Two weeks later, in the middle of the night, Zeitser broke free without warning from the rope that tethered him to the fig tree, went to Shlomo Levin’s house, raised one hoof, knocked politely on the door, and stepped aside to wait. Levin came out to see who it was, but by the time he recognised the mule’s huge silhouette lunging at him in the darkness, he knew it was too late. Cocking his head to see his foe with his good eye, Zeitser bared his yellow teeth, sank them in Levin’s upper arm, and bore down as hard as he could with all the powerful hatred left in his old jaws. He tore the flabby biceps to tatters, splintering the crunchy humerus as a froth of thin blood bubbled up amid the shreds and slivers. There was no time for Levin to scream. He passed out on the spot while Zeitser padded quietly back to his barrel of feed and his fig tree.
In the small hours of the morning Rachel Levin noticed that her husband was not in bed and hurried outside to find him green and moaning among the garden plants. Her screams woke the whole village, and Yosi drove Levin to the hospital. At first there was talk of a new hyena, but that afternoon Avraham came to the Committee office to confess that the culprit was Zeitser. The district veterinarian was called for, and following an investigation he ordered that Zeitser be shot as required by law.
There was an uproar. Avraham ran berserkly home, sobbing and slinging earth. When the vet appeared with a policeman, Zeitser was gone from the yard, because my uncle had already hidden him in the thicket by the spring. I had been busy pouring concrete that morning for the erection of two new gravestones and only heard the news when I returned home in the afternoon. Avraham refused to tell me the mule’s whereabouts, but when I went down to the spring to be alone the next day I discovered him there, his empty eye socket shedding slow tears of pus.
‘I’ll bring you some barley,’ I said. But Zeitser was beyond all that: ambling in his dreams along familiar paths, he was smelling blossoms whose names had been forgotten, the likes of which could only be found in my mother’s old album of dried flowers. In the evening Avraham came to stand guard against wild beasts and bureaucrats. Close to midnight, however, he dozed off, and Zeitser, taking advantage of the opportunity, slipped away to the fields.
It was dawn when we towed his big truncated body back from the highway. Zeitser knew that at 3 a.m. every day the milk lorry started out for the city, and he had waited for it by the roadside.
‘He jumped out and lay in front of the Mack’s wheels,’ related Motik the driver, still in a state of shock. ‘With twenty-eight tons of milk in the tank, there was nothing I could do.’
Chipped and falling apart from years of hard labour, Zeitser smashed against the tanker’s big bumper like a clay doll. Tyre marks, tufts of hair, dusty bloodballs, rashers of mule meat, and cracklings of old skin were strewn along three hundred yards of road, up and down which Avraham ran shouting to drive off the gathering jackals.
When Shlomo Levin returned from the hospital a month later with his stump of an arm swinging in an empty sleeve, no one even said hello to him. The late Zeitser, as Eliezer Liberson phrased it in a speech given at a memorial in the meeting house, to which he had come especially from the old folk’s home, had been ‘one of the monumental figures of the Movement’.
The wretched Levin was never his old self again. Day after day he sat wasting away in Rachel’s garden, nibbling whole sheets of kamardin. He was particularly angry at Zeitser because, having stolen the limelight in his lifetime, he had now conspired in his death to pre-empt the glorious suicide that Levin had long dreamed of. His only visitors were Avraham, who still remembered from childhood his uncle’s gifts and kind hands, and Uri when he returned to the village.
When Levin felt that his time was up, he sent for me and offered me a large sum of money, which I refused to accept, to bury him with the pioneers. ‘With the productive sector of the village,’ he said bitterly.
I granted him his request. He was, after all, genuine Second Aliyah. On his gravestone I got the masons to carve the inscription he composed for himself: ‘Here lies the Pioneer Shlomo Levin Who Took His Own Life by Mule Bite.’
Busquilla and our lawyer, Shapiro, argued with me every week about the need to invest my earnings wisely. I never listened to a word they said.
Busquilla now had an agent working for him in Florida.
‘They’re all down there,’ he said. ‘All the old Jews. They even have swamps, and a sun as killing as ours.’
He bought a black van with ‘Pioneer Home’ painted on the doors in gold letters and managed me and the business expertly.
‘It isn’t right for me to sit in an office while you dig graves and lug a garden hose,’ he said to me. ‘You’re the owner, Baruch. Why don’t you let me employ someone to do the dirty work?’
I did my best to explain the importance of agricultural work and the village’s opposition to hired help, but Busquilla forbearingly dismissed the ideals of co-operative farming.
‘That doesn’t convince me,’ he said. ‘I’m an observant Jew myself. Everyone has his own rituals and commandments, and yours are sometimes worse than ours.’
Another time he asked me, ‘Why don’t you ever take a trip abroad? Go on a holiday, have a good time, meet some girls.’ When I failed to answer, he persisted.
‘What’s the matter, can’t afford it?’
Busquilla had a plump, pretty, likable daughter who was younger than me. Often he spoke of introducing us.
‘What for?’ I said, blushing each time. ‘I’m happy as I am.’
‘I’ll send her to Pinness with some food,’ he ventured at last, ceasing to beat around the bush. ‘All you have to do is be there. She’ll make you a good wife, not like the women you have around here.’
‘Stop it,’ I said, feeling my forehead crawl with centipedes.
‘It’s no good, your living like this. You’re a healthy young man. You ought to be married.’
‘Not me!’ I said firmly.
‘When a Moroccan wants you to marry his daughter, don’t think he’ll take no for an answer,’ Busquilla warned me.
‘I don’t like girls,’ I told him.
‘Well, you can’t have my son,’ he joked. But there was a frown on his face.
Sometimes he watched me while I worked, marvelling at my size and strength. ‘You’re not at all like the rest of your family,’ he said. ‘You’re a big, dark, hairy hulk of meat who’s never been bitten by the love bug. Now, that cousin of yours, he’s something else! He’s slept with every girl in the village, but you just go your quiet way.’
‘Stop it, Busquilla,’ I said. ‘What goes on in the family and the village is none of your business.’
‘You’ve all got a screw loose somewhere,’ he needled me, testing the limits of my patience.
Sometimes he told me about his first days in the village. ‘Everyone looked down their nose at me. It was like being on permanent probation. I was put to work digging onions to see if I would make a decent postman. Even Zis thought he was better than me because his father once hauled water from the spring, until I gave him a right to the jaw and he began to act like a human being.’
He observed people with unconcealed curiosity, quickly grasped the fine points of village life, and annoyed me with his maxims.
‘A man who spends all his time in a septic tank must be afraid of something.’
‘No woman ever forgets the first finger that touched her.’
‘A good grandfather is better than a father. A bad one is worse than anything.’
‘What’s all this earth, earth, earth stuff all the time? It’s enough that we come from it and return to it. In between a man needs to rest.’
‘You people, if you hear someone say something stupid when he’s nine, you think he’s stupid till his dying day. You’re sure you’ve got him worked out.’
As a letter carrier he had knocked on every door in the village and remembered exactly which had opened to offer him fruit or cold water and which had stayed shut while suspicious eyes studied him through the window. Busquilla was the first to know that Margulis and Tonya were back together, that Grandfather received foreign mail via channels other than the post office, and that if Grandfather never gave him the time of day, it was because of a deep anguish and hate that had nothing to do with him personally. Busquilla also knew that apart from the historical journals he received, Meshulam subscribed to other magazines whose chrome-and-flesh-coloured contents winked and tittered through their supposedly opaque brown wrappers. He chuckled too whenever he brought the Libersons their post, because he knew that a good part of it, including letters that appeared to come from abroad, was from Liberson to Fanya.
‘He sends them without a return address to surprise her when she opens them.’