by Meir Shalev
“What’s under it?” asked Dovik.
“Nothing,” said Grandpa.
“Just a hole?”
“No. No hole. There’s an eye, but it’s dead. I can show you.”
Dovik was frightened. No, he didn’t want to see it. But after a few days of restlessness he asked, “Show us, but not just me, also Ruta.”
I was four at the time, and the blob that had been Grandpa Ze’ev’s eye became one of the first images engraved in my memory. He slid the patch to his forehead, and we saw sort of a tiny shriveled egg, chilling, grayish white, lacking the expression that an iris and a pupil give a seeing eye. I didn’t phrase it like this at the time, but I felt it: here was the first touch of death in a body that was still alive and warm.
“What is that, Grandpa?” I asked fearfully.
“I already told you, this was once my eye.”
“Why is it like that?”
“It got hit and it died.”
“How?”
“By what?”
“By the branch of a tree. I was galloping on a horse in the woods, and a branch hit me in the eye.”
“Were you chasing robbers?”
“No.”
“Then who were you chasing?”
“Nobody. I was just galloping. That’s all.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Not so much. The branch only scratched my eye, and I didn’t go to the doctor right away. Grandma Ruth put a bandage on it, and the neighbor put on some cow sulfa. By the time I got to a real doctor, the eye couldn’t see a thing.”
And he smiled. “Now you two put patches on one eye and try pouring water from a kettle into a glass.”
We did as he said and couldn’t do it. The water spilled on the table.
“You see?” he said. “I had to learn to do many things with one eye. To make tea, lace my shoes, but shooting a rifle was no problem.”
A number of years later, approaching my bat mitzvah, I sewed and embroidered him a present—a new patch, light blue, with tiny yellow flowers. “I want you to wear it at my party,” I said, “and not this old black one.”
“Sure,” he said, and because he was a man of his word he came wearing it, arousing new amazement among some guests and old fear among others. From then on he wore it on ordinary days, and I embroidered more patches for him, with a flower he loved on each of them: blue thistle, pink flax, chrysanthemum, poppy, cyclamen. When he died, by the way, we put them all in his coffin. I don’t believe in the afterlife, but Dovik said, “He’s starting a new life there now, so he should go there showing his good side. Not the murderer with the black eye patch but the grandpa who loved flowers and whose grandchildren loved him.”
TWENTY
A WOMAN AND A RIFLE AND A TREE AND A COW
(Draft)
1
At first Ze’ev saw only the treetop poking above the distant mound of earth. The tip of a small tree, which had not been there yesterday and should not be there now.
He clutched his stick and waited, and the tree, to his amazement, moved. It moved, drew closer, emerged from the hillside, and revealed itself. It was sitting in a wagon, the wagon was drawn by an ox, and a cow walked behind, tied to the wagon by a rope.
On the driver’s seat was the figure of a man, and in the wagon, in the shade of the tree, sat another figure. Ze’ev knew who these two were even though they were far away and their faces not yet visible. Under the driver’s seat, he knew, a rifle awaited him too, cold and silent and ready to strike.
He smiled to himself. A month ago he had informed his parents that he’d found a new place and purchased a plot of land in a new moshava, and now they were sending him everything a man needed to get started.
The wagon drew closer. The figures grew sharper and now had names: the wagon driver became his big brother Dov, and the tree became the young mulberry from his parents’ yard, and the woman became Ruth Blum, the neighbor’s daughter he had desired from the time he was a youth and she just a girl; he wanted her and had written his parents to ask her and ask her parents.
The wagon came nearer and arrived. His brother halted the magnificent ox with a shout. Ruth jumped out and came and stood before him and said:
“Do you remember me, Ze’ev?”
That is actually what she said: “Do you remember me, Ze’ev?” Which meant, in the language of those days: I have not forgotten you, Ze’ev, I have never stopped thinking about you from the day you left.
He said, “Yes, Ruth, I remember you. The youngest daughter of the Blum family.” Which meant: I love you.
And she said, “If so, I am happy.” Because that’s how one would say: And I you.
And he said, “You grew up.” As if to say: Before you filled only my memory and my dreams and now you also fill my eyes and my heart.
And she asked, “And you’re happy I grew up, Ze’ev?” That’s what she actually said: “And you’re happy I grew up, Ze’ev?” Which meant: All this is yours.
He answered her: “Yes, I am very happy you grew up.” And she heard and understood every word: I lust for you, big and beautiful girl that you are. I want to touch you, touch you and everything that grew and became beautiful in you.
“And you’re happy that I agreed and came, Ze’ev?”
And he was slightly abashed and his fingers tightened around his stick, and his mouth uttered, “Yes, I am happy that you agreed and came.”
And Ruth translated to herself: Don’t go, stay with me, please.
His big brother Dov, who all the while had kept a respectful distance, checking the axles and reins and pouring water into a pail, first for the ox and then the cow, stood up straight and looked at them and understood what they were saying by the tilt of their necks and their hand motions and angles of their bodies, and finally shouted, “Enough, Ze’ev, let her be for now. Look, I also brought you the mulberry tree from home, and the cow, and most important”—and from under the driver’s seat he pulled out and lifted up something elongated, wrapped in a flowered blanket and tied at both ends—“also the rifle you were promised! Everything a man needs to get started!”
He approached them, the bundled rifle in his hand, and continued, “And Father also put seeds and a harness in the wagon for you, and a taburetka stool to sit on while milking, and a pickax and two hoes, and an extra blade for the plow, and the blanket on the rifle is from Mother, a blanket with flowers she embroidered. I told them that they were giving you too much, more than what’s left for me and Arieh, but that’s what he decided. Come and look, it’s all in the wagon.”
Ze’ev drew close. The ox extended his mighty neck toward him and stuck out his tongue to lick him. Ze’ev stroked his nose affectionately and rubbed his forehead with his knuckles and looked in the wagon and saw the tools and sacks and also a black basalt stone, about forty centimeters long. From the basalt of the Lower Galilee, lichen stains on its upper side, bits of earth and spiderweb on the other, smoother side.
He held it and lifted it and hugged it. Its weight—it was heavy—felt good in his strong arms. Its heat—the heat of the lava that spawned it and the heat of the sun it had absorbed in its life—flooded his chest and his eyes.
“Father said you should put this stone into the wall of the house that Ruth and you will build,” said Dov. “Place it about a meter and a half high, and do not cover it with plaster. One black side of it should face the street and another black side face into the house. That way you will remember who you are and where you came from, and the neighbors will know: here lives someone who comes from the Galilee, and no one messes with him.”
He untied the blanket, his mother’s embroidered flowers fluttered, and the rifle was revealed.
“This is your rifle, Dov,” said Ze’ev with great surprise.
“I know it’s my rifle, but Father decided to give it to you.”
2
Dov had taken his German Mauser from a retreating Turkish soldier at the end of the First World War. He was just a youth, and
his father had ordered him to plow a portion of the field. He rose early in the morning, took provisions, hitched the wagon to a mule and loaded the plow on it, and went. When he neared the field he saw a figure lying in the shade of a big jujube tree. He carefully came closer and saw a Turkish soldier sleeping with a gun in his hands.
He was scared for a moment but not surprised. The British had already advanced northward, and retreating Turkish soldiers, alone or in small groups, were to be seen here and there, hungry, worn out, frightened, thirsty, some of them sick and wounded.
The soldier awoke and sat up. Dov saw the trembling hands, the cracked lips, the weary, imploring eyes, but his own eyes were fixed, with desire and trepidation, upon the rifle. He stopped the mule at a safe distance, smiled at the soldier, made a calming gesture with his hand, and then took from his pouch a quarter of a loaf of bread and waved it in his direction.
The sight of the bread had an immediate, wondrous effect on the man: he dropped the rifle and began crawling toward Dov on all fours, like a tired but determined animal. Dov, atop the wagon, tore off a piece of bread and tossed it to him. The soldier seized it and chewed and swallowed in haste, with muffled grunts of joy, and Dov jumped from the wagon and ran to the tree and took the rifle and pointed it at him.
The soldier did not panic. He extended a pleading hand, and Dov hoisted the rifle on his shoulder and returned to the wagon and tore off and threw another piece of bread and also took from his pouch a tin of olives, came close and began tossing him one olive after another.
The soldier could not summon the strength to catch them in flight. He crawled on all fours, gathered the olives from the ground, and put them in his mouth with the dirt and stubble of the field that stuck to them. His eyes sparkled with happiness and gratitude. Dov approached him cautiously, put his water jug on the ground and took a few steps back, gesturing to the soldier to take it.
When the soldier had drunk all the water, he ordered him to strip off his ammunition belt and throw it on the ground and then shouted at him in Arabic to go away, and to drive the point home made a slaughtering gesture across his neck with a finger and pointed in the direction he should go.
The soldier, somewhat revived and encouraged, stood up straight. Dov was frightened. Never had he seen so tall or broad a man. Again he pointed the rifle at him, but the giant clasped his hands to his heart in a gesture of thanks intelligible to any human being and common to all languages and bowed down. His damaged lips smiled. His staggering legs carried him, step by step, away from Dov and the tree. He did not even try to take back his weapon. He seemed glad to be rid of it—of what it could do, of the temptation loaded within it, of its weight.
Dov waited until the soldier became a dot in the distance, then hung the rifle and ammunition belt on branches of the tree, so that someone possibly watching from afar could not see them. All day he plowed, and at nightfall he hid the rifle in the wagon, returned home, and told his father what had happened.
“You did well,” his father praised him, adding that he did not want the village council to know about the rifle lest they take away the rifle that had been given to him for guard duty.
They removed a few boards from the floor of the shed in the yard, dug a pit in the earth, wrapped the rifle in rags soaked in engine oil, buried it, and replaced the floor above its grave. At the first opportunity the father obtained a tin box, and they put the rifle in that and again buried it in the ground, and when Ze’ev went to live in a different place, Dov brought him the rifle in the wagon.
“This rifle is part of our history,” Ze’ev told his sons and later his grandson and granddaughter.
The eyes of the children, generation by generation, sparkled, and Ruth, first a mother and then a grandmother, said nothing. Only once did she remark: “It is not part of our history; it determines and writes it. You are in its hands, not it in yours.”
TWENTY-ONE
“So what did they send me from home in the wagon?” Grandpa Ze’ev would quiz me and Dovik when we were little. And we were supposed to answer him in rhymes that he composed: “A rifle and cow / A stone and a plow / A mulberry tree / And Grandma for me.” The mulberry tree, by the way, he loved no less than he loved Grandma, and out of love he didn’t plant it in the ground but left it in the barrel it came in and on the same wagon, and everywhere he rode, so he told us, he rode with his tree.
And the mulberry grew and grew, and grew and grew, until what happened? “What happened, Dovik? Ruta? What happened, Neta?”
The roots of the mulberry tree burst through the barrel, and Grandpa Ze’ev filled the whole wagon with earth, and so the wagon became a giant flowerpot on wheels, and Grandpa Ze’ev and his tree continued to go out to work together. The magnificent ox pulled the wagon, and when they got to the field it was harnessed to the plow, and Grandpa plowed and planted and seeded, and at lunchtime he lay in the shade of his tree and ate and rested: “I ate what Grandma Ruth prepared for me, and for dessert I had berries from the tree, I cut grass for the ox and piled it up for him, I gave his poop to the tree, and the ox pulled it and me in the wagon. That’s how families are.”
Ultimately the mulberry grew so big that even two pairs of oxen couldn’t pull the wagon, and the wagon itself began to fall apart from the pressure of the roots and weight of the tree and wetness of the soil.
“And what happened then, Dovik? And what happened then, Ruta? And what happened then, Neta?”
“Grandpa dug a long deep hole at the edge of the yard, the oxen pulled, he pushed, the wagon went into the hole.”
“And what happened then, Dovik, Ruta, Neta?”
Grandpa Ze’ev released the oxen, and they climbed out with their harnesses; he removed the wagon shafts and covered the wagon with a lot of dirt. That’s it, that’s how he planted the mulberry tree in the yard and how it became our big mulberry tree today, which looks as if it was there forever, as if it hadn’t come to Grandpa Ze’ev and been planted in his yard, but instead that Grandpa Ze’ev came to it and decided to build a house in its shade. But we knew it came in a wagon, which was buried beneath it, and Dovik—who was a very active child and wanted to make an impression on other children and also to make money, so he said, to buy plane tickets and visit our mother in America—kept nagging Grandpa to dig out the wagon and attach it to a tractor instead of an ox so we could ride in the shade of the tree as he had in his younger years and maybe sell tickets to people who wanted a ride. But Grandpa Ze’ev said that the wagon was already completely rotted away, and even if it wasn’t, the roots of the tree had already pushed through the bottom and stuck way deep into planet Earth. That’s what he said—“stuck deep into planet Earth”—not into our yard or the land of the moshava.
Eventually, when Eitan showed up and joined the family and heard the story about the mulberry tree that rode in the wagon, he went to the carpentry shop of an old army buddy and came back with a small wagon, about eighty centimeters long, a precise model of an old farmer’s wagon, with rubber wheels and tall sides. He filled it with dirt, planted a lemon sapling, and said we should manufacture and sell these in all sizes with different kinds of trees.
The idea was that one could move the trees from place to place in a garden and change its appearance every day, but Dovik said, “It won’t work. People don’t like it when their trees move from place to place. It gives them a bad feeling.”
He was right. It’s enough that we move, we are shaken, pulled, shoved. Trees must stay in place and bestow confidence and calm. And I tell you all this, Varda, because our family can be described not only by the seeds and flowers from Grandpa Ze’ev’s wadi but also through its trees. Not the tens of thousands of poor little saplings at the Tavori Nursery, with roots yearning to break free from their black bags, wondering, Who will buy and raise me? Who will eat my fruit? Who will sit in my shade? I don’t mean the trees we sell, but the three truly important trees: Grandpa’s big carob in his wadi, in whose shade he taught us about plants and
under which he died. The good and beautiful acacia in the Negev, in whose shade my man and my son camped on the trip from which they did not return. And the big mulberry, under which nobody has died as yet, except for Eitan’s cold poikehs, which sat on the chilly ground for twelve years and came back to life after Grandpa Ze’ev died.
Three big trees. Size matters. Big trees help people relax. It’s the thickness and strength of the trunk, the shade and security and serenity of the scene, the whisper of the wind in the branches, which even in a storm sway slowly—such is the calm and beauty of the natural landscape. I won’t take you to the carob and the acacia, but you can see the mulberry through the window. Turn around and look. You see?
By the way, you can also see it clearly in the aerial photograph on the wall behind you. Get up a moment, Varda, come, I want to show you something. Here, you see the dedication on the photo? “To Teacher Ruta, who taught me everything, I want you to teach me more.” This is a present from Ofer, the son of the neighbors, Haim and Miri Maslina. My beloved student, who almost drowned from that bet about swimming underwater in the Kinneret. He started taking pictures when he was about bar mitzvah age, and when he finished high school he put together a wonderful exhibit that counted toward his matriculation exam. Everyone called it “the exhibit of aerial photographs of the moshava,” but Ofer called it “God Looking at Our Moshava and Thinking Thoughts.” I remember how he took those pictures. A friend of Haim’s took him up in a motorized paraglider every day for a week, and all day long he took pictures from different heights and at different angles of the sun, street by street, house by house, plot by plot of land, yard by yard, and the noise of the motor overhead drove the whole moshava crazy.
“Maybe shoot him the way you used to shoot the jaybirds?” Dovik suggested to Grandpa Ze’ev. But Grandpa for some reason surprised us all and didn’t shoot him, and Ofer kept taking pictures. He had the prints made in the city and had them framed with captions that also annoyed everyone concerned, in other words the whole moshava without exception.
