‘Before coming to the village I saw your grandmother only a few times,’ Fanya Liberson told me when I was a child, ‘and always from a distance. The first time was near Migdal. The Workingman’s Circle was camped on a hill above us, and the effect on our commune was electric. Everyone whispered and pointed. Feyge was wearing what Jewish farmhands in the Galilee wore in those days, a white blouse with red Arab shoes. You could almost see the strings tying them to her.’
Fanya smiled. ‘I never ploughed or sowed or crushed stones. My commune was full of big idealists who talked a lot about equality and sharing and made the women work in the kitchen. The night before I had burned the lentils, and I’ll never forget what I had to put up with. The men took the full plates, banged them on the table, passed them from hand to hand, and finally dumped them on the floor. I cried all night long. Among us women, Feyge Levin was a legend.’
When Fanya arrived in the village, she asked Liberson to introduce her to Feyge. ‘I walked up to her bashfully and looked her in the eyes.’ It was then that she noticed that Grandmother’s eyes went off to either side. Without believing she was doing it, Fanya laid her hands on Feyge’s temples. ‘They were cold and damp. Her forehead always felt like frost.’
Grandmother brought her eyes into focus, and the two women became best friends. While Grandmother was having three children one after the other, Fanya had a stillbirth followed by Daniel, who was an only child.
‘You should either have married all of them or none of them,’ Fanya told Feyge. She knew that Ya’akov Mirkin’s relations with his wife were affectionate but loveless.
‘Ten years of being together had made them like three brothers and a sister,’ Fanya said whenever people swapped tales or spun theories about the Workingman’s Circle. She never forgave her husband and his two friends. From the day of Grandmother’s death she went about in a perpetual rage.
‘I saw her sitting and crying on a big black rock by the Sea of Galilee,’ Fanya told Rachel Levin. ‘It was evening, and the three of them were combing her hair. I’ll never forget that scene.’ The two old women were sitting in Rachel’s spice garden, whose etheric smells enveloped me too as I crouched in its hedges.
Daniel smiled. ‘Everyone knew you eavesdropped,’ he said. ‘Personally, I didn’t give a damn.’
We were sitting on my rooftop. ‘This is my observation post,’ I told him as I set the table.
‘I still remember your grandfather as a young man, and your grandmother, and Efrayim when he was a boy.’
‘Your grandfather was the wisest person I ever knew,’ said Daniel the next morning. ‘The wisest and the wickedest.’ He was in good spirits. Stepping out into my little garden, he picked a green pepper from a bush and ate it with relish.
‘That,’ he said, ‘was a terrific pepper. No one grows vegetables in the village any more except for Rachel Levin. We buy them in the shop like city folk. They taste that way too.’
‘I always wondered why people came from all over the world to be buried next to him,’ I said.
‘It became the fashion, I suppose. But he was certainly someone everyone looked up to. Even my father felt like a worthless so-and-so beside him. To say nothing of Tsirkin …’
‘You know,’ he added, ‘when I was a boy – and I hung around your cabin all the time, as you know – people came to him from all over to ask about their fruit trees. The whole country knew he had found the cure for gummosis in the orange groves.’
‘I guess he was thought of as a saint,’ he added a few minutes later. ‘Mirkin underneath his palm tree. Saint Mirkin of the Green Thumb, with a halo of longing over his head.’
21
A great love bound Efrayim and Jean Valjean. Before a few weeks had gone by, in the course of which the calf gained several pounds a day, his appearance on Efrayim’s shoulders was considered routine. Despite the burden, Efrayim felt as light and happy as if the calf were his own flesh and bone. By now ‘the fat Frenchy’, as the Charolais cow was called in the village, knew that her son would come home safely from his walks and had no qualms about Efrayim taking him. The calf too thought it a fine notion and waited for his master in the yard, skipping toward him with youthful coquetry and butting him playfully with his flanks and hard head as he begged to be taken out. According to my calculations, Jean Valjean must have weighed over twenty stone at the time. Though the calf did not seem heavy to Efrayim, his odd habit of carrying it around with him had its share of critics and opponents. No doubt there was grumbling among the livestock too, and certain villagers feared an insurrection among them.