‘Our self-love makes us try to ignore this obvious truth,’ Pinness once said to me when I was a boy. ‘We seek to palliate it with all kinds of religious fairy tales about Messiahs, other worlds, and superstitious Paradises.’
Now I trailed him like a pack of hyenas following a wounded ram, waiting for him to fall. I stalked him in silence. ‘What a pitiful collector you are,’ he said, turning to face me. ‘You’d mount us all on pins if you could. But this is one series you’ll never finish.’
In the middle of the night I saw him fumble in the drawer of his bedside table, take out the old key, and set forth. He covered the three miles in two days with me a few paces behind him, as once I had followed Liberson to the kibbutz factory. Every now and then he turned to look at me anxiously.
‘You can wait for me there,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to tag on behind me. You know very well where I’m going.’ But I went on, carrying on my shoulders the memory of his old knapsack with its tweezers and jars of chloroform, the English wireless operator’s pack he had been given by my uncle Efrayim.
The old iron latch, which had not moved in its groove for years, slid open as if newly oiled. Pinness stood in the entrance for a moment before turning around to smile at me. ‘Being of clear mind,’ he declared. ‘Of clear mind.’ He stooped and vanished. I waited for him to pay his last respects and step back out to fall into my clutches.
He stood for a minute inside the cave, breathing deeply. As the blind snakes of the past snuggled up to his legs and the ancient African wood lice cralwed possessively over him, I suddenly realised from my vantage point outside what was about to happen. I rushed forward with a shout and a howl, but the old teacher stumbled on ahead with surprising agility, groping, tripping, and skidding along the damp ground until he reached the great slab of slate that screened off the unexcavated depths. Taking a little hammer from his pocket, he searched for the fault line that the old stonemason from Nazareth had shown him.
Pinness raised a feeble hand. He was too weak to bring the hammer down with any force and let it drop on the rock’s weakest point.
The loud chime could be clearly heard outside the cave. For a second nothing happened. Then came a gritty sound of crumbling from the heart of the rock, cracks appeared all over it with frightening speed, and it shattered like a glass plate. Pinness fell headlong, tumbling among the slivers as dozens of tons of earth from distant glacial epochs buried him with the antediluvian bones of his ancestors and his one-celled friends, the industrious bacteria, who pre-dated the swamps and the Creation of Light. More with the soles of my bare feet than with my ears, I heard the muffled echo rumble back to me.
A full moon punctured the sky, revealing the whole Valley at my feet, as clear and luminous as white silk. So, I thought, must Liberson have seen it before going wholly blind, when Fanya was alive and his cataracts still let the daylight through.
I looked around me. The sheets of plastic in the farmers’ fields shone like great lakes of milk, the trees and haylofts loomed hugely in the dark, and here and there a big new puddle glistened among them. The fruit trees Uri had planted in my cemetery were still small, and among them the gravestones shone whitely like great birds of passage that had come down to rest on the surface of the earth.
Slowly I swivelled my head. The Little Owl, rejoining its rank fledglings, bowed to me with ancient mockery. I headed back to the village.
All night I tossed and turned without falling asleep. Towards morning, like a big bear, I climbed slowly and noisily up the casuarina tree outside their bedroom to say goodbye to Uri and Nehama. Huddled in the branches with a headful of jointed needles, I heard the sound of their breathing, followed by Nehama’s voice, which still had its strange, rapid accent.
‘And now,’ she said to Uri, ‘shout it again.’
The three of us laughed, Uri and Nehama in their room and I in the boughs of the great tree that still bore the shiny scars of the hammock my father and mother had hung in it.
Several weeks later Busquilla informed me that he had bought me a house and drove me and my moneybags to the banker’s.
I am thirty-eight today, and my body is once more at peace. I will never be any bigger than I am, and my permanent weight, as I wrote in Grandfather’s crumpled old notebook, is twenty stone or seven poods. Sometimes Busquilla comes in the black farm truck to drive me back to the village, where I visit Uri and Nehama and play with their four little children.
I was there last spring. I brought Uri some more money, and he gave me a weary hug. Nehama shook my hand and smiled, and the four children rushed at me with loud squeals, trying to knock me to the ground. After lunch I took them for a walk in the fields. I do that every visit. I put Efrayim and Esther, the two oldest children, on my shoulders, and carry Binyamin and little Feyge, who is always complaining about the old-fashioned name her parents gave her, under my arms.