But Efrayim did not care about trees and was so overwrought that his skin began to quiver and twitch like a horse’s hide. Every evening he went to Esther and Binyamin’s cabin, on one wall of which hung a large map with pins and flags that were carefully moved about.
Men had already signed up and disappeared from the village. The first to go were our two smiths, the Goldman brothers. Since the day the village was founded they had shod its workhorses and tempered its pickaxes and ploughshares to make them strong. ‘Like Jachin and Boaz, the two mighty pillars of the Temple, they stood over their hearth with their tongs in their left hands and their trusty hammers in their right, a red glow suffusing their chests.’
‘One day when Zeitser and I came to the smithy,’ Grandfather told me, ‘the two brothers weren’t there. The coals were cold and grey, the bellows silent, the smoke gone. Only their two big hammers were still floating in the air above the anvil.’
Next to go was Daniel Liberson, who stayed on in Europe after the war with a band of anti-Nazi avengers. Though his curt, angry letters to Esther never mentioned my father, the hatred expressed by his ardour for killing blond Germans blew like a chill wind through all his words and deeds.
At night Binyamin sat with Rilov and various strangers who arrived in the village disguised as fertiliser consultants or egg salesmen. Together they prepared arms caches and time fuses, used irrigation pipes to cast mortars, and agreed on a system of nocturnal voice signals ‘that drove the owls and crickets of the Valley crazy’.
There was worry in the air. The war was far away, but there were times at night or in the quiet hours of the autumn afternoons when the villagers fell silent, gazing to the north and west as if they could see and hear what was happening. ‘The blood of our distant brothers was calling and crying out to us.’
Efrayim begged Grandfather for permission to join the British army, but Grandfather wouldn’t hear of it.
‘A boy of your age can make his contribution right here. You’re not going off to any war.’
‘My handsome wanderer in foreign fields,’ he wrote on a piece of paper torn from a notebook.
Efrayim went on working with his father. With a haunted expression on his thin, tense face he bound branches and kept his thoughts to himself. Pinness, who could predict the impending migrations of animals by their movements and expressions, warned Grandfather what lay ahead.
‘I can’t chain him down,’ said Grandfather.
‘Keep an eye on him,’ Pinness urged.
‘Did anyone ever manage to stop us?’ asked Grandfather. ‘Was your father glad to see you run away from home for this country?’
Over dinner he watched his son hungrily attack the vegetable salad. He looked at his strong, wirey arms and the green eyes that had lost their focus, and knew that deep down Efrayim had already spread his wings.
After the meal Efrayim jumped up from his chair and announced that he was going out to check the water taps.
‘Goodbye, Efrayim,’ said Grandfather.
‘I’ll be right back,’ Efrayim said. And he was gone.
A week later his heavy Hercules bicycle was found chained to the fence of the British army base at Sarafand. By then he himself was aboard a naval vessel bound for Scotland. Though he wasn’t seasick, his face was coated with skeins of foam. His noiseless feet were shod in stiff army boots, but even when he stamped on the vibrating iron deck, the sound was drowned out by the boom of the thrusting waves.
At night, listening to the sea pound and foam as it sprawls outside the windows of my white prison, I think about all the sounds that never stopped, though you had to concentrate to hear them: the wind in the casuarina trees, the ticking of the sprinklers, the burble of the spring, the cows chewing their cud, the scratchy slithers beneath the cabin floor. Pinness explained to me how Efrayim could walk so silently. ‘He wasn’t actually that silent. He just knew how to make his footsteps sound like one of the world’s steady noises.’
‘He was one of the few Palestinian Jews to serve with the British commandoes,’ said Meshulam when Efrayim was already a memory that not everyone cared to believe in or carry the burden of. He began pulling papers and envelopes from an orange crate on which he had written ‘Sons Who Served’.
‘Fifty-three members of farming families signed up, among them two older men, thirty-eight boys born in the village, and thirteen girls. Four sons and two daughters of non-farming families joined too. Sixteen failed to return. I have the letters home of quite a few soldiers, but none of Efrayim’s. Your family, for some reason, refused to let Founder’s Cabin have them.’