Then everyone went in search of the circumciser, who had gone out for a stroll to smell the good earth and murmur ecstatic prayers to himself. He took Avraham in his arms, clicked an appreciative tongue at the sight of his well-formed member, and relieved it of its foreskin. There was a profound hush. Even Liberson, who claimed that circumcision was a pagan custom, felt that it was no time for argument. And when the loud yelp of their firstborn son sounded over the fields, the pioneers burst into unashamed tears.
8
Efrayim, my lost uncle, was Grandfather’s favourite child. He was a handsome boy, quick on his feet, and Grandfather never tired of telling me how he went off to war, how he carried his calf around on his shoulders, and how he vanished from the village. Efrayim was born a year after Avraham and a year before my mother Esther. ‘The sight of all those children running about the village and helping out with the chores was a tonic for us all.’
Margulis’s Tonya had a daughter too, but the child’s father was Rilov. From the day of her arrival in the village Tonya had been swept off her feet by Rilov’s fierce masculine charms. The only bed she wished to die in was his, and she was maddened with passion when he asked her to smuggle rifle bullets in her brassiere. He took her down with him to the arms cache in the septic tank, their shadows jiggling to the light of an oil lamp as his fingers drew the ammunition from her breasts. Once having counted out the cartridges, however, he helped her put her clothes back on. She could feel her heart in her throat as he tightened and tied the pink laces on her back. Smiling with visionary eyes, Rilov told her how he dreamed at night of Pesya Tsirkin. ‘She has everything I need,’ he explained. ‘An automobile, the right connections, and a big bra.’ Tonya was hurt but undeterred.
Rilov soon saw that she could be counted on to keep a secret. At night she went with him to meet Arab informers in the wadis, to stow hand grenades in hideaways, and to eliminate Jewish collaborators with the British. Covered with white flakes of explosive, they embraced on crates of concussion grenades, and when Rilov, whose stock of imagery was limited, called Tonya his Schwarzlose after his favourite machine gun, she no longer felt put out.
They were married secretly, surrounded by a wall of Watchmen whose wedding gifts included a Tatar saddle, a thoroughbred horse that twitched its hide all through the ceremony, and a whining, handcuffed rabbi from Tiberias who officiated with a black blindfold covering his eyes. A year later Tonya gave birth to a daughter without ever knowing she had been pregnant, because Rilov had dismissed her morning sickness with a wave of his hand, declaring that nausea and vomiting were a common reaction to repeated contact with gelignite.
Sweet Margulis came to visit the Rilovs, as good-natured as always. Free of such follies as jealousy, grudge-bearing, and vengefulness, he arrived with a large jar of honey in his left hand and his new girlfriend Riva Beilin in his right. Riva was a pioneer from the Workers’ Brigade whom he had met on the train to Tiberias. Tonya, still aching all over from the birth, felt a rough edge of anger in her veins as she looked at her former lover and his new partner. That week she had had her first quarrel with her husband, who, true to the conspiratorial tradition he was trained in, had insisted on keeping the birth of their daughter a secret as well. This time Tonya was wounded to the point of hatred and tears.
Daniel, the son of Fanya and Eliezer Liberson, was the same age as my mother Esther. He was enamoured of her from the moment they were first laid beneath one blanket in a field, at the age of three weeks.
Grandfather, Liberson, Grandmother, and Fanya had gone to the orchard with their babies so that Grandfather could give them all a lesson in cup shaping young pear trees. The pruning shears clicked away in his hands while he scoffed at the theories of the Soviet agronomist Michurin, who claimed that the seeds of a grafted tree contained the genetic traits of both the scion and the rootstock.
Weak and pale, Feyge lay down on the ground, propped her head on Fanya’s thigh, and watched the babies to make sure no insects bit them. Just then Daniel raised his bald head, forcefully rocked it back and forth, and turned himself over to face Esther. He was only three weeks old, and his mother couldn’t believe her eyes. It never occurred to her that her son was seeking the company of her friend’s daughter. Grandmother, though, understood it at once. Her husband, she thought, could say what he pleased, but Michurin was not to be gainsaid.
That same evening Daniel began to crawl, and when Grandmother Feyge made ready to go home with Esther, he startled everyone by following them to the door like an obstinate little lizard and wailing inconsolably. Several sleepless weeks went by before his parents realised that he was not crying from hunger or teething pains but because he wanted Mirkin’s daughter. ‘You’d better believe it,’ said Uri. ‘You’d cry too if you had a hard-on two weeks after your circumcision.’