Only now do I understand that there were four people in that room: Grandfather and Shulamit as young lovers and as old ones. Sometimes they were old or young together, and sometimes one was young while the other was old. Time, which I only knew from the setting of fruit and the fermenting of silage, had become in their room a many-faced weather vane that had run out of wind.
Although he could barely swallow the milk I brought him, he still insisted on drinking it all. Sometimes he gagged and spewed up sticky little clots of sour cheese on his chest. On his ‘bad days’ I carried him to the bathroom and bathed him, his gaze fluttering off into space like a white handkerchief as his tiny soaped body lay cradled in my arms. On his ‘good days’ he forced himself to smile and asked me about the farm.
I never talked to Shulamit, although there was a great deal I might have liked to ask her. When she first arrived, I hated her – her and all those Russians of hers who had allowed her out. A week after she came, Grandfather began to arrange for his move to the old folk’s home. He had told us nothing of his plans, and we were dumbfounded when he sprang them on us. Avraham frowned, while Rivka gasped before huffing, ‘Very well, then, I suppose you know what you’re doing.’ Yosi kept silent. Uri chuckled and said, ‘You really are a dark horse, Grandfather!’
I was so frightened that my stomach felt like ice. I knew it was because of the woman from Russia who had knocked on the door of the cabin one day and walked in as though out of Grandfather’s trunk.
‘Hello, Ya’akov,’ she said. ‘Won’t you offer me a cup of tea?’
Grandfather rose with trembling hands. Not that he hadn’t known that Shulamit was about to appear. The pelicans had brought the mail, and Busquilla had festively delivered a telegram from Jerusalem the day before. Busquilla loved telegrams and had trained Zis to bray like a siren when he came with one. ‘It makes my day,’ he explained.
‘This is my grandson Baruch,’ said Grandfather. After all those years, those were his first words to her.
She laughed when he absentmindedly rolled an olive in his mouth while handing her the glass of tea, and laid her hand on his arm with a gesture of ownership and confirmation.
The fact of the matter was, I told myself, that she was nothing but an old woman. Tall but stooped, she had thick white hair, a wrinkled face, flabby rolls of flesh on her neck, and a complexion mildewed by age, like the mouldy skin of old olives. Yet beneath her dress she had long thighs, and her tottering ankles were still shapely.
She too drank her tea boiling hot. Not until their glasses were empty did they rise and embrace as though by a prearranged signal. Grandfather put his head against hers and moved with her to a slow rhythm. His moustache against her neck, he tapped out an identifying code on her shoulder with quick, small movements of his hand while sliding the other hand from her breasts to her stomach in an ancient, practised motion that the years had kept stored in some attic of old habits.
Every couple, Uri later explained to me, has their private and limited repertoire of love gestures, established quickly, perfected slowly, and never forgotten.
‘Even when their love is gone and they no longer breathe each other’s skin, eat each other’s flesh, and dive head-first like idiots into each other’s eyes, the same movements remain,’ he said.
Uri had something against eyes. He always insisted that they had no expression and that all the talk about their mirroring the soul was ‘nothing but a stupid optical illusion’. He himself read people by the mouth. That and not their eyes was what he looked at, deciphering the corners of their lips.
Shulamit cried, a shudder running through her body. Gently fingering her skin, Grandfather ran his planter’s hands over her. Just as the dam of Time was about to burst and its torrent buckle their old knees, he noticed that I was still in the cabin and broke away from her. They went on sitting and staring at each other, and the air was so thick with all the words and touches that had yet to be taken from their hiding places that I mumbled something about shutting an irrigation tap and wandered off into the orchard.
When I returned two hours later the light was still on in the cabin and the chimney of the boiler was sputtering. They were deep in a Russian conversation.
‘What’s done is done,’ Grandfather said to me. ‘From now on Shulamit and I will live together. We don’t have many years left.’
‘Each time I climbed the tower, I felt weaker and more afraid than the time before.’
One night Pinness had trouble holding on to the ladder. At one point in his descent he nearly lost his grip and toppled thirty feet to the ground. ‘For a long while I just hung on with a strength I didn’t know I had.’ His shaking knees bumped painfully against the cold metal. He was too scared to breathe.