Efrayim borrowed a rifle and a single cartridge from the British, waited for the sun to set, and took up a position amid the bales in Margulis’s hayloft. I can picture his good eye peering through the wisps of hay. When Bulgakov appeared he crept out of his hiding place and stalked the cat quietly from the rear, smiling to himself behind his beekeeper’s mask.
Margulis and Grandfather were hiding in the storage shed. ‘We looked out of the window and saw the beast and the hunter go by like two apparitions.’ Three green points, two low and one high, glowed in the dark. By the entrance to the brooding coop Efrayim called to the cat, ‘Hands up!’
Bulgakov froze. ‘Less from fright than from astonishment,’ Grandfather explained. The hairy tufts bristled on his ears as he spun around to see who had bested him. But when Efrayim stripped the mask from his face, the cat dropped his jaw in horror. Into his open mouth flew the single bullet, the copper nose of which Efrayim had filed almost in two beforehand. The dumdum splintered in Bulgakov’s skull, blowing his brains to wicked smithereens that went on squirming on the ground and walls.
‘Now the two of us look the same,’ said Efrayim to the mangled corpse, which was still twitching and secreting sticky poisons, and then he went back to his room.
20
Sometimes visitors from the village drop by: a hungry soldier on his way home from his base, or the village treasurer or a crop manager whose business has brought him to the metropolis on the coast. They walk through the large house in amazement, stepping out on the lawn to look at the female bathers on the beach. The younger ones shyly ask to borrow a swimming costume, which I don’t happen to own, while the older ones find the panorama too much for them and stare down at the ground or into the nearest hedge, seeking the reassurance of familiar boundaries and limits.
I’ve had my fill of the sea. I don’t even hear the sound of the surf any more unless I make an effort to listen. The waves too have lost their hypnotic effect on me. Close up, the sea is stripped of its intrinsic menace. Soft and lazy, it wallows fastidiously in the sun, and even in winter, when it turns grey and bitter and is pimpled by rain, there is something clownish about it. I don’t swim in it and it doesn’t scare me.
‘How are you doing?’ they ask.
‘Just fine.’
I do my best to play the host. The not baseless rumours of my wealth have got around. Perhaps they expect me to serve prime beef and lamb chops, but I still wear the same old clothes and eat what I ate in the village. I just don’t drink colostrum any more, because I’m big and strong enough as it is, exactly as Grandfather wanted me to be. At one end of the lawn I mixed eight cubic yards of soil from the village with the sand of the garden. Busquilla brought it in the black farm truck, and I grow a few tomato plants and some scallions, cucumbers, and peppers. My hens, which used to run loose, now lay their eggs in captivity because the neighbour’s children threw stones at them and I was afraid I might retaliate too savagely.
‘It’s very nice,’ say the guests, circulating through the rooms with the same careful steps they once took past the graves of Pioneer Home. Subdued and uncertain, they look for secrets and explanations.
I entertain them in the kitchen, where I make a salad, hard-boil some eggs, mash potatoes with yoghurt and fried onions, and slice a herring.
‘What’s going on in the village?’
They tell me about Rachel Levin, whom the years have not touched; about the wife of Ya’akovi the Committee head, who started a drama society; about the arguments over who is supposed to sign for whose debts; about Margulis’s son, who defied our co-operative marketing system and created mayhem at a general meeting by opening a private roadside stand for the produce of his bees.
‘A lot of it has to do with you,’ said Uzi, Rilov’s grandson, who appeared suddenly one day, several months before he was killed in a war, as if he had quite forgotten jumping on my back and pulling my ears or his father Dani calling Efrayim nasty names. I don’t blame him for it. I know now that there are people who don’t remember like I do, and it no longer surprises me. Like Meshulam, after all, I used the memory lanes of others to train in.
‘A lot of it has to do with you,’ Uzi accused me. ‘You ruined something basic in our life.’
‘I did what Grandfather wanted,’ I answered wearily.
Uzi gave me an annoyingly shrewd smile. ‘You can tell an old pal like me the truth,’ he said. ‘Stop pretending to be so stupid. Everyone knows by now that you’re smarter than they thought and a hell of a lot smarter than you look.’