Enraged and humiliated, Levin went home to plot his revenge. The mockery of the Workingman’s Circle resounded again in his mind. One day he surprised Avraham during his afternoon nap.
‘Me you treat like an animal, but Zeitser you keep on!’
‘Zeitser worked with my father back in the old days,’ said Avraham. ‘We won’t throw him to the dogs just because he’s become old and weak.’
‘Zeitser is an extra mouth to feed,’ snapped Levin. ‘He’s a sponger.’
‘Zeitser,’ replied Avraham, ‘is the best mule in this village. He was always more than just a draught animal to my father and me. He’s worked and sweated for us his whole life. A lot of two-legged pioneers never did half as much.’
‘He may have been the best mule in this village,’ said Levin, personally affronted by the reference to sweat, ‘but I never heard of a mule getting a pension. Why don’t you sell him to the Arab sausage factory or the glue works in Haifa bay? No one keeps an old mule in stock who can’t pull a cart any more.’
‘Don’t force me to choose between the two of you,’ said Avraham. ‘Zeitser isn’t stock and never was.’
Most of the mules in our village were English or Yugoslavian. Two were German, left behind at the end of World War One. Zeitser, I was told, was the only mule from Russia, whence he immigrated with a group of pioneers whose home was a place called Mogilev. They bought him the day they set out for Odessa. Seeing him on sale at a market, one of them joked loudly to his friends, ‘I know that mule. He’s a direct descendant of the mule of the Baal Shem Tov.’
‘Unbelievers!’ scolded the Hasid who was holding Zeitser’s tether. ‘Since when do mules have descendants?’
‘Are you questioning the Baal Shem Tov’s powers?’ answered the pioneer to the laughter of his comrades. ‘If the holy rabbi wished, even a mule could have sons.’
The Hasidim of Mogilev nearly came to blows with them, but the clink of roubles had a calming effect. The pioneers bought the mule, and Zeitser gratefully carried their belongings to the wharf. When they boarded the steamship Kernilov and saw how sad he looked, they chipped in for an extra ticket, ‘hoisted him on deck in a huge net that hung from a crane’, and brought him to the Land of Israel.
‘They never regretted it for a minute. No job was too hard for Zeitser.’
It was Meshulam Tsirkin who discovered that Zeitser had worked in Sejera with Ben-Gurion. He read one of Ben-Gurion’s letters to me, a document he had got from the Movement archives in a swap.
Sejera
April 2, 1908
Before the sun is up, at half past four, I rise and go to the cowshed to feed my animals. I sift hay into the feedbox for the oxen, sprinkle some vetches over it and mix them, and then make myself tea for my breakfast. With the first rays of the sun I take my herd, two teams of oxen, two cows, two calves, and a donkey, to drink from the trough.
It was one of the few times I saw Meshulam laugh.
‘A donkey!’ he roared, slapping his knees and his stomach. ‘A donkey! That donkey was Zeitser. But fat chance that some socialist fresh off the boat from Russia would know the difference between a donkey and a mule!’
Zeitser belonged to the Mogilev commune for several years. Now and then he ran into Grandfather and his friends, and for a while they even worked side by side. When his commune found a piece of land to settle down on, however, he began to have second thoughts. The main problem, as Grandfather put it, was that ‘Zeitser’s penchant for solitude and private initiative clashed with the rigidly communal framework’. Zeitser hated meetings and debates, and such questions as ‘the status of pregnant comrades’, ‘the latest news from the workers’ movement in Latvia’, and ‘improving the nutrition of field hands’ did not concern him in the least. Most of all he loathed the public confessionals in which the commune members bared their hearts to each other.
One day, according to Uri, when a female communard who was cleaning out the cowshed laid a soiled baby in his stall, Zeitser decided that his notion of family life was incompatible with that of the kibbutz. That same day he picked himself up and went to inspect a co-operative village.
‘Zeitser was an unusually good worker,’ Grandfather told me when I was a small boy. ‘He always knew what field to go to and never had to be steered.’
Zeitser ploughed and cultivated our fields, uprooted dead trees, pulled loaded carts, and was as thrilled as the rest of us by each new sprout and can of milk. When his shoes needed adjustment or replacement, he went on his own to the Goldman brothers’ smithy. He was the only draught animal in the village not to wear the leather blinkers Peker made against worldly temptations, because ‘nothing ever tempted him but work’. Only once did he succumb, when he mistakenly ate some Jimsonweed flowers growing by the manure pile. He got high, walked around in circles for two days, made eyes at the young female calves, and behaved like any hot-blooded numbskull.