With the passage of time, his strength faltered. Grandfather, who was personally acquainted with the ravages of old age and could easily discern them in the mule’s wasted body, tried easing up on his work, but Zeitser refused to acknowledge his decrepitude until one day he collapsed in the traces.
Generally, I remember what I am told better than what I have seen, but that day, like the day of my rescue from the hyena, sticks in my memory. Grandfather, Zeitser, and I had gone to fetch fodder and had loaded some twenty sacks of it on the cart. On the short uphill before the last bend Zeitser suddenly stopped with a queer, high-pitched snort, and the heavy cart began to roll backwards. Grandfather had never whipped Zeitser in his life, and now too he merely urged him on with shouts and slaps of the reins. Quivering all over, Zeitser managed to brake the slipping cart and braced himself to pull it up the hill, his haunches sinking nearly to the ground and his iron horseshoes striking sparks on the paved road. When his laboured panting turned to deep wheezes, Grandfather threw down the reins and climbed out of the cart. Anxious veins made an alarming wreath on his bald scalp as he tried to calm the mule and free him from his harness. Gathering his strength for one last mighty effort, however, Zeitser let out a huge fart, lost his balance, and collapsed. There was a loud crack from up front as the longpole snapped, leaving the traces hanging from the mule’s neck. Grandfather quickly slipped off the hames and grabbed Zeitser’s head in his hands. For a while they remained there, weeping soundlessly together.
Zeitser returned home without the cart, his head bowed with shame. I walked alongside him, not knowing what to say.
‘He’s a work animal,’ Grandfather said. ‘At least sit on his back so he’ll feel he’s doing something.’
I rode him home, feeling the twitching and damp breathing of his mortified hide in my thighs. Tsirkin’s horses Michurin and Stalin brought the cart to our yard, and that evening Grandfather and Avraham decided to start putting Zeitser out to pasture. It was then that we bought our first oil-fuelled Ferguson, which Grandfather never learned to drive, leaving Zeitser only the milk cans to haul. A few years later, when the phlebitis in his forelegs and the strongyles parasites in his intestines had depleted his remaining strength and even the simplest words, like ‘giddyup’, escaped him, Grandfather tethered him to a long rope in the shade of the big fig tree. Beneath the tree Avraham set out both halves of a sawed barrel, one for water and one for barley, and now and then Grandfather took Zeitser for a leisurely walk, just the two of them, to meditate and smell the flowers.
Unlike most old men, who forget the present and remember the distant past, Pinness had forgotten his childhood and youth entirely.
‘I know who I am and where I’m going, I just have no idea where I’ve come from,’ he explained to me, to himself, and to everyone.
He looked at me sadly when I came to visit him in his garden. The day before he had attended Bodenkin’s funeral in Pioneer Home, and now he was upset and mournful. All his life he had been a great believer in education, and he held himself partly to blame for my lapse. ‘Did I go wrong on that hike to Beth-She’arim, or was it those carrion beetles?’ But I knew that his anger was halfhearted, like his response to the nocturnal cries he still heard. He had stopped turning livid when telling me about them, cursing in Russian and waving his arms. Indeed, the look on his fat face was more one of baffled curiosity. The swamp of blood awash beneath his cranium could no longer be kept down.
‘Well now, Baruch,’ he smiled. ‘It seems I’ve gone through some kind of mutation. I just don’t have anyone to pass it on to.’
He was very old. Every week I brought him his clean laundry and changed his sheets and tablecloth.
‘Why are you doing this for me?’ he once asked me shrewdly. ‘What are you plotting?’
‘Neither of us has anyone else,’ I answered. ‘I have no grandfather, and you have no grandson.’ Despite his sorrowful smile, I could see he was pleased by what I said.
He had few friends left in the village. Grandfather, Liberson, Fanya, and Tsirkin were all dead. Even Rilov. Every morning Tonya paid a brief visit to her husband’s grave to make sure he hadn’t found a secret escape hatch, and then, supported by an aluminium frame, pulled herself along the gravel paths to Margulis’s tombstone, on which she sat senilely licking her fingers. I buried Margulis as per his request, perfectly embalmed like a Hittite monarch. His sons coated him with a black layer of bee glue and put him in a coffin filled to the top with honey and sealed with beeswax. In midsummer, when the white-hot earth turned so dry that it cracked, orange-coloured fumes rose from the grave, and Margulis’s bees, maddened by so much sweetness and longing, buzzed around it with loud melancholy. Tonya never budged from there. ‘Like Rizpah the daughter of Aiah by the corpses of her sons,’ whispered Pinness admiringly. ‘That’s the difference between us and you,’ he added. ‘We did it with sacred devotion. You do it with obscenities from water towers.’