‘I never even knew her name until she was dead,’ he wrote to his sister, who had learned by then to plough with a team of oxen.
‘It was my first furrow in the Land of Israel,’ she wrote. ‘At first I couldn’t manage to steer and press down on the plough at the same time. Liberson had to take the reins from me. Now, though, I can plough straight as an arrow.’
She came down with malaria too. ‘But their sweet blood is curing me,’ she wrote to her brother.
Shlomo Levin made his rounds with pens, inkwells, stationery, nibs, commercial forms, and pencils in the saddlebags of his donkey. Though twice he was robbed and asaulted, he proved to be a first-rate salesman and was taken in as a partner in the firm.
That year the first Jewish settlers pitched their tents in the Valley of Jezreel. The Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle decided that ‘Comrade Mirkin and Comrade Levin should enter the state of matrimony’. Together with the beekeeper Hayyim Margulis and his sweetheart Tonya from Minsk, who was later to fall in love with Rilov, the future pedagogue Ya’akov Pinness, and his pregnant wife Leah, who would die that same year, they formed the first group to scour the Valley for purchasable farmland, ‘to search out the country’, as Pinness put it biblically. Thus they became the founding fathers of the village.
‘We had a donkey called Katchke. By day he hauled water from the spring, and by night, while we slept, he put on a frock coat, polished his hooves and glasses, spread his ears wide, and flew off to London.
‘Just as the King of England was sitting down to breakfast, Katchke knocked with one hoof on the door of the palace. The King invited him in and offered him a soft-boiled egg in a cup and the softest white bread you could imagine. As soon as Katchke began to tell him about our village, the King ordered his servants to cancel his other appointments for the day.
‘“But Boris the King of Bulgaria is waiting in the royal office, Your Majesty.”
‘“Let him wait,” replied the King of England.
‘“The Queen of Belgium is in the garden.”
‘“She can stay there,” said the King. “Today I plan to talk with Katchke, a Hebrew donkey from the Land of Israel.”’
7
‘Grandmother Feyge,’ said Uri, dreamy-eyed, ‘walked through a field of jonquils in a dress without panties, just like a Ukrainian peasant. She got pregnant from the pollen. That’s why to this day my father cries and sneezes when the jonquils flower down by the spring.’
The Committee counted the months and concluded that Grandmother would give birth around Shavuot, the holiday of first fruits. ‘And what better first fruit could there be than the first child of the village?’
‘Tsirkin and Liberson were thrilled by Grandmother’s pregnancy,’ said Grandfather in a tone that made it seem perfectly normal. The two of them went on dangerous expeditions to bring her lemons from across the Jordan, caper buds from the mountains of Samaria, and partridge chicks from the Carmel. Two devoted women comrades were sent from a settlement in the Jordan Valley to wait on her during her difficult last months. They read to her aloud from selected works of fiction ‘and the writings of Movement theoreticians’.
‘As ridiculous as it may seem, the myth of the firstborn child retains its power,’ said Meshulam Tsirkin, who never forgave his father Mandolin and his mother Pesya for finishing second. ‘Your grandmother Feyge carried the child of the whole village in her womb.’
Feyge strolled radiantly among the tents along the muddy paths of the village, her voice grown so opulent that it charmed man and beast alike.
‘Mirkin too, who only loved her in partnership with Eliezer Liberson and Mandolin Tsirkin and never forgot his Crimean love even on the day he brought Feyge to his tent, looked at her moonily then,’ said Pinness.
‘He rubbed her belly with green olive oil,’ declared Uri, adding an embellishment of his own.
When it was time for Feyge’s accouchement, she was rushed by cart to the railway station, which was several miles away. The entourage had hardly left the village, however, when it saw the train come around the blue bend of the mountain and roll into the station.
The story of my uncle Avraham’s birth was one of the most famous in the Valley. On the village’s fiftieth anniversary it was even dramatised by a director from Tel Aviv, who astounded the locals with his purple pants and his loud efforts to bed every young girl in sight.
Mandolin Tsirkin and Rilov the Watchman ‘jumped on their horses, galloped off like two Cossack lightning bolts’, and caught up with the train. Over the protests of the engineer, who brandished a coal shovel, Rilov leapt from his horse into the locomotive, subdued the man with an angry glare and a stiff prod to the chest, and yanked the brake handle.