42

When his compulsory army service was over Yosi signed up as a career officer, while Uri became a heavy equipment operator for his uncle in the Galilee. Thus, there was never any problem about who would inherit the Mirkin farm.

It was Meshulam who explained to me that when the founding fathers came to Palestine and saw how the fields of the Arab peasants had been whittled to thin shavings by the jack-knife of inheritance, they decided to bequeath their farms to one son alone. From the day a boy was born, he was under constant scrutiny to see if he fitted the bill. The experienced eyes of his parents, teachers, and neighbours measured his first steps, the development of his back muscles, his success at predicting rain, and the presence or absence of the green fingers that every good farmer had to have. By the time he was ten the boy knew if he was destined to remain in the village or to seek his fortune outside it.

The failures first cloaked themselves in injured silence, then burst into stormy protest in the hope of reversing the decree, which was, however, irrevocable. Their fate sealed, they were sent out into the world with the ways of the village stamped in their flesh like a cattle brand. Some became farmers elsewhere; others went into business or to the university; all did splendidly in their new lives. Years of growing up in the village, of hard work, responsibility, and an intimate knowledge of nature and animals, made successes of them all.

Gradually, each father transferred part of his farm to the chosen son, consulting him about the harvest of various fertilisers and carefully weighing his answers and opinions. As a hive raises new queen bees, so the village raised its next generation of farmers.

Sometimes mistakes were made. Daniel Liberson, whose infant passion for my mother was taken as a sign of a nonagricultural personality, turned out to be a first-rate farmer. Having no one left to love or hate once my parents died, he devoted all his talents and energies to tilling the soil. Eventually, after working as a dedicated and much-praised adviser in an immigrants’ settlement, from which he brought back his Romanian wife, he became a thriving grower of chickens, cotton, and mushrooms. The latter were cultivated in a secret formula of straw, soil, and horse manure that Daniel found in an old Russian farmer’s almanac he got from Meshulam in a swap for Hagit’s original milking stool. According to the almanac, the best time for picking the mushrooms was when they gave off ‘a strong foresty smell’, and every few weeks when a new spore cycle ripened, since Daniel had no idea what a Russian forest smelled like, he tore his old parents away from their amours to have them sniff the dark fungal beds. Never once did they disappoint him.

Meshulam, on the other hand, made it clear from an early age that as Uri put it, ‘the only thing that ever drew him to the earth was the force of gravity’.

Uri himself never thought of remaining in the village, and his determination to leave came as no surprise. His love of books, ardour for his nursery teacher’s behind, tendency to tire easily from hard work, and quips about the frustrated lives of the hens or the over-intimacy of the inseminator with the heifers, along with other signs that could not be dismissed lightly, cast doubt on his character long before his escapades on the water tower, which were the last straw.

Though everyone liked Uri, it was obvious that Yosi would be the one to step into his father’s milking boots. He was a thorough, conscientious boy with a fund of technical knowledge and a born knack for planning and organisation. The one thing that worried Avraham was the violence pent up in him beneath the surface. Yet while my uncle was afraid that Yosi might harm an unruly or stubborn animal, he entrusted him with the morning milking at the age of fourteen, and even Grandfather, who saw in Uri a distant reflection of his lost son Efrayim, turned to Yosi when he needed someone to harrow the orchard without damaging the tree trunks.

And so, when Yosi announced that he too was not coming back to the village, Avraham looked up from the earth, which was something he had rarely done before, and shuddered at the sight of his life stretching desolately out before him as far as the horizon of his death. He was seized by despair. Though I tried to help him with the farm work as much as I could, I was far more interested in cultivating my field of dead bodies in Grandfather’s ruined orchard.

‘Not one of Mirkin’s grandsons will be a farmer,’ said Rilov. ‘The Committee should make them sell the farm.’

‘Don’t let him worry you,’ said Busquilla. ‘Who would be crazy enough to buy it? Who’s going to dig up all those bones or grow crops between gravestones?’

Grandfather’s revenge was taking shape. The graves burned like a chastisement in the earth of the village, like a terrible mockery of its way of life, a rank challenge to its very existence. People stared and whispered as I walked down its streets, appraised my stiff neck that would not be yoked to the founders’ vision, and imagined the money in my sacks. I paid no attention to them. The eyes fixed on me were a protective bluff that did not scare me. Busquilla, who kept a record of our running battle with the village authorities in his well-organised filing cabinet, thought it was all very funny. Again and again he told me not to take the threats against me seriously.

‘You may know more about farming than I do,’ he said, ‘but I happen to know something about graves. There are six hundred and sixty saints buried in Morocco, and still more of our rabbis crossed the sea to the Holy Land in order to be buried here.’

‘It’s not the same thing,’ I said.

‘Of course not,’ chuckled Busquilla. ‘We Moroccans charge money to visit a saint’s grave, while you Jews from Europe bill the saints themselves.’

Avraham alone did not mind my field of graves. Morose and past hope, he immersed himself in his dairy operation, at which he worked harder than ever. He invented new feeding techniques, disinfected the pens with special sprays that killed all internal and external parasites, enlisted the help of two engineers to develop a flow-sensor system that monitored air pressure in each teat, and experimented with different kinds of music during milking. Ever since my father had hooked his phonograph up to Rilov’s cowshed, the farmers had known that music meant more and better milk, but only Avraham matched his records to each cow’s personal taste. Large earphones on their broad heads, the solemn-looking animals stood dreamily swaying to the strains of flutes and string sections that coaxed the milk from their udders.

He also did away almost entirely with the weekly supplement of roughage in the cows’ feed, preferring ‘more for psychological than nutritional reasons’ to take them out to pasture once a week. The milking machines that whirred nonstop made him smile at the old argument over whether a cow should be milked two times a day or three. ‘It’s not a scientific issue,’ he explained. ‘It’s simply a matter of weighing the farmer’s convenience against the cow’s.’ His own cows were milked four times a day and kept the vacuum pumps working around the clock. And though the puniest of his animals gave three times as much milk as the renowned Hagit, Meshulam, whose depressive wanderings through the village brought him to us too, declared that none of them would be exhibited in a museum or listed in a record book. ‘History is not what is done,’ he said, ‘it’s what gets into writing. That’s what makes that damn swamp study so dangerous. And it’s Hagit who will go down in history, not any of your uncle’s milk wells.’

Having ceased to bring his milk to the village dairy like the other farmers, Avraham was excluded from their daily social chat and withdrew into himself like a mole cricket into its underground chambers. Every morning as Motik skilfully backed all twenty-two wheels of his huge tanker into our yard, I heard the sound of the big diesel engine and the gasps of the power steering, followed by the inevitable conversation.

‘Good morning.’

‘Good morning.’

‘Can I start pumping?’

‘Yes.’

‘He jumped right in front of me. There was nothing I could do about it.’

‘I know. It wasn’t your fault.’

Off in a side room two big separators whirled ceaselessly. From one end flowed cream that tickled the taste buds of visitors to Pioneer Home and drew them to the cowshed, where Rivka sold them clandestine jars of it in violation of the co-operative’s by-laws. From the other end came skimmed milk, which was piped back into the cows’ drink, enriched by minerals. Avraham was the first dairy farmer in the village to understand that far more than solid food, liquid intake was the most important factor in a cow’s metabolism. That was why he had never had a cow go dry on him while still in its productive years. ‘A cow should drink five quarts of liquid for every quart of milk it gives,’ I once heard him tell Yosi as they were cleaning the white terrazzo floor of the milkshed with clear plastic high-pressure hoses. All his piping – for water, for disinfectants, for air, and for milk – was transparent, as were the constantly filling and emptying glass tanks. ‘It’s so the cows can see what they’re doing,’ said Uri, who had a revolutionary proposal of his own for increasing production. ‘Why not,’ he asked, ‘add the water directly to the milk instead of to the cows?’

Only now did the village understand Liberson’s prophecy. The hard olive stone had split and germinated. The promise of the firstborn son had been fulfilled. In his white smock and yellow rubber boots, Avraham had professionally outclassed every other first son in the country. And yet there was something frightening in the mechanical way he moved his hands when he worked. His fingers no longer massaged the cows’ udders but rubbed them as though they were strangers, and he never smiled with pleasure any more when their teats grew erect, or slapped the rump of a heifer in heat, or handfed clover to a favourite milker. Like giant stuffed animals, his cows strode to their places while he fitted them to the rubber cups of the machine as though he were a new piece of automated equipment himself. Still, so much milk gushed from them that more than once he had to dump surpluses, forming bogs covered by a sour scum.

One evening when he was throwing out several hundred quarts of milk, Rivka came to the cowshed to inquire coquettishly why he did not offer to give her a milk bath like those the Roman empresses took. Avraham flashed her a smile whose tail end smouldered with an anger she had never seen in her life. The furrows deepened in his forehead, branching up into his thick hair, and for a moment his face was so contorted that he reminded her of his missing brother. Suddenly she grasped the full danger he was in. Remembering how quick the Mirkins were to hide behind tree bark and beekeepers’ nets, she realised what I had known all along, that her husband was drowning his anguish and wrath in his cows’ white lakes.

Meanwhile I ploughed and cultivated my earth, sowing it with lupin, while Busquilla brought in several lorryloads of red gravel and got masons to lay borders and polish square blocks of white marble into gravestones. I extended the paths to the ends of the property, ploughed the lupin under when it flowered to green-manure the soil, planted handsome ornamentals, and installed stone and wooden benches. Magnificent birds never seen even by Pinness descended to rest from their migrations, hopping on the tree boughs, and quiet little animals appeared among the flowers as though created there. At dusk I would stroll through the garden, polishing the copper letters, breathing the cool air that had formed in the shade of the trees, and naming the birds and animals.

It was utterly peaceful. The old pioneer songs had died down into a quiet murmur, the great manifestos were silent in the sweet clods of earth, and the flaming swords of debate no longer turned every way. Couples came from all over the Valley on summer nights to make love on the cool headstones. I could hear the wind carry off the soft moans and gasps of the women, and sometimes there was a dull explosion in the earth as a newly buried stomach swelled to the point that the flaccid abdomen popped loudly from the pressure. I knew that as the guts came spilling out, the hordes of white maggots knocking madly on the coffin burst inside. Except for Grandfather, who was laid to rest in nothing but shrouds as is the Orthodox custom, everyone in Pioneer Home was buried in a coffin. This has been the practice in Movement villages and kibbutzim ever since Liberson denounced the Orthodox for returning to the earth the easy way.

   

Eliezer and Fanya Liberson came to all my funerals. The old man always stood in the front row with one arm draped around his wife, his fingers grazing her breast, but he was still firmly opposed to my booming business. Like all his friends, he was carefully calculating the days he had left and his prospects of living them out.

Apart from sniffing the mushrooms, his entire farm was now in Daniel’s hands. Utopian formulations, polemical swordplay, and the trench warfare of ideology no longer interested him. Such phrases as ‘our inner world has ceased to be inviolable’, ‘in times of drift and doubt’, and ‘the question of economic self-sufficiency must be examined in historical perspective as well as in light of this generation’s inward experience’ now rolled off his pencil and out of his mouth with a painful, frustrating ease. Fanya alone, with her merry laugh, white hair, and keen eyes, was not to be taken for granted. She was still his holy grail of love, an airy butterfly of the vineyards whose polka dot dresses and bright head were the last lights his ailing eyes could make out.

Every year Eliezer celebrated their first bucolic meeting with a picnic in the lap of nature. In the old days Tsirkin had joined them with his mandolin, but now that he was confined to a wheelbarrow, this custom had ceased.

For the fiftieth anniversary of their falling in love, Liberson prepared a basket of bread, a wheel of farmer cheese that still showed the marks of the cheesecloth, some pickled herring in sour cream and green apples, and a few late-ripening cucumbers, in one of which was a note. He had implanted the little tin tube in the pistil of the flower several weeks ahead of time, as it was beginning to swell among the wilted petals, and the cucumber’s green flesh had formed around it. Fanya packed dishes and silverware, Liberson filled a thermos with clear pomegranate juice, and the two started out for the fields.

They walked slowly along the border of the planted crops, tottering happily. The first autumn rains had fallen the day before. Tender sprouts grunted their way up through the earth, which emitted the usual vapours of pure promise that made the farmers drunker every year. It was the season when I used to go with Pinness to watch the burrowing insects, who waited for the first showers to soften the ground before digging themselves and their offspring a new domicile.

Fanya and Eliezer headed for Margulis’s old vineyard. Liberson, with his thick-lensed glasses, carried the picnic basket, and Fanya, weak and light, rested her head on his shoulder, joking with her husband about the impudent spermlike aroma of the stamens of the carob trees. ‘Fanya, at your age!’ said Liberson, turning pink with love.

Both leading and clinging to each other, they walked along the cart tracks, thoroughly enjoying the smell of the rain and the clouds from the cave in the blue mountain. They spread a cloth beneath the ancient grapevines, held out their hands to help one another settle slowly down into the high grass, and ate without taking their eyes off each other.

There was not a soul in sight. Margulis had planted the little vineyard years ago for the exclusive use of his bees. He had never picked the fruit, believing that would make his honey winier, and the vines, untended since his death, grew over their rotting trellises in a jungle of sturdy, wildly intertwining shoots. Large silvery argiopidae wove sparkling curtains between them. Skinks warmed themselves in summer’s last rays on fresh molehills, looking fondly at the loving couple.

Liberson sliced the pickled fish with slow precision and spread sour cream on the rolls. ‘How about a cucumber, Fanya?’ he suggested slyly.

‘Later,’ Fanya answered. Not wanting to make her suspicious and spoil his surprise, Liberson did not press her. He settled back against a rock while Fanya lay on her back in the grass with the bright halo of her head on his thigh. It was mid-afternoon, and the soft autumnal sun, as pale as the yolk of a refrigerated egg, bathed their bodies, working its way into their old joints and filling them with amatory pleasure.

‘Look,’ said Liberson. His dim eyes had discerned some blurry dots flying towards him in the still air, bright with a black, translucent glow.

Fanya opened her eyes. ‘Queen ants,’ she said. ‘The queen ants have come out for their wedding flight.’

The winged queens of the harvest ants had emerged by the hundreds into the autumn light, flying or crawling over the ground. Many were hunted by the open beaks of swallows or trapped in spider webs. Others glided on air, each with a tiny male attached to it.

‘How beautiful they are,’ said Fanya. ‘How beautiful on the one day of light and love they’ll ever have.’

Liberson stared straight ahead, struggling to make out the glossy queens. Fanya shut her eyes again and stretched delicately out on the ground, her head turned to one side with her cheek on her husband’s leg. Feeling her light, winged touch, Liberson raised his hand to clasp her fingers and found himself gently clutching a queen ant.

‘Look,’ he said to Fanya. ‘Here she is, the queen. And I, my precious, I thought it was you.’

‘It is me,’ said Fanya. ‘Come fly with me.’

The swallows clove the air with their sharp cries and black sicklelike wings. Her eyes shut, Fanya let the sunlight pinken the darkness beneath her lids. She smiled as she heard the shrill calls, and Liberson felt love’s sweet pleasure steal from her body into his. He held the queen up to his frail eyes to examine her shapely figure.

‘When Pinness was in his prime,’ he said, ‘he would have given a speech about the power of love that makes the queen ant grow her wings.’

‘You could still give one,’ said Fanya. As though she were already asleep, a swift dreamlike breath escaped her slightly parted lips. Her hand dropped to the ground, and her white hair moved in the wind. Liberson looked at her, feeling her body relax. Careful not to wake her, he stretched out on his back, laid his head on the rock, and gazed up at the vast sky while his hand played slowly with a tuft of hair on her neck. Their long years together had taught him to cultivate the passion for life, which burned in him ever more strongly as he grew old. ‘The eternal flame’ was his private phrase for it. He was grateful to God for liking him despite his unbelief and giving him the strength to nourish this flame daily, and to the kibbutz and Mandolin Tsirkin for providing him with such a gift, the bright butterfly who was his very own.

A few queen ants landed on Fanya’s dress, and Liberson, before dozing off too, blew on them gently to keep them from disturbing her sleep. An hour later he awoke shivering from the chill that had crept into the air. By the time he realised that it was not the frost of autumn but of his wife’s dead body, the cataracts on his eyes had curtained off his last sight, leaving him totally blind. In the darkness that descended on him, his fingers probed Fanya’s icy skin while he listened to the buzz of the green flies that could scent death moments before it arrived. From the tall grass among the grapevines where I lay in hiding, I saw him shaking her corpse.

Liberson rose painfully to his feet, wrenched an old trellis out of the ground, and began groping his way between the rows of grapes with groans and shouts. I knew where he would go and followed him, making sure that no harm befell him. For six hours he stumbled over the black earth of his blindness, colliding with trees and rocks and tripping on bumps and irrigation pipes until he reached his destination. It was night-time now, and I hid again behind a slight rise in the ground.

‘She was my light,’ he kept saying as he tried to explain the situation to the night guards of the kibbutz. Hearing the alarm go off in the plastics factory, they had hurried over to find an old man whose filmy eyes shed chalky tears as he strove to pierce the concrete floor with a rotten piece of wood. Liberson was unable to convey to them how he had managed to pass through the security fence, the iron gate, and the beams of the searchlight in order to kneel by the plastic rolling mills on the spot where the muscat grapes had once grown and a young man and woman had eaten fruit and cheese while flirting to a mandolin’s fading notes.

‘This is where I met Fanya,’ he told them, six miles from her corpse.

The two handsome youngsters had no idea who Fanya or Liberson were, and did not know that the long, stubborn feud between their kibbutz and our village had started right there under a layer of concrete.

I watched them trying to decide what to do while holding Liberson up and patting him on the head. Assured they would not harm him, I slipped away and returned to the village in the dark. From afar I saw the sobbing red light of an ambulance pulling out of the kibbutz. I knew that Liberson was inside it, limp but irate, muttering incomprehensible phrases about cucumbers left uneaten in the fields. Fanya’s body had already been retrieved, and now two green flares shot up from the Rilov farm to recall the search parties.

Daniel Liberson and Ya’akovi were waiting for me by the cabin. ‘Where were you?’ they asked angrily. ‘We’ve been looking all over the place for you.’

A determined Liberson wanted to see me. He came straight to the point. In no mood to be brooked or reminded of his former opposition to Pioneer Home, he informed us that he wanted Fanya to be buried ‘in Baruch’s new cemetery’. As great as his grief and sense of loss were, he was not angry because of them but because of the fact that the death of his beloved had taught him nothing new. ‘The anticipated sorrow of parting never lets us down,’ Grandfather had written years before in one of his notes, and nowhere in the Valley was there a greater expert at reckoning separations and longing.

‘Unlike most lovers,’ Liberson wept, ‘I was struck blind when my love was taken from me, not when I first met her or lived with her.’

He refused to let the doctors treat his cataracts.

‘She was my sun, my moon, my stars, the light that ruled my day and night,’ he groaned as I dug her grave the next day. ‘A horror of great darkness has fallen on me.’ Although I remembered his angry diatribe at the Committee meeting devoted to my cemetery, when he had called me ‘a rotten apple’, ‘a death merchant’, and other such names, I was not surprised. By now I was used to Grandfather’s guiding hand hoeing the earth ahead of me to direct the flow of the future. Every night I lay down to sleep in a ditch he dug and woke shivering, smelly, and wet when the stream of his prophecies reached me.

Liberson instructed Daniel and me to save a place for him next to Fanya, and that was the end of the great cemetery debate. No one bothered me after that. The old man cloaked himself in his blindness and was sent to the old folk’s home, where he shared Grandfather and Shulamit’s former room with a hundred-and-four-year-old Bulgarian Jew.

The Bulgarian’s age impressed him greatly.

‘Yoghurt?’ asked Liberson appreciatively.

‘Brandy and chocolate,’ replied the Bulgarian, introducing himself as Albert.

And so Liberson surrendered one more article of faith while deepening his knowledge of human nature. Having lost his wife and left his land in a single week, he befriended the old Bulgarian quickly and unreservedly. They both knew that the home was their last stop and were determined to make the best of it. Liberson never argued with Albert or sought to convert him to his idea of the correct life, and Albert repaid him with a smile that could be felt if not seen. Their brief, friendly conversations led to a mutual understanding that few friends ever achieve. Liberson did not try to be funny or impressive. He told Albert neither about the Workingman’s Circle nor about the swamps and the pelicans, but only about the death of his wife and his childhood in the Ukraine. Between these two things a dark curtain hung before his eyes.

The Bulgarian lay in bed all day long with the covers pulled over his chest, his eyes burning brightly and his wet sheets smelling faintly of bedsores and septic tanks as he told Liberson about the wonders of the famous wrestler Podumov, the magnanimity of King Boris, and the taste of the black bread in the Plovdiv of his youth. Liberson was unaware that Albert was naked from the waist down beneath the armour of his ironed white silk shirt and shiny bow tie resembling a thirsty black moth that had landed on his throat, but he would not have minded had he known.