‘Rachel,’ he said, ‘is my revenge on the locusts whose wings darkened my blue sky.’
After Levin’s death Rachel came to me and said, ‘I know he would have wanted to be buried in your cemetery. He was a bit of a pioneer himself. He came with the Second Aliyah. So do it, even if it means that I won’t be buried next to him.’
Efrayim, my vanished uncle, was five years old when Levin married Rachel. He was fascinated by her many bangles, her quiet brown face, and her noiseless walk. The night of her wedding he clung to his new aunt’s legs and refused to let her go home despite the laughter of the village. When he grew older Rachel taught him to bake bread on a hot tin, to pray to God, and to walk as silently as a cat on sand, an art that was to give more than one farmer a fright and cause the premature death of many a German and Italian soldier.
Efrayim and his Charolais bull Jean Valjean disappeared from home when I was two. Although I don’t remember him, I still envy him his silent walk. My own big bulk always made so much noise that time and again I was caught skulking outside people’s houses as I eavesdropped. Slowly, impaled on the pitchforks of their angry glances, I would rise and walk away without a word. And yet no one ever did a thing to me. I was a parentless boy, ‘Mirkin’s orphan’, Grandfather’s child.
‘Take a deep breath, raise your knee high, let your breath out, and bring your foot down flat,’ Rachel said to Efrayim. They were walking over autumn thistles, which are the noisiest thing you can step on. By the time he was eight my uncle could cross a corn field or creep through a bed of thorns without a sound. He had also begun to speak in thick Yemenite gutturals, which Pinness made great efforts to eradicate.
My mother Esther was a baby then. Fanya Liberson and Shlomo Levin helped Grandfather raise her. Zeitser imitated birds and animals for her, Pinness read her Tolstoy’s ‘Fi-Li-Pok’, in Russian, and Tsirkin played her lullabies. Even Rilov entertained her by cracking his famous bullwhip, which exploded sharply in the air. So deftly did he wield it that he could pick an apple by severing its stem with his quivering lash.
‘You’re scaring the trees, go back to your septic tank!’ Grandfather would shout at him. But he permitted him to amuse his daughter.
Esther and Daniel grew up. By now Esther too was aware of Daniel’s love for her. Lit by the glow of his eyes, smothered by his kisses and caresses, she never took her hand from his. Grandfather, Liberson, and Fanya basked in the sight of their two children spending long days together, rambling through the fields or chasing young chickens in the yard.
‘Who are you going to marry?’ Daniel would be asked. Approaching Esther, he would put an arm around her waist and lay his head on her shoulder.
But when Liberson began to joke about an engagement party and a bride-price, Grandfather responded with a curt, wooden silence. Fanya proved an unexpected ally.
‘You’re always trying to decide people’s lives for them,’ she said.
When they went out to do the autumn ploughing and sowing, they took the children with them to the fields. Avraham was already able to hitch the mules to the cart, onto which they loaded the plough, the seed sacks, and enough food and water for themselves and the animals. Rather than return home for lunch, they sat eating under the cart with several families from the fields nearby. Esther and Daniel played in its shade and embraced on the ground, and were allowed to sit on the seed box during sowing as they grew older. My mother was quicker and wilder than Daniel, who was talked into some mad prank by her more than once. One day they were pulled half dead from the cows’ drinking trough, into which they had fallen while playing, their hair green and sticky from algae and spittle. Another time they disappeared for half a day, only to be found crying on top of the newly built water tower.
‘There was just one real problem with your mother – she was a total carnivore.’ When she was six months old, her mother Feyge threw her a chicken bone to suck on because she was teething. From then on Esther was mad about the taste of meat and never wanted to eat anything else.
Grandmother Feyge left behind a little orphan who would not touch fruit, cheese, or eggs. Only meat. Three times a day.
When Esther was two and a half, Levin once left a plate of raw chopped meat and parsley on the sink. ‘Your mother spooned it all up and was so angry when it was gone that she smashed the dish. All Sonya the nurse’s theories about proper vitamins, healthy minerals, and the link between meat diets and bloodlust came to grief in the case of that child, who grew up to be a tall, beautiful girl. She shot up like a blood-watered tomato, with marvellous skin, a hearty laugh, and a wonderful temperament.’