Two months went by, and when the soap was almost gone Fanya discovered in it her husband’s real present – ‘a silly note’ in a tiny tube he had had the tinsmith make specially. Liberson came running as soon as he heard her merry squeal in the laundry shack, which was where the showers were located in those days.
Subsequently, so it was said, he began leaving her notes wherever possible. Fanya found his little tubes in wheels of farmer cheese and in the feed stalls of the milk cows, heard them rattle in the oil cans of the brooder, and – for by now Liberson was a past master – even discovered one of them in the craw of a chicken she had slaughtered and was cleaning for dinner.
‘As usual, Eliezer is overdoing it,’ commented Pinness approvingly. ‘If he keeps it up he’ll make Fanya paranoid, though I must say his hiding places are far better chosen than that stinking arms cache of Rilov’s.’
Tsirkin, on the other hand, still devoted himself to his farm, though he was thoroughly sick of his life, his worthless son, and ‘that double-breasted politician’ his wife.
Meshulam, having salvaged dozens of boxes of old papers from a kibbutz in the Valley, was busy cataloguing them in those years, while Pesya occasionally sallied forth from the Movement’s headquarters in Tel Aviv to turn up in the village with foreign socialist leaders, agricultural experts from Burma, or some African minister in a gaudy skirt and baker’s hat. She was also active in the immigrant camps, where she organised social and educational activities, and even had her picture in the paper bathing a baby from Morocco in a tin tub while smiling at its mother. ‘Comrade Pesya Tsirkin Teaches New Immigrant Mother-Love’ was the caption beneath her maternal breasts.
Behind his impeccable manners Grandfather went on nursing a keen, secretive grudge against his two old friends. Meanwhile, he raised me, pruned and cultivated his trees, wrote notes, and made plans. The same passage of time that filled me with stories and layered my bones with thick flesh put an end to the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle, of which nothing was left but a monumental legend, a few torn snapshots, and some disembodied shadows.
I still thought of Tsirkin and Liberson as family, however. One day, finding no one in at the Libersons, I picked up the storybook he always read to me from. Although I was still a little boy and couldn’t read, I knew enough to realise that the glossy white pages of the book were blank in their cloth binding. Liberson had made up every story I had heard from him: ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’, ‘The Stork and the Fox’, even ‘The Flower of the Golden Heart’!
Pinness burst out laughing when I told him.
‘In general,’ he said, ‘we all either invent stories or retell those we’ve heard. And in particular, the tale of the Ant and the Grasshopper happens to be a lot of twaddle.’
One night I heard him talking with Grandfather in the kitchen.
‘He should spend more time with boys his own age,’ he said. ‘It’s no good for a small boy like him to be always with grown-ups.’
‘He’s my child,’ answered Grandfather, sucking extra hard on the bitter olive in his mouth.
‘Mirkin,’ insisted Pinness, ‘whether or not it’s what you want, you’re bringing Baruch up in an old ruined cloister. I see how he is in school. He doesn’t play with marbles or a ball during break. He doesn’t talk to anyone. All he does is crawl on the lawn. By himself.’
‘He’s looking for beetles, just like you,’ said Grandfather.
Sometimes I glanced up to see myself encircled by a shouting, jeering crowd.
‘The children surround him like a flock of songbirds that has cornered an owl. They screech and make fun of him.’
‘It doesn’t worry me,’ Grandfather said. ‘And I don’t envy the child who provokes him.’
When I was six I broke two of Uzi Rilov’s fingers. I was crouched by the white oleanders near the fence, looking for green hawkmoth caterpillars. Thick and shiny, they wriggled cumbersomely over the poisonous bushes, turning their necks to give me a frightening look when I touched them. I knew that their big blue mascara-ringed eyes were a bluff, because Pinness had told me that they weren’t real and were only there to scare away predators.
Uzi Rilov landed on my back with a thump, grabbed me by the ears, and began to shake me back and forth. I got hold of his wrist and spun around to face him. At thirteen he was older and quicker than me. For his bar mitzvah his grandfather had given him a stallion and a revolver and sent him off without food to survive as best he could in the hills near the Cherkessian villages. But though I was only six, at six stone I was just as tall as he was and had been raised by Grandfather on colostrum and hate. Slowly I bent back two of his fingers until I heard them snap. Turning pale, he toppled to the ground and passed out. Two teachers carried him off while I bent back down for a look at the make-believe eyes of my caterpillars.