‘The Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle,’ said Grandfather, pushing away the microphone, ‘is a private matter. If Liberson and Tsirkin want to tell you how they danced and made the wilderness bloom, let them go right ahead.’
But once a year, on the anniversary of the founding of the village, the Workingman’s Circle held a reunion . People came walking from all over the Valley, converging from the reaped fields like black dots. Seated on the ground, they watched the three men and the woman mount a platform of baled hay and stand facing them. A great tarpaulin of silence descended on the crowd. Tsirkin played the mandolin, Liberson and Mirkin sang along with him, and Feyge, frail and sickly, drummed laughingly on a pot.
She was nearing the end. Fanya Liberson was her best friend, and she bared her heart to her.
‘Twice a year those disgusting birds come bringing a blue envelope.’
‘Every six months a letter arrived,’ said Fanya Liberson, massaging her husband’s back. ‘And every six months she died all over again.’
Through the foggy windowpane, I could see her hands move. Though they already had liver spots, their anger and tenderness were still a young woman’s.
Liberson murmured something.
‘Your Workingman’s Circle joke ended badly,’ said Fanya.
Liberson wouldn’t admit it. ‘But one of us had to marry her. It was in the constitution.’
‘Why didn’t you?’ Fanya asked.
‘I didn’t draw the lucky number,’ smiled the old man, turning to gather his wife to him. ‘And what would have happened to us if I did? You’d be stranded in the kibbutz vineyard to this day. Unless Mirkin had run off with you instead.’
‘That’s all I needed.’
‘Grandmother spent three years being pregnant, milked the cows, hauled blocks of ice, cooked, sewed, cleaned, and loved Grandfather until her dying breath,’ said my cousin Uri to me in an unexpected outbreak of emotion.
‘Grandfather wasn’t to blame,’ I answered.
‘He won’t let anyone say a mean word about his wonderful grandfather,’ hissed my aunt Rivka, Avraham’s wife. ‘It’s no wonder he’s the way he is. He’s spent his whole life with addled old men who told him nonsense. He had his grandfather for a mother, that pest Pinness for a friend, and Zeitser to pass the afternoons with. Not that that senile old coot ever said a word to him. Why, he’s never even had a girlfriend. And he won’t ever have one, either.’
Her squat, heavy body turned to face me. ‘They should have sent you to an orphanage,’ she yelled.
I was a sad and angry seventeen-year-old at the time. My loneliness, the stiffening flesh of my adolescent body, the deviousness of my mind, which still followed every twist and turn of my childhood – all filled me with resentment, with a black, gritty, stinging bile. Shulamit had just arrived in Israel, and Grandfather had left me and gone off to live with her in an old folk’s home. Every other day I went on foot to visit him, bringing him a can of fresh milk.
When I returned home with the empty can in my hand, I went as usual to see Pinness. My old teacher dragged a little table out to the garden. He was raising balloon spiders for observation in the bushes, where dozens of them hid in their leafy domiciles, ready to swoop down on the prey caught in their nets. Though Pinness was old, he could still trap a fly in flight with one hand and cast it into a web.
‘All those years your grandfather went on loving Shulamit, until she finally arrived, and all those years I thought of my dead Leah. We were made of different stuff from you. The patience of an entire people, two thousand years of it, had built up in our bodies until our blood ran hot.’
He sighed. ‘I envy you. We had our romances too. We danced shirtless in the vineyards, young men and young maidens, and made love on the threshing floors. But who among us could shout in public, “I’m screwing so-and-so’s daughter, and so-and-so’s granddaughter, and so-and-so’s wife”? Who hath sent out the wild ass free, and who hath loosed his bands?”’
‘Is he still at it?’
‘Once every few months, the scum. Afterwards I can’t sleep for a week. The first time I wanted to climb up after him and throttle him. Now I just want to know who it is. To look him in the eyes and understand.’
As I sipped my tea I put an olive in my mouth. Pinness patted me affectionately.
‘Just like your grandfather, eh? He’s a man worth modelling yourself on. Ya’akov Mirkin is one of a kind. Even here in the village there’s no one else like him. He never went to congresses or lobbied in Jerusalem or galloped off on a horse with a bandolier of bullets and a black Keffiyeh, Arabic scarf, on his head, but everyone looked up to him. When Mirkin touched a fruit tree, there was an idea behind the act that we all understood. You were privileged to be raised by such a man. How is he?’