The Blue Mountain (33 page)
‘Excuse me for shouting at you, Baruch,’ said the blind man as I departed. ‘One day you’ll see what I see. Forgive me, and come again soon.’
Neither Pinness nor Levin could sleep at night. Each lay planning and plotting in his bed.
Levin sought vengeance on the mule, because of whom Eliezer Liberson had humiliated him in public as he had never been humiliated before. Through his window I could see his stinging old wounds reopen and suppurate with shame. Once again the uncouth hooligans of the Workingman’s Circle shot their mocking darts at him, mountains of sand and chocolate threatened to bury him, and hordes of locusts crawled over his bed, skinning him alive.
At that very moment, having gone to the refrigerator for some leftover couscous that he dribbled all over his pillow, Pinness was reflecting on the lascivious cries that pierced his tender eardrums and defiled all that was dear to him. Now that the blood soaking his brain had diluted his anger and swamped his thirst for vengeance, he merely desired to uncover the culprit.
He rose with difficulty, went out to the garden, crossed the street, and walked up and down beneath the large concrete columns of the water tower. It took him a while to get over
the annoying hot and cold flashes in his body. Then, grabbing hold of the iron ladder, he began to climb to the top.
‘It was only the second time in my life that I had done that,’ he told me. ‘Thirty years ago, when some high school students wanted to practise rope gliding, I climbed up there with Efrayim, Meshulam, Daniel Liberson, and Avraham. They all came down by rope except for me and Meshulam. We took the ladder again.’
He was afraid of being seen, and worse yet, of his own sick body failing him. ‘Every ounce of logic I had left argued against it.’ His fear of heights made every cell go numb. And yet, frail and brittle, he kept climbing. He didn’t dare look down. The higher he went, the colder it became.
He gripped the peeling rungs with damp hands, pulling his scared body after them with a mysterious strength until he reached the top of the tower. Hiking a leg over the edge, he collapsed on the concrete roof, shaking from fright and exertion. For a few minutes he lay there ‘like a stricken corpse’, gladly letting the chill roughness of the concrete bring him back to life. Then, still breathing hard, he sat up and looked about.
The flat, round roof was ringed by a low parapet topped by a guardrail of metal pipes. In one corner were the remains of the observation post that once had been ‘faithfully manned’ by a lookout equipped with a mounted searchlight and a bell. White with dust, a few empty sacks and tattered semaphore flags lay abandoned there.
Pinness rose, leaned against the cool metal of the railing to help fight off a wave of vertigo, and unpremeditatedly called out, ‘Yoo-hoo! Yoo-hoo!’ His cry, however, was too weak to escape the clutches of the branches and the gusting night breeze. Although classified as a Helpful, a barn owl startled him by darting close to his head, as silent as a groundsel’s floating seed. ‘The harm the barn owl does the poultry is more than balanced by the number of mice it eats,’ he had always claimed, greatly angered by farmers who killed it because they feared its noiseless flight and the human look of its white face.
Beneath him lay the village, ‘no longer white tents in the wilderness but houses and cowsheds and fields, paved and well-trodden paths, tall trees and rooted men.’
The village was asleep. The wind whistled through the treetops. Yolks formed and clustered in the vitals of the hens. Mixers hummed in the feed shed and sprinklers chattered in the darkness.
Pinness lay in ambush for an hour and a half, during which nothing happened. In the end he climbed down again, terrified, and slowly made his way home.
‘I did it,’ he thought, hardly able to move. ‘Tomorrow night I’ll do it again.’
T
owards the end of his life in the old folk’s home Grandfather was so feeble that he spent most of his time in bed or in a wheelchair. Shulamit took care of him as best she could, but she too was far from healthy or strong. The smoke of old steamships and railway stations hung in the air between them. They never stopped touching each other, looking at each other, supporting each other, meeting and parting from each other.
The Crimean whore sat watching Grandfather for hours, touching his fingertips and crying as she read the cuneiform writing on his wrinkled neck. Within a few weeks he had grown shorter; his chest was narrower, and his whole body had dwindled. No longer nourished by his sensual attentions, she now scavenged the cells of his body.
His carefully measured love was as dangerously calibrated as the act of a tightrope walker. A single heedless movement could have sent him plummeting into her eyes, choking on the dust of his own bones.
Only now do I understand that there were four people in that room: Grandfather and Shulamit as young lovers and as
old ones. Sometimes they were old or young together, and sometimes one was young while the other was old. Time, which I only knew from the setting of fruit and the fermenting of silage, had become in their room a many-faced weather vane that had run out of wind.
Although he could barely swallow the milk I brought him, he still insisted on drinking it all. Sometimes he gagged and spewed up sticky little clots of sour cheese on his chest. On his ‘bad days’ I carried him to the bathroom and bathed him, his gaze fluttering off into space like a white handkerchief as his tiny soaped body lay cradled in my arms. On his ‘good days’ he forced himself to smile and asked me about the farm.
I never talked to Shulamit, although there was a great deal I might have liked to ask her. When she first arrived, I hated her – her and all those Russians of hers who had allowed her out. A week after she came, Grandfather began to arrange for his move to the old folk’s home. He had told us nothing of his plans, and we were dumbfounded when he sprang them on us. Avraham frowned, while Rivka gasped before huffing, ‘Very well, then, I suppose you know what you’re doing.’ Yosi kept silent. Uri chuckled and said, ‘You really are a dark horse, Grandfather!’
I was so frightened that my stomach felt like ice. I knew it was because of the woman from Russia who had knocked on the door of the cabin one day and walked in as though out of Grandfather’s trunk.
‘Hello, Ya’akov,’ she said. ‘Won’t you offer me a cup of tea?’
Grandfather rose with trembling hands. Not that he hadn’t known that Shulamit was about to appear. The pelicans had brought the mail, and Busquilla had festively delivered a telegram from Jerusalem the day before. Busquilla loved telegrams and had trained Zis to bray like a siren when he came with one. ‘It makes my day,’ he explained.
‘This is my grandson Baruch,’ said Grandfather. After all those years, those were his first words to her.
She laughed when he absentmindedly rolled an olive in his mouth while handing her the glass of tea, and laid her hand on his arm with a gesture of ownership and confirmation.
The fact of the matter was, I told myself, that she was nothing but an old woman. Tall but stooped, she had thick white hair, a wrinkled face, flabby rolls of flesh on her neck, and a complexion mildewed by age, like the mouldy skin of old olives. Yet beneath her dress she had long thighs, and her tottering ankles were still shapely.
She too drank her tea boiling hot. Not until their glasses were empty did they rise and embrace as though by a prearranged signal. Grandfather put his head against hers and moved with her to a slow rhythm. His moustache against her neck, he tapped out an identifying code on her shoulder with quick, small movements of his hand while sliding the other hand from her breasts to her stomach in an ancient, practised motion that the years had kept stored in some attic of old habits.
Every couple, Uri later explained to me, has their private and limited repertoire of love gestures, established quickly, perfected slowly, and never forgotten.
‘Even when their love is gone and they no longer breathe each other’s skin, eat each other’s flesh, and dive head-first like idiots into each other’s eyes, the same movements remain,’ he said.
Uri had something against eyes. He always insisted that they had no expression and that all the talk about their mirroring the soul was ‘nothing but a stupid optical illusion’. He himself read people by the mouth. That and not their eyes was what he looked at, deciphering the corners of their lips.
Shulamit cried, a shudder running through her body. Gently fingering her skin, Grandfather ran his planter’s hands over her. Just as the dam of Time was about to burst and its torrent buckle their old knees, he noticed that I was still in the cabin and broke away from her. They went on sitting and staring at each other, and the air was so thick with all the words and touches that had yet to be taken from their hiding places that I mumbled something about shutting an irrigation tap and wandered off into the orchard.
When I returned two hours later the light was still on in the cabin and the chimney of the boiler was sputtering. They were deep in a Russian conversation.
‘What’s done is done,’ Grandfather said to me. ‘From now on Shulamit and I will live together. We don’t have many years left.’
‘Each time I climbed the tower, I felt weaker and more afraid than the time before.’
One night Pinness had trouble holding on to the ladder. At one point in his descent he nearly lost his grip and toppled thirty feet to the ground. ‘For a long while I just hung on with a strength I didn’t know I had.’ His shaking knees bumped painfully against the cold metal. He was too scared to breathe.
‘Why didn’t you call me?’ I burst out. ‘I would have caught you if you had fallen.’
Pinness smiled sadly. ‘This isn’t a story, Baruch. We’re talking about real life. And besides, you may be as strong as your father, but I weigh more than your mother.’
He steadied himself and remounted the ladder, since it was easier to climb up than down, then lay on the wet concrete of the tower while recovering his wits and his breath.
Half an hour had yet to go by when Pinness, who was ready to try another descent, heard quick hands and merry pants on the ladder rungs. He peered down and saw two dark, agile forms climbing limberly toward him. There was no way out. Feeling ridiculous, he crouched behind the old lookout post and tried to make himself small as the two figures drew closer.
Although he was unable to make out their faces in the dark, he could tell from their movements that they were young, sure of themselves and their bodies. ‘They had the confidence of youth that its limbs would not betray it.’
The two hurriedly threw themselves down on the bed of sacks. From his hiding place, Pinness heard the soft rustle of fabric over skin as clothes were peeled off, followed by whispered moans of pleasure and the long-forgotten squish of moist membranes coming together. The fumes of love given off by the warm bodies condensed in the cold air and trickled into his nostrils. Trapped in the sinful magic of the moment, the old teacher felt a flicker of excitement in the most deadened parts of his body until he saw
the handsome head of the young lover rise above the guardrail, a curly silhouette against the dark sky.
The brazen cry now sounded right beside him.
‘I’m screwing Ya’akovi’s wife!’ it rang out.
Pinness cringed like a frightened mole in its burrow, his head pounding so hard from desire and shame that he thought it would burst. Ya’akovi was the village’s successful young Committee head, and Pinness had known his wife since the days when she was his pupil.
‘Ben-Ya’akov’s granddaughter – the same Ben-Ya’akov who was killed in the Arab riots. A bright, lovely girl: I saw her grow into a fine, hardworking young woman right under my eyes! She was always so shy-looking.’
The cry burst in the wind, its syllables drifting down over the village like the white petals of almond blossoms, waking the sleeping women with dreamy smiles. In the silence that descended again on the water tower Pinness heard only the thumping of his own heart and a soft groan of laughter from the nearby throat of Ya’akovi’s wife as she sought to silence her lover by burying his head in her breasts.
They lay there quietly. Slowly the blood in the old man’s legs stopped its mad race. He felt the cold creeping over his body, but there was nothing to do but endure it until the two rose, put on their clothes, and started back down the ladder.
Pinness decided to wait a few more minutes to make sure he didn’t give himself away. Then, gripping the guardrail tightly, he started down just in time to see several men charge out of the dark bushes and hurl themselves on the couple ‘like wild beasts’.
The woman was dragged aside by the hair, while the young man was ‘knocked down, beaten, kicked, and pummelled with fists and work boots’ in the most horrible of silences, as methodically as if by a machine. The only sounds in the cold air were grunts and groans and the thud of blows on the squirming body.
When the men were gone, Pinness climbed down the ladder and went to have a look at the boy’s bloodied face. The minced flesh gleaming like a crushed pomegranate in all shades of scarlet broke the old teacher’s palpitating heart.
‘He was lying face down. When I turned him over gently, he groaned with pain. It was Uri Mirkin. Your cousin Uri.’
T
o this day I feel guilty for not having been there that night to come to my cousin’s rescue. Hoping to overhear something about Grandfather’s condition in the days before his death, I was outside the village doctor’s house, where the health director of the old folk’s home was giving one of his periodic reports to the physicians of the area.
‘If only I had been there!’ I wept to Pinness. ‘If only I had been there! I would have saved Uri. I would have killed every one of them.’ My hands clenched and opened, the sweat running down my neck.
Pinness told me the whole story after Uri had been made to leave the village. Everyone knew what had happened, but only I heard the old teacher confess that he had been on the water tower that night. When questioned by the Committee members, he had merely said that he was unable to fall asleep, went for a walk, and found my cousin lying senseless by the tower, ‘and started cursing at the top of my voice at those gangsters, those Cossacks, those evildoers’.