‘What?’
‘Did your mother run away?’
I knew the story by heart.
‘No!’
‘Did she cry?’
‘No!’
‘Did she faint?’
‘No!’
‘Well now, Baruch, my child, finish what’s in your mouth. Swallow. Your mother didn’t faint. What did she do? What did your mother do?’
‘She sat there without moving.’
‘And the viper came slowly, slowly crawling up the pavement, puffing and hissing, psss, psss, psss, until it was right next to your mother’s bare foot. And then … she took the big shoe brush and …’
‘Wham!’
‘Right on the head of the snake.’
‘Where is my mother?’
‘You’re with Grandfather now.’
‘And the snake?’
‘The snake is dead.’
‘And my father?’
Grandfather rose and patted me on the head.
‘You’ll be as tall as your mother and as strong as your father.’
He showed me the crumbling flowers that my mother had dried as Pinness’s pupil. He told me about a great river, ‘a hundred times wider than our little wadi’, about ‘Gypsy thieves’, about the poor German Templars who had tried settling the Valley before us until every one of their children, ‘all yellow and shaking like baby chicks’, died of malaria.
His fingers, used to binding grafts with raffia, hoeing weeds, and feeling fruit, undid my stained bib gently. He bent down to pick me up, his moustache springing against my neck as he tickled me with his breath.
‘My child.’
‘Where did Grandmother Feyge come from?’
Grandmother Feyge came from the same faraway land. She was much younger than Grandfather, who was already an old farmhand when she arrived, inured to illness and able to digest whatever local slop was put before him. All the time, though, he thought of Shulamit, who had made his life wretched and now sent him letters from Russia. Twice a year a blue envelope arrived from her – via the Turkish mail, on winds that blew from the north, in the bills of the pelicans who came down to rest ‘on their way to hottest Africa’.
5
Grandfather met Grandmother in Palestine when he, Eliezer Liberson, and Mandolin Tsirkin were working in Zichron Ya’akov, a town of private farmers supported by the philanthropical Baron Edmond de Rothschild.
While the unruly trio sang Ukrainian songs ‘to get the goat of the Baron’s parasites’, Feyge and her brother Shlomo Levin sat off to one side, their empty stomachs faint with hunger. Together they had come to Palestine and been cast by Arab stevedores onto a filthy wharf, from which they picked themselves up and wandered off in search of work, stricken by hunger, the sun, and dysentery. Their delicate mien discouraged employers, and when Shlomo Levin found work in a vineyard by removing the glasses that made him look too intellectual, his weak eyes could not tell the difference between a three-and four-bud cut, which made him ruin a whole row of grapevines and got him sacked on the spot.
They ate the potluck of charity: lentils in heartburn oil, Egyptian onions, Grade D oranges, brown strips of kamardin.
Kamardin was the poor man’s candy, apricots boiled to a pulp and dried into leather. Each time I mouthed the word I could feel the sticky sweetness of its syllables. Shlomo Levin once told me how he loathed it.
‘But it was cheap,’ he said. ‘And I and your grandmother, my poor sister, had no money.
‘The poor need sweets because they’re the taste of consolation,’ he explained, still angered by the memory of how the boys of the village had stolen chocolate from his store. ‘It’s not as if they couldn’t have afforded to pay for it, those big heroes!’
In Rehovot Feyge found temporary work as a seamstress. One day, as she was sitting on an empty orange crate patching clothes, several figures on horseback stopped in front of her. A thin, erect woman looked down from the saddle with lordly severity.
‘Why are you doing ghetto work?’ she scolded.
Feyge threw down her needle and thread, burst into tears, and ran off. Shlomo hurried after her.
‘Do you know who that was?’ he asked. ‘That was Rachel Yana’it, the workers’ leader.’
Ten years later, when Grandmother bought her first hen in the nearby Cherkessian village, she called her Rachel Yana’it and liked nothing better than to scold her for the tiny eggs she laid.
Feyge’s hunger pangs flowed in her veins. She could feel them circulate through her heart, pumped all over her body. That day in Zichron Ya’akov, she and her brother were cleaning vats in the winery, and the fermentation vapours so tortured her empty belly that she felt she was going to faint. When the three young men working next to them stopped their singing and produced from their knapsacks pitta bread, olives, some slices of cheese, and a bottle of brandy stolen from the storeroom, her eyes clouded mistily over. They rubbed their hands and dug in. After a while Mandolin Tsirkin felt Feyge staring at the crumbs on his lips.