Grandfather’s revenge was taking shape. The graves burned like a chastisement in the earth of the village, like a terrible mockery of its way of life, a rank challenge to its very existence. People stared and whispered as I walked down its streets, appraised my stiff neck that would not be yoked to the founders’ vision, and imagined the money in my sacks. I paid no attention to them. The eyes fixed on me were a protective bluff that did not scare me. Busquilla, who kept a record of our running battle with the village authorities in his well-organised filing cabinet, thought it was all very funny. Again and again he told me not to take the threats against me seriously.
‘You may know more about farming than I do,’ he said, ‘but I happen to know something about graves. There are six hundred and sixty saints buried in Morocco, and still more of our rabbis crossed the sea to the Holy Land in order to be buried here.’
‘It’s not the same thing,’ I said.
‘Of course not,’ chuckled Busquilla. ‘We Moroccans charge money to visit a saint’s grave, while you Jews from Europe bill the saints themselves.’
Avraham alone did not mind my field of graves. Morose and past hope, he immersed himself in his dairy operation, at which he worked harder than ever. He invented new feeding techniques, disinfected the pens with special sprays that killed all internal and external parasites, enlisted the help of two engineers to develop a flow-sensor system that monitored air pressure in each teat, and experimented with different kinds of music during milking. Ever since my father had hooked his phonograph up to Rilov’s cowshed, the farmers had known that music meant more and better milk, but only Avraham matched his records to each cow’s personal taste. Large earphones on their broad heads, the solemn-looking animals stood dreamily swaying to the strains of flutes and string sections that coaxed the milk from their udders.
He also did away almost entirely with the weekly supplement of roughage in the cows’ feed, preferring ‘more for psychological than nutritional reasons’ to take them out to pasture once a week. The milking machines that whirred nonstop made him smile at the old argument over whether a cow should be milked two times a day or three. ‘It’s not a scientific issue,’ he explained. ‘It’s simply a matter of weighing the farmer’s convenience against the cow’s.’ His own cows were milked four times a day and kept the vacuum pumps working around the clock. And though the puniest of his animals gave three times as much milk as the renowned Hagit, Meshulam, whose depressive wanderings through the village brought him to us too, declared that none of them would be exhibited in a museum or listed in a record book. ‘History is not what is done,’ he said, ‘it’s what gets into writing. That’s what makes that damn swamp study so dangerous. And it’s Hagit who will go down in history, not any of your uncle’s milk wells.’
Having ceased to bring his milk to the village dairy like the other farmers, Avraham was excluded from their daily social chat and withdrew into himself like a mole cricket into its underground chambers. Every morning as Motik skilfully backed all twenty-two wheels of his huge tanker into our yard, I heard the sound of the big diesel engine and the gasps of the power steering, followed by the inevitable conversation.
‘Good morning.’
‘Good morning.’
‘Can I start pumping?’
‘Yes.’
‘He jumped right in front of me. There was nothing I could do about it.’
‘I know. It wasn’t your fault.’
Off in a side room two big separators whirled ceaselessly. From one end flowed cream that tickled the taste buds of visitors to Pioneer Home and drew them to the cowshed, where Rivka sold them clandestine jars of it in violation of the co-operative’s by-laws. From the other end came skimmed milk, which was piped back into the cows’ drink, enriched by minerals. Avraham was the first dairy farmer in the village to understand that far more than solid food, liquid intake was the most important factor in a cow’s metabolism. That was why he had never had a cow go dry on him while still in its productive years. ‘A cow should drink five quarts of liquid for every quart of milk it gives,’ I once heard him tell Yosi as they were cleaning the white terrazzo floor of the milkshed with clear plastic high-pressure hoses. All his piping – for water, for disinfectants, for air, and for milk – was transparent, as were the constantly filling and emptying glass tanks. ‘It’s so the cows can see what they’re doing,’ said Uri, who had a revolutionary proposal of his own for increasing production. ‘Why not,’ he asked, ‘add the water directly to the milk instead of to the cows?’