Afterwards Efrayim would lift his mask a crack, poke out his still hidden head, bashfully announce, ‘We’re finished,’ and wipe the bull’s damp groin with a special disinfectant. Within a few months he had salted away enough money to build Jean Valjean a sumptuous private barn, buy himself a radio, a gramophone, and some records, and construct a large, suspicious-looking antenna on his roof. Afternoons he spent lying in bed listening to Scottish bagpipe music or Binyamin’s records. Sometimes he had his British soldier friends over, closely watched by Rilov.
All this time Shlomo Levin continued to work on our farm. He was never anything but a rotten farmer, but his love of the soil persisted, and Grandfather was grateful to him for helping with the children and the housework when Feyge died. Now, however, Levin, reminding Grandfather that he had been ‘practically the boy’s mother’, came out against ‘Efrayim’s shenanigans’ and argued that only ordinary farm chores could help get him back to normal life. Grandfather responded bluntly.
‘Anything that makes Efrayim happy is fine with me,’ he said.
Meanwhile, Jean Valjean’s fat French mother fell ill. Having never got used to the Land of Israel, she died one day from eating castor beans. Now her huge orphan’s attachment to Efrayim grew even greater. Zeitser, who pitied the motherless bull and had a soft spot for it, as he did for anyone who stuck to one thing and did it well, got hold of Levin in the yard and told him curtly that ‘farm animals are part of our national renaissance too’.
‘If he’s strong enough to carry a bull on his back,’ retorted Levin, ‘he’s strong enough for other work. It’s not good for him to lie in his room all day long living off fornication.’
But Efrayim’s war injuries had in fact weakened him greatly. He had strength for Jean Valjean alone. Lesser burdens were too much for him. My father Binyamin, for example, could carry two fodder sacks on his back from the cart to the cowshed without even losing his breath, while Efrayim staggered under one. No one understood how he could lift a bull except Pinness, who claimed in the village newsletter that ‘the case of Efrayim and Jean Valjean is not amenable to physical or biological analysis. The phenomenon is a psychological one of friendship, willingness, ecstasy, and great hope.
‘Every man,’ wrote Pinness, ‘has a bull that he must lift. We are all flesh, seed, and a great bellow in the heart that will not rest until it is let out.’
22
One night I heard Rivka talking to Avraham.
‘Are you sure that cow was really poisoned and not slaughtered by your sister for roast beef?’
I ran anxiously to Pinness’s house. His door was never locked, and his old body, sprawled on its back with arms and legs outspread in childish trust, bespoke the faith and understanding inspired in him by all things.
‘Rivka was a bad student,’ he comforted me. He didn’t even scold me for barging in and waking him. Since Grandfather’s death I had adopted Pinness in his place, and he was now even more patient with me than usual.
‘Don’t you believe all those stories,’ he said severely. ‘There are even rumours that Efrayim was driven from the village because he passed secrets to the British. Major Stoves was a good friend of his, and there are people around here – I don’t have to mention any names – who took a dim view of that.’
At the time there appeared in the village a consultant on chicken breeding who spent longer than was advisable in the vicinity of Rilov’s yard. Several days later he was found in the eucalyptus woods with a dark, clotted red flower between his eyes and a page from the Bible pinned to his chest.
‘That’s nonsense,’ said Pinness. ‘Efrayim left because of your parents. He was very attached to them. Binyamin was like a brother to him. He loved him with all his heart.’
Others said that Efrayim ran away with a rubber woman who performed in the village with a man named Zeitouni, and still others that he had simply despaired of being able to ‘rejoin society’.
‘How long can a man go on keeping company with a bull?’ asked Grandfather, who spoke of his son’s fate with venomous anger.
‘Don’t bury me in their cemetery,’ he instructed me again before his death. ‘Those hyenas drove out my son. Bury me in my own earth.’
‘What did they want from us?’ asked Rivka. ‘No one could bear to look at him. He was a monster, and a crazy one at that. What did they want from us?’