I never liked Meshulam. When I was a boy he used to come to Grandfather to ask about his first years in the country.
‘So tell me, Mirkin, did you meet Frumkin in Kinneret?’
‘Yes.’
‘In the pumphouse by the Jordan?’
‘There too.’
‘And you heard him call for a strike to make Berman resign?’
‘Why make a big deal of it, Meshulam? Berman refused to let them have a horse and waggon to visit a sick friend in Tiberias, and when the friend died they were furious. He made life hard for them. Like the officials in Kfar Uriah and the other big farms.’
‘Berkin wrote in The Young Worker that in Kfar Uriah there were four administrators, and that he had uncovered financial irregularities.’
‘So?’
‘Here, I’ll tell you exactly what he wrote.’ Meshulam shut his eyes and quoted from memory. ‘“Kfar Uriah has no less than four administrators, and what do they do? The first, who is the head administrator, lives in Petach Tikvah and comes to visit on a mule. As for the other three, one looks after the grain fields and one is in charge of planting trees.”’
‘Excuse me, Meshulam, but I have work to do.’ Grandfather turned to go with a powerful shake of his shoulders. Meshulam ran after him to the yard.
‘But don’t you see, Mirkin? He says four administrators and then mentions one in Petach Tikvah, one in the grain fields, and one in the orchards. Where’s the fourth? What happened to him? And Bilitskin only speaks of three. I’m looking for someone to put me right.’
‘That’s what’s worrying you? The number of administrators in Kfar Uriah? Why don’t you go and ask Zeitser?’
‘You know very well that I can’t get a word out of Zeitser.’
When he was ten years old Meshulam once spent a whole day following Zeitser around, pestering him with questions until he received a swift kick in the backside. He ran crying to his father, who told him that he would get a second kick if he didn’t stop the nonsense.
None of the other founding fathers could stand Meshulam either.
‘Get out of here!’ shouted Liberson in despair. ‘How am I supposed to remember how much money Hankin wanted from Abramson to buy the land at Ein Sheikha?’
After six hours in Meshulam’s company, Liberson dropped the heavy bale of hay he was holding and wearily sat down on it. Eighty-year-old men do not like pedantic questions that point up their failures of memory.
‘You don’t have to remember,’ said Meshulam. ‘Just tell me.’
‘Twelve francs a dunam.’
‘You see, Liberson, when you want to, you remember,’ Meshulam said. ‘There’s a little problem here, though, because Abramson, in his letter to Tyomkin at the end of the war, specifically speaks of fifteen francs a dunam. What happened to the rest of the money?’
I too ran out of patience.
‘What’s it to me?’ I asked, throwing the snapshot to the ground. ‘How do I even know it’s Efrayim?’
The cow was a present from Efrayim’s friends in the British army, who had scattered all over the globe after the war. She was a pregnant, pedigreed, highly valuable Charolais heifer. Most of the money for her purchase was donated by Efrayim’s former squad leader, who had returned to his family diamond mine in Rhodesia. Two Scottish secret agents brought the money to an ex-Resistance fighter who was now a motorcycle repairman in Dijon, and he bought the cow from an old farming woman in the Charolais district and passed it on to them. From there it was led over back mountain passes to a Mediterranean port and taken to Palestine by the British navy in a grey frigate assigned to hunt down ships carrying illegal Jewish immigrants.
Efrayim put on his uniform and decorations and drove to the port in Haifa.
‘He returned in a Bedford army truck with the lame officer, Major Stoves. The cow, still green from the voyage, was standing in a crate.’
The whole village came out to the main road to see her. She was the first Charolais cow in Palestine and had brought with her, in a flat walnut case with a green felt lining, her framed certificates from the French department of agriculture.
‘We had never seen a cow like her before. She was broad and low-built, brimming with self-esteem and unadulterated genes of a purity unknown among men. When I saw her I understood for the first time why Jeremiah compares the glorious kingdom of Egypt to “a very fair heifer”.’
Next to her, said Pinness, Ya’akovi’s handsome heifer Modesty, that year’s bronze medal finalist at the Haifa agricultural exhibit, looked like ‘one of the shrivelled wine-bottles of the Gibeonites’.