‘Zeitser is as stubborn as a mule,’ smiled Grandfather. ‘He’s used to it and he likes it.’
He was a strict vegetarian. On the rare occasions when he accepted a piece of cake from Grandmother, who was very fond of him, he suffered pangs of remorse and indigestion.
Zeitser remained with us until his horrible death. His chief speciality, which was ploughing in a ruler-straight line, aroused great admiration. No work was too hard for him, and only on Saturdays did he take off for long walks ‘to smell the flowers and think’.
‘Take me with you,’ I called, running after him on bare feet. ‘Take me with you, Zeitser.’ I knew that long ago, when Grandmother died, Zeitser had taken care of my uncle Avraham, playing with him and carrying him around piggyback. He never played with me or my cousins, though. He had grown old, his body mortified by its own arduous reckonings, so that all he ever carried on his back any more were his own memories and conclusions.
‘Don’t bother him, Baruch,’ said Grandfather. ‘It’s his day off. Everyone deserves to be alone now and then.’
Zeitser’s stocky body would disappear gradually into the distance. First it would be hidden by the orchard, then it would reappear as a flyspeck on the far-off yellow stubble, and finally it would vanish for good against the mountainside.
‘Those were hard, beautiful times,’ Pinness told me in the kitchen of his little home. ‘We went barefoot and dressed in rags like the Gibeonites, but our hearts were overflowing.’
In summer they threshed the grain together. Eighteen farmers operated the big thresher and screamed at each other like madmen each time the drum was caught. The women brought biscuits and homemade wine to the threshing floor, and at night the huge bales of hay drew lovers, snakes, and choral groups.
‘Nothing looks better on a woman than a few wisps of hay,’ Uri commented.
‘Every radish that reddened in the vegetable gardens, every baby and calf, were a new promise and hope,’ Pinness told us during our history lesson in school. ‘The fat content of the milk reached four per cent, and our new oil incubator could house three hundred and sixty eggs at a time.’ Rilov began to disappear for long periods. Everyone thought he was off buying arms and spying in Syria, until one day they found out that the huge septic tank by his cowshed was a sophisticated arms cache into which he descended to prepare for the worst, coming up for air at odd intervals.
The Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle was no longer in existence. It had vanished in a cloud. ‘You couldn’t exactly call it a factional split,’ said Meshulam. ‘Maybe they disbanded, or maybe they just drifted apart. They never talk about it. I think it must have happened after Avraham was born.
‘The roots, though,’ he guessed, ‘went deeper. They had to do with some secret among the three men.’
Every Saturday Mandolin Tsirkin came to visit Grandfather and eat olives and herring with him. Sometimes he brought little Meshulam along to play with Avraham. Tsirkin and his son always looked unwashed and neglected. Meshulam, bright streaks of hardened snot on his cheeks, stared wonderingly at the glass plates on the table, while Mandolin gave Grandmother a look that I only understood years later, when motionless in bed I listened to the two old men have an unusually harsh conversation. Not even the tea and olives could overcome their anger.
‘We trusted you with her,’ growled Mandolin Tsirkin.
‘I don’t want to discuss it,’ retorted Grandfather.
‘Well, I do!’ Tsirkin said.
Silence. Olives. A carefully nibbled sugar cube.
‘If the two of you loved her so much,’ Grandfather burst out, ‘what made you think up that nutty lottery?’
‘No one forced you to take part in it,’ hissed Tsirkin.
‘I’m not blaming just you.’
‘We wanted to heal you,’ whispered Tsirkin. ‘To cure you of Shulamit.’
‘Feyge Levin,’ declaimed Grandfather with wicked fanfare. ‘Devoted in her silence, indivisible in her love: the innocent, the poor sacrificial lamb!’
Liberson dropped in sometimes too, though since his marriage his visits were rare. He felt Grandfather’s changed attitude toward him, and besides, ‘he wanted to spend every spare minute making out with Fanya’.
Everyone sensed the subtle resentment blowing from Ya’akov Mirkin toward his friends. Grandfather was too much of a gentleman to hurt anyone on purpose, but with resolute tact he refused to sit down and swap memories or discuss his life with Feyge.
‘When you were a boy of four, some people came from the radio to make a programme about them. Your grandfather refused to take part in it.’