They stood looking into the distance until Zeitser coughed, catching a whiff of far-off smoke and explosives, and Grandfather, glimpsing the carmine flush of battlefields and hearing the screams that skipped like pebbles across the waves, buried his head in his knees.
They had already returned home when an English automobile drove into the village in the morning. The children ran to tell Rilov that Major Stoves had arrived and that the septic tank entrance should be camouflaged. Major Stoves was a tall, limping Englishman who had been wounded in North Africa and transferred to Palestine with his uniform and black walking stick. He descended from the automobile, hobbled to the far door, opened it, and saluted. Efrayim was home.
Wearing the soft yellow desert boots and winged-dagger insignia of a commando, and his ribbons, decorations, and sergeant’s stripes, in his pocket a lifelong pension certificate from His Majesty’s government, Efrayim stepped out of the car and smiled at the villagers gathered there.
The cry that went up at the sight of him was not soon forgotten. Mouths opened wide, retching with horror and consternation. Men came running from the green fields, from the leafing orchards, from the cowsheds and the chicken coops to stand before Efrayim and howl. The veterinarian’s wife, whom he had slept with on and off, screamed for a full minute and a half ‘without stopping to catch her breath’. Children he had taught to throw a knife and built kites for whimpered in high, terrified voices. Ya’akov Pinness emerged from the school and loped heavily toward his former pupil, then stopped in his tracks as suddenly as if he had run into a wall. Shutting his eyes, he bellowed like a slaughtered ox. The cows, the calves, the horses, and the chickens made a hideous racket in their pens and runs.
A phosphorous mine planted by the Italian army, ‘the Chicken Corps’, as Uri called it, had turned my uncle’s handsome face into a burned pudding of skin and flesh that glittered, ‘How can I describe the horror of it, my child, like a squashed pomegranate, in every shade of red, purple, and yellow. You’re lucky you don’t remember him.’
One of my uncle’s eyes had been torn out, his nose was in the wrong place, his lips were gone, and a crooked, wine-red gash ran diagonally across his face from the forehead to the hollow of the throat, disappearing in the collar of his shirt. His charred, mangled skin hung loosely from his cheekbones. A single green eye, sole testimony to the doctors’ attempt to restore his human visage, peered out from all that devastated tissue.
Efrayim, whose beauty had drawn curiosity-seekers from all over the Valley and made the startled birds swoop low overhead, had become a monster whom no one dared look at. The crowd pressed together in fear, ‘a whole village standing and shrieking’.
My uncle’s ghastly smile faded. He spun around as if wishing to vanish again. Major Stoves had already opened the door of the car with a muttered oath when the crowd suddenly parted to make way for Binyamin, who had elbowed his way through it like the solid blade of a ploughshare. Fighting to get to his brother-in-law’s side, he looked at him without flinching, hugged him in his thick arms, and kissed the shiny, minced flesh that had once been a cheek.
My father’s Hebrew had improved greatly. ‘Welcome home, Efrayim,’ he said, leading him away amid the silence that had collected like a puddle in the street.
For supper Efrayim asked for ‘the house vegetable salad’ and even told Esther how to make it. His voice was weak and throaty because his vocal cords were injured too.
‘First cut the onion and salt it a bit, then the tomatoes, and salt them too. The green pepper and cucumber come last. Mix well, season with black pepper, lemon juice, and oil, mix again, and let it breathe for a while.’
For the past two years, he said, he had dreamed of our salad, which ‘no one else in the world knows how to make’.
He shoved a heaped spoonful of it into his gullet and sighed with pleasure. As his horrid face made chewing motions and his flesh moved like a thousand crushed pellets, Avraham burst out crying and fled the table. But Binyamin remarked, ‘He must have forgotten to shut the water tap in the alfalfa,’ and went on talking with Efrayim about such subjects as the war, German submachine guns, a general named Rommel, commando training, and British military decorations.
‘I couldn’t speak,’ said Grandfather. ‘They had destroyed my beautiful boy. Before going to bed he said, “Goodnight, Father,” and turned away at once to spare me from hugging or kissing him.’
‘Every kiss not given him is a piece cut out of my heart,’ I found written in one of Grandfather’s notes.