‘What a stupid idiot you are!’ she said to Binyamin. ‘What a stupid fatso! Killing a snake is nothing. Efrayim once killed a viper with a shoe brush.’
Across the fields they saw Pinness and his children by the corn patch, far from the houses of the village. But they could not see the hyena, which was hidden up to its shoulders in the thick corn.
Pinness knew it would not attack. Hyenas rarely did, and even then only when they found a single weak, tender victim.
‘But I recognised it,’ he gasped. ‘It made me feel murderous. I wanted to run at it, kill it, choke it. It recognised me too, though, and disappeared back into the thick foliage. The children never even saw it.’
He gathered the children around him, flapping his arms like a mother hen, and returned with them to the village, where he worriedly related his fears to the Committee head.
‘The hyena must have been attracted by a carcass that somebody threw in the corn,’ said the Committee head, who was reminded by Pinness’s fears of ‘some idiotic Arab superstition’. It couldn’t possibly be the same beast that had bitten settlers and struck them down during their first years in the Valley, he argued. Pinness left more upset and worried than before.
He hurried to the teacher from the neighbouring village and urged him to set traps and post guards, but no one there had seen the hyena or even come across its tracks.
‘Just as years later no one heard those obscenities in the middle of the night,’ he said to me angrily.
The sleepwalker disappeared every night in search of his father. Without waking he loosed the ropes tying him to his bed and set out, vanishing under the noses of his pursuers as if he had dissolved into little flakes of darkness. Once the night watchmen saw his sleeping figure emerge from the shadows and cross right in front of the breeding horse, a splendid but violent stallion that had already trampled a calf and a hired hand to death. Not only did it do him no harm, it rubbed against the fence of its corral and whined as fearfully as an abandoned puppy.
‘On the seventh night the hyena called again, and the blond little boy, thinking it was his father, was tricked into rising from his mother’s bed and going out to the fields with his eyes shut, in nothing but a white nightshirt.’
Three days later the little body was found with a splintered neck bone, next to the jujube tree in the dry bed of the wadi. It was old Zeitser on one of his pensive walks who discovered it lying beneath the familiar, accursed green blanket of necrophiliac flies. He ran all over the Valley to tell the founders.
Pinness, who was not exactly ‘a fire-breathing warrior’, stood by the little coffin before the open grave, weeping and swearing revenge.
‘It’s no accident that it strikes at the smallest and weakest of us,’ he said. ‘The hyena is Doubt and Despair, the loss of faith and the sowing of confusion. But we shall be of good cheer and continue to build and plant, to sow and water, until the ploughman shall overtake the reaper and the treader of grapes him that soweth seed.’
The villages were in a state of panic. The broken neck and savaged chest of the little boy struck terror in all hearts. Children were no longer allowed out at night to turn off sprinklers or check that the barnyard gate was shut. And yet the springtime went its merry way.
‘Before long the dead boy sank into the sediments of the Valley’s painful memory. Along with the victims of malaria and of Arab bandits, the suicides and the fallers by the wayside, he too became a fable in our textbooks and a black-framed picture in the teachers’ room. Each time I looked at his little face, I cursed the fates in my heart.’
The spring earth had dried out and cracked, the stalks of grain turned yellow, and our new Marshall thresher was brought to the fields. The harvest was a particularly good one that year, ‘as if the earth had accepted our sacrifice’. Binyamin came to help out after finishing work at Rilov’s, and my mother brought his meals to the field, poking fun at his sensitive skin that blistered in the sun, hissing like a snake behind his back, tripping him among the sheaves, and wrestling with him in the smothering dust of chaff that covered their faces and clothes.
The Mirkins were preparing for a double wedding – Binyamin and Esther’s, Avraham and Rivka’s. No one had the slightest inkling of the cunning ambushes of Time or the tubers of evil swelling in its furrows. My parents’ death, Efrayim and Jean Valjean’s disappearance, Zeitser’s gruesome end, Pioneer Home – all these were not even the tiniest cloud on the horizon. In honour of the occasion Pinness and Tsirkin composed a short musical comedy on the history of threshing floors from the days of Ruth to the present. Some of the village women volunteered to make the food, and the Committee saw to the tables and tablecloths.