Grandfather watched me slowly taking it all in. Suddenly it dawned on me why he had fed me all those vegetables, raised me on stories and colostrum, saved me from the hyena, weighed me so carefully.
‘And now take me back to the cabin,’ he ordered.
I wheeled him back, my heart heavy. Never before had I realised what a stupid idiot I was. I felt like an animal that doesn’t understand a thing.
After I helped Grandfather into bed, he told me to go back to work. ‘I’ll rest for a while,’ he said.
At noon a hen came out to the field, importantly flapping her wings, and I followed her back to the cabin. Grandfather was getting impatient. He wanted me to go to the co-op and ask Levin for a new pair of pyjamas.
‘At my age I can afford to indulge myself,’ he smiled.
‘Maybe he’d also like some silk sheets for the mule?’ Levin jeered.
I returned carrying a pair of soft grey flannel pyjamas with light blue stripes. Grandfather asked me to light the old wood-burning stove and bring his trunk to the bedside.
While the stove’s chimney purred, Grandfather picked his way through the old vellum of his papers, arranging them: letters, documents, photographs the colour of earth. Then he walked about the cabin a bit, hobbling from corner to corner. I followed him around instead of going back to work, all but clinging to his tiny body. My big bulk must have bothered him, because suddenly he turned around and scolded me. But even then I didn’t leave him. I was afraid that if I looked away for a second he might vanish into thin air.
Towards evening I brought him some milk from the cowshed, but he vomited it all up, lost his temper, and yelled at me to mop the floor. Afterward he apologised and asked me to help him to the shower and sit by his side while he washed. I had kept his old milking stool there, its wooden seat sanded white by the rough cotton weave of his work clothes. He sat on it to keep from slipping on the wet tile floor, running the water so hot that his white skin turned pink and steamy and drops of vapour trickled down the windowpane. He soaped his body and took care to cleanse it well, fussily wielding the scouring pad behind his ears and in between his toes and buttocks while I sat and waited, crouched against the wall beneath a hanger that held my sour work clothes. I could tell when Grandfather wanted to be alone with his thoughts and didn’t bother him.
When he was finished I helped him to his feet, wrapped his body in the big old soft sheet he liked to dry himself with, and carried him back to bed like a nurse carrying a baby. He slowly put on the new pyjamas I had bought him, asked me to button up the shirt, and said, ‘Bury me in my earth, among the trees.’ Then he lay down, placed his glasses on the little night table, pulled the blanket up to his chin, and fell into a deep sleep. It took me six hours to admit to myself that his lost consciousness would never be regained.
Rivka and the doctor wanted to rush him to the hospital, but Avraham said that his father had made up his mind to die and should be allowed to do so. At 1 a.m., when Doctor Munk declared that such a comatose state could last for days, Rivka and Avraham went home to sleep. Grandfather’s body went on breathing and quivering and secreting brown, dry, foetid earth.
For three whole days I sat by the wooden wall of the cabin without sleeping a wink. People went in and out, and I was so delirious by then that I no longer knew who came via the door and who via Grandfather’s trunk. On the third night, when my body was limp and porous from lack of sleep, there was an end to the eddy of dreams in the room and I knew that Grandfather was dead. I went over to his bed and picked him up. He was small and light.
‘The earth, the earth,’ he said all at once. ‘The earth will lift up its voice.’
I held him in my arms and headed for the fields. We passed the hayloft and the pens of nodding calves. By Efrayim’s old hut we stopped to take a pitchfork, a pickaxe, and a spade. Soundlessly we glided past Zeitser, whose twitching body was in the middle of an argument with itself. A jackal yelped far away, startling the turkeys. A heavy layer of dew covered the earth, the blades of grass, and the Fordson tractor parked nearby.
‘Here,’ said Grandfather.
I broke the earth with several blows of the pickaxe and dug down with the pitchfork, flinging up the heavy clods and then evening out the sides with the spade. I did this over and over, and since I’m strong and was in a frenzy, it took me exactly twenty-five minutes to dig a square pit a yard and a half deep among the pear and apple trees.
I took off Grandfather’s pyjamas and laid him in the grave. His smooth white body glistened in the darkness. I covered him with dirt, packed it down with my feet, and marked the site with some heavy stones gathered from the borders of the property. Then I lay down on the damp ground and fell sound asleep.