‘Capnodis,’ said Grandfather. ‘The foe of the almond, the apricot, the plum, and every stoned fruit.’
‘Whose work is done in darkness,’ quoted Pinness.
Grandfather pried the grub loose from its burrow with his knife tip and flung it to the ground. I felt a wave of anger and disgust.
‘We brought you here,’ Pinness said, ‘because your grandfather’s trees don’t have pests like this. Mother Capnodis stays away from trees that are healthy and well kept. She looks for the sickliest sheep in the flock and deposits her eggs there. Let her but see a robust tree bubbling with juices and she will straightaway seek another victim that is bitter, dry, and despondent. There she lays her eggs of doubt, which soon ravage the tormented soul from within.’
Grandfather turned away to hide his smile while Pinness kept me from crushing the grub with my foot.
‘Let it be,’ he said. ‘The jays will put it out of its misery. If the thief be found breaking in and be smitten so that he die, there shall be no bloodguilt for him.’
We went home, Grandfather holding me by one hand and Pinness by the other. Both were named Ya’akov. Ya’akov Mirkin and Ya’akov Pinness.
On another such outing Pinness showed me a capnodis beetle strolling on the branch of a tree.
‘She disguises herself as a black, rotten almond,’ he whispered.
When I reached for it, it tucked in its legs and fell like a pebble to the ground. The old teacher bent to pick it up and dropped it in a jar of chloroform.
‘She’s so tough,’ he told me, ‘that it takes a little hammer to drive the pin into her.’
The two old men drank a dozen glasses of tea, ate a pound of olives, and at 3 a.m. Pinness announced that he was going home and that if he ever found the Casanova, ‘he’ll rue the day he was born’.
He opened the door and stood facing the darkness for a moment. Then he turned around and said to Grandfather that he felt heavy at heart because he had just thought of the hyena.
‘The hyena is dead, Ya’akov,’ said Grandfather. ‘No one knows that better than you do. Relax.’
‘Every generation has its enemies,’ said Pinness darkly as he left.
He made his way home through the warm thicket of the night, treading upon ‘the thin crust on which our life has been established’, and thinking, I knew, of the menacing creatures of havoc that hatched and swarmed ceaselessly around him, bursting in his sombre nightmares like the bubbles of a foul, unruly past. He could sense the silent squat of the mongoose and see the blood-spotted face of the wildcat padding on its silken-pawed rampage of murder and plunder. Mice gnawed at the farmer’s labours in the fields of grain, and beneath the chequered carpet of ploughed field, stubble, and orchard, waiting for the first signs of Doubt, growled the most legendary beast of all, the great swamp imprisoned by the founders. Far in the west he saw the orange-glowing lights of the big city beyond the mountain, with their seductive glitter of exploitation and corruption, of easy money, carnal baubles, and lewd winks.
It took Grandfather a few minutes to clean up in the kitchen. Then he turned out the light and came into the bedroom. He leaned over me for a moment, and I shut my eyes to make believe I was asleep.
‘My little child,’ he whispered, his moustache tickling my cheeks and mouth.
I was fifteen years old, over sixteen stone of raw muscle and bristly black hair, but Grandfather still made sure to cover me every night. He had done so on the first night he brought me home, and he did so now. Only then did he take his pyjamas from the linen chest under the bed. I watched him undress, undiminished and untarnished by the years. Even when I buried him in our orchard in the middle of the night, taking off the new pyjamas he had requested before dying, his body still gleamed with the same mysterious whiteness that had enveloped it all his life. All his friends were deeply bronzed, their skin cracked and crisped by molten years of light and labour. But Grandfather had never gone out to his trees without a wide-brimmed straw hat and long sleeves, and his face was still pale as a sheet, unmarked by the whip lines of the sun.
He opened the window and got into bed with a sigh.
3
Meshulam Tsirkin shook his head at the end of each sentence, sending a handsome ripple through his mane of grey hair and splaying the bitter lines in his cheeks. Even as a child I had never liked this master-of-no-trades who lived at the other end of the village. ‘Who gave you such a big body and such a small brain?’ he used to ask me with a slap on my back, breaking into his cackling laugh.
Meshulam was the son of Mandolin Tsirkin, who, together with Grandfather, Grandmother Feyge, and Eliezer Liberson, organised the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle. Mandolin was a good farmer and a wonderful musician, and today he is buried in my cemetery.