Liberson and Tsirkin reminded him that Daniel had loved Esther from the age of three weeks, but Grandfather lost his temper and declared that he did not believe in such nonsense. ‘Unlike certain other things we did,’ he wrote in one of his notes, ‘love has nothing to do with the staking of claims, the planting of flags, or the ploughing of furrows.’
15
When Eliezer Liberson was still a bachelor, before Daniel was born and Hagit was bought, he owned a big, thin Damascene cow with a long neck and long horns. His relations with the animal made the whole village laugh. She ate twice as much as other cows and gave almost no milk, which made Liberson hate her in a most unfarmerly way. ‘The dregs of bovinity,’ he called her. The cow, who had a tender and unforgiving heart behind her massive ribs, felt his animosity and repaid him in kind.
Once, when Liberson came home to his humble cabin from the fields, he found the cow sprawled on the floor, ‘chewing on a bed sheet and an article by Borochov’. The table he ate, wrote, and read at, the only piece of furniture he owned, was smashed to smithereens. The cow took one look at his fury, realised that this time she had crossed the fine line between pest and menace, and ran alarmedly outside.
‘And took the wall with her,’ lamented Liberson. The next day he tied a rope around her neck and went off to sell her in the nearby kibbutz. Though the kibbutz’s new barn worker had just returned from a course in Utrecht and was full of praise for Dutch cows, Liberson scared him to death with his stories of how such animals could not adjust to hot climates.
‘They’re spoiled,’ he said. ‘They’re prone to parasites and depression.’
‘It’s not up to me,’ said the barn worker. ‘The kibbutz has to vote on it.’
‘Of course,’ said Liberson. General meetings were so much putty in his hands.
‘Your Dutch cows need a mixture of local blood,’ he told the packed dining hall. ‘They’ll supply the milk, and this wonderful animal of mine will provide the powers of endurance.’
The kibbutz members were entranced. ‘Together we’ll give the world its first Hebrew cow,’ cried Liberson.
‘And what now?’ asked Tsirkin when Liberson came merrily back from the kibbutz and sat down to eat a bowl of lupin gruel with him. ‘Those kibbutzniks will want their revenge. Are you going to leave your poultry and livestock unguarded each time you go out to your vegetable patch? You need a wife.’
Up to then, Liberson had been a conscientious bachelor. Now Tsirkin offered him Pesya with two cows thrown in for a dowry. Liberson, however, refused.
‘That would have made three cows,’ said Uri when the two of us heard the story, ‘which is really too much for one bachelor.’
Since there wasn’t a single available girl in the village, Tsirkin and Liberson decided to revive the old custom of bride snatching.
The two young men returned to the kibbutz. It was autumn, and several girls had been sent to the vineyard to pick the last grapes that were drying into raisins. Armed with a mandolin, a box of delicacies, and some kitchenware, they waited for them to arrive.
It took a great deal of pestering to get Fanya to tell me the rest. Her head nodded up and down as she spoke, her white hair a gorgeous sight.
‘I heard someone playing an instrument at the other end of the vineyard and went to have a look. Behind the last row of vines stood two boys. One, whom I didn’t know, was playing the mandolin, and the other was the nice young man who had just sold us a useless cow. He was cutting up vegetables for a salad and invited me to join them.’
‘You’d better get out of here quick,’ said Fanya to Liberson. ‘The comrades have sworn to rope you to that cow’s horns if they find you.’
Liberson just grinned, made a dressing for the salad, and started to slice bread and cheese. As he and Fanya sat eating, Tsirkin, a red gypsy bandanna around his neck, circled them ‘like a cockerel’ and played ‘the sweetest, most seductive tunes’. Then Liberson told Fanya about himself, his farm, the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle, and his trials and tribulations with the cow.
Fanya felt her heart skip a beat. In those days the Workingman’s Circle was already shrouded in a thick cloud of mystery and adulation. Legends circulated among the women of the Valley about Feyge Levin, the first female pioneer to do the work of men and to be loved by three of them, who waited on her hand and foot, immunised her with their sweet blood, and washed her dirty clothes.
Modestly Liberson confessed that he indeed knew Feyge, had washed her clothes and cooked for her himself, and had even been bandaged and caressed by her hands. Showing Fanya the small scar on his bottom lip, he revealed to her that this was the exact spot where Feyge Levin had kissed him. When he saw that her face had grown soft and dreamy as expected, he made a secret sign to Tsirkin and began to hum the well-known lines, ‘I shall plough, and I shall sow, and I shall rejoice / Only when I am in Israel’s land.’ Tsirkin played along, and Fanya could not resist the temptation to join in with her high, sweet voice.