‘Grandmother Feyge,’ said Uri, dreamy-eyed, ‘walked through a field of jonquils in a dress without panties, just like a Ukrainian peasant. She got pregnant from the pollen. That’s why to this day my father cries and sneezes when the jonquils flower down by the spring.’
The Committee counted the months and concluded that Grandmother would give birth around Shavuot, the holiday of first fruits. ‘And what better first fruit could there be than the first child of the village?’
‘Tsirkin and Liberson were thrilled by Grandmother’s pregnancy,’ said Grandfather in a tone that made it seem perfectly normal. The two of them went on dangerous expeditions to bring her lemons from across the Jordan, caper buds from the mountains of Samaria, and partridge chicks from the Carmel. Two devoted women comrades were sent from a settlement in the Jordan Valley to wait on her during her difficult last months. They read to her aloud from selected works of fiction ‘and the writings of Movement theoreticians’.
‘As ridiculous as it may seem, the myth of the firstborn child retains its power,’ said Meshulam Tsirkin, who never forgave his father Mandolin and his mother Pesya for finishing second. ‘Your grandmother Feyge carried the child of the whole village in her womb.’
Feyge strolled radiantly among the tents along the muddy paths of the village, her voice grown so opulent that it charmed man and beast alike.
‘Mirkin too, who only loved her in partnership with Eliezer Liberson and Mandolin Tsirkin and never forgot his Crimean love even on the day he brought Feyge to his tent, looked at her moonily then,’ said Pinness.
‘He rubbed her belly with green olive oil,’ declared Uri, adding an embellishment of his own.
When it was time for Feyge’s accouchement, she was rushed by cart to the railway station, which was several miles away. The entourage had hardly left the village, however, when it saw the train come around the blue bend of the mountain and roll into the station.
The story of my uncle Avraham’s birth was one of the most famous in the Valley. On the village’s fiftieth anniversary it was even dramatised by a director from Tel Aviv, who astounded the locals with his purple pants and his loud efforts to bed every young girl in sight.
Mandolin Tsirkin and Rilov the Watchman ‘jumped on their horses, galloped off like two Cossack lightning bolts’, and caught up with the train. Over the protests of the engineer, who brandished a coal shovel, Rilov leapt from his horse into the locomotive, subdued the man with an angry glare and a stiff prod to the chest, and yanked the brake handle.
‘We’re not just anyone, we’re Committee!’ he told the engineer and his sooty assistant, who lay shivering on a pile of coal, stunned by this pronouncement and the sudden stop of the train.
‘On your feet and shake a leg if you want to die in your own bed, you dead jackal, you!’ shouted Rilov. ‘Full steam ahead!’
The train started out with a groan, leaving behind a great wake of sparks, columns of smoke, two saddled horses, and Grandmother Feyge and her forgotten entourage, which ran shouting toward the tracks. There was no choice but to give birth in the fields.
My uncle Avraham was delivered an hour later, Grandmother and Grandfather’s firstborn son and the first child of the village. ‘He was born in our field, on our earth, beneath our sun, in the exact place where Margulis’s main irrigation tap now stands.’
That day the cicadas kept up a steady roar in the fields. The pioneers sat up singing all night, and in the morning Rilov and Tsirkin reappeared, having run all the way back. Rilov did not even apologise. After sipping some water, he demanded a general meeting to decide what the child should be called. ‘He’s already been given a name by his mother,’ he was told. ‘It’s Avraham, after her father.’ Eliezer Liberson muttered something about ‘comrades taking impermissible liberties’ and even wrote in the village newsletter that ‘the child is as much ours as hers’, but there was nothing he could do about it.
Knowing that the birth of a first child afflicts all men with a sense of their own mortality, Fanya Liberson, who had been shanghaied from her kibbutz several weeks previously, made Grandfather leave Grandmother’s tent.
‘Fanya and my poor wife Leah moved in with her. The two of them embroidered nappies for little Avraham and wove him a cradle of reeds they had cut by the spring.’
A week later the circumciser arrived from the city beyond the blue mountain. The villagers dressed in white, cut their hair and nails, and sat in a semicircle in front of Mirkin’s tent. A great cheer went up as Grandfather stepped outside holding his son high in the air. ‘Your uncle Avraham was truly our first fruit, because he was born before the fruits of the trees had set.’ To this day, on the holiday of Shavuot, the feast of first fruits, all that year’s children are held high in front of everyone to commemorate the occasion.
The whole village was dazzled by the beauty and fairness of the new baby, who ‘smiled with a mouth so bright that you could have sworn he had already cut his teeth. He was like a big jonquil swaddled in its calyx.’ Avraham was born without the two deep creases that now furrow his brow, and with a friendly expression on his face, which was as fresh and smooth as the peel of a large apple.
‘We formed a circle immediately,’ said Pinness. ‘Each arm found a shoulder or waist and the dance began.’ Everyone felt that it was a moment of grace for the village, which now had ‘someone to carry the torch forward in the great relay race of the generations’ and need not fear extinction with the death of its founders.
Pinness smiled softly, the pleasure of the memory etched in every line of his face. ‘The child bound us forever,’ he said, the words dropping from his mouth like the fruit of the wild plum tree on Margulis’s land – sweet, small, and precise.
‘We passed him around from hand to hand and let everyone hold him in their arms. For a sweet, awesome moment each of us felt the promise of his delicious flesh and inhaled his good smell. One by one, as if he were a ritual object, we took him and gave him our blessing, some out loud and some deep in their hearts. Each of us had a part in him.’
‘Someday I’ll show you the protocol of the circumcision,’ promised Meshulam. ‘Liberson’s wish for the baby was that he should grow up to plough the first furrow in the Negev desert. Rilov’s was that he redeem the mountains of Gilead and the Bashan. My father promised to teach him the mandolin. They imagined him sowing and ploughing, bringing faraway Jews from the Urals and the deserts of Arabia to this country, and developing new, sturdier strains of wheat. And what did he turn out to be? Your uncle Avraham.’
Still, it was a fine hour, one whose bounty helped see the villagers through many long weeks of hardship and privation. They all felt quiet and content – all except Shlomo Levin, my grandmother’s brother, who came by train from Tel Aviv. Afraid to appear in his citified white jacket, he wore a grey cap with a protective visor and a rough work shirt that made him break out in a rash.
Levin walked from the railway station through the fields, overwhelmed by the deep smell of the heavy earth that purred beneath his feet. And though Feyge threw her thin, tired arms around him, and Tonya and Margulis, who remembered him from their hike to Jaffa, smiled at him like old friends, he felt like an outsider among the excited pioneers who hugged him and plied him with drink. He even managed ‘to hold the baby wrong’, so that it bit his wrist with its sharp little teeth.
Then everyone went in search of the circumciser, who had gone out for a stroll to smell the good earth and murmur ecstatic prayers to himself. He took Avraham in his arms, clicked an appreciative tongue at the sight of his well-formed member, and relieved it of its foreskin. There was a profound hush. Even Liberson, who claimed that circumcision was a pagan custom, felt that it was no time for argument. And when the loud yelp of their firstborn son sounded over the fields, the pioneers burst into unashamed tears.