‘I think we should take them up on it,’ said Uri. ‘Weissberg must have forgiven us.’
‘Not me,’ I said. ‘That’s not my cup of tea. And I don’t like having supper at 4 p.m.’
‘I’m going.’
‘You can do what you want.’
At four o’clock, with the Day of Atonement soon to begin, I took off my shirt, stood in the middle of the yard, and split a few logs as loudly as I could. I stuffed the pieces into the wood-burning stove that stood against the cabin, making sure the iron door clanked, and took a steaming hot shower on Grandfather’s little milking stool while Uri sat in his parents’ house feasting his stomach on the cantor’s food and his eyes on his beautiful daughter.
I scrubbed myself till I was red, hidden in steam as I listened to the deep purr of the chimney on the other side of the wall. I knew that the Weissbergs could hear the stove too and were doing their best to ignore the religious outrage.
Towards evening, when the cantor and his family went off to synagogue, Uri returned to the cabin.
‘Aren’t you going to pray?’ I asked as caustically as I could.
‘Not tonight. But I will go tomorrow,’ he answered solemnly.
Although the second and third generation of villagers kept away from the synagogue, which was empty and abandoned most of the year, the old folk, after lapsing from the fiery free thought of their youth into subsequent indifference, had begun to take a renewed interest in religion. Some became greater heretics than ever, while others, falling prey to fears and penitence, took to praying regularly every Sabbath with great devoutness and even with tears. Eliezer Liberson referred to them as ‘our bugbear comrades’, a term whose exact significance escaped me, though its tone and intention were perfectly clear.