A puddle of blood, scattered stones, the tracks of familiar work boots, and the imprint of frantic hooves made what had happened all too clear. Taking advantage of our absence, Shlomo Levin had stolen into the yard during the hot noon hours when everyone was closeted indoors and stoned Zeitser from a safe range until he succeeded in knocking the mule’s eye out.
Avraham called for the vet, a kindhearted man who had never given much thought to the true relations between farmers and their animals. They crouched together by Zeitser’s side to examine the terrible wound.
‘It’s a bad one,’ said the vet. ‘He’s very old. We’ll have to give him a shot.’
‘A shot?’ said Avraham.
‘Between the eyes,’ replied the vet, getting to his feet.
Avraham threw him out of the yard. He brought a cattle hypodermic and some sulpha from the medicine cabinet in the cowshed, cleaned, disinfected, and bandaged the mule’s eye socket, and pumped a quart and a half of Biocomb into his veins. Tears kept running down his cheeks, but his hands were sure and steady. He sat by Zeitser’s side for three whole nights, and then, despairing of conventional remedies, filled some baby bottles with sweetened skimmed milk, barley gruel, and brown rice in poppy aspic and fed him as though he were a newborn calf critically ill with dysentery.
The old mule just wheezed and kept dying, too weak even to open his good eye. In the end the only thing that saved his life was Grandfather’s black tree tar, a can of which I kept in the cabin. Taking a chance, Avraham applied a whole handful of it to the deep, abscessing hole in Zeitser’s head, and within a few hours the stubborn old creature revived and my uncle went home to sleep.
I watched him from behind the trunk of the olive tree, walking slowly with his head down, the air eddying around him while the night light of the cowshed dripped shadows from his feet.
I always liked Avraham. Though he never talked much or displayed physical affection, I felt I knew what he suffered inside himself. He had added a wistfulness of his own to the yearning inherited from Grandfather and Grandmother. I haven’t seen him for years, but when I think of him today it’s still crouching by Zeitser’s big body, or bent over the milk jetting out of his cows, or crossing the yard in his yellow rubber boots and blue work clothes, his frightful forehead carving furrows in the air.
Levin never showed his face at our place again. ‘Efrayim would have put a bullet in him,’ said Yosi when he came home on his first leave from basic training. He was all for such military retaliations against Levin as kneecapping or antipersonnel- mining him, but Avraham convinced us to let the matter drop and keep his uncle’s heinous deed a secret. Eventually, though, word got around. It was the old itinerant barber who spread the tidings over the Valley, from every corner of which Zeitser’s friends came to visit him.
They were old, these last founding fathers. With their worker’s caps, grey shirts, and rheumatic, work-gnarled fingers, they all looked like Grandfather. Each having withdrawn into a shell of his own, they hadn’t had such a reunion in years. Some hadn’t seen each other since my parents’ wedding. Now they strolled about our yard and descended as one man to the fig tree, ploughed earth beneath their feet and tall skies of words above their heads. They were as tough as nails, it was said of them in the village, a generation of titans and tribal chieftains. Once, when Grandfather was alive and still his old cynical self, I remembered him saying to Pinness that his comrades’ suspicions and disputatiousness would eventually lead them to the ultimate in factional splits: schizophrenia.
After visiting Zeitser, they trooped on down to my cemetery, a single grey monolith, stopping at the graves of their friends, sniffing the flowering ornamentals, and conversing in quiet tones without rancour. I stood off to one side, not daring to approach them.
Like Grandfather, many of them had grown small and short, the first sign of their impending death. Years of loving too much, hating too long, being disappointed too often, and searching their souls too hard had burned out their cells and sapped their vitality. ‘We were the sour orange stock onto which the Jewish state was grafted,’ said Eliezer Liberson to me a few days before he died, though not wishing to sound boastful, he added at once that the sour orange was ‘a most horrible- tasting fruit’.
Half hiding behind my back, Busquilla whispered timidly, ‘You’ll see, Baruch, everything will be all right now.’ He already knew some of the old-timers well, those who had ventured to buy a plot for themselves while still alive.
The pioneers surveyed their future resting place as they had surveyed the earth of the Valley upon arriving there years before. Each step they took was met by answering vibrations from Grandfather. His old comrades did not even have to put their ears to the ground, because the broad soles of their feet conveyed his sound to the panniers of their bodies. Though I did not have the nerve to follow them, I knew from my vantage point by the hedge that Busquilla was right and that my quarrel with the elders of the Valley was nearing its end.