‘You’ve come back,’ he said. ‘I always knew you would.’
‘I’ve come back,’ said Uri.
‘And you’re all healed,’ added Liberson. ‘Everything is all right now.’
‘Yes,’ said Uri. ‘I’m all right now.’
‘And your French calf?’
The touch of horror made my heart a tight fist. The blind man had peeled Uri like a fruit and put his finger on the poisonous, sore kernel.
‘I’m Uri Mirkin,’ my disconcerted cousin whispered.
The old man’s hand jumped back as if burned by a live coal.
‘Uri Mirkin,’ he said. ‘Of the water tower?’
I glanced back and forth from the ugly old man who had held one woman in thrall to my handsome cousin who had slept with every woman in the village.
‘I came to say I’m sorry,’ said Uri hoarsely.
‘Who isn’t?’ Liberson asked.
‘Did he do you wrong?’ asked Albert.
‘Oh, no,’ said Liberson. ‘He’s just a wild shoot that sprang up in the village fields.’
‘He is a fine-looking boy,’ Albert said.
‘If I had his looks,’ said Liberson, ‘my life would have been unbearable. The girls would have thrown themselves at me like ripe fruit falling off a tree.’
‘Non tiene busha,’ said Albert. ‘He has no shame.’
‘That’s not how it was,’ Uri said.
Liberson rose and asked us out to the terrace. He walked up and down the balcony, the light breeze picking up from his skin its mossy old farmer’s smell of steamer trunks, dried dung, clover, and milk. His sturdy cane and grey work trousers lent him a presence that had not been passed on in his genes, Michurin notwithstanding.
Lifting the cane, he pointed towards the horizon.
‘Do you see that wadi way out there? That’s where we came from, Tsirkin and I, with your grandmother and grandfather, to have a look at the Valley. That good-for-nothing brother of hers was a bank clerk in Jaffa at the time.’
Though he paused to make sure we hadn’t missed the dig at Levin, we said nothing. Eliezer Liberson viewed the Valley as a relief map of his memories, its co-ordinates given by the smells and shadows that reached him. And yet, despite their confident precision, the movements of his cane in the darkness that shrouded him filled me with sorrow.
‘The roads were full of bandits,’ he continued. ‘The Valley was one big vale of tears. Here and there pus-eyed sharecroppers worked tiny patches of land. Jackals and hyenas walked around in broad daylight.’
He ran his cane over the landscape like a master of generations. ‘And over there by those two oak trees, do you see? That’s where Jael had her tent, the wife of Heber the Kenite. But we only got as far as the Germans’ abandoned site and then left by train.’
‘King Boris stood outside the railway station and said, “You’re not taking my Jews.” That’s what he told the Germans. They didn’t scare him.’ Albert’s voice sounded huskily from inside the room, strained with gratitude.
‘That’s the same Boris who cooled his heels while Katchke was talking to the King of England,’ said Uri.
The blind man gave us a loving and compassionate smile. ‘Albert tends to daydream,’ he said. ‘The Balkan Jews aren’t like us.’ He resumed the thread of his discourse. ‘We worked by the Sea of Galilee and on the road to Tiberias, and at night we swam in the sea. We were already bare-bottomed in the water, splashing your grandmother, when she took off her dress and stood on the shore tall and naked, like a beautiful heron on the rocks. We swam back to her and climbed out.’
‘Seven pounds each,’ said the soft voice within the room.
‘What is he talking about?’ whispered Uri.
Liberson went to the door. ‘Shhh, Albertiko. Shhh,’ he said.
We continued to sit on the terrace. The earth underneath the garden of the old folk’s home was alive. Seeds waited. Cicada larvae nursed. Earthworms and carrion beetles laboured over putrefaction.
‘We were no better than you are,’ said Liberson. ‘The time and place made us what we were. Many of us couldn’t take it and left. That’s something you know about, Baruch, because now they’re coming back to you.’
‘Tell us a story, Eliezer,’ I said all of a sudden. ‘Tell us a story.’
‘A story,’ said the old man. ‘All right, I will.’
‘A few days after we arrived in this country,’ he began in the old familiar tone, ‘before we met your grandfather, Tsirkin and I found work digging holes for new saplings in an almond grove near Gedera. It’s awful work. You feel your spine is splitting, your hands are full of blisters, and the Arab coolies beyond the acacia hedge are waiting for you to break so they can get their old jobs back again. Just then one man threw down his hoe and said he was going for water, and another went along to help him. They came back with a jug and poured everyone a drink, and when they had finished that they said they would count the holes.’