The Blue Mountain (32 page)
It baffled him that no one else heard the cries. ‘How can it be?’ he asked. ‘It’s been going on for several years. There are night watchmen in the village who are supposed to keep their ears open. There are farmers who get up in the middle of the night to help a cow calve or prepare a shipment of turkeys. There are early-morning sprayers and the drivers of the milk lorry, which never leaves before midnight – why does no one hear it but me?’
He paused to consider. ‘I’ll bet it’s poor Daniel Liberson. He never did get over it. Or maybe it’s Efrayim, coming back at night to take revenge.’
Uri and I glanced at each other uncomfortably, wondering in what damaged lobe of his brain the old man was weaving such fantasies.
‘I’ll get to the bottom of it if it’s the last thing I do,’ declared Pinness. ‘I’ll climb the water tower and wait there for him.’
I smiled and did not try to talk him out of it. The old teacher, I felt sure, was too fat, sick, and weak ever to climb the ladder of the tower. With his usual scientific pedantry, however, Pinness was determined to solve the mystery. He sprawled for hours in his armchair, going through old notebooks in the hope of finding some childhood deviancy or telltale clue. He had kept a special journal of the best poems and cleverest remarks of his pupils, selections from which he sometimes sent to the village newspaper. These items invariably aroused the wrath of his ex-students, some of whom were already in their fifties or sixties.
Once the publication of a poem of Dani Rilov’s had the whole village in stitches.
Chick-chick-chickina
Eats semolina.
Poor little hen,
She’ll get old and then
Off with her head
And she’s dead!
Forty years after the composition of this lyric the compassionate poet was a calf breeder whose best friends were brutal meat merchants and coarse butchers. But Pinness merely smiled when told that Dani Rilov was furious, and went on tending his many nests and keeping a kind eye on his fledglings. Meshulam, too, was enraged by this poem, which he considered a gross fabrication.
‘Who had money in those days to feed his hens semolina?’ he fumed. ‘It’s disgraceful how some people will rewrite history just for the sake of a rhyme!’
Pinness noticed that I was prowling around his house at night to protect him from the vengeance of the Rilov clan.
‘Go to sleep, Baruch,’ he said, stepping outside. ‘I’ve already scattered my spore to the winds. Childless old teachers are indestructible. The seeds I planted won’t sprout till after I die.’
In a second, more secret notebook he had jotted down over the years various comments on his pupils’ families. Although he had always exhorted the schoolchildren to help their parents with chores, he knew that some of the farmers overworked them.
He told me about his first years as a teacher. The school had only a few students and was poorly and cheaply equipped. In summer the children sat on reed mats, and each morning he examined them ‘as the shepherd surveyeth his flock’, running his eyes over the classroom to see which of his pupils had been petted, fed, and kissed, and which had been dragged out of bed before dawn to do chores. More than once Riva Margulis’s daughter, who was awakened at 5 a.m. every day to scrub the paving-stones outside the house, came late to school, since her
mother kept turning back the hands of the clock until the strip of pavement gleamed. There were no milking machines then in the village, and some children came with fingers so stiff from milking that they couldn’t write a word. Pinness made no comment when sleepy children shut their eyes and let their heads sink onto their chests, but everyone knew that he would have a private talk with the parents that evening.
‘Every child was a world in itself. I never tired of observing them.’
He made a point of arriving in the classroom before his pupils to hang pictures and posters on the walls, and then he sat down to wait for them. Avraham once told me that the year of Scott and Amundsen’s race to the South Pole, Pinness kept the children posted on their daily progress. When terrible mud covered the village in winter, he carried his little charges on his back or hitched himself to one of the legendary mud sleds and pulled them home, barking like an Antarctica-bound husky.
Avraham and Meshulam were in his first class, which had only seven pupils. While Avraham was quiet, neat, hardworking, and uncommunicative, Meshulam was lively, resentful, and argumentative. He was fascinated by Pinness’s stories about the old pioneer days, but the nature lessons left him cold.
‘Your uncle had no mother at home, and neither for that matter had Meshulam.’ Pinness noticed that Meshulam did not bring a sandwich to school like the other children but only a plain slice of bread. He knew too that Tsirkin raised the boy on baked pumpkin and hard-boiled eggs, the only dishes he could prepare, which were sometimes supplemented by good-hearted neighbours who brought Meshulam hot meals or invited him to eat with them.
‘Meshulam could have been our pride and joy,’ he said. ‘He had a good head and a steadfast character, but his childhood diverted him into a world in which torn clothes and baked pumpkin were lofty ideals instead of signs of neglect.’
He knew that Meshulam’s laziness had turned the whole village against him. ‘Still,’ he said to me, ‘I would have expected you to be more understanding of him.’
‘Grandfather couldn’t stand him either,’ I said.
‘Your grandfather couldn’t stand anyone,’ said Pinness. ‘Except, sometimes, me, and that too for debatable reasons. You see the village and the whole world through your grandfather’s eyes. You’re still tied to him by the apery strings.’
He chuckled at his own pun and told me in a near whisper how Meshulam had celebrated his bar mitzvah. Since Pesya was never at home and Mandolin Tsirkin was always tired from the farm work, Meshulam had to prepare the party for his schoolmates on his own. Finding a few dried tortes left over from a visit by the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, he cut them into thin slices and brought them to the classroom early that morning. Pinness arrived at 6 a.m. to find the frantic boy wetting the desiccated cakes with tears and drops of sweet wine in the hope of bringing them back to life. Retreating silently, he went home and came back with a tray of crackers spread with jam.
‘Your mother left these with me for your birthday,’ he told Meshulam, who said nothing though he knew it was a lie.
All these things were recorded by Pinness in his notebook, which he referred to as his ‘barn log’. There, in the old teacher’s handsome hand, you could find whatever failed to appear on his pupils’ report cards. His handwriting was so elegant, and his concern for penmanship so great, that all the children of the village learned to write exactly like him. In fact, they still do, which has led to the misattribution of anonymous love letters and the crediting of cheques to the wrong accounts. Once, when the poet Bialik came to visit, Pinness presented him with an album of poetry composed in his honour by the schoolchildren. The great writer was so struck by the sameness of the script that he joked that the teacher must have written everything himself. Pinness was too insulted to respond, but that very week he took his students to the foot of Mount Gilboa to study the verse of Bialik’s rival Tchernichovski.
I watched him open his green gate and hobble up the street to Levin’s house. Tonya and Riva were the last of the village’s female founders, while he, Zeitser, and Shlomo Levin were the three surviving males.
‘Zeitser was never much of a conversationalist, Rachel stuffs me with food, and Levin, who couldn’t learn to farm a plot of land, now does nothing but cultivate plots all the time,’ he said after returning one night to find me sitting by Grandfather’s grave.
E
very year Zeitser participated in two festive events. On the anniversary of the founding of the village he was invited by the culture committee to join the founding fathers on the stage, an honour reserved for him and Hagit alone among the animals, and on the holiday of Shavuot three neatly combed boys in white shirts came to take him to Meshulam’s yard, where he was hitched with a great to-do to ‘the first cart’, which was then piled high with fruits, milk cans, garlanded sheaves of wheat, screaming infants, baby chicks, and calves. It was the only day of the year on which Zeitser agreed to doff his old Russian worker’s cap with its specially made earholes and don a wreath of flowers that gave him a slightly Dionysiac appearance.
When an irate Shlomo Levin was reminded of all this, however, he raved and ranted even more, labelled Zeitser ‘an old parasite’, and related with loud shouts how he had left his newspaper in our cowshed the night before and had returned there to find Zeitser squatting hoofishly on his haunches against the fig tree, perusing by moonlight the paper spread out in his lap. His, Levin’s, newspaper!
This argument raged not far from the mule himself, who was tethered to the fig tree beside his food and water, delicately being deloused by two devoted cattle egrets who had come especially from the Jordan Valley. The earth packed hard by his hooves described an exact circle around him. Dipping his big jaws into his barrel, Zeitser stood smacking his lips over a mouthful of the best barley. A thin smile flitted over his face, and he pricked
up his ears through his battered cap as though listening. Levin, angrier than ever, stepped up to the mule’s water barrel and kicked it over. Avraham lost his temper and chased his uncle from the yard.
The next day the old man returned to apologise and went back to work. Meanwhile Avraham, who was equally contrite, came to talk things over with me.
‘We owe both Zeitser and Levin a great deal,’ he said. ‘Obviously we can’t send Zeitser to the glue factory, but we mustn’t hurt Uncle Shlomo’s feelings either. He may be no great shakes as a farmer, but my father would never have managed without him.’
Yosi hated Levin, and Uri was for sausaging both him and Zeitser, which was why Avraham asked me to keep an eye open. Before long I discovered that old Levin, hoping the mule would die of thirst before anyone noticed, was secretly moving Zeitser’s water out of reach.
Now and then, while weeding the gravestones, I waved to the old mule to let him know that I was keeping a protective eye on him. Zeitser never waved back. Since Grandfather’s death he had lost the last of his old verve, and Levin’s harassment made him nervous and irritable. The appearance of the store manager’s thin shadow in the yard caused him to stiffen tensely, and though his big head remained hidden in his barrel of expensive barley, his rear end shifted back and forth in carefully calculated movements to ensure that he had a leg to kick with.
He had become a crusade for Levin. An excellent bookkeeper, Grandmother’s brother came to Avraham one evening with ‘an exact cost accounting’ of every penny that had ever been spent on ‘that pompous, freeloading ass of yours’.
It was a hot night, full of buzzing crickets. Through the open windows I could hear the whole angry debate. Levin read ‘the mule sheet’ out loud in a level, venomous voice. ‘Eighteen pounds of ground barley per day, plus three and a half pounds of vetch hay, plus six pounds of straw.’ He went on and on until Avraham told him to stop making a fool of himself.
Levin stalked out, slamming the door behind him. Stooped,
crushed, and swearing under his breath, he passed by the casuarina in which I was sitting, too injured to notice me.
He stayed away for a week, at the end of which his answer appeared in an article in the newsletter that spoke of ‘a certain family that is maintaining a dissipated mule and feeding it royally in utter disregard of our Movement’s commitment to economic productivity’.
For several weeks there was a boom in the readership of the newsletter, which generally contained little more than seasonal figures on rainfall and milk prices, indiscreet insemination notices, the morbid reflections of adolescent girls, and announcements of deaths, births, and weddings. Now its pages were flung open to the Zeitser–Levin debate.
Though Zeitser had his share of supporters, so did the store manager. Dani Rilov, whose intimate involvement with slaughtered cows had made him a budding satirist, wrote a humorous sketch about an imaginary society in which ‘benighted and compassionate souls’ filled the Jewish homeland with ‘sanatoriums for ailing donkeys and old age homes for menopausal hens’. And yet, he concluded, ‘in a family long noted for carrying livestock on its back’, there was nothing surprising about Zeitser’s costly maintenance.
Eventually, Eliezer Liberson himself was drawn into the dispute. Liberson, the last surviving member of the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle, was then in the old folk’s home, where he occupied the same room that had belonged to Grandfather and Shulamit. A blind old widower who was as good as dead in his own eyes and the village’s, he sent me a message that he would welcome a speedy visit from me ‘equipped with pencil and paper’.
We sat on the terrace. Liberson asked me about the village. He reminded me of Grandfather, except that there was more anger and yearning in his voice. He asked if I watered the flowers around his wife’s grave and if I ever talked to his son.
‘Not really,’ I answered, apprehensively changing that to, ‘I mean, I do water the flowers, but I don’t really talk to Daniel.’
‘Everything could have been so different,’ said Liberson.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Yes?! What’s that supposed to mean?’ exclaimed the old man fiercely. ‘He doesn’t even know what I’m talking about, and he says yes!’
I said nothing.
‘Did you bring pencil and paper?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
Crossly he dictated a few short, stern sentences for me to give the newsletter. Expressed in them was the opinion that ‘although there may be an economic logic in the arguments of Comrade Shlomo Levin, whose dedicated labours in the co-op were greatly appreciated by us farmers, it is nevertheless unthinkable that the nonagricultural population should interfere in the productive life of the village to which our dear Zeitser belongs.’