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fine dirt off their feet. I pictured the scrape of spartan chairs in the Committee room, the broken-nailed hands drumming like hooves on the table. Let the two of them face those stalwart eyes for me, those rough fingers jabbing the air.
    I was only Grandfather’s little child, doing what he wanted. I had nothing more to say.
       
    In Odessa Grandfather and his brother Yosef boarded the Ephratos , a small, filthy ship ‘full of bad people’ that plied the Mediterranean and Black seas. Like two sides of the same coin, Ya’akov and Yosef Mirkin saw different halves of the world. ‘My brother was excited, tempestuous. He paced back and forth in the prow of the ship, looking straight ahead.’
    Yosef nurtured dreams of white donkeys, Hebrew power, and Jewish homesteads in the mountains of Gilead. Grandfather thought of Shulamit, who had stayed behind after threshing his flesh with the flails of deceit and jealousy, and of Palestine, which was for him but a refuge from crimes of passion, a land beyond the borders of memory where he and his wounds might grow scar tissue.
    He sat in the stern of the ship and gazed at the water, his bare heart unravelling behind him in the foam. ‘Can’t you see? Our warm hearts come apart like balls of twine,’ he wrote in a note long years later.
    During their days at sea, when all they ate was bread and dried figs, Ya’akov and Yosef Mirkin vomited incessantly.
    ‘We arrived in this country and headed north. By summer Yosef and I were on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.’ Grandfather’s hand travelled back and forth, shovelling mashed potatoes mixedwith homemade yoghurt and salty fried onions into my mouth. ‘The first night we found work guarding the fields, and at dawn we sat down to see how the sun rose in the Promised Land. It came up at half past four. By quarter past five it was trying to kill us. Yosef hung his head and started to cry. That wasn’t how he had imagined the day of redemption.’
    Now his hands were busy with the salad. ‘We were three friends. Mandolin Tsirkin, Eliezer Liberson, and me. My brother Yosef fell ill, couldn’t take any more, and ran away to America.’
    Hot, weak, and irritable, Grandfather oscillated between attacks of malaria and spasms of anger and longing.
    Yosef made it big in California. ‘When we were still walking around wrapped in burlap in winter, our socks stuffed with newspapers to keep out the cold, he was selling suits to bourgeois Americans.’ When the village was hooked up to electricity a few months before Grandmother Feyge died and Yosef sent a money order so they could buy a refrigerator, Grandfather threw the letter into the slops ditch by the cowshed and told Grandmother that he would never touch ‘the dollars of a capitalist traitor’. Yosef then went to Santa Rosa, Luther Burbank’s small and beloved farm that attracted sentimental hordes of visitors, insects, and fan mail, and sent Grandfather a signed photograph of the great planter. I saw him in the trunk beneath Grandfather’s bed with his straw hat, polka dot tie, and fleshy earlobes. ‘But even a gesture like that couldn’t reconcile Mirkin.’
    Fanya Liberson was Grandmother’s best friend.
    ‘Feyge, who was already sick and weak, short of breath and love, came to me in tears,’ she said after I had pestered her for hours, following her expectantly about. ‘But not even we could convince your grandfather. He made her go on carrying those big blocks of ice for the icebox.’
    ‘And your friend Mirkin was her biggest ice block of all,’ Fanya said another time to her husband. Grandmother Feyge’s sufferings and death still haunted her and made her furious anew each time she thought of them.
    I couldn’t hear Eliezer Liberson’s murmured answer. Crouched by their house, my face pressed to the wet slats of the blinds, I sawonly his lips as they moved, and her beautiful, bright old head laid across his chest.
    Grandfather never forgave his brother and