He cut an opening for the falcon’s curved beak and then, from some thicker leather, stitched himself a large elbow-length glove. ‘That’s to guard my arm from being shredded by the falcon. Just look at those talons of his.’
By then the falcon had started hunting on his own. Yet whenever he heard Yosi’s whistle he hurried back to land at his feet.
‘The fact that he’s already trained to return is excellent. Now we’ll teach him to stand on my arm. Just wait and see, Yosi, in two weeks he will be bringing us rabbits for lunch.’
‘The red falcon is too small a bird,’ scoffed Pinness, dismissing the whole idea. ‘The most he will bring you is a mouse. For hunting you need a peregrine falcon. Besides which, Yosi, falconry is a revolting sport practised by an exploitative and decadent social class that leads a life of parasitic luxury.’
‘Why don’t you tell your teacher to go back to hunting frogs at night,’ snorted Peker the saddler when Yosi anxiously reported this conversation.
Yosi and his grandfather took the falcon out to the fields. Uri and I were told to walk a distance behind them so as not to get in the way. The falcon sat obediently on the old saddler’s arm, his white talons gripping his glove and his chiselled head motionless inside the leather mask. Peker chose a suitable site, wet his finger to test the wind, removed the blindfold, and let the falcon take off. The splendid bird soared aloft, his brown-striped red belly gleaming in the clear air.
‘A-a-a-ll right! Whistle for him now!’
Yosi stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled. The falcon froze in midair, fanned his tail feathers, fluttered in place for a moment, and dived diagonally towards them with half-folded wings. The old saddler held his gloved arm out to the bird. With a flap the falcon spread its braking pinions, but the outstretched arm scared him off. Beating the air, he made for Peker’s bald head.
‘It was horrible,’ Peker told the doctor who stitched up his skull. ‘I thought I was done for.’
Unable to gain a foothold on the smooth surface, Yosi’s falcon kept jabbing it with razor-sharp talons. His face streaming with blood, Peker passed out. The damn bird flew away in a fright, and we ran home to get help. No one was there except old Zeitser, who was working in the yard and came back to the field with us. Green flies covered Peker’s head, from which the scalped skin was hanging free. We helped Zeitser hoist him onto his shoulders and carry him to the village clinic.
Within a few days, once it was clear that Tanchum Peker would recover, since he was already up and about with a huge turban of white gauze on his head, nicknames like ‘Hawkeye’, ‘Nimrod the Hunter’, and ‘Sultan Abdulhamid’ were being tried out on him. In the village newsletter Liberson wrote that while we were indeed building a new society that sought to return to nature, this did not mean ‘exploiting the instincts of predatory birds for our own primitive needs’.
‘The beast hunts for sustenance, man for perverted pleasure,’ declared Pinness in school before reading us a few relevant passages from The Jungle Book of Rudyard Kipling, who was ‘a wise man for a colonialist’.
I stood up and sent the rock I was holding crashing through the window. Slivers of glass fell on Avraham and Rivka’s table.
‘Grandfather did not kill her,’ I said heavily.
‘Like grandfather, like grandson,’ mocked Rivka. ‘Get him out of here before I murder him.’
‘That’s enough!’ said Avraham.
‘I suppose you’ll ask your father to pay for the window!’
‘I want you to calm down this minute.’
‘Just wait till the old man dies,’ Rivka snarled, ‘and he starts brawling over the inheritance.’
‘I said, enough!’ shouted Avraham.
He rose, went outside, and came over to me.
‘Don’t worry about her, Baruch,’ said my uncle Avraham. ‘She’s just worked up. You can stay here as long as you like. No one’s kicking my own nephew out of my house.’
I looked at him. His short stride, his sloping shoulders, and his ploughed forehead formed an impenetrable grid that moved with him like the shell of a turtle. Sometimes he took the twins and me to the hayloft and encouraged us to wrestle on the bales of hay. I never knew whether or not he liked seeing me floor his two sons. Uri would leap on me from behind and break into helpless giggles as I lifted him in the air, while Yosi, humiliated, would run to his mother with hurt sobs.
Avraham took my hand in his. I liked the feel of it. Even then I understood dimly that certain members of our family shared the same portion of pain. As a boy, it was said in the village, Avraham had attacked a foreign woman who came to visit, screaming, kicking her legs, and biting her in the stomach until a slap from Rilov sent him sprawling. But my uncle was an excellent farmer who read volumes of professional literature and was often called to a neighbour’s farmyard to help make a diagnosis. He kept careful tabs on all his cows, writing down the family tree of each beside a record of milk production, fat content, number of inseminations, calves, stillbirths, and cessations of lactation. This made for an unusually detailed farm log even without the section in which he entered the exact dates when his bereaved cows’ sons were sent to the slaughterhouse.