Like Grandfather, I too drink my tea while drawing sustenance from the bitter olive in my mouth and imbibing strength from the sugar cube between my fingers. Like him, I stand staring into the distance to see Efrayim and Jean Valjean return and Shifris finally arrive. From the rooftop of my large house I look out at the sea. White boats bob on the waves, combs bulge in the bathing suits of trim men, and burly women crouch on windsurfers, guiding their sails with distant hips while their short, stippled hair bristles in the breeze.
Once a great wave drove one of the surfers onto the rocks. I put down my binoculars, hurried to her, slung her over one shoulder and her surfboard with its sail over the other, and carried them to the safety of the sand, leaving her there in a prone position. Back on my roof again, I watched her get to her feet and look dazedly around, studying her bloodstains and my footprints on the sand.
So Grandfather stood atop the hayloft and on the terrace of the old folk’s home, looking out over the Valley for his returning son.
The old folk’s home is eleven miles from the village, a tall building that rises high above its surroundings. I went there every other day, taking a shortcut through the fields and furiously covering the distance in three hours with a pitcher of milk from the cowshed.
‘Wait a minute, Baruch,’ my uncle Avraham would say to me, ‘I’ll give you milk from a better cow.’ While waiting, I carried heavy sacks of fodder, helped load the full milk cans, and slung timid calves into shipment pens.
My two cousins were busy with the cows: Yosi, as morose as his father, quick and efficient at work, his pet red falcon perched on his shoulder or hopping after him like a dog, and Uri, who had taken to disappearing at night and sleeping late in the morning.
‘Some female of his must be in heat,’ grumbled Avraham, slapping him fondly on the back.
Uri, said Grandfather, was like Efrayim, only dreamier and more delicate. The resemblance was strongest in their wiry bodies, gaunt cheeks, and breathtakingly good looks. You could see Grandfather turn his grandson this way and that with his eyes as though he were his lost son frozen in a drop of amber. ‘Children. Strung pearls. Long necklaces of sperm,’ he wrote in a note I found after he had moved to the old folk’s home.
Before starting out, I wrapped the aluminium pitcher in jute and dipped it in water to keep the milk fresh. On my way I wet it again from the sprinklers I passed.
The air was cool and crisp when I set out, and dewdrops still hung from the leaves. The Valley was mantled by a sea of low-lying clouds, the mountain jutting above them like a blue isle. The rising sun, the same sun of the Land of Israel that had tried to murder Grandfather and his brother at 5.15 in the morning, was already stripping the fields of their white coverlet of mist, which dissolved like a seething blanket in the heat. Slowly the Valley threw off its soft bedclothes. The earth grew warm, drying out the damp soles of my feet. I always went barefoot, my sandals slung around my neck so that my heels could crush the earth beneath them. I can still feel the pleasure of that thin, hot soil between my toes, a grey flour ground by cart wheels and tough cattle hooves. Sometimes I walk along the sandy beach by my house, but its sharp, coarse granules are unlike the soft powder of the paths that took me to Grandfather.
Greenfinches jumped on the hedgerows along the path, and a pair of falcons tumbled in the air, sporting in high-pitched spirals. A yellow cloud of goldfinches swarmed anxiously over the thistles, their thick, short beaks sounding little squeaks of surprise.
‘By their beaks ye shall know them. The goldfinch’s is short and thick, well suited for cracking seeds, and the falcon’s is curved and sharp, perfectly adapted to tearing meat.’
One morning Pinness took us to the edge of the eucalyptus woods, where the carcass of a cow had been dumped. Belly swollen, horns ploughing the earth, it had been dragged there chained to a tractor the evening before. ‘He shall be buried with the burial of an ass, drawn and cast forth beyond the gates of Jerusalem,’ quoted Pinness sadly, telling us to watch in silence. Several vultures were gathered around the dead body. I liked their familiar bald heads, fierce stares, and wrinkled throats. With their perfectly evolved beaks they disembowelled the dead cow, their featherless white necks in its gut.
Pinness told us how Darwin had studied the Galápagos Island chaffinches, ‘a small, isolated community of birds equipped by evolution with a variety of beaks adapted to different kinds of food’. By splitting up into subspecies, each of which adjusted to new diets, the chaffinches ensured their survival. From here, via parable and analogy, it was but a short step to our teacher’s exhortations on the advantages of multiculture farming. ‘The orchard and the cowshed, the poultry run and the vegetable patch: thou shalt take hold of this and withdraw not thine hand from the other.’
Sometimes I would flush a mother lark from her hiding place, and she would run ahead of me and flop around in the stubble like a shrill, lame old woman, soiling her crest in the dirt while luring me away from her nest and camouflaged eggs. Green lizards ran quickly, leaving tiny cuneiform prints. Partridges took off with a loud applause of wings, and sometimes a mongoose scurried across the path, its long, wicked body wriggling like a snake. There were real snakes too.
‘Though it eats baby chicks and eggs, the black snake is the farmer’s friend, for it destroys the mice. Step aside and let it pass when you see it.’
The farmers who were out early in their fields knew me by my lumbering walk and the pitcher in my hand and said a friendly hello. Some even offered me a waggon ride. Carefully I crossed the wheat field of the nearby kibbutz, my muscles stiffening as a kibbutznik the age of my uncle Avraham stepped out from behind a tree with a small basket. Ages after Liberson’s abduction of Fanya, the tension was still there. Future generations would never even know what had happened. The rivers of time, the dams of memory, and clashing politics and seasons had coloured Liberson’s romantic prank in harsh, divisive hues. The bad blood between the kibbutz and the village kept growing, sending its tendrils out in all directions to fasten on trellises of hate. From time to time funds were fought over, stones were thrown, black eyes sprouted in angry faces, and shouts were fired back and forth across the wadi.
The man was alone. He approached me hesitantly with his eyes on the ground, as if expecting to find a cloven foot on me.
‘Are you going to the old folk’s home? You’re Ya’akov Mirkin’s grandson? My father used to tell me about him.’
Gently, bashfully, he held out the basket. ‘I’d appreciate your taking this to Ze’ev Ackerman, room number five. He’s a friend of your grandfather’s.’
Everyone was a friend of Grandfather’s. And I buried them all next to him. Ze’ev Ackerman, if my memory is not mistaken, is in row six, plot seventeen.
The straw basket held a cake and some enormous Japanese medlars that were as big as oranges. ‘They’re from our tree. You can eat one on your way. Only one, though.’
By 8.20 I was at the old folk’s home, wiping my feet on the lawn before putting on my sandals.
‘Mirkin’s grandson is here,’ said the old men sitting by the door as usual, desperately waiting for visitors. ‘He brings his grandfather milk. He’s a good boy.’ They regarded me with fond glances. Some looked like Grandfather, as if they had been cast in the same mould. Others, city types, were a transparent grey, like the insect moults I collected in the fields, frail and timid like Shlomo Levin. Years of bad nutrition, ‘ideological weakness’, and ‘estrangement from nature’ had left their mark on them.
Originally the home had been built for our own old people alone, the village’s and the kibbutz’s. No sooner did they arrive than they held a general meeting at which they voted to throw the occupational therapists’ beads and knitting needles in their faces and go to work in the flower garden. With rough, palsied hands they dug up the yellow roses and blue leadwort and sowed rows of beets, peppers, cabbages, and scallions. Then, singing lustily, they drained the gold-fish pond and diverted its water for irrigation.
‘All that was missing was for one or two of them to commit suicide,’ Grandfather said.
‘No one knew what to do with us,’ Liberson told me years later, when Fanya was dead and he himself had been brought to the home, blind and irritable. ‘They weren’t prepared for ageing pioneers. The sight of us mighty visionaries and men of action reduced to arteriosclerotic rheumatics sent them all into shock.’
I entered the dining hall, where Grandfather was waiting for me, and halted in front of him. Everyone looked at him enviously. He patted my stiff head of hair happily.
‘Good morning, Shulamit,’ I said to the woman seated beside him.
Grandfather’s lady friend, a large, stooped, sickly-looking woman with white hair and reading glasses, smiled at me. I stared down at the ground.
Once when I came Grandfather was not in the dining hall. I crossed the garden to look in his window and saw Shulamit lying on the bed, her dress hiked up above her fallen stomach. Grandfather was kneeling on the rug, his bald head pecking at the flesh between her legs while she talked to him in the same crooning, spongy alphabet that Pinness had not wanted to translate. I left the milk by their door. Later Grandfather came looking for me on the lawn. His moustache had a scary swamp smell when he kissed my cheek.
Now I put the can on the table, removed the lid, and poured Grandfather a cup of milk. ‘Straight from the cow,’ I said, proudly looking around. Shoshanna, a housemother, wiped her red hands on her apron and clapped them together.
‘That’s wonderful, Mirkin. Drink, Mirkin. Isn’t it good for you, Mirkin? There’s nothing healthier than milk.’
‘She thinks everyone over the age of sixty-five is senile,’ grumbled Grandfather, polishing off the milk. Four cups of it, one after the other. Shulamit did not like milk.
Afterwards, watched by everyone, Grandfather and I went for a walk in the garden or chatted on the terrace. I had to tell him over and over what was happening at home, what was new in the orchard and the farmyard, what was the latest in the village.
‘How’s Pinness?’
‘He heard that crank again.’
‘Who was he screwing this time?’
‘It’s always someone else.’
‘And Tsirkin?’
‘Tsirkin had a big fight with Meshulam. He wanted him to burn some weeds in the yard, but Meshulam was too busy repairing the old binding machine.’
‘That piece of junk?’
Meshulam had found the old Clayton binder next to the bullpen, its traces cracked and its wings broken, like the giant skeleton of some shattered bird. I stood up and started to mimic him. ‘You do not throw out history just because it has no spare parts.’
Grandfather laughed. ‘Meshulam will stuff his own father with his mandolin in his hand.’
When Grandfather moved to the old folk’s home, Meshulam came to ask me for all his papers, letters, and personal belongings.
‘Ya’akov Mirkin’s memoirs can throw valuable light on the situation in this country at the beginning of World War One,’ he declared.
‘He didn’t write any memoirs,’ I said.
‘Letters and notes are valuable too,’ explained Meshulam importantly.
Grandfather laughed when I told him how I had grabbed Meshulam by his belt and collar and thrown him out of the window.
‘Meshulam will cause some disaster yet,’ he said as he saw me off. ‘Don’t forget to water the orchard and help in the cowshed. You don’t have to wait for Avraham to ask you.’
After I left he would stand on the terrace for a long while, watching my figure disappear around the bend in the road. Once I waited there for half an hour and then ducked back and looked up. Grandfather was still at his post. Bent with work. Looking with longing. Waiting with vengeance. For his son Efrayim. For the blossoms in the orchard. For Shifris, the last pioneer, who would come walking slowly, making his way through sand and snow to the Land of Israel.