‘Hold tight,’ he shouted. ‘I’ll run and get Daniel.’
He vanished while my mother gritted her teeth and held on to the gutter for dear life. Just then Benjamin Schnitzer, ‘that idiot worker of Rilov’s’, passed by below.
‘Benjamin!’ the girl called down through clenched jaws.
Rilov’s worker glanced up and looked down again in embarrassment, ‘because,’ as a bright-eyed Uri told me, ‘your mother was wearing a flared dress and kicking her legs.’ Benjamin had already been the butt of more than one practical joke in the village and suspected that this was another.
‘Don’t be so shy, Benjamin,’ called my mother. ‘It’s all right, you can look.’
He was standing directly beneath her, and as he glanced up again he felt his throat constrict at the splendour of her thighs, which swung like warm clappers in the bell of her dress.
‘Your father Benjamin arrived in this country in the thirties with a group of Jewish boys from Munich. He came to the village for agricultural training and was sent to work on Rilov’s farm.’
He was a short, blond, powerful young man. In the album of the village war dead my father appears standing in smartly cuffed blue work trousers and a clean white undershirt beneath Rilov’s date tree – the same tree whose fruit, according to Uri, exploded on contact with the ground. Blinking in the sun, his boyish, coarse-featured face stares out above rounded shoulders. The hands are thick and unshapely, like my own, and the arm, wrist, and palm look like a single two-by-four. He has a big, round barrel chest.
‘You’ll be as tall as your mother and as strong as your father,’ I was always told. As I grew older, everyone was pleased to see the prophecy come true.
Benjamin held out his arms.
‘You lets go, quick,’ he said. His Hebrew was still rudimentary.
My mother hesitated.
‘Schnell, schnell, quick, quick,’ said Benjamin. ‘I catch.’
The farmers of our village can guess a calf’s weight at a glance, predict the winds from the colour of the moon, and tell you the nitrogen content of the soil by tasting an onion. My mother took a good look at Benjamin’s calm eyes and solid shoulders, let go, and plummeted, her dress flying over her face and her stomach soaring up into her ribs. Eyes tightly shut, she felt herself cradled in his huge hands.
Benjamin grunted from the impact. My mother was tall and not at all light, and he had to go down on his knees to absorb the shock. Her terrified body struck his chest, her bare belly panting with fright against his cheeks, so close that I can still feel the warmth of it across all the yarns and years.
‘You can let go of me now,’ she smiled. She had got her breath back, but her nails still dug frantically into his shoulders and arms. ‘You were great.’
My father was nonplussed. He had never before been so close to a female body.
‘Thank you kindly, Benjamin,’ she laughed, jumping from his arms and smoothing out her dress just as Efrayim and Daniel appeared carrying a tall fruit-picker’s ladder.
‘Hey, you German schmuck, what are you doing?’ shouted Efrayim irately. Light and skinny fifteen-year-old though he was, he was on the verge of laying into Rilov’s worker. Daniel stood there dumbstruck, pallid with envy, helplessness, and loss. His lips twitched.
‘He saved my life,’ said Esther. ‘Rilov’s stupid German saved my life.’
Once more my father heard her laugh and was brushed by a sweet breeze as my mother, Efrayim, and Daniel Liberson took off on the run around the corner.
My father was sixteen when he came to the village and went to live and work on Rilov’s farm.
‘He arrived from Germany right before the war,’ it says in the village album. ‘His entire family died in the gas chambers, and he met his death among us here. We will always remember the hardworking, thoughtful, cultured young man that he was. Who can forget him on his way to the dairy each evening, whistling symphonies and giving everyone a big hello while carrying four large milk cans on his shoulders?’
Rilov’s stupid German carried the milk cans himself because he had trouble communicating with Rilov’s mules. The four cans, weighing five and a half stone apiece, were chained to an iron yoke on his shoulders.
Rilov’s mules arrived with the British army during World War I and decided to stay on.
‘Apart from their annoying habit of cadging beer from every passer-by, they were excellent draught animals,’ said Meshulam. In a box labelled ‘Miscellanies’ he kept the protocol of the Committee meeting at which Rilov requested a beer budget for them. It was his custom to read it aloud at village celebrations.