The Blue Mountain (13 page)

Unlike ‘that boy of Tsirkin’s’, Mirkin’s children helped their father with the farm chores. They were hard workers. Avraham had a great talent with the cows. At the age of twelve he conceived the idea of introducing artificial insemination, which was only impractical, the veterinarian explained to Grandfather, because there was no good semen available in the country. Scientifically, Avraham was often ahead of the scientists.

‘Semen could be frozen,’ he announced in the middle of lunch one day, the furrows in his forehead contracting in concentration. ‘It could be frozen and brought to the cowshed instead of bringing the cows to the bull. We could get it from the best-bred bulls abroad. Think of all the time and work it would save.’

Ever since the episode of the ‘American beauty’, however, Avraham’s ideas were received with suspicion. He was an introverted, unspontaneous child. Occasionally he would disappear for a day at a time, turning out to have been at the grave of his mother, whom he told all about himself.

Efrayim, having stealthily followed him, heard him talking to her.

‘We have a raised floor for the chickens now, so that the manure drops down below. It’s the best fertiliser there is.’

‘Why don’t you also tell her about the ice cream you’re going to make from bulls’ balls,’ his brother called out behind his back.

Avraham spun around and went for him. Efrayim, quick and agile, dodged. Noiseless as a barn owl, he skimmed over the field, his bare feet kicking up little dust clouds. Avraham ran after him, sobbing all the way to the village, a distance of three miles. Now and then he bent to pick up a stone or clod and threw it at his brother.

At night Grandfather told the children stories from his childhood. He told them how his brother Yosef, the capitalist traitor, had been kidnapped by gypsies when he was three.

‘The Czarist police found him in a sack in the Kharkov railway
station. The gypsies had wanted to make an acrobat and a thief out of him. He was only with them for four days, but we had to teach him to talk again. He had forgotten all the words he knew, crawled around on all fours, and picked pockets.’

Grandfather told them how he had built a hothouse for myrtle bushes when he was ten. ‘On the Feast of Tabernacles I sold myrtle branches to the Hasidim, every one of them ritually perfect. It was the first hothouse in Makarov. My father was very proud of me.’

‘Tell us about our mother,’ begged Avraham. Grandfather told them how Grandmother Feyge had thought of setting a male turkey on chicken eggs. The turkey was so big that it could sit on fifty eggs at a time. The problem was that it squashed all the eggs when it stood up. And so Grandmother gave it wine, and the drunk bird, its flushed wattles red as fire, sat happily smiling at the eggs and never stirred.

‘All the women in the village switched to turkeys,’ laughed Grandfather, ‘even though Liberson wrote in the newsletter that “a Hebrew poultry run isn’t a bar”.’

I thought of those days with envy. They seemed to me a sort of dream, though Yosi said they had in fact been quite awful.

‘They were three orphans and one father who had no idea how to run a farm,’ he said. ‘When everyone else was buying new double-bladed ploughs, Grandfather was busy hugging olive trees. They had no money for boots in the winter, they did all their milking by hand, and they shared their work animals with the neighbours, whom they were always quarrelling with. Today we have electric incubators, and soon we’ll be inseminating the turkeys too.’

Yosi was proud of the new breeding coop he had built for his turkeys. It was an enclosed lightproof structure covered with tarpaper, in which the young females sat waiting to get good prices for their fertilised eggs. Blindly groping for their food, they were prevented by the darkness from thinking, hoping, or wanting sex. As soon as an order came in from the National Turkey Council, we hurried to bring them to the males. They staggered out warily on feeble legs, blinking the watery, sun-split
lenses of their eyes. Five minutes in the sun was all it took to put them in heat. Kowtowing in the hot dirt with palsied wings, they summoned the males with shrill voices and the red flowers that pulsed beneath their tails.

‘Stupid randy birds,’ said Yosi. The turkey hens squatted in the middle of the yard and turned up their rumps, too much in heat to walk to the breeder. Yosi and Avraham had to kick them inside and strap canvas saddles on their backs to keep the heavy males from tearing their flesh when they mounted them.

‘Just look at that,’ Uri said to me. ‘That’s what falling in love is like. It lets in the light.’

The males squabbled near the impatient hens, pushing and shoving each other. As soon as one succeeded in doing his duty, his consort rose with smug languor, shook out her wings, and went off to her friends in a chatter of show-offy silence.

‘She’s running to tell them it was worth waiting for,’ said Uri.

‘The thought of spending two months in the dark just to be screwed by a turkey!’ sneered Yosi.

But I was thinking of three children beneath Grandfather’s sheltering wings, sitting down to a winter supper of potatoes cooked in their jackets, hard-boiled eggs, a bowl of homemade herring marinated in lemon juice and onion rings, and bright slices of radish. I was thinking of my dead mother; of her long braids and legs catching fire; and of Efrayim. To this day I sometimes whirl around suddenly, thinking he is behind me with his great Charolais bull on his shoulders, laughing at having startled me.

‘No one understood how my son Efrayim could pick up a bull,’ Grandfather told me with a smile.

No one understood and no one saw what was coming. Not even Pinness foretold the embryonic evil as it ripened. ‘An orphan growing up with his grandfather is one big barrel of stories,’ he said of me. I myself no longer know what I have heard and what I have seen myself. Was it Avraham who ran to his mother’s grave, or was it me? Did I leave the village, or did Efrayim?

The large gravestones gleam brightly in Pioneer Home. ‘Stones to stop the well of dreams with,’ Pinness called them. At night I
wander through the banker’s big house, the bull of memory heavy on my shoulders.

13

‘Y
our mother was a sentimental tomboy, a Tom Sawyer with a soul.’

Her carnivorousness, though, was more than Pinness could fathom.

‘She was a good student. She knew the poetry of Tchernichovski and Lermontov by heart. And yet halfway through a lesson she would suddenly take a piece of meat from her schoolbag and tear into it with her teeth.’

Not only the teacher but the entire village watched the children hopefully. As healthy and quick as wild asses, they worked alongside their parents. The local air could not scorch their lungs, and their bodies soaked up the sun as if made of the local chalkstone.

‘Mirkin’s three orphans did all the jobs.’ At dawn Avraham woke his brother and sister to help with the milking before going off to school. Before supper they found time to cut and load a cart of alfalfa and bring it to the yard, their pitchforks thrust into the rear of the tottering green bale on which Efrayim and my mother stood wrestling while Avraham, who practically speaking was already running the farm, taciturnly gripped the reins. The deep furrows of anger crawled like lizards up his forehead and disappeared into his bushy hair.

Shouting with merriment and anger, my wiry mother and her brother tumbled in each other’s arms. Sometimes they fell off the cart and went on fighting by the roadside while their father watched them from the branches of his orchard.

‘That girl is a greater menace to the chickens than the wildcat down by the spring,’ said Grandfather to Zeitser. ‘The way she eats meat, there soon won’t be a hen left.’

My mother began climbing trees and roofs to catch starlings. She made Daniel Liberson come along on these safaris, and the love-stricken boy followed her through the fields, watching her remove birds from her traps. Because of her the migrating quail began overflying our fields, and vegetable gardens lost their rabbits. Calves froze with fright if she patted them on the back.

Once she clambered onto the roof of the village feed shed with Efrayim to ambush doves. A wooden plank broke beneath her. She skidded, grabbed hold of the rain gutter, and was left dangling by her arms twenty feet above the concrete pavement. Efrayim tried to pull her back up but couldn’t manage.

‘Hold tight,’ he shouted. ‘I’ll run and get Daniel.’

He vanished while my mother gritted her teeth and held on to the gutter for dear life. Just then Benjamin Schnitzer, ‘that idiot worker of Rilov’s’, passed by below.

‘Benjamin!’ the girl called down through clenched jaws.

Rilov’s worker glanced up and looked down again in embarrassment, ‘because,’ as a bright-eyed Uri told me, ‘your mother was wearing a flared dress and kicking her legs.’ Benjamin had already been the butt of more than one practical joke in the village and suspected that this was another.

‘Don’t be so shy, Benjamin,’ called my mother. ‘It’s all right, you can look.’

He was standing directly beneath her, and as he glanced up again he felt his throat constrict at the splendour of her thighs, which swung like warm clappers in the bell of her dress.

‘Your father Benjamin arrived in this country in the thirties with a group of Jewish boys from Munich. He came to the village for agricultural training and was sent to work on Rilov’s farm.’

He was a short, blond, powerful young man. In the album of the village war dead my father appears standing in smartly cuffed blue work trousers and a clean white undershirt beneath Rilov’s date tree – the same tree whose fruit, according to Uri, exploded on contact with the ground. Blinking in the sun, his boyish, coarse-featured face stares out above rounded shoulders. The hands are thick and unshapely, like my own, and the arm,
wrist, and palm look like a single two-by-four. He has a big, round barrel chest.

‘You’ll be as tall as your mother and as strong as your father,’ I was always told. As I grew older, everyone was pleased to see the prophecy come true.

Benjamin held out his arms.

‘You lets go, quick,’ he said. His Hebrew was still rudimentary.

My mother hesitated.

‘
Schnell, schnell
, quick, quick,’ said Benjamin. ‘I catch.’

The farmers of our village can guess a calf’s weight at a glance, predict the winds from the colour of the moon, and tell you the nitrogen content of the soil by tasting an onion. My mother took a good look at Benjamin’s calm eyes and solid shoulders, let go, and plummeted, her dress flying over her face and her stomach soaring up into her ribs. Eyes tightly shut, she felt herself cradled in his huge hands.

Benjamin grunted from the impact. My mother was tall and not at all light, and he had to go down on his knees to absorb the shock. Her terrified body struck his chest, her bare belly panting with fright against his cheeks, so close that I can still feel the warmth of it across all the yarns and years.

‘You can let go of me now,’ she smiled. She had got her breath back, but her nails still dug frantically into his shoulders and arms. ‘You were great.’

My father was nonplussed. He had never before been so close to a female body.

‘Thank you kindly, Benjamin,’ she laughed, jumping from his arms and smoothing out her dress just as Efrayim and Daniel appeared carrying a tall fruit-picker’s ladder.

‘Hey, you German schmuck, what are you doing?’ shouted Efrayim irately. Light and skinny fifteen-year-old though he was, he was on the verge of laying into Rilov’s worker. Daniel stood there dumbstruck, pallid with envy, helplessness, and loss. His lips twitched.

‘He saved my life,’ said Esther. ‘Rilov’s stupid German saved my life.’

Once more my father heard her laugh and was brushed by a sweet breeze as my mother, Efrayim, and Daniel Liberson took off on the run around the corner.

My father was sixteen when he came to the village and went to live and work on Rilov’s farm.

‘He arrived from Germany right before the war,’ it says in the village album. ‘His entire family died in the gas chambers, and he met his death among us here. We will always remember the hardworking, thoughtful, cultured young man that he was. Who can forget him on his way to the dairy each evening, whistling symphonies and giving everyone a big hello while carrying four large milk cans on his shoulders?’

Rilov’s stupid German carried the milk cans himself because he had trouble communicating with Rilov’s mules. The four cans, weighing five and a half stone apiece, were chained to an iron yoke on his shoulders.

Rilov’s mules arrived with the British army during World War I and decided to stay on.

‘Apart from their annoying habit of cadging beer from every passer-by, they were excellent draught animals,’ said Meshulam. In a box labelled ‘Miscellanies’ he kept the protocol of the Committee meeting at which Rilov requested a beer budget for them. It was his custom to read it aloud at village celebrations.

‘“Comrade Rilov: Mules eat barley, and beer is liquid barley.

‘“Comrade Liberson: Rilov is being sophistical.

‘“Comrade Rilov: What about the turkeys who drank wine?

‘“Comrade Tsirkin: No one wasted good wine on turkeys. It’s just one of Mirkin’s stories.

‘“Comrade Rilov: After a little tipple, the mules work like the very devil.

‘“Comrade Liberson: The request is rejected. We will not introduce alcohol into our work life.

‘“Comrade Rilov: The Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle put away gallons of vodka.

‘“Comrade Liberson: We thank Comrade Rilov for the comparison, but there were no mules in the Workingman’s Circle, only jackasses.

‘“Comrade Rilov: I’ll brew my own beer, then.

‘“Comrade Tsirkin: We did not come to the Land of Israel to treat our animals to champagne breakfasts.”’

The audience would laugh and applaud, but everyone knew that Rilov had planted two rows of hops and that his mules could plough twice as much in a day as any other team. To this day the villagers remember the great steaming puddles they left behind. And yet even Zeitser, who was an expert on both mules and barley, declared that he was ‘dead set against such decadence’.