Two She-Bears (14 page)

How did he die?

Neta? I already told you. What kind of question is that?

Not Neta. Your grandfather.

My grandfather died in a fitting way.

Meaning what?

He died the way men like him used to die. “Moshe, Shlomo, every man
bimkomo,
” each in his own way. Some in the pasture or the field, surrounded by their fruit trees or their wheat. Some on the battlefield in wartime, among dear comrades and enemies. Some at sea, surrounded by waves that swallowed their friends and their ship. Or at their workbench, surrounded by pliers or test tubes or words or paintbrushes. In the orchard or the garden, surrounded by vegetables or trees that they planted, like in
The Godfather
—the most biblical film I've ever seen—when Don Corleone dies in the garden beside his little grandson, amid his tomato plants. How I cried during that scene. Terrible. Till now I don't understand why. Who died there, anyway? A mafioso, a murderer, a piece of shit, but the fact is I cried. That's what happened. I can hide feelings even from myself, but not facts.

And your grandfather?

Grandpa Ze'ev died in his wadi, next to his big carob tree, in the place he collected seeds and took Dovik and me for educational walks.

But how?

Not entirely clear. He apparently tripped on the path, which can happen if you're ninety-two and insist on hiking alone. He fell and broke his head on a rock. That's how Dovik found him.

Awful.

Why awful? Ninety-two years old, suddenly, and in a place you know and love so well. Luckily Dovik got to the body before the birds and beasts did. I have here in the drawer something I read at his funeral. You want to hear it?

Yes.

Very well. I tried to describe the misery of old age that he was spared. It's a bit flowery, so I apologize in advance. That's how it turned out. I'll just drink a little water first. Okay. A little cough and we're on our way: “Slowly shall the men of valor bend down, slowly shall the guards of the house become shaky, shall the joints weaken, the eye grow dim. Here a strap will become undone, here a pipe will drip, plaster will peel, ears go deaf, and the sound of the mill grow faint. But not for you, Grandpa Ze'ev. For you all at once. The jar is broken at the fountain, and the wheel smashed at the cistern, and the dust shall return to the earth as it was and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.”

That's beautiful. Very special.

I agree with you. I can compliment this text wholeheartedly because I didn't write it. I lifted almost all of it from Ecclesiastes, and people who heard it at the funeral also gave me compliments I didn't deserve but the Bible did. But what's important is that it worked out well for Grandpa Ze'ev. He didn't deserve it, but he succeeded. He lived a long life, died with sound mind and body, and, as I told you, surrounded by his landscape and plants. In a certain respect he died at home, because, like the house and the nursery, the wadi was his territory, and that's what he was—a man of the land and borders and fences and declarations of ownership. As Caleb the son of Jephunneh said at age eighty-five, “as my strength was then, even so is my strength now, to go out and come in,” to rise up and inherit the land. The house and nursery were his, and the body of Grandma Ruth was his, and this wadi also belonged to him.

From the day he died, by the way, we went back there only twice. Once with the police, right after Dovik found the body, and another time the next winter. But when Dovik and I were children, we drove out there with him many times, to mark plants and collect some seeds and mostly to learn to identify them by name. Those were pleasant trips, full of love and patience. The small amount of good in him he invested in us. I, the younger granddaughter, sat in the back, and Dovik, the older grandson, in the seat beside him, provoking me incessantly: “I'm sitting up front, I can see better, I was in Grandpa's wadi before you, he took me there even when we lived with Mom in Tel Aviv, and he showed me the cave and told me about the caveman before you were even born.”

And then he began to annoy Grandpa: how could he drive with only one eye?

“I can,” said Grandpa. “It's a fact. I'm driving, aren't I?”

I'm wondering inside: If we had also asked him about all the other things he did. How could you have done them, Grandpa? Would he have answered the same way: I did them, no? That answer—“It's a fact!”—answers many questions: How could you? How did you? How did it happen? How could it happen? And how could you, Ruta, have lived with this grandfather and also loved him? It's a fact. I hated him, I was afraid of him, I loved him, and I lived with him. It was good to live with him and it was good for him too, not only for us. The cases are vastly different, but maybe raising us and taking care of us, so alien to his character, were for him what the hard labor, years later, was for Eitan.

Whatever. It's complicated. Let's go back to traveling with him. He drove the way he always drove. Slowly, poorly, and confidently. He derived no pleasure from driving and didn't quite understand how his vehicle related to other vehicles, and like various other laws, various traffic laws made no sense to him. And despite that and his one eye, he wasn't involved in any accidents until his first one, years later, when he was almost eighty. You want to hear about it? He was driving on an old dirt road in the vineyards and got on the main road without looking to either side and without stopping and without giving the right-of-way to a woman driving there. Nothing happened to her or to him, but the bumper of his pickup truck sent her fancy-assed Audi to the body shop for a week. She was one of the city people who had come to live here, built a villa the size of a community center, and planted old olive trees so she could spend weekends with friends playing at “I own an estate and this is Tuscany.” There was shouting. I mean, she shouted: “You came from the field onto the road! You have to give me the right-of-way!” And he didn't shout at all. He answered her calmly: “Madam, here I have the right-of-way.”

“How? You went from a dirt road to the main road!”

“This is the road I traveled on my horse to the vineyard when we established the moshava, and then neither this road nor you were yet here.”

She screamed, “What does that have to do with it?”

He said, “It has to do with the fact that the right-of-way is the right of the one who got here first.”

“You're not only stupid, you're half blind. How do they let you drive with one eye?”

“When I see you,” he said to her, “I'm sorry I didn't lose my other eye. And now calm down, because I can leave you here and you can keep yelling at the trees and rocks, or I can take you home and send my grandson to tow your car to a garage and pay for the repair. So what's your decision?”

On the way she tried to conduct a slightly more civilized conversation, but Grandpa Ze'ev told her to shut up because she had already used up her right to speak to him. Dovik, by the way, met her later at the garage and described her as a most worthwhile daughter of Pharaoh and hinted that she had provided him an opportunity to correct the bad impression she had perhaps gotten about the men in our family. But Dovik's tales need to be taken with a grain of salt, and even without this addendum the whole story was very charming and we all laughed a lot about this city woman who didn't even realize she had been saved from troubles far worse than a week in the body shop. But in the evening, at home, when no outsider could hear, Grandpa Ze'ev told us that in truth he simply hadn't seen her, and that a man needs to be responsible and draw conclusions. That same week he sent his license to the motor vehicle department and informed them that in honor of his eightieth birthday he was suspending himself from driving.

From that day onward one of us would drive him to his wadi and let him off by the small bridge on the road. From there he walked up to his flowers and bushes and seeds, and at midday he rested under his big carob tree and always ate the same meal: bread, cheese, cucumber, garlic, a hard-boiled egg, a slice of salami, hot green pepper, olives he had pickled himself, and a few swigs of red wine from a flask. Then he napped awhile on the royal throne, as we called one of the rocks, which resembled a giant's chair and was easier on the buttocks than it appeared, and then got up and continued to leave markers or collect seeds, depending on the season. And in late afternoon he went back down to the road, where one of us was waiting to take him home.

But back when I was a little girl, he still drove there himself and often took Dovik and me with him. We would leave the pickup truck in the shade of the oaks at the side of the road and follow him up the gully. He taught us how to identify and how to find and how to gather the seeds of his wildflowers. In their flowering season he stuck thin, tall marking sticks beside them, because later on, when the seeds were ready, the plant was completely dried up and hard to find among the other dry plants. Sometimes he would attach a label to the stick noting some special quality, like a cyclamen of a richer color or an anemone with unusually large flowers, a hollyhock that was darker than normal or a squill that year after year flowered early.

We went from marker to marker, stick to stick, we collected seeds in paper bags—not plastic, so the seeds would not get moldy—and in each bag put a note with the name. Grandpa Ze'ev could identify every seed and every fruit of every plant as easily as he identified their flowers, but he did this so we would learn and also know. Sometimes he would give us a quiz—he put seeds on the table and asked us to name the plants they came from: the brownish-purple seeds of the cyclamen, which retained a sweetish scent even when dry, and seeds of anemones, in the fluff that carries them in the wind, and buttercup seeds, like golden flakes you had to rub between your hands to free them from the stalk, and seeds of the blue thistle, smooth and yellowy, that jump out of the dry berry when you squeeze it, and seeds of flax, also smooth and oily, but smaller and darker and barely sprouting, and seeds of squill, like thin dark flakes. And how to tell the difference between poppy seeds and snapdragon seeds, crocus and gladiolus, and the common corn cockle and slender corn cockles, whose seeds are almost identical.

At the end of every collection and marking we returned to his big carob tree, which surprised us anew every time, how big and thick and green it was, and we would sit in its shade and eat. Grandpa Ze'ev explained to us that in nature luck and chance are very important. The layer of soil in the hills is very thin, sometimes only a few centimeters deep, and under it is chalky rock. But this carob got lucky—that's what he said—and took root in a good place, in deep soil, and the creek provided plenty of water and every winter swept in some new soil.

The big rocks under the carob kept away the cows and nettles that tend to gather under big carob trees and leave stinking turds on the ground and burning blisters on the skin. Grandpa Ze'ev said that only people from kibbutzim think that cow dung has a good smell and even sing songs in its praise: our moshava had real farmers who knew the truth—all shit stinks, even if it's the dung of socialist calves and Zionist cows.

We often found cigarette butts there, the remnants of a campfire, the footprints of visitors.

Dovik got annoyed. “Who gave them permission to sit under our carob?”

Grandpa Ze'ev displayed remarkable tolerance. “They apparently don't know it's ours,” he said, and even complimented the campfire of the anonymous visitors, which was small and neat and built precisely on the remains of a previous fire. That means they're completely okay, he declared, adding that the tree belonged not only to us and them but to the birds who live in it and to the beetles and lizards who climb on it and the ants and goats who eat its fruit and the snakes who live in its shade among the rocks.

He gathered a few twigs, taught us how to set them on fire, built a small campfire on the same spot that others had lit similar campfires. Dovik sat on the throne, and Grandpa told him to move over a bit so I could sit beside him.

“There's enough room for Ruta too,” he said, and took out the cucumber and cheese from his backpack, and the bread and salami and olives and garlic and hot green pepper. He put up a small kettle and made us tea and told us about the nearby cave, which was once the home of the caveman.

Go have a look in the cave, he told Dovik, maybe he's home and we can invite him to have lunch with us.

Dovik hurried over there, peeked in, shouted—“He's not here!”—and came back.

“That's really too bad,” said Grandpa Ze'ev, “we could have learned from him how to light a fire with flint rock, not with a match or lighter.” There was genuine longing in his smile, not that of an archaeologist or a historian but of a man looking for a worthy friend.

Grandma Ruth was still alive in those days, but he was the one who raised us. She was there in the house but not present in our lives, which we could sense even in the sandwiches she would make us for school. All the necessary components were there, the fresh tomato and cheese omelet, but his cracked olives and hard cheese and garlic and cucumber and hot pepper were much tastier and fresher. Sometimes I tried to engage her in conversation. In general I didn't succeed, but I once saw her sitting motionless on the steps of the kitchen porch and asked her what she was doing.

“I am longing,” she said.

“For whom?”

“For my children, who flew the coop as soon as they were able to fly.” And then she said, “Away from him and because of him, which I also tried to do.”

She explained to me that here, in the moshava, there are big extended families that stay together, on the same plot of land, and never stop arguing, and there are some like us, where the children run away, and who knows which is better.

Grandpa also spoke with us on the very same topic, about offspring who go far away from home and offspring who stay, but he did so by means of clever parables about plants that scatter their seeds versus plants that leave their progeny, as he put it with unexpected tenderness, “at home near Mommy and Daddy.”