I lay on a bed of jonquils, staring up at the sky. Flocks of migrating storks soared overhead, circling like tiny water insects on a clear, transparent pond. Back in the Ukraine, two storks had nested in the chimney of Grandfather’s house. ‘I knew that they visited the Land of Israel each year and came back with a bellyful of the frogs of Canaan,’ Grandfather told me. Were the grandchildren of those storks flying over me now?

Each spring and autumn Grandfather stepped out of his cabin and stared up at the storks and pelicans with his hand shading his eyes, full of the sorrow of great rivers, of vast fields of grain, of snowy steppes and forests of birch trees. ‘Here I am among the blackberries,’ he wrote, ‘in the land of the grasshopper and the jackal, of the olive and the fig.’

I thought of Shifris. Was he still alive? Would he be able to find the paths that his comrades had long since built over? Where was he now? Killed by border guards and buried beneath snow or sand? Fallen like ashes from the sting of some electrified fence? Did he know that the swamps had already been drained and the wilderness made to bloom? That Grandfather had gone to live with Shulamit in the old age home?

Shifris would come, and I would let him have Grandfather’s bed. He would cure olives, smoke in the kitchen at night, plant olive trees, pomegranates, vines, and figs. He would be a frail old man with a battered hat on his head, a rod of an almond tree in his hand, and a backpack containing mouldy bread, a canteen, olives, cheese, a Bible, and a couple of oranges. Sometimes he walked singing quietly, sometimes piping on a reed he had cut along the way. Slowly he crossed mountains and deserts and followed rocky coastlines, his lips dry and cracked, his shoes clouted like the Gibeonites’.

‘We should make Shifris a little swamp to drain,’ said my cousin Uri. ‘And plant a bit of crabgrass so that he’ll have something left to weed. And find him an old pioneeress with white braids to gallop over him at night on the threshing floor.’ His eyes shone. He was a boy who hunted sensations, mocked memories, and cared only for love stories.

Like a small dot, Shifris would detach himself from the blue mountain and draw nearer, until he reached Grandfather’s cabin and said, ‘Go, my child. Go tell Mirkin that I’m here.’ Weary from his long journey, he would fall on Grandfather’s bed, wanting nothing but a glass of water. How light he would be, how thin and emaciated, as I carried him over the fields of the Valley to show to Grandfather!

I will go now to the spring to lie down in the thicket beside it. Coming back, I will pass through my family’s fields, the same fields in which water buffalo once grazed, green rushes prospered, and the larvae of the anopheles mosquito multiplied in the execrable waters. Before they were dried and ploughed. Before Grandfather grew his blossoming trees in them, and Avraham pastured his cows in their meadows, and I planted them with my ornamentals, my flowers, and my dead.

   

Unlike ‘that boy of Tsirkin’s’, Mirkin’s children helped their father with the farm chores. They were hard workers. Avraham had a great talent with the cows. At the age of twelve he conceived the idea of introducing artificial insemination, which was only impractical, the veterinarian explained to Grandfather, because there was no good semen available in the country. Scientifically, Avraham was often ahead of the scientists.

‘Semen could be frozen,’ he announced in the middle of lunch one day, the furrows in his forehead contracting in concentration. ‘It could be frozen and brought to the cowshed instead of bringing the cows to the bull. We could get it from the best-bred bulls abroad. Think of all the time and work it would save.’

Ever since the episode of the ‘American beauty’, however, Avraham’s ideas were received with suspicion. He was an introverted, unspontaneous child. Occasionally he would disappear for a day at a time, turning out to have been at the grave of his mother, whom he told all about himself.

Efrayim, having stealthily followed him, heard him talking to her.

‘We have a raised floor for the chickens now, so that the manure drops down below. It’s the best fertiliser there is.’

‘Why don’t you also tell her about the ice cream you’re going to make from bulls’ balls,’ his brother called out behind his back.

Avraham spun around and went for him. Efrayim, quick and agile, dodged. Noiseless as a barn owl, he skimmed over the field, his bare feet kicking up little dust clouds. Avraham ran after him, sobbing all the way to the village, a distance of three miles. Now and then he bent to pick up a stone or clod and threw it at his brother.

At night Grandfather told the children stories from his childhood. He told them how his brother Yosef, the capitalist traitor, had been kidnapped by gypsies when he was three.

‘The Czarist police found him in a sack in the Kharkov railway station. The gypsies had wanted to make an acrobat and a thief out of him. He was only with them for four days, but we had to teach him to talk again. He had forgotten all the words he knew, crawled around on all fours, and picked pockets.’

Grandfather told them how he had built a hothouse for myrtle bushes when he was ten. ‘On the Feast of Tabernacles I sold myrtle branches to the Hasidim, every one of them ritually perfect. It was the first hothouse in Makarov. My father was very proud of me.’

‘Tell us about our mother,’ begged Avraham. Grandfather told them how Grandmother Feyge had thought of setting a male turkey on chicken eggs. The turkey was so big that it could sit on fifty eggs at a time. The problem was that it squashed all the eggs when it stood up. And so Grandmother gave it wine, and the drunk bird, its flushed wattles red as fire, sat happily smiling at the eggs and never stirred.

‘All the women in the village switched to turkeys,’ laughed Grandfather, ‘even though Liberson wrote in the newsletter that “a Hebrew poultry run isn’t a bar”.’

I thought of those days with envy. They seemed to me a sort of dream, though Yosi said they had in fact been quite awful.

‘They were three orphans and one father who had no idea how to run a farm,’ he said. ‘When everyone else was buying new double-bladed ploughs, Grandfather was busy hugging olive trees. They had no money for boots in the winter, they did all their milking by hand, and they shared their work animals with the neighbours, whom they were always quarrelling with. Today we have electric incubators, and soon we’ll be inseminating the turkeys too.’

Yosi was proud of the new breeding coop he had built for his turkeys. It was an enclosed lightproof structure covered with tarpaper, in which the young females sat waiting to get good prices for their fertilised eggs. Blindly groping for their food, they were prevented by the darkness from thinking, hoping, or wanting sex. As soon as an order came in from the National Turkey Council, we hurried to bring them to the males. They staggered out warily on feeble legs, blinking the watery, sun-split lenses of their eyes. Five minutes in the sun was all it took to put them in heat. Kowtowing in the hot dirt with palsied wings, they summoned the males with shrill voices and the red flowers that pulsed beneath their tails.

‘Stupid randy birds,’ said Yosi. The turkey hens squatted in the middle of the yard and turned up their rumps, too much in heat to walk to the breeder. Yosi and Avraham had to kick them inside and strap canvas saddles on their backs to keep the heavy males from tearing their flesh when they mounted them.

‘Just look at that,’ Uri said to me. ‘That’s what falling in love is like. It lets in the light.’

The males squabbled near the impatient hens, pushing and shoving each other. As soon as one succeeded in doing his duty, his consort rose with smug languor, shook out her wings, and went off to her friends in a chatter of show-offy silence.

‘She’s running to tell them it was worth waiting for,’ said Uri.

‘The thought of spending two months in the dark just to be screwed by a turkey!’ sneered Yosi.

But I was thinking of three children beneath Grandfather’s sheltering wings, sitting down to a winter supper of potatoes cooked in their jackets, hard-boiled eggs, a bowl of homemade herring marinated in lemon juice and onion rings, and bright slices of radish. I was thinking of my dead mother; of her long braids and legs catching fire; and of Efrayim. To this day I sometimes whirl around suddenly, thinking he is behind me with his great Charolais bull on his shoulders, laughing at having startled me.

‘No one understood how my son Efrayim could pick up a bull,’ Grandfather told me with a smile.

No one understood and no one saw what was coming. Not even Pinness foretold the embryonic evil as it ripened. ‘An orphan growing up with his grandfather is one big barrel of stories,’ he said of me. I myself no longer know what I have heard and what I have seen myself. Was it Avraham who ran to his mother’s grave, or was it me? Did I leave the village, or did Efrayim?

The large gravestones gleam brightly in Pioneer Home. ‘Stones to stop the well of dreams with,’ Pinness called them. At night I wander through the banker’s big house, the bull of memory heavy on my shoulders.