‘I thought so too,’ I said, swallowing a dry dungball of mucus in my mouth. ‘I’m not so sure any more.’
‘I envied your being an orphan,’ he said. ‘Once, when we were six or seven, I told Uri that I wished our parents would die so that Pinness would take us for hikes too and Grandfather would bring us up.’
‘But neither of you would have buried him like I did,’ I said. ‘Ya’akovi would have made you back down, and Uri couldn’t care less.’
‘You were always so strange, always hanging out with the old folk, with Pinness and Grandfather and Tsirkin and Liberson. You frightened everyone from the time you were six. Do you know that no one ever dared pick on me or Uri because of you? They were scared of you.’
He slipped off the grave and sat on the ground, running his hand over the soil and rolling some between his fingers, which were short and stubby like his father’s. It was a habit the pioneers had picked up in the Valley and passed on to their children. Their grandchildren were born with it.
‘I would have stayed on here,’ he said after a pause. ‘I swear I would have, and you know I could have made a decent farmer. It was only these graves that made me decide to leave home, and Uri will never come back. In the end you’ll be the only one left. You’ll show the village and the world, and you’ll make more money than the old folk ever dreamed of in their wildest visions.’
‘Why does everyone keep talking about the money?’ I asked. ‘You can see for yourself that I don’t spend it. Have I bought anything for the cabin? Clothes? Built a swimming pool? I’ve never even been abroad.’
‘That shows you’re a real farmer,’ chuckled Yosi. ‘No one in this village knows how to enjoy life, including myself. Farmers don’t like to spend money. They’re too afraid of drought, locusts, mice. They’ve got their feet on the ground and their heads in the clouds, looking for rain – because that’s the one thing that’s free. Uri is the only one who was able to outgrow all that.’
‘I’m just a watchman,’ I said. ‘I’m watching Grandfather. I promised I wouldn’t let anyone take him from here.’
‘My favourite story was the one about his saving you from that rabid jackal,’ murmured Yosi. ‘Our father made a bedtime story out of it. You were sitting in the yard throwing earth at some kittens, and Grandfather jumped on the jackal and broke all its bones.’
‘It was a hyena,’ I said. ‘It even said so in the newspaper. Its skull is in the nature room at school.’
‘If you feel that strongly about it, fine,’ said Yosi. ‘The point is that Grandfather saved your life.’
‘I was in the yard by pure chance,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think he would have saved yours?’
‘If it had been me, there would have been no hyena. Don’t you see that? Do you think it just happened to come along?’
I was flabbergasted. It never occurred to me that he might look at it that way.
‘Sometimes, when we’ve been lying in ambush along the border night after night until I get so sleepy I hallucinate, I’m afraid that Shifris will turn up. I worry that he’s going to set off a mine, or that some soldier will yell “Halt!” and that idiot who never halted in his life will keep on going and get himself shot.’
‘He won’t,’ I said. ‘He’s just somebody Grandfather made up.’
‘Grandfather was quite something,’ said Yosi. ‘He must have been a real heavyweight. Why else would they come from all over the world to be buried next to him?’
‘That day with the hyena was a clear, bright summer day,’ I said. ‘Pinness made me remember everything by seasons.’
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ he said. ‘I’m getting cold.’
‘Your father was born in early summer,’ I told him. ‘The double wedding was in the autumn. Grandmother died in the spring, and Rilov blew himself up in winter. That’s when Tsirkin died too, but Fanya died in summer and Grandfather in autumn.
‘I sat up with him for three days and three nights,’ I said. For the first time in my life I was telling a story too. ‘Your father kept coming and going. So did the doctor. Grandfather’s friends were there too – Tsirkin, Liberson, Shifris, and Pinness. I was so tired I didn’t know what I was doing.’
He lay in his bed, on his prickly mattress of seaweed, his pale skin clothed in new pyjamas. I rose heavily and stepped outside, onto the earthen paths that never failed me.
Autumn had descended on the village with the usual downpour of fallen leaves and the anxious, mournful cries of baby swifts baulking at their first migration. I followed the cart track to the fields, trampling the last yellow grass sticking up in the centre ridge. The titmouse and warbler nests were unravelling in the orchards and in the drainpipes of the cowsheds. Behind the stud pen I spied the cattle dealers’ loathsome six-wheel lorry loaded with three dejected, stricken-tailed calves as it made its way among horse-drawn carriages and American limousines never seen in our village. Elegantly dressed men and women in high, round collars and children in shiny black shoes were walking up and down. I wondered who had told all these strangers about Grandfather’s death, but I continued along the avenue of carob trees, whose heavy white smell embarrassed the visitors. ‘The date and the carob are unisexual fruit trees. One male can pollinate dozens of females,’ said Pinness in my ear.