Slander

"Get up out of your sleep, my son, it's late."

"Today is Sunday, dada. It's a rest day, and it's still pitch dark outside."

"I know, but we have to go to the market. I say we should get there early, before the blessing on buying and selling has flown off."

"I'm coming, I'll be ready in a moment."

From the beginning of the road to the end of it, father and son were silent, each sunk in his own thoughts. The father threw out long strides. The son ran nimbly, telling himself he must not fall behind.

"Dada, are we going to the cattle market?"

"Yes."

"Are we buying a heifer?"

"How do you know that?"

"I was awake in the night. I heard you and my mother talking."

A cow had gone missing from the farm's pasture, and because no head-count had been made for two weeks nobody had known of it. The animals had been brought some while before from the neighbouring district. Since they had not been divided out among the herdsmen, neither had they been struck off the accountant's neck. It was precisely in that stretch of time that one heifer had vanished without a trace. The people of the farm knew nothing of the creature's fate. Searching and asking about brought no benefit. The manager reported it to the collective farm office and laid the matter across their path. At a full meeting that went on until the middle of the night they tried the accountant, brought him out guilty, and demanded that the very next morning he bring a cow and hand it over in the missing one's place. It was of this that the man had poured out his heart to his wife.

Their bargaining went well. They bought a fine dappled heifer.

"Dada, do we take her straight to the farm?"

"Yes."

"Do we hand her over to the herdsman?"

"Yes."

"And then?"

"And then our souls are free of it, my son."

The man slipped the cow's new rope off the tip of her horn. His son tossed away the switch he had been driving her with. They settled their account with the herdsman.

Father and son bent at the lip of the irrigation ditch and washed their hands and faces.

"What have the market prices come to this week?" the herdsman asked, straightening up.

"They haven't changed."

"You'll have bargained her at around five hundred, I suppose?"

"A little more."

"It's a wrong, a wrong. There are some cursed wretches who muddy the water and catch their fish in it. One day, sooner or later, it will break out through their skin," and the herdsman went off in the direction of the watchman's hut.

Father and son were left alone. The man sat stroking his son's shaggy hair, sunk in thought.

"My son, believe me, I am not guilty. Nor have I stolen. Believe me," he said.

The father turned his face the other way, in case his son should see the drop of tears in his eyes.

Grief rose in him from the humiliation dealt out by the unjust, from the inhumanity of it, from his own powerlessness, and inside his heart he said over and over:

"Believe me, my son. I am not a thief."