The Blue Mountain (22 page)

My unfortunate uncle, who had hoped that ‘his love for Jean Valjean would win him friends again in the village’, retired once more to the straits of his solitude. Silent and alone, as if thrusting aside unseen barriers, he strode along with the huge, magnificent calf on his back. Putting the streets of the village behind them, they tramped through the orange groves, orchards, and broad fields. Farmers avoided them when they saw them, and only the children still ran after them, begging to pet Jean Valjean.

Uncharacteristically, Grandfather went to his friends and demanded that his son be restored to society despite his disfigurement, lest he turn into a cattle-carrying madman. But Efrayim’s hideous, masked visage and unconventional ways were too much for the frightened villagers.

‘Our constitution made no provision for defaced children of charter members who went around with young bulls on their shoulders,’ said Grandfather bitterly. ‘And meanwhile Jean Valjean kept getting bigger and my poor son kept carrying him around.’

Upon reaching maturity, Jean Valjean weighed two hundred stone of ungovernable meat. The strength hidden in my uncle’s body inspired awe and trepidation. But since Jean Valjean was the only bull of his kind in the entire country, the villagers were soon lining up outside Efrayim’s door to seek a match for their heifers.

At first Efrayim turned them down indignantly. In the privacy of his thoughts, I imagine, the bull’s surging masculinity disturbed his peace. In the privacy of my body, I can understand that well. Efrayim had been without a woman for a very long time. I daresay he may have preferred it that way, although I know nothing about such things. But Jean Valjean wanted a mate. Anyone could see that his virile powers needed an outlet,
because often his pointed member crawled out of its sheath and groped in the air like a blind man’s red cane.

At about that time a letter arrived from the Charolais district of France. I asked Busquilla, who shook with laughter, to translate it. The woman farmer who had sold her cow to the motorcycle repairman from Dijon was writing to inquire ‘whether the bull has already become frisky’, adding that ‘each drop of his
crème
is worth its weight in gold’. Efrayim’s English and Scottish friends were quick to point out too that the animal was no mere symbol of the fellowship of former fighting men but a practical expression of the wish to see an ex-comrade-in-arms make a go of it.

The farmers of the village were willing to pay handsomely for the enormous bull to frisk with their cows, and eager cattle raisers began turning up from neighbouring villages too. One glimpse of Jean Valjean was enough to take their breath away with the promise stored in his great bulk.

Thus Efrayim became a man of means. Rising each morning, he curried Jean Valjean’s coat, washed his short horns and hooves until they gleamed in the sun, slapped his mighty hide, and rasped affectionately, ‘Come on, you big brute, let’s get to work.’

Jean Valjean shut his eyes, tucked in his stomach, and spread his stout legs wide, and Efrayim knelt and lifted him off the ground, gripping the huge forelegs in such a way that his horrid face was almost hidden by the panting, bright, mountainous belly of the bull. In their smooth pink sac, the two heavy testicles that were now his meal ticket bounced against his chest like exotic fruit.

By the time Jean Valjean and his master disappeared, the bull’s lusty progeny were a common sight in all the cow pens of the village. Even today, on a visit, I sometimes spot a particularly bright-coloured calf, broad-headed heifer, or stout yearling with a great curly neck. Jean Valjean’s
crème
still bubbles in our cowsheds, foaming like white cataracts of unmentionable rebuke.

Although the village children ran after my uncle and his bull
in the hope of seeing it perform, Efrayim behaved with the utmost discretion. ‘When he reached the cowshed of the heifer, he demanded that every man get out.’ Unloading his burden in a corner, he checked to see that the floor was clean and dry so that the bull would not slip and break its shank bone and stretched a curtain of jute from wall to wall before leading Jean Valjean to the cow. Outside the shed you could hear Efrayim’s soft rasp and the pounding of huge hooves, followed by the cow’s loud moan as the great weight descended on her flanks, and the heavy breathing of the ejaculating bull.

Afterwards Efrayim would lift his mask a crack, poke out his still hidden head, bashfully announce, ‘We’re finished,’ and wipe the bull’s damp groin with a special disinfectant. Within a few months he had salted away enough money to build Jean Valjean a sumptuous private barn, buy himself a radio, a gramophone, and some records, and construct a large, suspicious-looking antenna on his roof. Afternoons he spent lying in bed listening to Scottish bagpipe music or Binyamin’s records. Sometimes he had his British soldier friends over, closely watched by Rilov.

All this time Shlomo Levin continued to work on our farm. He was never anything but a rotten farmer, but his love of the soil persisted, and Grandfather was grateful to him for helping with the children and the housework when Feyge died. Now, however, Levin, reminding Grandfather that he had been ‘practically the boy’s mother’, came out against ‘Efrayim’s shenanigans’ and argued that only ordinary farm chores could help get him back to normal life. Grandfather responded bluntly.

‘Anything that makes Efrayim happy is fine with me,’ he said.

Meanwhile, Jean Valjean’s fat French mother fell ill. Having never got used to the Land of Israel, she died one day from eating castor beans. Now her huge orphan’s attachment to Efrayim grew even greater. Zeitser, who pitied the motherless bull and had a soft spot for it, as he did for anyone who stuck to one thing and did it well, got hold of Levin in the yard and told him curtly that ‘farm animals are part of our national renaissance too’.

‘If he’s strong enough to carry a bull on his back,’ retorted Levin, ‘he’s strong enough for other work. It’s not good for him to lie in his room all day long living off fornication.’

But Efrayim’s war injuries had in fact weakened him greatly. He had strength for Jean Valjean alone. Lesser burdens were too much for him. My father Binyamin, for example, could carry two fodder sacks on his back from the cart to the cowshed without even losing his breath, while Efrayim staggered under one. No one understood how he could lift a bull except Pinness, who claimed in the village newsletter that ‘the case of Efrayim and Jean Valjean is not amenable to physical or biological analysis. The phenomenon is a psychological one of friendship, willingness, ecstasy, and great hope.

‘Every man,’ wrote Pinness, ‘has a bull that he must lift. We are all flesh, seed, and a great bellow in the heart that will not rest until it is let out.’

22

O
ne night I heard Rivka talking to Avraham.

‘Are you sure that cow was really poisoned and not slaughtered by your sister for roast beef?’

I ran anxiously to Pinness’s house. His door was never locked, and his old body, sprawled on its back with arms and legs outspread in childish trust, bespoke the faith and understanding inspired in him by all things.

‘Rivka was a bad student,’ he comforted me. He didn’t even scold me for barging in and waking him. Since Grandfather’s death I had adopted Pinness in his place, and he was now even more patient with me than usual.

‘Don’t you believe all those stories,’ he said severely. ‘There are even rumours that Efrayim was driven from the village because he passed secrets to the British. Major Stoves was a good friend of his, and there are people around here – I
don’t have to mention any names – who took a dim view of that.’

At the time there appeared in the village a consultant on chicken breeding who spent longer than was advisable in the vicinity of Rilov’s yard. Several days later he was found in the eucalyptus woods with a dark, clotted red flower between his eyes and a page from the Bible pinned to his chest.

‘That’s nonsense,’ said Pinness. ‘Efrayim left because of your parents. He was very attached to them. Binyamin was like a brother to him. He loved him with all his heart.’

Others said that Efrayim ran away with a rubber woman who performed in the village with a man named Zeitouni, and still others that he had simply despaired of being able to ‘rejoin society’.

‘How long can a man go on keeping company with a bull?’ asked Grandfather, who spoke of his son’s fate with venomous anger.

‘Don’t bury me in their cemetery,’ he instructed me again before his death. ‘Those hyenas drove out my son. Bury me in my own earth.’

‘What did they want from us?’ asked Rivka. ‘No one could bear to look at him. He was a monster, and a crazy one at that. What did they want from us?’

‘I know Efrayim. He did it for revenge,’ said Major Stoves, who spent a whole day ransacking the Rilov place with his men without ever suspecting that the arms were cached in the septic tank.

Rilov kept mum.

‘He murdered my cat Bulgakov,’ said Riva Margulis.

Since her cat’s death she had made a bastion of her storage shed, stocking it with cleaning supplies, Lysol, detergents, and thousands of rags while talking constantly about the price she had paid for the Jewish people’s return to its land.

Armed with brooms and rags, all the women of the village fought a daily battle against the dust from the cart wheels. Riva, however, was an exceptional advocate of cleanliness, and after
Bulgakov’s death when the dirt drifting in through the windows stained even her purest memories, her obsession grew worse. To the three rooms in her house that were off limits she now added the bathroom, having discovered that drops of water from the shower left tiny white spots on the floor when they evaporated. ‘Tile leprosy’, she called it, sending her family to the laundry room or the cattle trough when anyone needed to wash.

The whole village saw that she was losing her sanity, but Margulis and his sons, nourished by the purest and most fragrant of all natural substances, were by nature equable and forgiving. Their lives with the bees had taught them to respect all hard workers, and they not only failed to reprimand the mad Riva but gave in to her every demand. Indeed, on the anniversary of Bulgakov’s death Margulis bought his wife an American vacuum cleaner to assuage her grief and give her something new to live for.

When Riva opened the big cardboard carton with its strong smell of still remembered luxury, her heart skipped a beat from pure ecstasy. For the rest of the evening she almost forgave her husband for putting Efrayim up to killing Bulgakov. Her whole body throbbed to the powerful motor that sucked up the dirt and left clean pathways behind it, but when she opened the machine a blissful week later, she saw that the filth was now inside. Hurt and indignant, she realised that Margulis had tricked her. Far from getting rid of dirt, the vacuum cleaner simply transferred it to another, better-concealed place. ‘Riva discovered the Law of the Conservation of Crap,’ said Uri when he heard the story.

After scrubbing the vacuum cleaner inside and out, Riva wrapped its disassembled parts in clean, soft linen, locked them in the bathroom, and went to scream at her husband in his bee shed.

‘Your machine just sweeps everything under the rug,’ she yelled. ‘I know that’s your system. It’s the way you do everything!’

One look at his wife was enough to convince Margulis that not even pure pollen could calm her.

‘Don’t come any closer,’ he said. ‘The bees might attack you.’

He himself could move among the hives without rippling the air. Through a curtain of angry worker bees prepared to defend him against all comers, he scrutinised his wife. Never before had he noticed the thick, flabby wattles that had developed on her knees from years of vigorous floor scrubbing, or the stubbiness of her fingers, which had shrunk to half their length from wielding too many rags dipped in ammonia.

‘Leave me alone, Riva,’ he said. ‘You’re not in your right mind.’

That night he went to Tonya’s, waiting outside in the dark until he saw Rilov head for his septic tank with a flashlight and a machine gun. As soon as the little trapdoor with its disguise of earth and straw shut behind him, Margulis entered the house, his dripping hands staining the doorknobs with myrrh. Extending two sweet forthright fingers to Tonya, he told her that he was agreeable.

I don’t remember Efrayim at all. Sometimes I try dredging my memory for a masked head leaning over my bed, its green eye protruding at me through the holes of a net. The mind-boggling picture of a man with a bull on his back is nowhere to be found in me either.

Nor do I remember my mother and father. I was two years old when the Mirkins were struck their double blow, the death of my parents and the disappearance of Efrayim with Jean Valjean. That’s when Grandfather took me to live with him.

Voices, mostly women’s, were heard to say in the village that an old widower was incapable of giving an infant ‘the proper home environment’, but Grandfather paid them no heed. He had raised children before, and now he simply added me to his mixture of olives, bereavement, and sugar cubes.

My loneliness and longing blur his image in my mind. Although sometimes I can conjure up a full portrait of him, pale and precise, mostly all I glimpse are scattered details that suddenly shine in a strong light, like a winter field when a sunburst pours through the clouds. A white arm resting by a glass of tea; the movement of a shoulder; a cheek and moustache
leaning over me; the thin trunks of his legs, gnarled by work and years.

But I do remember a few things clearly and completely, even from my first year with him.

One is being weighed. Grandfather made sure to weigh me every month. I was still a baby when he began enriching my diet with various seeds and Margulis’s royal bee jelly. As he dressed me each morning he gently pinched my thighs and shoulders to gauge the meat on them, happily noting my phenomenal growth. It was only years later that I understood that I was being checked against his plans for me.

The weigh-in was a ritual I loved dearly. Other babies were weighed in the village clinic, and later on, as they grew older, by the nurse in school, but I was weighed by Grandfather in the village feed shed. I remember myself in cotton shorts, proudly standing barefoot on the smooth, cool metal plate of the large scales while the powerful workers who carried the fodder sacks stood laughing around me. After adjusting the sliding weights in their grooves, Grandfather took out a battered notebook, contentedly jotted down some numbers, and patted me on the back of my neck. I shut my eyes as the grizzled skin of his palm grazed my flesh.