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I was thrilled by the publication of Pinness’s advertisement. For the first time, I saw the words of the stories I knew spread out on the printed page for all to see. I looked back at the mountain, searching once more for the figure of Shifris, the green of Efrayim’s eye, the glimmer of Jean Valjean’s horns. Uri scoffed at any mention of this trio and asked me in his sardonic letters whether Efrayim would also carry Shifris on his back or Shifris would carry Efrayim and Jean Valjean on his.
Nevertheless, although Pinness’s article aroused a degree of interest in the village and the area, the great public debate he had hoped for failed to materialise.
Meshulam, as bitter as the leaves of a cornflower, exclaimed, ‘I told you so. This country needs a shaking up!’
Returning to Founder’s Cabin, he settled down among his old rolling pins, washboards, sooty lanterns, clay pots, sieves, winnowers, butter churns, millstones, and oil incubators to launch a new project, namely, a diorama of the swamp and its draining. Visitors, so he hoped, would come from all over the country to see it.
With no little effort he dug a large, shallow pit in his yard and filled it with water. ‘I’m founding a swamp,’ he answered all inquiries, and since the heavy black Valley soil is not very porous, the water remained there for several days. I went to have a look at it. It was already a little swamp of sorts: mosquitoes and dragonflies had come to lay their eggs in it, protozoal algae had tinged it a mythical green, and a loudly singing Meshulam had hastened to dig drainage ditches and plant a few eucalyptus branches in the mud. At that point, however, his neighbours, unable to stand the mosquitoes and the oestrous croaking of the frogs, broke into his yard at night, gave him a good beating, and drained the little bog with a sewage pump hooked up to a tractor engine. The issue came up at a general meeting of the village, at which Meshulam announced that he had just begun to fight. And indeed, in the days that followed, his annoying puddles turned up in the most unexpected places, such as the entrance to the village, the lawn in front of the meeting house, the public war memorial, and the nursery.
Following Meshulam one night, I saw him drag a fireman’s hose from the school hydrant to the nursery playground, where toddlers arriving at seven-thirty in the morning discovered that the sandpit built years ago by the Gang was completely flooded, its contents blasted all over the yard by the pressurised water. In it stood a shirtless Meshulam, his trousers rolled up to his knees, waiting to be carried off by malaria. The hair on his chest was a furious grey, his head was streaked red by his father’s gypsy bandanna, and plastic toys in all colours floated around his legs. The sight of the blond, innocently chirping youngsters coming upon such a scene alarmed me. I knew it was silly, but it did.
Not that anything happened. The children were of course frightened, and two became totally hysterical; one, Ya’akovi’s son, stuttered for months afterward; but that was all. Meshulam, standing in the middle of his swamp, was not bitten by a single anopheles mosquito, although a sudden, mocking breeze blew the hair of some processionary moth caterpillars out of the nearby pine trees, which did make his shoulders itch for a long time to come.
That same week we went to visit Uri. He asked about Zeitser, whom he called ‘Productivus Bound’, and inquired after Pinness, whose ‘adverticle’ he had seen in the newspaper. I told him about Meshulam’s latest madness. ‘King Jonquil of the Swamps,’ pronounced Uri, and we both burst out laughing. When Rivka said that she saw no difference between Meshulam’s swamps and my cemetery, however, Uri grew suddenly serious and told his mother that the village had more surprises in store for it, and that now, from a distance, he could more clearly see the processes of disintegration that he himself had played a part in.
We drove home in time for a nap. An onerous heat lay over the yard. The cows were asleep in their pen. The refrigerator motors hummed quietly in the milk shed. Farther off we saw Zeitser lying under his fig tree with his head covered. No one gave it a second thought, because Zeitser liked to shade himself in hot weather with an old green cloth, but when we rose from our nap the waning sun’s rays glinted off an army of green flies. Avraham let out a great bitter cry and ran to the old mule, whose head was wrapped in the necrophagous blanket of the outdoors.
Zeitser was still breathing. His ribs rose and sank slowly. An odd, sticky, round object lay on the ground by his neck. It took a few seconds to absorb the full horror of what we were looking at and to realise that it was the mule’s left eyeball, which a flying stone had dislodged from its socket.