‘That’s what kept us going,’ said Pinness.
Levin got to his feet, pale with hatred. ‘I kept myself going too,’ he said. ‘I could have left and I didn’t. I could have been a rich businessman in the city and I came here instead. You taught them to look down on me. And don’t start in on that song and dance of yours – they’re my saplings, they’re my plant bed – because you’re no more of a farmer than I am. We’re both public servants. Both of us thought we were serving an idea, and now it turns out to have been just a bunch of kulaks. You can have them and their earth and their first fruits and their cows! Gordon and Brenner wrote with the fountain pens that I fixed.’
Pinness lost his temper. ‘No one came here to do anyone a favour,’ he said. He raised his voice. ‘And no one deserves a medal for giving up a shop in the city. You came because you needed this earth as we all did. The feel of it, the smell of it, the promise of it. Needed it more than it needed you.’
Once Levin had left with an injured slam of the door, however, Pinness gathered the Gang and gave them a loud dressing-down.
‘Our life in this village is more than just sweets. If all you want is bonbons and petit fours, you can pack your bags and go to the city.’
The Gang walked out shamefacedly and submitted to the pedagogical penance of building a big sandbox for the kindergarten that the children still play in to this day.
My uncle Efrayim was one of them. He was a handsome, slender boy, as quick and unerring as a ferret, the biggest prankster and mocker of them all. One day the Gang decided to play a joke on Binyamin, whose slow, clumsy gait had caught their notice. Efrayim had hated and feared him ever since his rescue of my mother.
One Saturday while Binyamin was resting, the boys threw a young viper into his cabin and waited to see what would happen. When my father heard its slithering scales, he gave a cry and ran outside to gales of laughter. For a moment he stood facing them, his bright eyes slit against the afternoon sun with the fury of knowing he had been duped. Stepping up to Efrayim, who was then seventeen, he grabbed him by his broad leather belt and jerked him off the ground with one motion.
‘Your uncle Efrayim squirmed and yelled and laughed, but your father, using only his left hand, carried him to the farmyard and threw him into the cow trough, Sabbath clothes and all.’
‘Bravo!’ shouted the Gang. In no time they had all trooped into Binyamin’s cabin. Efrayim raised a heel tough as a horn and bashed in the snake’s neck as it lay coiled beneath a chair. Then they made Binyamin sit down at the table and arm-wrestle with them one by one. Emerging unvanquished, he was declared a Gang member himself.
Slow, smiling, shy, and inarticulate, he met them every Friday. Before long they learned to use his technical talents and broke into Pesya Tsirkin’s car, which had been given to her by the Movement. Told by them that it was needed to convey arms and important intelligence, Binyamin started it up without a key. Somehow, however, the group always managed to stop on its way at a cinema in the city.
Efrayim grew attached to Binyamin and forgot his old grudge at seeing his sister giggling breathlessly in his arms. Several times a week he went to listen to music in his cabin. In Binyamin’s trunk was clothing from Germany that Efrayim found funny. Putting on a pair of leather Tyrolean shorts and a dark flannel suit jacket, he ran outside to make his friends laugh. At the bottom of the trunk he discovered a long muslin dress.
‘What’s this?’ he asked, running his hand over the soft fabric. Nothing in the village could match it for sheer silkiness, not even the velvet noses of the colts or the petals of the apple blossoms. Suddenly, thinking of his mother, Efrayim felt tears in his eyes.
‘For my wedding,’ replied Binyamin. ‘My mother for my wedding gave me it.’
He took a photograph from his wallet. ‘Father, Mother, Hannah, Sarah,’ he said, pointing. ‘My mother gave me the dress.’
Binyamin’s mother, a tall blonde woman, was seated on a chair, her two daughters, in identical dresses, beside her. Behind them stood his short, slender father with a clipped haircut and a military moustache.
Efrayim, who had no mother, and Binyamin, who soon would have no family at all, became fast friends.
‘I can still hear their voices in my ears. My two pupils’ voices, Efrayim’s quick chatter and Binyamin’s nasal bass. Your lost uncle. Your dead father.’
14
One day in late winter Tonya Rilov stole into Hayyim Margulis’s bee patch. After the death of her daughter under the hooves of a cow, Tonya had given birth to a son named Dani. Rilov was a man of so few words that the boy did not begin to talk until he was five, and Tonya’s hatred for her husband kept growing like a wall. Most of his time Rilov spent in the huge arms cache in his septic tank, where he had accumulated quantities of weapons that no one dared even guess at. No matter how hard he scrubbed himself with steel wool, his body still smelled of urea and dynamite. Tonya longed for the honeyed fingers of Margulis.