‘Leave the boy alone,’ Grandfather scolded the stream of curiosity-seekers who came looking for Avraham, lifting the canvas tent flap at all hours and even crawling inside to see if there was any truth to the rumours that the baby shone in the dark.
Grandfather was incensed. ‘We don’t live in the old days any more,’ he exclaimed, and taking Avraham, a shepherd’s club, and a mosquito net, he went off to sleep in the thicket by the spring with a cry of ‘The child isn’t yours!’ No one dared follow him. The area around the spring had once been inhabited by German settlers, every one of whom died of malaria, and the reedy death shrieks of their blond children could still be heard there, haunting the rushes and elecampane. This put an end to the harassment, though whoever looked southward from the watchtower that night saw a golden glimmer beaming through the dark patches of the blackberry bushes like the light of some great firefly. A few years later Grandmother died, and no one dared bother the orphan any more. Avraham’s only memory of that night by the spring was a lifelong allergy to jonquils and swamp flowers.
And yet inwardly, there was no one who didn’t worry and brood about him. Zakkai Ackerman, the firstborn son of the kibbutz across the wadi, had already raised a row of cucumbers that averaged eighteen inches and planted a medlar tree whose fruit was the size of a Grand Alexander apple. The first child of Kfar Avishai had made his debut at a Movement conference with ‘an astounding oration’ that unerringly prophesied the factional split in the Workers’ Brigade, ‘though he was only three and a half years old’. The first child of Bet Eliyahu was all of six when he began investigating the coccidiosis infection then ravaging the chicken coops, and soon after he was asked to join Professor Adler’s research team, which had already developed a remedy for the epidemic of miscarriages introduced into our herds in the late 1920s by imported Dutch cows, and had received a decoration from the British High Commissioner and a parchment certificate from the Movement. Avraham Mirkin alone was a late bloomer who kept the village in suspense – or, to put it more bluntly, disappointed it.
‘We would have taken it in our stride had he been an ordinary child, but everyone could see that your uncle did have something special about him.’
Avraham had the ability to calm a panicky animal with a single glance. During the gnat season he sometimes had to be called to the fields to treat a mule or farmer gone half out of their minds from the ceaseless buzzing. There were also other odd things about him that kept hopes for him alive, such as his habit of wandering around at night looking for no one knew what, a five-year-old boy who overturned stacks of cans, shook out piles of old sacks, lifted curtains, stared at sleeping calves, and scared the chickens in their coops as if in search of something.
Some thought it was because he was an orphan. ‘He’s looking for his mother,’ they said. ‘Poor Feyge.’
‘And little wonder,’ said Fanya years later. Held in her husband’s embrace, ringed round by an inexhaustible reserve of Libersonian love, she had no inkling that someone was listening on the other side of the wall.
‘And little wonder,’ she said about my uncle. ‘The child was born in a house without love.’
11
It was Pesya Tsirkin, naturally, who brought the American philanthropists for a visit, thus putting her oafish stamp on my family history.
Although Grandfather never said an unkind word about her, I was an expert at decoding the slightest tremor of every line and wrinkle in his face. He loathed her. And so for that matter did her husband.
Mandolin met Pesya at some conference where she gave an impassioned speech on the subject of mutual aid funds, bobbing her large breasts in time with her visionary ardour. Tsirkin, whose strong point was never the financial aspects of pioneering, was swept off his feet by pure lust. Trapping Pesya with his mandolin strings proved no problem, and when she became pregnant they were married – yet soon it dawned on her that life in the village lacked the emotional rewards of a career in the Movement, with its sense of mission, its joys of travel, and the polished intellects and shoes of its orators, bursars, and platform drafters.
For a while Pesya enjoyed stepping into the yard and calling ‘Hssst, hssst’ to the chickens, baking bread, and growing kohlrabi, Egyptian onions, and Wondermart tomatoes for home consumption. Before long, however, she found herself up to her neck in heavy soil and irritating poultry droppings. When Meshulam was two years old she took a trip to Tel Aviv, where, yielding to the exhortations of her comrades on the Central Committee, she returned to her old job.