As soon as they signed the protocol, the three men turned to Feyge with deep ceremonial bows and asked her to join too. ‘What about your brother?’ asked Liberson once she had added her signature. Levin, however, pointed out gloomily that he hadn’t yet made up his mind ‘where my political sympathies lie’.
‘In that case,’ said Grandfather, ‘since you have so much trouble making up your mind, you’re the man we’ll send to the next Zionist congress to deliver a speech on the subject.’
‘You can always join the Hole Counters’ Local,’ said Mandolin Tsirkin. Until his dying day, ‘hole counter’ was the most savage term of abuse in his vocabulary.
Shlomo Levin rose disgustedly and went off to sleep in the workers’ hostel, but realising the next morning that he was liable to be left all alone, he followed the Workingman’s Circle southward to the vineyards of Judea.
‘There were no roads or cars, and we didn’t even own a horse,’ said Grandfather. ‘We walked the whole way and let the frogs guide us through the swamps.’
Although they seemed to him like a three-headed monster, Levin tagged after them for several days. Tsirkin played the mandolin until its notes ‘nearly bore a hole in my skull’. Mirkin held them up for hours at a time to observe the slow dance of the stamen of the jujube tree. Liberson was the worst of them all. At night he lay croaking in low, lazy tones, keeping it up until he was covered with toads that converged on him from all directions. ‘They’re excellent sources of information,’ he confided.
‘They’re nothing but a bunch of clowns,’ said Levin to Feyge. ‘They don’t take a single thing seriously.’
Whenever he told me about his dead sister, he had to keep removing his glasses to defog their thick lenses.
‘Our father made me promise to look after you.’ Many times in his life he must have thought and uttered the words he declaimed for me now. ‘I want you to leave them and come with me.’
‘I’m seventeen years old, Shlomo,’ answered Feyge, ‘and I’ve found the man I’m going to live my life with.’
‘Who?’ asked Levin with a suspicious look at the three ragged young men weeding grapevines with dizzying speed.
‘I haven’t decided yet,’ she said. ‘But we can’t put it off much longer. It will be one of those three.’
‘They’re hooligans. They’ll make you cook for them, darn their socks, do their washing.’
‘We have a constitution,’ said Feyge.
‘They’ll turn you into their charwoman. You won’t be the first girl who came here as a pioneer and ended up buried in the communal kitchen.’
‘But they’ll keep me laughing,’ said Grandmother Feyge. ‘And I’ll get to know the land through them.’
‘And no one can say,’ said Shlomo Levin with a catch in his throat, ‘no one can say that Ya’akov Mirkin did not help her get to know the land.’
By now, long years after her death, he had forgiven Grandfather, even helping him with the farm work and playing draughts with him. Twice a year, though, on the anniversary of his arrival from Russia and on that of his sister’s death, he visited her grave ‘so that I can have a quiet place for an hour or two to hate all the big shots and smart alecks’.
He followed them to the colonies of Judea, to the experimental farms, to the Jordan and the Yavne’el valleys. Grandfather told me how they had danced, hungered, drained swamps, quarried rock, ploughed fields, and hiked together through the Galilee and the Golan.
‘We had no Busquilla or Zis to bring us mail in those days. Do you know how we got letters from Russia?’
‘How?’
‘Liberson had some friends who were pelicans. They brought them.’
I opened an incredulous mouth, into which Grandfather stuck a hard toothbrush smeared with acrid paste and began to scrub my gums.
‘Have you ever seen the bill of a pelican?’
‘Ah?’ I gargled.
‘It comes with a sack. Now rinse your mouth. The pelicans put the mail there, and on their way to Africa they stopped to bring us letters and regards.’
Pinness had no use for such stories. ‘This Valley and the coastal plain aren’t even on the pelicans’ migration route,’ he said to Grandfather. ‘Why fill the boy’s head with such nonsense?’
But Grandfather, Liberson, and Tsirkin didn’t obey Pinness’s laws of nature. Mounted on hoes, they flew over poisonous swamps and blazed trails through a rank cover of rushes and crabgrass while the light, fragrant cloud of Feyge’s dress draped their faces with thin veils of devotion. I saw them airborne like groundsel seeds, white splotches against the drab landscape. Below them ran Levin, shouting at Feyge to come down.