* * *
That night the square in front of the dairy was flooded. Pinness was not in when we went to visit him in the morning, because he had gone to watch the workmen who had been rushed to the village centre. Rotting, ice-cold liquids seeped up from the cracks that yawned in the concrete. Arriving in the morning with their milk, the disgruntled farmers found Meshulam dancing with his red bandanna and crooked sickle while singing ecstatically. This time Ya’akovi had no qualms. He had had enough, and hit Meshulam in the face.
‘Just let me catch you near a water tap once more,’ he said, looming over him ominously, ‘and you’ll end up in that stupid museum of yours with your belly full of absorbent cotton.’
Despite the blood that ran from his nose and stained his white mourner’s beard scarlet, Meshulam merely smiled. The workmen cleaned up the mess, made forms for pouring new concrete, sealed the cracks, and sprayed everything with insecticide.
When Pinness hobbled to the office to explain to the weary and furious Committee members that this was one swamp that public works could never drain, Ya’akovi screamed at him so loudly that a crowd formed outside the windows. ‘What the hell swamp are you talking about? We have a madman who goes around opening water taps, and it’s about time you stopped talking at us. We’re not your students anymore.’
Pinness was too shocked and hurt to notice Uri standing there. The Committee head saw both of us, though, and his anger exploded as forcefully as a high-pressure sprinkler. The scar on his lower lip, split by me on the day of Grandfather’s death, turned white.
‘They’re all here,’ he spluttered. ‘The whole damn family. I’m supposed to put in a seed bid and find tractors for the grain fields, and instead I have my hands full with Mirkin’s two idiotic grandsons, the mad fucker and the mad undertaker, a swamp revivalist, and an insane old beetlemaniac.’
Pinness put a restraining hand on my neck, Uri took his arm, and we went off to the old teacher’s house to have tea.
‘Maybe now that he has a swamp to drain, Shifris will finally turn up,’ Uri said.
‘Or Efrayim,’ I added.
‘We’ve seen the last of them both,’ declared Pinness.
47
No one knew the name of the Valley’s old barber. Everyone called him ‘the Rabbi’, and though he always insisted, ‘I’m just an ordinary Jew,’ he seemed to like the title. A resident of a co-operative farming village of religious Jews in the north- west corner of the Valley, he also doubled as a cantor and circumciser.
Once, in my childhood, when Grandfather was asked to treat a sick orchard there, he took me along. As we set out on the track that ran through the fields, he let me hold the reins. Zeitser covered the whole distance in an easy, steady trot. He enjoyed these breaks in his daily routine because they took him all over the valley, and he returned from them raring to go to work more than ever.
Grandfather spoke to the bearded planters in a language I didn’t understand. It was not the language he wrote to Shulamit in but the one Levin used when talking to the wholesalers in his store. On our way back he humorously described for me how the religious farmers got around the biblical injunction against sowing mingled seed in one field. ‘One goes and sows hay, and the next day another comes back and sows legumes, pretending he didn’t know the first was there.’
These religious farmers were odd types. They never swore when they looked up at a cloudless sky in autumn. Though they weren’t supposed to work on the Sabbath, they milked their cows to keep them from suffering, putting a floor tile in each bucket to make God think that the milk had been spilled on the ground. On Passover they saw to it that their livestock ate no leavened food, which so tickled the fancy of Eliezer Liberson, it was said, that he rode off to their village to sing their cows a comic Passover song called ‘Moo Nishtanah’.
Being good-natured folk who had a sense of humour, they did not take it amiss, and as soon as the holiday was over they sent a delegation to Liberson’s farm. With it came a crate of bread, jars of red horseradish guaranteed to bring tears to the eyes, bottles of home-made schnapps that packed a wallop, and cans of pickled herring that drew founding fathers from all over the Valley by magic fetters of longing. When the peppery, cockles-of- the-heart-warming banquet was over, the visitors winked at each other, trooped off to Liberson’s turkey run, and shouted, ‘Hurrah for Socialism!’ in a mighty chorus.