‘It’s hopeless,’ he said to me. ‘Cut them back above ground once a week, keep dousing them with petrol, and maybe you’ll get rid of them.’
But I wanted to go for the jugular, for the hidden body that had waited for Grandfather to depart before reaching out its tentacles and creeping up at me from the earth.
The deep trench I had dug crossed the yard and ran out to the fields. I extended it now towards the orchard, sending clods of earth flying with great whacks of the hoe as I cut through acres of corn and clover and worked my way through the ruins of the British ack-ack positions, to the consternation of moles and centipedes and the dismay of unearthed pot-shards and mole crickets. I rooted out every side shoot I could find, and four days later I straightened up to find myself down by the spring.
Here, by the blackberries where the infant Avraham lay glowing in the dark and Pinness met the old Arab walking behind his plough, there was still a strong sulphurous stench of Bulgakov. His silken hairs floated in the air, and the venomous, spittley breath of the hyena condensed on the elecampane leaves. It was here that I traced the mother plant to its lair.
Suddenly the stubborn root thickened and dived down into the bowels of the earth. I wrapped it around my waist, dug in my heels and began to pull. I was in great shape, nineteen stone of meat and gristle, as tall as my mother and as strong as my father. Slowly the earth lifted as the yellowish root came to light, raising great clumps of soil, rat corpses, buried owl turds, large pewter beer mugs, and crushed tin toys still warm from the hands of the German children who had gone clutching them to their malarial deaths.
I toppled backwards when the rootstalk came out, its white rootlets wriggling like parasitic worms as they looked for something to grip. A great hole remained in the ground, and from it rose a milky, pestilent vapour thick with swarms of mosquitoes. Peering down into it, I saw the dense, murky water of the past swirling slowly, little grubs clinging to its surface and breathing patiently through their short air tubes. Like any old pupil of Pinness’s, I could have identified the larvae of the anopheles mosquito with my eyes closed.
A deep gurgle sounded from the hole. Shut up by the founders in the bowels of the earth, imprisoned in the trunks of the eucalyptus trees they planted, the soughing swamp began to surge toward me as it was touched by the sun’s rays.
I was seized by fear. All the horror stories I had heard from the old pioneers until they were flesh of my flesh now came to life. As fast as I could I hoed the earth back into the hole, stamping on it insanely with all my weight and strength.
I came home to find the feathery prosopis leaves wilted and moribund, tore what was left of them out of the ground with my hands, and went to sleep. I stayed in bed for days, breathing the smell of the spring, the sappy odour of the cabin’s wooden walls, and the fragrance of Grandfather. It was then I first realised that my own life, overpowered in his body’s huge shade, had grown like a low fern, mere mould of the forest floor.
Long night after night I lay without a blanket, listening to tiny footsteps on the roof and tremulous chirps of yellow-plumed chicks, until Avraham came to me with a full pitcher and told me that Grandfather had asked for milk.
At about that time I was informed that as an orphan I was exempt from the army. In the village it was rumoured that I had been found psychologically unfit.
‘What else could you expect from a child who adopted a mad grandfather as his mother?’ asked my aunt Rivka.
Never an easy woman, Aunt Rivka had loathed me openly since Grandfather’s departure for the old folk’s home. She was so worried he might will the farm to me that she kept begging her sons to visit him. Yosi, though, said he was too busy with the cows, while Uri didn’t give a damn.
‘I couldn’t care less about trees, and I don’t intend to be a farmer,’ he announced. ‘Who wants to live in a place like this? There’s nothing to do here but blabber about cows all day long.’
Still, everyone watched his step with me. I was the strongest teenager in the village. At the age of fourteen I was already anchor man on our tug-of-war team. Before each match Grandfather would say to me, ‘Just dig your heels in and stay put, Baruch. We’ll show ’em!’
I had no one except Pinness, who liked to chat with me, trying out new ideas and answering my questions. Sometimes Zeitser looked in my window and nodded, but he too was very old and hardly spoke any more.
In the mornings I rose feeling weak from the smell of Grandfather, which lingered in the cabin. The olives I cured didn’t taste like his. They grew mushy and rotten in no time because I never managed to get the salt right. The fresh egg either sank to the bottom like a rock or jumped out of the barrel as if shot from a catapult.