23

‘But you did so pee,’ I said to Grandfather years later, when I was older. I had asked about the story so often that I knew its every detail.

We were walking in the orchard. Grandfather was teaching me to notch the branches of the quince trees, which needed shaping because they had grown long and wild without forking properly.

‘Now tell me, my child, where do you want this branch to fork?’

I looked at him disbelievingly. I didn’t know that making branches fork was routine work in an orchard. Grandfather studied a straight branch, selected a developed bud on it, and made a crescent-shaped incision above it. The next time the tree leafed, each such bud would put out a side branch, and Grandfather would then prune the tree.

   

When he was a blind widower in the old folk’s home, able to see only the shades of his love for Fanya, Eliezer Liberson once told me how Grandfather made his reputation as a planter.

‘I can picture him right now with that sour orange stock of his,’ he sighed with pleasure. ‘It made a great impression. It wasn’t every day that a little socialist from Russia showed up the orange growers of the colonies.’

I knew that Grandfather had quarrelled with the citrus growers after discovering that some of them were selling bud sticks ‘irresponsibly’ and compromising the quality of the Shamouti oranges.

‘And then came the gummosis blight and wiped out whole orange groves,’ Liberson told me. ‘The trunks rotted, the leaves turned yellow, and the trees died. All the ointments and disinfectants and copper oxides and liming didn’t help. Every time a hoe was used, it was sterilised as though in a hospital, but that didn’t do any good either.’

Grandfather asked to be given an infected grove for experimental purposes, and the desperate growers, most of whom had their doubts about the young pioneers, decided to let him have what he wanted and put an orange grove, money, and workers at his disposal. Grandfather brought sturdy sour orange stock and planted it alongside the sick trees. When it was doing nicely, he peeled a strip from the trunk of each sour orange, cut a matching patch in the bark of each sick orange, tied the two trees together so that their exposed piths were in contact, and wrapped them in dry sacking for protection.

‘The dying oranges recovered as if they had received a blood transfusion,’ said Liberson.

‘The pioneers made a big ideological fuss over it,’ said Meshulam. ‘It wasn’t just a question of agronomy or botany for them. It was a symbol. The unspoiled new blood of the sour orange curing the rot in the decadent colonies – you can imagine how they went to town with it! You didn’t know? Why, it was written up in all the newspapers.’

   

‘Pioneers who pee don’t make the newspapers,’ joked Grandfather. But if with a child’s peevishness I liked the truth better, which was that Grandfather had been urinating in the sewage ditch, not working in the yard, when he saw the hyena, that was because it made a difference. Anyone could understand that it was easier to throw down a pail of fodder or a bundle of hay than to stop peeing in midstream.

After the incident, I would sometimes go to the cowshed in the afternoon hours when Grandfather was napping in the cabin or under a tree in the orchard. Zeitser would be leaning wearily against a wall, perusing an old newspaper that Shlomo Levin had left lying in the yard; the cows would be drowsing in the cowshed; and even the exhausted flies would be resting on dusty piles of sacks in the corner or curled up in the fodder sweetly asleep on a piece of carob. Going behind the manure pile to pee, I would suddenly force myself to stop with a round, violent squeeze, grab a pitchfork, and run back with it to the yard. After many such practice sessions, I could do it without spilling a drop.

Grandfather returned from the clinic groaning from the painful injections. The first thing he did was summon Manya, our delinquent watchdog, and give her a dressing down. Hurt and disgraced, she slunk away, taking her food bowl with her, and was never seen again. Liberson, who was the village treasurer at the time and often went to Tel Aviv, claimed to have seen her there hanging around the boardwalk cafés and toadying up to the English. ‘She was so embarrassed that she pretended not to know me,’ he guffawed.

I pulled up an armchair for Grandfather to sit in. I was, so they say, a strong child even then. No one thought me particularly bright, but I was considered ‘sturdy, responsible, and good-natured’. Grandfather sat down and told me a story of which all I remember today are the words I didn’t understand – bacillus, anthrax, hydrophobia – and a vague something about a Ukrainian peasant boy who was bitten by a rabid wolf and brought to Paris to have his life saved.

‘Yes, indeed, my child,’ said Grandfather. ‘Like Burbank, Louis Pasteur was the farmer’s friend.’

Riva Margulis and Tonya Rilov came to visit, their faces furrowed with worry. When Grandfather looked at them in astonishment, because the two of them were never seen together, they explained that the Committee had recommended that Comrade Mirkin be given chicken soup as a restorative, and that they were volunteering to make it. Grandfather thanked them but said it wasn’t necessary. He told me to bring the hatchet and the hook, and we went to catch a chicken ourselves.

At the far end of the cowshed we found Pinness measuring the teeth and skull of the charred hyena and jotting down the results in a notebook. Serene but excited, he hurried over to us when he saw us.

‘I’m sure it’s him,’ he said. ‘I’m absolutely certain.’

He began to cut the hyena’s head off, inserting his knife deftly between the spines of the vertebrae and severing the large neck and shoulder tendons with practised strokes. A week later the animal’s white, shiny skull was on display in the glass cabinet of the nature room. As was his custom, Piness did not remove the flesh with chemicals but simply buried the carcass with the eggs of the greenbottle fly. Within a few days the newly hatched maggots had picked the hyena’s bones clean.

As soon as the anxious hens roving around by the hayloft saw Grandfather and me approach with the short hatchet and the long hook, they knew what we had come for. While Grandfather sharpened the hatchet, first honing it on a grindstone that spun around in a basin of water with a flurry of sparks and spray, then filing it down with a sickle, they ran around the yard beating their wings and screeching to one another. Grandfather, who was traditionally the family chicken killer though not much of a meat eater himself, brandished the hook, which was no more than a rusty reinforcing rod a yard and a half long and twisted at one end, swept our speckled hen Shoshanna off her feet with it, bent down with a grunt of pain because his stomach still hurt from the injections, and grabbed her by the throat.

The cows shut their horrified eyes. With a movement so lightning fast that it made me want to study it in slow motion to see how it was done, Grandfather laid Shoshanna’s neck on the concrete partition of a feed stall and brought the sharpened hatchet down on her throat. Contorted beak opened wide, her combed head dropped on his black rubber boots as he flung her startled body over his shoulder in a parabola so perfect that he did not even bother to glance at the familiar curve.

The beheaded chicken, a flying fountain of blood, fell, writhed, and rose to its feet for its death dance. Grandfather moved away. He disapproved of the hypnotic way I stared at the hen doing her last little jitterbug. ‘That’s something you must have got from your mother,’ he said.

Meanwhile Shoshanna ran back and forth, staggering and stumbling as the blood burbled from her headless throat and seeped into the ground with the ghastly yet attractive silence of a soul and body now suffering separate fates.

Even when her head and throat, with their vocal cords, memories, and pain centres, were lying on the straw by the feed stall, I feared that the hen might put herself back together and walk off. To be on the safe side, I picked up the bodiless head and threw it to the cats.

Shoshanna was beginning to slow down. Her friends went back to pecking by her side as though nothing had happened. The fiery little cockscomb in my trousers was dying too. When she finally collapsed, I went to take a good look at her last gasps. There was a brief spasm and a few more short jets of blood before some pink and black froth bubbled up with a curious wheeze from her slashed white gullet. Grandfather came, stamped on the puddle of blood to mix it well with the earth, and brought Shoshanna to Aunt Rivka to be plucked. The swarm of green flies spattered across the yard by her dance did not disappear for several hours.

That evening Fanya Liberson came to make the soup. Beautiful as always, she sat watching Grandfather eat Shoshanna and read him the village charter in her mellifluous voice.

‘“Our goal is to create a community of workers that will live from its own labours without exploitation…

‘“Our path is one of integrating reality with ideology …

‘“The children of all members will receive equal and common educational opportunities …

‘“The village’s institutions will meet the spiritual and economic needs of every family …”’

‘Mutual aid’, ‘self-sufficiency’, ‘the status of women’, ‘the return to the earth’ – the comforting phrases sounded in Grandfather’s room until his suffering features softened with sudden forgiveness. A bored smile played over the corners of his mouth, and he fell asleep like a baby. His face while he slept was like his face when he died, when I took his warm, soft, white body and buried it in the earth he had wished to be laid to rest in.