But I do remember a few things clearly and completely, even from my first year with him.
One is being weighed. Grandfather made sure to weigh me every month. I was still a baby when he began enriching my diet with various seeds and Margulis’s royal bee jelly. As he dressed me each morning he gently pinched my thighs and shoulders to gauge the meat on them, happily noting my phenomenal growth. It was only years later that I understood that I was being checked against his plans for me.
The weigh-in was a ritual I loved dearly. Other babies were weighed in the village clinic, and later on, as they grew older, by the nurse in school, but I was weighed by Grandfather in the village feed shed. I remember myself in cotton shorts, proudly standing barefoot on the smooth, cool metal plate of the large scales while the powerful workers who carried the fodder sacks stood laughing around me. After adjusting the sliding weights in their grooves, Grandfather took out a battered notebook, contentedly jotted down some numbers, and patted me on the back of my neck. I shut my eyes as the grizzled skin of his palm grazed my flesh.
I remember him handing me a wooden hammer and sitting down by my side to crack olives for curing. The stinging juice squirted in my eye and I ran away crying for my mother.
I remember him washing me each night with a rough pad and a bar of laundry soap, scrubbing my elbows while describing swims in a big river, large geese, and a white-breasted heron in a clump of papyrus reeds, as lovely as a bright, beckoning woman.
I remember our breakfasts well. By the time I was three he would leave my food on the table and go to work. The same things always awaited when I awoke: two slices of bread with ‘the hard part’ (which was his name for the crust) removed for me, a wedge of my favourite farmer’s cheese, some scallions, a sliced tomato sprinkled with rock salt, a hard-boiled egg, still warm, and a glass of milk mixed with colostrum from Avraham’s cows.
I would sit down to eat slowly by myself, taking pleasure in the fresh tastes and smells coming from my plate and through the window, and in my small boy’s independence. Then, wearing only my white nightshirt, I opened the screen door and skipped into the unsullied day that streamed outside. There was no one in sight. Barefoot, on soles that were already strong and tough, I crossed the black gravel to the kittens basking in the sun.
From all around came the soft bustle of the village, a dull cascade of purring engines and sprinklers, thumping hoes, rustling leaves, and the deep slurping of cattle. Even today I can hear it, like a curtain rising inside me to swaddle my ears. Looking around, I saw pigeons on a roof, ripening sunflowers, and Grandfather running toward me from the cowshed with Efrayim’s sharp pitchfork in one hand and his open trousers clutched in the other. He had been peeing behind the manure pile when he suddenly saw the hyena slinking from the fields into our yard, tail curled between its haunches and mouth slobbering with hunger and cupidity.
‘You were just sitting there teasing the kittens, throwing dust on them as they warmed themselves in the sun.’
As soon as the hyena appeared the kittens ran to hide beneath a pile of old cans while our watchdog Manya began to bark in terror. She was so frightened that she jumped onto the roof of the cowshed like a squirrel and lay there trembling on the tiles.
It was such a clear, bright day that I will always remember its bravery as being drenched in light. The hyena bared its teeth in a seductive smile, pointed its dry snout in my direction, and headed straight for me, its quivering butt so close to the ground that it stained the ground with its smells. I wasn’t afraid of it, so I was told, because I was used to animals. Just then, however, it recoiled with a look of hardened cunning because it saw the old man running with trousers and pitchfork in his hands.
Grandfather’s white face, tense and concentrated, floated toward me through the warm air. Still on the run, he drew back his arm and flung the pitchfork at the beast, missing his mark. The hyena, a sticky slaver of anger trickling from its mouth, looked from me to Grandfather, unsure whom to deal with first. Grandfather kept on running, sobbing and groaning under his breath, threw himself on the hyena, and wrapped his bony arms around its matted chest.
The hyena screeched and wheezed, squirming and thrashing its legs, its wet teeth scraping Grandfather’s shoulder and ripping the sleeves of his grey cotton shirt to shreds. I remember the crack of snapping ribs in the clear air as Grandfather’s white arms, used to hard work, opening letters, waving goodbyes, and grafting trees, crushed the animal’s body. I didn’t even bother to stand up. Cosy and confident, or maybe just curious, I watched the struggle go on until Grandfather rose from the ground, cursing in Russian through clenched teeth, with a large, spread-eagled carcass dangling from his hands.