The Blue Mountain (25 page)

At first Zeitouni made a living from petty theft and ordinary
miracles of the kind known to him from his Hasidic life. He sold brass amulets to childless women, cured the pox by numerology, set piles of wet wood on fire with cunning incantations, and made rain by invoking the Tetragrammaton. But though such deeds aroused fervent hopes in various places up and down the Land of Israel, Zeitouni’s pitiful wonders inspired only scorn and compassion in the Valley. ‘We saw enough of that nonsense in the Hasidic courts of the Ukraine,’ declared Eliezer Liberson to the nods of the other founding fathers.

At the end of his first appearance, which took place the year the village was founded, Zeitouni was received with less than overwhelming applause. When the troupe’s performance was over he was approached by Mandolin Tsirkin, a merry young descendant of Hasidic rabbis himself on his mother’s side and of leading Bolsheviks on his father’s. Brandishing his hoe, Tsirkin proceeded to dig a deep ditch. The deeper he dug, the louder the earth growled, until finally, when the hoe struck the crust of the pent-up swamp, sharp blades of rushes popped up in a loathsome cloud of mosquitoes and lanced Zeitouni’s delicate skin. Muscular leeches shinnied up his skinny calves and hung on there, while pale worms sought to drag him down into the depths. He stood screaming every prayer he knew until Rilov forced him to sing the old Valley favourite ‘Friend of the Frog’ and whisked him to safety with the tip of his whip.

‘Sleight-of-hand and silly tricks, how low can you get,’ commented Pinness. ‘Here today and gone tomorrow. He’s one big non-productive vagabondish bluff.’

Efrayim had spent such a quiet week by my parents’ fresh graves on the hilltop that neither Feyge, Esther, Binyamin, nor any of the other dead noticed he was there. He did not even speak when Jean Valjean placidly cropped the juicy grass growing between the graves and lapped up the flowers on the gravestones with his long tongue. He drank from the cemetery sprinkler, ate the fruit of the big jujube tree on the next hill, and roasted partridges who never knew if what hit them was a wildcat, hawk, or polecat. At
night he watched the Little Owl bow and scrape on the cemetery fence, regarding him with phosphorescent golden eyes.

On the seventh day, as my uncle rose to go home, Zeitouni’s entourage slipped out of the shadows of the eucalyptus woods, crossed the track formerly used by the British ack-ack guns, and pitched camp by the spring. It wasn’t long before small fires crackled beneath iron tureens and good smells of roast meat and potage rose in wisps of smoke that drifted up Efrayim’s mangled nostrils.

The wandering players ate their meal while chatting in loud tones that carried through the clear, translucent air. Among them was a thin, top-hatted Assyrian magician who was also the bear trainer, an Arab fortune-teller whose enormous buttocks thumped together as she walked to the tinkle of the coins in her brassiere, and a strong man who had split the logs for the fire between his forefinger and thumb. Drawing the curtain on the caravan, Zeitouni took from the rear a small wooden box the size of a fruit crate, out of which wiggled a double-jointed rubber woman who snaked softly like an adder on the ground. Through the shimmering heat waves Efrayim’s sharp eye saw her brown-grey skin glitter as her boneless body, freed from its bonds, coiled and slithered with soft susurrations.

According to Uri, Efrayim had seen such a woman once before, during the war, in a port city of Algeria. Lowering themselves by ropes from the roof and scaling the walls like spiders, his commando unit had just captured the Foreign Legion fortress commanding the harbour. After tossing grenades through all the windows, they set out to clear the city of snipers.

Someone opened fire on them from one of the houses. The men stormed inside, shot the sniper, and found themselves surrounded by frightened girls dressed in see-through fabric and coughing from the dust of bullet holes and smashed powder jars. When the smoke of battle had cleared, the whores, convinced the soldiers were American, asked for chewing gum. Captain Stoves, Efrayim’s platoon commander, borrowed a lipstick from one of them and stepped outside. As he was scrawling ‘Off Limits For
All Ranks’ on the front door, he was shot in the left knee and forced to drag himself back inside.

Though the girls wore heavy silk veils over their faces, Uri related excitedly, their nipples could gauge the width of each commando’s shoulders through their lace clothes. Pouring spicy perfumes on Captain Stoves’s wound, they dressed it and laid him down on a soft divan to watch their act. Its principals were two tall Senegalese whose tribal morés allowed them to copulate only standing up, in such a manner that the male partner bumped his head against the arched alabaster ceiling upon climax; a young Hungarian with a velvet-lined oral cavity and fleshy flower petals fluttering in the depths of her throat; and an Anatolian shepherdess whose armpits, perfumed with tincture of nasturtium buds, sprouted long braids festooned with coloured ribbons, while her pubic hair – as could be seen by anyone giving it a gentle tug to make sure it wasn’t a wig – fell in a dense, curly curtain from her navel to her knees. There was also a Communist from Cracow, a Jewess with thin eyebrows who demanded absolute silence in her boudoir so that she could concentrate on speaking from between her legs. ‘Not that Efrayim understood a word, because he knew no Yiddish,’ Uri rhapsodised. Each time he told the story, the marvels of the prostitutes grew greater.

They did their best to entertain the platoon, and ‘Efrayim learned in a night whatever our veterinarian’s wife still hadn’t taught him.’ Coloured fountains shot up merrily from the establishment’s bidets, and trained pornithological jackdaws cawed in all the languages they knew to arouse the young lads and ladies. One bright talent performed the dance of the rubber woman, which ended with her applauding herself by clapping the soles of her feet behind her back. Zeitouni’s rubber woman, Uri explained, reminded Efrayim of the little silver bells on the toes of this Algerian harlot, which had gone on tinkling in his ears when her dance was done, in a purple-canopied bed on the building’s second storey.

Pinness saw them setting up camp by the spring and didn’t know what to do. Normally one spoke to Rilov in such cases, but Pinness and Rilov weren’t on speaking terms. In the end he
ran to tell Margulis. Margulis told Tonya, who hurried outside and knocked on the iron door of the arms cache.

She was greeted by a flashlight and the twin barrels of a shotgun.

‘What do you want?’ demanded Rilov, grabbing his bullwhip, jumping on his horse, and galloping off to the fields as soon as he was told that Zeitouni had arrived.

Like all the founding fathers, Rilov knew Zeitouni and didn’t like him.

‘Care for a bite?’ asked Zeitouni, reaching for a ladle and removing the cover from a pot as Rilov rode up.

‘What do you want here, Zeitouni?’ snapped Rilov, rearing his horse.

‘We’ll have something to eat, put on a show, and be on our way.’

‘You’ll have nothing to eat, put on no show, and be on your way!’ Rilov corrected him, adding his usual threat about out-of-bed deaths.

Zeitouni smiled. ‘This is our livelihood,’ he said in a syrupy voice. ‘And it’s all the same to me where I die.’

‘You’re not dealing with just anyone!’ Rilov threatened him. ‘I’m Committee!’

Zeitouni, however, was made of sterner stuff than train engineers and argued unperturbedly back. Rilov’s first thought was to call Mandolin Tsirkin to swamp the circus owner again. Despite appearances to the contrary, he was by no means an extremist and ‘made do with reaching for his whip, which lay folded in his saddlebag’.

Just as the strong man, reading Rilov’s mind, was about to desert the rock he had been sitting on and join the fray, men and women began arriving from the village in animated conversation, eager to have their minds taken off the oppressive atmosphere of mourning that had lain over them for a week. While Pinness ran after them, stumbling over the uneven ground as he shouted at them to come back, Zeitouni signalled his troupe to begin and shinnied up a large palm tree to direct it.

‘But why did it matter to you?’ I asked Pinness.

He still remembered all the pros and cons from the day of Efrayim’s disappearance. ‘Look here, Baruch,’ he said, calm and affable, ‘apart from the fact that we had just buried your parents, there were a few matters of principle involved. Men and woman seeking to strike roots in the earth after two thousand years of alienation from it didn’t need to see a Jewish tightrope act; that fortune-teller might have foretold a future that didn’t square with our own vision; and the fraudulence of the magician could have misled our youth into looking for easy solutions to our problems – solutions whose whiff of opportunism would only have heightened the doubts that were already undermining our resolve.’

His voice dropped to the Russian whisper. ‘Besides which, we could never have allowed that queen of the cesspool – that rubber woman, that human chamber pot – to display her lewd obscenities. Who could have doubted for a moment that her unmentionable bumps and grinds would have a bad effect on our young farmers? Yea, for a whore is a deep ditch, and a strange woman is a narrow pit.’

We were sitting on the wooden bench by Grandfather’s grave. Pioneer Home had already overrun all of Grandfather’s land. Avraham and Rivka were abroad, Yosi was a career officer rising rapidly in the army, and Uri was driving tractors for his uncle in the Galilee.

The money piled up in the cowshed, and a good smell of flowers and well-nourished earth hung in the air. A few visitors circulated among the large gravestones, pleasantly crunching the gravel under their shoes: relatives of the deceased, high- school students writing sentimental essays, and hefty female youth group leaders waddling around inhaling the fragrance of the dappled shadows. A silvery shadow herself through the glimmering wings of the bees that swarmed about her, Tonya Rilov sat in her usual place on Margulis’s grave. ‘She’s his true gravestone,’ responded Uri with surprising pathos when I wrote and told him how old Tonya sat sucking and licking her fingers without cease on the grave of her beloved.

Busquilla strolled up and down the paths with two young
Americans, the sons of a cosmetics manufacturer from New York by the name of Abe Cederkin, a one-time member of the Jordan commune who had sent them to pick out his grave site. They were in a state of high emotion.

‘Wonderful,’ they kept saying. ‘Marvellous.’

Busquilla thanked them for their compliments.

‘Our father worked in Baron de Rothschild’s winery for three weeks before his mother took sick and he had to leave Palestine,’ they told Busquilla.

‘A good pioneer had to think of his mama too,’ Busquilla beamed. He showed them a few available sites on a map of the cemetery. ‘The price varies according to the distance from Ya’akov Mirkin, may his memory sustain us,’ he explained.

‘Our father worked with Mirkin for four days in Petach Tikvah,’ said the two.

‘All Jews are brothers,’ replied Busquilla. ‘Who didn’t work with Mirkin at one time or another?’

‘Our father wants to know how Balalaika Tsirkin is doing,’ said the older son.

‘Mandolin,’ Busquilla corrected him. ‘Mandolin Tsirkin. Row five, plot seven, beneath that big olive over there. He was Mirkin’s best friend.’

‘So was our father,’ said the American.

‘We don’t give discounts,’ Busquilla declared. ‘All that matters is that your father, may he live to a ripe old age, belonged to the Second Aliyah.’

‘Naturally.’

‘You’ll give us a deposit now to reserve the place for you. The balance will be paid upon delivery. Of course, there’s no rush. This way to the office, please.’

Pinness watched Busquilla’s sales pitch with interest, then grunted and turned his back. He was a very old man. His eyesight was poor, and his cheeks and tongue moved incessantly, as if chewing an endless bowl of pabulum. He had put on a lot of weight too.

‘Yea, I’m an old man and heavy,’ he said of himself.

‘In the end Zeitouni backed down,’ he told me. ‘He agreed
that only the bear and the strong man would perform.’

The show was subdued, professional, and rather disappointing.

‘It’s true that the bear could do arithmetic,’ said Uri, who liked to embellish the story of Zeitouni, ‘but any seven-year-old could have done as well.’

The strong man, on the other hand, aroused initial interest by braiding some thick nails together and smashing several bricks against his forehead. The farmers regarded him with curiosity, as if appraising a valuable work animal. Their excitement grew as he began to flex and ripple his muscles, which looked like large rats scrambling beneath his skin from his sloping shoulders to the two babyish hollows in the small of his back.

Just as he let out a mighty roar, however, all flushed and quivering with the pleasurable exertion of lifting his ‘Apollo Weights’, a pair of train wheels joined by their heavy axle, Efrayim came tripping down from my parents’ graves to see the show with Jean Valjean on his back, a ton and a half of horns, hooves,
crème
, and meat.

The villagers grinned. The strong man stared at Efrayim and the bull as if delirious, began to sway dangerously, dropped his dumb-bells, and tumbled to the ground. Efrayim’s green eye peered at him through the screen of his beekeeper’s mask.

‘That’s fabulous,’ shouted Zeitouni, hurrying over to Efrayim. ‘Fantastic! And I love your hat too.’ According to Pinness, he was quite out of breath ‘from avarice and the prospect of settling old scores’.

Efrayim stepped aside with a yawning Jean Valjean on his shoulders to watch the mangy bear jump through a flaming hoop, whimpering with pain.

‘How much do you want to appear?’ asked Zeitouni.

A mutter of protest ran through the crowd. Efrayim turned himself and the bull around to face it.

‘For them it’s on the house,’ he said, stripping off his mask.

There was not a peep from the audience.

‘Good afternoon, folks,’ Efrayim said.

‘We all stared at the ground in shame and horror.’