The Blue Mountain (34 page)

Pinness asked Uri if he was all right, and failing to get an answer, he hurried to the rose garden by the synagogue, soaked a handkerchief under a tap, and rushed back to wet my cousin’s split lips. His slender, savaged body, ‘like a fallen, lynched angel’s’, made a slow, excruciating effort to move its cracked ribs and battered organs.

Pinness took Uri by the arms and barely managed to drag him to his nearby house. ‘His collarbone was fractured and one shoulder was dislocated.’

‘Why didn’t you call me?’ I wailed. ‘I would have carried him.’

Pinness laid Uri in his bed and sat by his side. Completely undressing the handsome, finely formed, mauled figure, he swabbed the wounds with a soft cloth and disinfected them.

Uri kept tossing and turning in pain. Bright welts covered him like flowers, and the pudendal smell rising from his loins flew up Pinness’s inflamed nostrils ‘and clogged my sinuses’, accumulating behind his forehead like a sweet layer of dew.

Pinness sat watching Uri all night.

‘He asked me why I shouted each time and what made the women of the village line up to go to bed with me.’

‘His shock and pain were too great for him to answer any of my questions.’

Pinness could not get the sounds – the thumping blows, the splintering bones, the cracking joints, the shriek of flayed skin – out of his mind. He had failed to make out the attackers in the dark, and now he suspected every man in the village between the ages of sixteen and sixty. ‘We have become like the beasts of the forest,’ he declared, ‘each man devouring his brother alive.’ His skull bones had thinned to a perforated membrane that could not hold back his sorrow and his wrath. ‘All my life I stood in the breach, and now that the dyke had collapsed, I faced the tide of danger by myself.’

In the morning he left tea and biscuits by the bed and went to our cowshed. Avraham and Yosi were busy with the milking, grumbling over Uri’s absence. I was unloading a cart of beet fodder in the farmyard.

‘Uri’s at my place,’ announced the teacher.

Before he could say another word, the Committee members appeared on the scene. Avraham left Yosi and me with the milking and went off with them to his house. Before two minutes had gone by Rivka’s frightful screams sounded up and down the street. As if being a saddler’s rather than a farmer’s daughter and the wife of the village’s firstborn disappointment were not bad enough, she now had to bear the disgrace of her son’s profligacy. For the first time in my life I could hear as much as I wanted without having to crawl, duck, climb trees or creep through the darkness like a thief.

‘It’s all the fault of that hard-up nursery teacher who let him go around with his head up her arse,’ screamed my aunt.

‘You don’t have to tell the whole world about it,’ said Avraham.

‘It’s all your fault. You were hard up yourself at the age of nine. Your brother fucked cows and your sister went down on every rooftop.’

A huge flock of startled pigeons took off from the roof of the cowshed, the last echo of their wingbeats ringing in Rivka’s cheeks. The Committee waited patiently for the rumpus to die down and informed Uri’s parents of its decision to ‘ask Uri to take a leave of absence from the village’. Ya’akovi’s wife, it was announced, had already been driven to her sister in the city that night. Meshulam Tsirkin, who was then a fifty-year-old virgin, admitted afterward that ‘if every woman Uri screwed had to leave the village, there would be no one here but Tonya and Riva’.

Uri was taken to the district hospital. I visited him there only once, because he asked that no one come again. ‘At least Grandfather’s dead and doesn’t know,’ he said. The nurses who ogled the good looks that showed through his bandages and bruises suspected that women were not to his taste. After his release it was decided to send him to his mother’s brother, a wealthy road contractor in the Galilee. Avraham and Rivka accompanied him to the railway station. From the roof of the hayloft I watched them depart via the paths of Pioneer Home.

They paused by Grandfather’s grave, passed through the orchard, and diminished like ants in the straw-yellow expanse. That was how I had seen Zeitser disappearing on his Sabbath walks, and Efrayim vanishing, and Grandmother Feyge rushing toward the railway tracks with her comrades, and Levin returning to Tel Aviv after his sister’s funeral.

Uri was wearing a light shirt and a pair of pressed blue cotton trousers, and carrying a small wooden suitcase. Rivka walked by his side, and Avraham a few steps ahead of them, his head lowered as if to clear the way. They crossed the fields of stubble, made a detour around the abandoned British ack-ack guns, and reached the station hidden among giant eucalyptus trees. When the train had pulled out, leaving only its whistle behind, I saw Avraham and Rivka coming back. Now it was she who strode ahead, excitedly waving her hands, while every now and then
he bent down to the ground and placed some poisoned seeds in a mousehole he had spied along the way.

Each time I tried to discuss Uri with Pinness, he told me that I could not understand what had happened because I had never felt love for a woman. His old qualms and cautions thrown to the wind, he now spoke his mind freely. ‘You never loved anyone but your grandfather,’ he said. ‘Sometimes you remind me of Efrayim’s bull. Maybe you expect to be carried to a coupling on someone’s back too.’

I didn’t tell him that I had known about my cousin’s escapades all along. I had never caught him red-handed, but more than once I had unwittingly overheard the shamelessly candid conversations of women confessing their indiscretions, laughing, sighing, and nudging each other with fingers and eyes as they spoke about Uri. Afterwards I would see them in the village exchanging secretive smiles. Rilov’s and Liberson’s granddaughters; the wife of Shuka the cow breeder; the daughter of Gidon the carpenter; Michal Margulis’s mother; Michal herself, who had been a classmate of ours; the doctor’s wife; the vet’s wife, who despite her age was as stormy as wheat in the wind and cried out, ‘Efrayim, Efrayim!’ – every last one of them.

‘The strangest part of it,’ said Uri, surprised by how much I knew, ‘is that they love it when I shout their name. They’ve heard about it from each other, and it means more to them than actually doing it with me.’

The first of them was Rilov’s husky-voiced granddaughter Edna, who had breasts at the age of nine. Once a month swarms of male emperor moths would dash themselves against her window blinds.

She was seventeen at the time, two years older than Uri. Haunted by his looks and mocking manner, she grabbed hold of him one night and dragged him up to the water tower.

‘I had no choice,’ said Uri, the old hidden grin on his face. ‘She had a gun.’

He climbed the ladder after her, his eyes glued to her behind, which glimmered in the dark in its white pants.

‘Was she ever hot!’ he told me. ‘She made sounds like a bare
foot in the mud. I wanted to crawl all over her, to get my hands and legs and head and body inside her – only just then I thought of her grandfather with all his bombs and guns and explosives, and of what he would do to me if he found me in his granddaughter’s ammunition dump, and I started to laugh.’

‘What’s so funny?’ asked Edna.

‘I’m screwing Rilov’s granddaughter.’ Uri whispered the slow boast into her mouth.

‘Then why don’t you tell everyone,’ she jeered. Before she could stop him, he had raised his head above the guardrail of the tower and yelled at the top of his voice:

‘I’m screwing Rilov’s granddaughter!’

The words tangled with the night breeze, bounced off the treetops, and burst into meaningless droplets of letters and syllables that none of the farmers ever heard.

Even I, the great eavesdropper, was deaf to them. Not so Pinness, whose ears had never been stopped with earth and whose closeness to insects and children had taught him the art of piecing together jigsaw puzzles of sound. Not so the women of the village, whose monotonous lives had taught them to seek excitement even beneath the hairy leaves of pumpkins and in the foetid drinking boxes of the hens.

The old teacher jumped up in a sweat and rushed outside to lay into the culprit, but the women merely awoke and smiled as one at the darkness. In a flash of blinding possibility, they knew at once whose voice had whinnied like a stallion. A rare and subtle fragrance, a crystal transparency, the touch of youthful flesh or flawless crystal, overcame them where they lay.

‘You’ll never understand it,’ said Uri. ‘You don’t care for women. But I think of those poor turkey hens in their darkrooms, and of Grandmother, and of Shulamit, and of Hayyim Margulis’s sweet fingers, and of poor Daniel Liberson falling in love with your mother when he was three weeks old, and I think of Grandmother’s saying that somewhere in the world everyone has a true love. I’m going to find mine.’

‘If Fanya Liberson were alive,’ said Pinness, ‘she would call it your grandmother’s revenge. In the veins of the Mirkins the sweet
blood of the Workingman’s Circle turned into a never-clotting venom. There was your grandfather, who couldn’t love Feyge and tortured himself with longing and hate for Shulamit. There was Avraham, who sang his first and last love song at the age of nine. There was Uri, who made us lose all sense of proportion. And there’s you, the family ox, Isaiah’s wild bull in a net, big, strong, and barren of heart.’

Uri’s beating hit the old teacher hard. ‘We were wrong,’ he wrote in the newsletter. ‘Wrong educationally. Wrong politically. Wrong in how we thought about the future. We are like the blind beasts that perish, up to our necks in mire.’

Now, at the age of ninety-five, Pinness looked up to discover that the menacing tides had dried behind the dykes and fresh breezes blew over the earth.

‘If only I could tell you,’ he said to me, ‘what marvellous thoughts I have inside my head! I can feel them flutter there like moths.’

‘Only now do I understand,’ he wrote in an article that touched off a storm when it appeared, ‘that Uri Mirkin was the most original thinker our village ever produced. Like Jeremiah in the Valley of Ben Hinnom, like Elijah on Mount Carmel, like Jotham atop Mount Gerizim – so Uri Mirkin spake in parables from the heights of the water tower.’

34

‘E
verything happened after Grandfather left the village and after he died,’ my banished cousin wrote to me. He had finished his army service and was operating a scraper for his uncle in the Galilee, declining to return to the Valley. ‘Zeitser and Liberson went blind and died, Pinness lost his mind, Meshulam started reswamping the village, my father and mother left the country, Yosi became a career officer who speaks without using his jaws and thinks without using his head, I was sent into exile, and you of all people have become the richest farmer in the Valley.

‘I received a letter from Pinness. He thinks about us. Mirkin’s two grandsons, he writes, both dealt him a low blow. One in Death and one in Love. The necrophile and the nymphophile. Quote, unquote. It’s a shame that Grandfather isn’t around to hear Pinness’s language these days.

‘What was it about the old man that held everything together?’ wrote Uri. ‘Who knows who he really was: an angel of green growth or the Satan of poor Grandmother Feyge’s Workingman’s Circle? Like you, I think a lot about Efrayim. Did Grandfather bring him the mask for Efrayim’s sake or for his own? Sometimes I think Efrayim left because of Grandfather alone.’

My big footprints run along the retreating margin of the sandy beach. I look in amazement at this light, poor soil whose grains are so pretty and so worthless. And yet what is it but the soil of the Valley speeded up? Quicker to absorb moisture and quicker to lose it, quicker to blow away and quicker to pile up, quicker to fall apart and quicker to clump together, quicker to imprint and quicker to obliterate.

Damp nubs left by the playful toes of little children, the prints of beach sandals, the balled heels of women leading to the water’s edge and disappearing there, and jagged holes torn in the sand by the joggers with their dumb, tormented looks. Were Efrayim to walk here, Jean Valjean’s weight would make deep depressions in the sand, deeper even than mine.

I can’t imagine anyone leaving because of Grandfather. Deep down I want to grab his shirt and huddle under his wings to this day. ‘You’re wrong,’ I wanted to say to Uri. ‘Completely wrong. No one could want to leave Grandfather, not even our uncle Efrayim.’

The search for Efrayim continued until Grandfather’s death. A dragnet was spread all over the Levant for a masked man with a big blond bull on his shoulders. Colonel Stoves, who was now serving with the Arab Legion in Transjordan, looked for him everywhere, hobbling on his shattered knee. Old Arab friends of Rilov’s brought reports from Syria and Lebanon. The Movement had its own intelligence network in the country. Agricultural
advisers, party activists, veterinarians, ritual circumcisers, itinerants of all kinds who ran into varieties of man and beast, were asked to keep their eyes open.

Occasionally Charolais calves were rumoured to have been sired in odd places. Pilgrims returning from Mecca told the headman of the Mazarib tribe that they had seen a huge white bull on the Saudi Arabian coast near al-Magnah. Through their binoculars two Scottish naturalists studying the reproductive habits of coots in the Seyhan marshes of Turkey saw a short- legged blond calf mating with a female water buffalo. A migrant starling that landed in Pinness’s garden to beg him to remove an irksome aluminium band from its leg had seen Efrayim swimming across the Black Sea in a northerly direction while Jean Valjean galloped thunderously along the shore.

For a while these reports aroused hopes. But the noiseless and invisible Efrayim, who was a past master at infiltration, camouflage, navigation, and survival, was never found. His route took him over greater distances than anyone had at first imagined. After a few years a French racing motorcyclist found Charolais-like calves in Armenia and Algeria. Jean Valjean’s
crème
, so it seemed, could be carried by the wind like pollen.

‘He must have taken Jean Valjean to that brothel in Algiers,’ Uri said.