Liberson was jubilant, so much so that he made the near fatal mistake of telling Fanya about the famous Hasidic court he had belonged to as a youth in the Ukraine. Though this titbit had worked well enough with the farmers’ daughters in the colonies of Judea, Fanya was so allergic to anything involving prayers, religious ceremonies, or miracles that her exquisite face broke into a grimace when Liberson poured into her ears the names of renowned rabbis and preachers he had known.
Yet Liberson kept his wits about him. Like a falcon, the young man of the Workingman’s Circle had the knack of reversing direction in mid-flight without losing altitude or speed. ‘To tell you the truth, I’m a direct descendant of the Golem of Prague,’ he said, earning a merry laugh from Fanya.
He knew all about love’s link to laughter, which could inflame, incite, and liquefy a woman’s flesh, and quickly struck again with a sharp jest about the kibbutz ideal of equality.
‘Fanya, my angel,’ he said, ‘I took a peek at your mixed shower room the other day and saw with my own eyes that human beings are definitely not born equal.’
Fanya blushed and laughed again, her whole body rocking with pleasure. Quite unselfconsciously, she laid a hand on his knee. ‘Make me laugh some more,’ she said.
Now that he was confident that the pretty kibbutznik would be his, though he knew that years of courting and probation lay ahead of him, Liberson seized her hand and proposed to her. She came to our village straight from the vineyard.
‘It’s a lovely story, and Eliezer Liberson is a genius at such things, but that’s not how it was,’ said my cousin Uri heatedly. ‘Tsirkin went to the vineyard by himself and played his mandolin among the grapevines. No woman could resist its music, and Fanya had to follow it. Tsirkin lured her past the grapes and into the high grass, and slid down the hill with Fanya hot on his heels. He led her a merry chase as far as the big oak tree, at which she arrived to see Liberson with a mandolin in his hands. Tsirkin was hiding quietly in the tree. It was only after the wedding that she discovered that Liberson couldn’t play a note.’
‘That same year,’ said Meshulam, ‘Ben-Gurion proclaimed that the kibbutz was a higher form of Zionism than the cooperative village, while Tabenkin stated that only the lust for lucre could make a person leave a commune. You don’t have to be a great genius to understand the connection. My father and Eliezer Liberson’s irresponsible action did nothing to improve relations between the two forms of agricultural settlement.’
Fanya’s abduction led to a wave of hostility between the village and the kibbutz. Joint irrigation projects were cancelled. There were even incidents of stone throwing and fisticuffs in the wadi between us. In a comic issue of the village newsletter Fanya was referred to as ‘fair Helen’, and voices were heard to say that the redemption of the Valley should not be sacrificed on the altar of private concupiscence. And yet Eliezer and Fanya Liberson were the most loving couple ever seen on the soil of the Jewish homeland. Liberson never ceased wooing and amusing his wife, whose laughter and cries of surprise were heard all over the village. In those days, when the villagers lived in tents with nothing but a sheet of canvas to separate them from the world, everyone knew what was going on everywhere without having to creep up and eavesdrop beneath windows.
‘First of all, get her to laugh,’ said Liberson to his son. ‘Women love that. They can’t resist it.’
‘Laughter,’ said Mandolin, ‘is the blast of the ram’s horn that brings down the walls of Jericho. It is the open sesame to magic treasure caves, the first drops of autumn rain to fall on the parched earth.’
‘Well said,’ said Liberson with a startled look at his friend.
By then, though, Daniel was far removed from any possibility of laughter. His sense of humour, indeed, had been the first victim of his spurned love.
‘Flowers! Song! Music!’ declared Mandolin.
‘Enough, Tsirkin,’ Liberson said. He turned to his son. ‘What does she like most?’ he asked.
‘Meat,’ answered the sheepish Daniel.
Liberson and Tsirkin began to cook. Despite the general shortage of food in those days, Daniel began furtively visiting the Mirkin house at night with covered trays. The smell of roasted chicken, baked ribs of calf, and rare roast beef made the angry neighbours’ mouths water. They complained about the waste, which was drawing cats and jackals from all over the Valley. And yet Esther, though she wolfed it all avidly and rewarded Daniel with happy hugs, did not cease her night-time walks with Binyamin.
My father made his sweetheart a huge hammock, which was nothing more than an old box mattress welded to iron chains and a railing. He hung it from two casuarinas behind the cabin, and the needles of the trees garnished her hair. The muffled sound of their laughter, Binyamin’s quiet whistling, and Esther’s low sighs when he took her in his smith’s arms could all be heard from the cabin.