Even before deciding to banish Tonya, Margulis the beekeeper knew that something was wrong. Her voice and smell had changed, her skin had lost its smoothness, and her speech had grown brusque. Most nights she disappeared, and when she stayed home she no longer talked in her sleep.
Margulis had a kind heart. Witch-hunts and investigations were not his style. But when he found a bundle of foul-smelling dynamite fingers in a cask of his beeswax, he quietly showed Tonya out.
‘What a difference between my fingers and his!’ he said sadly.
For a while he lived in gloomy solitude, busying himself with apiarian innovations. Margulis was the only beekeeper in the country to pasture his bees in the fields, where he trained them to land on specific flowers. This technique, which he had learned from the writings of the Russian beekeeper Khlimenko, who was a great partisan of Michurin, enabled him to produce new flavours of honey while pollinating only those plants he wished to. And yet while adopting the Communists’ methods, he rejected the theory behind them, to wit, the claim that the acquired knowledge of insects, like the traits of grafted fruit trees and the beliefs of revolutionaries, could be passed on genetically, thus making possible the propagation of new breeds of bees that would be attracted by some flowers and not others.
‘Red ones, obviously,’ sneered Grandfather.
‘They’re wrong,’ said Margulis. ‘How can anything learned by a worker bee be passed on genetically? It’s the queen bee that reproduces, and since she never leaves the hive, she never learns a thing.’
Grandfather was thrilled to find out from Margulis that each generation of worker bees needed to be re-educated. It was a bad day for Michurin in the Valley.
‘What did Lenin know about bees?’ he scoffed. ‘Since when do Communists model themselves on monarchical societies?’
The two pioneers sat on the ground, their laughter breezing past young pear trees and tickling the funny bones of bees wallowing in the innards of flowers.
‘In their admiration for the worker bees, the Stakhanovites of the hive,’ said Margulis, ‘the Communists completely forgot that it’s the proletariat’s mission to depose the Czarina and make a revolution.’
‘Once,’ Grandfather told me, ‘Hayyim Margulis led his winged proletariat all the way to the railway tracks to show them the wild orchids and purple clover growing along the embankments.’
As the train crawled by, Margulis caught sight of Riva Beilin’s profile through the window. Followed by a great cloud of bees, he jumped onto the train, still holding an earthenware beehive. The horrified passengers moved away from him, vacating the place beside Riva.
‘There’s nothing to be afraid of,’ he told her. ‘They don’t bite.’
Riva Beilin came from a very rich family in Kiev. Dressed in expensive clothing that aroused the ridicule of her astonished comrades, she was grudgingly seen off to Palestine by her parents, who were sugar manufacturers and grain merchants. Now, as she looked suspiciously at Margulis, whose boots were covered with mud, he dipped a bare, practised hand into his hive, withdrew a honey-drenched finger, and extended it toward her mouth.
Though Riva was dumbfounded, the blue innocence of Margulis’s eyes overcame her objections. Hesitantly gripping his wrist, she licked the honey off his finger. At once her eyes lit up and a smile spread over her lips. It was her first taste of Margulis’s fingers and of the wildflower honey of the Valley. Sweetly and merrily, Margulis jumped out to rejoin his bees, but in the months that followed he travelled by train twice a week to meet his new love.
Every Saturday Margulis brought Grandfather a mysterious jar in which he had prepared a special concoction for the firstborn son of the village. Avraham’s development was followed with patient expectancy by everyone. His height, weight, first words, and clever sayings were regularly published in the village newsletter. He was hugged and petted by all hands. The farmers brought him fresh vegetables and milk from their best cows, and their wives sewed clothes for him, but Grandfather could not be made to understand that his first son was communal property.
‘It started when Feyge was still alive. Neighbours would arrive with visitors at ten o’clock at night to see the first child of the village. They insisted that Mirkin wake him up.’
Meshulam read me ‘an original document’ about Zakkai Ackerman, the first child born on the neighbouring kibbutz. ‘He was considered a public possession. Everyone felt free to wake him up and bring him to the dining hall, even in the middle of the night. More than one long winter evening was spent by the kibbutzniks sitting around tables admiring the infant.’
‘Leave the boy alone,’ Grandfather scolded the stream of curiosity-seekers who came looking for Avraham, lifting the canvas tent flap at all hours and even crawling inside to see if there was any truth to the rumours that the baby shone in the dark.
Grandfather was incensed. ‘We don’t live in the old days any more,’ he exclaimed, and taking Avraham, a shepherd’s club, and a mosquito net, he went off to sleep in the thicket by the spring with a cry of ‘The child isn’t yours!’ No one dared follow him. The area around the spring had once been inhabited by German settlers, every one of whom died of malaria, and the reedy death shrieks of their blond children could still be heard there, haunting the rushes and elecampane. This put an end to the harassment, though whoever looked southward from the watchtower that night saw a golden glimmer beaming through the dark patches of the blackberry bushes like the light of some great firefly. A few years later Grandmother died, and no one dared bother the orphan any more. Avraham’s only memory of that night by the spring was a lifelong allergy to jonquils and swamp flowers.
And yet inwardly, there was no one who didn’t worry and brood about him. Zakkai Ackerman, the firstborn son of the kibbutz across the wadi, had already raised a row of cucumbers that averaged eighteen inches and planted a medlar tree whose fruit was the size of a Grand Alexander apple. The first child of Kfar Avishai had made his debut at a Movement conference with ‘an astounding oration’ that unerringly prophesied the factional split in the Workers’ Brigade, ‘though he was only three and a half years old’. The first child of Bet Eliyahu was all of six when he began investigating the coccidiosis infection then ravaging the chicken coops, and soon after he was asked to join Professor Adler’s research team, which had already developed a remedy for the epidemic of miscarriages introduced into our herds in the late 1920s by imported Dutch cows, and had received a decoration from the British High Commissioner and a parchment certificate from the Movement. Avraham Mirkin alone was a late bloomer who kept the village in suspense – or, to put it more bluntly, disappointed it.
‘We would have taken it in our stride had he been an ordinary child, but everyone could see that your uncle did have something special about him.’
Avraham had the ability to calm a panicky animal with a single glance. During the gnat season he sometimes had to be called to the fields to treat a mule or farmer gone half out of their minds from the ceaseless buzzing. There were also other odd things about him that kept hopes for him alive, such as his habit of wandering around at night looking for no one knew what, a five-year-old boy who overturned stacks of cans, shook out piles of old sacks, lifted curtains, stared at sleeping calves, and scared the chickens in their coops as if in search of something.
Some thought it was because he was an orphan. ‘He’s looking for his mother,’ they said. ‘Poor Feyge.’
‘And little wonder,’ said Fanya years later. Held in her husband’s embrace, ringed round by an inexhaustible reserve of Libersonian love, she had no inkling that someone was listening on the other side of the wall.
‘And little wonder,’ she said about my uncle. ‘The child was born in a house without love.’