This was a flawless arrangement. Ostensibly. For alongside the strait of his life another channel rolled along, an ever-multiplying serpent of offspring in the form of a gang of boys entitled to address him as “Uncle.” They had been produced in quick succession by Grandpa Lolek’s only brother, Grandpa Hainek.
Our anointing of Grandpa Hainek as a grandfather was solely due to Grandpa Lolek. He himself was not of much use, but when we adopted Grandpa Lolek we simply reached out and added Grandpa Hainek, just in case. He was distinguished by his blue eyes and blond hair, which had turned white over the long and torpid snowy years. His body was heavy and solid, almost dwarfish, and his face was handsome. At the beginning of the war, aged eleven, he had been given to a Polish family. His Aryan looks and his youth enabled him to fit in easily with the farmer’s children. For five years he ran barefoot with the peasant children, earned his keep, learned about life. When Grandpa Lolek came for him at the end of the war, Grandpa Hainek did not recognize this man who was trying to separate him from his parents. The Polish family wanted to adopt him: He didn’t look like a Yid anyway, and soon they would need more hands for the harvest. But Grandpa Lolek, hero of Anders’ Army, persisted in his mission, and led Grandpa Hainek all the way to a cot in the youth hut of a kibbutz in the Naftali Mountains.
On the kibbutz, they took one look at Grandpa Hainek, wearing a black coachman’s cap and boots in the middle of August, and sent him to work in the hay. He slowly grew accustomed to the Yids surrounding him, but was barely able to pick up their language and their ideas remained incomprehensible. Why was it bad to accumulate property on the kibbutz? He stole eggs, bread and knives from the kitchen, which he buried who-knew-where, the-devil-knows-why. He did find a common language with the local Arabs, those who hung around the edges of the fields, keenly interested in wagon shafts, tractor parts, anything Grandpa Hainek brought them in return for sheep skins and good pitchforks.
It was with the Arabs that he arrived in Tiberias. He found himself a pair of strong horses and started working as a porter and hauler of goods. Wearing heavy boots and a redolent sheep skin slung over his shoulders year-round, with what little broken Hebrew he spoke, Grandpa Hainek continued his life in the land of the Yids. He ate a lot of beets and a lot of cabbage. He distilled his own vodka from potatoes, and from the Christians in the Galilee he bought huge cuts of pork which he hung in his room alongside his coachman’s overcoat, whip and sheep skin.
In one of the Yids’ villages he found a wife, Tamar, and they had three sons together before she died of a nameless disease, most likely typhoid fever. Apart from his sons, she also left him her Shabbat candlesticks, an assortment of feminine items bundled together in a purse, and a book of Psalms that she was extremely fond of, and which Grandpa Hainek nailed to the wall above his bed as a talisman against witches. When he returned to the kibbutz for a short while to deposit his sons and make sure his treasures were still well hidden, he met Naomi. She was the educational coordinator on the kibbutz, and he was referred to her to take in his sons. After she had performed her job impeccably, she followed him, to live with him wherever he should choose. They bought a plot of land on an old moshav and lived off the fruits of their labors. They had no real connection with the State of Israel and were cut off from its institutions. Naomi would chat a little with the neighbors, Grandpa Hainek would not. He had heard of the Israel Defense Forces (he found the concept of a Yid army impressive) but not of the Sick Fund. He traded in straw, sowed oats, beets and potatoes. He fattened calves and pigs. He wanted to have children with Naomi but could not. He took her to Arab witch-doctors, to a rabbi in Tiberias, to anyone who offered a cure, but none was found.
He did not maintain contact with our family. Yids. Grandpa Lolek always knew where he was and how many children he had — that was enough. As long as there were no monetary demands he took no interest in Grandpa Hainek’s affairs, not even when he left the moshav and settled on the outskirts of the abandoned Arab villages, Ikrit and Biram. Grandpa Hainek, roaming the Galilee, had found the villages deserted and free for the taking. He was immediately drawn to a church with a ruined bell tower at its peak, and to the expansive wilderness enveloped in low-growing weeds, where the only sound was the screeching of crows. He spent long days on the barren hilltops and in the wadi beds, where gray rivers groaned in wintertime. On snowy nights, when black rain threatened to wash everything into the rivers, Grandpa Hainek liked to roam about, battling the winds, in fear that the darkness descending from the woods of Mount Meron would settle on him. He scanned each and every ruin in the villages, examining the opportunities afforded by this Eden.
One day he took Naomi and housed her in one of the ruins. He gathered new bricks and built walls, a fireplace and chimneys. With his own two hands he installed a kitchen and cabinets, a wash-basin and house wares. He brought her feathers to make down comforters. He brought her windows that he stole from the Arab villages, and even sewed curtains for the windows. Adjacent to the house he turned a few ruins into covered barns. He fenced in some yards and raised goats. With the displaced villagers of Ikrit and Biram, who returned from time to time to examine their villages, he did not have many dealings. He respected them, and forced them to respect him. He usually made them leave. Sometimes he bought jewelry for Naomi from them, and in return sold them aspirins stolen from kibbutzim.
By a circuitous route, Naomi found religion. She suddenly began to observe the mitzvahs, pray, light Shabbat candles. Grandpa Hainek had to go with her to Tzfat to buy kosher meat, wait for her to bathe in the ritual mikvah, sit with her with rabbis, in congregants’ houses, in synagogues.
He bore her barrenness silently. He was not angry at having to hire laborers to gather the potatoes instead of using his own sons. He built her a life of royalty and did not resent her tendency to visit with her family members, the Yids, to escape once in a while who knows where.
Naomi and Grandpa Hainek lived on the edge of the abandoned villages, childless, far from the family. Even when she persuaded him to take in the late Tamar’s three children so she could bring them up properly at their father’s side, and even when she dragged him to meet a few people — her family, Jewish friends from Tzfat, friends from the kibbutz — it never occurred to Grandpa Hainek to establish contact with us.
It is said that his first appearance in our family was at my briss, which happened to be held on the Tisha B’Av fast of 1963. He turned up for some reason, dressed festively in a white shirt. His yellowish hair was neatly combed and he had wiped the grease stains off his cap. No one looked at him much, and they ignored him when he ungrammatically and unabashedly wondered, “And the food, where is? And drinks, where are?” even though it was a fast day. Dumbstruck, they all gaped at Naomi with her light blue eyes and grey hair, her aquiline nose and high cheekbones. An angelic vine, a beautiful, noble icon with a white peasant’s dress and a shy look. We immediately wanted her to give us children. To breathe life into our family. That tall, serene body was made for our offspring. We wanted to drink from this well of life, even at the cost of mingling with Grandpa Hainek.
The family members greeted her warmly, connected with her. They asked — where had she left the children? Whispers traveled through the room: she was barren. Acting on a vague instinct, they brought her to my cradle, a fertility charm concocted on the spot.
Many more prayers were whispered for her, countless blessings were showered upon her, and finally they also thought to ask — it turned out that she had no Sick Fund membership and had not tried any doctors. Only witches and a soothsayer and one medic. Naomi was sent to the doctors and a year later she began to have children. Despite having been the source of the charm, I myself was somewhat forgotten, and her children — whom she bore at the ages of thirty-five, thirty-six and thirty-seven, until the midwife was unable to stop the bleeding when she gave birth to Oz, her fourth son — are not attributed to me.