She hid among Ya’akovi’s Japanese satsuma plum trees, observing her old love from a distance. In his cumbersome beekeeper’s suit he looked like a jolly bear. He was moving his hives around among the trees while planning blossoming dates, new aromatic combinations, and the pasturing of his winged cows in the spring. Crouching low, Tonya followed him to his work shed and entered behind him. His heavy cloth-and-mesh mask kept him from noticing her.
Margulis took a hive down from a shelf, opened it and studied its honeycombs. Tonya could see how intense and happy he looked. Removing a honeycomb on which an excited throng of worker bees had clustered, he drove them off with his bare hand and beamingly laid on the table two bees that were embroiled in a battle. He separated them with two matchsticks, and when they flew at one another again, he parted them once more. Finally, when their strength began to flag, he put them in a special container with a glass divider to keep them apart. Stripping off his mask, he went to put it in its place and ran into a stiff embrace from Tonya, who was standing right behind him.
‘Tonya!’ breathed the startled Margulis. ‘Are you crazy? In broad daylight? Your husband will murder me.’ He pushed her firmly away, sat her down in a chair and served her honey.
‘Why the spoon, Hayyim?’ purred Tonya. ‘Why not do it the old way?’
‘You’ve just been a witness to my greatest secret,’ said Margulis, ignoring her with a grin. ‘The reconciliation of the queens.’
Tonya tried to switch the subject back to their own reconciliation, but Margulis just looked at her with his innocent blue eyes and went on talking.
‘In every hive there’s just one queen,’ he lectured her. ‘That’s an inviolable law. It limits the number of new bees. And now, with spring blossoms on the way, I need as many workers as I can get.’
‘You talk just like a capitalist,’ smiled Tonya through her tears. But Margulis overlooked her humour and anguish alike.
‘I wait for the new queens to hatch,’ he continued, ‘and when they attack each other, I keep patiently separating them with a stick, over and over, until they’re tired of fighting and are willing to live and lay eggs together in one hive. That way I have twice as many workers and twice as much honey. You left me for him, Tonya, now sleep in the bed you’ve made.’
‘But what’s that got to do with it, Hayyim?’ she murmured, her lips softly closing over his name as she thought about his honeyed fingers. ‘Why are you telling me all this about bees?’
Margulis, however, had returned to his fighting queens and was once more separating the murderous mothers with infinite patience, coaxing them with gentle words. Tonya left the shack and slipped back through Ya’akovi’s orchard. Under a sky like flattened grey tin there was no sound but her own smothered sobs and the loathsome squish of her boots as they sucked in and out of the mud.
She was crossing the next plot of land, half hidden amid the first flowering fruit trees and some crowded rows of cabbage, when she spied Efrayim and Binyamin dancing a waltz among the Valencia oranges. At once she went home and told her husband.
Rilov hurried to Grandfather, less worried by the relations between the two boys then by the insidious appearance of bourgeois dances in the village. But the rumour began to circulate and people started to talk.
‘He was only teaching me to dance,’ explained Efrayim at the family table. ‘I recited Pushkin for him and showed him how to harness Rilov’s crazy mules, and he taught me to listen to music.’
‘Isn’t that the fellow who caught Esther when she fell off the roof?’ asked Grandfather.
‘I did not fall,’ protested my mother. ‘I jumped into his arms.’
‘Why don’t you bring that Romeo of yours home so we can meet him?’ Grandfather said to Efrayim.
Rivka Peker, the saddler’s daughter who was going out with Avraham, sounded a raspberry with her fat lips, and Avraham called Efrayim ‘Strauss’ and ‘Matilda’, for which he was rewarded by the discovery of a whole herring in his shirt pocket.
‘I invited him for Friday night dinner,’ announced Efrayim the following day. ‘He eats whatever he’s given.’
* * *
Avraham began to sneeze a few minutes before Binyamin arrived, and everyone smiled with the realisation that the German must be bringing a bouquet of jonquils.
My mother was eighteen then. From childhood on she had been the motherless family’s cook. She looked curiously at Rilov’s dumb worker, who wielded his knife and fork skilfully but had dropped the flowers he picked for her in the wadi on the white socks she had worn in his honour. Her body still recalled his powerful hands and the hot breath of his mouth against her bare belly. Though they had passed each other often since the day she fell from the roof, he had stared down at the ground each time he saw her. The jingle of her legs in her dress made his mouth go so dry that he was afraid of not being able even to get out a hello.