Every year Zeitser participated in two festive events. On the anniversary of the founding of the village he was invited by the culture committee to join the founding fathers on the stage, an honour reserved for him and Hagit alone among the animals, and on the holiday of Shavuot three neatly combed boys in white shirts came to take him to Meshulam’s yard, where he was hitched with a great to-do to ‘the first cart’, which was then piled high with fruits, milk cans, garlanded sheaves of wheat, screaming infants, baby chicks, and calves. It was the only day of the year on which Zeitser agreed to doff his old Russian worker’s cap with its specially made earholes and don a wreath of flowers that gave him a slightly Dionysiac appearance.
When an irate Shlomo Levin was reminded of all this, however, he raved and ranted even more, labelled Zeitser ‘an old parasite’, and related with loud shouts how he had left his newspaper in our cowshed the night before and had returned there to find Zeitser squatting hoofishly on his haunches against the fig tree, perusing by moonlight the paper spread out in his lap. His, Levin’s, newspaper!
This argument raged not far from the mule himself, who was tethered to the fig tree beside his food and water, delicately being deloused by two devoted cattle egrets who had come especially from the Jordan Valley. The earth packed hard by his hooves described an exact circle around him. Dipping his big jaws into his barrel, Zeitser stood smacking his lips over a mouthful of the best barley. A thin smile flitted over his face, and he pricked up his ears through his battered cap as though listening. Levin, angrier than ever, stepped up to the mule’s water barrel and kicked it over. Avraham lost his temper and chased his uncle from the yard.
The next day the old man returned to apologise and went back to work. Meanwhile Avraham, who was equally contrite, came to talk things over with me.
‘We owe both Zeitser and Levin a great deal,’ he said. ‘Obviously we can’t send Zeitser to the glue factory, but we mustn’t hurt Uncle Shlomo’s feelings either. He may be no great shakes as a farmer, but my father would never have managed without him.’
Yosi hated Levin, and Uri was for sausaging both him and Zeitser, which was why Avraham asked me to keep an eye open. Before long I discovered that old Levin, hoping the mule would die of thirst before anyone noticed, was secretly moving Zeitser’s water out of reach.
Now and then, while weeding the gravestones, I waved to the old mule to let him know that I was keeping a protective eye on him. Zeitser never waved back. Since Grandfather’s death he had lost the last of his old verve, and Levin’s harassment made him nervous and irritable. The appearance of the store manager’s thin shadow in the yard caused him to stiffen tensely, and though his big head remained hidden in his barrel of expensive barley, his rear end shifted back and forth in carefully calculated movements to ensure that he had a leg to kick with.
He had become a crusade for Levin. An excellent bookkeeper, Grandmother’s brother came to Avraham one evening with ‘an exact cost accounting’ of every penny that had ever been spent on ‘that pompous, freeloading ass of yours’.
It was a hot night, full of buzzing crickets. Through the open windows I could hear the whole angry debate. Levin read ‘the mule sheet’ out loud in a level, venomous voice. ‘Eighteen pounds of ground barley per day, plus three and a half pounds of vetch hay, plus six pounds of straw.’ He went on and on until Avraham told him to stop making a fool of himself.
Levin stalked out, slamming the door behind him. Stooped, crushed, and swearing under his breath, he passed by the casuarina in which I was sitting, too injured to notice me.
He stayed away for a week, at the end of which his answer appeared in an article in the newsletter that spoke of ‘a certain family that is maintaining a dissipated mule and feeding it royally in utter disregard of our Movement’s commitment to economic productivity’.
For several weeks there was a boom in the readership of the newsletter, which generally contained little more than seasonal figures on rainfall and milk prices, indiscreet insemination notices, the morbid reflections of adolescent girls, and announcements of deaths, births, and weddings. Now its pages were flung open to the Zeitser–Levin debate.
Though Zeitser had his share of supporters, so did the store manager. Dani Rilov, whose intimate involvement with slaughtered cows had made him a budding satirist, wrote a humorous sketch about an imaginary society in which ‘benighted and compassionate souls’ filled the Jewish homeland with ‘sanatoriums for ailing donkeys and old age homes for menopausal hens’. And yet, he concluded, ‘in a family long noted for carrying livestock on its back’, there was nothing surprising about Zeitser’s costly maintenance.
Eventually, Eliezer Liberson himself was drawn into the dispute. Liberson, the last surviving member of the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle, was then in the old folk’s home, where he occupied the same room that had belonged to Grandfather and Shulamit. A blind old widower who was as good as dead in his own eyes and the village’s, he sent me a message that he would welcome a speedy visit from me ‘equipped with pencil and paper’.
We sat on the terrace. Liberson asked me about the village. He reminded me of Grandfather, except that there was more anger and yearning in his voice. He asked if I watered the flowers around his wife’s grave and if I ever talked to his son.
‘Not really,’ I answered, apprehensively changing that to, ‘I mean, I do water the flowers, but I don’t really talk to Daniel.’
‘Everything could have been so different,’ said Liberson.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Yes?! What’s that supposed to mean?’ exclaimed the old man fiercely. ‘He doesn’t even know what I’m talking about, and he says yes!’
I said nothing.
‘Did you bring pencil and paper?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
Crossly he dictated a few short, stern sentences for me to give the newsletter. Expressed in them was the opinion that ‘although there may be an economic logic in the arguments of Comrade Shlomo Levin, whose dedicated labours in the co-op were greatly appreciated by us farmers, it is nevertheless unthinkable that the nonagricultural population should interfere in the productive life of the village to which our dear Zeitser belongs.’
‘Excuse me for shouting at you, Baruch,’ said the blind man as I departed. ‘One day you’ll see what I see. Forgive me, and come again soon.’
Neither Pinness nor Levin could sleep at night. Each lay planning and plotting in his bed.
Levin sought vengeance on the mule, because of whom Eliezer Liberson had humiliated him in public as he had never been humiliated before. Through his window I could see his stinging old wounds reopen and suppurate with shame. Once again the uncouth hooligans of the Workingman’s Circle shot their mocking darts at him, mountains of sand and chocolate threatened to bury him, and hordes of locusts crawled over his bed, skinning him alive.
At that very moment, having gone to the refrigerator for some leftover couscous that he dribbled all over his pillow, Pinness was reflecting on the lascivious cries that pierced his tender eardrums and defiled all that was dear to him. Now that the blood soaking his brain had diluted his anger and swamped his thirst for vengeance, he merely desired to uncover the culprit.
He rose with difficulty, went out to the garden, crossed the street, and walked up and down beneath the large concrete columns of the water tower. It took him a while to get over the annoying hot and cold flashes in his body. Then, grabbing hold of the iron ladder, he began to climb to the top.
‘It was only the second time in my life that I had done that,’ he told me. ‘Thirty years ago, when some high school students wanted to practise rope gliding, I climbed up there with Efrayim, Meshulam, Daniel Liberson, and Avraham. They all came down by rope except for me and Meshulam. We took the ladder again.’
He was afraid of being seen, and worse yet, of his own sick body failing him. ‘Every ounce of logic I had left argued against it.’ His fear of heights made every cell go numb. And yet, frail and brittle, he kept climbing. He didn’t dare look down. The higher he went, the colder it became.
He gripped the peeling rungs with damp hands, pulling his scared body after them with a mysterious strength until he reached the top of the tower. Hiking a leg over the edge, he collapsed on the concrete roof, shaking from fright and exertion. For a few minutes he lay there ‘like a stricken corpse’, gladly letting the chill roughness of the concrete bring him back to life. Then, still breathing hard, he sat up and looked about.
The flat, round roof was ringed by a low parapet topped by a guardrail of metal pipes. In one corner were the remains of the observation post that once had been ‘faithfully manned’ by a lookout equipped with a mounted searchlight and a bell. White with dust, a few empty sacks and tattered semaphore flags lay abandoned there.
Pinness rose, leaned against the cool metal of the railing to help fight off a wave of vertigo, and unpremeditatedly called out, ‘Yoo-hoo! Yoo-hoo!’ His cry, however, was too weak to escape the clutches of the branches and the gusting night breeze. Although classified as a Helpful, a barn owl startled him by darting close to his head, as silent as a groundsel’s floating seed. ‘The harm the barn owl does the poultry is more than balanced by the number of mice it eats,’ he had always claimed, greatly angered by farmers who killed it because they feared its noiseless flight and the human look of its white face.
Beneath him lay the village, ‘no longer white tents in the wilderness but houses and cowsheds and fields, paved and well-trodden paths, tall trees and rooted men.’
The village was asleep. The wind whistled through the treetops. Yolks formed and clustered in the vitals of the hens. Mixers hummed in the feed shed and sprinklers chattered in the darkness.
Pinness lay in ambush for an hour and a half, during which nothing happened. In the end he climbed down again, terrified, and slowly made his way home.
‘I did it,’ he thought, hardly able to move. ‘Tomorrow night I’ll do it again.’