The Blue Mountain (19 page)

Greenfinches jumped on the hedgerows along the path, and a pair of falcons tumbled in the air, sporting in high-pitched spirals. A yellow cloud of goldfinches swarmed anxiously over the thistles, their thick, short beaks sounding little squeaks of surprise.

‘By their beaks ye shall know them. The goldfinch’s is short and thick, well suited for cracking seeds, and the falcon’s is curved and sharp, perfectly adapted to tearing meat.’

One morning Pinness took us to the edge of the eucalyptus woods, where the carcass of a cow had been dumped. Belly swollen, horns ploughing the earth, it had been dragged there chained to a tractor the evening before. ‘He shall be buried with the burial of an ass, drawn and cast forth beyond the gates of Jerusalem,’ quoted Pinness sadly, telling us to watch in silence. Several vultures were gathered around the dead body. I liked their familiar bald heads, fierce stares, and wrinkled throats. With their perfectly evolved beaks they disembowelled the dead cow, their featherless white necks in its gut.

Pinness told us how Darwin had studied the Galápagos Island chaffinches, ‘a small, isolated community of birds equipped by evolution with a variety of beaks adapted to different kinds of food’. By splitting up into subspecies, each of which adjusted to new diets, the chaffinches ensured their survival. From here, via parable and analogy, it was but a short step to our teacher’s exhortations on the advantages of multiculture farming. ‘The orchard and the cowshed, the poultry run and the vegetable patch: thou shalt take hold of this and withdraw not thine hand from the other.’

Sometimes I would flush a mother lark from her hiding place, and she would run ahead of me and flop around in the stubble like a shrill, lame old woman, soiling her crest in the dirt while luring me away from her nest and camouflaged eggs. Green lizards ran quickly, leaving tiny cuneiform prints. Partridges took off with a loud applause of wings, and sometimes a mongoose scurried across the path, its long,
wicked body wriggling like a snake. There were real snakes too.

‘Though it eats baby chicks and eggs, the black snake is the farmer’s friend, for it destroys the mice. Step aside and let it pass when you see it.’

The farmers who were out early in their fields knew me by my lumbering walk and the pitcher in my hand and said a friendly hello. Some even offered me a waggon ride. Carefully I crossed the wheat field of the nearby kibbutz, my muscles stiffening as a kibbutznik the age of my uncle Avraham stepped out from behind a tree with a small basket. Ages after Liberson’s abduction of Fanya, the tension was still there. Future generations would never even know what had happened. The rivers of time, the dams of memory, and clashing politics and seasons had coloured Liberson’s romantic prank in harsh, divisive hues. The bad blood between the kibbutz and the village kept growing, sending its tendrils out in all directions to fasten on trellises of hate. From time to time funds were fought over, stones were thrown, black eyes sprouted in angry faces, and shouts were fired back and forth across the wadi.

The man was alone. He approached me hesitantly with his eyes on the ground, as if expecting to find a cloven foot on me.

‘Are you going to the old folk’s home? You’re Ya’akov Mirkin’s grandson? My father used to tell me about him.’

Gently, bashfully, he held out the basket. ‘I’d appreciate your taking this to Ze’ev Ackerman, room number five. He’s a friend of your grandfather’s.’

Everyone was a friend of Grandfather’s. And I buried them all next to him. Ze’ev Ackerman, if my memory is not mistaken, is in row six, plot seventeen.

The straw basket held a cake and some enormous Japanese medlars that were as big as oranges. ‘They’re from our tree. You can eat one on your way. Only one, though.’

By 8.20 I was at the old folk’s home, wiping my feet on the lawn before putting on my sandals.

‘Mirkin’s grandson is here,’ said the old men sitting by the door as usual, desperately waiting for visitors. ‘He brings his
grandfather milk. He’s a good boy.’ They regarded me with fond glances. Some looked like Grandfather, as if they had been cast in the same mould. Others, city types, were a transparent grey, like the insect moults I collected in the fields, frail and timid like Shlomo Levin. Years of bad nutrition, ‘ideological weakness’, and ‘estrangement from nature’ had left their mark on them.

Originally the home had been built for our own old people alone, the village’s and the kibbutz’s. No sooner did they arrive than they held a general meeting at which they voted to throw the occupational therapists’ beads and knitting needles in their faces and go to work in the flower garden. With rough, palsied hands they dug up the yellow roses and blue leadwort and sowed rows of beets, peppers, cabbages, and scallions. Then, singing lustily, they drained the gold-fish pond and diverted its water for irrigation.

‘All that was missing was for one or two of them to commit suicide,’ Grandfather said.

‘No one knew what to do with us,’ Liberson told me years later, when Fanya was dead and he himself had been brought to the home, blind and irritable. ‘They weren’t prepared for ageing pioneers. The sight of us mighty visionaries and men of action reduced to arteriosclerotic rheumatics sent them all into shock.’

I entered the dining hall, where Grandfather was waiting for me, and halted in front of him. Everyone looked at him enviously. He patted my stiff head of hair happily.

‘Good morning, Shulamit,’ I said to the woman seated beside him.

Grandfather’s lady friend, a large, stooped, sickly-looking woman with white hair and reading glasses, smiled at me. I stared down at the ground.

Once when I came Grandfather was not in the dining hall. I crossed the garden to look in his window and saw Shulamit lying on the bed, her dress hiked up above her fallen stomach. Grandfather was kneeling on the rug, his bald head pecking at the flesh between her legs while she talked to him in the
same crooning, spongy alphabet that Pinness had not wanted to translate. I left the milk by their door. Later Grandfather came looking for me on the lawn. His moustache had a scary swamp smell when he kissed my cheek.

Now I put the can on the table, removed the lid, and poured Grandfather a cup of milk. ‘Straight from the cow,’ I said, proudly looking around. Shoshanna, a housemother, wiped her red hands on her apron and clapped them together.

‘That’s wonderful, Mirkin. Drink, Mirkin. Isn’t it good for you, Mirkin? There’s nothing healthier than milk.’

‘She thinks everyone over the age of sixty-five is senile,’ grumbled Grandfather, polishing off the milk. Four cups of it, one after the other. Shulamit did not like milk.

Afterwards, watched by everyone, Grandfather and I went for a walk in the garden or chatted on the terrace. I had to tell him over and over what was happening at home, what was new in the orchard and the farmyard, what was the latest in the village.

‘How’s Pinness?’

‘He heard that crank again.’

‘Who was he screwing this time?’

‘It’s always someone else.’

‘And Tsirkin?’

‘Tsirkin had a big fight with Meshulam. He wanted him to burn some weeds in the yard, but Meshulam was too busy repairing the old binding machine.’

‘That piece of junk?’

Meshulam had found the old Clayton binder next to the bullpen, its traces cracked and its wings broken, like the giant skeleton of some shattered bird. I stood up and started to mimic him. ‘You do not throw out history just because it has no spare parts.’

Grandfather laughed. ‘Meshulam will stuff his own father with his mandolin in his hand.’

When Grandfather moved to the old folk’s home, Meshulam came to ask me for all his papers, letters, and personal belongings.

‘Ya’akov Mirkin’s memoirs can throw valuable light on the situation in this country at the beginning of World War One,’ he declared.

‘He didn’t write any memoirs,’ I said.

‘Letters and notes are valuable too,’ explained Meshulam importantly.

Grandfather laughed when I told him how I had grabbed Meshulam by his belt and collar and thrown him out of the window.

‘Meshulam will cause some disaster yet,’ he said as he saw me off. ‘Don’t forget to water the orchard and help in the cowshed. You don’t have to wait for Avraham to ask you.’

After I left he would stand on the terrace for a long while, watching my figure disappear around the bend in the road. Once I waited there for half an hour and then ducked back and looked up. Grandfather was still at his post. Bent with work. Looking with longing. Waiting with vengeance. For his son Efrayim. For the blossoms in the orchard. For Shifris, the last pioneer, who would come walking slowly, making his way through sand and snow to the Land of Israel.

19

‘I
have a photo of him,’ Meshulam informed me. Sometimes he would toady up to me, trying to get into my good books as we walked up and down among the graves.

He took it from his shirt pocket. Like all the old snapshots, its borders were cut in a wavy line. Efrayim looked like a beekeeper, his face invisible behind its mask. A slender young man in wide khaki trousers and crepe shoes. Neither beauty nor horror was immortalised here. Only quiet, still visible despite the years.

‘I’ll swap it for the constitution of the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle,’ offered Meshulam.

I pushed him away. ‘Beat it before I beat you.’

I never liked Meshulam. When I was a boy he used to come to Grandfather to ask about his first years in the country.

‘So tell me, Mirkin, did you meet Frumkin in Kinneret?’

‘Yes.’

‘In the pumphouse by the Jordan?’

‘There too.’

‘And you heard him call for a strike to make Berman resign?’

‘Why make a big deal of it, Meshulam? Berman refused to let them have a horse and waggon to visit a sick friend in Tiberias, and when the friend died they were furious. He made life hard for them. Like the officials in Kfar Uriah and the other big farms.’

‘Berkin wrote in
The Young Worker
that in Kfar Uriah there were four administrators, and that he had uncovered financial irregularities.’

‘So?’

‘Here, I’ll tell you exactly what he wrote.’ Meshulam shut his eyes and quoted from memory. ‘“Kfar Uriah has no less than four administrators, and what do they do? The first, who is the head administrator, lives in Petach Tikvah and comes to visit on a mule. As for the other three, one looks after the grain fields and one is in charge of planting trees.”’

‘Excuse me, Meshulam, but I have work to do.’ Grandfather turned to go with a powerful shake of his shoulders. Meshulam ran after him to the yard.

‘But don’t you see, Mirkin? He says four administrators and then mentions one in Petach Tikvah, one in the grain fields, and one in the orchards. Where’s the fourth? What happened to him? And Bilitskin only speaks of three. I’m looking for someone to put me right.’

‘That’s what’s worrying you? The number of administrators in Kfar Uriah? Why don’t you go and ask Zeitser?’

‘You know very well that I can’t get a word out of Zeitser.’

When he was ten years old Meshulam once spent a whole day following Zeitser around, pestering him with questions until he received a swift kick in the backside. He ran crying to his father, who told him that he would get a second kick if he didn’t stop the nonsense.

None of the other founding fathers could stand Meshulam either.

‘Get out of here!’ shouted Liberson in despair. ‘How am I supposed to remember how much money Hankin wanted from Abramson to buy the land at Ein Sheikha?’

After six hours in Meshulam’s company, Liberson dropped the heavy bale of hay he was holding and wearily sat down on it. Eighty-year-old men do not like pedantic questions that point up their failures of memory.

‘You don’t have to remember,’ said Meshulam. ‘Just tell me.’

‘Twelve francs a dunam.’

‘You see, Liberson, when you want to, you remember,’ Meshulam said. ‘There’s a little problem here, though, because Abramson, in his letter to Tyomkin at the end of the war, specifically speaks of fifteen francs a dunam. What happened to the rest of the money?’

I too ran out of patience.

‘What’s it to me?’ I asked, throwing the snapshot to the ground. ‘How do I even know it’s Efrayim?’

The cow was a present from Efrayim’s friends in the British army, who had scattered all over the globe after the war. She was a pregnant, pedigreed, highly valuable Charolais heifer. Most of the money for her purchase was donated by Efrayim’s former squad leader, who had returned to his family diamond mine in Rhodesia. Two Scottish secret agents brought the money to an ex-Resistance fighter who was now a motorcycle repairman in Dijon, and he bought the cow from an old farming woman in the Charolais district and passed it on to them. From there it was led over back mountain passes to a Mediterranean port and taken to Palestine by the British navy in a grey frigate assigned to hunt down ships carrying illegal Jewish immigrants.

Efrayim put on his uniform and decorations and drove to the port in Haifa.

‘He returned in a Bedford army truck with the lame officer, Major Stoves. The cow, still green from the voyage, was standing in a crate.’

The whole village came out to the main road to see her. She was the first Charolais cow in Palestine and had brought with her, in a flat walnut case with a green felt lining, her framed certificates from the French department of agriculture.

‘We had never seen a cow like her before. She was broad and low-built, brimming with self-esteem and unadulterated genes of a purity unknown among men. When I saw her I understood for the first time why Jeremiah compares the glorious kingdom of Egypt to “a very fair heifer”.’

Next to her, said Pinness, Ya’akovi’s handsome heifer Modesty, that year’s bronze medal finalist at the Haifa agricultural exhibit, looked like ‘one of the shrivelled wine-bottles of the Gibeonites’.

‘She had a tender smell of red meat that made my daughter Esther look at her so hungrily that everyone burst out laughing.’

A month and a half later Efrayim’s heifer bore a magnificent Charolais calf. ‘Nothing like it had ever been seen in these parts.’ The birth was presided over by our animal doctor and the British district veterinarian, who was responsible for all the police dogs and horses in the area.