Towards the end of his life Levin grew cross and insufferable. Grandfather, the only man he had ever deferred to, was already dead, and in a moment of weakness I gave him the old work boots Grandfather had worn in the orchard. Levin sat on my bed, thrust his thin legs into them, stood up, and walked around as happily as a child with his first pair of grown-up shoes, shaking his head like a giddy colt each time he looked down at the battered toes.

‘What did you give him Grandfather’s boots for?’ grumbled Yosi. ‘Now he thinks he’s somebody.’

Inspired by the boots, Levin began poking his nose into the running of the farm and grew careless with the co-op books. He also yelled at Rachel, went for long, booted walks in the fields, stopping to look at his reflection in every puddle, took to calling himself ‘Sweet Levin’, made his wife go around in a blue kerchief, and developed a grasshopper phobia.

Unable to control myself one night, I went to peek through the window of his house and saw him take out a black notebook and wave it angrily beneath Rachel’s nose.

‘All the sins of the Workingman’s Circle,’ he hissed. ‘They’re all written down here!’

‘I wish you’d calm down,’ said Rachel wearily. ‘Tsirkin and Mirkin are dead. Poor Liberson is blind in an old folk’s home. Who are you still out to get?’

‘It was the way she laughed,’ replied Levin. ‘She went out with them every night, laughing. They purposely put funny words to Hasidic songs to make her laugh and insult me.’

Feyge’s laughter, the stains of stolen chocolate, Zeitser’s mocking glances – all left their mark on Levin’s thin skin like the voracious teeth of locusts. He recalled how Liberson had pestered him a whole night over whether the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle should play a more active role in the Chinese workers’ movement. ‘The FLWC is coming, O ye yellow masses,’ the young pioneer called out into the darkness. Feyge burst into giggles and embraced him, pressing her body against his. Levin didn’t sleep a wink that night, convinced that his sister could no longer tell reality from revolutionary fantasy.

In Petach Tikvah Mirkin smoked publicly on the Sabbath and started a row with the local religious farmers. In Jaffa Tsirkin told stupid anti-Hasidic jokes to two Hasidim they happened to meet. In Rishon-le-Tsiyyon Liberson was apprehended in the vineyards with his hands inside the blouse of the school principal’s daughter. All three of them regularly dressed and undressed in Feyge’s presence.

In a little black notebook Levin began to record secretly all the misdeeds of his sister’s corrupters. One evening he produced it and read the list out loud to them.

‘You forgot about the time Mirkin stole oranges in Jaffa,’ said Liberson.

‘I didn’t forget a thing,’ Levin told Rachel. ‘They humiliated me and killed my sister, and they got off scot-free except for Mirkin. He’s the only one who was punished.’

He began asking Meshulam about suicides in the early days of the Second Aliyah. Every graveyard in the old villages and kibbutzim had its pioneers who had taken their own lives, leaving behind gravestones carved with guilt and remorse. Most of these had been transferred to my keeping, and Levin walked up and down among them, reading the inscriptions. ‘Died at His Own Hands’, ‘Overcome by His Suffering’, ‘Drank the Hemlock’, ‘Put an End to His Own Life’. Dreamly, he murmured the awful words.

Now and then he ran screaming out of his house with a can of green insect spray in his hand, Rachel hurrying after him. Though she was younger than he was, his madness made his grey limbs strong and spry. Once she found him lying in a field, waiting to die from the spray can he had drained. But long years spent in the store amid fumes of ammonia, DDT, parathion, and benzoic acid had immunised him against all chemicals. Two hours of lying in the sun was enough for him, and rising despairingly, he went home with Rachel walking wordlessly by his side.

Even after Grandfather’s death, Levin kept coming to look for odd jobs in our farmyard. My uncle Avraham, who remembered how his kind hands had fed, bathed, and clothed him as a little orphan, put up with him and had him collect the old wires scattered among the bales of hay. Not that they were worth anything, but it was just as well not to have them getting into a feed stall and killing a cow. Levin even made himself a little work corner in the cowshed, where he sat for hours drawing coloured charts of milk production and straightening old nails for re-use. Now and then the blows of the hammer were accompanied by a groan of pain that was taken up by a merry chorus of turkeys. ‘I think your uncle must have straightened more fingers than nails,’ I once heard Uri say to his father over lunch. Yosi complained that the clouds of thick dust billowing up from the old fodder sacks Levin kept shaking out and folding were giving the poultry laryngitis. Stepping into the yard, he bawled him out rudely, assisted by juicy imprecations from his mother Rivka standing on her porch.

Enraged and humiliated, Levin went home to plot his revenge. The mockery of the Workingman’s Circle resounded again in his mind. One day he surprised Avraham during his afternoon nap.

‘Me you treat like an animal, but Zeitser you keep on!’

‘Zeitser worked with my father back in the old days,’ said Avraham. ‘We won’t throw him to the dogs just because he’s become old and weak.’

‘Zeitser is an extra mouth to feed,’ snapped Levin. ‘He’s a sponger.’

‘Zeitser,’ replied Avraham, ‘is the best mule in this village. He was always more than just a draught animal to my father and me. He’s worked and sweated for us his whole life. A lot of two-legged pioneers never did half as much.’

‘He may have been the best mule in this village,’ said Levin, personally affronted by the reference to sweat, ‘but I never heard of a mule getting a pension. Why don’t you sell him to the Arab sausage factory or the glue works in Haifa bay? No one keeps an old mule in stock who can’t pull a cart any more.’

‘Don’t force me to choose between the two of you,’ said Avraham. ‘Zeitser isn’t stock and never was.’

Most of the mules in our village were English or Yugoslavian. Two were German, left behind at the end of World War One. Zeitser, I was told, was the only mule from Russia, whence he immigrated with a group of pioneers whose home was a place called Mogilev. They bought him the day they set out for Odessa. Seeing him on sale at a market, one of them joked loudly to his friends, ‘I know that mule. He’s a direct descendant of the mule of the Baal Shem Tov.’

‘Unbelievers!’ scolded the Hasid who was holding Zeitser’s tether. ‘Since when do mules have descendants?’

‘Are you questioning the Baal Shem Tov’s powers?’ answered the pioneer to the laughter of his comrades. ‘If the holy rabbi wished, even a mule could have sons.’

The Hasidim of Mogilev nearly came to blows with them, but the clink of roubles had a calming effect. The pioneers bought the mule, and Zeitser gratefully carried their belongings to the wharf. When they boarded the steamship Kernilov and saw how sad he looked, they chipped in for an extra ticket, ‘hoisted him on deck in a huge net that hung from a crane’, and brought him to the Land of Israel.

‘They never regretted it for a minute. No job was too hard for Zeitser.’

It was Meshulam Tsirkin who discovered that Zeitser had worked in Sejera with Ben-Gurion. He read one of Ben-Gurion’s letters to me, a document he had got from the Movement archives in a swap.

It was one of the few times I saw Meshulam laugh.

‘A donkey!’ he roared, slapping his knees and his stomach. ‘A donkey! That donkey was Zeitser. But fat chance that some socialist fresh off the boat from Russia would know the difference between a donkey and a mule!’

Zeitser belonged to the Mogilev commune for several years. Now and then he ran into Grandfather and his friends, and for a while they even worked side by side. When his commune found a piece of land to settle down on, however, he began to have second thoughts. The main problem, as Grandfather put it, was that ‘Zeitser’s penchant for solitude and private initiative clashed with the rigidly communal framework’. Zeitser hated meetings and debates, and such questions as ‘the status of pregnant comrades’, ‘the latest news from the workers’ movement in Latvia’, and ‘improving the nutrition of field hands’ did not concern him in the least. Most of all he loathed the public confessionals in which the commune members bared their hearts to each other.

One day, according to Uri, when a female communard who was cleaning out the cowshed laid a soiled baby in his stall, Zeitser decided that his notion of family life was incompatible with that of the kibbutz. That same day he picked himself up and went to inspect a co-operative village.

‘Zeitser was an unusually good worker,’ Grandfather told me when I was a small boy. ‘He always knew what field to go to and never had to be steered.’

Zeitser ploughed and cultivated our fields, uprooted dead trees, pulled loaded carts, and was as thrilled as the rest of us by each new sprout and can of milk. When his shoes needed adjustment or replacement, he went on his own to the Goldman brothers’ smithy. He was the only draught animal in the village not to wear the leather blinkers Peker made against worldly temptations, because ‘nothing ever tempted him but work’. Only once did he succumb, when he mistakenly ate some Jimsonweed flowers growing by the manure pile. He got high, walked around in circles for two days, made eyes at the young female calves, and behaved like any hot-blooded numbskull.

With the passage of time, his strength faltered. Grandfather, who was personally acquainted with the ravages of old age and could easily discern them in the mule’s wasted body, tried easing up on his work, but Zeitser refused to acknowledge his decrepitude until one day he collapsed in the traces.

Generally, I remember what I am told better than what I have seen, but that day, like the day of my rescue from the hyena, sticks in my memory. Grandfather, Zeitser, and I had gone to fetch fodder and had loaded some twenty sacks of it on the cart. On the short uphill before the last bend Zeitser suddenly stopped with a queer, high-pitched snort, and the heavy cart began to roll backwards. Grandfather had never whipped Zeitser in his life, and now too he merely urged him on with shouts and slaps of the reins. Quivering all over, Zeitser managed to brake the slipping cart and braced himself to pull it up the hill, his haunches sinking nearly to the ground and his iron horseshoes striking sparks on the paved road. When his laboured panting turned to deep wheezes, Grandfather threw down the reins and climbed out of the cart. Anxious veins made an alarming wreath on his bald scalp as he tried to calm the mule and free him from his harness. Gathering his strength for one last mighty effort, however, Zeitser let out a huge fart, lost his balance, and collapsed. There was a loud crack from up front as the longpole snapped, leaving the traces hanging from the mule’s neck. Grandfather quickly slipped off the hames and grabbed Zeitser’s head in his hands. For a while they remained there, weeping soundlessly together.

Zeitser returned home without the cart, his head bowed with shame. I walked alongside him, not knowing what to say.

‘He’s a work animal,’ Grandfather said. ‘At least sit on his back so he’ll feel he’s doing something.’

I rode him home, feeling the twitching and damp breathing of his mortified hide in my thighs. Tsirkin’s horses Michurin and Stalin brought the cart to our yard, and that evening Grandfather and Avraham decided to start putting Zeitser out to pasture. It was then that we bought our first oil-fuelled Ferguson, which Grandfather never learned to drive, leaving Zeitser only the milk cans to haul. A few years later, when the phlebitis in his forelegs and the strongyles parasites in his intestines had depleted his remaining strength and even the simplest words, like ‘giddyup’, escaped him, Grandfather tethered him to a long rope in the shade of the big fig tree. Beneath the tree Avraham set out both halves of a sawed barrel, one for water and one for barley, and now and then Grandfather took Zeitser for a leisurely walk, just the two of them, to meditate and smell the flowers.

Unlike most old men, who forget the present and remember the distant past, Pinness had forgotten his childhood and youth entirely.

‘I know who I am and where I’m going, I just have no idea where I’ve come from,’ he explained to me, to himself, and to everyone.

He looked at me sadly when I came to visit him in his garden. The day before he had attended Bodenkin’s funeral in Pioneer Home, and now he was upset and mournful. All his life he had been a great believer in education, and he held himself partly to blame for my lapse. ‘Did I go wrong on that hike to Beth-She’arim, or was it those carrion beetles?’ But I knew that his anger was halfhearted, like his response to the nocturnal cries he still heard. He had stopped turning livid when telling me about them, cursing in Russian and waving his arms. Indeed, the look on his fat face was more one of baffled curiosity. The swamp of blood awash beneath his cranium could no longer be kept down.

‘Well now, Baruch,’ he smiled. ‘It seems I’ve gone through some kind of mutation. I just don’t have anyone to pass it on to.’

He was very old. Every week I brought him his clean laundry and changed his sheets and tablecloth.

‘Why are you doing this for me?’ he once asked me shrewdly. ‘What are you plotting?’

‘Neither of us has anyone else,’ I answered. ‘I have no grandfather, and you have no grandson.’ Despite his sorrowful smile, I could see he was pleased by what I said.

He had few friends left in the village. Grandfather, Liberson, Fanya, and Tsirkin were all dead. Even Rilov. Every morning Tonya paid a brief visit to her husband’s grave to make sure he hadn’t found a secret escape hatch, and then, supported by an aluminium frame, pulled herself along the gravel paths to Margulis’s tombstone, on which she sat senilely licking her fingers. I buried Margulis as per his request, perfectly embalmed like a Hittite monarch. His sons coated him with a black layer of bee glue and put him in a coffin filled to the top with honey and sealed with beeswax. In midsummer, when the white-hot earth turned so dry that it cracked, orange-coloured fumes rose from the grave, and Margulis’s bees, maddened by so much sweetness and longing, buzzed around it with loud melancholy. Tonya never budged from there. ‘Like Rizpah the daughter of Aiah by the corpses of her sons,’ whispered Pinness admiringly. ‘That’s the difference between us and you,’ he added. ‘We did it with sacred devotion. You do it with obscenities from water towers.’

Meanwhile, Riva was at home, scrubbing the last sticky stains left behind on the floor by her husband and dreaming of lace tablecloths, lacquered Chinese furniture, angora cats, and vacuum cleaners.

‘If Riva knew that Chinese lacquer is nothing but the secretion of certain aphids,’ Pinness said, ‘she wouldn’t make such a fuss over it.’

His blood carved out new channels, shooting the gaps between nerve endings and the chasms of memory. ‘It’s as though I was born an eighteen-year-old on the day I arrived in this country,’ he said. ‘My father could have been the hotel owner in Jaffa. He’s the first person I remember after birth.’

He had forgotten the names of his parents and sisters, his native landscape, the yeshiva, religious school, in Nemirov where he had studied before running off to the Land of Israel.

‘Every bit of it has been wiped out.’

For the first time, he revealed his old hatred of Rilov in public. No one understood why, because Rilov himself was already dead. ‘A he-man, a coachman, a flea-man,’ he called the dead Watchman. ‘A gentile’s brain in a Jew’s body.’

He piled his plate with more than it could hold and stuffed himself with huge mouthfuls, wolfing his food as if hungry jackals were waiting behind him to pirate it. Half-chewed, slobbery shreds tumbled out of his mouth and ran down his glistening chin. Little mounds piled up on the table around the rim of his plate.

‘I put it away like Jean Valjean, eh? As the ox licketh up the grass of the field.’

He felt so fatigued upon finishing a meal that he fell into bed at once.

‘Rest is vital for the digestion,’ he announced. ‘The body must not be asked to do more than one thing at a time. A time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing.’

I wasn’t the only one in the village concerned for the childless old teacher. His food was delivered from the co-op to keep him from having to carry baskets. Rachel Levin brought him cooked meals, slipping into his house on her silken old soles and startling him with the sudden clink of cutlery as she set the table.

‘I want fresh food, not meat from the fleshpots,’ he told her biblically. ‘Bring me of the fruit of your garden, a banquet of greens and quietness therewith.’

Once a week I brought him vegetables from the patch I kept near the cabin. It was alarming to watch him gulp them down. Busquilla came with pots of home cooking from the nearby town where he lived. In his old age Pinness had fallen in love with Mrs Busquilla’s couscous. Though he didn’t touch the meat, he ate the steamed vegetables and semolina ravenously, yellow morsels clinging to his bottom lip.

‘Thou hast tempted me and I have succumbed,’ he quoted to Busquilla. ‘Your wife should have run the workers’ kitchen in Petach Tikvah. No one would have dumped her food on the floor.’

‘Enjoy it, Mr Pinness,’ said Busquilla. He liked Pinness, was afraid of him, and sometimes furtively kissed his hand, dodging back to avoid a swat from the other hand, which could still be as quick as a jumping spider. Despite Busquilla’s explanation that ‘it’s just a Moroccan custom’, Pinness disapproved of such manners.

I offered to pay Busquilla for his wife’s food.

‘Shame on you, Baruch,’ he said. ‘Pinness is a saint, a holy man. We’re nothing but his servants. You don’t understand it because you can’t read the signs. Do you think those white pigeons that are always on his roof are just a lot of birds? And what about that snake that guards the gate of his garden?

‘God forgive me for even mentioning his death,’ said Busquilla with a heavenward glance, ‘but on that day light will flash from his grave, or perhaps water will flow from his gravestone. It’s an honour to bring him food, because it’s serving God.’

Uri scoffed at Busquilla’s beliefs and called the old teacher ‘Saint Pinness’ behind his back.

‘Let’s go and visit the saint,’ he would say to me. But our conversations with Pinness were monotonous. Once again we were his pupils, to be lectured on Shamgar the son of Anath who routed six hundred Philistines with an oxgoad or on the life cycle of the great titmouse. He even tried to give us homework.

Every few months he still heard the cry of the brazen fornicator from on high.

‘I’m sure he does it on the water tower,’ he told Uri and me through a mouthful of sweet peas. ‘One difference between Homo sapiens and birds is that men don’t copulate in the treetops.

‘He’s already, you should excuse the expression, screwed half the village,’ he winked slyly. ‘Married women too. Last night it was the wife of Yisra’eli’s oldest grandson. I don’t get it. Why, they were just married two months ago, and she seemed such a lovely young lady!’

It baffled him that no one else heard the cries. ‘How can it be?’ he asked. ‘It’s been going on for several years. There are night watchmen in the village who are supposed to keep their ears open. There are farmers who get up in the middle of the night to help a cow calve or prepare a shipment of turkeys. There are early-morning sprayers and the drivers of the milk lorry, which never leaves before midnight – why does no one hear it but me?’

He paused to consider. ‘I’ll bet it’s poor Daniel Liberson. He never did get over it. Or maybe it’s Efrayim, coming back at night to take revenge.’

Uri and I glanced at each other uncomfortably, wondering in what damaged lobe of his brain the old man was weaving such fantasies.

‘I’ll get to the bottom of it if it’s the last thing I do,’ declared Pinness. ‘I’ll climb the water tower and wait there for him.’

I smiled and did not try to talk him out of it. The old teacher, I felt sure, was too fat, sick, and weak ever to climb the ladder of the tower. With his usual scientific pedantry, however, Pinness was determined to solve the mystery. He sprawled for hours in his armchair, going through old notebooks in the hope of finding some childhood deviancy or telltale clue. He had kept a special journal of the best poems and cleverest remarks of his pupils, selections from which he sometimes sent to the village newspaper. These items invariably aroused the wrath of his ex-students, some of whom were already in their fifties or sixties. Once the publication of a poem of Dani Rilov’s had the whole village in stitches.

Chick-chick-chickina

Eats semolina.

Poor little hen,

She’ll get old and then

Off with her head

And she’s dead!

Forty years after the composition of this lyric the compassionate poet was a calf breeder whose best friends were brutal meat merchants and coarse butchers. But Pinness merely smiled when told that Dani Rilov was furious, and went on tending his many nests and keeping a kind eye on his fledglings. Meshulam, too, was enraged by this poem, which he considered a gross fabrication.

‘Who had money in those days to feed his hens semolina?’ he fumed. ‘It’s disgraceful how some people will rewrite history just for the sake of a rhyme!’

Pinness noticed that I was prowling around his house at night to protect him from the vengeance of the Rilov clan.

‘Go to sleep, Baruch,’ he said, stepping outside. ‘I’ve already scattered my spore to the winds. Childless old teachers are indestructible. The seeds I planted won’t sprout till after I die.’

In a second, more secret notebook he had jotted down over the years various comments on his pupils’ families. Although he had always exhorted the schoolchildren to help their parents with chores, he knew that some of the farmers overworked them.

He told me about his first years as a teacher. The school had only a few students and was poorly and cheaply equipped. In summer the children sat on reed mats, and each morning he examined them ‘as the shepherd surveyeth his flock’, running his eyes over the classroom to see which of his pupils had been petted, fed, and kissed, and which had been dragged out of bed before dawn to do chores. More than once Riva Margulis’s daughter, who was awakened at 5 a.m. every day to scrub the paving-stones outside the house, came late to school, since her mother kept turning back the hands of the clock until the strip of pavement gleamed. There were no milking machines then in the village, and some children came with fingers so stiff from milking that they couldn’t write a word. Pinness made no comment when sleepy children shut their eyes and let their heads sink onto their chests, but everyone knew that he would have a private talk with the parents that evening.

‘Every child was a world in itself. I never tired of observing them.’

He made a point of arriving in the classroom before his pupils to hang pictures and posters on the walls, and then he sat down to wait for them. Avraham once told me that the year of Scott and Amundsen’s race to the South Pole, Pinness kept the children posted on their daily progress. When terrible mud covered the village in winter, he carried his little charges on his back or hitched himself to one of the legendary mud sleds and pulled them home, barking like an Antarctica-bound husky.

Avraham and Meshulam were in his first class, which had only seven pupils. While Avraham was quiet, neat, hardworking, and uncommunicative, Meshulam was lively, resentful, and argumentative. He was fascinated by Pinness’s stories about the old pioneer days, but the nature lessons left him cold.

‘Your uncle had no mother at home, and neither for that matter had Meshulam.’ Pinness noticed that Meshulam did not bring a sandwich to school like the other children but only a plain slice of bread. He knew too that Tsirkin raised the boy on baked pumpkin and hard-boiled eggs, the only dishes he could prepare, which were sometimes supplemented by good-hearted neighbours who brought Meshulam hot meals or invited him to eat with them.

‘Meshulam could have been our pride and joy,’ he said. ‘He had a good head and a steadfast character, but his childhood diverted him into a world in which torn clothes and baked pumpkin were lofty ideals instead of signs of neglect.’

He knew that Meshulam’s laziness had turned the whole village against him. ‘Still,’ he said to me, ‘I would have expected you to be more understanding of him.’

‘Grandfather couldn’t stand him either,’ I said.

‘Your grandfather couldn’t stand anyone,’ said Pinness. ‘Except, sometimes, me, and that too for debatable reasons. You see the village and the whole world through your grandfather’s eyes. You’re still tied to him by the apery strings.’

He chuckled at his own pun and told me in a near whisper how Meshulam had celebrated his bar mitzvah. Since Pesya was never at home and Mandolin Tsirkin was always tired from the farm work, Meshulam had to prepare the party for his schoolmates on his own. Finding a few dried tortes left over from a visit by the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, he cut them into thin slices and brought them to the classroom early that morning. Pinness arrived at 6 a.m. to find the frantic boy wetting the desiccated cakes with tears and drops of sweet wine in the hope of bringing them back to life. Retreating silently, he went home and came back with a tray of crackers spread with jam.

‘Your mother left these with me for your birthday,’ he told Meshulam, who said nothing though he knew it was a lie.

All these things were recorded by Pinness in his notebook, which he referred to as his ‘barn log’. There, in the old teacher’s handsome hand, you could find whatever failed to appear on his pupils’ report cards. His handwriting was so elegant, and his concern for penmanship so great, that all the children of the village learned to write exactly like him. In fact, they still do, which has led to the misattribution of anonymous love letters and the crediting of cheques to the wrong accounts. Once, when the poet Bialik came to visit, Pinness presented him with an album of poetry composed in his honour by the schoolchildren. The great writer was so struck by the sameness of the script that he joked that the teacher must have written everything himself. Pinness was too insulted to respond, but that very week he took his students to the foot of Mount Gilboa to study the verse of Bialik’s rival Tchernichovski.

I watched him open his green gate and hobble up the street to Levin’s house. Tonya and Riva were the last of the village’s female founders, while he, Zeitser, and Shlomo Levin were the three surviving males.

‘Zeitser was never much of a conversationalist, Rachel stuffs me with food, and Levin, who couldn’t learn to farm a plot of land, now does nothing but cultivate plots all the time,’ he said after returning one night to find me sitting by Grandfather’s grave.