My mother was dead, Efrayim was gone, and Avraham was the only one of Grandmother Feyge’s children still at home. All those years he continued to visit his mother’s grave regularly. Uri and I used to watch him riding Efrayim’s heavy Hercules bicycle up to the cemetery on the hill.
‘He’s going to talk to Grandmother,’ Uri said. ‘He tells her what’s new on the farm.
‘Your mother’s there too,’ he added. I didn’t answer him.
Never without trepidation, I myself went once a year with Grandfather to visit my parents’ graves. Time in the village moved in loops of rain clouds and was measured by gestations, the length of furrows, and the mysterious, irreversible processes of decay, and I did not want to add memorial days to the list. Years later, when I had become an expert undertaker, I learned to hear the violent popping of death-bloated bellies in the earth. Then, though, I simply sat with Grandfather by my parents’ headstones and walked with him to his wife’s grave, which was always spotless and well kept. The concrete gutter at its foot was bright with yellow-white jonquils and purplish-green stalks of basil.
‘My father planted the jonquils,’ Uri said, ‘to make it easier for him to cry.’
28
We were eleven when Pinness organised one of his last hikes.
‘We’ll do it like the good old days, in a horse-drawn cart,’ he announced.
When he was younger he used to take his pupils as far as the Golan and the Horan on expeditions that lasted up to three weeks. They dried flowers, trapped insects, and slept at night in Jewish settlements, as well as in Arab villages that Rilov gave a clean bill of health. Angry parents complained that Pinness took their boys and girls away during the busiest times on the farm, but Pinness, at a special meeting convened to discuss the matter, retorted that ‘education knows no slack seasons’.
‘Have patience, friends,’ he said. ‘What the school sows now, you will reap in ten years’ time.’
This time he had planned a mere three-day hike.
‘I’m sorry, my children. Your parents will tell you about the great hikes of long ago, but my strength now is not what it was then. We’ll go only so far as the Kishon River and ancient Beth-She’arim.’
Before it was light Grandfather brought me to Pinness’s house.
‘Take good care of my child, Ya’akov,’ he said.
At the age of eleven I was as tall as Grandfather. Pinness laughed and said that no doubt I would take better care of him.
Daniel Liberson came along as our escort. He rode on horseback, armed with a rifle and a whip. His glance seemed to flay me alive, searching my forehead for lost signs. When we reached the channel of the Kishon, we took our little pocket Bibles from our knapsacks and read in high, excited voices:
‘The kings came and fought;
Then fought the kings of Canaan in Taanach by the waters
of Megiddo;
They fought from heaven;
The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.
The river of Kishon swept them away,
That ancient river, the river Kishon.’
Pinness rocked back and forth to the ancient cadence and spoke scathingly of the elders of the city of Meroz, ‘who avoided conscription by hiding at the town dump’. And he added, ‘The Canaanites had nine hundred chariots. They thundered through the Valley while we hid among the oaks on Mount Tabor.’ He traced great movements in the air, his voice growing passionate. ‘And then it rained. And what do we get in our Valley when it rains?’
‘Mud,’ we shouted.
‘How much mud?’
‘Lots,’ we shouted. ‘Mud up to your boots.’
‘Mud up to the cows’ stomachs,’ said my cousin Yosi in all seriousness.
‘Then it came up to the horses’ stomachs,’ said Pinness, leading us step by step. ‘The chariot wheels stuck in the mud, and down we came from the woods and smote them so hard that the land was quiet for forty years.
‘Such quiet,’ he repeated as though to himself, ‘such quiet that it could only be measured in years.’ But we were children and did not understand his mutterings.
The next day we travelled to ancient Beth-She’arim. On our way Pinness warned us that we were about to visit ‘a terrible place’.
‘Here the dead were brought from the Diaspora to be buried in the soil of our land,’ he said to us as we stood in the large burial cave. His voice echoed in the chill gloom, his shadow flickering over the walls and running down the ancient sluices left by the quarriers’ chisels. ‘Rabbi Judah the Prince lived and died in this place, and after his burial here, it became an important necropolis.