Pioneer Home was anathema to the whole village, but Meshulam Tsirkin hated it especially. The buses that rolled up to it, the wide-eyed children, the enchanted tourists who strolled agog among its freshly washed headstones and rosebushes, reading in whispers the legendary names in copper letters and drinking the cold fruit juice that Busquilla’s younger brother sold them from a pitcher at the entrance gate – all this made his blood boil.
Meshulam Tsirkin hated my cemetery because I refused to bury his mother. I buried only Grandfather’s friends of the Second Aliyah.
‘I’m very sorry,’ I said to him when he waved the Trade union Yearbook in my face with an article about his mother’s contribution to the Workers’ Co-operative Credit Fund. ‘Your mother came to this country after the First World War, when the Second Aliyah was over.’
‘The deceased does not comply with our entrance requirements,’ explained Busquilla.
When Meshulam threatened to appeal to the institutions of the Movement, I reminded him that he had already done so after old Liberson put out The pioneers’ album, in which he refused to publish a photograph of Pesya for reasons similar to ours.
‘Besides which,’ said Busquilla, ‘your father couldn’t stand to have her near him when she was alive either.’
What most got Meshulam’s goat were the lead coffins I brought from the airport. He knew that every new casket from America filled my old sacks with tens of thousands of dollars.
‘By what right do you bury traitors who left this country, and not my own mother?’ he screamed at me.
‘Whoever came to this country with the Second Aliyah can buy a plot here,’ I replied.
‘You mean to tell me that any little fart who came here from Russia, chucked it all after two weeks of hoeing crabgrass, and went traipsing off to America can be buried here as a pioneer? Just look at that!’ he shouted, pointing to one of the headstones. ‘Rosa Munkin, the archfiend in person!’
Rosa Munkin, who had known Grandfather back in Makarov, was my first customer.
‘Shall I tell you about Rosa Munkin?’ asked Meshulam contemptuously after the outcry that arose when her pink headstone was unveiled beside Grandfather’s grave. ‘Rosa Munkin came here from the Ukraine, worked for a week in an almond grove in Rehovot, didn’t like what the country did to her lily-white hands, and bombarded the whole world with SOSs. A brother of hers who had emigrated to America, a little bandit who became a pioneer Jewish gangster in Brooklyn, sent her a ticket to join him.’
Meshulam planted a foot on the pink marble slab in a gesture of patronising disdain.
‘During the First World War, when your grandparents and my father and Eliezer Liberson nearly starved to death and Zeitser was conscripted into the Turkish army, Rosa Munkin bought her fourth corset shop in the Bronx. When the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle was settling this village, Rosa Munkin saw the light, married a Rabbi Shneour from Baltimore, and began publishing anti-Zionist advertisements in the papers. During the Second World War, when your poor uncle Efrayim was wounded with the British commandoes, she was widowed, leased a suite in a Miami hotel, and ran her brother’s casinos from there. In the files of the FBI she’s known as “the Red Queen” to this day.
‘And now,’ he yelled, ‘she’s buried in your ground. In the earth of this Valley. A pioneer. A builder. A founding mother.’
‘God rest her soul,’ said Busquilla. He went over to the stone, politely removed Meshulam’s foot, took a flannel rag from his pocket, and wiped the ‘a’ in ‘Rosa’.
‘You shut up, Busquilla,’ said Meshulam, turning white. ‘Shits like you should snap to attention when the founders are being discussed.’
‘The deceased paid one hundred thousand dollars,’ said Busquilla, to whom such slights meant nothing.
‘Mafia money,’ sneered Meshulam.
‘Meshulam, what do you want from me?’ I said. ‘She came with the Second Aliyah.’
‘And Shulamit?’ screamed Meshulam. ‘Did she come with the Second Aliyah too?’
‘Don’t be a wise guy,’ I shot back angrily. ‘Shulamit is a private family matter.’
When Rosa Munkin’s letter arrived from America, Grandfather and Shulamit, his old love who came from Russia half a century after him – ‘the Crimean whore,’ as Fanya Liberson called her – were the only people buried in the orchard. Busquilla, who was the village postman at the time, came galloping up on Zis, the post office donkey, shouting, ‘An aerogram! An aerogram! A letter from America!’