‘Curiously,’ continued Pinness, ‘the biblical creation myth and Darwin’s theory of evolution have a similar attraction. Both portray Man as the ultimate achievement. And yet, my child, what right have we to assume that Nature is purposeful and has goals? Is it not just as likely to be an accidental chain of developments that automatically eliminates its own mistakes?’
He opened his big Bible and showed me ‘an important verse’ from the Book of Ecclesiastes. ‘“For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them; as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast.”’
‘None of the commentators ever understood this verse,’ he said, slamming his Bible shut. ‘The key word in it is not “dieth” but “befalleth”. It’s not death that best expresses the equality between man and beast, it’s the randomness of life.’
He watched me carefully, as pleased as punch to see that I was looking back at him attentively.
‘“For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts”,’ he declaimed. ‘Both are the products of accident, and both are subject to the quirks of Chance.’ He burst out laughing. ‘To say nothing of the work animals in our village, who are our social equals as well.’
‘Does the cicada remember its four years underground?’ wondered Pinness out loud beneath the apple tree. ‘Or the pretty swallowtail – does it recall having been a clumsy caterpillar on leaves of rue?
‘The pupal period,’ he explained to me, ‘is not just a stage of maturation and quiet readying for a new life. It is also one of forgetting and oblivion, an impenetrable screen between the larva and the imago, those two so contradictory life phases of a single creature.
‘Whereas we,’ he lamented, ‘have been given this most terrible of gifts. Not only must we bear on our backs the camel’s hump of memory, we are not even recompensed with a brief life of flight, song, and love unburdened by the constant urge to eat, accumulate, and grow fat.’
I watched entranced as the stream of marauding ants attacked the cicada, drove it off, and plundered the juicy well it had dug. Pinness studied me to see if I was ripe for his final peroration. ‘Why, then, did Solomon praise the ant?’ he asked. ‘Because he was a king, and kings have always preferred ants to cicadas and bees to dung beetles. Just like that stinker Michurin. They have always thought of us as a huge, blind mob of slaves whose acquired submission to servitude is genetically transmitted.’
Bringing me back to the cabin, he took the volume of Burbank from Grandfather’s bed and read aloud to me from it.
‘“Nature takes just as much cognisance of the deadly snake as of the greatest statesman.”’
‘Why? Why?’ Grandfather roused himself from the kitchen table. ‘Why must you put such things into the boy’s head?’
And so I never heard the end of Pinness’s lesson until I was grown up and the ailing old teacher had lost all inhibition. ‘It’s better to roll your own ball of shit than to eat the higher-ups’ honey,’ he informed me, chuckling as he champed on Mrs Busquilla’s Moroccan treats.
45
Now only Rilov, Pinness, Tonya, Levin, and Riva were left in the village. I asked Busquilla to drive them to the old folk’s home now and then to visit blind Eliezer Liberson, and he was ‘honoured to do it’. Liberson, however, did not show much interest in them. It took Levin’s attack on Zeitser to get him to react in his famous article, while when Rilov’s septic tank blew up, he heard the explosion, knew at once what it was, and came for the funeral.
Rilov was very old. Sometimes he emerged from his arms cache to get a breath of air, go for a ride in the fields, take in the sun, and see what was new in the village. Visitors came from all over the country to see the Watchman, who was as tough as an old boot and could still sit in the saddle for hours. ‘They don’t understand that the poor old codger climbs up there and rides around for two days at a clip because he’s embarrassed to ask for help to climb back down again,’ wrote Uri in reply to a letter from me about Yehoshua Ber and Rilov’s suspicions.
Most likely, I imagine, the uric acid fumes that penetrated the cache’s sealed ammunition crates also ate their way into the chemical time fuses. The blast shook the whole village. Thousands of old Mauser cartridges and percussion grenades and tons of TNT and dynamite sticks blew sky-high in a great tidal wave of sewage, milk, mangled earth, and twisted Sten guns.