Each time I tried to discuss Uri with Pinness, he told me that I could not understand what had happened because I had never felt love for a woman. His old qualms and cautions thrown to the wind, he now spoke his mind freely. ‘You never loved anyone but your grandfather,’ he said. ‘Sometimes you remind me of Efrayim’s bull. Maybe you expect to be carried to a coupling on someone’s back too.’
I didn’t tell him that I had known about my cousin’s escapades all along. I had never caught him red-handed, but more than once I had unwittingly overheard the shamelessly candid conversations of women confessing their indiscretions, laughing, sighing, and nudging each other with fingers and eyes as they spoke about Uri. Afterwards I would see them in the village exchanging secretive smiles. Rilov’s and Liberson’s granddaughters; the wife of Shuka the cow breeder; the daughter of Gidon the carpenter; Michal Margulis’s mother; Michal herself, who had been a classmate of ours; the doctor’s wife; the vet’s wife, who despite her age was as stormy as wheat in the wind and cried out, ‘Efrayim, Efrayim!’ – every last one of them.
‘The strangest part of it,’ said Uri, surprised by how much I knew, ‘is that they love it when I shout their name. They’ve heard about it from each other, and it means more to them than actually doing it with me.’
The first of them was Rilov’s husky-voiced granddaughter Edna, who had breasts at the age of nine. Once a month swarms of male emperor moths would dash themselves against her window blinds.
She was seventeen at the time, two years older than Uri. Haunted by his looks and mocking manner, she grabbed hold of him one night and dragged him up to the water tower.
‘I had no choice,’ said Uri, the old hidden grin on his face. ‘She had a gun.’
He climbed the ladder after her, his eyes glued to her behind, which glimmered in the dark in its white pants.
‘Was she ever hot!’ he told me. ‘She made sounds like a bare foot in the mud. I wanted to crawl all over her, to get my hands and legs and head and body inside her – only just then I thought of her grandfather with all his bombs and guns and explosives, and of what he would do to me if he found me in his granddaughter’s ammunition dump, and I started to laugh.’
‘What’s so funny?’ asked Edna.
‘I’m screwing Rilov’s granddaughter.’ Uri whispered the slow boast into her mouth.
‘Then why don’t you tell everyone,’ she jeered. Before she could stop him, he had raised his head above the guardrail of the tower and yelled at the top of his voice:
‘I’m screwing Rilov’s granddaughter!’
The words tangled with the night breeze, bounced off the treetops, and burst into meaningless droplets of letters and syllables that none of the farmers ever heard.
Even I, the great eavesdropper, was deaf to them. Not so Pinness, whose ears had never been stopped with earth and whose closeness to insects and children had taught him the art of piecing together jigsaw puzzles of sound. Not so the women of the village, whose monotonous lives had taught them to seek excitement even beneath the hairy leaves of pumpkins and in the foetid drinking boxes of the hens.
The old teacher jumped up in a sweat and rushed outside to lay into the culprit, but the women merely awoke and smiled as one at the darkness. In a flash of blinding possibility, they knew at once whose voice had whinnied like a stallion. A rare and subtle fragrance, a crystal transparency, the touch of youthful flesh or flawless crystal, overcame them where they lay.
‘You’ll never understand it,’ said Uri. ‘You don’t care for women. But I think of those poor turkey hens in their darkrooms, and of Grandmother, and of Shulamit, and of Hayyim Margulis’s sweet fingers, and of poor Daniel Liberson falling in love with your mother when he was three weeks old, and I think of Grandmother’s saying that somewhere in the world everyone has a true love. I’m going to find mine.’
‘If Fanya Liberson were alive,’ said Pinness, ‘she would call it your grandmother’s revenge. In the veins of the Mirkins the sweet blood of the Workingman’s Circle turned into a never-clotting venom. There was your grandfather, who couldn’t love Feyge and tortured himself with longing and hate for Shulamit. There was Avraham, who sang his first and last love song at the age of nine. There was Uri, who made us lose all sense of proportion. And there’s you, the family ox, Isaiah’s wild bull in a net, big, strong, and barren of heart.’
Uri’s beating hit the old teacher hard. ‘We were wrong,’ he wrote in the newsletter. ‘Wrong educationally. Wrong politically. Wrong in how we thought about the future. We are like the blind beasts that perish, up to our necks in mire.’