All night Efrayim paced up and down in the yard, the silence of his feet keeping everyone awake. In the morning Binyamin arrived and sat down with him at the table, and the two sketched some plans on several large sheets of paper. Then Binyamin asked Zeitser to lend a hand. They took a cart through the fields to the English air base, where they were met by the lame Major Stoves, two lean, quiet Scottish commando officers who gave Efrayim an embrace, and an Indian quartermaster whose heart thumped loudly at the sight of the medals on my uncle’s chest. When they returned to the village, followed by an army truck loaded with construction rods, sand, cement sacks, and gravel, the two Scotsmen, Binyamin, and Efrayim took off their shirts and began digging a foundation hole by the cowshed. Over it they built a brick room with windows and a door that faced away from the house, out toward the cowshed and the fields.
Binyamin hooked the hut up to water and electricity, built a wonderful wood-burning stove that heated the room and the boiler, and made brown wooden shutters with copper clasps in the shape of dwarves that turned green with the years and wept ugly stripes on the plaster.
‘That’s the shed I keep my tools and plant medicines in now.’
Efrayim moved into his new home and never left it.
‘I circled the walls, which smelled of fresh, moist lime and plaster, waiting for my son to step out. Your mother put food in front of the door and pleaded with her brother to show himself. But he wouldn’t.’
Pinness came, knocked on the door, and asked to see his old pupil.
‘You screamed when you saw me,’ rasped Efrayim from within, refusing to open the door.
‘“I’m only human,” I told him. “No one knew you were wounded so badly. Open up, Efrayim. Open up for an old teacher who would like to apologise.”’
But Efrayim did not.
Grandfather and Pinness told me about it dozens of times, as if asking me to forgive them for Efrayim.
Binyamin came to visit him each evening. After a few weeks he advised him to start working in the cowshed at night.
‘The cows are afraid of me too,’ Efrayim said.
If he didn’t put himself to work, said Binyamin, he would grab him by the belt again and throw him in the cow trough.
‘But only at night,’ said Efrayim, stepping out of his room.
‘At half past nine I would see a strip of light as the door opened and the shadow of my son’s legs slipped off to the cowshed. He shovelled the manure, rinsed the milk cans, and put feed in the stalls for the morning milking.’
His heart ‘breaking into little pieces’, Grandfather lay paralysed in the cabin, listening to the rumble of the manure cart on the metal ramp, the scraping of the shovel in the sewage ditch, and the lowing of the cows crowding together in the pen and glancing surreptitiously at his son with sad whispers.
After four nights of this, Ya’akov Mirkin rose from his bed and went to the cowshed. He stood outside in the darkness and called to his son.
‘Don’t come in, Father,’ whispered Efrayim in a choked voice. ‘Don’t come into the cowshed.’
‘I have to,’ said Mirkin, stepping inside.
Efrayim managed to pull an empty feed sack over his head a second before he felt his father’s hands on his shoulders. Mirkin kissed the coarse jute, grinding the last of the fodder between his teeth until it melted thickly in tears and saliva. Gently, he removed the sack from his son’s head. Old Zeitser saw the two of them from his corner, where he pretended to be asleep.
‘The next morning I went to Margulis, asked him for an old beekeeper’s mask, and brought it to my son so that he could come and go among men.’
Efrayim’s handsome looks became a forgotten shadow, a configuration that came to life only before the shut eyes of those who cared to remember. But the life of the villagers was harder without such beauty to contemplate.
‘In a place so dependent on the laws of the earth and the weather, on the genetic quirks of animals and the acquired vagaries of men,’ Pinness explained to me, ‘Efrayim’s radiance was like the cold of snow in the time of harvest, like rest for the weary, like a lake of water in the wilderness.’ Only now did the villagers grasp what they had lost, which made their estrangement from him grow even greater.
Once a week my uncle ironed his khaki trousers and went to the military air base to chat with Major Stoves and the two laconic Scotsmen and drink beer with the British and Indian gunners stationed there. Sometimes he walked through the fields, waiting until he had left the orange grove to strip off his mask before the eyes of the startled bees who had followed him out of curiosity. Sometimes the base commander sent a car for him.