‘She kept watching the skies,’ put in Grandfather.
‘Like Grandmother?’ I asked.
Grandfather did not answer.
‘Everyone in this village watched the skies,’ said Liberson. ‘For rain clouds. Or homing pigeons. Or locusts.’
‘Or migrating birds,’ added Fanya scornfully.
But Riva watched the skies because she expected the imminent arrival of dust clouds from the desert and flocks of defecating starlings from the north. ‘Filthbirds,’ she called them. Around her cabin she set out a dozen large flytraps, wooden crates with nets, a bait of meat or rotten fruit, and an opening below where the flies could swarm in but could not get out again. Such traps are used successfully in the village to this day, but Riva’s were perpetually empty, since the flies soon learned that she and her house were poor pickings.
Every day the English scientists regarded her blithely when she made them remove their shoes before entering her house to eat their borscht, chicken, and potatoes; thanked her politely, and returned to their cave accompanied by Pinness.
‘I used to join them because I liked their company, until Liberson informed me that no self-respecting socialist would be caught wolfing fried chicken paid for by the English bourgeoisie when his comrades were eating baked pumpkin and wild mallow.’
The English did not understand why Pinness stopped taking his meals with them. He, for his part, could not fathom why they never sang when they wielded their hoes.
After excavating and sifting thirty cubic yards of earth, the archaeologists ran into a huge slab of slate that blocked off the space behind it. There was an ominous rumble when they tried to move it. Pinness recommended consulting an expert mason who could find the fault lines in its veins and even brought such a man from Nazareth, an old Arab who descended into the cave, put an ear to the stone slab, scratched at it lightly with his chisel, tapped it with his fingers, and announced that it was as fragile as glass and would bury them all in a cave-in if they tried to break through. And so the back of the cave remained unexplored.
Eventually the Englishmen packed their finds and belongings and went home. The district governor had an iron door made for the cave entrance, locked it, and gave Pinness the key. None too gently, Rilov demanded that the cave be used for hiding dynamite and corpses and conducting secret initiation rites, but Pinness adamantly refused. With a surprisingly mulish show of courage he told Rilov that any sign of the door’s having been tampered with would be reported to the governor at once.
The cave became his retreat. ‘Everyone needs to bury himself somewhere,’ he chuckled. Best of all he liked to sit in the entrance looking down on the Valley from an unconventional perspective of time and space. Though he never slept in it, fearing not only cave fever but all kinds of prehistoric diseases that the ticks which lived there might infect him with, odd strains of Neanderthalian typhus and even more primitive and incurably pre-anthropoid illnesses, he visited it often for research and meditation.
There in the bowels of the earth Pinness discovered blind snakes that lived off thallophytes, pallid salamanders that metamorphosed more slowly than their surface-dwelling cousins, and African wood lice that were unknown in Palestine. ‘Living fossils,’ he called them, struck by a mind-boggling thought. Not far from the cave grew a small stand of Acacia albida, ‘the only surviving remnant of the African flora that invaded this country millions of years ago’, and Pinness conjectured that the wood lice were relics of the same period. As he crouched watching these crablike immortals scuttle over the ground, the cave startled him by becoming the aperture of a time tunnel. The perseverance of such ‘exceedingly wise lilliputians’, who had managed to create an enduring society despite their lack of Movements, utopian visions, and historical traditions, filled him with a warm glow. With its exotic acacias, the cave seemed to him part of a primeval bubble unburst by time. Often he had to take a deep breath before entering its subterranean labyrinth, where he felt that he was sinking into the strange, viscous depths of a pocket of still hardening amber.
For years he brought his pupils to the cave. We would tramp for close to two hours through fields and up the steep hillside to plunge all at once into the cleft of a rock. Taking the key from his pocket, Pinness would open the grating iron door, releasing a chill, thick eddy of air that crawled inquisitively over our faces and bare legs. First he made us sit in the front of the cave by a small pool of water so old it had no taste at all, its sediments having long since settled to the bottom. Eyeless little creatures jetted back and forth on it. Though the aeons of darkness stored in their bodies blinded anyone who looked at them, their soft forms could be felt as they brushed the backs of our hands.