Of course, Binyamin knew that Esther was the girlfriend of Daniel Liberson, the Valley volleyball star, her steady folkdance partner, and the son of Eliezer Liberson, who once a month assembled the young trainees in the village for a lecture on the principles and beliefs of the Movement.
He kept his eyes on his plate, swallowing his soup with a sound. Throughout the meal he seemed to be debating something, and right after dessert, as if having come to a decision that must not be frittered away, he asked Grandfather’s permission ‘to go for a walk with Esther’.
‘The person to ask is the young lady,’ said Grandfather, regarding Binyamin and his daughter. Whenever he saw a new couple he wondered when and how their love would go amiss.
They went out to the fields, Efrayim gliding after them like a polecat. For a long while he watched them walk in silence. At last Binyamin looked up at the sky and said in a strange, muffled voice, ‘So many stars.’
‘Lots,’ said my mother, putting her hands on his shoulders. She was much taller than he was. ‘Tell me, Binyamin,’ she asked, ‘is it true that where you come from people would rather eat sausage than meat?’
The following Thursday she asked Efrayim to sneak into the English base and steal some sausages from the canteen, because Binyamin was coming again for dinner. ‘And now, my child, finish your dinner too, and let’s see you leave a clean plate.’
Grandfather sighed. ‘That was the start of your parents’ love affair,’ he said. The love of the barefoot girl, ‘Mirkin’s wild she-goat’, with her braids and long legs and brown eyes flecked with green and yellow, and the polite, awkward, inarticulate young man from Bavaria. My father’s blond head reached his sweetheart’s shoulders. His lumbering walk alongside her tall, merry skip amused the villagers no end. But there were also remarks about ‘incompatibility’, both ‘physically speaking’ and regarding the relationship of Mirkin’s daughter ‘with a young man who did not imbibe the values of the Movement with his mother’s milk’.
There were also more practical considerations. Raising cows had taught the farmers that romance had its genetics, and the thought of crossbreeding Mirkin’s daughter with Liberson’s son tempted them greatly.
As for Daniel, having witnessed all his life the incessant pawing of his parents, who would rise from the table with an exchange of glances and disappear for passionate afternoon naps that kept the whole household awake and so frightened the animals that the hens began to lay less, he either could not or did not want to decipher the first signs of Esther’s faltering love.
‘Nothing worse could happen to a man,’ said Uri one time when we were talking about my mother. ‘He lost both his nerve and his head – and with them all his charm too.’
Daniel was condemned to the gauntlet run by rejected lovers. It was like having a limb amputated. Pitying glances followed him as he made his way toward our house, looking lost and crushed. At first he pleaded and wept. Then he grew quiet. At night he lay in the high grass across from Grandfather’s cabin, peering through the stalks for a glimpse of his beloved’s silhouette flitting across the lit window. After a few weeks Grandfather noticed that the grass had grown higher at a certain spot, as if from a leaky water tap. Going over to it one night, he found Daniel shedding noiseless tears.
‘“You’ll never get her back like this,” I told him.’
Liberson and Tsirkin decided to have a talk with Mirkin but encountered an unexpected obstacle before they were out of the house. Standing in the doorway, Fanya announced that in matters of the heart the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle had already made one decision too many.
‘Once with Feyge was enough,’ she informed her husband and his friend. ‘Let the boys have it out between them, and let the girl make up her own mind. We’re not Arabs or Orthodox Jews who marry off their children. And the days are also over when young ladies were given away according to your constitution and hearts broken to pieces by a comradely vote.’
Liberson was enraged. He did not consider Rilov’s dumb worker fit competition for his son.
‘What a waste of an immigration certificate,’ he grumbled. Gently removing his wife from the doorway, he held her until Tsirkin was safely past. When they spoke to Grandfather, however, they heard the same refrain from him.
‘I like your son very much,’ Grandfather said to Liberson. ‘But I have nothing against Binyamin either. He’s a decent, hardworking, reliable boy, and I do believe that the girl loves him.’