‘I hear my father calling,’ he told everyone.
Pinness was furious. The children of the dead man’s village attended our school. Every day they arrived in a cart pulled by a team of horses, their shoes wet from the dewy weeds by the roadside. ‘How can a child be lied to like that?’ he screamed in the teachers’ room. ‘How can anyone contaminate such a tender sprout?’
Though he realised at once that it was the work of the hyena, it was high spring and no one paid heed to his warnings. Man and beast wanted only to stretch out in the grass and take in the sun and warm earth. The cowsheds and rabbit hutches were full of the squeals of calves and babes. The young primiparous heifers came down with spring fever and ran wildly about with their tails sticking up, kicking the air. The deep winter mud was drying out, and the ground was no longer sticky and treacherous but soft and springy underfoot. The snorts of the wildcat cubs, scrapping playfully as they practised their murderous arts on carpets of grass and daisies, could be heard down by the spring. Hayyim Margulis’s bees growled softly among the flowers as they transported their sweet cargo, while flocks of bee-eaters freshly returned from the tropics wreaked havoc among them. Male doves strutted atop the cowsheds, their bright, swollen crops and their sheeny breasts slicing the sunshine like prisms. Great flocks of pelicans passed overhead, bound northward for there, the land of wheat, wolves, and birches. On their way they flew low over Liberson’s house and screamed mockingly at Fanya. The spring doubled its flow, and the last winter jonquils gave off such a powerful scent that Avraham broke out in long riffs of tears and sneezes.
Anxious and tense, Pinness took the children out to the fields for a look at the flowers.
‘The month of Nisan is the month of our Movement,’ he told his pupils, his eyes combing his surroundings for the enemy. ‘It’s then that Nature lifts high her red flags in memory of our liberation from bondage in Egypt: the poppy, the anemone, the red buttercup, the pheasant’s-eye, the mountain tulip, and the everlasting.’
‘And then, as I was standing there listening to their laughter in the field, the green wall of young corn suddenly parted like a curtain, thrust aside by the shoulders of the hyena.’
Every spring the hornet queens emerged from their winter hideaways. Weak and frozen, they searched for a place to build their nests. Within a few weeks each had hatched a regiment of brigands. When summer came their black-and-yellow forms flashed through the air with a fierce, menacing rasp, raiding the grape clusters, descending on fruits and milk cans, biting men and animals, decimating beehives, and terrorising the whole village. The Committee paid the children a small bounty for every dead hornet, and every spring Pinness took them out to the field to trap the queens before they could establish a new generation of ‘rapacious Midianites’.
‘It isn’t easy for me to ask you to kill a hornet queen,’ he told them. ‘It’s not our way to kill living things. But the field mouse, the hornet, the viper, and all tree pests are our mortal enemies.’
The vipers emerged early that year, unwinding their thick bodies in the sun and waiting for a careless mouse, hoof, or bare foot. In the mornings we found their limp bodies hanging from the chicken wire that had trapped their broad heads at night while they were trying to steal eggs and baby chicks. Binyamin, who was scared to death of snakes, never went out to the fields without boots and a long hoe on his shoulder.
‘My daughter just laughed at him, skipping barefoot through the clover no matter how he screamed at her to stop.’
‘A big strong boy like you,’ said Esther, ‘and such a coward!’
They sat in a field overlooking the British air base.
‘I steal a plane and fly to my old home,’ said Binyamin.
‘When my mother was still alive,’ Esther revealed to him, ‘we had a little donkey. Every night she spread her ears and flew off to Constantinople to meet the Turkish sultan.’
Esther lay on her back while Binyamin regarded her sceptically. He checked the lush grass, took off his shirt and boots, and lay down pleasurably beside her. Two minutes later Esther nudged him in the stomach and pointed to a large viper, as thick as a man’s forearm, that was crawling slowly toward them. She could feel Binyamin stiffen and start to shake, every pore of his skin gushing sweat.
‘Don’t move,’ she said. ‘If I haven’t eaten you, it won’t either.’
But the viper kept coming toward them, sniffing the ground with its tongue. Esther pinned Binyamin down with her hand to keep him from moving. When the snake neared her foot, she picked up one of his heavy work boots and clubbed it on the neck. It lunged and writhed while she struck it again and again till its head was as flat as a wafer.