‘I stood there thinking of the day Avraham Mirkin recited his poem,’ he testified much later before the Movement commission of inquiry that investigated the events. ‘Then too not everyone sensed the approaching disaster.’ The commission members looked at him, looked at each other, thanked him politely, and told him he could go.
Even after the crowd had dispersed, I couldn’t bring myself to leave the Tsirkin farm. The longer I stood watching, the more stagnant the clear water grew, forming a green nightmare of slime before my eyes. Lured from their lairs by the odour of legend and doubt, sedge and loosestrife sprouted alongside great snails that had waited all their lives for such wet tidings.
From his place atop the earthworks, armed with his father’s gypsy bandanna and a curved papyrus sickle that he had removed from the walls of Founder’s Cabin, Meshulam proclaimed: ‘A swamp is born!’
‘There’ll be mosquitoes!’ shouted Ya’akovi the Committee head, who was close to collapse from the late summer busy season and the cost of the lost water.
Meshulam raised a hand. ‘So there will,’ he called out. ‘The Jews of this country have forgotten what a swamp is. The time has come to remind them.’
Ya’akovi did not wait to hear the rest. Shouting, ‘You’re out of your mind!’ he ran for the digger and started up the engine. With a thud the steel scoop rammed the earthen breastwork and battered a two-yard breach through which Meshulam’s lake began to flow, flooding the neighbouring fields.
‘Mend your ways!’ cried Meshulam, consciously adopting the hortatory tone in which Pinness declaimed the jeremiads of the prophets during Bible lessons. ‘Drainage ditches must be dug! Clay pipes must be laid! Our comrades from the press must be invited to see us plant eucalyptus, sing, catch malaria, and die!’
There were loud guffaws. And yet Pinness, Tonya, and Riva, I saw, were standing off to one side, apprehensively holding hands. I knew that in the old folk’s home Eliezer Liberson must have stopped chewing his breakfast as he caught his poignant first whiff of the forgotten old smell. ‘I don’t feel well,’ he said to Albert, and vomited up a glob of oozy green muck onto the tablecloth.
‘The thin crust has burst, the abyss has opened its jaws,’ said Pinness, thinking ‘circularly’ about the inundation of his own brain by the stroke that had swamped it in a cloud of forgetfulness. Only the top of the blue mountain remained, protruding like a lonely isle of memory. Ravenously hungry, the old teacher summoned up the last of his strength to go home and drown his worries in a pot of squash with rice and tomato sauce.
Tonya Rilov stuck two fingers in her mouth and resumed her vigil at Margulis’s grave. By now the skin around her fingernails was as white and porous as a wrinkled crust of boiled milk. Riva, whom the swamp had caught scrubbing windows, went back to work. Meshulam was in high spirits. His knowledge of Visionary Pioneering’s practical fine points was a sure guide to the future, and Ya’akovi’s assault on his earthworks had only strengthened his resolve.
From then on everything happened according to the ineluctable laws of cause and effect. Meshulam’s water flooded an adjacent patch of clover, decimating the shoots, and malignantly washed away a corn field, reducing it to spongy splotches of foam. Huge, gurgling, atavistic bubbles formed and burst, releasing a horrible stench. With a great squish, a cloud of high-bellied mosquitoes flew up from the bog and circled over it.
Only now did I understand that none of this was accidental, and that the secret, invisible skeins tying us to the earth ran far deeper than I had imagined, intertwined fathoms down with rootlets, corpses, and hoofprints. I thought of poor Levin wringing his blue fingers while insisting that ‘this land never gives the slightest strength to anyone who walks on it but simply suffuses the soles of your feet with its madness.’
Grandfather’s flight from Shulamit, Efrayim’s vanishing, Uri’s banishment, Avraham’s going abroad, Daniel Liberson’s undeciphered love furrows – all these were merely the fissures through which the never-clotting venom could circulate.
Pinness, I told myself, was wrong. He had plugged the wrong holes with his fingers. We were not the products of accident – not unless you considered Pesya Tsirkin’s breasts two random cornucopias whose effect on Mandolin Tsirkin brought their addlebrained son Meshulam into this world.
That afternoon a few unemployed men Meshulam had hired in the nearest town arrived on the scene. Smiling sheepishly in the old peasant’s blouses and Russian worker’s caps he had dressed them in, they looked pathetic and ridiculous. Meshulam gave them sickles and hoes and took them to his swamp, where to our astonishment they burst at once into the old swamp drainers’ song: