The Blue Mountain (2 page)

‘When we were already at the railway station at Makarov and the conductor blew the all-aboard, Shifris suddenly announced that he wasn’t coming with us. Finish your tomato, Baruch.’

I opened my mouth, and Grandfather slipped a slice of tomato sprinkled with rock salt into it.

‘Shifris said to us, “Comrades! To the Land of Israel we should go on foot, like pilgrims.” And with that he parted from us, shouldered his pack, waved, and disappeared in a puff of steam. He’s still trudging along on his way, the last pioneer to arrive.’

Grandfather told me about Shifris so that someone would
know who he was when he came. Long after all the others had given up or died without waiting, I went on expecting him. I would be the boy who ran to greet him when he neared the village. Each dot on the distant flank of the mountain was his approaching form. A circle of ashes by the side of a field was the campfire he had made to boil tea. Tufts of wool in a hawthorn tree were the remains of his torn puttees. Every unfamiliar footprint in the dirt was a sign he had left as he passed by.

I asked Grandfather to show me Shifris’s route on the map, the borders he had crossed clandestinely, the rivers he had forded. I was fourteen years old when Grandfather said to me, ‘That’s enough of Shifris.’

‘He really did say he would walk,’ he told me. ‘But after a few days he must have run out of steam. Or else something happened to him on the way – maybe he got sick or hurt himself or joined the Party or fell in love … who knows, my child? There’s more than one thing can nail a man down to a place.’

On one of his slips of paper, in tiny letters, I found this note: ‘The flowering, not the fruit. The way, not the distance covered.’

The books were propped against a large Philco radio that subscribers to
Field
could buy in easy instalments. Facing them were a couch and two armchairs that my uncle Avraham and his wife Rivka had moved to Grandfather’s cabin after refurnishing their house. Grandfather called this room the living room, although his guests always sat at the large table in the kitchen.

Pinness stepped inside. I recognised at once the loud voice that had taught me Bible and nature.

‘Mirkin,’ he said, ‘he’s been shouting again.’

‘Who was it this time?’ asked Grandfather.

‘I’m screwing Liberson’s granddaughter,’ said Pinness loudly and emphatically. Shutting the window apprehensively, he added, ‘Not me, whoever shouted.’

‘That’s wonderful,’ said Grandfather. ‘A most accomplished fellow. Would you care for some tea?’

I strained to hear their conversation. More than once I had
been caught eavesdropping behind open windows, a secret listener among fruit trees and bales of hay. With a practised movement I would wrest myself free of the hands gripping me and walk away with head high and shoulders squared, silent and untouchable. Later, when the injured party came to complain, Grandfather wouldn’t believe a word of it.

I heard his old feet scrape across the wooden floor, followed by the pouring of water, the tinkle of teaspoons against thin glass, and loud slurps. I had stopped being surprised long ago by the way the old people of the village could hold burning glasses in their hands and calmly swallow boiling water.

‘The nerve of him!’ said Pinness. ‘How could he shout like that? Shooting his foul mouth off in the trees!’

‘It’s just someone’s idea of a joke,’ said Grandfather.

‘But what should I do?’ groaned the old schoolteacher, who took it as his personal failure. ‘How can I show my face to the village?’

He rose and began pacing relentlessly. I could hear him cracking his knuckles in chagrin.

‘Boys will be boys,’ said Grandfather. ‘Why get so worked up about it?’

The chuckle creeping into his voice enraged Pinness even more. ‘Screaming at the top of his lungs so that the whole world can hear him!’

‘Look, Ya’akov,’ said Grandfather soothingly, ‘we live in a small place. If someone goes too far, he’ll be caught by the night watchmen and the Committee will take it up at a meeting. Why get all worked up?’

‘But I’m the teacher,’ stormed Pinness. ‘The teacher, Mirkin, the educator! It’s me they’ll blame.’

Filed away in Meshulam Tsirkin’s documentary archives was Pinness’s famous declaration at the 1923 Conference of the Movement: ‘The biological ability to bear children is no guarantee of the ability to educate them.’

‘No one’s going to blame you for some horny young ass,’ said Grandfather sharply. ‘You’ve given the village and the Movement a splendid generation of youngsters.’

‘I can picture every one of them,’ said Pinness softly. ‘They come to the first form as tender as baby rushes, like flowers that I weave into the brocade of our life.’

Pinness never spoke of ‘years’, only of ‘forms’. I smiled to myself in the darkness, knowing what would come next. Pinness liked to compare education to agriculture. When talking about his work, he was prone to expressions like ‘virgin earth’, ‘an unpruned vine’, ‘irrigation holes’. His pupils were saplings. Each form was a furrow.

‘Mirkin,’ he continued emotionally, ‘I may not be a farmer like the rest of you, but I too sow and reap. They’re my vineyard, my orchard. It only takes one rotten apple …’ He almost choked on his own despair. ‘Yea, and it brought forth wild grapes.… Screwing! The issue of horses and the flesh of asses!’

Like all his pupils, I was used to his quoting from the Bible, but I had never heard verses like these from him before. Unwittingly I moved in my bed and froze at once. The floorboards creaked beneath the weight of my body, and the two of them fell silent for a minute. At the age of fifteen I weighed close to sixteen and a half stone and could grab a large calf by the horns and wrestle it to the ground. My size and strength were marvelled at in the village, the farmers joking that Grandfather must be feeding me colostrum, the vim-giving first milk of nursing cows.

‘Not so loud,’ said Grandfather. ‘You’ll wake the child.’

The child; that’s what he called me until the day he died. ‘My child.’ Even when dark hair had sprouted all over my body. Even when my voice had changed and my shoulders had grown broad and beefy. My cousin Uri couldn’t stop laughing when our voices began to crack. I was the only boy in the village, he said, whose voice went from baritone to bass.

Pinness uttered a few sentences in Russian, the language the founding fathers switched to for angry whispers, after which I heard a metallic pop that was the sound of Grandfather opening a can of homemade olives with a screwdriver. Now he would place a full saucer of them on the table. As soon as Pinness, who had a great liking for anything hot, sour, or salty, began to devour them, his mood would lighten at once.

‘Do you remember, Mirkin, how we stepped off the boat, a bunch of yokels from Makarov, and ate black olives in that restaurant in Jaffa? And that pretty blonde girl with the blue kerchief who waved to us in the street?’

Grandfather didn’t answer. Words like ‘Do you remember …’ left him cold. Besides, I knew he couldn’t talk because he had an olive in his mouth and was sucking on it slowly as he sipped his tea. ‘Either you eat or you remember,’ he once said to me. ‘There’s only so much you can chew on at once.’

It was a habit of his to keep a cracked olive in his mouth while he drank his tea and nibbled gingerly at the sugar cube hidden in his palm, enjoying the soft, bittersweet combination. ‘Tea and olives. Russia and the Land of Israel.’

‘These olives are good,’ said Pinness, growing affable. ‘Wonderful. How few are the pleasures left us, Mirkin, how very few indeed, and how few are the things that still excite us! Can thy servant taste what I eat or what I drink? Can I hear any more the voice of singing men and singing women?’

‘You seemed excited enough when you walked in,’ Grandfather remarked.

‘What gall!’ spat Pinness. I could hear the olive stone shoot from his mouth, bounce off the table, and fly into the sink. Then there was silence, in which I knew that a new olive was slowly being crushed between Grandfather’s false teeth, releasing its subtly bitter juice.

‘And Efrayim?’ asked Pinness suddenly. ‘Have you heard anything of Efrayim?’

‘Not a word,’ replied Grandfather with predictable aloofness. ‘Nothing.’

‘It’s just you and Baruch, eh?’

‘Just me and the child.’

Just Grandfather and me.

The two of us. From the day he carried me in his arms from my parents’ house to the day I carried him in my arms to his grave in the orchard.

Just him and me.

2

M
y eyes clouded over with longing for Grandfather. I rose from the big leather armchair and wandered through the rooms of my home, the big house I bought after growing up, burying him and his friends in the orchard, becoming rich, and leaving the village. ‘Just me and the child’ – I could not get these words to disappear back into their drawer. I went out to the mowed lawn and lay down facing the shore and the booming surf.

I had bought the house and everything in it from a banker who had to leave the country in a hurry. I never knew why, just as I never knew anyone of his ilk and was never inside a bank in my life. The money I received from the families of the deceased had been stashed away in some fertiliser sacks in the cowshed, next to the bedding of old Zeitser, who slept with the cows on principle.

‘In the old days in Sejera I slept with the livestock too,’ he declared.

Zeitser’s large ears stuck out on either side of his old Russian worker’s cap. He was able to wiggle them, and sometimes, when in a good mood, he gave in to the pleas of us children and showed us how he did it. Zeitser had unshakeable principles and a platform that bent reality like a clover stem. ‘Zeitser,’ Grandfather once wrote, ‘is the only workers’ party that never split into factions, because it never had more than one member.’

Busquilla, the manager of my cemetery, Pioneer Home, brought me to my new house in the same van we used for transporting coffins from the airport and old folk’s homes, and headstones from old stone carvers in the Galilee.

It was a spacious white residence surrounded by a fragrant hedge of pittosporum. Busquilla surveyed it with a satisfied look before ringing the buzzer on the electronic gate. As soon as I told
him that the last of the pioneers was dead, that there was no room for even one more grave, and that I wanted to shut down the business and leave the village, he went and found me a new place to live. He bought it on his own, haggling with the agents and wearing down the lawyers with his poisonous good nature.

Standing there with him in front of the big gate, I realised that I had never lived in a real house in my life. My only home had been Grandfather’s wooden cabin, the likes of which the other farmers in the village had long ago turned into sheds or chopped into firewood.

I was wearing my blue work clothes. Busquilla, in a light linen suit, was carrying a sack in one hand. The banker hurried out to us, a plump, agile man propelled by flabby muscles along the polished floor tiles.

‘Ah,’ he called out. ‘It’s the undertakers.’

Busquilla said nothing. Years of ideological warfare with our village and the Movement had taught him that our cemetery was resented by whomever was not buried in it. He untied the sack and dumped the dusty banknotes on the rug, sending up a noxious cloud of ammonium sulphate. Then, stepping up to the gasping banker, he slapped him hard on the back with one hand while shaking his hand with the other.

‘Busquilla, Mordecai, director,’ he announced. ‘It’s all in cash, as agreed. Please be so kind as to count it.’

Busquilla is my right-hand man. He’s a good friend too, though he’s a generation older than me. A short, sharp, thin-haired, thin-bodied man who always gives off an agreeable smell of green soap.

While the banker gathered up the notes, Busquilla showed me around the large house, leading me over entrapping rugs, past fancy crystal and a collection of silver goblets. Sketches and portraits peered down at me in anger and astonishment from every wall. Busquilla stuck his head into a walk-in cupboard where dozens of suits were hanging, and fingered the fabrics with an appraiser’s expertise.

‘What will you do with all this?’ he asked. ‘His clothes will be small on you.’

I told him to take whatever he liked. He put on a record, flooding the white interior with the soprano screech of an opera singer. The banker rushed furiously over.

‘Can’t you wait to have your party until I leave?’ he snapped.

‘The faster you count, the faster that will be,’ smiled Busquilla. ‘It’s for your own good.’ He put an arm around the banker’s portly waist, spun him around in a dance step, and steered him gently back toward the pile of money.

Soon the lawyers arrived with the papers to sign. The banker took his luggage and made a quick getaway, and Busquilla, a drink already in his hand, went to wish him bon voyage from the terrace. Returning, he saw I looked depressed.

‘Maybe I should leave?’

‘Stay,’ I said. ‘You may as well sleep here. We’ll have breakfast together, and then you can go.’

The banker’s large bed was the first in my life that my legs did not stick out of. My body was not used to the submissive mattress, the black feel of silk perfumed with degeneracy, the redolence of fancy women who had left their prurient crinkles in the sheets. And yet the walls built in me by Pinness and Grandfather were impregnable. The calloused soles of my feet shredded the soft fabric, and the scent of leather and wood panelling left no more trace on my skin than the glitter of chrome and crystal.

It was a quarter of an hour before dawn when I fell asleep, and then only for a few minutes. Grandfather’s schedule was branded in my flesh like a tattooed clock. He always woke before me, put my breakfast on the table, gave me a quick, rough shake, and went out to work in the orchard. ‘It’s best to catch the pears before they’re wide awake,’ he explained to me.

Busquilla was still sleeping. I opened the large glass door and stepped outside. The banker’s garden was too sweet-smelling, full of pompous flowers I had never seen before. Pinness had taught us to be experts in wildflowers and field crops exclusively.