The Blue Mountain (10 page)

‘Nothing looks better on a woman than a few wisps of hay,’ Uri commented.

‘Every radish that reddened in the vegetable gardens, every baby and calf, were a new promise and hope,’ Pinness told us during our history lesson in school. ‘The fat content of the milk reached four per cent, and our new oil incubator could house three hundred and sixty eggs at a time.’ Rilov began to disappear for long periods. Everyone thought he was off buying arms and spying in Syria, until one day they found out that the huge septic tank by his cowshed was a sophisticated arms cache into which he descended to prepare for the worst, coming up for air at odd intervals.

The Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle was no longer in existence. It had vanished in a cloud. ‘You couldn’t exactly call it a factional split,’ said Meshulam. ‘Maybe they disbanded, or maybe they just drifted apart. They never talk about it. I think it must have happened after Avraham was born.

‘The roots, though,’ he guessed, ‘went deeper. They had to do with some secret among the three men.’

Every Saturday Mandolin Tsirkin came to visit Grandfather and eat olives and herring with him. Sometimes he brought little Meshulam along to play with Avraham. Tsirkin and his son always looked unwashed and neglected. Meshulam, bright streaks of hardened snot on his cheeks, stared wonderingly at the glass plates on the table, while Mandolin gave Grandmother a look that I only understood years later, when motionless in bed I listened to the two old men have an unusually harsh conversation. Not even the tea and olives could overcome their anger.

‘We trusted you with her,’ growled Mandolin Tsirkin.

‘I don’t want to discuss it,’ retorted Grandfather.

‘Well, I do!’ Tsirkin said.

Silence. Olives. A carefully nibbled sugar cube.

‘If the two of you loved her so much,’ Grandfather burst out, ‘what made you think up that nutty lottery?’

‘No one forced you to take part in it,’ hissed Tsirkin.

‘I’m not blaming just you.’

‘We wanted to heal you,’ whispered Tsirkin. ‘To cure you of Shulamit.’

‘Feyge Levin,’ declaimed Grandfather with wicked fanfare. ‘Devoted in her silence, indivisible in her love: the innocent, the poor sacrificial lamb!’

Liberson dropped in sometimes too, though since his marriage his visits were rare. He felt Grandfather’s changed attitude toward him, and besides, ‘he wanted to spend every spare minute making out with Fanya’.

Everyone sensed the subtle resentment blowing from Ya’akov Mirkin toward his friends. Grandfather was too much of a gentleman to hurt anyone on purpose, but with resolute tact he refused to sit down and swap memories or discuss his life with Feyge.

‘When you were a boy of four, some people came from the radio to make a programme about them. Your grandfather refused to take part in it.’

‘The Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle,’ said Grandfather, pushing away the microphone, ‘is a private matter. If Liberson and Tsirkin want to tell you how they danced and made the wilderness bloom, let them go right ahead.’

But once a year, on the anniversary of the founding of the village, the Workingman’s Circle held a reunion. People came walking from all over the Valley, converging from the reaped fields like black dots. Seated on the ground, they watched the three men and the woman mount a platform of baled hay and stand facing them. A great tarpaulin of silence descended on the crowd. Tsirkin played the mandolin, Liberson and Mirkin sang along with him, and Feyge, frail and sickly, drummed laughingly on a pot.

She was nearing the end. Fanya Liberson was her best friend, and she bared her heart to her.

‘Twice a year those disgusting birds come bringing a blue envelope.’

‘Every six months a letter arrived,’ said Fanya Liberson, massaging her husband’s back. ‘And every six months she died all over again.’

Through the foggy windowpane, I could see her hands move. Though they already had liver spots, their anger and tenderness were still a young woman’s.

Liberson murmured something.

‘Your Workingman’s Circle joke ended badly,’ said Fanya.

Liberson wouldn’t admit it. ‘But one of us had to marry her. It was in the constitution.’

‘Why didn’t you?’ Fanya asked.

‘I didn’t draw the lucky number,’ smiled the old man, turning to gather his wife to him. ‘And what would have happened to us if I did? You’d be stranded in the kibbutz vineyard to this day. Unless Mirkin had run off with you instead.’

‘That’s all I needed.’

‘Grandmother spent three years being pregnant, milked the cows, hauled blocks of ice, cooked, sewed, cleaned, and loved Grandfather until her dying breath,’ said my cousin Uri to me in an unexpected outbreak of emotion.

‘Grandfather wasn’t to blame,’ I answered.

‘He won’t let anyone say a mean word about his wonderful grandfather,’ hissed my aunt Rivka, Avraham’s wife. ‘It’s no wonder he’s the way he is. He’s spent his whole life with addled old men who told him nonsense. He had his grandfather for a mother, that pest Pinness for a friend, and Zeitser to pass the afternoons with. Not that that senile old coot ever said a word to him. Why, he’s never even had a girlfriend. And he won’t ever have one, either.’

Her squat, heavy body turned to face me. ‘They should have sent you to an orphanage,’ she yelled.

I was a sad and angry seventeen-year-old at the time. My loneliness, the stiffening flesh of my adolescent body, the deviousness
of my mind, which still followed every twist and turn of my childhood – all filled me with resentment, with a black, gritty, stinging bile. Shulamit had just arrived in Israel, and Grandfather had left me and gone off to live with her in an old folk’s home. Every other day I went on foot to visit him, bringing him a can of fresh milk.

When I returned home with the empty can in my hand, I went as usual to see Pinness. My old teacher dragged a little table out to the garden. He was raising balloon spiders for observation in the bushes, where dozens of them hid in their leafy domiciles, ready to swoop down on the prey caught in their nets. Though Pinness was old, he could still trap a fly in flight with one hand and cast it into a web.

‘All those years your grandfather went on loving Shulamit, until she finally arrived, and all those years I thought of my dead Leah. We were made of different stuff from you. The patience of an entire people, two thousand years of it, had built up in our bodies until our blood ran hot.’

He sighed. ‘I envy you. We had our romances too. We danced shirtless in the vineyards, young men and young maidens, and made love on the threshing floors. But who among us could shout in public, “I’m screwing so-and-so’s daughter, and so-and-so’s granddaughter, and so-and-so’s wife”? Who hath sent out the wild ass free, and who hath loosed his bands?”’

‘Is he still at it?’

‘Once every few months, the scum. Afterwards I can’t sleep for a week. The first time I wanted to climb up after him and throttle him. Now I just want to know who it is. To look him in the eyes and understand.’

As I sipped my tea I put an olive in my mouth. Pinness patted me affectionately.

‘Just like your grandfather, eh? He’s a man worth modelling yourself on. Ya’akov Mirkin is one of a kind. Even here in the village there’s no one else like him. He never went to congresses or lobbied in Jerusalem or galloped off on a horse with a bandolier of bullets and a black
Keffiyeh
, Arabic scarf, on his head, but everyone looked up to him. When Mirkin
touched a fruit tree, there was an idea behind the act that we all understood. You were privileged to be raised by such a man. How is he?’

‘He’s living with her there. He spends a lot of time standing on the terrace.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Looking. Waiting.’

‘Still waiting?’

‘For Efrayim, I suppose. And Jean Valjean. Maybe for Shifris too.’

9

T
o this day I haven’t managed to transfer Grandmother’s body from the village cemetery to mine. I offered the village a fortune for it. I thought of robbing her grave. Even Pinness, who was dead set against Pioneer Home, filed a request with the Committee on my behalf and wrote in the village newsletter about it.

Fanya Liberson was furious. That evening she burst through the green gate that led to the teacher’s garden and stuck her lovely old head through the patch of light in his window.

‘Won’t you ever let her rest in peace?’ she shouted, returning home without waiting for an answer. I followed her as quietly as I could, skipping from shadow to shadow.

‘Mirkin killed her, and now that undertaker of a grandson of his is trampling on her memory. What does he want? To make his grandfather a happy man with his wife on one side of him and his Crimean whore on the other?’

I huddled outside the Liberson house, trying to make my big body smaller. It was difficult to hear the rest of their conversation. A wind was blowing, and Fanya’s lips were pressed against her husband’s wrinkled neck.

Avraham, who was five years old when his mother died, still remembers her, her funeral, and her fingers on his wrist. Yet
though the veils of orphanhood flit over his face and graze its terrible creases, he never mentions her.

‘Avraham, our first son, is now our first orphan,’ said Pinness over the open grave.

The huge cypresses in the village cemetery were tender saplings then. There were only ten graves at the time: six pioneers whose bodies or souls had given out; the old mother of Margulis the beekeeper, who arrived from Russia with a hive of choice Caucasian bees and died of happiness three days later; two children dead from the cold in their tents; and Tonya Rilov’s secret daughter, who slipped out of her cabin at the age of one year, crawled across the yard, and was trampled by a cow. ‘The poor thing didn’t die in her own bed either,’ said Pinness in one of the few cruel remarks I ever heard him make.

‘It was then,’ he added, ‘that I first understood that we had founded two settlements, the village and the cemetery, and that both would keep on growing.’

A flock of sheep was grazing nearby. The tinkle of their bells, the daubs of colour on their wool, and the whistles of the shepherds drifted toward the mourners. In the crisp, still air they were small, clear, and precise. From the village came the melancholy cries of Daniel Liberson, who, left alone at home, had gone looking for Esther and had tripped and fallen in the hayloft. Shlomo Levin wept by his sister’s grave.

Tsirkin and Liberson stood by Grandfather, their hands protectively on his shoulders, half touching, half shielding him. The Workingman’s Circle was silent. It was a spring day, and flocks of pelicans glided over the village, flying low as they screeched their way north. Fanya stood apart from her husband and his friends, cursing and crying. ‘You can go and tell that bitch that Feyge is dead,’ she whispered, her face turned toward the sky.

I tried to picture Shlomo Levin receiving the telegram from Grandfather, dropping his fountain pen, and passing out on the floor of his stationery shop.

‘No,’ he said to me when I asked him if that was how it was. ‘I just looked at the telegram and thought to myself, “The
hooligans, the hooligans, the hooligans!” That’s all I thought. Hooligans. Over and over.’

He had sat there in a chair, imagining the lash of his father’s belt on his body. ‘I was holding a fountain pen that I was fixing, and the broken well dripped ink on my trousers.’ He shut the shop, wrote a letter to his family in Russia, and took the train to Haifa. Outside the station he was spotted by Rilov, who was transporting a cart full of cement sacks and hidden shotgun parts to the village.

‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ Rilov asked suspiciously.

‘“I’m Mirkin’s brother-in-law,” I said to him.’

‘Hop aboard.’

‘What exactly happened?’ asked Levin. He sat by Rilov’s side, feeling the sinewy thigh with its metallic bulge against his own frightened body. But all Rilov said was, ‘She was ill.’ His rough hands, the low, muscular brow behind which he was knitting plans for the establishment of military communes in Transjordan, and the unintelligible language in which he talked to his two mules reminded Levin of his first days in the country. It took an hour’s silent deliberation for Rilov to decide to reveal another fact. ‘There was something wrong with her,’ he said. ‘She wasted ammunition. Twice in the last month she went outside and started shooting at birds in the sky.’

Levin’s hatred and fear of Tsirkin, Mirkin, and Liberson turned to pity when he saw my grandfather carrying Efrayim on one arm and Esther on the other with little Avraham clinging to his legs. Levin hugged his brother-in-law and cried uncontrollably for his dead little sister and his own directionless life. Everyone remembered him from Avraham’s circumcision, and Hayyim Margulis patted him on the back.

‘I have a new queen bee,’ he whispered. ‘Her name is Riva.’

Levin said nothing.

‘Why don’t you come over later for a bite of pollen, the sweet flour of spring,’ said Margulis. ‘You’ll see how much better it makes you feel.’

After the funeral Levin stepped up to Grandfather.

‘Ya’akov,’ he said bravely, ‘I’ll stay with you for the week of mourning.’

And he did, cleaning, cooking, bathing Avraham, and changing Efrayim’s and Esther’s nappies. As he hoed the bindweed that had infested Feyge’s vegetable garden, he felt for the first time since his arrival in Palestine that he was actually doing some good and that the sun wasn’t roasting him alive. The black earth of the Valley stuck to his hands, and the scent of the mignonette and wild dill that he weeded among the tomato plants made him a happy man. Fanya Liberson, who was helping out at Grandfather’s too, was impressed.

‘He’s an unusual man,’ she told her husband. ‘I know that you and your friends could never stand him, but he is a dear fellow.’

When the week was up Levin went back to the stationery shop, but he took no interest in the customers. ‘I sat there making up my mind.’ When he returned to the village a month later to visit his sister’s grave, he asked the Committee for a position. As he was a good bookkeeper with business experience, the farmers were happy to have him.