I was, as Uri put it, ‘a lone bird on a roof’. Until he was made to leave the village he came to see me every morning, bringing two pieces of cake stolen from his mother’s pantry, one for me and one for Zeitser.
‘How can you live like this?’ he asked.
Swallows nested in the corners of the ceiling, and grey lichen pocked the walls.
‘You can’t let the cabin go to pieces like this,’ said Meshulam. ‘It’s one of the last artifacts left from the village’s first years.’ He had come to borrow Grandfather’s old hat for one of his exhibits. It was a grey floppy-brimmed thing that I sometimes liked to wear to the fields.
Alone in the cabin, pacing the floorboards between the rotting walls, I groaned for the grandfather who had abandoned me, for the father and mother who had died, for the uncle who had disappeared, for the stars above to save me from my loneliness and sorrow. My only friends were the spiders jiggling in the corners and the translucent geckos who scaled the walls with their hands and looked at me with black innocent eyes. By day I tended Grandfather’s orchard. From the heights of his love nest he had instructed Avraham to put me in charge of it.
‘The child needs something to do,’ he said. ‘And he has a good pair of hands.’
I pruned, notched buds, tied branches, smeared tree tar on wounds, and let the fruit ripen and fall like Grandfather had. Now and then Avraham asked for a hand in the cowshed, which I was always glad to lend. I liked unloading heavy bales from the cart and stacking them in the hayloft, cleaning the sewage ditch, and dragging the giddy, excited young heifers to their first tryst with the inseminator.
Whenever things seemed so hopeless that I felt my bones begin to rot, I would go and wrestle the calves in the feed pen. As I playfully grabbed a half-ton yearling by the horns, Zeitser would raise his wrinkled head from his pile of old newspapers and give me a quizzical look. The calves, gargantuan crossbreeds of Brahma, Angus, and Charolais, let out glad, chesty bellows when they saw me coming, pulling off my shirt as I drew near. They loved me for being the one bright spot in their brief, nasty lives.
Raising beef cattle was a highly profitable business in those days, but the sight of the meat dealers pulling up in their lorries always made my uncle Avraham glower. Wrapping a calf’s tail around a fist, they would twist it painfully back and forth while leading the big animals to the lorry ramp. Avraham couldn’t bear it. For two or three days after the teary-eyed calves were taken to the slaughterhouse, his muscles were so tense that he staggered stiffly around the yard like a mechanical doll.
Although he never said anything about my horseplay with the calves, a small, slow smile of approval spread over his face when he watched it, smoothing the furrows in his brow. Sometimes, stepping sweaty and bare-chested out of the pen, the veins bulging under my skin, I spied Aunt Rivka hiding behind the thick trunk of a eucalyptus tree.
‘Why don’t you find yourself a girl instead of laying bulls in their own shit?’ she shouted angrily before hurrying off.
In Grandfather’s drawers I found old papers and documents, flowers dried by my mother, and letters from all over the country requesting agricultural advice. ‘I have such heavy soil that the water stands after a rain,’ wrote Aryeh Ben-David of Kfar Yitzchak. ‘Do you think I should plant peach trees?’
Grandfather attached a copy of his answer to each letter. He advised ‘Dear Aryeh’ to plant a hundred and forty-four trees to an acre and to graft them on myrobalan plum stock.
I found bits of gnawed, infected leaves that were sent to him for diagnosis and a note in his own hand that said, ‘Shimon, my friend, what I said about pruning back branches does not apply to a new vineyard. At this stage, no shoots from the graft should be touched. Just make sure to remove any suckers coming up from the stock.’
There were other finds too. ‘I’m living in a rented room with several other workers,’ wrote Shlomo Levin from Jerusalem to his sister in the Galilee. ‘Every day I come home with my hands so raw and swollen from cutting stones that I can’t touch a thing. Not far from here are a few old olive trees that I go and lean my head against and cry like a small child. Will I ever make a working man? Or am I just a mummy’s boy?’
Rain drummed on the roof of the cabin, the slow, full rain of the Valley which turns the earth into a quagmire and a man’s flesh into a sponge. I enjoyed walking in it like the old-timers, with an empty sack rolled up over my head and shoulders like a huge monk’s hood. Once a week I went to see the film showing at the meeting house, more for the sake of seeing Rilov bounce some trespasser from his regular seat than anything else. Sometimes I walked to the spring, where I lay on my back looking up at the sky through the bushes. It was here that Grandfather had come with his firstborn son, baby Avraham, the night the whole village climbed the water tower to see his magic halo.