1
One summer night the old schoolteacher Ya’akov Pinness awoke from his sleep with a great start. ‘I’m screwing Liberson’s granddaughter!’ someone had shouted outside.
High, brazen, and clear, the shout winged past the Canary Isle pine trees near the water tower. For a moment it hovered like a bird of prey before swooping earthwards to the village. The old teacher felt a familiar twinge of pain. Once more he alone had heard the obscene words.
For years he had chinked every crack, repaired every rent, stood in the breach every time. ‘Like the Dutch boy plugging the dyke,’ he would say as he beat back yet another threat. Fruit aphids, state lotteries, cattle ticks, anopheles mosquitoes, bands of locusts and jazz musicians swirled around him like dark waves before breaking in a slimy froth against the breastwork of his heart.
Pinness sat up in bed and wiped his fingers on the hair on his chest, perplexed and enraged that life in the village could go on as usual when such debauchery publicly thumbed a nose at it.
The little co-operative settlement in the Valley of Jezreel was sound asleep. The mules and cows in their sheds, the hens in their coops, the visionary men of toil in their humble beds. Like an old machine whose parts were used to each other, the village purred routinely in the night. Udders filled with milk, clusters of grapes swelled with juice, prime beef waxed fat on the joints of calves soon to be sent to the slaughterhouse. Tireless bacteria, ‘our one-celled friends’, as Pinness appreciatively called them in the classroom, laboured to fix fresh nitrogen at the roots of plants. But notoriously patient and even-tempered though he was, the old educator was determined to let no one, least of all himself, rest on the laurels of productivity and past achievement. ‘I’ll catch you yet, you degenerate,’ he mumbled irately, jumping heavily from his iron bed. His hands trembled as he buttoned his old khaki pants and pulled on his confidence-inspiring black work boots in preparation for the fray. He was too upset to find his glasses in the dark, but the moonlight shining through the cracks in the door showed him the way.
Outside he tripped over a molehill subversively dug in the garden. He picked himself up, brushed himself off, called out, ‘Who’s there?’ and waited intently for an answer, his myopic eyes boring into the night while his large hoary head swivelled back and forth like an owl’s.
The lecherous shout was not repeated. It never was. Each time it was sounded but once.
The coarse words, Pinness brooded, were a battle cry of decadence, of mean hedonism, of individualism run wild – in short, of gross breach of conduct. Reluctantly the old teacher, ‘under whose tutelage our children were reared to a life of high ideals and hard work’, recalled the great chocolate robbery, in which several of his eldest pupils had raided the village co-op; the steamer trunk of Riva Margulis, which had arrived from Russia bursting with seductive luxuries and outrageous frills; and the devilish laughter of the hyena haunting the fields outside the village, ‘smirking and up to no good’.
The thought of the hyena when he was without his spectacles and unable to see a thing plunged the alarmed Pinness into an all but paralysing anxiety.
The hyena was a sometime visitor to the area, a messenger unleashed from the worlds that lay beyond the wheat fields and the blue mountain. Several times in the years since the founding of the village the old teacher had heard its clear, mocking bark ring out from the nearby wadi, and a shiver had run down his spine.
The hyena’s bite was highly dangerous. Some of its victims were so badly infected that they sowed penicillaria in autumn and pruned their vineyards in summer. Others took leave of their senses and became doubters, cynics, even turncoats, forsaking the land and drifting off to the city, or else dying or even leaving the country.
Pinness was beside himself with worry. He had lived long enough to see the many fallers by the wayside, the slinking deserters re-embarking in the ports, the haggard suicides at rest in their graves. He saw renegades and deviants everywhere – ‘The parasitic Talmudists of Jerusalem, the messianic millenarians of Safed, the credulous Communists, disciples of Lenin and Michurin, who were the ruin of the Workers’ Brigade’. Long years of observation and reflection had taught him how easily a man was struck down once his immune system failed him.
‘It especially attacks children, because their young minds are still vulnerable,’ he warned, demanding that the schoolhouse be guarded around the clock when the scurrilous creature’s tracks were discovered near the farmers’ houses. At night he joined the posse of young men, his former pupils, who sought to track the fiend down. But the hyena was wily and elusive.