When we arrived I took him gently by the elbow and led him to his room. The old Bulgarian lay in bed in his silk shirt and black bow tie and smiled up at his friend.
‘Good evening, Albert,’ said Liberson.
‘Back so soon?’ Albert asked.
‘It’s all over.’
‘After a Bulgarian funeral, everyone goes to the dead man’s house for a huge meal,’ said Albert longingly. ‘Pastelikos, apyu, cold beans. And of course a drink or two.’
‘After a funeral in the village, we just go on eating hay,’ said Liberson.
The two old men laughed. ‘I once had a girlfriend in Varna,’ Albert declared. ‘You should have seen her breasts. They weighed seven pounds each. They’re pushing up the daisies now.’
Liberson signalled me to go home, and I did.
46
As if they had planned it together, the old folk were dying off one by one. A great deal was said at their graves about ‘the vacuum left behind’, but although Pinness had taught us in school that Nature abhors a vacuum, nothing rushed in to fill this one.
One night I went to spy on Meshulam. Through his window I saw him bent over his documents, his face lined with contrition and framed with the new white fuzz of a mourner’s beard. His visitors heard him regret having shortened his father’s life with his shirking, denounce his own petty-mindedness, and list the principal differences between the anopheles and the house mosquito as smoothly as if humming a melody. Whereas the larva of the latter has a long breathing tube and lies in the water diagonally, the larva of the former has a short breathing tube and lies in the water horizontally. The house mosquito has short antennae and a drooping stomach, the anopheles has long antennae and an arched stomach. Asked why he should bother to recite basic facts that every schoolboy in the village knew by heart, Meshulam answered modestly that the memory of the Jews of Israel was going soft and some things needed to be saved from oblivion.
When the month of mourning was over, Meshulam looked in the mirror and decided to keep his beard. ‘It’s the first crop he ever managed to grow, so of course he can’t stand ploughing it under,’ wrote Uri, who kept asking me to send him news of the village.
As sometimes happens with beards, Meshulam’s flourished splendidly and gave him a sense of his own rectitude. Every day he came with new queries to his father’s grave, where his appearance caused a stir among the visitors. With Mandolin Tsirkin’s old work clothes and rope belt and his own great shock of salt-and-pepper hair, Meshulam was the spitting image of Hankin, Gordon, or the prophet Isaiah. American tourists and visiting schoolchildren looked at him admiringly and asked to have their pictures taken with him. Busquilla suggested paying him ‘a modest salary’ to hang around Pioneer Home all day ‘with a worker’s cap and a hoe’, and even wanted to sell picture postcards of him. As far as I was concerned, though, Meshulam was nothing but a pest. Since Avraham and Rivka had gone abroad, he had become more obnoxious than ever. He even insisted that ‘we must’ – we, no less! – put Hagit’s stuffed body by his father’s grave. Now that Grandfather and Avraham were gone and the farm was mine, I had no more patience for him.
‘I don’t need that mangy cow of yours in my cemetery,’ I told him. ‘If your father had wanted her next to him, he would have told Liberson.’
Busquilla was poised to recite our usual disclaimer about the candidate not meeting admission requirements, but Meshulam, his face limned by the golden aura of swamp drainers and desert blossomers that he had managed to acquire from a prolonged study of old photographs, chose not to argue.
For several weeks he tried to make a farmer of himself, getting some Rhode Island broilers for his yard and even attempting to plant vegetables. Bashfully approaching Rachel Levin, whose greens were famous throughout the village, he tendered her one of his prize exhibits, a book by a farmer named Lifshitz entitled Vegetable Growing in the Land of Israel. Rachel, however, looked doubtfully at the old paperbound volume, on the cover of which two fat children and a huge lettuce graphically symbolised the bounty of the land, and pointed out to Meshulam that the book was older than the village and badly out of date in its advice.
Nevertheless, Meshulam was smitten by Lifshitz’s prose style. ‘“Your aubergine delights in light and well-mannered soil”,’ he read aloud to me, his lips curling as though tasting the aubergine’s delightful nourishment. The two sentences he found most spellbinding were: ‘“The most suitable of radishes for the Land of Israel gardener is the Giant White of Stuttgart”,’ and ‘“The smaller the animal, the finer its manure: sheep droppings are finer than cattle droppings; songbird droppings are finer than pigeon droppings; but finest of all are the droppings of the silkworm”.’