16
I have written here of the big old pear tree in the garden, whose blossoms are lovely but whose fruit is inedible. The time has come to admit that this is my own opinion, and there are others who really love the taste: once a year a colony of fruit bats descends upon the garden, and they, unlike me, have no interest in pear blossoms but are partial to the fruit and come to gorge themselves. The pear tree stands close to the house, and as soon as they appear I rush to the balcony, sit down, switch on the light, and use a bright flashlight in order to watch them lunging toward their nighttime feast.
These bats are not permanent fixtures in my garden. They come from afar, perhaps from the Carmel caves, for only one or two nights in the year, when the fruit ripens. Their visit is a unique and wondrous spectacle, different from any other spectacle offered by the garden. Since I also know how to identify ripe pears, I prepare myself for these flying dinner guests: incline my ear, peer into the dark—Are they here? Not yet? And I wonder, How do they know it is time? Do they send scouts and spies? How do they navigate through the darkness to the specific coordinate of a tree? Do they remember the route from previous years? Either way, I am happy at their arrival, because they cast an atmosphere of authentic savagery and wildness over my garden.
Although they are vegetarians, bats possess a predatory quality. They are large, nimble, and noiseless. They lunge at the fruit-laden tree like birds of prey. Each time a bat dives, it collects a pear and carries it to the nearby oak to consume it. I suppose this habit is designed to avoid overcrowding, collisions, and squabbles on the tree itself and to enable each bat to eat undisturbed, but I have no way of corroborating this hypothesis. I sit and watch them for hours and eventually thank them and say good night, and the next morning there are neither bats nor pears, and the garden resumes a restful pose until the bats return the following year.
Porcupines are additional nocturnal visitors to my garden. I have never seen them here, but sometimes they leave traces of digging, a few black-and-white quills, and easily identifiable droppings. Here and there I see hedgehogs, endearing creatures I like a lot and who, I am sorry to say, visit infrequently and are becoming increasingly rare. On summer nights, jackals and wild boars also venture into the garden. These are real pests, who have learned to dig up irrigation pipes to quench their thirst by biting into them. The wild boars also cause alarm. I was once forced to stand on my germination table after suddenly hearing the furious snorting of a female arriving with her offspring and already planning to charge at me. We stood facing each other for some minutes, me on the table and she on the ground. We cursed, snorted, spoke without mincing our words, and were generally boorish to each other. Finally, she came to the conclusion that I am a bad role model for her children. She called to them, and took off.
Nighttime is the kingdom of sound, and most nocturnal occurrences are detected aurally. Darkness descends with the blackbird’s final calls and continues with the jackal’s yelping, sometimes very close to home. The jackals come back much later to yelp some more, and occasionally return for a midnight encore. In my humble opinion, this is how the packs tell one another where they are in order not to waste time and energy on arguments and skirmishes. I am certain of this because I already understand some of their words, and others I infer. This is how I translate some of their nightly exchanges:
“We’re at the dumpster tonight. How about you?”
“We’re down at the chicken coop on the kibbutz.”
“Howww…Howwww…did you manage to get inside?”
“That’s a secret.”
And sometimes I hear the jackals when the muezzin from the nearby village calls, and they join in. All this is good. They are God’s creatures, too, and were created by His will and His word, and they also have the right to supplicate and to jack up God’s glory. Who knows, perhaps “jackal” and “jack” share the same linguistic root?
Other nocturnal poets are toads and crickets. The toads live in the neighbors’ small ornamental pond, and their crooning is pleasant, but the crickets in my own garden cause me sleepless nights and almost drive me out of my mind. “So humble, and hidden, concealed ’mongst the dishes, / Lamenting in crannies, at home in dark fissures”—so Bialik described the cricket in his father’s house. But I have looked into this and found that during the day the cricket hides close to the trunks of the same trees it frequents at night. This is how I discovered this “poet of poverty” and relocated it to another part of the moshav, and the problem was solved.
There are other insufferable sounds, first and foremost the barking of dogs left outside by their owners at night. These dogs stand by the dark forest and bark with fear and trembling, hackles raised. Since I live right by the forest, this wakes me up. On the one hand, I am as angry as the next person at being woken up. On the other hand, I am amused at the absurdity of the whole situation: These dogs are not the wild animals their ancestors were. They are domestic creatures created by man for his own use and pleasure with selective crossbreeding. Food is served to them, and clean water is readily available. They have a roof over their heads and medical insurance. But the real animal kingdom is in the forest, a kingdom of real animals who live real lives, devouring and being devoured in a real forest. Consequently, their nocturnal barking not only expresses fear but a respect for fear.
It really is absurd, but sometimes it dawns on me that my garden is not that different from those dogs. After all, the garden is not really one hundred percent wild. It is true that domesticated dogs are comparable to ornamental plants and, like them, were created by humans, whereas in my garden there are authentic wild plants whose genetics I have not meddled with. But I do help them along by weeding, and I sow them in the right places at the right times. I pamper my garden with extra water when there is a particularly severe heat wave. If I am not mistaken, the garden sometimes stands and barks at the forest, realizing that uncompromising nature is over there, a battle for survival is over there, and the real wild, too.
