Grandfather bit his lips and said nothing.
Lord Lovat was a slim old gentleman who leaned on a carved walking stick and kept his throat covered with a blue silk scarf. The scarf also concealed a stainless steel pipe that stuck out of his shredded Adam’s apple and whistled softly when he laughed. Accompanying him was a tall, attractive middle-aged woman who began to shiver when she entered the village.
Lord Lovat signed the village visitors’ book and then, curious to see where Efrayim had learned the art of silent walking, was taken to Rachel Levin’s home. He watched in amazement as the bronzed old woman glided over to a rabbit filching greens from her garden and scared it to death by shouting ‘Boo!’ into its long ear.
Soon after he and Grandfather had closeted themselves for a long talk in the cabin, I was discovered eavesdropping near the timber wall and sent to join the pretty woman in the orchard. She walked among the blossoming trees, pressing their petals to her throat while singing and laughing in low tones.
I was asked to guard her, and I did, walking as quietly behind her as I could at a safe distance so that she could waltz unhindered among the pear trees. Not even Avraham or Grandfather recognised her. I alone caught a whiff of her scent and heard the bulls bellow as they lunged at the fences of their pens.
‘Ya’akov,’ said Grandfather to Pinness when Lord Lovat and his attractive companion were gone, ‘do you remember how Jacob says in the Bible, “My son is yet alive, I will go see him before I die”?’
‘And he did see him, Ya’akov,’ Pinness said. ‘In the end he saw him.’
‘This Jacob will never see his son again,’ said Grandfather. ‘The only thing still keeping me alive is getting even with you all. You drove him from the village, and I’ll get you where it hurts the most, in the earth. I’ll get Shulamit in the heart, and you in the earth.’
35
She had a hard Russian r and deep, spongy l’s. Once all the founders of the village talked like that, but the local air stretched their palates, widened their larynxes, and diluted the thick saliva in their mouths.
‘For sixty-five years your grandfather wrestled with Shulamit in his heart. He wallowed in sands and swamps like an animal to get rid of the smell and touch of her; he tried to purge her from every orifice of his body, rooting her out with the long steel wires of memory. But her skin shimmered at him in the pear petals and from the flank of the blue mountain. No stone skimmed across the ponds of his soul ever sank to the bottom. Each pelican swooping low over Liberson’s house showed him her white breast.’
Pinness, now a fat, hungry, curious, sick old man, easily waxed poetic. Camouflaged as an old nature teacher, he clasped me to his breast, jabbing me with reflections and spines of love. When I started to cry in a thick, sticky voice he patted the back of my neck.
‘Revenge is patient,’ he said, ‘as patient as the bulb of the squill awaiting summer’s end. Its greatest pleasure lies in ripening and refinement. It takes shape in the deepest recesses of the soul, beneath the thin surfaces of wheat fields and smooth complexions, in hidden clefts and cleavages.’
Towards the end of his life no revenge escaped his notice. He explained to me how Grandfather had wreaked vengeance on the village and on Shulamit, and how the earth had wreaked vengeance on us all. The things he said in those years shocked the village more than anything except Pioneer Home.
‘Long accustomed to the stench of saints’ bones and the gross feet of pilgrims and legions, this vulgar earth must have split its sides laughing at the sight of us pioneers kissing it and watering it with our tears of thanksgiving, possessing it in a frenzy, thrusting our little hoes into its great body, calling it mother, sister, lover. Even as we ploughed our first furrows and planted our first crops, as we weeded, drained swamps, and cleared thickets, we sowed the seed of our own failure.’
His voice became almost festive as he continued.
‘We may have drained the swamps, but the mud we discovered beneath them was far worse. Man’s bond with the earth, man’s union with Nature – is there anything more regressive and bestial? We raised a new generation of Jews who were no longer alienated and downtrodden, a generation of farmers linked to the land, a society of the grossest, most quarrelsome, most narrow-minded, most thick-skinned and thick-headed peasants! Your uncle Avraham understood that when he was nine, your grandfather understood it when Efrayim disappeared, and I understood it when I saw him let the fruit rot in his orchard while caring only for the flowers. Uri had to have his spleen kicked in before he understood it too.