Yosi was proud of the new breeding coop he had built for his turkeys. It was an enclosed lightproof structure covered with tarpaper, in which the young females sat waiting to get good prices for their fertilised eggs. Blindly groping for their food, they were prevented by the darkness from thinking, hoping, or wanting sex. As soon as an order came in from the National Turkey Council, we hurried to bring them to the males. They staggered out warily on feeble legs, blinking the watery, sun-split lenses of their eyes. Five minutes in the sun was all it took to put them in heat. Kowtowing in the hot dirt with palsied wings, they summoned the males with shrill voices and the red flowers that pulsed beneath their tails.
‘Stupid randy birds,’ said Yosi. The turkey hens squatted in the middle of the yard and turned up their rumps, too much in heat to walk to the breeder. Yosi and Avraham had to kick them inside and strap canvas saddles on their backs to keep the heavy males from tearing their flesh when they mounted them.
‘Just look at that,’ Uri said to me. ‘That’s what falling in love is like. It lets in the light.’
The males squabbled near the impatient hens, pushing and shoving each other. As soon as one succeeded in doing his duty, his consort rose with smug languor, shook out her wings, and went off to her friends in a chatter of show-offy silence.
‘She’s running to tell them it was worth waiting for,’ said Uri.
‘The thought of spending two months in the dark just to be screwed by a turkey!’ sneered Yosi.
But I was thinking of three children beneath Grandfather’s sheltering wings, sitting down to a winter supper of potatoes cooked in their jackets, hard-boiled eggs, a bowl of homemade herring marinated in lemon juice and onion rings, and bright slices of radish. I was thinking of my dead mother; of her long braids and legs catching fire; and of Efrayim. To this day I sometimes whirl around suddenly, thinking he is behind me with his great Charolais bull on his shoulders, laughing at having startled me.
‘No one understood how my son Efrayim could pick up a bull,’ Grandfather told me with a smile.
No one understood and no one saw what was coming. Not even Pinness foretold the embryonic evil as it ripened. ‘An orphan growing up with his grandfather is one big barrel of stories,’ he said of me. I myself no longer know what I have heard and what I have seen myself. Was it Avraham who ran to his mother’s grave, or was it me? Did I leave the village, or did Efrayim?
The large gravestones gleam brightly in Pioneer Home. ‘Stones to stop the well of dreams with,’ Pinness called them. At night I wander through the banker’s big house, the bull of memory heavy on my shoulders.
13
‘Your mother was a sentimental tomboy, a Tom Sawyer with a soul.’
Her carnivorousness, though, was more than Pinness could fathom.
‘She was a good student. She knew the poetry of Tchernichovski and Lermontov by heart. And yet halfway through a lesson she would suddenly take a piece of meat from her schoolbag and tear into it with her teeth.’
Not only the teacher but the entire village watched the children hopefully. As healthy and quick as wild asses, they worked alongside their parents. The local air could not scorch their lungs, and their bodies soaked up the sun as if made of the local chalkstone.
‘Mirkin’s three orphans did all the jobs.’ At dawn Avraham woke his brother and sister to help with the milking before going off to school. Before supper they found time to cut and load a cart of alfalfa and bring it to the yard, their pitchforks thrust into the rear of the tottering green bale on which Efrayim and my mother stood wrestling while Avraham, who practically speaking was already running the farm, taciturnly gripped the reins. The deep furrows of anger crawled like lizards up his forehead and disappeared into his bushy hair.
Shouting with merriment and anger, my wiry mother and her brother tumbled in each other’s arms. Sometimes they fell off the cart and went on fighting by the roadside while their father watched them from the branches of his orchard.
‘That girl is a greater menace to the chickens than the wildcat down by the spring,’ said Grandfather to Zeitser. ‘The way she eats meat, there soon won’t be a hen left.’
My mother began climbing trees and roofs to catch starlings. She made Daniel Liberson come along on these safaris, and the love-stricken boy followed her through the fields, watching her remove birds from her traps. Because of her the migrating quail began overflying our fields, and vegetable gardens lost their rabbits. Calves froze with fright if she patted them on the back.
Once she clambered onto the roof of the village feed shed with Efrayim to ambush doves. A wooden plank broke beneath her. She skidded, grabbed hold of the rain gutter, and was left dangling by her arms twenty feet above the concrete pavement. Efrayim tried to pull her back up but couldn’t manage.