‘You … you … you …’ he kept moaning until the neighbours arrived and prised the corpse loose from his grip. ‘No one is going to take another thing from me. No one is going to take another thing from me,’ he said over and over as he hugged me and carried me home. For a few speechless minutes he said no more – and then, as the hyena’s poison began to course through his veins, he uttered some ancient verses to a mournful chant, rocked strangely back and forth, and was rushed to the clinic.
The neighbours’ son speared the dead hyena with the pitchfork, carried it to the manure pile behind the cowshed, doused it with oil from a yellow can, and set it on fire. The rancid smoke that rose from the corpse hung over the village for several days.
‘What a lack of historical foresight,’ Meshulam said to me years later. ‘That hyena could have been in my museum.’
It was a great deed, the villagers agreed, and a small account of it appeared in the Movement newspaper under the headline ‘Second Aliyah Man Saves Grandson’s Life.’ Once I was old enough to read, I would sit rummaging through Grandfather’s drawers, reading the clipping until I knew it by heart.
‘Ya’akov Mirkin, a Second Aliyah veteran and Valley of Jezreel pioneer, saved his little grandson Baruch Shenhar from the jaws of a marauding hyena by their house this week. Mirkin was working in the cowshed when he saw the dangerous beast, which had already attacked several residents of the Valley, approach his grandson, who was playing in the yard. With unhesitating courage he threw himself on it and choked it with his bare hands. Mirkin was bitten and taken to the clinic of the General Trade union of the Workers of the Land of Israel Health Plan for a series of rabies shots. The little boy, Baruch Shenhar, age three, is the son of Esther and Binyamin Shenhar, who were killed last year when Arab raiders threw a bomb into their house.’
23
‘But you did so pee,’ I said to Grandfather years later, when I was older. I had asked about the story so often that I knew its every detail.
We were walking in the orchard. Grandfather was teaching me to notch the branches of the quince trees, which needed shaping because they had grown long and wild without forking properly.
‘Now tell me, my child, where do you want this branch to fork?’
I looked at him disbelievingly. I didn’t know that making branches fork was routine work in an orchard. Grandfather studied a straight branch, selected a developed bud on it, and made a crescent-shaped incision above it. The next time the tree leafed, each such bud would put out a side branch, and Grandfather would then prune the tree.
When he was a blind widower in the old folk’s home, able to see only the shades of his love for Fanya, Eliezer Liberson once told me how Grandfather made his reputation as a planter.
‘I can picture him right now with that sour orange stock of his,’ he sighed with pleasure. ‘It made a great impression. It wasn’t every day that a little socialist from Russia showed up the orange growers of the colonies.’
I knew that Grandfather had quarrelled with the citrus growers after discovering that some of them were selling bud sticks ‘irresponsibly’ and compromising the quality of the Shamouti oranges.
‘And then came the gummosis blight and wiped out whole orange groves,’ Liberson told me. ‘The trunks rotted, the leaves turned yellow, and the trees died. All the ointments and disinfectants and copper oxides and liming didn’t help. Every time a hoe was used, it was sterilised as though in a hospital, but that didn’t do any good either.’
Grandfather asked to be given an infected grove for experimental purposes, and the desperate growers, most of whom had their doubts about the young pioneers, decided to let him have what he wanted and put an orange grove, money, and workers at his disposal. Grandfather brought sturdy sour orange stock and planted it alongside the sick trees. When it was doing nicely, he peeled a strip from the trunk of each sour orange, cut a matching patch in the bark of each sick orange, tied the two trees together so that their exposed piths were in contact, and wrapped them in dry sacking for protection.
‘The dying oranges recovered as if they had received a blood transfusion,’ said Liberson.
‘The pioneers made a big ideological fuss over it,’ said Meshulam. ‘It wasn’t just a question of agronomy or botany for them. It was a symbol. The unspoiled new blood of the sour orange curing the rot in the decadent colonies – you can imagine how they went to town with it! You didn’t know? Why, it was written up in all the newspapers.’