The next day the old man returned to apologise and went back to work. Meanwhile Avraham, who was equally contrite, came to talk things over with me.
‘We owe both Zeitser and Levin a great deal,’ he said. ‘Obviously we can’t send Zeitser to the glue factory, but we mustn’t hurt Uncle Shlomo’s feelings either. He may be no great shakes as a farmer, but my father would never have managed without him.’
Yosi hated Levin, and Uri was for sausaging both him and Zeitser, which was why Avraham asked me to keep an eye open. Before long I discovered that old Levin, hoping the mule would die of thirst before anyone noticed, was secretly moving Zeitser’s water out of reach.
Now and then, while weeding the gravestones, I waved to the old mule to let him know that I was keeping a protective eye on him. Zeitser never waved back. Since Grandfather’s death he had lost the last of his old verve, and Levin’s harassment made him nervous and irritable. The appearance of the store manager’s thin shadow in the yard caused him to stiffen tensely, and though his big head remained hidden in his barrel of expensive barley, his rear end shifted back and forth in carefully calculated movements to ensure that he had a leg to kick with.
He had become a crusade for Levin. An excellent bookkeeper, Grandmother’s brother came to Avraham one evening with ‘an exact cost accounting’ of every penny that had ever been spent on ‘that pompous, freeloading ass of yours’.
It was a hot night, full of buzzing crickets. Through the open windows I could hear the whole angry debate. Levin read ‘the mule sheet’ out loud in a level, venomous voice. ‘Eighteen pounds of ground barley per day, plus three and a half pounds of vetch hay, plus six pounds of straw.’ He went on and on until Avraham told him to stop making a fool of himself.
Levin stalked out, slamming the door behind him. Stooped, crushed, and swearing under his breath, he passed by the casuarina in which I was sitting, too injured to notice me.
He stayed away for a week, at the end of which his answer appeared in an article in the newsletter that spoke of ‘a certain family that is maintaining a dissipated mule and feeding it royally in utter disregard of our Movement’s commitment to economic productivity’.
For several weeks there was a boom in the readership of the newsletter, which generally contained little more than seasonal figures on rainfall and milk prices, indiscreet insemination notices, the morbid reflections of adolescent girls, and announcements of deaths, births, and weddings. Now its pages were flung open to the Zeitser–Levin debate.
Though Zeitser had his share of supporters, so did the store manager. Dani Rilov, whose intimate involvement with slaughtered cows had made him a budding satirist, wrote a humorous sketch about an imaginary society in which ‘benighted and compassionate souls’ filled the Jewish homeland with ‘sanatoriums for ailing donkeys and old age homes for menopausal hens’. And yet, he concluded, ‘in a family long noted for carrying livestock on its back’, there was nothing surprising about Zeitser’s costly maintenance.
Eventually, Eliezer Liberson himself was drawn into the dispute. Liberson, the last surviving member of the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle, was then in the old folk’s home, where he occupied the same room that had belonged to Grandfather and Shulamit. A blind old widower who was as good as dead in his own eyes and the village’s, he sent me a message that he would welcome a speedy visit from me ‘equipped with pencil and paper’.
We sat on the terrace. Liberson asked me about the village. He reminded me of Grandfather, except that there was more anger and yearning in his voice. He asked if I watered the flowers around his wife’s grave and if I ever talked to his son.
‘Not really,’ I answered, apprehensively changing that to, ‘I mean, I do water the flowers, but I don’t really talk to Daniel.’
‘Everything could have been so different,’ said Liberson.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Yes?! What’s that supposed to mean?’ exclaimed the old man fiercely. ‘He doesn’t even know what I’m talking about, and he says yes!’
I said nothing.
‘Did you bring pencil and paper?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
Crossly he dictated a few short, stern sentences for me to give the newsletter. Expressed in them was the opinion that ‘although there may be an economic logic in the arguments of Comrade Shlomo Levin, whose dedicated labours in the co-op were greatly appreciated by us farmers, it is nevertheless unthinkable that the nonagricultural population should interfere in the productive life of the village to which our dear Zeitser belongs.’