The Bulgarian lay in bed all day long with the covers pulled over his chest, his eyes burning brightly and his wet sheets smelling faintly of bedsores and septic tanks as he told Liberson about the wonders of the famous wrestler Podumov, the magnanimity of King Boris, and the taste of the black bread in the Plovdiv of his youth. Liberson was unaware that Albert was naked from the waist down beneath the armour of his ironed white silk shirt and shiny bow tie resembling a thirsty black moth that had landed on his throat, but he would not have minded had he known.
43
Time passed. Milk flowed. Corn ripened on the stalk, its lancelike leaves cutting the skin. Granaries filled. Fig trees set their fruit. More wars were fought. And one day a powerfully built old worker named Yehoshua Ber turned up in the feed shack.
‘I know you from somewhere,’ said Rilov. ‘And I’ll find out from where.’
Whenever a newcomer arrived in the village, the old Watchman scrambled out of his arms cache ‘to look him over’. I liked to watch him emerge from his rancid lair, stand for a moment in the sunlight until he could move his limbs freely again, mount his horse, back it out of the yard with a wonderfully adept swivel of hand and hip, and fly off about his business. That was how all the old folk moved when holding some tool in their hands, an ancient fork for digging in the garden or a sickle for reaping the first symbolic ear of wheat. That was how Grandfather caressed Shulamit.
Yehoshua Ber smiled uneasily. He was a balding, wrinkled giant of a man, more good-natured than clever.
‘I’ve been around, for example,’ he said.
‘We don’t like people who’ve been around too much,’ said Rilov. ‘Moving targets are harder to hit, even when they’re as big as you.’
‘Leave him alone,’ said the manager of the feed shack. ‘He’s a good worker. What do you want from him?’
‘Nothing,’ Rilov said. ‘But if the two of you want to die in your own bed, make sure he stays clear of my yard.’
‘We don’t share no bed together. What kind of way is that to talk, for example!’ said Yehoshua Ber angrily.
Rilov, however, was already spurring his horse’s flanks. ‘And stop saying “for example” all the time,’ he called back as he rode off, his granitelike back repelling the stares that sought to follow him.
Yehoshua Ber liked to play with the village children. During his lunch break he would go to the co-op and buy a loaf of bread, a quarter of a pound of butter wrapped in waxed paper, and three cloves of garlic. That was his afternoon meal.
‘The bread is for health, the butter greases your guts to help you shit, and the garlic makes you strong, for example, and kills the worms that come to eat the butter,’ he explained to the toddlers who huddled like baby chicks around the big brooder of his rugged, heat-giving body.
In Poland he had been a famous wrestler. ‘I’d get dressed up in a leopard skin, for example, put on a Roman belt, and beat the hell out of the Christians.’ He even excitedly showed us an old photograph of himself wearing a gold cardboard helmet with a horsehair plume, his huge calf muscles laced in the leather straps of a gladiator.
Yehoshua Ber rented a room from Rachel Levin and pleased the feed manager with his untiring hard work. Every morning he jogged and exercised out in the fields, his great buffalo gasps audible all over the village. Twice a week he coached the teenagers in those two forgotten arts of British Mandate days, jujitsu and hand-to-hand combat. ‘You don’t even have to pay me, for example,’ he told them bashfully. And then one day, when he was demonstrating how he could lift a feed sack with one hand, his face flushed with pleasurable exertion, Rilov came charging out from behind a heap of sorghum seeds, drew his Russian revolver from his belt, and declared:
‘I’ve got it! I know who you are. You’re Zeitouni’s strong man.’
Now everyone remembered. Although the years had stripped him of his great mane of hair, he was the same performer who had smashed bricks and twisted nails for Zeitouni.
Dani Rilov and Ya’akovi took Yehoshua Ber to the Committee office and sent for Avraham.
Avraham was excited and edgy. ‘Where’s my brother?’ he demanded at once.
The strong man, however, was unable to be of any help.
‘Your brother was only with us for one day, for example,’ he said. ‘Zeitouni billed him as Alfonso Corrida, the Strong Man of Toledo.’
The repulsive stage name made everyone groan and shudder with disgust.
‘He followed us all day with that cow on his back,’ said the strong man.