‘He sends them without a return address to surprise her when she opens them.’
42
When his compulsory army service was over Yosi signed up as a career officer, while Uri became a heavy equipment operator for his uncle in the Galilee. Thus, there was never any problem about who would inherit the Mirkin farm.
It was Meshulam who explained to me that when the founding fathers came to Palestine and saw how the fields of the Arab peasants had been whittled to thin shavings by the jack-knife of inheritance, they decided to bequeath their farms to one son alone. From the day a boy was born, he was under constant scrutiny to see if he fitted the bill. The experienced eyes of his parents, teachers, and neighbours measured his first steps, the development of his back muscles, his success at predicting rain, and the presence or absence of the green fingers that every good farmer had to have. By the time he was ten the boy knew if he was destined to remain in the village or to seek his fortune outside it.
The failures first cloaked themselves in injured silence, then burst into stormy protest in the hope of reversing the decree, which was, however, irrevocable. Their fate sealed, they were sent out into the world with the ways of the village stamped in their flesh like a cattle brand. Some became farmers elsewhere; others went into business or to the university; all did splendidly in their new lives. Years of growing up in the village, of hard work, responsibility, and an intimate knowledge of nature and animals, made successes of them all.
Gradually, each father transferred part of his farm to the chosen son, consulting him about the harvest of various fertilisers and carefully weighing his answers and opinions. As a hive raises new queen bees, so the village raised its next generation of farmers.
Sometimes mistakes were made. Daniel Liberson, whose infant passion for my mother was taken as a sign of a nonagricultural personality, turned out to be a first-rate farmer. Having no one left to love or hate once my parents died, he devoted all his talents and energies to tilling the soil. Eventually, after working as a dedicated and much-praised adviser in an immigrants’ settlement, from which he brought back his Romanian wife, he became a thriving grower of chickens, cotton, and mushrooms. The latter were cultivated in a secret formula of straw, soil, and horse manure that Daniel found in an old Russian farmer’s almanac he got from Meshulam in a swap for Hagit’s original milking stool. According to the almanac, the best time for picking the mushrooms was when they gave off ‘a strong foresty smell’, and every few weeks when a new spore cycle ripened, since Daniel had no idea what a Russian forest smelled like, he tore his old parents away from their amours to have them sniff the dark fungal beds. Never once did they disappoint him.
Meshulam, on the other hand, made it clear from an early age that as Uri put it, ‘the only thing that ever drew him to the earth was the force of gravity’.
Uri himself never thought of remaining in the village, and his determination to leave came as no surprise. His love of books, ardour for his nursery teacher’s behind, tendency to tire easily from hard work, and quips about the frustrated lives of the hens or the over-intimacy of the inseminator with the heifers, along with other signs that could not be dismissed lightly, cast doubt on his character long before his escapades on the water tower, which were the last straw.
Though everyone liked Uri, it was obvious that Yosi would be the one to step into his father’s milking boots. He was a thorough, conscientious boy with a fund of technical knowledge and a born knack for planning and organisation. The one thing that worried Avraham was the violence pent up in him beneath the surface. Yet while my uncle was afraid that Yosi might harm an unruly or stubborn animal, he entrusted him with the morning milking at the age of fourteen, and even Grandfather, who saw in Uri a distant reflection of his lost son Efrayim, turned to Yosi when he needed someone to harrow the orchard without damaging the tree trunks.
And so, when Yosi announced that he too was not coming back to the village, Avraham looked up from the earth, which was something he had rarely done before, and shuddered at the sight of his life stretching desolately out before him as far as the horizon of his death. He was seized by despair. Though I tried to help him with the farm work as much as I could, I was far more interested in cultivating my field of dead bodies in Grandfather’s ruined orchard.
‘Not one of Mirkin’s grandsons will be a farmer,’ said Rilov. ‘The Committee should make them sell the farm.’
‘Don’t let him worry you,’ said Busquilla. ‘Who would be crazy enough to buy it? Who’s going to dig up all those bones or grow crops between gravestones?’