‘No more hard work and farm animals, day and night, rain or shine. My machine will manufacture food from earth, sunlight, and water. It will drink and breathe, photosynthesise and flower, store nutrients and produce fruit just like any plant.’
He filled a large pan at the bottom of the machine with earth. ‘Now I’ll add some water with the necessary chemicals at this end, while at that end the good sunshine of our Valley is concentrated by the receptors. Those are the controls over there.
‘Look, Baruch,’ he said to me when a muffled clank came from the machine’s depths. ‘We have reaped a bounteous harvest, the aubergine and radish together.’
He cranked a few handles, and indeed, with a great deal of clicking and grinding, a slow, grimy trickle of something resembling mashed potatoes flowed from the machine. The old man scooped up a spoonful of it and thrust it radiantly in my face.
‘Go on, try it,’ he urged. ‘It tastes exactly like radish. You’ll never know the difference.’
‘That’s enough, Father. Stop,’ whispered his embarrassed son.
Whenever I brought Ackerman the cakes and fruits his son sent him, he would give me a mocking smile and say that cake was bad for the system, and as for fruit, he had all he could eat from his machine, stoneless and easy to chew. Aggrieved, he told me how none of the places he had written to had taken his invention seriously.
‘Even the milk,’ he added, ‘even the milk you bring your grandfather, though it’s certainly good of you to do so, can be taken from my machine. Milk and honey too – both, if you don’t mind my putting it crudely, nothing but animal secretions. And when my machine is old, no one will put it on the chopping block or throw it into an old folk’s home. No, indeed. They will not!’
I was so upset by Ackerman that I told Pinness about him.
‘We never thought we would grow old,’ said Pinness, who had grown weak from despair and very old himself ever since Uri’s beating at the foot of the water tower. ‘Having come to this country together, and worked together, and settled the Valley together, we were certain we would die together too.’
‘It’s a fact,’ confirmed Meshulam. ‘You won’t find a single document of theirs referring to old age. They discussed everything under the sun – the proper diet for a pregnant comrade, the fairest way to divide up work clothes, whether to invest in a pair of city shoes for the village treasurer. The only subject that never came up was what to do about themselves when they grew old.’
‘The battle with old age is a very private one,’ sighed Pinness. ‘It was never a matter for the Movement. When it’s time for me to depart this world, all I ask is a clear mind to face my death with.’
Today Ackerman is buried in row six, plot seventeen of my cemetery. His food machine lies behind the kibbutz cowshed, shiny, abandoned, and silent. Some experts from the Institute of Technology who had heard of it tried to operate it and gave up. No one besides Ackerman could get it to work, just as the sour orange tree by our cabin, which had borne, so it was said, lemons, pears, apricots, and quinces, stopped yielding when Grandfather died. Green, unfriendly, and infertile, it stands in the yard with the rude nests of sparrows, impudent patchworks of straw and stolen feathers, hanging from its branches.
Only Zeitser, in whose honour the old people had come to our village, bore his suffering in silence, as if determined to live out his life with as much circumspection as possible. Now and then I untied him and took him to the cemetery, where he stood in the cool shade of the trees, unrebuked by me if he cropped the grass or trampled a flower on his blind side.
Meshulam’s swamp fever seemed to have passed too. ‘Tsirkin is down with his final illness,’ said Pinness of Meshulam’s father. Meshulam so wished to give the old man some pleasure in his last days that he even began working on the farm. And yet, said Pinness, like all revenges, Tsirkin’s too was ripening poignantly, deep beneath the fragile membranes of broad wheat fields and smooth skin.
A few weeks before his death Mandolin Tsirkin asked to see me. He still lived at home and was dead set against going to the old folk’s home. ‘I don’t need to have my fingers broken by some physiotherapist while a young intern sticks tubes up my backside.’
Irritable and grumpy, Tsirkin could barely walk. Meshulam pushed him around the village in a wheelbarrow padded with sacks.
‘Who but a good-for-nothing like him would have time to take care of his old father,’ grumbled Tsirkin. ‘At least he’s finally found something to do with himself.’