Touchingly wrapped in Pesya’s wet black slip, he looked like a little baby crow.
‘Moron!’ said Yosi.
‘We were just having a little fun, Meshulam,’ I said. ‘Let’s get out of here, boys.’
Uri walked out backward, his sardonic face toward Meshulam. ‘You know the rules,’ he said. ‘You have to count to a hundred before you can look for us.’
My high spirits had faded. We started back for the cabin, but halfway there Yosi asked to go to the cemetery. ‘It must be awfully nice there at night, with all those white flowers and gravestones.’
I opened the gate. The gravel crunched beneath our feet. Crickets sang all around. The twins leaned on Grandfather’s grave while I sat on Rosa Munkin’s pink tombstone.
‘How much do you charge for a grave?’ Yosi asked.
‘That depends. For a rich old American it’s about a hundred thousand dollars. Busquilla could tell you exactly.’
‘That makes you a millionaire,’ said Yosi in a voice that was higher than usual. ‘You’re a millionaire, do you know that?’
‘I’m not anything,’ I said. ‘I’m just keeping up the farm. I’m doing what Grandfather wanted.’
‘It is nice here,’ said Uri. ‘It’s awfully nice.’
He rose and went over to the wall. We heard him peeing there.
‘Didn’t the army teach you how to take a leak quietly at night?’ called Yosi. ‘Wag it.’
‘I’m trying, but all my life it’s wagged me,’ came Uri’s voice from the darkness. ‘I’m going to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.’
‘What a character,’ said Yosi. ‘He’s a character, that Uri.’
Now that we had fooled around and it was too dark to see his mother’s face looking at me from his own, I felt more comfortable with him.
‘So what’s going to happen with you?’ he asked.
‘What’s worrying you? Didn’t you say I was a millionaire?’
‘Why are you always so edgy with me?’
‘Because you get on my nerves.’
‘And you don’t get on mine? You’re a pain in the neck. You made the whole school laugh at us. To this day everyone in the village thinks there’s something wrong with you.’
‘Let them,’ I said. ‘They’re just jealous. They drove Efrayim away from here. It’s time they realised.’
‘Stop quoting Grandfather all the time,’ said Yosi. ‘And if you ask me, it’s a bit odd that no one but you ever heard Grandfather make such a strange request.’
‘What are you getting at?’
‘That if that was his will, you didn’t do badly by it.’
‘Pinness heard it too,’ I said.
‘Pinness,’ snorted Yosi. ‘Well, well.’
For some reason I was enjoying the conversation.
‘This is the first real talk you and I have ever had,’ said Yosi.
He rose, about-faced, bent to smell the flowers, studied Shulamit’s grave, walked back and forth, and sat down beside me.
‘Why did you bury her here? Who the hell was she?’
‘It was Grandfather’s wish,’ I said.
‘Grandfather’s wish, Grandfather’s wish! Don’t you ever get tired of it?’
‘It’s what he wanted.’
‘So you just went and took her?’
I went and took her. Her coffin was the only one I never opened before the funeral.
‘She was all alone in this country. She had no one else.’
‘You’re making me cry,’ he said. ‘Tell me, you saw the two of them together in that old folk’s home. What was there between them?’
‘I don’t know anything about those things,’ I answered, thinking of Grandfather’s wrinkled neck and bald head in the flesh of Shulamit’s dead thighs.
‘What did you say?’
‘Nothing.’
He looked at me suspiciously. ‘But you must have spied on them like you did on everyone.’
He waited for an answer, then went on. ‘You think we didn’t know that you snooped and peeked through windows?’
‘Suppose you did. So what?’
‘When we were little, my mother once said that if she ever caught you at it again, she’d give you a licking. My father told her that if she so much as laid a finger on you, he’d break her arms and legs.’
I said nothing. I thought of the looks Rivka gave me when I wrestled with the big calves and of her hatred for my mother, whose wedding dress and flawless bell-clapper legs went on ravaging my aunt’s life even after they had gone up in flames.
‘I always envied your living with Grandfather,’ Yosi said suddenly. ‘You were his child.’