The Blue Mountain (3 page)
‘Dahlias and freesias are bourgeois plants,’ he told us. ‘Our ornamentals are the jonquil and the burnet, our gardens the vineyard and the clover patch.’
‘That Burbank of yours,’ he jeered at Grandfather, ‘wasted good time growing chrysanthemums.’
Looking about me, I saw the sea for the first time in my life. It had always hidden behind the mountain, though I knew of it from Grandfather’s stories, because its waves had borne him and my father to this country and sprayed the handsome face of my lost uncle Efrayim as they carried him off to war. Half an hour later I was joined on the lawn by Busquilla, wearing a dressing gown and carrying a tray full of toast and tall glasses of juice.
We sat at one end of the garden, where my eyes, peering into the bushes, immediately picked out a balloon spider’s web still shiny with dew. Busquilla guffawed while I crawled over on all fours to search for the spider itself. It was hiding in a little tent of dry leaves stitched together with filaments, lying in wait for its prey. It was Pinness who first showed me a balloon spider, in Grandfather’s orchard. Early that summer he had taken me often to ‘the School of Nature’ to look for insects and spiders. With astounding agility, his old hand trapped a fly on a leaf and cast it onto a web.
‘Watch closely, Baruch,’ he said.
The spider came running down a radial strand, wrapped the fly in white shrouds, flipped the tiny mummy this way and that between its hairy legs, gave it a little poison kiss, and carried it off deftly to its hideaway. I stood up and walked back to Busquilla.
‘Well, do you feel better now?’ he asked, amused. ‘You’ll be all right here? I had the insects especially ordered for your new garden.’
When I was five, Grandfather and Pinness took me to Eliezer Liberson’s almond grove. Grandfather strode over to a tree, dug a little by its roots, and showed me signs of chewing and tunnelling beneath its bark. He ran his fingers over the trunk, pressing gently until he found what he was looking for, and then took out his grafting knife and cut an exact square in the bark. The large grub that appeared was a good four inches long, pale yellow in colour, with a broad, hard head that was much darker. Struck by the sunshine, it began to wriggle and curse.
‘Capnodis,’ said Grandfather. ‘The foe of the almond, the apricot, the plum, and every stoned fruit.’
‘Whose work is done in darkness,’ quoted Pinness.
Grandfather pried the grub loose from its burrow with his knife tip and flung it to the ground. I felt a wave of anger and disgust.
‘We brought you here,’ Pinness said, ‘because your grandfather’s trees don’t have pests like this. Mother Capnodis stays away from trees that are healthy and well kept. She looks for the sickliest sheep in the flock and deposits her eggs there. Let her but see a robust tree bubbling with juices and she will straightaway seek another victim that is bitter, dry, and despondent. There she lays her eggs of doubt, which soon ravage the tormented soul from within.’
Grandfather turned away to hide his smile while Pinness kept me from crushing the grub with my foot.
‘Let it be,’ he said. ‘The jays will put it out of its misery. If the thief be found breaking in and be smitten so that he die, there shall be no bloodguilt for him.’
We went home, Grandfather holding me by one hand and Pinness by the other. Both were named Ya’akov. Ya’akov Mirkin and Ya’akov Pinness.
On another such outing Pinness showed me a capnodis beetle strolling on the branch of a tree.
‘She disguises herself as a black, rotten almond,’ he whispered.
When I reached for it, it tucked in its legs and fell like a pebble to the ground. The old teacher bent to pick it up and dropped it in a jar of chloroform.
‘She’s so tough,’ he told me, ‘that it takes a little hammer to drive the pin into her.’
The two old men drank a dozen glasses of tea, ate a pound of olives, and at 3 a.m. Pinness announced that he was going home and that if he ever found the Casanova, ‘he’ll rue the day he was born’.
He opened the door and stood facing the darkness for a
moment. Then he turned around and said to Grandfather that he felt heavy at heart because he had just thought of the hyena.
‘The hyena is dead, Ya’akov,’ said Grandfather. ‘No one knows that better than you do. Relax.’
‘Every generation has its enemies,’ said Pinness darkly as he left.
He made his way home through the warm thicket of the night, treading upon ‘the thin crust on which our life has been established’, and thinking, I knew, of the menacing creatures of havoc that hatched and swarmed ceaselessly around him, bursting in his sombre nightmares like the bubbles of a foul, unruly past. He could sense the silent squat of the mongoose and see the blood-spotted face of the wildcat padding on its silken-pawed rampage of murder and plunder. Mice gnawed at the farmer’s labours in the fields of grain, and beneath the chequered carpet of ploughed field, stubble, and orchard, waiting for the first signs of Doubt, growled the most legendary beast of all, the great swamp imprisoned by the founders. Far in the west he saw the orange-glowing lights of the big city beyond the mountain, with their seductive glitter of exploitation and corruption, of easy money, carnal baubles, and lewd winks.
It took Grandfather a few minutes to clean up in the kitchen. Then he turned out the light and came into the bedroom. He leaned over me for a moment, and I shut my eyes to make believe I was asleep.
‘My little child,’ he whispered, his moustache tickling my cheeks and mouth.
I was fifteen years old, over sixteen stone of raw muscle and bristly black hair, but Grandfather still made sure to cover me every night. He had done so on the first night he brought me home, and he did so now. Only then did he take his pyjamas from the linen chest under the bed. I watched him undress, undiminished and untarnished by the years. Even when I buried him in our orchard in the middle of the night, taking off the new pyjamas he had requested before dying, his body still gleamed with the same mysterious whiteness that had enveloped it all his life. All his friends were deeply bronzed, their skin cracked and
crisped by molten years of light and labour. But Grandfather had never gone out to his trees without a wide-brimmed straw hat and long sleeves, and his face was still pale as a sheet, unmarked by the whip lines of the sun.
He opened the window and got into bed with a sigh.
M
eshulam Tsirkin shook his head at the end of each sentence, sending a handsome ripple through his mane of grey hair and splaying the bitter lines in his cheeks. Even as a child I had never liked this master-of-no-trades who lived at the other end of the village. ‘Who gave you such a big body and such a small brain?’ he used to ask me with a slap on my back, breaking into his cackling laugh.
Meshulam was the son of Mandolin Tsirkin, who, together with Grandfather, Grandmother Feyge, and Eliezer Liberson, organised the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle. Mandolin was a good farmer and a wonderful musician, and today he is buried in my cemetery.
Pesya Tsirkin, Meshulam’s mother, was a functionary in the Movement and spent little time at home. Though Meshulam was fed by charitable neighbours and had to do his own and his father’s washing, he adored his mother and was proud of her contribution to the cause. The most he saw her was once or twice a month, when she arrived with her big breasts and important visitors, who were always ‘comrades from the Central Committee’. All of us children saw them too. My cousin Uri would be the first to spot the grey Kaiser parked by the Tsirkin house and to inform the rest of us, ‘They’re here again to smell the cow shit and have their pictures taken with the calves and the radishes.’
In a world in which his mother came and went, Meshulam was always on the lookout for a tolerable niche. He stayed clear of
the imaginative mazes in which other children lost their way. The old pioneers wove a different web for him than for me. He devoted his keen memory and thirst for knowledge to research, documentation, and the collecting of historical artifacts, and found solace in perusing old by-laws, deciphering correspondence, and thumbing through papers so ancient that they fell apart at a touch.
Already as an adolescent he displayed several proud exhibits, each with a handwritten card: ‘Liberson’s Hoe’, ‘Milk Can,
c
. 1924’, ‘The First Plough (a product of the Goldman Bros. Smithy)’, and of course, ‘My Father’s Original Mandolin’. As he grew older he removed his father’s old spray cans and rusty cultivator blades from the toolshed, retiled its roof, filled its two little rooms with broken kitchen utensils and decrepit furniture, and renamed it ‘Founder’s Cabin’. Rummaging through houses and farmyards, he found corroded flour sieves and washboards, copper pots that were green with age, and even an old mud sled.
‘I want everyone to know how people once lived here,’ he declared. ‘I want them to know that before the road was paved the carts sank into such deep mud every winter that the milk had to be brought to the dairy on sleds.’
He was especially proud of the gargantuan stuffed figure of Hagit, Eliezer Liberson’s half-Dutch, half-Lebanese cow, who was once national champion in milk production and fat content. When Hagit grew old and Liberson’s son Daniel decided to sell her to the glue factory, Meshulam was up in arms. Calling for an emergency session of the village Committee, he protested that ‘so dedicated a comrade’ could not possibly be converted into sausages and gelatin. ‘Hagit,’ claimed Meshulam, ‘is not just an agricultural phenomenon. She is the definitive proof that pure Holstein cows were not suited for conditions in this country.’
The Committee paid Liberson to deed the cow to Meshulam and even offered to give her a small pension. That very day, however, Meshulam dispatched the dedicated comrade with a generous portion of rat poison and stuffed her huge frame with the help of the veterinarian.
For years Hagit stood stinking of embalming fluids on the front
porch of the Tsirkin house, her famed udders dripping formaldehyde while alfalfa stems dangled from her mouth. Meshulam regularly brushed her coat, which had large bald spots from the rat poison, polished her bovine glass eyes, and sewed up her cracked hide to keep the sparrows from stealing blades of straw and tufts of cotton wool for their nests.
The stuffed cow revolted the entire village, and especially Zeitser, who had been most attached to Hagit and her prodigious flow of milk, which he considered to be ‘a symbol of our national renaissance’. Sometimes he stole from our yard for a look at her. Each time he was face to face with her, he told us, he was seized by a combination of ‘horror and longing’.
‘The poor cow,’ he murmured to himself. ‘Meshulam Tsirkin stuffed her with more straw than Liberson ever gave her to eat in her whole lifetime.’
My irreverent cousin Uri, however, who looked down on the village from his mockingbird’s-eye view, was sure that the stuffed cow had nothing to do with Meshulam’s historical research.
‘Hagit’s udders reminded him of his mother,’ he said to me. ‘It’s that simple.’ And I looked at him as I do to this day; with love and with envy.
Our village has many visitors. Busloads of tourists and school-children come to see the flourishing creation of the founding fathers. Excitedly they stroll the village streets, oohing and aahing over every pear and chicken and breathing in the smells of earth and milk. Their tours always end in my cemetery on the old Mirkin farm.
Meshulam demanded that no tourist buses be allowed into the village and Pioneer Home unless they also stopped at Founder’s Cabin for a look at Hagit and the gold medal from the British High Commissioner that hung around her stuffed neck.
Pioneer Home was anathema to the whole village, but Meshulam Tsirkin hated it especially. The buses that rolled up to it, the wide-eyed children, the enchanted tourists who strolled agog among its freshly washed headstones and rosebushes, reading in whispers the legendary names in copper letters and drinking the
cold fruit juice that Busquilla’s younger brother sold them from a pitcher at the entrance gate – all this made his blood boil.
Meshulam Tsirkin hated my cemetery because I refused to bury his mother. I buried only Grandfather’s friends of the Second Aliyah.
‘I’m very sorry,’ I said to him when he waved the
Trade
Union Yearbook
in my face with an article about his mother’s contribution to the Workers’ Co-operative Credit Fund. ‘Your mother came to this country after the First World War, when the Second Aliyah was over.’
‘The deceased does not comply with our entrance requirements,’ explained Busquilla.
When Meshulam threatened to appeal to the institutions of the Movement, I reminded him that he had already done so after old Liberson put out
The pioneers’ album
, in which he refused to publish a photograph of Pesya for reasons similar to ours.
‘Besides which,’ said Busquilla, ‘your father couldn’t stand to have her near him when she was alive either.’
What most got Meshulam’s goat were the lead coffins I brought from the airport. He knew that every new casket from America filled my old sacks with tens of thousands of dollars.
‘By what right do you bury traitors who left this country, and not my own mother?’ he screamed at me.
‘Whoever came to this country with the Second Aliyah can buy a plot here,’ I replied.
‘You mean to tell me that any little fart who came here from Russia, chucked it all after two weeks of hoeing crabgrass, and went traipsing off to America can be buried here as a pioneer? Just look at that!’ he shouted, pointing to one of the headstones. ‘Rosa Munkin, the archfiend in person!’
Rosa Munkin, who had known Grandfather back in Makarov, was my first customer.
‘Shall I tell you about Rosa Munkin?’ asked Meshulam contemptuously after the outcry that arose when her pink headstone was unveiled beside Grandfather’s grave. ‘Rosa Munkin came here from the Ukraine, worked for a week in an almond grove in Rehovot, didn’t like what the country did to her lily-white
hands, and bombarded the whole world with SOSs. A brother of hers who had emigrated to America, a little bandit who became a pioneer Jewish gangster in Brooklyn, sent her a ticket to join him.’