‘She had a tender smell of red meat that made my daughter Esther look at her so hungrily that everyone burst out laughing.’
A month and a half later Efrayim’s heifer bore a magnificent Charolais calf. ‘Nothing like it had ever been seen in these parts.’ The birth was presided over by our animal doctor and the British district veterinarian, who was responsible for all the police dogs and horses in the area.
‘She took it like a trouper,’ they said, removing their rubber gloves and washing their hands of blood and excrement. The pedigreed cow had given birth without a peep in a private corner of the cowshed, unlike the mothers of our own mixed breed, who bellowed as though being led to the slaughter, encouraging all the other cows to come and watch.
Efrayim looked at the baby calf struggling to its feet and was beside himself with excitement. The animal’s thick neck and square forehead, its stout legs and soft, bright curls, made him shiver with delight. When he knelt with his hand on its broad back and removed his mask, the calf stuck out a rough tongue, licked the charred flesh of his cheeks, and sought to nurse from his disfigured ears and nose. It still could not walk without stumbling. Its mother stood beside it, snorting in annoyance while burying the afterbirth with her hoof.
‘That was the start of an unusual friendship,’ I was told by Avraham, who was a great expert on cattle.
‘Efrayim embraced the calf,’ said Pinness, ‘and then, overcome by a sudden, embarrassing urge, lifted it as the nursing father beareth a sucking child, walked out into the yard with it, and headed for the fields.’
‘And so off went your uncle Efrayim with ninety sweet pounds on his shoulders. He had already decided to call his little Frenchman Jean Valjean.’ Grandfather undid the bib around my neck, lifted me out of my highchair, placed me on his shoulders, and began to prance around the room with me. The Charolais calf laid its warm, kinky head in the hollow of its master’s breast and grunted quietly. While Grandfather scrubbed my neck with his fingers, the maddened bleats of the cow looking for her baby sounded in the yard. Efrayim capered happily in the fields until an evening chill set in and he brought Jean Valjean back to his mother to be nursed.
The calf was the talk of the village. Two days later the British veterinarian returned for a check-up and swabbed Jean Valjean’s navel with disinfectant. He and our own vet gave Efrayim some good advice on raising him.
Every day Efrayim took Jean Valjean out for walks in the yard and orchard, and every night, after cleaning out the cowshed, he came to check that he was safe and sound and that his straw mattress was dry. Only then did he lie down blissfully in bed, his one eye glittering in the dark. Binyamin teased him, calling him ‘the Minotaur’, but Efrayim did not mind. Having never seen him before he was wounded, he said, the calf accepted him as he was.
When Jean Valjean was a month old my uncle hoisted him onto his shoulders and went out in the street for the first time since his return.
‘I’m taking him on a tour of our village,’ he announced in his splintered voice.
A few astounded glances were sent his way, but Efrayim merely croaked from underneath his mask that he was showing the calf his future home. With self-conscious smiles the villagers followed after him, petting Jean Valjean and stroking his fine limbs. Several greeted Efrayim in a friendly fashion, causing new hope to spring in his heart. His relations with the village, he decided, were looking up – and so, when Hayyim Margulis came to ask for his help in hunting down Bulgakov, he was happy to agree.
Bulgakov was Riva Margulis’s big pet cat, which had run wild and become the most dreaded killer in the area.
‘Margulis’s cat was the only animal I ever knew who killed for pleasure rather than from hunger,’ said Pinness, who devoted a special nature lesson to him. ‘It was the bad influence of human society on him.’
Having once been a pet, he explained to us, the animal had acquired human habits and forgotten ‘the laws of the jungle’.
Bulgakov was a dazzlingly long-haired silver Persian who had jumped out of the city-bound bus that stopped every day in the village, and headed straight for the Margulises’ as if he had lived there all his life. The splendid cat stepped inside and rubbed against Riva’s calves until the two of them shut their eyes with pleasure. Riva Margulis had never seen such a beautiful creature. Bulgakov leaped onto the table, lapped up some milk, and surveyed the rows of jars there with a smile. Years later Riva still swore that he had read their labels aloud: ‘Alfalfa Honey, Wildflower Honey, Pomelo Honey.’
The guest tapped a manicured claw on the Leek Honey to let Riva know that she should open it. When he was finished licking his whiskers and had curled up in her lap, she sat dreaming of her trousseau sent in a steamer trunk from Kiev, of its thick rugs confiscated by the Committee to be traded for Dutch cows and machine guns, and of the Limoges china and Steuben glass smashed in the wheat fields, where slivers of them still gleamed every autumn when the ploughshares turned up the earth.