The Blue Mountain (20 page)

‘She took it like a trouper,’ they said, removing their rubber gloves and washing their hands of blood and excrement. The pedigreed cow had given birth without a peep in a private corner of the cowshed, unlike the mothers of our own mixed breed, who bellowed as though being led to the slaughter, encouraging all the other cows to come and watch.

Efrayim looked at the baby calf struggling to its feet and was beside himself with excitement. The animal’s thick neck and square forehead, its stout legs and soft, bright curls, made him shiver with delight. When he knelt with his hand on its broad back and removed his mask, the calf stuck out a rough tongue, licked the charred flesh of his cheeks, and sought to nurse from his disfigured ears and nose. It still could not walk without stumbling. Its mother stood beside it, snorting in annoyance while burying the afterbirth with her hoof.

‘That was the start of an unusual friendship,’ I was told by Avraham, who was a great expert on cattle.

‘Efrayim embraced the calf,’ said Pinness, ‘and then, overcome by a sudden, embarrassing urge, lifted it as the nursing father beareth a sucking child, walked out into the yard with it, and headed for the fields.’

‘And so off went your uncle Efrayim with ninety sweet pounds on his shoulders. He had already decided to call his little Frenchman Jean Valjean.’ Grandfather undid the bib around my neck, lifted me out of my highchair, placed me on his shoulders, and began to prance around the room with me. The Charolais calf laid its warm, kinky head in the hollow of its master’s breast and grunted quietly. While Grandfather scrubbed my neck with his fingers, the maddened bleats of the cow looking for her baby sounded in the yard. Efrayim capered happily in the fields until an evening chill set in and he brought Jean Valjean back to his mother to be nursed.

The calf was the talk of the village. Two days later the British veterinarian returned for a check-up and swabbed Jean Valjean’s navel with disinfectant. He and our own vet gave Efrayim some good advice on raising him.

Every day Efrayim took Jean Valjean out for walks in the yard and orchard, and every night, after cleaning out the cowshed, he came to check that he was safe and sound and that his straw mattress was dry. Only then did he lie down blissfully in bed, his one eye glittering in the dark. Binyamin teased him, calling him ‘the Minotaur’, but Efrayim did not mind. Having never seen him before he was wounded, he said, the calf accepted him as he was.

When Jean Valjean was a month old my uncle hoisted him onto his shoulders and went out in the street for the first time since his return.

‘I’m taking him on a tour of our village,’ he announced in his splintered voice.

A few astounded glances were sent his way, but Efrayim merely croaked from underneath his mask that he was showing the calf his future home. With self-conscious smiles the villagers followed after him, petting Jean Valjean and stroking his fine limbs. Several greeted Efrayim in a friendly fashion, causing
new hope to spring in his heart. His relations with the village, he decided, were looking up – and so, when Hayyim Margulis came to ask for his help in hunting down Bulgakov, he was happy to agree.

Bulgakov was Riva Margulis’s big pet cat, which had run wild and become the most dreaded killer in the area.

‘Margulis’s cat was the only animal I ever knew who killed for pleasure rather than from hunger,’ said Pinness, who devoted a special nature lesson to him. ‘It was the bad influence of human society on him.’

Having once been a pet, he explained to us, the animal had acquired human habits and forgotten ‘the laws of the jungle’.

Bulgakov was a dazzlingly long-haired silver Persian who had jumped out of the city-bound bus that stopped every day in the village, and headed straight for the Margulises’ as if he had lived there all his life. The splendid cat stepped inside and rubbed against Riva’s calves until the two of them shut their eyes with pleasure. Riva Margulis had never seen such a beautiful creature. Bulgakov leaped onto the table, lapped up some milk, and surveyed the rows of jars there with a smile. Years later Riva still swore that he had read their labels aloud: ‘Alfalfa Honey, Wildflower Honey, Pomelo Honey.’

The guest tapped a manicured claw on the Leek Honey to let Riva know that she should open it. When he was finished licking his whiskers and had curled up in her lap, she sat dreaming of her trousseau sent in a steamer trunk from Kiev, of its thick rugs confiscated by the Committee to be traded for Dutch cows and machine guns, and of the Limoges china and Steuben glass smashed in the wheat fields, where slivers of them still gleamed every autumn when the ploughshares turned up the earth.

The Persian cat arrived at the Margulises’ exactly twenty years after the last cut-glass goblet had been shattered. ‘It was the only cat in the Valley that wouldn’t drink milk with a skin on it.’ Riva was sure that it too was a gift from her parents and called it Bulgakov in honour of a young Russian cat lover she had once met at the writers’ club in Kiev.

‘I don’t care if you smear me with a hiveful of honey,’ she told her husband. ‘This cat is mine, not the village’s. It’s not going to plough or pull carts or be milked by anyone.’

She tied wine-red ribbons around Bulgakov’s neck and put out a wooden box of fine white sand for him. At lunchtime the handsome beast ate his first meal with the family.

The next day Riva Margulis took him to the village shop with her.

‘You’re making a big mistake, Riva,’ said Fanya Liberson, who noticed the cat’s crestfallen look at the sight of the poorly stocked shelves. ‘That’s no cat for a village like this. Either he’ll suffer or we will.’

In answer Riva simply petted Bulgakov. His soft fur restored the smoothness to her blistered hands and turned her husband’s dusty hayloft into a Ukrainian manor house festooned with golden ivy.

Margulis had nothing against it. ‘Just make sure he keeps away from the hives,’ he said. ‘And he’d better not touch my Italian bees.’

Riva was a fiend for cleanliness, and Bulgakov was the only member of the Margulis household who was allowed to enter every room and sit on the antimacassars. As soon as the cat snuggled up on the sofa cover, every particle of dust disappeared and the air was filled with the subtle smell of berries in sour cream and the swish of serving girls’ legs. Bulgakov shunned the hives, never climbed trees or hunted mice in the hayloft, and stood his ground when attacked by Rilov’s dogs, studiously raising a large paw at the offender while baring his sharp claws one by one like a series of lightning bolts.

Three years passed in this fashion until, strolling through the fields one night with a lordly expression of boredom on his face, Bulgakov found himself in the thicket by the spring and soon met the wildcat, the eagle owl, and the mongoose. Although no one knew exactly what transpired there, his lifestyle underwent a drastic change. First he altered his meow to a hoarse, raucous screech; next he lost his good manners and became brusque, short-tempered, and violent. But though everyone noticed it, no
one guessed what it would lead to. As always in our village, the warning signs were ignored. Had not the villagers already seen dogs run off to howl with the jackals, farmers’ sons abscond for the city, calves elope with water buffalo? ‘To say nothing,’ added Uri, ‘of the time one of Rilov’s carrier pigeons flew away to nest in the cliffs with the wild rock doves and gave away all his military secrets.’ No one suspected for a moment, however, that such would be the fate of Bulgakov, not even when he cropped his magnificent fur to an evil crewcut, grew tufts of savage black lynx hair on his ears, and finally ran away from home, leaving an amazed Margulis and a shocked Riva behind.

Riva went to look for him, scattering fried livers, beloved cream dishes, and piles of pure kitty sand in the fields – all in vain. Sometimes she saw him flit like a shadow among the fruit trees. Once she ran after him, begging him to come home. But Bulgakov merely bared his fangs at her and hissed. An overwhelming smell of rotten meat and digestive acids seeped from his gullet. Riva went home in tears and spent the night scrubbing door handles with lemon juice and brass polish.

His lust for murder caused Bulgakov to strew the chicken coops with hundreds of slit-necked, blood-spangled birds. Like all born-again evangelicals, he observed the commandments of his new life with uncompromising zealotry. So ferocious was he that the chickens, who generally made an insane racket at the slightest danger, were struck dumb when his handsome face appeared outside the wire fences of their homes. Ravaging whole coops of young Anconas, he wreaked the greatest havoc on his ex-masters. Try as they might to trap and ambush him, the farmers met with no success. They even brought a Druze hunter from the mountain, but when the devilish beast leaped on his neck and ripped his shirt and cap, the man turned pale and went home muttering prayers.

Desperately Margulis turned to Rilov, who summoned two old Watchmen from the Galilee. And yet their riding boots, old Arab cloaks, Mauser pistols, and secret passwords did not impress the cat at all. Slippery and clever, he knew the ways of men too well
to be fooled by traps and poisoned meat. And he was as noiseless as a cloud.

‘I’m sure he has the chickens so scared that they actually open the gate for him,’ said Margulis to Grandfather and Efrayim.

Efrayim borrowed a rifle and a single cartridge from the British, waited for the sun to set, and took up a position amid the bales in Margulis’s hayloft. I can picture his good eye peering through the wisps of hay. When Bulgakov appeared he crept out of his hiding place and stalked the cat quietly from the rear, smiling to himself behind his beekeeper’s mask.

Margulis and Grandfather were hiding in the storage shed. ‘We looked out of the window and saw the beast and the hunter go by like two apparitions.’ Three green points, two low and one high, glowed in the dark. By the entrance to the brooding coop Efrayim called to the cat, ‘Hands up!’

Bulgakov froze. ‘Less from fright than from astonishment,’ Grandfather explained. The hairy tufts bristled on his ears as he spun around to see who had bested him. But when Efrayim stripped the mask from his face, the cat dropped his jaw in horror. Into his open mouth flew the single bullet, the copper nose of which Efrayim had filed almost in two beforehand. The dumdum splintered in Bulgakov’s skull, blowing his brains to wicked smithereens that went on squirming on the ground and walls.

‘Now the two of us look the same,’ said Efrayim to the mangled corpse, which was still twitching and secreting sticky poisons, and then he went back to his room.

20

S
ometimes visitors from the village drop by: a hungry soldier on his way home from his base, or the village treasurer or a crop manager whose business has brought him to the metropolis on the coast. They walk through the large house in amazement,
stepping out on the lawn to look at the female bathers on the beach. The younger ones shyly ask to borrow a swimming costume, which I don’t happen to own, while the older ones find the panorama too much for them and stare down at the ground or into the nearest hedge, seeking the reassurance of familiar boundaries and limits.

I’ve had my fill of the sea. I don’t even hear the sound of the surf any more unless I make an effort to listen. The waves too have lost their hypnotic effect on me. Close up, the sea is stripped of its intrinsic menace. Soft and lazy, it wallows fastidiously in the sun, and even in winter, when it turns grey and bitter and is pimpled by rain, there is something clownish about it. I don’t swim in it and it doesn’t scare me.

‘How are you doing?’ they ask.

‘Just fine.’

I do my best to play the host. The not baseless rumours of my wealth have got around. Perhaps they expect me to serve prime beef and lamb chops, but I still wear the same old clothes and eat what I ate in the village. I just don’t drink colostrum any more, because I’m big and strong enough as it is, exactly as Grandfather wanted me to be. At one end of the lawn I mixed eight cubic yards of soil from the village with the sand of the garden. Busquilla brought it in the black farm truck, and I grow a few tomato plants and some scallions, cucumbers, and peppers. My hens, which used to run loose, now lay their eggs in captivity because the neighbour’s children threw stones at them and I was afraid I might retaliate too savagely.

‘It’s very nice,’ say the guests, circulating through the rooms with the same careful steps they once took past the graves of Pioneer Home. Subdued and uncertain, they look for secrets and explanations.

I entertain them in the kitchen, where I make a salad, hard-boil some eggs, mash potatoes with yoghurt and fried onions, and slice a herring.

‘What’s going on in the village?’

They tell me about Rachel Levin, whom the years have not
touched; about the wife of Ya’akovi the Committee head, who started a drama society; about the arguments over who is supposed to sign for whose debts; about Margulis’s son, who defied our co-operative marketing system and created mayhem at a general meeting by opening a private roadside stand for the produce of his bees.

‘A lot of it has to do with you,’ said Uzi, Rilov’s grandson, who appeared suddenly one day, several months before he was killed in a war, as if he had quite forgotten jumping on my back and pulling my ears or his father Dani calling Efrayim nasty names. I don’t blame him for it. I know now that there are people who don’t remember like I do, and it no longer surprises me. Like Meshulam, after all, I used the memory lanes of others to train in.

‘A lot of it has to do with you,’ Uzi accused me. ‘You ruined something basic in our life.’

‘I did what Grandfather wanted,’ I answered wearily.

Uzi gave me an annoyingly shrewd smile. ‘You can tell an old pal like me the truth,’ he said. ‘Stop pretending to be so stupid. Everyone knows by now that you’re smarter than they thought and a hell of a lot smarter than you look.’

One day I opened the door to find Daniel Liberson standing there.

‘I happened to be in the neighbourhood,’ he said sullenly.