Eliezer Liberson didn’t always have time for me. After turning his farm over to Daniel, he devoted himself to finding new and better ways of courting Fanya.
He never ceased amusing and surprising her with a savoir faire that, latent in him from the start, had developed remarkably from the moment it was pressed into use. Well aware that no loam was more mysterious and demanding than love’s, he declared that it did not tolerate such commonplace methods as crop rotation and fallowing, which were intended for poor soils and unimaginative farmers. Periodically, the whole village heard the ripples of Fanya’s laughter through the Libersons’ windows. ‘Liberson’s done it again,’ was always Uri’s admiring comment.
None of us could resolve the contradiction between Liberson the stuffy ideologue, who bombarded meetings and the village newsletter with utopian avalanches of words, and the concealed Don Juan who would do anything for Fanya. He taught the jackdaws in his orchard to wolf-whistle at her and took her out to the fields on summer nights for erotic walks that sometimes had me as their secret companion. Years ago, Pinness once told me, when Fanya was working in the village packing house, Liberson prepared a cup of rich cocoa with sweet cream and sugar, filled his mouth with it, and went off to give his wife a custardy kiss. ‘No one who stopped to talk to him on his way could understand why, for the first time in memory, he kept his mouth shut.’
On the occasion of their tenth wedding anniversary he overcame his proletarian principles, went off to town in his cart, and returned with some expensive scented soap that smelled of frivolity and rank heresy. Hitherto the women of the village had bathed and washed their hair with huge bars of smelly grey laundry soap. Though Fanya used the gift only on Fridays, the seductive fragrance of her skin made her self-conscious, led to disapproving whispers in the village, reminded several old-timers of Riva Margulis’s infamous luxury trunk and Pesya Tsirkin’s perfume, and tripled Liberson’s passion for her.
Two months went by, and when the soap was almost gone Fanya discovered in it her husband’s real present – ‘a silly note’ in a tiny tube he had had the tinsmith make specially. Liberson came running as soon as he heard her merry squeal in the laundry shack, which was where the showers were located in those days.
Subsequently, so it was said, he began leaving her notes wherever possible. Fanya found his little tubes in wheels of farmer cheese and in the feed stalls of the milk cows, heard them rattle in the oil cans of the brooder, and – for by now Liberson was a past master – even discovered one of them in the craw of a chicken she had slaughtered and was cleaning for dinner.
‘As usual, Eliezer is overdoing it,’ commented Pinness approvingly. ‘If he keeps it up he’ll make Fanya paranoid, though I must say his hiding places are far better chosen than that stinking arms cache of Rilov’s.’
Tsirkin, on the other hand, still devoted himself to his farm, though he was thoroughly sick of his life, his worthless son, and ‘that double-breasted politician’ his wife.
Meshulam, having salvaged dozens of boxes of old papers from a kibbutz in the Valley, was busy cataloguing them in those years, while Pesya occasionally sallied forth from the Movement’s headquarters in Tel Aviv to turn up in the village with foreign socialist leaders, agricultural experts from Burma, or some African minister in a gaudy skirt and baker’s hat. She was also active in the immigrant camps, where she organised social and educational activities, and even had her picture in the paper bathing a baby from Morocco in a tin tub while smiling at its mother. ‘Comrade Pesya Tsirkin Teaches New Immigrant Mother-Love’ was the caption beneath her maternal breasts.
Behind his impeccable manners Grandfather went on nursing a keen, secretive grudge against his two old friends. Meanwhile, he raised me, pruned and cultivated his trees, wrote notes, and made plans. The same passage of time that filled me with stories and layered my bones with thick flesh put an end to the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle, of which nothing was left but a monumental legend, a few torn snapshots, and some disembodied shadows.
I still thought of Tsirkin and Liberson as family, however. One day, finding no one in at the Libersons, I picked up the storybook he always read to me from. Although I was still a little boy and couldn’t read, I knew enough to realise that the glossy white pages of the book were blank in their cloth binding. Liberson had made up every story I had heard from him: ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’, ‘The Stork and the Fox’, even ‘The Flower of the Golden Heart’!
Pinness burst out laughing when I told him.
‘In general,’ he said, ‘we all either invent stories or retell those we’ve heard. And in particular, the tale of the Ant and the Grasshopper happens to be a lot of twaddle.’
One night I heard him talking with Grandfather in the kitchen.
‘He should spend more time with boys his own age,’ he said. ‘It’s no good for a small boy like him to be always with grown-ups.’
‘He’s my child,’ answered Grandfather, sucking extra hard on the bitter olive in his mouth.
‘Mirkin,’ insisted Pinness, ‘whether or not it’s what you want, you’re bringing Baruch up in an old ruined cloister. I see how he is in school. He doesn’t play with marbles or a ball during break. He doesn’t talk to anyone. All he does is crawl on the lawn. By himself.’
‘He’s looking for beetles, just like you,’ said Grandfather.
Sometimes I glanced up to see myself encircled by a shouting, jeering crowd.
‘The children surround him like a flock of songbirds that has cornered an owl. They screech and make fun of him.’
‘It doesn’t worry me,’ Grandfather said. ‘And I don’t envy the child who provokes him.’
When I was six I broke two of Uzi Rilov’s fingers. I was crouched by the white oleanders near the fence, looking for green hawkmoth caterpillars. Thick and shiny, they wriggled cumbersomely over the poisonous bushes, turning their necks to give me a frightening look when I touched them. I knew that their big blue mascara-ringed eyes were a bluff, because Pinness had told me that they weren’t real and were only there to scare away predators.
Uzi Rilov landed on my back with a thump, grabbed me by the ears, and began to shake me back and forth. I got hold of his wrist and spun around to face him. At thirteen he was older and quicker than me. For his bar mitzvah his grandfather had given him a stallion and a revolver and sent him off without food to survive as best he could in the hills near the Cherkessian villages. But though I was only six, at six stone I was just as tall as he was and had been raised by Grandfather on colostrum and hate. Slowly I bent back two of his fingers until I heard them snap. Turning pale, he toppled to the ground and passed out. Two teachers carried him off while I bent back down for a look at the make-believe eyes of my caterpillars.
That evening Rilov came to the cabin to talk to Grandfather. With a contemptuous rattle of ice cubes between his teeth, Grandfather advised him to tell his grandson to pick on children his own age and keep away from little boys with a big punch.
That was the last time anyone tried that with me. But comic songs were sung about me during break, and Pinness, who had a knack of looking out the window of the teachers’ room in the nick of time, would come and lead me away just as I was about to charge, his hand drawing out the stiff tension in my neck.
Two afternoons a week I went out to the fields with him, to ‘the School of Nature’.
‘Nature lets nothing go to waste,’ he declared as we trod the rough path leading to the wadi. ‘Everything is grist to its mill. Seize the one and withhold not thy hand from the other. There are worms that live in garlic peels. There are spiders that eat their mates. Cattle dung, rotten fruit, fabric, paper – it’s all grist to the mill.’
He had his hands crossed behind him like a landowner inspecting his estate. On my back I carried a square army pack with his pincers, nets, empty matchboxes, and sealed bottles of chloroform. ‘Your grandfather gave me this knapsack,’ he said. ‘It’s an English wireless operator’s pack that belonged to your uncle Efrayim.’
I asked if we could catch a praying mantis, an insect whose mincing gait and pious mien intrigued me. Just then, though, our path was busily crossed by an orange beetle with a black-spotted carapace, and I pointed it out to Pinness, who kept looking around while talking continually. He was thrilled to see it.
‘Maybe we’ll be in luck this time,’ he said, ordering me not to lose sight of it.
The beetle proceeded in a straight line, its two clublike antennae moving ceaselessly. Clearly it had something on its mind.
‘It has a wonderful sense of smell,’ whispered Pinness, crawling after it on all fours.
A quarter of an hour later the beetle quickened its pace. Shortly we too smelled the faint scent of carrion.
The beetle disappeared beneath a bed of straw.
‘Well now,’ said Pinness, ‘let’s have a look.’ Lifting the straw, he bared the dead body of a goldfinch. We sat down upwind to avoid the smell, and Pinness told me to watch carefully.
A second beetle appeared, making its way among the clods of earth. Without further ado, the two began mating by the corpse.
‘Look how nature has a place for everyone, Baruch,’ Pinness said. ‘Some couples meet in fields full of flowers, others at the theatre – these two prefer the stench of death.’
Now the two beetles began to burrow beneath the goldfinch, excavating little pebbles and bits of earth as the dead bird sank into the hole. We sat watching for several hours until it was completely underground and covered with soil.
‘Now,’ Pinness said, ‘Mother Beetle will lay her eggs in the carcass, chewing and softening its meat for her maggots. Some children grow up in palaces and others in corpses. May my lot always be with the salt of the earth!’
He took my hand and we went home.
When the doctors announced that Pinness could return to the village, Busquilla hired a taxi to bring him. I suggested to the old teacher that he spend a few weeks with me, but his only answer was, ‘Home.’
His eyes welled with sorrow and exertion when we got there. He had aged greatly. The little blood clots had attacked him with surgical precision, severing the bonds of memory, destroying the walls he had built during his long years in the country, and causing his brain to send out unremitting signals of hunger.
‘All the old boys are dead now,’ said Pinness. ‘From hard work and battling temptation. Levin alone is still alive. Levin alone, and I who live on with him. Two old dotards.’
He taught no more classes and rarely had pupils over to his house. He did not go out to the fields any more either. Sometimes he sat in his garden watching the ants and grasshoppers scurry across the lawn. A sand boa he released from its cage in the nature room lay limply coiled among the wild flowers. He had divided his zoological collection between me and the school, the arthropods, the bleached reptiles in their jars of formaldehyde, and the hollow birds’ eggs remaining in the nature room. Alongside the more conventional systems of taxonomy, however, Pinness also classified all life into Helpful and Harmful, and his own private collection had two categories alone, Our Friends and Our Enemies.
‘There are some borderline cases,’ he admitted. ‘Take the bee-eater. On the one hand, it kills wasps, but on the other, it eats Margulis’s bees. The mongoose preys on both voles and baby chicks.’
‘Whenever you see an insect, bird, mammal, or reptile, ask if it is friend or foe,’ said Pinness to me on one of our first outings, when I was five years old.
‘Someday I’ll leave you this collection,’ he informed me. ‘You deserve it.’
He often consulted with Grandfather, who was an expert on tree pests, and together the two taught me to identify and eradicate them. Taking me to the orchard, they put their hands on my shoulders and pointed me at a pear tree.
‘Watch carefully,’ said Grandfather.
The two men, both in grey work shirts, one wearing a worker’s cap and one a floppy-brimmed straw hat, looked down at me ceremoniously. I could feel their emotion, although I did not understand the cause of it.
‘I don’t see anything,’ I said.
Grandfather knelt and showed me a round hole, about a quarter of an inch in diameter, in the trunk of the tree. Directly beneath it on the ground was a little pile of sawdust.
‘Such a predator can eat a whole tree,’ Pinness said.
Grandfather took out a long, thin piece of wire that was coiled like a spring at one end.
‘The planter’s fishing rod,’ he said. Slowly but surely, he inserted it into the caterpillar’s tunnel. A yard and a half of wire disappeared gradually up the tree as Grandfather sighed quietly, realising the extent of the damage.
‘Damn you!’ he swore when he felt the tip of the wire pierce the caterpillar. He gave it a twist, corkscrewing it into the grub’s flesh, and gently began to retract it. The caterpillar let out an eerie squeal and a soft, repulsive whistle as its jaws and nails tore loose from the pith of the pear tree, scraping the sides of its wormhole on its reluctant journey to the sunlight.
‘Aha!’ exclaimed Grandfather, pulling out the last of the wire. Impaled on its tip was a soft, black-spotted, yellow-orange blob that squirmed and wriggled as Grandfather held it up to me. I felt a wave of nausea and hatred.
‘Take a good look, my child,’ said Grandfather. ‘This is the enemy. The tiger moth.’
That was my first lesson in agriculture. Thenceforth I was sent to the orchard twice a week to look for the telltale sawdust at the base of the fruit trees.
I can still remember fishing my first caterpillar out of a Rennet apple tree. The feel of the monster writhing and gnashing its teeth inside the tree trunk ran along the steel wire into my fingers and up through my wrist to my spine.
‘Don’t be afraid, Baruch,’ said Grandfather. ‘You’ve got him where you want him.’
I dashed the grub to the ground and stamped on it with my foot.
When a tiger moth murdered one of Liberson’s apricots, Pinness chopped down the dead tree and tunnelled in its trunk with a little axe until he found one of the caterpillars.
He cut off a section of tree trunk with the caterpillar in it. ‘We’ll add you to our collection,’ he smiled, ‘and burn the rest of your comrades at the stake.’ We dragged the tree’s carcass out of the orchard and set it on fire.
‘So long, you scoundrels,’ said Pinness as the screeches and death coughs rose from the burning branches.
He took me home with him. Removing the caterpillar with a pair of padded pincers, he wrapped it in blotting paper. ‘Some larvae secrete a staining substance when they die,’ he explained.
He put the still wriggling caterpillar in a test tube, added some petrol-soaked absorbent cotton, told me to have a seat, and gave me a biscuit and a lecture.
‘This is the true test of every collector,’ he said. ‘Nothing is harder than preserving a caterpillar. It’s so juicy that it decomposes easily, and there’s no exoskeleton to keep its shape.’
When the caterpillar had been gassed to death, Pinness took it from the test tube, laid it on a glass slide, and made an incision near its anus with a sharp little surgical knife. ‘I stole this knife from Sonya in the clinic,’ he confided, his body shaking with suppressed mirth. Rolling a pencil down the grub’s body until the intestines were squeezed out through the opening, he severed them and tossed them out the window.
‘For the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the earth,’ he intoned.
He took a small straw, inserted it into the caterpillar’s hollow corpse, and blew gently, his eyes blinking behind his concentration-fogged glasses. As the caterpillar slowly expanded, Pinness rose carefully and bent over the table lamp, rotating the larva above the hot bulb while continuing to blow softly.
‘A hot iron will do the job too, but not an open fire.’
Within a few minutes the caterpillar’s skin was dry and hard.
‘The purists coat it with clear varnish,’ Pinness said, pouring a drop of diluted glue into the cut in the caterpillar’s rear.
He took the section of the apricot tree, sawed it lengthwise to expose the tiger moth’s tunnel, blew away the sawdust, and restored the now immortalised pest to its former residence. After writing down the date and site of its capture on a slip of paper, he opened a little box, took out a large, hairy adult moth with spotted wings, and placed it on the tree trunk still pierced by its pin.
‘It’s important to exhibit them in their natural habitat,’ he declared with a sigh of contentment.