Greenfinches jumped on the hedgerows along the path, and a pair of falcons tumbled in the air, sporting in high-pitched spirals. A yellow cloud of goldfinches swarmed anxiously over the thistles, their thick, short beaks sounding little squeaks of surprise.
‘By their beaks ye shall know them. The goldfinch’s is short and thick, well suited for cracking seeds, and the falcon’s is curved and sharp, perfectly adapted to tearing meat.’
One morning Pinness took us to the edge of the eucalyptus woods, where the carcass of a cow had been dumped. Belly swollen, horns ploughing the earth, it had been dragged there chained to a tractor the evening before. ‘He shall be buried with the burial of an ass, drawn and cast forth beyond the gates of Jerusalem,’ quoted Pinness sadly, telling us to watch in silence. Several vultures were gathered around the dead body. I liked their familiar bald heads, fierce stares, and wrinkled throats. With their perfectly evolved beaks they disembowelled the dead cow, their featherless white necks in its gut.
Pinness told us how Darwin had studied the Galápagos Island chaffinches, ‘a small, isolated community of birds equipped by evolution with a variety of beaks adapted to different kinds of food’. By splitting up into subspecies, each of which adjusted to new diets, the chaffinches ensured their survival. From here, via parable and analogy, it was but a short step to our teacher’s exhortations on the advantages of multiculture farming. ‘The orchard and the cowshed, the poultry run and the vegetable patch: thou shalt take hold of this and withdraw not thine hand from the other.’
Sometimes I would flush a mother lark from her hiding place, and she would run ahead of me and flop around in the stubble like a shrill, lame old woman, soiling her crest in the dirt while luring me away from her nest and camouflaged eggs. Green lizards ran quickly, leaving tiny cuneiform prints. Partridges took off with a loud applause of wings, and sometimes a mongoose scurried across the path, its long, wicked body wriggling like a snake. There were real snakes too.
‘Though it eats baby chicks and eggs, the black snake is the farmer’s friend, for it destroys the mice. Step aside and let it pass when you see it.’
The farmers who were out early in their fields knew me by my lumbering walk and the pitcher in my hand and said a friendly hello. Some even offered me a waggon ride. Carefully I crossed the wheat field of the nearby kibbutz, my muscles stiffening as a kibbutznik the age of my uncle Avraham stepped out from behind a tree with a small basket. Ages after Liberson’s abduction of Fanya, the tension was still there. Future generations would never even know what had happened. The rivers of time, the dams of memory, and clashing politics and seasons had coloured Liberson’s romantic prank in harsh, divisive hues. The bad blood between the kibbutz and the village kept growing, sending its tendrils out in all directions to fasten on trellises of hate. From time to time funds were fought over, stones were thrown, black eyes sprouted in angry faces, and shouts were fired back and forth across the wadi.
The man was alone. He approached me hesitantly with his eyes on the ground, as if expecting to find a cloven foot on me.
‘Are you going to the old folk’s home? You’re Ya’akov Mirkin’s grandson? My father used to tell me about him.’
Gently, bashfully, he held out the basket. ‘I’d appreciate your taking this to Ze’ev Ackerman, room number five. He’s a friend of your grandfather’s.’
Everyone was a friend of Grandfather’s. And I buried them all next to him. Ze’ev Ackerman, if my memory is not mistaken, is in row six, plot seventeen.
The straw basket held a cake and some enormous Japanese medlars that were as big as oranges. ‘They’re from our tree. You can eat one on your way. Only one, though.’
By 8.20 I was at the old folk’s home, wiping my feet on the lawn before putting on my sandals.
‘Mirkin’s grandson is here,’ said the old men sitting by the door as usual, desperately waiting for visitors. ‘He brings his grandfather milk. He’s a good boy.’ They regarded me with fond glances. Some looked like Grandfather, as if they had been cast in the same mould. Others, city types, were a transparent grey, like the insect moults I collected in the fields, frail and timid like Shlomo Levin. Years of bad nutrition, ‘ideological weakness’, and ‘estrangement from nature’ had left their mark on them.
Originally the home had been built for our own old people alone, the village’s and the kibbutz’s. No sooner did they arrive than they held a general meeting at which they voted to throw the occupational therapists’ beads and knitting needles in their faces and go to work in the flower garden. With rough, palsied hands they dug up the yellow roses and blue leadwort and sowed rows of beets, peppers, cabbages, and scallions. Then, singing lustily, they drained the gold-fish pond and diverted its water for irrigation.