‘Like other traitors we’ve known,’ said Pinness at one of the village’s general meetings.
One night when he was out hunting shrews and tree toads for the school nature corner, he saw the hyena cross the planted fields on the other side of the wadi and come toward him with the steady, distance-devouring lope of a wild beast. Pinness stopped in his tracks while the creature fixed its bright orange eyes on him and purred seductively. He could clearly make out the large, sloping shoulders, the bulging jaws, and the striped coat that swelled and bristled along the ridged backbone.
The hyena quickened its pace, trampling the tender vetch sprouts, and threw the old pedagogue a last mocking smile, baring its purulent fangs as it vanished into a wall of sorghum. Only when he realised that he had forgotten to take his gun along did Pinness understand the reason for ‘that sly grin’.
‘Pinness always forgets his gun,’ said the farmers upon hearing of the nocturnal encounter. They still recalled how, long ago, when the village was newly founded and Pinness’s wife Leah died of malaria while pregnant with twin daughters, he had risen from the deathbed of his beloved, whose body continued to exude green sweat even after it was cold and still, and taken off on the run for the copse of acacia trees in the wadi that was a popular spot for suicides. Several friends who rushed to the rescue found him lying among the golden thistles, sobbing bitterly. ‘He forgot his gun then too.’
Now, thinking agitatedly of the abominable beast, of his dead wife, and of her two blue, sinless foetuses, Pinness stopped shouting, ‘Who’s there?’, returned to his room, found his glasses, and hurried off to my grandfather.
Pinness knew that Grandfather rarely slept. He knocked and entered without waiting, the slam of the screen door waking me up. I glanced at Grandfather’s bed. As usual it was empty. The smell of his cigarette drifted in from the kitchen.
I was fifteen years old. Most of those years had been passed in Grandfather’s cabin. He had raised me with his own hands, the hands of a planter. Under his watchful eyes I had grown, bound tightly by the heavy raffia of his yarns. In the village I was known as ‘Mirkin’s orphan’, but Grandfather, a man merciful, zealous, and vengeful, never called me anything but ‘my child’.
He was as old and pale as though he had dipped himself in the white unguent he painted the trunks of his fruit trees with each spring. He was also short, sinewy, moustached, and mostly bald, with eyes that had slowly receded into their sockets and lost their lustre until they had come to resemble grey, nebulous rock pools.
On summer nights Grandfather liked to sit at the kitchen table in his faded undershirt and blue shorts, filling the room with smoke and good, woody, milky smells while swinging viney legs that were gnarled from work, and reliving old memories and iniquities. He had a habit of jotting down his thoughts on scraps of paper, which later flew about the room like swarms of migrating butterflies. He kept awaiting the return of whomever he had lost. ‘To see them again become flesh before my eyes,’ I once found written on a note that fluttered into my hand.
Many times, from the day I was old enough to wonder about it until the day he died, I asked him, ‘What are you thinking about, Grandfather?’ His answer was always the same. ‘About you and me, my child.’
We lived in the old cabin. Casuarinas showered their needles on its roof, and I climbed up there twice a year on Grandfather’s orders to brush layers of them off. The cabin floor was raised above the ground to keep the wooden walls free of insects and dampness, and the dark, narrow hollow beneath it resounded with the wars of hedgehogs and snakes and the soft scratching of skink scales. Once, after a huge, poisonous centipede crawled into the room, Grandfather bricked off this space. But the death groans and grunts for mercy coming from below persuaded him to dismantle his enclosure, and he never repeated the experiment.
Our cabin was one of the last in the village. The founding fathers had spent their first funds on concrete sheds for the cows, made vulnerable to the vagaries of the weather by long centuries of domestication that had rendered them deaf to the call of the wild. The pioneers themselves lived in tents and later in wooden cabins. Years went by before a brick house stood in every farmyard. Ours was inhabited by my uncle Avraham, his wife Rivka, and my twin cousins Yosi and Uri.
Grandfather hadn’t wanted to leave the cabin. A planter of trees, he was a lover of wood.
‘A wooden house breathes, sweats, and moves,’ he told me. ‘No two people make the same sound when they walk in it.’ Proudly he pointed at the thick beam over his bed that put out a green sprig every spring.