‘Do you remember, Mirkin, how we stepped off the boat, a bunch of yokels from Makarov, and ate black olives in that restaurant in Jaffa? And that pretty blonde girl with the blue kerchief who waved to us in the street?’
Grandfather didn’t answer. Words like ‘Do you remember …’ left him cold. Besides, I knew he couldn’t talk because he had an olive in his mouth and was sucking on it slowly as he sipped his tea. ‘Either you eat or you remember,’ he once said to me. ‘There’s only so much you can chew on at once.’
It was a habit of his to keep a cracked olive in his mouth while he drank his tea and nibbled gingerly at the sugar cube hidden in his palm, enjoying the soft, bittersweet combination. ‘Tea and olives. Russia and the Land of Israel.’
‘These olives are good,’ said Pinness, growing affable. ‘Wonderful. How few are the pleasures left us, Mirkin, how very few indeed, and how few are the things that still excite us! Can thy servant taste what I eat or what I drink? Can I hear any more the voice of singing men and singing women?’
‘You seemed excited enough when you walked in,’ Grandfather remarked.
‘What gall!’ spat Pinness. I could hear the olive stone shoot from his mouth, bounce off the table, and fly into the sink. Then there was silence, in which I knew that a new olive was slowly being crushed between Grandfather’s false teeth, releasing its subtly bitter juice.
‘And Efrayim?’ asked Pinness suddenly. ‘Have you heard anything of Efrayim?’
‘Not a word,’ replied Grandfather with predictable aloofness. ‘Nothing.’
‘It’s just you and Baruch, eh?’
‘Just me and the child.’
Just Grandfather and me.
The two of us. From the day he carried me in his arms from my parents’ house to the day I carried him in my arms to his grave in the orchard.
Just him and me.
2
My eyes clouded over with longing for Grandfather. I rose from the big leather armchair and wandered through the rooms of my home, the big house I bought after growing up, burying him and his friends in the orchard, becoming rich, and leaving the village. ‘Just me and the child’ – I could not get these words to disappear back into their drawer. I went out to the mowed lawn and lay down facing the shore and the booming surf.
I had bought the house and everything in it from a banker who had to leave the country in a hurry. I never knew why, just as I never knew anyone of his ilk and was never inside a bank in my life. The money I received from the families of the deceased had been stashed away in some fertiliser sacks in the cowshed, next to the bedding of old Zeitser, who slept with the cows on principle.
‘In the old days in Sejera I slept with the livestock too,’ he declared.
Zeitser’s large ears stuck out on either side of his old Russian worker’s cap. He was able to wiggle them, and sometimes, when in a good mood, he gave in to the pleas of us children and showed us how he did it. Zeitser had unshakeable principles and a platform that bent reality like a clover stem. ‘Zeitser,’ Grandfather once wrote, ‘is the only workers’ party that never split into factions, because it never had more than one member.’
Busquilla, the manager of my cemetery, Pioneer Home, brought me to my new house in the same van we used for transporting coffins from the airport and old folk’s homes, and headstones from old stone carvers in the Galilee.
It was a spacious white residence surrounded by a fragrant hedge of pittosporum. Busquilla surveyed it with a satisfied look before ringing the buzzer on the electronic gate. As soon as I told him that the last of the pioneers was dead, that there was no room for even one more grave, and that I wanted to shut down the business and leave the village, he went and found me a new place to live. He bought it on his own, haggling with the agents and wearing down the lawyers with his poisonous good nature.
Standing there with him in front of the big gate, I realised that I had never lived in a real house in my life. My only home had been Grandfather’s wooden cabin, the likes of which the other farmers in the village had long ago turned into sheds or chopped into firewood.
I was wearing my blue work clothes. Busquilla, in a light linen suit, was carrying a sack in one hand. The banker hurried out to us, a plump, agile man propelled by flabby muscles along the polished floor tiles.
‘Ah,’ he called out. ‘It’s the undertakers.’
Busquilla said nothing. Years of ideological warfare with our village and the Movement had taught him that our cemetery was resented by whomever was not buried in it. He untied the sack and dumped the dusty banknotes on the rug, sending up a noxious cloud of ammonium sulphate. Then, stepping up to the gasping banker, he slapped him hard on the back with one hand while shaking his hand with the other.