Two wedding canopies were set up between Mirkin’s fig and olive trees. Grandmother and Grandfather’s friends came from all over the country, embracing each other gaily and tramping over the pliant earth. Their fingers were arthritic from too much prying and milking, many were bald, and not a few carried reading glasses in their white shirt pockets.
‘The shoulders,’ said Eliezer Liberson, ‘the shoulders that an entire people had leaned on were a bit stooped, but the eyes had a fiery glow.’ Leading politicians came too. ‘When the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle married off a son and a daughter in one day, even the shirkers who preferred Zionist congresses to working knew they had better appear.’
Firstborn sons from all over the country came to Mirkin’s double wedding. Posed in a group, they were a moving sight. Among them were military commanders, teachers, heads of villages and kibbutzim, inventors of agricultural machines, and philosophers – ‘but all,’ said Pinness, ‘had the same clear eyes and proud bearing’.
My uncle stood solemnly beneath the canopy in blue trousers and a white shirt, a silent, searching groom who made everyone remember that Liberson once said of him, ‘He’s like an olive stone that lies in its husk for years before opening and sprouting.’ The wedding guests scrutinised him, looking for the promise that had yet to be fulfilled. Rivka, the daughter of Tanchum Peker the saddler, stood by his side, frowning with envy at Esther’s wedding dress. Her father, who had downed quantities of schnapps, walked among the guests in shiny boots redolent of leather, reminiscing about the wild officers’ parties in his days in the Russian cavalry, the cooks and servant girls he had cornered in pantries among smoked meats and straw-cushioned bottles. Bowing his knees as though on horseback, he clucked to old steeds that he alone remembered, flushed with nostalgia and pride.
Under the second canopy Esther stood laughing. Now and then she spun around giddily, her Bavarian wedding dress flying up like a dish of white foam. Far away in the eucalyptus woods Daniel Liberson crawled among wet tree trunks, beside himself with anguish, his throat so dry from crying that all he could do was wheeze. The week before, when he had been awarded the contract to plough the village grain fields, which amounted to nearly a thousand acres, Tsirkin and Liberson had decided to launch an unprecedented last-minute offensive. Following their orders, Daniel took the D-4 and the disc harrow and ploughed the name of his beloved in a field of stubble. Half a mile high and half a mile wide, the word ‘ESTHER’ ran outlined in rich brown earth against a background of yellow straw. But since no one whose two feet were on the ground was elevated enough to see it, the desperate love note went unnoticed by everyone except some British pilots, ‘and they couldn’t read Hebrew’.
‘And my father?’
‘Binyamin smiled at the guests but didn’t say much, because he missed his own father and mother.
‘When the ceremony and the presentations were over, a space was cleared for the two couples to dance. Tsirkin struck up the mandolin, and your father and my son Efrayim stepped into the circle and danced a cheek-to-cheek waltz. Tonya Rilov had a fit, and the whole village split its sides with laughter.’
‘And then?’
‘Then, my child, a war broke out and Efrayim went off to it.’
17
Grandfather sensed the approaching disaster and took Efrayim to the orchard, hoping to divert him with new projects. Most pears and apples, he explained to him, just as he did years later to me, develop on special short branches that bear annual fruit and must never be pruned.
Next to these, Grandfather showed Efrayim, are tall, upright branches that grow more quickly but are less fruitful. Although all the experts agreed that these infertile shoots should be cut back, Grandfather showed Efrayim how you could bend them outward and back on themselves like a taut bow and tie their tips to their bases with twine. The village was astounded to see how much fruit these bound branches gave. ‘He realised it during his first years in the country,’ Pinness told me admiringly. ‘Your grandfather discovered that not only men and horses but trees too can be harnessed and reined.’
Several years later, when an enthusiastic agricultural instructor appeared in the village to demonstrate the new ‘Caldwell method’ of branch bending developed in America, he was informed that we had been practising it for years without the fancy name. Moreover, Grandfather’s method was still unique in its periodic freeing of the bound branches, which repaid such thoughtfulness by increasing their yield even more.