‘“Despite the warnings of Doctor Yoffe and the fever we all came down with, we cut papyrus with our sickles until our arms ached and our shoulders felt like stone,”’ he held forth from his father’s memoirs. ‘“Under absolutely no circumstance must you try settling in such a place,”’ he quoted Doctor Yoffe, the country’s leading expert on malaria. Meshulam knew a large portion of the documents in his possession by heart.
We were busy opening and shutting air valves. By the time Avraham switched off the Alfa-Laval vacuum pump, Meshulam had moved on to the high ground of principle, castigating ‘the epidemic of cynicism that has infected the public’ and ‘the pathetic hunger for publicity and sensationalism that you find among academics, which will soon spread throughout our society, this village not excepted.’
In those days Avraham no longer brought his milk churns to the dairy. His cows yielded such prodigious quantities of milk that he had installed his own refrigerator in the yard, and the village tanker emptied it every day. Now, checking its temperature, he remarked that perhaps Meshulam should write an article for the papers. But Meshulam merely spat angrily and said that the press was ‘part of the conspiracy’ and that ‘something drastic must be done to set this country on its ear’.
‘It’s scandalous,’ admitted Pinness, grateful to be released for a while from the clutches of the cavemen and the slow crumbling of the Via Maris into a world that had reassuringly contracted to the dimensions of a local outrage. ‘Today it’s Guitar Tsirkin and tomorrow they’ll say there were never any pioneers to begin with. Why, Doctor Yoffe was here in person and declared that this place was every bit as bad as the swamps of Hadera.’
He wrote a long article and sent it to the Movement newspaper, which not only failed to print it but did not even bother to return it. Pinness was cut to the quick. Resentfully he recalled all the pieces that he and his fellow pedagogues had regularly published in Movement dailies and periodicals in the past. ‘A little poem’ of his had even been printed in The Young Worker in a special box bordered by flowers, and had been set to music by Mandolin Tsirkin. Every child in the Valley could sing its refrain in a piping, confident voice:
Say ye not the flesh is weary,
Say ye not the dream is fled.
Be in this land a pioneer, ye!
Never shall ye bow your head.
In the end Pinness turned to the village treasurer and asked for a grant to publish the article at his own expense. He was given the money and the piece appeared, but the words ‘Paid Advertisement’ at the bottom seared his soul like a humiliating tattoo.
Under the title ‘A Land That Devoureth Its Inhabitants’, Pinness referred to the Swamp Revisionists as ‘promiscuousmouthed hypocrites’ and related his own memories.
‘On our visit to the site we saw the graves of the Germans who had tried to settle there before us and died of malaria. Later we met an old Arab who was ploughing with a team of oxen.
‘“Don’t you suffer from swamp fever?” I asked him.
‘“No,” he said. “If you come to live here, you will have four years of war, because that’s how long you will fight your own blood, but if you are alive at the end of them, you will go on living.”
‘“What about your children?” I asked. “Do many of them die?”
‘“Yes,” he said. “The old people live, but the children, Allah takes them.”
‘A year later my wife Leah died of malaria with two infants in her womb, sinless twins who never saw the light of day. As the chief butler says to Pharaoh, “I do remember my faults today.” I sought to take my own life, but my comrades snatched my gun from me. My wife and twins were the victims of the imaginary swamps of the Valley of Jezreel.’
In the village, the old argument over Pinness’s rifle was revived.
‘What is he yacking about that gun again for? He forgot to take it with him,’ said Meshulam, who considered Pinness’s article a red herring.
‘Rilov removed the firing pin,’ said Levin.
‘You weren’t even here then,’ Levin was told.
‘Rilov was carrying on with Leah Pinness,’ declared Riva Margulis.
‘That whore never died of malaria. She died of cave fever,’ said Tonya Rilov.
‘Whoever should know knows, and whoever shouldn’t doesn’t,’ said Rilov, sticking his head out of his septic tank for a breath of fresh air before resubmerging and vanishing from sight.