Just then the young beauty approached. Seeing the firstborn son, she reached out unthinkingly to stroke his head. Avraham rose from the ground without a word and brushed the dirt from his hands and knees.
There was a sudden premonition of disaster in the air. Everyone who felt it realised at once that something terrible was about to take place.
The firstborn son turned his bold stare from the crowd of guests to the beautiful lady and said to her:
And when a heavy dust falls from the ceiling
and the remembrance of my body strikes,
what will you say to appease the fire in your soul?
A blossom, warm and hard,
will bud in your flesh.
Your lover entrapped in the bonds of his words,
silent, at bay,
what will you say in your dream as his hand
like a creditor’s soft palm descends on your skin?
The towering gourd of love above your head
refuses to wilt.
Then you will know the scorching east winds,
the sands’ obstinate will.
Our backs we gave to the smiters,
your memory stifled and kept.
Ah, from the depths, the tenacious depths,
weeds of longing enwrap our heads.
So spoke Avraham, touching off a great uproar. ‘What did he say?’ asked the young lady in English, her perfect limbs ablaze. ‘What did he say?’ A reporter from the Movement newspaper who was travelling with the group took furious notes. Meshulam Tsirkin showed me the article he wrote: ‘The village’s first child, Avraham Mirkin, recited a poem of uncertain nature having no clear relevance to our national situation or goals.’
The comrades were in a state of shock. Fanya Liberson buried her cheek in her husband’s neck with a movement that would become second nature and murmured that the thirst for love had passed from poor Feyge’s tormented body to the child in her womb, driving him out of his mind.
‘Now you see your fruit,’ she whispered angrily. ‘It wasn’t blood and it wasn’t sweet. It was poison. Never-clotting venom. And don’t you dare tell me any jokes now.’
Pinness, who felt greatly sorry for Avraham and his father, tried to demonstrate that the child had merely ‘linked together verses from the Book of Jonah by a process of free association’, but Rilov snapped at him to shut his mouth if he wanted to die in his own bed.
Avraham alone paid the commotion no mind. He simply looked at the beautiful woman, who began to tremble, her flesh insidiously lanced by the child’s stare. A strong oestrous smell known to every farmer cleaved the veils of her perfume, and the Dutch bull was heard to bellow dully as it charged the fence of its corral. The beautiful visitor laughed with an embarrassed stamp of her foot. Then, her hips and thighs stirring the air, she stepped up to Avraham, took a glittering coin from her purse, and waved it in front of his eyes.
‘She gave him money,’ said Grandfather to Pinness during one of their night-time talks. ‘Money! That’s what Pesya taught them to redeem land and souls with.’
The woman from abroad placed the coin in Avraham’s shirt pocket, where it lay like a written anathema, and took a step back, waiting anxiously to see what would happen.
The firstborn son’s face turned dark all at once. Two terrible furrows creased his brow from the bridge of the nose to the hairline, as though at the stroke of a pickaxe.
12
I lay on a bed of jonquils, staring up at the sky. Flocks of migrating storks soared overhead, circling like tiny water insects on a clear, transparent pond. Back in the Ukraine, two storks had nested in the chimney of Grandfather’s house. ‘I knew that they visited the Land of Israel each year and came back with a bellyful of the frogs of Canaan,’ Grandfather told me. Were the grandchildren of those storks flying over me now?
Each spring and autumn Grandfather stepped out of his cabin and stared up at the storks and pelicans with his hand shading his eyes, full of the sorrow of great rivers, of vast fields of grain, of snowy steppes and forests of birch trees. ‘Here I am among the blackberries,’ he wrote, ‘in the land of the grasshopper and the jackal, of the olive and the fig.’
I thought of Shifris. Was he still alive? Would he be able to find the paths that his comrades had long since built over? Where was he now? Killed by border guards and buried beneath snow or sand? Fallen like ashes from the sting of some electrified fence? Did he know that the swamps had already been drained and the wilderness made to bloom? That Grandfather had gone to live with Shulamit in the old age home?
Shifris would come, and I would let him have Grandfather’s bed. He would cure olives, smoke in the kitchen at night, plant olive trees, pomegranates, vines, and figs. He would be a frail old man with a battered hat on his head, a rod of an almond tree in his hand, and a backpack containing mouldy bread, a canteen, olives, cheese, a Bible, and a couple of oranges. Sometimes he walked singing quietly, sometimes piping on a reed he had cut along the way. Slowly he crossed mountains and deserts and followed rocky coastlines, his lips dry and cracked, his shoes clouted like the Gibeonites’.