I heard the whirr of the spring as it laboured to cool its late-summer trickle, and the fragrant fizz of delicate, ripely fallen fruit that lay rotting on the ground with soft drunken eructations. Every summer we stored yellow pears in bales of hay, where they gave off sweet fermenting fumes as they stewed. The fruits’ flesh dissolved inside the peel, and by autumn they had turned into soft egglike lozenges swollen with intoxicating cream. Removing them gently from their hiding place, we pierced their skin with our teeth and sucked out the alcoholic nectar.
‘I remember that,’ said Yosi. ‘It tasted like a liqueur.’
Dryness and finality were everywhere. The cicadas were long gone. The fierce, confident buzzing of heat-propelled wasps and beetles had subsided, and little piles of pebbles and chaff were the only signs of the dwellings of the harvest ants. And yet in the green groves the pistils of the oranges were swelling with a slow murmur and the grapefruits were fattening on their stems. Cells divided in the turkey eggs. Frozen sperm thawed in the wombs of cows. Milk and honey, sap and semen, were gathered up by the autumn.
There was a smell of watered earth in the air. The soil had been turned for autumn ploughing. It always smelled of rain before the first rains came. ‘That’s how the earth gets the clouds to water it,’ said Pinness, who was walking by my side.
I felt a terrible sadness. For Grandfather, dying of his own incurable volition. For my own life. For the House of Mirkin, on whose windows love had stealthily tapped but once to die with my mother and father.
The blackberries were blooming by the spring. A baby bleated poems in their brambles. Strong as an ox, a barefoot boy with coarse features came towards me swinging cans of milk. ‘Straight from the cow,’ he bellowed, shutting his eyes for me to pat his neck.
‘Let’s get out of here, my child,’ said Pinness, pushing me aside with uncharacteristic strength. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
It was autumn, and flocks of storks and pelicans were already wandering southward overhead, darkening the skies of the Valley with their giant wings. I knew that soon the robin would return to nest in the pomegranate tree, defending its home with loud, rosy- hearted clicks. Next would come the starlings, their thousands of spotted breasts spinning and whirling in great flocks, descending to blanket the earth of the Valley with their excrement.
My bare soles felt the huge snails stirring in the ground, waiting to be awakened by the first rains and tilt at each other with their siliceous blades. The bulbs of the autumn crocuses made bubbles in the surface of the earth. ‘Soon the plover will arrive in our fields, wagging its pretty plumes and following the furrows,’ called out Pinness behind me. I headed on into the hills, along the orphaned paths leading to the mountain. The farther I walked from the village, the stronger became the unruly smell of elecampane and the woodier the pads of thorny burnet. On the blue mountain where I had never been, the rubbery sceptres of the squill were already in bloom, and the speckled white blossoms of the caper plants hid sharp hooks that would tear at my flesh.
Green plains stretched beyond the mountain. (Not the sea, said the wind, not the sea, said the rustle of grain.) A wide river flowed there. White-breasted women bathed in its waters, and on its banks nestled little villages. Farther off the earth tilted and vanished with a motile, nebulous glow. It might have been white tundra wolves that howled there, or the wind tousling the birch trees. The land was broad, so vast it never met the horizon, which quivered high above it.
I turned and ran like a child who has opened a forbidden trunk.
And then the visions stopped rising from Grandfather’s body and I knew that he was dead.
‘That’s an interesting way to determine clinical death,’ said Yosi. ‘Did you ever tell Doctor Munk about it?’
‘Grandfather died when he had no more dreams,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t everyone?’
50
After a few days Yosi went back to the army. When I shook his hand as he climbed into the jeep, it still prickled with wary suspicion. Uri stayed on and helped me out with some jobs. Tonya Rilov died that week, and when Uri and I lifted her up from Margulis’s gravestone, there were not enough bees to fill the space she had left. Dani Rilov stood to one side, whimpering in a strange, high voice. ‘Listen to him,’ Uri said. ‘He doesn’t know how to cry. His father never taught him.’
The days that followed kept us digging all the time. Dani Rilov’s little insect brain had hatched an unexpected problem – should his mother be buried next to her husband’s boots or next to Margulis? He was so dense that he even went to ask Riva, who wrung out the cloth she was holding, pushed him off her freshly mopped stairs, and said that for all she cared we could open her husband’s coffin and ‘throw your mother and your father’s filthy boots into it together’.