The Blue Mountain (17 page)
Two wedding canopies were set up between Mirkin’s fig and olive trees. Grandmother and Grandfather’s friends came from all over the country, embracing each other gaily and tramping over the pliant earth. Their fingers were arthritic from too much prying and milking, many were bald, and not a few carried reading glasses in their white shirt pockets.
‘The shoulders,’ said Eliezer Liberson, ‘the shoulders that an
entire people had leaned on were a bit stooped, but the eyes had a fiery glow.’ Leading politicians came too. ‘When the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle married off a son and a daughter in one day, even the shirkers who preferred Zionist congresses to working knew they had better appear.’
Firstborn sons from all over the country came to Mirkin’s double wedding. Posed in a group, they were a moving sight. Among them were military commanders, teachers, heads of villages and kibbutzim, inventors of agricultural machines, and philosophers – ‘but all,’ said Pinness, ‘had the same clear eyes and proud bearing’.
My uncle stood solemnly beneath the canopy in blue trousers and a white shirt, a silent, searching groom who made everyone remember that Liberson once said of him, ‘He’s like an olive stone that lies in its husk for years before opening and sprouting.’ The wedding guests scrutinised him, looking for the promise that had yet to be fulfilled. Rivka, the daughter of Tanchum Peker the saddler, stood by his side, frowning with envy at Esther’s wedding dress. Her father, who had downed quantities of schnapps, walked among the guests in shiny boots redolent of leather, reminiscing about the wild officers’ parties in his days in the Russian cavalry, the cooks and servant girls he had cornered in pantries among smoked meats and straw-cushioned bottles. Bowing his knees as though on horseback, he clucked to old steeds that he alone remembered, flushed with nostalgia and pride.
Under the second canopy Esther stood laughing. Now and then she spun around giddily, her Bavarian wedding dress flying up like a dish of white foam. Far away in the eucalyptus woods Daniel Liberson crawled among wet tree trunks, beside himself with anguish, his throat so dry from crying that all he could do was wheeze. The week before, when he had been awarded the contract to plough the village grain fields, which amounted to nearly a thousand acres, Tsirkin and Liberson had decided to launch an unprecedented last-minute offensive. Following their orders, Daniel took the D-4 and the disc harrow and ploughed the name of his beloved in a field of stubble. Half a mile high
and half a mile wide, the word ‘ESTHER’ ran outlined in rich brown earth against a background of yellow straw. But since no one whose two feet were on the ground was elevated enough to see it, the desperate love note went unnoticed by everyone except some British pilots, ‘and they couldn’t read Hebrew’.
‘And my father?’
‘Binyamin smiled at the guests but didn’t say much, because he missed his own father and mother.
‘When the ceremony and the presentations were over, a space was cleared for the two couples to dance. Tsirkin struck up the mandolin, and your father and my son Efrayim stepped into the circle and danced a cheek-to-cheek waltz. Tonya Rilov had a fit, and the whole village split its sides with laughter.’
‘And then?’
‘Then, my child, a war broke out and Efrayim went off to it.’
G
randfather sensed the approaching disaster and took Efrayim to the orchard, hoping to divert him with new projects. Most pears and apples, he explained to him, just as he did years later to me, develop on special short branches that bear annual fruit and must never be pruned.
Next to these, Grandfather showed Efrayim, are tall, upright branches that grow more quickly but are less fruitful. Although all the experts agreed that these infertile shoots should be cut back, Grandfather showed Efrayim how you could bend them outward and back on themselves like a taut bow and tie their tips to their bases with twine. The village was astounded to see how much fruit these bound branches gave. ‘He realised it during his first years in the country,’ Pinness told me admiringly. ‘Your grandfather discovered that not only men and horses but trees too can be harnessed and reined.’
Several years later, when an enthusiastic agricultural instructor appeared in the village to demonstrate the new ‘Caldwell method’ of branch bending developed in America, he was informed that we had been practising it for years without the fancy name. Moreover, Grandfather’s method was still unique in its periodic freeing of the bound branches, which repaid such thoughtfulness by increasing their yield even more.
But Efrayim did not care about trees and was so overwrought that his skin began to quiver and twitch like a horse’s hide. Every evening he went to Esther and Binyamin’s cabin, on one wall of which hung a large map with pins and flags that were carefully moved about.
Men had already signed up and disappeared from the village. The first to go were our two smiths, the Goldman brothers. Since the day the village was founded they had shod its workhorses and tempered its pickaxes and ploughshares to make them strong. ‘Like Jachin and Boaz, the two mighty pillars of the Temple, they stood over their hearth with their tongs in their left hands and their trusty hammers in their right, a red glow suffusing their chests.’
‘One day when Zeitser and I came to the smithy,’ Grandfather told me, ‘the two brothers weren’t there. The coals were cold and grey, the bellows silent, the smoke gone. Only their two big hammers were still floating in the air above the anvil.’
Next to go was Daniel Liberson, who stayed on in Europe after the war with a band of anti-Nazi avengers. Though his curt, angry letters to Esther never mentioned my father, the hatred expressed by his ardour for killing blond Germans blew like a chill wind through all his words and deeds.
At night Binyamin sat with Rilov and various strangers who arrived in the village disguised as fertiliser consultants or egg salesmen. Together they prepared arms caches and time fuses, used irrigation pipes to cast mortars, and agreed on a system of nocturnal voice signals ‘that drove the owls and crickets of the Valley crazy’.
There was worry in the air. The war was far away, but there were times at night or in the quiet hours of the autumn
afternoons when the villagers fell silent, gazing to the north and west as if they could see and hear what was happening. ‘The blood of our distant brothers was calling and crying out to us.’
Efrayim begged Grandfather for permission to join the British army, but Grandfather wouldn’t hear of it.
‘A boy of your age can make his contribution right here. You’re not going off to any war.’
‘My handsome wanderer in foreign fields,’ he wrote on a piece of paper torn from a notebook.
Efrayim went on working with his father. With a haunted expression on his thin, tense face he bound branches and kept his thoughts to himself. Pinness, who could predict the impending migrations of animals by their movements and expressions, warned Grandfather what lay ahead.
‘I can’t chain him down,’ said Grandfather.
‘Keep an eye on him,’ Pinness urged.
‘Did anyone ever manage to stop us?’ asked Grandfather. ‘Was your father glad to see you run away from home for this country?’
Over dinner he watched his son hungrily attack the vegetable salad. He looked at his strong, wirey arms and the green eyes that had lost their focus, and knew that deep down Efrayim had already spread his wings.
After the meal Efrayim jumped up from his chair and announced that he was going out to check the water taps.
‘Goodbye, Efrayim,’ said Grandfather.
‘I’ll be right back,’ Efrayim said. And he was gone.
A week later his heavy Hercules bicycle was found chained to the fence of the British army base at Sarafand. By then he himself was aboard a naval vessel bound for Scotland. Though he wasn’t seasick, his face was coated with skeins of foam. His noiseless feet were shod in stiff army boots, but even when he stamped on the vibrating iron deck, the sound was drowned out by the boom of the thrusting waves.
At night, listening to the sea pound and foam as it sprawls outside the windows of my white prison, I think about all the
sounds that never stopped, though you had to concentrate to hear them: the wind in the casuarina trees, the ticking of the sprinklers, the burble of the spring, the cows chewing their cud, the scratchy slithers beneath the cabin floor. Pinness explained to me how Efrayim could walk so silently. ‘He wasn’t actually that silent. He just knew how to make his footsteps sound like one of the world’s steady noises.’
‘He was one of the few Palestinian Jews to serve with the British commandoes,’ said Meshulam when Efrayim was already a memory that not everyone cared to believe in or carry the burden of. He began pulling papers and envelopes from an orange crate on which he had written ‘Sons Who Served’.
‘Fifty-three members of farming families signed up, among them two older men, thirty-eight boys born in the village, and thirteen girls. Four sons and two daughters of non-farming families joined too. Sixteen failed to return. I have the letters home of quite a few soldiers, but none of Efrayim’s. Your family, for some reason, refused to let Founder’s Cabin have them.’
When Meshulam said ‘your family’, he meant me. Grandfather was dead already, Yosi was in the army, and Uri was operating a tractor for an uncle of his in the Galilee, moving soil and firming sand. Avraham and Rivka were preparing to go to the Caribbean, where they had been offered the management of a large dairy farm, and the family farm was left in my hands, prospering nicely around Grandfather’s gravestone.
‘I don’t want to be buried with them,’ he told me, stating his will over and over. ‘They drove Efrayim from the village. Bury me in my own earth.’
It took more than just a little nerve, I thought, for Meshulam to demand Efrayim’s letters for his idiotic museum.
‘I’ll take my revenge where it hurts them the most,’ said Grandfather in the words he repeated like a menacing slogan during the last years of his life. ‘In the earth.’
And it was I who carried it out. The body of the old tree wizard poisoned the ground and stood the founders’ vision on its head. The graves on Mirkin’s land burned in the flesh of the village like open abscesses of mockery and chastisement. Spiders built
their thick funnels in Avraham’s modern milking stalls. Mossy lichen bruised the concrete walls, wiping out the last traces of bounty and blessing. Mud daubers constructed great colonies out of paper and mud in the chinks of the hayloft.
Neglect was everywhere, but the money kept pouring in. Sacks of it piled up in the old cowshed while my field of graves flowered. Pioneer Home made time stop like a great wedge thrust in the earth, shattering by-laws and ways of life, breaking the vegetative cycle, flouting the seasons of the year.
Two months after Efrayim’s induction his letters began to arrive. They were short and uninteresting. Sometimes I reread them. Amphibious landings under live fire. Rock climbing. A boy from New Zealand who ‘kept wanting to know about our breeds of milk cows’ drowned during an exercise in fording rivers at a camp called Achnacarry near Inverness. I turned the strange syllables around in my mouth, seeking a taste of Efrayim’s life there. Forced marches in full battle gear, a sapper’s course in Oban. A snapshot of a night on the town, Efrayim in a Scottish kilt and a funny leopard-skin hat, a hairy sceptre in one hand. A letter of thanks to Rachel Levin for teaching him the art of silent walking.
‘His Majesty’s royal commandoes don’t know the first thing about creeping up on anyone,’ he wrote. ‘They waddle like the porcupines in the rushes by our spring.’
He was caught, so I learned, poaching deer with a knife in the royal preserve at Van Kripsdale, sentenced to a week in the brig, and fined forty pounds. Later he received a Distinguished Service Cross for his part in the raid on Dieppe, when in hand-to-hand combat he wiped out a German gun crew that was inflicting casualties on Lord Lovat’s commandoes. I read these letters out loud because I’m used to oral history. ‘Dieppe,’ I say to myself. ‘Kripsdale. Lovat.’ The foreign words make the air flow in unfamiliar ways through the cavities of my mouth and throat.
Time passed. The sun rose each morning on the foxholes of the soldiers in Russia, on Shulamit in the Crimea, on Shifris somewhere along his way, until it lit up our Valley, falling on
Grandmother Feyge’s grave, on Grandfather’s straw hat, on Avraham’s cloven forehead, on my father and mother. Only then was it seen by Efrayim far to the west. Round and round it went for a whole month, until Grandfather received word that his son had been wounded in the battle of the el-Guettar Range in Tunisia.
For six long months after Efrayim’s injury not a single letter arrived from him. Grandfather was beside himself with worry. One night he set out with Zeitser to climb to the top of the blue mountain, where you could see the sea.
Like a huge wall, the mountain screened us from the city, from the sea, from all vanity and seduction. Every year the village turned its eyes toward it and studied the clouds that formed among its ridges, filling and marshalling themselves before beginning their great journey over our fields. ‘The clouds are the children of the mountain,’ Grandfather told me when I was small. We were walking in the fields, waiting for the rain, my hand shading my eyes just like his. He crumbled some soil between his fingers and gazed straight ahead at the mountain.
‘Once, when the rain clouds didn’t come, we decided to go and see what had happened to them. The entire Circle was there – Tsirkin, Liberson, Grandmother Feyge, and myself. We spent a whole day climbing to the top over rocks and thorns, and a whole night looking for the Rain Cave, until we heard the clouds muttering and grumbling. A big rock was blocking the cave and keeping them from getting out. We began to tug at it,
raz dva, raz
dva
– one two, one two – as hard as we could, pulling from one side while the clouds pushed from the other, and at last the rock rolled loose and out they burst. Tsirkin managed to hitch a ride on one of them and came down with the rain by his house.’