Fanya Liberson was Grandmother’s best friend.
‘Feyge, who was already sick and weak, short of breath and love, came to me in tears,’ she said after I had pestered her for hours, following her expectantly about. ‘But not even we could convince your grandfather. He made her go on carrying those big blocks of ice for the icebox.’
‘And your friend Mirkin was her biggest ice block of all,’ Fanya said another time to her husband. Grandmother Feyge’s sufferings and death still haunted her and made her furious anew each time she thought of them.
I couldn’t hear Eliezer Liberson’s murmured answer. Crouched by their house, my face pressed to the wet slats of the blinds, I saw only his lips as they moved, and her beautiful, bright old head laid across his chest.
Grandfather never forgave his brother and never saw him again. It was only after his death that I had Yosef exhumed and his bones brought from California to our Valley. His two sons, joint owners of the Mirkin & Mirkin Textile Company of Los Angeles, sent me a cheque for ninety thousand dollars.
‘Your father was a capitalist traitor,’ Busquilla wrote to them on the official stationery of Pioneer Home, ‘but we are still giving you a ten per cent discount because he was a member of the family.’
The dead arrived in hosed-down farm trucks, in carts hitched to tractors, in the bellies of airplanes, in wooden coffins and lead caskets.
Sometimes there were big funerals with huge crowds and reporters and sweating troops of VIPs and politicians. Busquilla greeted them with scraping, sinuous gestures that disgusted me. They watched me dig the grave, shrinking back from the shower of earth I sent flying, while urging Busquilla to make his worker hurry up.
Other bodies came unattended, accompanied only by a bill of lading and a note with the inscription requested for the gravestone. Some were interred by a single angry son or weeping daughter. Some arrived alive, crawling through the fields with their last breath to be buried in Pioneer Home.
‘With my old comrades,’ they said. ‘Next to Mirkin,’ they pleaded. ‘In the earth of the Valley.’
Before burying them, I opened their coffins in the shed by Busquilla’s office to have a look at them. I had to make sure that no one ineligible was smuggled in.
The ‘capitalist traitors’ who arrived from America were already slightly decomposed. Their carnal frivolity moulted, they stared at me with fishy, apologetic eyes rheumy with supplication. The old comrades from the Valley were very quiet, as if napping under a tree in the fields. Many of them I knew from their visits to Grandfather or Zeitser when I was a boy, in their hands a gnawed branch, an old letter, or a leaf attacked by aphids that they had come to consult about. Others I knew only from stories, from answers to questions I had asked, and from what I had had to imagine myself.
Grandfather brought me to his cabin wrapped in a blanket when I was two years old. He washed the soot off me and picked the slivers of glass and wood from my skin. He raised me, fed me, and taught me the secrets of trees and fruit.
And told me stories. As I ate. As I weeded. As I pruned the wild suckers of the pomegranate trees. As I slept.
‘My son Efrayim had a little calf called Jean Valjean. Efrayim got up every morning, took Jean Valjean out for a walk on his back, and returned home at noon. He did that each day. “Efrayim,” I said to him, “that’s no way to raise a calf. It will get so used to it that it will never want to use its own legs.” But Efrayim didn’t listen. Jean Valjean grew bigger and bigger until he became a huge bull. And even then Efrayim insisted on carrying him everywhere … That was my son Efrayim for you.’
‘Where is Efrayim?’
‘No one knows, my child.’
Though there were never tears in his eyes, the corners of his mouth sometimes trembled imperceptibly. Often, when the fruit trees were in blossom, or on an exceptionally fine day in the Valley, he told me about my uncle Efrayim’s handsome looks.
‘When he was still a little boy, the birds used to flock to his window to watch him wake up.
‘Now I’ll tell you about your mother. Ah-h-h … open your mouth, Baruch. She was an extraordinary young woman. Once, when she was a little girl, she was sitting on the pavement outside our cabin polishing the family’s shoes: mine, and Grandmother Feyge’s, and Uncle Avraham’s, and Uncle Efrayim’s, who still lived at home. Just then … open your mouth, my child … just then she saw a snake, a big viper, crawling slowly up the pavement, coming closer and closer.’
‘And then?’
‘And then … one more bite. What happened then?’