The Blue Mountain (12 page)
‘We would have taken it in our stride had he been an ordinary child, but everyone could see that your uncle did have something special about him.’
Avraham had the ability to calm a panicky animal with a single glance. During the gnat season he sometimes had to be called to the fields to treat a mule or farmer gone half out of
their minds from the ceaseless buzzing. There were also other odd things about him that kept hopes for him alive, such as his habit of wandering around at night looking for no one knew what, a five-year-old boy who overturned stacks of cans, shook out piles of old sacks, lifted curtains, stared at sleeping calves, and scared the chickens in their coops as if in search of something.
Some thought it was because he was an orphan. ‘He’s looking for his mother,’ they said. ‘Poor Feyge.’
‘And little wonder,’ said Fanya years later. Held in her husband’s embrace, ringed round by an inexhaustible reserve of Libersonian love, she had no inkling that someone was listening on the other side of the wall.
‘And little wonder,’ she said about my uncle. ‘The child was born in a house without love.’
I
t was Pesya Tsirkin, naturally, who brought the American philanthropists for a visit, thus putting her oafish stamp on my family history.
Although Grandfather never said an unkind word about her, I was an expert at decoding the slightest tremor of every line and wrinkle in his face. He loathed her. And so for that matter did her husband.
Mandolin met Pesya at some conference where she gave an impassioned speech on the subject of mutual aid funds, bobbing her large breasts in time with her visionary ardour. Tsirkin, whose strong point was never the financial aspects of pioneering, was swept off his feet by pure lust. Trapping Pesya with his mandolin strings proved no problem, and when she became pregnant they were married – yet soon it dawned on her that life in the village lacked the emotional rewards of a career in the Movement, with its sense of mission, its joys of travel, and the
polished intellects and shoes of its orators, bursars, and platform drafters.
For a while Pesya enjoyed stepping into the yard and calling ‘
Hssst, hssst
’ to the chickens, baking bread, and growing kohlrabi, Egyptian onions, and Wondermart tomatoes for home consumption. Before long, however, she found herself up to her neck in heavy soil and irritating poultry droppings. When Meshulam was two years old she took a trip to Tel Aviv, where, yielding to the exhortations of her comrades on the Central Committee, she returned to her old job.
Pesya Tsirkin quickly scaled the heights of public office and soon was in charge of budgets and bureaus herself. It did not take Mandolin many months to realise that the queasy feeling produced in him by his wife’s visits was hatred pure and simple. After Pesya went to London on Movement business, she returned to the village cloaked in exotic perfumes that made the barnyard animals sneeze and stagger. Arriving home, she kissed little Meshulam, who was playing with some baby chicks on the floor, seized her husband by the hand with a strange expression, and tried to drag him off to the bedroom. Tsirkin, whose most ingrained beliefs were offended by the scent of her, slipped from her prurient grasp and found in her suitcase still more perfume, a pair of high-heeled shoes, and a black dress. A body search also uncovered a silk slip.
‘You bought all this crap with Movement money,’ he accused her, shaking with anger.
‘Like hell I did,’ laughed Pesya, opening her arms wide. ‘I won the money in a casino I went to with Ettinger between sessions.’
The sight of her newly shaven armpits filled him with fear and indignation. Throwing the clothing and shoes into the barrel he used for burning dead chickens and poisoned mice, he doused them with the perfume to send the flames higher. That same Saturday he moved his bed out to the large mulberry tree in the yard and broke off relations with the woman who had brought such disgrace on the Movement, the village, and the Tsirkin family. Everyone knew that he slept in the yard whenever his wife came to visit, because he sat up half the night
strumming away on his mandolin. His Sabbath clothes were stained with the black and purple blotches of ripe mulberries that fell on him in his sleep. Now and then he let out a shout that could be heard all over the village, for he was one of the first victims of the stealth of Efrayim, who took to sneaking up to his bed and poking prickly ears of wheat into his nostrils.
Forty years later Pesya was awarded the Labour Prize. The real reason that Comrade Tsirkin’s whole life was ‘devoted to her society and people’, as it says on the parchment certificate hanging on the wall of Founder’s Cabin, was her husband’s unyielding abstinence. It was also the reason Meshulam remained an only child.
The guests Pesya brought were the Americans who had donated the money for buying the village lands, and who now wanted to see how they had helped make the wilderness blossom. The three Ford limousines they came in were the first American automobiles we had seen.
The wealthy Jews spent hours walking through the farmyards, smiling and taking pictures. ‘Their clothes stank of sybaritism, and their smooth skins masked the hideous secrets of wealth. But what could we do? The money was theirs.’
One of them was accompanied by an attractive young woman. ‘No one as beautiful as she had been seen in our village before. She was like the very heavens for purity, tall and striking, with grey eyes that crinkled like olives when she laughed. The spirit of gaiety lurked in the corners of her mouth.’
The visitors were shown the new refrigerator in the dairy, saw Avigdor Ya’akovi single-handedly yoke the breeding bull to a cart, and were taxied on it to the garden to pick fresh vegetables. They watched Ya’akov Mirkin graft vines onto the new grape stock they had brought him, and Rilov demonstrate the correct breathing for target shooting in the three standard positions, standing, kneeling, and lying.
It was then that Pesya announced her intention of showing them the village’s firstborn son.
Grandfather objected. ‘The child is not a display item,’ he said.
Pesya stepped up to him with a smile, bobbing her breasts to heighten her persuasiveness.
‘This isn’t a London casino,’ said Grandfather, who knew the truth behind Mandolin’s stained Sabbath clothes. ‘Keep your hands off the boy.’
Just then, though, Avraham came back from the fields on Zeitser’s back. Grandfather turned to take him home, but something in the eyes of the village’s firstborn son as they glanced at the assemblage made him freeze.
The philanthropists from America were agog at the sight of the earnest, motherless boy, whose radiant complexion brought home the full significance of the enterprise they were supporting. He smiled at them, and then, without being asked, knelt on the ground, dug a small hollow, placed a seed of corn in it, and covered it with earth. ‘This symbolic act, which expressed the meaning of our lives so well, moved everyone greatly.’ Two of the philanthropists immediately proposed bringing the boy back with them to America, where he would be sent to the best schools before returning to his homeland as an all-round Renaissance man. At this point, however, Pinness intervened to explain tactfully that a firstborn son’s virility came from contact with his native soil, taken from which ‘he will lose his strength like Samson and be like any other man’. And so the guests had to content themselves with asking the child to speak a few words to them about the Jewish people’s return to their ancestral land, the village’s ties to the earth, and so on and so forth.
Just then the young beauty approached. Seeing the firstborn son, she reached out unthinkingly to stroke his head. Avraham rose from the ground without a word and brushed the dirt from his hands and knees.
There was a sudden premonition of disaster in the air. Everyone who felt it realised at once that something terrible was about to take place.
The firstborn son turned his bold stare from the crowd of
guests to the beautiful lady and said to her:
And when a heavy dust falls from the ceiling
and the remembrance of my body strikes,
what will you say to appease the fire in your soul?
A blossom, warm and hard,
will bud in your flesh.
Your lover entrapped in the bonds of his words,
silent, at bay,
what will you say in your dream as his hand
like a creditor’s soft palm descends on your skin?
The towering gourd of love above your head
refuses to wilt.
Then you will know the scorching east winds,
the sands’ obstinate will.
Our backs we gave to the smiters,
your memory stifled and kept.
Ah, from the depths, the tenacious depths,
weeds of longing enwrap our heads.
So spoke Avraham, touching off a great uproar. ‘What did he say?’ asked the young lady in English, her perfect limbs ablaze. ‘What did he say?’ A reporter from the Movement newspaper who was travelling with the group took furious notes. Meshulam Tsirkin showed me the article he wrote: ‘The village’s first child, Avraham Mirkin, recited a poem of uncertain nature having no clear relevance to our national situation or goals.’
The comrades were in a state of shock. Fanya Liberson buried her cheek in her husband’s neck with a movement that would become second nature and murmured that the thirst for love had passed from poor Feyge’s tormented body to the child in her womb, driving him out of his mind.
‘Now you see your fruit,’ she whispered angrily. ‘It wasn’t blood and it wasn’t sweet. It was poison. Never-clotting venom. And don’t you dare tell me any jokes now.’
Pinness, who felt greatly sorry for Avraham and his father, tried to demonstrate that the child had merely ‘linked together verses from the Book of Jonah by a process of free association’,
but Rilov snapped at him to shut his mouth if he wanted to die in his own bed.
Avraham alone paid the commotion no mind. He simply looked at the beautiful woman, who began to tremble, her flesh insidiously lanced by the child’s stare. A strong oestrous smell known to every farmer cleaved the veils of her perfume, and the Dutch bull was heard to bellow dully as it charged the fence of its corral. The beautiful visitor laughed with an embarrassed stamp of her foot. Then, her hips and thighs stirring the air, she stepped up to Avraham, took a glittering coin from her purse, and waved it in front of his eyes.
‘She gave him money,’ said Grandfather to Pinness during one of their night-time talks. ‘Money! That’s what Pesya taught them to redeem land and souls with.’
The woman from abroad placed the coin in Avraham’s shirt pocket, where it lay like a written anathema, and took a step back, waiting anxiously to see what would happen.
The firstborn son’s face turned dark all at once. Two terrible furrows creased his brow from the bridge of the nose to the hairline, as though at the stroke of a pickaxe.
I
lay on a bed of jonquils, staring up at the sky. Flocks of migrating storks soared overhead, circling like tiny water insects on a clear, transparent pond. Back in the Ukraine, two storks had nested in the chimney of Grandfather’s house. ‘I knew that they visited the Land of Israel each year and came back with a bellyful of the frogs of Canaan,’ Grandfather told me. Were the grandchildren of those storks flying over me now?
Each spring and autumn Grandfather stepped out of his cabin and stared up at the storks and pelicans with his hand shading his eyes, full of the sorrow of great rivers, of vast fields of grain, of snowy steppes and forests of birch trees. ‘Here I am among the
blackberries,’ he wrote, ‘in the land of the grasshopper and the jackal, of the olive and the fig.’
I thought of Shifris. Was he still alive? Would he be able to find the paths that his comrades had long since built over? Where was he now? Killed by border guards and buried beneath snow or sand? Fallen like ashes from the sting of some electrified fence? Did he know that the swamps had already been drained and the wilderness made to bloom? That Grandfather had gone to live with Shulamit in the old age home?
Shifris would come, and I would let him have Grandfather’s bed. He would cure olives, smoke in the kitchen at night, plant olive trees, pomegranates, vines, and figs. He would be a frail old man with a battered hat on his head, a rod of an almond tree in his hand, and a backpack containing mouldy bread, a canteen, olives, cheese, a Bible, and a couple of oranges. Sometimes he walked singing quietly, sometimes piping on a reed he had cut along the way. Slowly he crossed mountains and deserts and followed rocky coastlines, his lips dry and cracked, his shoes clouted like the Gibeonites’.
‘We should make Shifris a little swamp to drain,’ said my cousin Uri. ‘And plant a bit of crabgrass so that he’ll have something left to weed. And find him an old pioneeress with white braids to gallop over him at night on the threshing floor.’ His eyes shone. He was a boy who hunted sensations, mocked memories, and cared only for love stories.
Like a small dot, Shifris would detach himself from the blue mountain and draw nearer, until he reached Grandfather’s cabin and said, ‘Go, my child. Go tell Mirkin that I’m here.’ Weary from his long journey, he would fall on Grandfather’s bed, wanting nothing but a glass of water. How light he would be, how thin and emaciated, as I carried him over the fields of the Valley to show to Grandfather!
I will go now to the spring to lie down in the thicket beside it. Coming back, I will pass through my family’s fields, the same fields in which water buffalo once grazed, green rushes prospered, and the larvae of the anopheles mosquito multiplied in the execrable waters. Before they were dried and ploughed.
Before Grandfather grew his blossoming trees in them, and Avraham pastured his cows in their meadows, and I planted them with my ornamentals, my flowers, and my dead.