The Blue Mountain (21 page)

‘Come in,’ I said.

Daniel was the first visitor who did not make a detour around the Chinese carpet in the living room. He trod over it in his work boots straight to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, and peered inside.

‘Don’t you have any cold water?’

Almost apologetically I showed him the little device in the door that spewed ice cubes.

He smiled. ‘I can see there’s been progress since your grandmother sat crying in our house because she couldn’t have your uncle’s refrigerator from America.’

I could easily picture him crawling in nappies toward my
mother’s cot. He still had the same loving devotion in his face and the same murderous itch in his fingers.

He looked out of the window and took a deep breath.

‘The air is so different here,’ he said. ‘Come, Baruch, let’s take a walk on the beach.’

Daniel walked slowly, the intervals between his footprints as exact as if spaced by a ruler. I waved to the distant figure of David, the old man who rents out beach chairs.

‘So what do you do all day?’ Daniel asked.

‘Nothing special.’

‘Sometimes, on the anniversary of my father’s or my mother’s death, I visit your old place. Uri is doing a good job. He’s a good farmer. Serious. He’s changed a lot, your cousin. For the better.’

Daniel looks like neither of his parents. Eliezer Liberson had a head of curly hair until he died. Daniel is almost entirely bald, more rugged and quiet than his father.

‘Sometimes, too, I go to visit your mother’s grave on the hill.’

If that’s what he wants to talk about, I thought, let him talk. I wouldn’t stop him. I was bound and chained just like he was. The same ring of earth and memories led us both around by the nose.

‘It doesn’t upset me any more,’ he continued. ‘Today I think that I fell in love with her at the right age and that it broke off at the right age too.’

There was a sudden roar behind us. A boy and girl on a blue motorcycle were riding by the water’s edge, spraying wet sand in a flare of golden limbs and toothy tyre marks.

‘To this day, even when I have grown children with the woman I married, there are people who look at me with Esther in their eyes.’

I don’t know Daniel’s wife well. She’s a small, sturdy, hardworking woman who reminds me of a donkey. He brought her to the village, nervous and excited, from an immigrants’ settlement where he worked as an agricultural adviser. The news on her in the village is that ‘for a Romanian, she’s all right’.

‘They still remember Esther and me when we were children. Meshulam says that our love was seen as an opportunity, a prophecy straight out of Pinness’s Bible lessons. Liberson’s son and Mirkin’s daughter. And if it weren’t for my mother and your grandfather, it would have come true.’

‘How is Meshulam?’

He fumbled for words. ‘You could have been my son,’ he murmured. ‘You would have been different then.’

‘I would have been someone else,’ I said.

‘It was puppy love,’ said Daniel. ‘At the age of eight, when all the boys hate all the girls, Pinness put us next to each other in the school choir and I fell in love with her.’

‘There are more versions of what happened in our Valley than there are people it happened to,’ Meshulam once said to me.

‘When we were about eight or nine years old she made me go to the mountain with her. “There are pheasants there,” she said. “I want to catch some and pick flowers to dry.” We roamed around all day, and when the sun went down she said, “Let’s stay and sleep between the rocks.” Nothing scared her. And yet, you know, even then she made me feel I was protecting her. A nine-year-old girl …

‘We spent all night among the rocks, and it was then that she told me she could never marry me because I was too serious. Too loving and dependent. At the age of nine! All that meat made her think like a woman, even if she still looked like a little girl.’

‘What happened?’

‘Zeitser found us in the morning. The village was out looking for us all night. Rilov brought Bedouin shepherds down from the hills and horsemen from Tel Adashim, but the only one who ever managed to find lost children was Zeitser. He brought us home.’

‘I meant what happened between the two of you.’

‘What happened?’ His voice rose to a bellow. Two fishermen who came to the beach every evening turned to stare at us. ‘You want to know what happened? Are you making fun of me? You mean to tell me you don’t know?’

I didn’t answer. Comparing versions of old stories always left me disappointed.

‘She chose your father instead of me because he was such a big, solid, dumb animal that he gave her the most marvellous feeling of masculine apathy.’

‘He saved her life,’ I shouted. ‘When you and Efrayim went running for a ladder, he caught her in his arms.’

‘What?’ roared Daniel. ‘That’s what they told you? That he saved her life?’

I said nothing.

‘They were a very interesting couple, your father and mother. Very interesting. The village is full of wild stories – that I courted her with pots of roast meat, that I ran shouting through the eucalyptus woods instead of coming to her wedding, that I ploughed her name in letters a mile wide …’

‘You didn’t?’

‘Tell me,’ said Daniel, turning toward me belligerently, ‘do you think that at ploughing time, when you’re racing to get the grain sown, anyone has time to make mile-wide letters? What the hell world do you live in, I’d like to know! Do you have any idea what’s happening in the village? Do you have any idea what’s happening in the country? Do you know that the Movement is in big trouble? That the young people are leaving and everyone is up to their necks in debt? That farmers are selling their cows and tearing out their orchards? Has anyone told you that men have been getting killed in wars, or do you think that the dead soldier’s memorial gravestone is just one more fossil Pinness dug up from the earth?’

We walked on in silence. Slowly Daniel’s breathing grew calmer and the tremor left his cheeks.

‘The only one who ever helped me was your grandfather,’ he said at last. ‘I got over her the night he heard me howling like an idiot outside your cabin. He stepped outside with those bow legs of his and said, “You’ll never get her that way.” That’s when I, the son of Eliezer Liberson, Daniel Liberson the athlete, the dancer, the romantic lover, picked myself up off the ground and thought, “But that’s the only way to get her that I know of!”’

We fell silent again.

‘I dug her out of me the way you dig out a weed. I left nothing
in the ground and I burned all the pieces. She wasn’t worth a minute of my love.’

‘I don’t know much about all that love stuff,’ I murmured.

‘That night on the mountain,’ said Daniel, ‘is the only memory I cherish. We were children. It’s hard to believe, but we were little more than babies. There were wildcats around. The jackals came up to sniff our feet. She kept talking all night. I was so afraid that I kept hugging and kissing her. I could hear her talking through my mouth.’

My mother’s vocal cords had made the air vibrate around her. The nine-year-old Daniel had had no idea that from then on his life would skid downhill on the terrible slope of disillusionment.

‘What did you say?’

‘Nothing,’ I answered. ‘Forget it.’

‘I didn’t mean to tell you all this,’ Daniel said. ‘I just happened to be passing by. I know you were very close to my parents as a boy. They loved you too. Up to a point, of course. Believe me, I never meant to tell you all this.’

‘You didn’t tell me that much,’ I said. ‘I already knew most of it anyway.’

‘You always have to know better, haven’t you?’

He regarded me curiously.

‘When you were a boy, I used to watch you a lot. I’m sure you never noticed. Once Pinness asked me to come along on a class hike of yours. I never took my eyes off you. If anything happened to you, I was sure I would be blamed for it. You were a strange boy, always tagging after Pinness. You carried his chloroform bottles and butterfly nets, and you even moved your lips when he spoke.’

‘Pinness was like a second grandfather,’ I said.

‘At their wedding and afterward everyone went around feeling sorry for me, as though I were some kind of charity case. You can’t say our village has no principles. You help a comrade in distress even if he’s young and stupid. The only one who thought it was funny was that goddess of love, my mother the field nymph.’

‘You see,’ he added after a brief pause, ‘it only happened because my mother had this thing about your poor grandmother Feyge. That was the only reason.’

‘All the loves and hates and feuds in our village are like a siphon,’ he remarked as we walked back. ‘You squeeze one end and all the crap comes out the other. In the end everything evens out and quietens down. It was me who paid the price of your grandfather’s eternal love for that woman in Russia. Meshulam killed Hagit because Pesya Tsirkin wouldn’t work on the farm. And your grandmother, poor Feyge Mirkin, paid for everyone. I still remember her, even though I was only a baby when she died. I do. My parents’ only fights were over her.’

‘Before coming to the village I saw your grandmother only a few times,’ Fanya Liberson told me when I was a child, ‘and always from a distance. The first time was near Migdal. The Workingman’s Circle was camped on a hill above us, and the effect on our commune was electric. Everyone whispered and pointed. Feyge was wearing what Jewish farmhands in the Galilee wore in those days, a white blouse with red Arab shoes. You could almost see the strings tying them to her.’

Fanya smiled. ‘I never ploughed or sowed or crushed stones. My commune was full of big idealists who talked a lot about equality and sharing and made the women work in the kitchen. The night before I had burned the lentils, and I’ll never forget what I had to put up with. The men took the full plates, banged them on the table, passed them from hand to hand, and finally dumped them on the floor. I cried all night long. Among us women, Feyge Levin was a legend.’

When Fanya arrived in the village, she asked Liberson to introduce her to Feyge. ‘I walked up to her bashfully and looked her in the eyes.’ It was then that she noticed that Grandmother’s eyes went off to either side. Without believing she was doing it, Fanya laid her hands on Feyge’s temples. ‘They were cold and damp. Her forehead always felt like frost.’

Grandmother brought her eyes into focus, and the two women became best friends. While Grandmother was having three
children one after the other, Fanya had a stillbirth followed by Daniel, who was an only child.

‘You should either have married all of them or none of them,’ Fanya told Feyge. She knew that Ya’akov Mirkin’s relations with his wife were affectionate but loveless.

‘Ten years of being together had made them like three brothers and a sister,’ Fanya said whenever people swapped tales or spun theories about the Workingman’s Circle. She never forgave her husband and his two friends. From the day of Grandmother’s death she went about in a perpetual rage.

‘I saw her sitting and crying on a big black rock by the Sea of Galilee,’ Fanya told Rachel Levin. ‘It was evening, and the three of them were combing her hair. I’ll never forget that scene.’ The two old women were sitting in Rachel’s spice garden, whose etheric smells enveloped me too as I crouched in its hedges.

Daniel smiled. ‘Everyone knew you eavesdropped,’ he said. ‘Personally, I didn’t give a damn.’

We were sitting on my rooftop. ‘This is my observation post,’ I told him as I set the table.

‘I still remember your grandfather as a young man, and your grandmother, and Efrayim when he was a boy.’

‘Your grandfather was the wisest person I ever knew,’ said Daniel the next morning. ‘The wisest and the wickedest.’ He was in good spirits. Stepping out into my little garden, he picked a green pepper from a bush and ate it with relish.

‘That,’ he said, ‘was a terrific pepper. No one grows vegetables in the village any more except for Rachel Levin. We buy them in the shop like city folk. They taste that way too.’

‘I always wondered why people came from all over the world to be buried next to him,’ I said.

‘It became the fashion, I suppose. But he was certainly someone everyone looked up to. Even my father felt like a worthless so-and-so beside him. To say nothing of Tsirkin …’

‘You know,’ he added, ‘when I was a boy – and I hung around your cabin all the time, as you know – people came to him from all over to ask about their fruit trees. The whole
country knew he had found the cure for gummosis in the orange groves.’

‘I guess he was thought of as a saint,’ he added a few minutes later. ‘Mirkin underneath his palm tree. Saint Mirkin of the Green Thumb, with a halo of longing over his head.’

21

A
great love bound Efrayim and Jean Valjean. Before a few weeks had gone by, in the course of which the calf gained several pounds a day, his appearance on Efrayim’s shoulders was considered routine. Despite the burden, Efrayim felt as light and happy as if the calf were his own flesh and bone. By now ‘the fat Frenchy’, as the Charolais cow was called in the village, knew that her son would come home safely from his walks and had no qualms about Efrayim taking him. The calf too thought it a fine notion and waited for his master in the yard, skipping toward him with youthful coquetry and butting him playfully with his flanks and hard head as he begged to be taken out. According to my calculations, Jean Valjean must have weighed over twenty stone at the time. Though the calf did not seem heavy to Efrayim, his odd habit of carrying it around with him had its share of critics and opponents. No doubt there was grumbling among the livestock too, and certain villagers feared an insurrection among them.

Naturally, there were also jokers and spoilsports who poked fun at Efrayim and his lap calf. ‘Before you know it our cows and donkeys will demand similar transportation,’ wrote an anonymous contributor to the village newsletter.

Wickeder tongues wagged about ‘
les Misérables
, Jean Valjean and his master Quasimodo’. Hearing such epithets, Grandfather turned white as a ghost and stayed that way. Esther and Binyamin hoped his colour would return with the spring, but he remained as pale as milk until his dying day. Beneath that white
skin he had begun to hate with a cold and calculating passion that was already spinning threads of revenge. After a thorough investigation revealed that it was Rilov’s son Dani who had come up with the label ‘Quasimodo’, Binyamin went over to him, laid a heavy hand on his shoulder, and said, ‘You’re not safe in your own bed either, because for my part you’re kaput, got it?’