Scenes from Village Life (7 page)

"The devil only knows," said Pesach Kedem, "what brought this student who's not really a student here to us. How do we know that he's a student at all? Did you check his certificates before you adopted him? Did you read any of his essays? Did you examine him, in writing or orally? And who says that he's not the one digging underneath the house night after night, searching for something, some document or ancient proof that this property once belonged to his forebears? Maybe the reason he came here was that he is scheming to claim some kind of right of return, to establish a claim on the land and the house in the name of some grandfather or great-grandfather who may have lived here in the days of the Ottoman Empire. Or the crusaders. First he moves in here as an uninvited guest, something between a lodger and a servant, he digs under the foundation till the walls start shaking, and then he demands some right, a share in the property, an ancestral claim. And you and I, Rachel, will suddenly find ourselves out in the street. There are flies again on the veranda, there are flies in my room, too. It's those cats of yours, Abigail, that attract the flies. In any case, your cats have taken over the whole house. Your cats, and your Arab, and your beastly vet. And what about us, Rachel? What are we, would you mind telling me that? No? Well, let me tell you then, my dear: we are a passing shadow, like yesterday when it is past."

Rachel silenced him.

But a moment later she took pity on him and reached for a couple of chocolates wrapped in silver paper from her apron pocket.

"Here, Daddy. Take these. Eat them. Only give me a break."

DANNY FRANCO, DEAD
on his fiftieth birthday, was a sentimental man who was easily moved to tears. He wept at weddings and sobbed in the films that were shown in the Village Hall. The skin of his neck hung in folds, like a turkey's. He had a soft, guttural way of pronouncing his
r
's that gave his speech a hint of a French accent, though he hardly knew any French. He was a stocky, broad-shouldered man, but his legs were spindly: he looked like a wardrobe set on stick legs. He had a habit of hugging people he was talking to, even strangers, patting them on the shoulder, on the chest, between the ribs, on the back of the neck. He often slapped his own thighs, too, or gave you an affectionate punch in the belly.

If somebody praised the way his calves were coming along, or an omelet he had made, or the beauty of the sunset from the window of his house, his eyes immediately filled with moisture in gratitude for the compliment.

Beneath the stream of words on any subject whatever—the future of calf-fattening, government policy, a woman's heart, a tractor engine—there gushed a stream of joy that had no need of any pretext or connection. Even on the last day of his life, ten minutes or so before he dropped dead of heart failure, he was standing at the fence chatting to Yossi Sasson and Arieh Zelnik. Most of the time there was between him and Rachel that ceasefire so common between couples after long years of marriage, when conflicts, insults and temporary separations have taught both partners to tread warily and to give the marked minefields a wide berth. From the outside this cautious routine resembled a mutual resignation, which still left room for a calm comradeship, of the type that sometimes develops between soldiers of opposing armies facing each other, a few yards apart, in the course of long-drawn-out trench warfare.

This is how Danny Franco ate an apple: for a while he would turn it around in his hand, inspecting it closely until he found the precise point at which to sink his teeth into it, then he would stare at the wounded apple once more before attacking it again, this time at another point on its circumference.

After his death, Rachel let the farm go. The henhouses were closed, the calves were sold, and the incubator became a storeroom. Rachel continued to water the fruit trees that Danny Franco had planted at the end of the yard, apples and almonds, a couple of dusty fig trees, two pomegranates and an olive. But she gave up pruning the old creepers that clung to the walls of the house, covered the roof and gave shade to the veranda.

The abandoned sheds and outbuildings filled up with junk and dust. Rachel sold the lease on the land farther down the slope, and the water ration of the now inoperative farm. She also sold her parental home in Kiryat Tivon, and took in her cantankerous father. With the proceeds of all these sales she bought herself a portfolio of shares and the status of silent partner in a small company manufacturing pharmaceutical products and health foods. The company paid her a monthly salary, on top of her pay as a literature teacher at Green Meadows High School in Tel Ilan.

DESPITE HIS WEAK BODY
and thin shoulders, Adel took it on himself to weed the former farmyard, which had become overgrown since Danny's death. He also, on his own initiative, tended a small vegetable patch beside the front path, trimmed and watered the unruly hedge, looked after the oleanders, roses and geraniums that grew in front of the house, cleaned and tidied the cellar, and did most of the housework, scrubbing floors, hanging out the wash, ironing, and washing the dishes. He even reactivated Danny Franco's little carpentry workshop: he managed to oil and sharpen the electric saw and get it working again. Rachel bought him a new vise to replace the old one that was rusted up, some timber, nails, screws and carpenter's glue. In his spare time he made her some shelves and stools, gradually replaced the fence posts, and removed the old, broken gate and fitted a new one, which he painted green. It was a lightweight double gate fitted with springs, so that the two flaps swung to and fro behind you several times before closing gently of their own accord, without slamming.

The student spent the long summer evenings sitting on his own on the steps of his hut, which was formerly the hatchery, smoking and writing in a notebook placed on top of a closed book on his knees. Inside the hut Rachel had set him up with an iron bedstead and an old mattress, a school desk and a chair, an electric hotplate and a small refrigerator where Adel kept some vegetables, cheese, eggs and milk. He stayed sitting on the step until ten or ten-thirty, with a golden cloud of sawdust floating around his dark head in the yellow electric light, his smell of young male sweat mingling with a sharp, heady odor of carpenter's glue.

Sometimes he sat there after sunset, playing to himself on a mouth organ in the twilight or the moonlight.

"There he is again, pouring out his soul with his oriental wailing," the old man would grumble from the veranda. "It's probably some song of yearning for our land, which they'll never give up."

Adel knew only five or six tunes, but he never tired of repeating them. Sometimes he would stop playing and sit motionless on the top step with his back leaning against the side of the shed, deep in thought, or dozing. Around eleven o'clock he would stand up and go inside. The light above his bed would still be on after Rachel and her father had turned out their own bedside lamps and gone to sleep.

"At two o'clock in the morning, when the digging sounds started again," the old man said, "I got up and went to check if the little Arab's light was still on. There was no light. He may have turned it off and gone to sleep, but it's just as likely he turned it off and went to dig in our foundation."

Adel made his own meals: brown bread with slices of tomato, olives, cucumber, onion and green pepper, with pieces of salty cheese or sardines, a hard-boiled egg, zucchini or eggplant cooked with garlic and tomato sauce, washed down with his favorite drink, which he brewed in a soot-stained tin kettle: hot water and honey, flavored with sage leaves and cloves or with rose petals.

Rachel sometimes watched him from the veranda as he sat on his usual step, with his back against the side of the shed, his notebook on his knees, writing, pausing, thinking, writing a few more words, then pausing again, thinking, writing another line or two, getting up and walking slowly around the yard, turning off a sprinkler, feeding the cats or scattering a handful of durra for the pigeons.(He had also installed a dovecote at the bottom of the yard.)Then he would sit down again on his step, play his five or six tunes one after the other, eliciting heart-rendingly plaintive, long-drawn-out notes from his harmonica, then wipe the instrument carefully on his shirt tail and tuck it into his breast pocket. Then he would bend over his notebook again.

Rachel Franco, too, wrote in the evenings. Three or four times a week, almost every day during that summer, she and her old father sat facing each other on the veranda, on either side of the table that was covered in a flowered oilcloth. The old man talked and talked, while Rachel, frequently pursing her lips, wrote down his memories.

"
YITZHAK TABENKIN,
" Pesach Kedem said, "better you shouldn't ask me anything about Tabenkin." (She didn't.) "When he was an old man Tabenkin decided to disguise himself as a Hasidic rabbi: he grew his beard down to his knees and started issuing rabbinic rulings. But I don't want to say a single word about him. For good or ill. He was a considerable fanatic, believe me, and he was a dogmatist, too. A cruel, tyrannical man. He maltreated even his wife and his children all those years. But what is he to me? I have nothing to say about him. You can torture me if you like, you won't get me to say a bad word about Tabenkin. Or a good one either. Kindly note down: Pesach Kedem chooses to maintain a total silence over the whole incident of the great split between him and Tabenkin in 1952. Did you write that down? Word for word? Then kindly add this, too: From an ethical viewpoint, Poalei Zion stood at least two or three rungs below Hapoel Hatza'ir. No. That you should please cross out. Instead you should write: Pesach Kedem no longer sees any reason to become involved in the controversy between Poalei Zion and Hapoel Hatza'ir. It's all over and done with. History has proved both of them wrong, and proved to anyone who is not a fanatic or a dogmatist how wrong they were and how right I was in that controversy. I state this with all due modesty, and with total objectivity: I was right where they both erred. No, cross out ‘erred' and write ‘transgressed.' And they added iniquity to transgression when they hurled groundless accusations and all sorts of stuff and nonsense at me. But history itself, objective reality, came along and proved in black on white how they had wronged me. And the worst offenders were Comrade Hopeless and Comrade Useless, Tabenkin's cat's-paws. Full stop. Yet there was a time, when we were young, that I liked them both. I even liked Tabenkin sometimes, before he became a rabbi. And they liked me up to a point, too. We dreamed of improving ourselves, of improving the whole world. We loved the hills and the valleys, and the wilderness up to a point. Where were we, Rachel? How did we get here? Where were we before?"

"Tabenkin's beard, I think."

She filled his glass with Coca-Cola, a drink that he had lately come to be so fond of that it had taken the place for him of both tea and lemonade. Only he insisted on calling it "Coca-Coca," and nothing his daughter said would make him change. (He also pronounced the names of the two political parties Poalei Zion and Hapoel Hatza'ir, and even his own name, with a marked Yiddish accent.) He insisted on letting the Coca-Cola stand for a while until the bubbles had all subsided before he raised the glass to his cracked lips.

"How about that student of yours," the old man said suddenly. "What do you think? He's an anti-Semite, isn't he?"

"What makes you say that? What has he done to you?"

"He hasn't done anything. He just doesn't like us. That's all. And why should he?"

After a moment he added:

"I don't like us much myself. There's no reason."

"Pesach, calm down. Adel lives here and works for us. That's all. He works to pay for his lodging."

"Wrong!" the old man roared. "He doesn't work for us, he works instead of us! That's why he digs under the house at night, in the foundation or in the cellar."

Then he added:

"Cross that out, please. Don't write any of this. Neither what I said against the Arab nor what I said against Tabenkin. At the end of his life Tabenkin was totally senile. Incidentally," he added, "even his name was false. The fool was so smitten with the name Tabenkin, Ta-ben-kin—three proletarian hammer blows! Like Cha-lya-pin! Like Marshal Bul-ga-nin! But in fact his original name was simply Toybenkind, Itchele Toybenkind, Itchele Pigeonson! But that little son of a pigeon wanted to be a Molotov! A Stalin! A Hebrew Lenin he wanted to be!
Na,
I don't give a damn about him. I won't say a word about him, for good or ill. Not a word. Abigail, make a note: Pesach Kedem is totally silent on the subject of Tabenkin. A nod is as good as a wink."

Midges, moths, mosquitoes and daddy longlegs congregated around the light on the veranda. In the distance, from the direction of the hills, orchards and vineyards, a desperate jackal howled. And opposite, in front of his hut that was lit by a feeble yellow light, Adel got up slowly from his step, stretched, wiped his mouth organ with a cloth, took a few deep breaths, as though trying to draw all the expanse of the night into his narrow chest, and went indoors. Crickets, frogs and sprinklers chirped as if in response to the distant jackal, now joined by a whole choir of jackals somewhere nearby, in the darkened wadi.

"It's getting late," Rachel said. "Maybe it's time for us to stop, too, and go indoors."

"He burrows under our house," her father said, "because he simply doesn't like us. Why should he? What for? Because of all our villainy, our cruelty, our arrogance? And our hypocrisy?"

"Who doesn't like us?"

"Him. The goy."

"Daddy, that's enough now. He's got a name. Please use it. When you talk about him you sound like the last of the anti-Semites yourself."

"The last of the anti-Semites hasn't been born yet. And never will be."

"Come to bed, Pesach."

"I don't like him either. Not one bit. I don't like all they've done to us, and to themselves. And I certainly don't like what they want to do to us. And I don't like the way he looks at us, in that hungry, mocking way. He looks at you hungrily, and he looks at me contemptuously."