Tonya Rilov, whose rejection by Margulis had made her highly sensitive to public morality, scolded Grandfather for letting his daughter walk around holding hands with ‘that new immigrant from Germany’ and told him that the village children came to the orchard at night to peep at them.
That year Grandfather’s orchard blossomed as never before. He asked Hayyim Margulis to place a few beehives among the trees, and the honey that resulted was nearly red and so sweet that it burned the tongue. All day long Grandfather circulated among his rows of fruit trees, whose dates of blossoming and parade of scents had been calculated from midwinter through spring, tottering drunkenly home from their lush fragrance. By now Avraham was in full charge of the cows, leaving Grandfather free to enjoy his private Eden, around which he planted thick hedges of cypress trees to shield it from the winter winds that came roaring down from the blue mountain.
The white blossoms of the almonds were the first to appear, the sweetness of their petals wafting through the air as if challenging the rain and the mud. Next the peach bloomed in a fierce pink, the tall, slender stamens of its flowers lighter than its rich, dark buds. Beside it glowed the delicate apricot, whose scent was like a woman’s perfume. Soon the plums joined in, their little blossoms covering the branches with a velvety white. The apples flowered after Purim in reds and whites, their smell as full and juicy as their fruit. At Passover time came the quinces, from which Rachel and Shlomo Levin made jams and jellies, and the pears with their white flowers, winey-fumed and purple-funnelled. Finally, when the earth was hot from the ascendant sun that ruled the orchard, swelling its pregnant pistils, the orange trees brought Grandfather’s scent fest to a close with a cloak of fragrance so heavy that it enveloped the whole village.
It was in this orchard, where the meadow browns flitted freely, the bees buzzed with loud gaiety, and the birds and buprestid beetles fell fainting from the treetops, that I buried Grandfather and his friends. But in those days Esther planted gillyflowers that opened overnight and led Binyamin to wet wallows of fallen petals. Before dawn she stole back to the cabin with her sandals in her hands, though the strong, familiar scent of wet earth, pears, and gillyflowers given off by her warm skin awakened Grandfather anyway.
‘He was too happy for words. The smell of his daughter was as the smell of a field which the Lord hath blessed.’
‘What a lovely story,’ said Fanya Liberson. Her hair, I assume, was draped over her husband’s chest, and her thigh lay across his stomach then too. ‘As sorry as I feel for our poor Daniel, I’m glad for a change to see a man at Mirkin’s who is crazy in love.’
For the first time, love reigned supreme at the Mirkin farm. With wild shrieks the two of them re-enacted their first encounter, Esther clambering up the bales in the hayloft and grabbing hold of the ridgepole while Binyamin stood below her, watching her kick her legs.
‘I’m not letting go till you say schnell, schnell,’ she would shout.
Avraham cleaned out the cowshed, his eyes darkly on the floor, the creases pulsing in his forehead.
One night, coming back from a stroll in the fields, I took off my shoes and tiptoed quietly up to Rivka and Avraham’s window, where I heard my aunt discussing my mother.
‘I remember her as though it were yesterday,’ she rasped in her lizardy voice. ‘Hanging from the roof of the hayloft. You never looked, but believe you me, she wasn’t wearing any underpants.’
‘I think my mother was jealous. My father never looked up her dress like that, and he never whistled any off-key operas for her either.’
16
In a nearby village there was an awful incident at the time. A farmer took his own life without anyone knowing why. ‘He was buried with the secret of his death,’ said our village newsletter. His body, covered with dead buds and the broken wings of satyr butterflies, was found in Grandfather’s orchard with its skull blown off and its big toe on the trigger of an old five-round semi-automatic. It had been lying there for several days, the strong smell of the flowering fruit trees hiding the stench of the putrefying corpse until Grandfather’s suspicions were aroused by the sight of swarms of green flies, which generally found blossoms repulsive.
The suicide left behind a widow, an only son aged eight, and the rifle, which was so rusted that Rilov had to cross it off his list of useable firearms in the Valley. The child was told that his father had gone on a long trip and would bring him presents when he returned, but the children in school told him what they heard at night when their parents were gathered at the kitchen table with their friends, whispering over tea after a day’s work. The boy took to walking in his sleep, and came home every night before dawn with his feet scratched by thorns and stones.