‘I want you to stop it!’ shouted Rivka at her son. ‘You’re the talk of the whole village. What kind of business is this?’
Not even a five-year-old, though, likes to be deprived of his pleasures.
‘I like it,’ said Uri.
‘But no one walks that way,’ Avraham butted in.
‘You mind your own business,’ said Rivka. ‘We know all about the poems you recited when you were nine. The child is a chip off the old block.’
‘Ruth lets me,’ said Uri.
‘I’d like to know what she’ll be letting you do two years from now,’ snapped Rivka.
‘Ruth smells nice,’ said Uri.
It was because of Uri that the Committee ordered Ruth to come to work in trousers. My cousin was reduced to coming to her after the ten o’clock break, taking off his shirt, slouching against her solid thighs, and asking her to ‘make my back feel good’.
On the first day of school Grandfather took a half-day off from his trees to escort me, Yosi, and Uri to our classroom. Yosi stepped up to the front wall, regarded the big poster that Pinness had hung above the blackboard, and slowly read from it out loud.
‘Not the soldier’s sword, but the farmer’s plough, conquers the land.’
Grandfather burst out laughing. ‘You completely fooled us,’ he said to Yosi, who was blushing with pleasure. ‘All the time you sat there quietly understanding everything!’
Being a head taller than anyone else, I was placed in the last row. I put down my schoolbag, a leather briefcase from Germany that had belonged to my father Binyamin, and watched Pinness enter the classroom. This was not my first lesson with him. When I was five he once took me out to the orange grove to show me a roofed oval nest with a round entrance on one side.
‘This is the nest of the graceful warbler,’ he said. ‘Its fledglings are gone already. You can stick your hand inside it.’
The inside of the nest was lined with soft, warm down and groundsel seeds.
‘The warbler is our friend because it eats harmful insects,’ said Pinness. ‘It has a little body and a long tail.’
He took me home with him. From the hundreds of hollowed- out birds’ eggs he kept in boxes, he produced a warbler’s egg to show me. It was pale and tiny with red speckles at the ends. A few days later we dodged through thick undergrowth, listening to the male warbler’s mating chirp and watching him balance with his tail. His long, sharp bill was indeed perfectly adapted to catching insects.
‘Good morning, boys and girls. My name is Ya’akov.’ Pinness’s spectacles swept over the room and paused to smile at me and my briefcase, which had once been filled with classical records. It had been in his house the night of my parents’ death and so had survived the fire. Before the start of the school year he brought it to me. ‘Tomorrow you’re starting school, Baruch. This is your father’s briefcase. I kept it for you.’
Every year he came to the first-year classroom to greet the new pupils. Generally, he took advantage of the opportunity to tell a story. This time it was about the mighty Samson. The school walls shook when he roared like the mangled lion.
‘Now tell me, children,’ he asked when he had finished, ‘what made Samson a hero?’
‘’Cause he killed the lion,’ said Rilov’s granddaughter Ya’el.
‘’Cause he knocked down the Philistines’ house,’ said Yosi.
‘He wasn’t afraid of bees. He took the honey with his hands,’ said Margulis’s grandson Micha.
‘I never thought of that before,’ Pinness commented excitedly.
After school he held a teachers’ meeting.
‘I have been young and now I am old,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen generations of children come and go, and still I am filled with wonder by their wisdom. This morning a boy in the first year told me that the heroism of Samson was more a matter of mental courage than of physical strength, as evidenced by the fact that he was not afraid to reach bare-handed into a wild beehive for its honey.’
He eyed the teachers one by one.
‘You are the custodians of a rare treasure, of the tenderest, most beautiful saplings that this village has planted in its earth. You must water and fertilise and enrich them, but be careful how you prune them.’
That night, while I lay eavesdropping on them from my bed, Pinness told Grandfather about Margulis’s grandson and his talk with the teachers.
‘You see, Ya’akov,’ said the teacher, ‘Hayyim Margulis’s little grandson sees his father and grandfather put on masks, gloves, and protective suits and smoke the bees from their hives. But Samson stepped up with no protection at all and took the honey as easily as bread from a baby. In that boy’s eyes no deed could be more heroic.’