The Blue Mountain (40 page)
I
was thrilled by the publication of Pinness’s advertisement. For the first time, I saw the words of the stories I knew spread out on the printed page for all to see. I looked back at the mountain, searching once more for the figure of Shifris, the green of Efrayim’s eye, the glimmer of Jean Valjean’s horns. Uri scoffed at any mention of this trio and asked me in his sardonic letters whether Efrayim would also carry Shifris on his back or Shifris would carry Efrayim and Jean Valjean on his.
Nevertheless, although Pinness’s article aroused a degree of
interest in the village and the area, the great public debate he had hoped for failed to materialise.
Meshulam, as bitter as the leaves of a cornflower, exclaimed, ‘I told you so. This country needs a shaking up!’
Returning to Founder’s Cabin, he settled down among his old rolling pins, washboards, sooty lanterns, clay pots, sieves, winnowers, butter churns, millstones, and oil incubators to launch a new project, namely, a diorama of the swamp and its draining. Visitors, so he hoped, would come from all over the country to see it.
With no little effort he dug a large, shallow pit in his yard and filled it with water. ‘I’m founding a swamp,’ he answered all inquiries, and since the heavy black Valley soil is not very porous, the water remained there for several days. I went to have a look at it. It was already a little swamp of sorts: mosquitoes and dragonflies had come to lay their eggs in it, protozoal algae had tinged it a mythical green, and a loudly singing Meshulam had hastened to dig drainage ditches and plant a few eucalyptus branches in the mud. At that point, however, his neighbours, unable to stand the mosquitoes and the oestrous croaking of the frogs, broke into his yard at night, gave him a good beating, and drained the little bog with a sewage pump hooked up to a tractor engine. The issue came up at a general meeting of the village, at which Meshulam announced that he had just begun to fight. And indeed, in the days that followed, his annoying puddles turned up in the most unexpected places, such as the entrance to the village, the lawn in front of the meeting house, the public war memorial, and the nursery.
Following Meshulam one night, I saw him drag a fireman’s hose from the school hydrant to the nursery playground, where toddlers arriving at seven-thirty in the morning discovered that the sandpit built years ago by the Gang was completely flooded, its contents blasted all over the yard by the pressurised water. In it stood a shirtless Meshulam, his trousers rolled up to his knees, waiting to be carried off by malaria. The hair on his chest was a furious grey, his head was streaked red by his father’s gypsy bandanna, and plastic toys in all colours floated around his legs.
The sight of the blond, innocently chirping youngsters coming upon such a scene alarmed me. I knew it was silly, but it did.
Not that anything happened. The children were of course frightened, and two became totally hysterical; one, Ya’akovi’s son, stuttered for months afterward; but that was all. Meshulam, standing in the middle of his swamp, was not bitten by a single anopheles mosquito, although a sudden, mocking breeze blew the hair of some processionary moth caterpillars out of the nearby pine trees, which did make his shoulders itch for a long time to come.
That same week we went to visit Uri. He asked about Zeitser, whom he called ‘Productivus Bound’, and inquired after Pinness, whose ‘adverticle’ he had seen in the newspaper. I told him about Meshulam’s latest madness. ‘King Jonquil of the Swamps,’ pronounced Uri, and we both burst out laughing. When Rivka said that she saw no difference between Meshulam’s swamps and my cemetery, however, Uri grew suddenly serious and told his mother that the village had more surprises in store for it, and that now, from a distance, he could more clearly see the processes of disintegration that he himself had played a part in.
We drove home in time for a nap. An onerous heat lay over the yard. The cows were asleep in their pen. The refrigerator motors hummed quietly in the milk shed. Farther off we saw Zeitser lying under his fig tree with his head covered. No one gave it a second thought, because Zeitser liked to shade himself in hot weather with an old green cloth, but when we rose from our nap the waning sun’s rays glinted off an army of green flies. Avraham let out a great bitter cry and ran to the old mule, whose head was wrapped in the necrophagous blanket of the outdoors.
Zeitser was still breathing. His ribs rose and sank slowly. An odd, sticky, round object lay on the ground by his neck. It took a few seconds to absorb the full horror of what we were looking at and to realise that it was the mule’s left eyeball, which a flying stone had dislodged from its socket.
A puddle of blood, scattered stones, the tracks of familiar work boots, and the imprint of frantic hooves made what had
happened all too clear. Taking advantage of our absence, Shlomo Levin had stolen into the yard during the hot noon hours when everyone was closeted indoors and stoned Zeitser from a safe range until he succeeded in knocking the mule’s eye out.
Avraham called for the vet, a kindhearted man who had never given much thought to the true relations between farmers and their animals. They crouched together by Zeitser’s side to examine the terrible wound.
‘It’s a bad one,’ said the vet. ‘He’s very old. We’ll have to give him a shot.’
‘A shot?’ said Avraham.
‘Between the eyes,’ replied the vet, getting to his feet.
Avraham threw him out of the yard. He brought a cattle hypodermic and some sulpha from the medicine cabinet in the cowshed, cleaned, disinfected, and bandaged the mule’s eye socket, and pumped a quart and a half of Biocomb into his veins. Tears kept running down his cheeks, but his hands were sure and steady. He sat by Zeitser’s side for three whole nights, and then, despairing of conventional remedies, filled some baby bottles with sweetened skimmed milk, barley gruel, and brown rice in poppy aspic and fed him as though he were a newborn calf critically ill with dysentery.
The old mule just wheezed and kept dying, too weak even to open his good eye. In the end the only thing that saved his life was Grandfather’s black tree tar, a can of which I kept in the cabin. Taking a chance, Avraham applied a whole handful of it to the deep, abscessing hole in Zeitser’s head, and within a few hours the stubborn old creature revived and my uncle went home to sleep.
I watched him from behind the trunk of the olive tree, walking slowly with his head down, the air eddying around him while the night light of the cowshed dripped shadows from his feet.
I always liked Avraham. Though he never talked much or displayed physical affection, I felt I knew what he suffered inside himself. He had added a wistfulness of his own to the yearning inherited from Grandfather and Grandmother. I haven’t seen him for years, but when I think of him today it’s still crouching by
Zeitser’s big body, or bent over the milk jetting out of his cows, or crossing the yard in his yellow rubber boots and blue work clothes, his frightful forehead carving furrows in the air.
Levin never showed his face at our place again. ‘Efrayim would have put a bullet in him,’ said Yosi when he came home on his first leave from basic training. He was all for such military retaliations against Levin as kneecapping or antipersonnel- mining him, but Avraham convinced us to let the matter drop and keep his uncle’s heinous deed a secret. Eventually, though, word got around. It was the old itinerant barber who spread the tidings over the Valley, from every corner of which Zeitser’s friends came to visit him.
They were old, these last founding fathers. With their worker’s caps, grey shirts, and rheumatic, work-gnarled fingers, they all looked like Grandfather. Each having withdrawn into a shell of his own, they hadn’t had such a reunion in years. Some hadn’t seen each other since my parents’ wedding. Now they strolled about our yard and descended as one man to the fig tree, ploughed earth beneath their feet and tall skies of words above their heads. They were as tough as nails, it was said of them in the village, a generation of titans and tribal chieftains. Once, when Grandfather was alive and still his old cynical self, I remembered him saying to Pinness that his comrades’ suspicions and disputatiousness would eventually lead them to the ultimate in factional splits: schizophrenia.
After visiting Zeitser, they trooped on down to my cemetery, a single grey monolith, stopping at the graves of their friends, sniffing the flowering ornamentals, and conversing in quiet tones without rancour. I stood off to one side, not daring to approach them.
Like Grandfather, many of them had grown small and short, the first sign of their impending death. Years of loving too much, hating too long, being disappointed too often, and searching their souls too hard had burned out their cells and sapped their vitality. ‘We were the sour orange stock onto which the Jewish state was grafted,’ said Eliezer Liberson to me a few
days before he died, though not wishing to sound boastful, he added at once that the sour orange was ‘a most horrible- tasting fruit’.
Half hiding behind my back, Busquilla whispered timidly, ‘You’ll see, Baruch, everything will be all right now.’ He already knew some of the old-timers well, those who had ventured to buy a plot for themselves while still alive.
The pioneers surveyed their future resting place as they had surveyed the earth of the Valley upon arriving there years before. Each step they took was met by answering vibrations from Grandfather. His old comrades did not even have to put their ears to the ground, because the broad soles of their feet conveyed his sound to the panniers of their bodies. Though I did not have the nerve to follow them, I knew from my vantage point by the hedge that Busquilla was right and that my quarrel with the elders of the Valley was nearing its end.
Once they had gone home, it became clear that Grandfather’s rotting body, Rosa Munkin’s moneybags, and the other capitalist traitors I had buried had not merely poisoned the orchard and sowed confusion. Within a few weeks, as though by mutual consent, the voice of the old pioneers was raised in lament across the Valley. Pinness, who was accustomed to painstaking observation and precise notation, was the first to understand what was happening. Once recovered from the initial fright of his own uncontrollable crying, he began to make out the sobs and snuffles of the others and to realise that he was hearing something more than the smothered threnody of cornered moles or the wailing of fruit sprayed with pesticide.
‘A voice is heard on high, lamentation and bitter weeping,’ he pronounced.
The barely audible yet all-penetrating sound of deeply cleared throats, loudly blown noses, and painfully swallowed lumps made the night air shudder. No jaw was clenched tightly enough to stop the sobs that escaped it. Softly these flowed from the wrinkled vulture throats of the founding fathers, easily overcoming the resistance of bald gums and rumpled lips. ‘They’re softening
up the earth,’ declared Pinness, who told me about the amazing digging capacities of certain insects.
Soon word began to reach us from other villages, travelling as fast as a dust devil. The old itinerant barber, who came once a month on his ancient motorcycle, told us that Yehoshua Krieger, the chicken breeder from the kibbutz of Nir Ya’akov who had invented the fuelless incubator and drafted the first workers’ manifesto in Gedera, claimed to be growing roots. Krieger’s announcement was made at his ninetieth birthday party, which was celebrated by a large crowd, and would not have bothered anyone had he not planted himself by the water pipe leading to the grain fields, thus interfering with the laying of irrigation lines and the tractors finishing the autumn ploughing. Each time they tried to remove him he began to scream horribly, insisting that he was in devilish pain because his little rootlets were being torn.
In the end, said the barber, Krieger had to be dug up with a great clump of earth clinging to his feet and replanted among the cypresses by the approach to the kibbutz, where he stood waving at whoever came and went, harassing embarrassed young female volunteers from abroad, and pestering everyone with incorrect weather forecasts.
Yitzchak Tsfoni, who had ploughed the first furrow at the Valley’s eastern end, pressing down on the ploughshare with one hand while firing his gun wildly with the other, took to wandering around the centre of his village with baskets of reddish soft-shelled eggs that he said he had laid himself. Believing they would bring him eternal youth, he ate them avidly and tried to get his children and grandchildren to do so too.
‘It’s not illogical,’ said Pinness, straining to catch a glimpse of the back of his new haircut in the mirror. ‘Eating your own eggs could turn the linear flow of time into a circle.’
Ze’ev Ackerman, who had lived on the kibbutz next door, completed construction of a revolutionary new food machine with which he appeared one day in Pioneer Home, accompanied by his sheepish-looking son.
I remembered them well from my visits to Grandfather in the old folk’s home. Ackerman had been the kibbutz plumber for
years and had always complained bitterly about the snobbery of the field hands. When these ‘princes of the wheat fields’, as he called them, came to the communal dining hall smelling of earth and hay, he, reeking of linseed oil, soap fumes, and sewage, would sit there watching them jealously.
Now, in the old folk’s home, he toyed with the kibbutz members who came once a month to beg him to reveal the location of the underground water and sewage pipes he had installed years before. He alone had a map of the system, and the kibbutz gardeners were forced to look on distraughtly while three whole lawns were dug up to find leaks, blockages, and the whereabouts of pipes that the angry old man kept a zealously guarded secret.
He himself devoted his spare time and vast technical knowledge to a single all-consuming project, his ‘constructivist revenge’, as he called it, a machine made of pipes, tanks, and shiny little solar receptors whose valves he had turned on the lathe belonging to the old folk’s home’s handyman.
Old Ackerman was overcome with emotion when Grandfather came to the home. ‘There was so much we could have done together if it hadn’t been for that oversexed friend of yours, Eliezer Liberson,’ he said, reminding Grandfather of the incident of the cow.