Apologetic for waking them, Fanya would bring her son, blue in the face from bawling, to Grandfather and Grandmother’s in the middle of the night. Before Daniel could walk he had learned to shinny like a monkey up his beloved’s crib, where, clinging to Esther hand and foot like a cicada to a juicy branch, he calmed down at once and fell asleep.
He spent whole days at Grandmother’s. If Esther was taken away from him for a bath or a nap, he burst into howls that could be heard on the other side of the blue mountain. At the age of seven months he was walking and running so as to be able to follow his darling, whose name he learned before ‘Papa’ and ‘Mama’.
Grandmother Feyge regarded the two children fondly. She had always believed that every person in the world had a true love.
‘It’s just that someone usually sees to it that they’re born at opposite ends of the earth,’ she said to Fanya. ‘They cry their way through life without knowing why. It was the fate of my daughter and your son to be born in the same village.’
‘Like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden,’ declared Ya’akov Pinness, the heartbroken young widower, who was so moved by the infant love of Daniel Liberson and Esther Mirkin that he couldn’t wait to have them in his class.
‘The real moral of the story of the Garden of Eden,’ observed Pinness to the members of the village’s loyal and argumentative Bible club, ‘is not ethical but erotic. They were the world’s only couple.’
Eliezer Liberson rose to his feet. ‘What impresses me,’ he said, ‘is less Adam’s being alone with his Creator than his being alone with Eve.’
The club members smiled and nodded. Liberson was equally renowned in the Valley for his atheism and his love of Fanya. Pinness was overjoyed. As always, the Bible interested him for its human situations and natural history. He had only disdain for the scholars, preachers, and politicians who found all kinds of messages in it.
‘The only things that haven’t changed since the days of the Bible are the heart of man and the soil of this land, and both are equally long-suffering,’ he said.
Holding their oil lanterns, the club members left the teacher’s tent and sloshed through the terrible mud. ‘Every paradise has its snake,’ said Grandmother to Fanya. ‘Sooner or later it comes slithering out of the grass.’
‘And hers lives in Russia,’ murmured Fanya Liberson. ‘The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge arrives from there in blue envelopes.’
Her eyes sparkling with happiness, Feyge looked at little Daniel lying on his back sucking his beloved’s fingers. ‘He’ll never look at another woman,’ she said.
She died when Daniel and Esther were still babies, and didn’t live to see my mother jilt her first love. Her photograph, an enlargement of the one in Grandfather’s trunk, stood for years on Fanya’s kitchen cupboard: the same black braids, the same clenched little fists, the same embroidered white linen blouse, the same eyes seeming to drift off to either side of the camera. From early on I knew that this was the look of a woman ‘short of love’.
‘To my friend Fanya,’ the inscription on the photograph said.
In those days the village was little more than two rows of white tents barely visible through a miasmic veil of swamp gas and mosquito wings. A few lean-tos had gone up, there was a large trough for the cattle, and the chickens ran loose pecking at the dirt.
Eventually Grandfather planted some trees several hundred yards from his tent: a pomegranate, an olive, a fig and two rows of chasselas grapes. On them he nailed signs with such verses as ‘And the vine shall give her fruit’, ‘Thou shalt have olives throughout thy coasts’, ‘Whoso keepeth the fig tree shall eat the fruit thereof’ and ‘The pomegranates put forth their bud’.
The pomegranate aged quickly: tears of yellow sap studded its sickly trunk, and only rarely did it yield some paltry fruit. After it had been unsuccessfully injected with various remedies and pesticides, Pinness pronounced it ‘fatally infected with the moth of Doubt’. The first grapevines died of phylloxera rot, which caused Grandfather to graft the next vines on California stock despite his mixed feelings about that state, the home of his brother Yosef and Luther Burbank.
To this day, however, surrounded by gravestones, lawns and ornamentals, the fig and the olive still bear in abundance. So wildly vigorous did the fig become at Grandfather’s magic hands, in fact, that its branches ooze puddles of sharp, viscous syrup all over the ground, while the olive’s fine greenish drupes are speckled with yellow spots of oil.