A great love bound Efrayim and Jean Valjean. Before a few weeks had gone by, in the course of which the calf gained several pounds a day, his appearance on Efrayim’s shoulders was considered routine. Despite the burden, Efrayim felt as light and happy as if the calf were his own flesh and bone. By now ‘the fat Frenchy’, as the Charolais cow was called in the village, knew that her son would come home safely from his walks and had no qualms about Efrayim taking him. The calf too thought it a fine notion and waited for his master in the yard, skipping toward him with youthful coquetry and butting him playfully with his flanks and hard head as he begged to be taken out. According to my calculations, Jean Valjean must have weighed over twenty stone at the time. Though the calf did not seem heavy to Efrayim, his odd habit of carrying it around with him had its share of critics and opponents. No doubt there was grumbling among the livestock too, and certain villagers feared an insurrection among them.
Naturally, there were also jokers and spoilsports who poked fun at Efrayim and his lap calf. ‘Before you know it our cows and donkeys will demand similar transportation,’ wrote an anonymous contributor to the village newsletter.
Wickeder tongues wagged about ‘les Misérables, Jean Valjean and his master Quasimodo’. Hearing such epithets, Grandfather turned white as a ghost and stayed that way. Esther and Binyamin hoped his colour would return with the spring, but he remained as pale as milk until his dying day. Beneath that white skin he had begun to hate with a cold and calculating passion that was already spinning threads of revenge. After a thorough investigation revealed that it was Rilov’s son Dani who had come up with the label ‘Quasimodo’, Binyamin went over to him, laid a heavy hand on his shoulder, and said, ‘You’re not safe in your own bed either, because for my part you’re kaput, got it?’
My unfortunate uncle, who had hoped that ‘his love for Jean Valjean would win him friends again in the village’, retired once more to the straits of his solitude. Silent and alone, as if thrusting aside unseen barriers, he strode along with the huge, magnificent calf on his back. Putting the streets of the village behind them, they tramped through the orange groves, orchards, and broad fields. Farmers avoided them when they saw them, and only the children still ran after them, begging to pet Jean Valjean.
Uncharacteristically, Grandfather went to his friends and demanded that his son be restored to society despite his disfigurement, lest he turn into a cattle-carrying madman. But Efrayim’s hideous, masked visage and unconventional ways were too much for the frightened villagers.
‘Our constitution made no provision for defaced children of charter members who went around with young bulls on their shoulders,’ said Grandfather bitterly. ‘And meanwhile Jean Valjean kept getting bigger and my poor son kept carrying him around.’
Upon reaching maturity, Jean Valjean weighed two hundred stone of ungovernable meat. The strength hidden in my uncle’s body inspired awe and trepidation. But since Jean Valjean was the only bull of his kind in the entire country, the villagers were soon lining up outside Efrayim’s door to seek a match for their heifers.
At first Efrayim turned them down indignantly. In the privacy of his thoughts, I imagine, the bull’s surging masculinity disturbed his peace. In the privacy of my body, I can understand that well. Efrayim had been without a woman for a very long time. I daresay he may have preferred it that way, although I know nothing about such things. But Jean Valjean wanted a mate. Anyone could see that his virile powers needed an outlet, because often his pointed member crawled out of its sheath and groped in the air like a blind man’s red cane.
At about that time a letter arrived from the Charolais district of France. I asked Busquilla, who shook with laughter, to translate it. The woman farmer who had sold her cow to the motorcycle repairman from Dijon was writing to inquire ‘whether the bull has already become frisky’, adding that ‘each drop of his crème is worth its weight in gold’. Efrayim’s English and Scottish friends were quick to point out too that the animal was no mere symbol of the fellowship of former fighting men but a practical expression of the wish to see an ex-comrade-in-arms make a go of it.
The farmers of the village were willing to pay handsomely for the enormous bull to frisk with their cows, and eager cattle raisers began turning up from neighbouring villages too. One glimpse of Jean Valjean was enough to take their breath away with the promise stored in his great bulk.
Thus Efrayim became a man of means. Rising each morning, he curried Jean Valjean’s coat, washed his short horns and hooves until they gleamed in the sun, slapped his mighty hide, and rasped affectionately, ‘Come on, you big brute, let’s get to work.’
Jean Valjean shut his eyes, tucked in his stomach, and spread his stout legs wide, and Efrayim knelt and lifted him off the ground, gripping the huge forelegs in such a way that his horrid face was almost hidden by the panting, bright, mountainous belly of the bull. In their smooth pink sac, the two heavy testicles that were now his meal ticket bounced against his chest like exotic fruit.
By the time Jean Valjean and his master disappeared, the bull’s lusty progeny were a common sight in all the cow pens of the village. Even today, on a visit, I sometimes spot a particularly bright-coloured calf, broad-headed heifer, or stout yearling with a great curly neck. Jean Valjean’s crème still bubbles in our cowsheds, foaming like white cataracts of unmentionable rebuke.
Although the village children ran after my uncle and his bull in the hope of seeing it perform, Efrayim behaved with the utmost discretion. ‘When he reached the cowshed of the heifer, he demanded that every man get out.’ Unloading his burden in a corner, he checked to see that the floor was clean and dry so that the bull would not slip and break its shank bone and stretched a curtain of jute from wall to wall before leading Jean Valjean to the cow. Outside the shed you could hear Efrayim’s soft rasp and the pounding of huge hooves, followed by the cow’s loud moan as the great weight descended on her flanks, and the heavy breathing of the ejaculating bull.
Afterwards Efrayim would lift his mask a crack, poke out his still hidden head, bashfully announce, ‘We’re finished,’ and wipe the bull’s damp groin with a special disinfectant. Within a few months he had salted away enough money to build Jean Valjean a sumptuous private barn, buy himself a radio, a gramophone, and some records, and construct a large, suspicious-looking antenna on his roof. Afternoons he spent lying in bed listening to Scottish bagpipe music or Binyamin’s records. Sometimes he had his British soldier friends over, closely watched by Rilov.
All this time Shlomo Levin continued to work on our farm. He was never anything but a rotten farmer, but his love of the soil persisted, and Grandfather was grateful to him for helping with the children and the housework when Feyge died. Now, however, Levin, reminding Grandfather that he had been ‘practically the boy’s mother’, came out against ‘Efrayim’s shenanigans’ and argued that only ordinary farm chores could help get him back to normal life. Grandfather responded bluntly.
‘Anything that makes Efrayim happy is fine with me,’ he said.
Meanwhile, Jean Valjean’s fat French mother fell ill. Having never got used to the Land of Israel, she died one day from eating castor beans. Now her huge orphan’s attachment to Efrayim grew even greater. Zeitser, who pitied the motherless bull and had a soft spot for it, as he did for anyone who stuck to one thing and did it well, got hold of Levin in the yard and told him curtly that ‘farm animals are part of our national renaissance too’.
‘If he’s strong enough to carry a bull on his back,’ retorted Levin, ‘he’s strong enough for other work. It’s not good for him to lie in his room all day long living off fornication.’
But Efrayim’s war injuries had in fact weakened him greatly. He had strength for Jean Valjean alone. Lesser burdens were too much for him. My father Binyamin, for example, could carry two fodder sacks on his back from the cart to the cowshed without even losing his breath, while Efrayim staggered under one. No one understood how he could lift a bull except Pinness, who claimed in the village newsletter that ‘the case of Efrayim and Jean Valjean is not amenable to physical or biological analysis. The phenomenon is a psychological one of friendship, willingness, ecstasy, and great hope.
‘Every man,’ wrote Pinness, ‘has a bull that he must lift. We are all flesh, seed, and a great bellow in the heart that will not rest until it is let out.’