Pesya Tsirkin, Meshulam’s mother, was a functionary in the Movement and spent little time at home. Though Meshulam was fed by charitable neighbours and had to do his own and his father’s washing, he adored his mother and was proud of her contribution to the cause. The most he saw her was once or twice a month, when she arrived with her big breasts and important visitors, who were always ‘comrades from the Central Committee’. All of us children saw them too. My cousin Uri would be the first to spot the grey Kaiser parked by the Tsirkin house and to inform the rest of us, ‘They’re here again to smell the cow shit and have their pictures taken with the calves and the radishes.’
In a world in which his mother came and went, Meshulam was always on the lookout for a tolerable niche. He stayed clear of the imaginative mazes in which other children lost their way. The old pioneers wove a different web for him than for me. He devoted his keen memory and thirst for knowledge to research, documentation, and the collecting of historical artifacts, and found solace in perusing old by-laws, deciphering correspondence, and thumbing through papers so ancient that they fell apart at a touch.
Already as an adolescent he displayed several proud exhibits, each with a handwritten card: ‘Liberson’s Hoe’, ‘Milk Can, c. 1924’, ‘The First Plough (a product of the Goldman Bros. Smithy)’, and of course, ‘My Father’s Original Mandolin’. As he grew older he removed his father’s old spray cans and rusty cultivator blades from the toolshed, retiled its roof, filled its two little rooms with broken kitchen utensils and decrepit furniture, and renamed it ‘Founder’s Cabin’. Rummaging through houses and farmyards, he found corroded flour sieves and washboards, copper pots that were green with age, and even an old mud sled.
‘I want everyone to know how people once lived here,’ he declared. ‘I want them to know that before the road was paved the carts sank into such deep mud every winter that the milk had to be brought to the dairy on sleds.’
He was especially proud of the gargantuan stuffed figure of Hagit, Eliezer Liberson’s half-Dutch, half-Lebanese cow, who was once national champion in milk production and fat content. When Hagit grew old and Liberson’s son Daniel decided to sell her to the glue factory, Meshulam was up in arms. Calling for an emergency session of the village Committee, he protested that ‘so dedicated a comrade’ could not possibly be converted into sausages and gelatin. ‘Hagit,’ claimed Meshulam, ‘is not just an agricultural phenomenon. She is the definitive proof that pure Holstein cows were not suited for conditions in this country.’
The Committee paid Liberson to deed the cow to Meshulam and even offered to give her a small pension. That very day, however, Meshulam dispatched the dedicated comrade with a generous portion of rat poison and stuffed her huge frame with the help of the veterinarian.
For years Hagit stood stinking of embalming fluids on the front porch of the Tsirkin house, her famed udders dripping formaldehyde while alfalfa stems dangled from her mouth. Meshulam regularly brushed her coat, which had large bald spots from the rat poison, polished her bovine glass eyes, and sewed up her cracked hide to keep the sparrows from stealing blades of straw and tufts of cotton wool for their nests.
The stuffed cow revolted the entire village, and especially Zeitser, who had been most attached to Hagit and her prodigious flow of milk, which he considered to be ‘a symbol of our national renaissance’. Sometimes he stole from our yard for a look at her. Each time he was face to face with her, he told us, he was seized by a combination of ‘horror and longing’.
‘The poor cow,’ he murmured to himself. ‘Meshulam Tsirkin stuffed her with more straw than Liberson ever gave her to eat in her whole lifetime.’
My irreverent cousin Uri, however, who looked down on the village from his mockingbird’s-eye view, was sure that the stuffed cow had nothing to do with Meshulam’s historical research.
‘Hagit’s udders reminded him of his mother,’ he said to me. ‘It’s that simple.’ And I looked at him as I do to this day; with love and with envy.
Our village has many visitors. Busloads of tourists and school-children come to see the flourishing creation of the founding fathers. Excitedly they stroll the village streets, oohing and aahing over every pear and chicken and breathing in the smells of earth and milk. Their tours always end in my cemetery on the old Mirkin farm.
Meshulam demanded that no tourist buses be allowed into the village and Pioneer Home unless they also stopped at Founder’s Cabin for a look at Hagit and the gold medal from the British High Commissioner that hung around her stuffed neck.