‘But we, children,’ Pinness went on, ‘returned to this land not to die but to live. In those days it was believed that being buried in the Land of Israel would purge you of sin and make you worthy of eternal life. We, however, do not believe in the resurrection of the dead and ritual atonement. Our atonement is the tilling of the soil rather than the quarrying of graves. Our resurrection is the ploughed furrow. Our sins will be purged by hard work. The accounting that we give will be in this world, not in the next.’
‘Why fill their heads with all that nonsense?’ Grandfather asked him during one of their night-time tea talks. Liberson, however, interrupted to say that Pinness was right, because the next world was the cunning invention of unscrupulous rabbis and priests who had failed to keep their promises in this one.
Ten years later in my own cemetery, which was populated largely by Diaspora Jews, Pinness reminded me of our hike to Beth-She’arim.
‘What a pedagogical failure,’ he said. ‘I never would have dreamed that one of my own pupils would decide to ape what he saw there. I thought I was sounding a warning, but now I wonder whether I didn’t plant the idea for this monstrosity in your mind then.
‘Ninety per cent of the pioneers of the Second Aliyah left this land,’ said Pinness. ‘Now you’re returning them to it.’
We were standing by Mandolin Tsirkin’s grave. ‘He’s still playing away down there,’ Pinness said. ‘Still playing away.’
It was there, by the grave of Mandolin Tsirkin, that Pinness had his stroke. He had bent close to the earth in his fashion, keeping his ear to the ground, when suddenly he smiled weakly, his expression slowly changing to that of a man who has heard a secret burble in his head. At first I didn’t realise what had happened, but as soon as I saw his body start to slump I threw down my hoe and hurried over. Too timid to grab him with both arms, I held out a hand for him to lean on, but he was unable to find it with his own. The same hand that had dissected tadpoles beneath the microscope and strummed the drumheads of crickets now groped feebly in the air like a blind proboscis.
He raised his head heavily, his lips grimacing as he tried to speak. All that came from his throat were some thick rasping sounds. As if sinking into quicksand, he fell slowly to the ground. His face went white, his breathing grew quick and shallow, and sweat trickled down his cheeks. I put him on my shoulder and ran to the clinic.
Doctor Munk, our repulsive village physician, called an ambulance, and I went along to the hospital.
‘It’s difficult to predict the outcome,’ the doctor in the emergency room told me. ‘We’ll have to keep him here. You never know with these things.’
Pinness lay writhing in his bed like a huge maggot exposed to light. White, bulky, and damp, he squirmed on the sheets, ate incessantly, and kept trying to make himself talk. When I gave him a pen and paper, he made some squiggles in the far margin of the page and went on writing in the air. One leg could barely move, anhis eyes bulged and rolled in their sockets like overripe fruit.
His skin mildewed, thin grey webs of it clinging to the sponge when the nurse washed him in the morning. They grew back again at night, as if he wished to spin a cocoon around himself and awake, winged and well, in a familiar world of flowers and sunlight.
He had me very worried. He cackled like an animal, wet his bed, and now and then tried to get his hands to meet in midair. I sat up by his bedside for two nights and three days, all but going mad from the grinding of his jaws, which never stopped working away. Luckily, the village sent someone to relieve me and look after him until he recovered.
It took three weeks for his skin to return to normal and his speech to be restored. At first he found certain consonants difficult, but from the moment he started to talk again, the power of words lifted him out of the depths. It was a while before I realised that he was not using the past or future tense. That was a good sign, I tried telling the doctor, because it meant that the old man was fighting to regain a sense of the time he was living in. Gradually, more and more words reappeared with their grammar, gathered like ants on a fallen fruit, and bore him back into consciousness in a great, excited procession.
‘Excellent,’ said the doctor. ‘He’s much improved.’
Once he could speak again, Pinness recovered quickly. The doctor was surprised by his powers of recuperation. He never understood that a man like Pinness, a man of language and vision, could bypass his blocked synapses by speaking directly to the limbs of his body and making them obey his words. This was how he regained control of his leg, and eventually, of his fine motor co-ordination.