One day I opened the door to find Daniel Liberson standing there.
‘I happened to be in the neighbourhood,’ he said sullenly.
‘Come in,’ I said.
Daniel was the first visitor who did not make a detour around the Chinese carpet in the living room. He trod over it in his work boots straight to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, and peered inside.
‘Don’t you have any cold water?’
Almost apologetically I showed him the little device in the door that spewed ice cubes.
He smiled. ‘I can see there’s been progress since your grandmother sat crying in our house because she couldn’t have your uncle’s refrigerator from America.’
I could easily picture him crawling in nappies toward my mother’s cot. He still had the same loving devotion in his face and the same murderous itch in his fingers.
He looked out of the window and took a deep breath.
‘The air is so different here,’ he said. ‘Come, Baruch, let’s take a walk on the beach.’
Daniel walked slowly, the intervals between his footprints as exact as if spaced by a ruler. I waved to the distant figure of David, the old man who rents out beach chairs.
‘So what do you do all day?’ Daniel asked.
‘Nothing special.’
‘Sometimes, on the anniversary of my father’s or my mother’s death, I visit your old place. Uri is doing a good job. He’s a good farmer. Serious. He’s changed a lot, your cousin. For the better.’
Daniel looks like neither of his parents. Eliezer Liberson had a head of curly hair until he died. Daniel is almost entirely bald, more rugged and quiet than his father.
‘Sometimes, too, I go to visit your mother’s grave on the hill.’
If that’s what he wants to talk about, I thought, let him talk. I wouldn’t stop him. I was bound and chained just like he was. The same ring of earth and memories led us both around by the nose.
‘It doesn’t upset me any more,’ he continued. ‘Today I think that I fell in love with her at the right age and that it broke off at the right age too.’
There was a sudden roar behind us. A boy and girl on a blue motorcycle were riding by the water’s edge, spraying wet sand in a flare of golden limbs and toothy tyre marks.
‘To this day, even when I have grown children with the woman I married, there are people who look at me with Esther in their eyes.’
I don’t know Daniel’s wife well. She’s a small, sturdy, hardworking woman who reminds me of a donkey. He brought her to the village, nervous and excited, from an immigrants’ settlement where he worked as an agricultural adviser. The news on her in the village is that ‘for a Romanian, she’s all right’.
‘They still remember Esther and me when we were children. Meshulam says that our love was seen as an opportunity, a prophecy straight out of Pinness’s Bible lessons. Liberson’s son and Mirkin’s daughter. And if it weren’t for my mother and your grandfather, it would have come true.’
‘How is Meshulam?’
He fumbled for words. ‘You could have been my son,’ he murmured. ‘You would have been different then.’
‘I would have been someone else,’ I said.
‘It was puppy love,’ said Daniel. ‘At the age of eight, when all the boys hate all the girls, Pinness put us next to each other in the school choir and I fell in love with her.’
‘There are more versions of what happened in our Valley than there are people it happened to,’ Meshulam once said to me.
‘When we were about eight or nine years old she made me go to the mountain with her. “There are pheasants there,” she said. “I want to catch some and pick flowers to dry.” We roamed around all day, and when the sun went down she said, “Let’s stay and sleep between the rocks.” Nothing scared her. And yet, you know, even then she made me feel I was protecting her. A nine-year-old girl …
‘We spent all night among the rocks, and it was then that she told me she could never marry me because I was too serious. Too loving and dependent. At the age of nine! All that meat made her think like a woman, even if she still looked like a little girl.’
‘What happened?’
‘Zeitser found us in the morning. The village was out looking for us all night. Rilov brought Bedouin shepherds down from the hills and horsemen from Tel Adashim, but the only one who ever managed to find lost children was Zeitser. He brought us home.’
‘I meant what happened between the two of you.’
‘What happened?’ His voice rose to a bellow. Two fishermen who came to the beach every evening turned to stare at us. ‘You want to know what happened? Are you making fun of me? You mean to tell me you don’t know?’