The moronic birds cackled an enthusiastic chorus of agreement, and even Fanya Liberson burst into loud laughter and told her mortified husband that he had been bested.
The cantor-barber-circumciser was now very old. He had first arrived in the Valley long ago, brought in a cart from the city beyond the mountain to circumcise my uncle Avraham. The wagon skimmed over the resilient paths of spring, a good smell of horses and flowers filled the air, and the young man, whose long beard hid a soft, pale complexion, was enthralled by the purring magic of the land. He went on dreaming of it after returning home, and when he looked at our blue mountain from the other side, the Valley appeared above it in fair weather like a mirage, its upside-down image so tempting in the sky that it gave his heart no rest. When he heard that a group of Hasidim had decided to form a farming village there, he hurried to join them. A year later, however, a full cart ran over him, the wooden wheels smashed both his knees, and he was forced to return to his old profession.
His work took him all over the Valley. One day in a field he saw a hefty woman, her chin adorned by several bristly hairs, harnessed to a light Arab plough on whose handle leaned a ten-year- old boy. Captivated by the girth of this Astarte’s columned legs, by her grunts of exertion, and by the sweat stains tracing her armpits, the Hasid stopped to ask about her. Her name was Tehiya Fein. Her husband, he was told by the local farmers, had divorced her and gone back to Bolshevik Russia ‘to light the world with the torch of Revolution’, leaving her hardened and embittered. The ten-year-old, they hastened to add, was not her child but the son of neighbours who felt sorry for her.
The Rabbi asked the villagers to arrange a match for him. For their part, they were only too happy to be rid of the woman, who had sorely tried the principle of mutual aid they all subscribed to. Before two weeks were up she had covered her hair with a kerchief like a good Hasid’s wife and followed her new husband, pulling after her by a rope a small calf and a donkey loaded with all her possessions.
Though the Atlas of a bride was infertile, she was industrious and good-humoured. She learned to observe every jot and tittle of Jewish law and worked the Rabbi’s farm for him, producing bountiful harvests in place of children while he continued to wander the Valley. At first he made the rounds of the kibbutzim and villages on foot, kosherly slitting the throats of chickens, pedicuring cows, clipping locks and foreskins, and marvelling at the bare thighs of female pioneers and the fragrance of freshly tilled earth. With his earnings he bought a small two-wheeled cart hitched by a tall light-footed Cypriot donkey, and after the war he acquired an old BSA motorcycle with a sidecar from British army surplus.
When I was a boy he visited our village once a month. First you saw from afar a speeding grey cyclone crossing the fields like an autumn dust devil, next you heard the muffled chatter of his old piston, and then came the moment you were waiting for. Squeezing the throttle of his cycle, the old Hasid raced it down the bank of the wadi and flew heavily across to the other side with a loud cry of ‘Yippee!’ His face beamed. His grey coat and the ritual fringes of his undershirt flapped in the wind. On his head was a leather pilot’s helmet with his thick sidelocks stuffed inside, shielding his eyes was a pair of tractor goggles, and in his sidecar rattled an astonishing wooden chest that opened up into a barber’s cabinet. Collapsible legs unfolded from its bottom, while out of its drawers came razor blades, scissors, a stained sheet, and a manual clipper. Spreading the sheet over his customer and a newspaper over the table, the old barber wagged his shears and tongue and gossiped about the surrounding villages.
He was an unfailing source of news and information from all over the Valley. It was he who took Shlomo Levin’s letters to the matchmakers and drove him secretly to Tiberias for his first meeting with Rachel. He transmitted clandestine notes to and from Rilov, tipped us off that the boys from the next-door kibbutz were planning to waylay us with stones, brought word that the new stud horse at the experimental farm was possessed of prodigious powers (‘His sheaf arises and also stays upright like Joseph’s in his dream,’ he told us with a grin), and devoutly spread the word about Uri’s escapades after my cousin was caught. Taken with a grain of salt, his reports were of considerable value. He also volunteered to sniff around for news of Efrayim, in whom he took a special interest not only because he had cut his hair in the privacy of his room, but also because it was my uncle who had obtained his pilot’s helmet for him from the British air base.
He was our village barber for half a century. He had cut Grandfather’s hair, Efrayim’s, Avraham’s, my mother’s and father’s, Uri’s, Yosi’s, my own, everyone’s. ‘The same teacher, the same barber, the same earth,’ Uri said. ‘What a cosy sense of continuity!’ Early each summer all the children were sent to him to have their heads shaved, which saved the village money as well as strengthening the roots of their hair. The indignant youngsters squirmed and had tantrums in the barber’s chair, but I, acting on Grandfather’s orders, sat there ‘as quiet as a mouse’, the only child who did not have to be subdued by sheer force while the Rabbi’s pinchy clippers made a single broad part from the victim’s forehead to his neck. ‘Make haste, my beloved,’ he would sing as he released the partially shorn child, who would jump up and run for dear life, only to return before long with the plea that his tormentor finish the job.