The Blue Mountain (11 page)
Levin sold his share in the stationery business, was given a cabin and a plot of land, and began managing the village co-op while continuing to help Grandfather.
‘Whenever he had a free moment, Shlomo came over. He bathed the children, made them supper, and brought them little presents.’
When he tried his hand at farm work, however, he ran up against Zeitser. The two couldn’t abide each other from the start. Though Zeitser did not actively oppose Levin’s presence, he never made any effort to help him. ‘He looked right through me as if I wasn’t there.’
Levin had a delicate constitution, and when he tried to join the threshing crew that summer he breathed chaff into his lungs and went around coughing for years. From then on he just worked in the yard. ‘They gave him all the women’s jobs,’ said my cousin Yosi when we were discussing the family one day. Levin fed the chickens, collected eggs, shook out and folded the empty fodder sacks, and washed the milk cans. He also concocted excellent jam
from Grandfather’s fruit, and gradually they became friends. His senses, which had become as sharp as a rabbit’s from years of timidity and failure, told him that Grandfather no longer felt the same about his two old friends. It gladdened him to see that Grandfather preferred his own quiet company to postmortem arguments with Mandolin Tsirkin and Eliezer Liberson.
‘Your grandfather, who was guilt-stricken after his wife’s death, developed a liking for his brother-in-law, whose good humour and tactfulness he appreciated. We weren’t living in the old days any more. We had the ground beneath our feet, each man under his vine. We knew what home and family were. We danced less. We sang less. We hated less.’
On winter evenings the dead woman’s husband and brother sat playing draughts. Zeitser stood behind Grandfather, kibitzing into his ear. ‘It didn’t help, though,’ Grandfather told me. ‘I always lost. It helped Levin to feel at home.’
Grandfather taught him grafting cuts, proper pruning, and the right way to probe an infected tree for the most feared pest of all, the tiger moth, which had decimated whole orchards of apples throughout the Valley. The trees, however, shrank from Levin’s touch. When he notched the bark of a Santa Rosa plum tree, it lost all its leaves overnight.
‘We have to find him a wife,’ said the villagers, mentally listing all the widows and unmarried pioneeresses they knew of.
But Levin surprised them all. After a secret correspondence with some matchmakers, he drove off one day to Tiberias in the cart of the itinerant barber who cut the Valley’s hair, and returned with Rachel, a Yemenite many years younger than himself. She had a great many bracelets and teeth, and hundreds of relatives who came on donkeys for the wedding celebration and camped out in the fields in tents made of reed mats. Rachel spoke with an incomprehensible accent and walked with inaudible steps, but the most wondrous thing about her was her habit of roasting grasshoppers on a sheet of red-hot tin and eating their big, crispy bodies. Levin couldn’t take his eyes off her and blessed his lucky stars for shining on him at last, for the first time since his arrival in the country.
‘Rachel,’ he said, ‘is my revenge on the locusts whose wings darkened my blue sky.’
After Levin’s death Rachel came to me and said, ‘I know he would have wanted to be buried in your cemetery. He was a bit of a pioneer himself. He came with the Second Aliyah. So do it, even if it means that I won’t be buried next to him.’
Efrayim, my vanished uncle, was five years old when Levin married Rachel. He was fascinated by her many bangles, her quiet brown face, and her noiseless walk. The night of her wedding he clung to his new aunt’s legs and refused to let her go home despite the laughter of the village. When he grew older Rachel taught him to bake bread on a hot tin, to pray to God, and to walk as silently as a cat on sand, an art that was to give more than one farmer a fright and cause the premature death of many a German and Italian soldier.
Efrayim and his Charolais bull Jean Valjean disappeared from home when I was two. Although I don’t remember him, I still envy him his silent walk. My own big bulk always made so much noise that time and again I was caught skulking outside people’s houses as I eavesdropped. Slowly, impaled on the pitchforks of their angry glances, I would rise and walk away without a word. And yet no one ever did a thing to me. I was a parentless boy, ‘Mirkin’s orphan’, Grandfather’s child.
‘Take a deep breath, raise your knee high, let your breath out, and bring your foot down flat,’ Rachel said to Efrayim. They were walking over autumn thistles, which are the noisiest thing you can step on. By the time he was eight my uncle could cross a corn field or creep through a bed of thorns without a sound. He had also begun to speak in thick Yemenite gutturals, which Pinness made great efforts to eradicate.
My mother Esther was a baby then. Fanya Liberson and Shlomo Levin helped Grandfather raise her. Zeitser imitated birds and animals for her, Pinness read her Tolstoy’s ‘Fi-Li-Pok’, in Russian, and Tsirkin played her lullabies. Even Rilov entertained her by cracking his famous bullwhip, which exploded
sharply in the air. So deftly did he wield it that he could pick an apple by severing its stem with his quivering lash.
‘You’re scaring the trees, go back to your septic tank!’ Grandfather would shout at him. But he permitted him to amuse his daughter.
Esther and Daniel grew up. By now Esther too was aware of Daniel’s love for her. Lit by the glow of his eyes, smothered by his kisses and caresses, she never took her hand from his. Grandfather, Liberson, and Fanya basked in the sight of their two children spending long days together, rambling through the fields or chasing young chickens in the yard.
‘Who are you going to marry?’ Daniel would be asked. Approaching Esther, he would put an arm around her waist and lay his head on her shoulder.
But when Liberson began to joke about an engagement party and a bride-price, Grandfather responded with a curt, wooden silence. Fanya proved an unexpected ally.
‘You’re always trying to decide people’s lives for them,’ she said.
When they went out to do the autumn ploughing and sowing, they took the children with them to the fields. Avraham was already able to hitch the mules to the cart, onto which they loaded the plough, the seed sacks, and enough food and water for themselves and the animals. Rather than return home for lunch, they sat eating under the cart with several families from the fields nearby. Esther and Daniel played in its shade and embraced on the ground, and were allowed to sit on the seed box during sowing as they grew older. My mother was quicker and wilder than Daniel, who was talked into some mad prank by her more than once. One day they were pulled half dead from the cows’ drinking trough, into which they had fallen while playing, their hair green and sticky from algae and spittle. Another time they disappeared for half a day, only to be found crying on top of the newly built water tower.
‘There was just one real problem with your mother – she was a total carnivore.’ When she was six months old, her mother Feyge threw her a chicken bone to suck on because she was teething.
From then on Esther was mad about the taste of meat and never wanted to eat anything else.
Grandmother Feyge left behind a little orphan who would not touch fruit, cheese, or eggs. Only meat. Three times a day.
When Esther was two and a half, Levin once left a plate of raw chopped meat and parsley on the sink. ‘Your mother spooned it all up and was so angry when it was gone that she smashed the dish. All Sonya the nurse’s theories about proper vitamins, healthy minerals, and the link between meat diets and bloodlust came to grief in the case of that child, who grew up to be a tall, beautiful girl. She shot up like a blood-watered tomato, with marvellous skin, a hearty laugh, and a wonderful temperament.’
E
ven before deciding to banish Tonya, Margulis the beekeeper knew that something was wrong. Her voice and smell had changed, her skin had lost its smoothness, and her speech had grown brusque. Most nights she disappeared, and when she stayed home she no longer talked in her sleep.
Margulis had a kind heart. Witch-hunts and investigations were not his style. But when he found a bundle of foul-smelling dynamite fingers in a cask of his beeswax, he quietly showed Tonya out.
‘What a difference between my fingers and his!’ he said sadly.
For a while he lived in gloomy solitude, busying himself with apiarian innovations. Margulis was the only beekeeper in the country to pasture his bees in the fields, where he trained them to land on specific flowers. This technique, which he had learned from the writings of the Russian beekeeper Khlimenko, who was a great partisan of Michurin, enabled him to produce new flavours of honey while pollinating only those plants he wished to. And yet while adopting the Communists’ methods,
he rejected the theory behind them, to wit, the claim that the acquired knowledge of insects, like the traits of grafted fruit trees and the beliefs of revolutionaries, could be passed on genetically, thus making possible the propagation of new breeds of bees that would be attracted by some flowers and not others.
‘Red ones, obviously,’ sneered Grandfather.
‘They’re wrong,’ said Margulis. ‘How can anything learned by a worker bee be passed on genetically? It’s the queen bee that reproduces, and since she never leaves the hive, she never learns a thing.’
Grandfather was thrilled to find out from Margulis that each generation of worker bees needed to be re-educated. It was a bad day for Michurin in the Valley.
‘What did Lenin know about bees?’ he scoffed. ‘Since when do Communists model themselves on monarchical societies?’
The two pioneers sat on the ground, their laughter breezing past young pear trees and tickling the funny bones of bees wallowing in the innards of flowers.
‘In their admiration for the worker bees, the Stakhanovites of the hive,’ said Margulis, ‘the Communists completely forgot that it’s the proletariat’s mission to depose the Czarina and make a revolution.’
‘Once,’ Grandfather told me, ‘Hayyim Margulis led his winged proletariat all the way to the railway tracks to show them the wild orchids and purple clover growing along the embankments.’
As the train crawled by, Margulis caught sight of Riva Beilin’s profile through the window. Followed by a great cloud of bees, he jumped onto the train, still holding an earthenware beehive. The horrified passengers moved away from him, vacating the place beside Riva.
‘There’s nothing to be afraid of,’ he told her. ‘They don’t bite.’
Riva Beilin came from a very rich family in Kiev. Dressed in expensive clothing that aroused the ridicule of her astonished comrades, she was grudgingly seen off to Palestine by her parents, who were sugar manufacturers and grain merchants. Now, as she looked suspiciously at Margulis, whose boots were covered with
mud, he dipped a bare, practised hand into his hive, withdrew a honey-drenched finger, and extended it toward her mouth.
Though Riva was dumbfounded, the blue innocence of Margulis’s eyes overcame her objections. Hesitantly gripping his wrist, she licked the honey off his finger. At once her eyes lit up and a smile spread over her lips. It was her first taste of Margulis’s fingers and of the wildflower honey of the Valley. Sweetly and merrily, Margulis jumped out to rejoin his bees, but in the months that followed he travelled by train twice a week to meet his new love.
Every Saturday Margulis brought Grandfather a mysterious jar in which he had prepared a special concoction for the firstborn son of the village. Avraham’s development was followed with patient expectancy by everyone. His height, weight, first words, and clever sayings were regularly published in the village newsletter. He was hugged and petted by all hands. The farmers brought him fresh vegetables and milk from their best cows, and their wives sewed clothes for him, but Grandfather could not be made to understand that his first son was communal property.
‘It started when Feyge was still alive. Neighbours would arrive with visitors at ten o’clock at night to see the first child of the village. They insisted that Mirkin wake him up.’
Meshulam read me ‘an original document’ about Zakkai Ackerman, the first child born on the neighbouring kibbutz. ‘He was considered a public possession. Everyone felt free to wake him up and bring him to the dining hall, even in the middle of the night. More than one long winter evening was spent by the kibbutzniks sitting around tables admiring the infant.’
‘Leave the boy alone,’ Grandfather scolded the stream of curiosity-seekers who came looking for Avraham, lifting the canvas tent flap at all hours and even crawling inside to see if there was any truth to the rumours that the baby shone in the dark.
Grandfather was incensed. ‘We don’t live in the old days any more,’ he exclaimed, and taking Avraham, a shepherd’s club, and a mosquito net, he went off to sleep in the thicket by the
spring with a cry of ‘The child isn’t yours!’ No one dared follow him. The area around the spring had once been inhabited by German settlers, every one of whom died of malaria, and the reedy death shrieks of their blond children could still be heard there, haunting the rushes and elecampane. This put an end to the harassment, though whoever looked southward from the watchtower that night saw a golden glimmer beaming through the dark patches of the blackberry bushes like the light of some great firefly. A few years later Grandmother died, and no one dared bother the orphan any more. Avraham’s only memory of that night by the spring was a lifelong allergy to jonquils and swamp flowers.
And yet inwardly, there was no one who didn’t worry and brood about him. Zakkai Ackerman, the firstborn son of the kibbutz across the wadi, had already raised a row of cucumbers that averaged eighteen inches and planted a medlar tree whose fruit was the size of a Grand Alexander apple. The first child of Kfar Avishai had made his debut at a Movement conference with ‘an astounding oration’ that unerringly prophesied the factional split in the Workers’ Brigade, ‘though he was only three and a half years old’. The first child of Bet Eliyahu was all of six when he began investigating the coccidiosis infection then ravaging the chicken coops, and soon after he was asked to join Professor Adler’s research team, which had already developed a remedy for the epidemic of miscarriages introduced into our herds in the late 1920s by imported Dutch cows, and had received a decoration from the British High Commissioner and a parchment certificate from the Movement. Avraham Mirkin alone was a late bloomer who kept the village in suspense – or, to put it more bluntly, disappointed it.