I didn’t answer. Comparing versions of old stories always left me disappointed.
‘She chose your father instead of me because he was such a big, solid, dumb animal that he gave her the most marvellous feeling of masculine apathy.’
‘He saved her life,’ I shouted. ‘When you and Efrayim went running for a ladder, he caught her in his arms.’
‘What?’ roared Daniel. ‘That’s what they told you? That he saved her life?’
I said nothing.
‘They were a very interesting couple, your father and mother. Very interesting. The village is full of wild stories – that I courted her with pots of roast meat, that I ran shouting through the eucalyptus woods instead of coming to her wedding, that I ploughed her name in letters a mile wide …’
‘You didn’t?’
‘Tell me,’ said Daniel, turning toward me belligerently, ‘do you think that at ploughing time, when you’re racing to get the grain sown, anyone has time to make mile-wide letters? What the hell world do you live in, I’d like to know! Do you have any idea what’s happening in the village? Do you have any idea what’s happening in the country? Do you know that the Movement is in big trouble? That the young people are leaving and everyone is up to their necks in debt? That farmers are selling their cows and tearing out their orchards? Has anyone told you that men have been getting killed in wars, or do you think that the dead soldier’s memorial gravestone is just one more fossil Pinness dug up from the earth?’
We walked on in silence. Slowly Daniel’s breathing grew calmer and the tremor left his cheeks.
‘The only one who ever helped me was your grandfather,’ he said at last. ‘I got over her the night he heard me howling like an idiot outside your cabin. He stepped outside with those bow legs of his and said, “You’ll never get her that way.” That’s when I, the son of Eliezer Liberson, Daniel Liberson the athlete, the dancer, the romantic lover, picked myself up off the ground and thought, “But that’s the only way to get her that I know of!”’
We fell silent again.
‘I dug her out of me the way you dig out a weed. I left nothing in the ground and I burned all the pieces. She wasn’t worth a minute of my love.’
‘I don’t know much about all that love stuff,’ I murmured.
‘That night on the mountain,’ said Daniel, ‘is the only memory I cherish. We were children. It’s hard to believe, but we were little more than babies. There were wildcats around. The jackals came up to sniff our feet. She kept talking all night. I was so afraid that I kept hugging and kissing her. I could hear her talking through my mouth.’
My mother’s vocal cords had made the air vibrate around her. The nine-year-old Daniel had had no idea that from then on his life would skid downhill on the terrible slope of disillusionment.
‘What did you say?’
‘Nothing,’ I answered. ‘Forget it.’
‘I didn’t mean to tell you all this,’ Daniel said. ‘I just happened to be passing by. I know you were very close to my parents as a boy. They loved you too. Up to a point, of course. Believe me, I never meant to tell you all this.’
‘You didn’t tell me that much,’ I said. ‘I already knew most of it anyway.’
‘You always have to know better, haven’t you?’
He regarded me curiously.
‘When you were a boy, I used to watch you a lot. I’m sure you never noticed. Once Pinness asked me to come along on a class hike of yours. I never took my eyes off you. If anything happened to you, I was sure I would be blamed for it. You were a strange boy, always tagging after Pinness. You carried his chloroform bottles and butterfly nets, and you even moved your lips when he spoke.’
‘Pinness was like a second grandfather,’ I said.
‘At their wedding and afterward everyone went around feeling sorry for me, as though I were some kind of charity case. You can’t say our village has no principles. You help a comrade in distress even if he’s young and stupid. The only one who thought it was funny was that goddess of love, my mother the field nymph.’
‘You see,’ he added after a brief pause, ‘it only happened because my mother had this thing about your poor grandmother Feyge. That was the only reason.’
‘All the loves and hates and feuds in our village are like a siphon,’ he remarked as we walked back. ‘You squeeze one end and all the crap comes out the other. In the end everything evens out and quietens down. It was me who paid the price of your grandfather’s eternal love for that woman in Russia. Meshulam killed Hagit because Pesya Tsirkin wouldn’t work on the farm. And your grandmother, poor Feyge Mirkin, paid for everyone. I still remember her, even though I was only a baby when she died. I do. My parents’ only fights were over her.’