Meanwhile Shoshanna ran back and forth, staggering and stumbling as the blood burbled from her headless throat and seeped into the ground with the ghastly yet attractive silence of a soul and body now suffering separate fates.
Even when her head and throat, with their vocal cords, memories, and pain centres, were lying on the straw by the feed stall, I feared that the hen might put herself back together and walk off. To be on the safe side, I picked up the bodiless head and threw it to the cats.
Shoshanna was beginning to slow down. Her friends went back to pecking by her side as though nothing had happened. The fiery little cockscomb in my trousers was dying too. When she finally collapsed, I went to take a good look at her last gasps. There was a brief spasm and a few more short jets of blood before some pink and black froth bubbled up with a curious wheeze from her slashed white gullet. Grandfather came, stamped on the puddle of blood to mix it well with the earth, and brought Shoshanna to Aunt Rivka to be plucked. The swarm of green flies spattered across the yard by her dance did not disappear for several hours.
That evening Fanya Liberson came to make the soup. Beautiful as always, she sat watching Grandfather eat Shoshanna and read him the village charter in her mellifluous voice.
‘“Our goal is to create a community of workers that will live from its own labours without exploitation…
‘“Our path is one of integrating reality with ideology …
‘“The children of all members will receive equal and common educational opportunities …
‘“The village’s institutions will meet the spiritual and economic needs of every family …”’
‘Mutual aid’, ‘self-sufficiency’, ‘the status of women’, ‘the return to the earth’ – the comforting phrases sounded in Grandfather’s room until his suffering features softened with sudden forgiveness. A bored smile played over the corners of his mouth, and he fell asleep like a baby. His face while he slept was like his face when he died, when I took his warm, soft, white body and buried it in the earth he had wished to be laid to rest in.
24
After Shulamit arrived and took Grandfather to the old folk’s home, I went to Pinness when I wanted to hear stories. He lived by the water tower in a small house surrounded by an unusual garden of indigenous shrubs and wildflowers. In it he had planted dark corms of cyclamen and giant, colourful anemones; bulbs of oriental hyacinth brought from the hills above the Sea of Galilee; and wild lupin from the Carmel, with large poisonous seeds that produced splashes of bright royal purple. He had taken jonquils and veronicas from the swamp flora left by the spring, and his red buttercups were as shiny as if varnished by the village carpenter.
‘If I had wanted rosebushes and chrysanthemums, I would have stayed in Russia,’ he declared.
‘The orchid is a marvellous wildflower that human beings have made an invalid,’ he once said to me, scolding me for liking Peker the saddler’s stories about being sent by a Russian officer to woo ‘the general’s beautiful daughter’ with bouquets of orchids.
‘Even Luther Burbank, who cultivated roses and chrysanthemums, swore never to touch the orchid. Its fate has been like that of the poor girls in China who have their feet bound in infancy.’
Each time I opened his green gate and walked up the flagstone path to his house, I again became ‘Baruch from the fourth form’ who was sent to the old teacher once a week for hitting another child.
‘Why don’t you go to Ya’akov to calm down a bit? Maybe he can make a human being out of you.’
He was the village’s first teacher. He had taught my mother; he had taught my uncle Efrayim and my uncle Avraham; he had taught Uri, Yosi, and me. Pinness had taught everyone. Each time he started a group of five-year-olds on the alphabet you could feel a quiet sense of excitement throughout the village. People even gathered by the school fence to hear the laughter of the new pupils through the window. He never began with the letter alef but always with heh. ‘The sound it makes, children, is “ha”. Say it after me: ha ha ha ha ha!’ For a year or two he played with them, took them for walks, and cast his spell over them, until they discovered that they were saddled with his bit firmly in their mouths and accepted his authority with a love and a longing that lasted the rest of their lives.
Of all the non-farmers in the village, Pinness alone was treated with full respect. Though the children sometimes made fun of him, he never ceased to awe them even when he was a retired ex- principal who would walk into a classroom without knocking, say, ‘Don’t let me bother you,’ to the anxious teacher and excited pupils, and sit there watching the lesson with yearning and love.