When Meshulam said ‘your family’, he meant me. Grandfather was dead already, Yosi was in the army, and Uri was operating a tractor for an uncle of his in the Galilee, moving soil and firming sand. Avraham and Rivka were preparing to go to the Caribbean, where they had been offered the management of a large dairy farm, and the family farm was left in my hands, prospering nicely around Grandfather’s gravestone.
‘I don’t want to be buried with them,’ he told me, stating his will over and over. ‘They drove Efrayim from the village. Bury me in my own earth.’
It took more than just a little nerve, I thought, for Meshulam to demand Efrayim’s letters for his idiotic museum.
‘I’ll take my revenge where it hurts them the most,’ said Grandfather in the words he repeated like a menacing slogan during the last years of his life. ‘In the earth.’
And it was I who carried it out. The body of the old tree wizard poisoned the ground and stood the founders’ vision on its head. The graves on Mirkin’s land burned in the flesh of the village like open abscesses of mockery and chastisement. Spiders built their thick funnels in Avraham’s modern milking stalls. Mossy lichen bruised the concrete walls, wiping out the last traces of bounty and blessing. Mud daubers constructed great colonies out of paper and mud in the chinks of the hayloft.
Neglect was everywhere, but the money kept pouring in. Sacks of it piled up in the old cowshed while my field of graves flowered. Pioneer Home made time stop like a great wedge thrust in the earth, shattering by-laws and ways of life, breaking the vegetative cycle, flouting the seasons of the year.
Two months after Efrayim’s induction his letters began to arrive. They were short and uninteresting. Sometimes I reread them. Amphibious landings under live fire. Rock climbing. A boy from New Zealand who ‘kept wanting to know about our breeds of milk cows’ drowned during an exercise in fording rivers at a camp called Achnacarry near Inverness. I turned the strange syllables around in my mouth, seeking a taste of Efrayim’s life there. Forced marches in full battle gear, a sapper’s course in Oban. A snapshot of a night on the town, Efrayim in a Scottish kilt and a funny leopard-skin hat, a hairy sceptre in one hand. A letter of thanks to Rachel Levin for teaching him the art of silent walking.
‘His Majesty’s royal commandoes don’t know the first thing about creeping up on anyone,’ he wrote. ‘They waddle like the porcupines in the rushes by our spring.’
He was caught, so I learned, poaching deer with a knife in the royal preserve at Van Kripsdale, sentenced to a week in the brig, and fined forty pounds. Later he received a Distinguished Service Cross for his part in the raid on Dieppe, when in hand-to-hand combat he wiped out a German gun crew that was inflicting casualties on Lord Lovat’s commandoes. I read these letters out loud because I’m used to oral history. ‘Dieppe,’ I say to myself. ‘Kripsdale. Lovat.’ The foreign words make the air flow in unfamiliar ways through the cavities of my mouth and throat.
Time passed. The sun rose each morning on the foxholes of the soldiers in Russia, on Shulamit in the Crimea, on Shifris somewhere along his way, until it lit up our Valley, falling on Grandmother Feyge’s grave, on Grandfather’s straw hat, on Avraham’s cloven forehead, on my father and mother. Only then was it seen by Efrayim far to the west. Round and round it went for a whole month, until Grandfather received word that his son had been wounded in the battle of the el-Guettar Range in Tunisia.
For six long months after Efrayim’s injury not a single letter arrived from him. Grandfather was beside himself with worry. One night he set out with Zeitser to climb to the top of the blue mountain, where you could see the sea.
Like a huge wall, the mountain screened us from the city, from the sea, from all vanity and seduction. Every year the village turned its eyes toward it and studied the clouds that formed among its ridges, filling and marshalling themselves before beginning their great journey over our fields. ‘The clouds are the children of the mountain,’ Grandfather told me when I was small. We were walking in the fields, waiting for the rain, my hand shading my eyes just like his. He crumbled some soil between his fingers and gazed straight ahead at the mountain.
‘Once, when the rain clouds didn’t come, we decided to go and see what had happened to them. The entire Circle was there – Tsirkin, Liberson, Grandmother Feyge, and myself. We spent a whole day climbing to the top over rocks and thorns, and a whole night looking for the Rain Cave, until we heard the clouds muttering and grumbling. A big rock was blocking the cave and keeping them from getting out. We began to tug at it, raz dva, raz dva – one two, one two – as hard as we could, pulling from one side while the clouds pushed from the other, and at last the rock rolled loose and out they burst. Tsirkin managed to hitch a ride on one of them and came down with the rain by his house.’