‘He doesn’t remember me,’ Pinness said. ‘We once worked together for a few days in a grapefruit grove near the pumphouse by the Jordan, painting tree trunks with your grandfather’s black salve. There were rats there as big as cats who had gone mad from the heat and the loneliness. They climbed the citrus trees and ate their bark. The trees had terrible wounds in them.’
He sat down again, sad and tired.
‘We never guessed what would happen,’ he said. ‘Rilov should have sent that troublemaker Zeitouni packing. He should have whipped the living daylights out of him, a whip for the horse and a rod for the fool’s back.’
26
I never go down to the public beach below my house before evening. The swimmers and surfers are gone, and there is not a soul in sight. Half-eaten sandwiches, lost sandals, and the twiggy skeletons of grape clusters litter the sand. The slowly dissolving cries of children still hang in the air like dirty rags. Out at sea a sturdy grey coastguard vessel rocks rapaciously on the foam.
David, the old beach chair man, sees me coming and puts the kettle on the little gas burner in his cane hut. I always bring him something to eat, or else a bottle of spirits from the banker’s cellars or a book from his library. David devours books in both French and Spanish.
‘Just call me Da-vid and rhyme it with “read”,’ he introduces himself with a rusty laugh. His teeth are big and white. His body is burnt and shrivelled from the sun.
We drink spicy tea and chat lazily while the sand around us squirms with fine-pincered little yellow crabs.
‘They’re my beach cleaners,’ says David.
The sand crabs scuttle out of their holes and run about, their arms raised in that most moving and primeval of human gestures that is both threat and plea. So Efrayim raised his hands to his face when he stepped out of the British automobile in the village. So Grandmother Feyge raised hers, searching the skies for pelicans and rain.
Other crabs, busy refurbishing their burrows, give themselves away by little flurries of wet sand. Their tawny colour makes them hard to see when they stand still, but I, who was taught to pick out a praying mantis on a dry branch, to open the camouflaged trapdoors of spiders, and to tell the caterpillar of the geometer moth from a bare twig, am able to spot them easily.
‘You like those little things?’ David asked, following my gaze. ‘They’re not kosher.’
‘I do,’ I said. ‘I don’t eat them. But I have an old aunt who eats grasshoppers.’
‘There are grasshoppers in the desert that look just like pebbles until they move,’ chuckled David.
‘It takes patience,’ I said.
Little insects hid in the silver whitlowwort, disguised as shiny dry leaves.
‘It takes patience, Baruch,’ said Pinness. We were crouched in ambush by a shrub. ‘Some of those little white leaves swaying back and forth are insects that can mimic the motion of a leaf in a breeze. As soon as the breeze dies down, you’ll see. The real leaves will stop moving while the silly insects go on.’
Human beings and insects, he explained to me, were polar opposites in their methods of adaptation. The former, poorly equipped and vulnerable, depended on their inventiveness and ability to learn, while the latter, rugged and prolific, were incapable of learning a thing. They were born with whatever they had. Even behaviour as complex as that of Margulis’s bees, said Pinness, had nothing to do with learning or experience.
Grandfather watched us stand on two milk cans by a wall of the cowshed, examining the mud daubers’ houses in a corner of the ceiling. Pinness took a blade of straw and poked a hole in the bottom of one of the little juglike structures, showing me how the wasp continued to work on her roof without bothering to repair her ruined floor.
‘She’s obeying inherited patterns of behaviour,’ he said, immediately adding the question: ‘Which is better, the small but precisely programmed intellect of the insect or the capacious and unconcentrated mind of man?’
‘Take Rilov and his son,’ he said to me another time. ‘They were born total morons and that’s all they’ll ever be. No more than five per cent of the volume of their brains is even useable. But unlike all the scatterbrained geniuses, they utilise that five per cent with single-minded efficiency.’
I told David about the giant long-horned grasshopper that Pinness brought from the Galilee. Pinness’s eyes sparkled when he added it to his collection, fearsomely impaled on a pin.
‘Just see how perfectly camouflaged it is, Baruch,’ he said. ‘It’s green and looks like a long leaf when it stands perfectly still. When its prey approaches, it leaps on it and embraces it in a death hug, crushing it against the spines on its chest. So Joab took Amasa by the beard to kiss him while shedding his bowels on the ground with the sword in his other hand.’