When the yellow vapours had settled, it emerged that half of old Rilov’s farmyard was now a canyon. His son Dani’s calf pen had become a ruin of blackened posts and veal cutlets. Nothing was left of the hayloft but a few foul-smelling brands of charcoal hissing and sputtering beneath the endless drops of rain that started to fall. ‘Fourteen milk cows went to their deaths without disclosing the whereabouts of the hidden arms,’ was Uri’s journalistic summation. Rilov himself was scattered over a radius of hundreds of yards. Trained in the conspiratorial tradition of their family, his son Dani and his grandson Uzi managed to convince the police investigators that they were confronted with a work accident caused by mixing large amounts of red phosophorus with potash and sulphur salts used for fertiliser.
The search for Rilov’s remains went on all over the village for several days, but the old man was never found. It was months before the horrid smell of ammonia, roast meat, and smoke dissipated and the old Watchman’s spiked army boots turned up, each with a rotting lump of flesh inside it. The right boot was discovered in the bushes by the spring, while the left was found in the bougainvillaea vine twining up the columns of the water tower. Both were put in a plastic bag and buried in my cemetery in the presence of a large crowd.
The funeral of Rilov’s boots was attended by the last surviving Watchmen, veterans of the Haganah, and hundreds of pallid, unknown old men who emerged from airtight compartments and underground cellars and chambers. Once the grave was filled in, they gathered beneath the shade trees to update passwords, synchronise watches, and trade secrets.
We had always known that Rilov continued to stow arms away for the defence of the village and the Movement even after the establishment of a Jewish state, but no one had had any notion of the quantities he had managed to secrete. ‘Rilov could have armed two whole divisions,’ proclaimed one of his eulogists, fixing his yellow eyes on the assembly. ‘We weep for you, Comrade. We weep for your arms cache. We weep for Tonya, your partner in subterfuge. We weep, ah, bitterly, for so many good weapons gone forever.’
Having learned from her life with her husband that death is no excuse, Tonya walked away from his fresh grave, went straight to Margulis’s tombstone, and sat down in her usual place in sight of the mourners. The shape of her body was waiting for her there in the swarm of hovering bees, and she quickly slipped into it, licking and sucking her decomposing fingers.
Liberson too remained in the cemetery after the funeral, groping up and down among the graves with his cane of sour orange wood. He ran a hand over my face and shoulders when I approached and recognised me at once. ‘How big you are,’ he said. ‘You have your father’s strength and your mother’s height.’ Asking me to lead him to Fanya’s grave, he sat down on the white stone and took a deep breath of air. ‘So Rilov’s gone too,’ he said. ‘That madman. It’s a great loss. Pinness and Mirkin couldn’t stand him, but if not for him and his friends, we wouldn’t be here today. His type is needed also, indeed it is.’
He was glad to smell the flowers and ornamentals. ‘You should plant vegetables too,’ he said to me. ‘Vegetables would do well here.’ In Russia, he told me, there was a Crimean farmer who planted squash, onions, watermelons, and potatoes between the rows in the village graveyard with fabulous results. His potatoes were as big as melons, his watermelons were unusually red and sweet, and ‘he once grew a pumpkin weighing six poods – nearly as much as you, Baruch – that was taken by troika to the summer home of Czar Nikolai.
‘The blood of the dead ran in its veins,’ he explained. ‘I want you to plant roses and aubergines on my grave, and I’ll nourish them with my old body. Verily, I shall blossom in the Land of Israel.’
Liberson took his wooden-handled grafting knife from his pocket. It was just like the one Grandfather had and sometimes used for whittling. Cautiously I sat down beside him, afraid of his wrath if he sensed me on his wife’s grave. He began to peel an apple that he also produced from his pocket. The skin came off in a red ribbonlike strip that kept getting longer until it was all peeled and he commenced to chew with his corniculate gums.
‘Over there in the kibbutz,’ he said, ‘where the factory is now, there used to be a lovely vineyard. That’s where I met Fanya.’
Toward evening Busquilla drove us to the old folk’s home. Frail and faded, Liberson sat between us in the black farm truck. ‘Next time,’ he said, ‘I’ll be in a box in the back.’