‘The Committee permitted Riva to use them, although they were really hers anyway,’ explained Pinness, his voice dropping to a whisper. ‘They came in the steamer trunk her parents sent from Russia.’
By the time Pinness told me about the cave and its archaeological deposits, Riva’s famed luxury trunk had long been buried beneath thick layers of earth and forgetfulness.
‘That was one of the first trials we were put to.’ Along with my uncle Avraham’s poem, the plague of locusts during the Great War, and the death of Leah Pinness, Riva’s trunk lay interred at such depths that only a hydraulic plough could have unearthed it.
‘After marrying Margulis, Riva wrote her parents a letter about him and his bees telling them how she loved the hard field work and enclosing some photographs of herself – a little maid from the Land of Israel in a dress of coarse grey Arab cloth, scattering chicken feed in the yard and gathering honey from the hives.
‘At the time of their wedding,’ said Pinness, ‘no one, not even Margulis himself, knew that the bride was the daughter of Beilin of Kiev, the richest Jew in the Ukraine.’
Six months later a cart arrived drawn by three span of oxen. Six Cossacks and four Cherkessians, Winchester rifles slipped through their saddles and gleaming daggers thrust in their belts, escorted it on small, nervous horses. It bore a large trunk out of which came ebony furniture, sets of dishes thinner than air, silk pillows, quilts puffed with goose down, blue lace curtains, and Bukharan rugs. Somehow Riva’s parents had managed to smuggle out a trousseau under the eyes of the Bolsheviks. That evening Tonya Rilov, beside herself with envy and principles, insisted on convening the Committee, whose members had already noticed a wild gleam in the eyes of the female comrades. The urgently called session made it clear to Riva that the co-operative would not abide such luxuries in the home of a Hebrew farmer. Either she could send the trunk packing, or else she could pack and leave with it.
‘I have a better suggestion,’ proposed Margulis mildly. ‘Riva and I have already talked it over and would like to donate the entire trousseau to the village.’
Choking on the lump in her throat, Riva nodded her agreement, and Rilov and Liberson were sent to take possession of her treasure. For years afterwards she had to watch ragged farmers eating from her family crystal, their grimy fingers clutching her gold forks while they jokingly addressed each other with courtly phrases, bowing, scraping, and dancing minuets in newly reaped fields. I can remember Pinness repeating the word ‘narodniks’– Russian nobles – as he told me about it. Liberson, who never missed a chance to make his wife laugh and stay in her good graces, fashioned himself a beard out of corncobs, dressed up as Count Tolstoy, and sallied forth in a long white shirt to his comrades in the fields, greeting them as his serfs and serving them chilled lemonade in fancy glasses poured from a cut-glass jug.
Riva’s lacquered Chinese sideboard stood in the Committee tent until it was eaten by oak borers. The silver was traded for six cows and a spoiled, evil-tempered Frisian bull. With one of the Bukharan rugs Rilov bought a disassembled howitzer, while the goose down was divided up among the villagers, each family getting an equal quiltful. Tonya and the village by-laws were satisfied; Riva sulked bitterly, even when Margulis reassured her that his honey tasted better licked from fingers than from golden spoons. He salved her rough hands with beeswax and dripped stalactites of honey on her navel, but she refused to be consoled. Although she seemed to have resigned herself to the village’s verdict, ‘she sobbed so gustily at night that you could hear Margulis’s tent flaps whipping in the wind’.
‘What even the Bolsheviks couldn’t take from my father our own Reds stole from me,’ she said to her husband.
Within two years all the crystal was broken. It was so transparent that it was invisible when empty, and glass after glass was swept off kitchen tables by the rude hands of the farmers.
Margulis spent the days herding his bees among the flowers. When the last cups and dishes were shattered, Riva was left to her own devices with nothing but dust, sweat, utopian visions, and the thick smell of cow manure.
‘It was then that she went mad,’ said Pinness. ‘The normal feminine passion for cleanliness, which is simply a higher form of the nesting instinct, turned into an insane obsession.’ Armed with a tightly bound kerchief, an apron, strips of old clothes, and a pair of rubber boots, she went forth to do battle each day.
First she banished the rubbish bin, since the presence of filth, even with a lid on, upset her delicate nerves. Dozens of times a day her children had to walk the hundred and fifty yards to the cowshed, where they dumped cucumber peels, breakfast leftovers, and swept-up table crumbs onto a big compost pile.