The Blue Mountain (41 page)

He asked about Mandolin Tsirkin and the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle, wiped a tear as he thought of Grandmother, whom he called ‘a pioneer’s pioneer’, inquired after Zeitser, who had worked with him in Yavne’el, and then, grabbing Grandfather by the sleeve and sitting him down on his bed, began haranguing him about his machine, which would revolutionise agricultural life.

‘No more hard work and farm animals, day and night, rain or shine. My machine will manufacture food from earth, sunlight, and water. It will drink and breathe, photosynthesise and flower, store nutrients and produce fruit just like any plant.’

He filled a large pan at the bottom of the machine with earth. ‘Now I’ll add some water with the necessary chemicals at this end, while at that end the good sunshine of our Valley is concentrated by the receptors. Those are the controls over there.

‘Look, Baruch,’ he said to me when a muffled clank came from the machine’s depths. ‘We have reaped a bounteous harvest, the aubergine and radish together.’

He cranked a few handles, and indeed, with a great deal of clicking and grinding, a slow, grimy trickle of something resembling mashed potatoes flowed from the machine. The old man scooped up a spoonful of it and thrust it radiantly in my face.

‘Go on, try it,’ he urged. ‘It tastes exactly like radish. You’ll never know the difference.’

‘That’s enough, Father. Stop,’ whispered his embarrassed son.

Whenever I brought Ackerman the cakes and fruits his son sent him, he would give me a mocking smile and say that cake was bad for the system, and as for fruit, he had all he could eat from his machine, stoneless and easy to chew. Aggrieved, he told me how none of the places he had written to had taken his invention seriously.

‘Even the milk,’ he added, ‘even the milk you bring your grandfather, though it’s certainly good of you to do so, can be taken from my machine. Milk and honey too – both, if you don’t mind my putting it crudely, nothing but animal secretions. And when my machine is old, no one will put it on the chopping block or throw it into an old folk’s home. No, indeed. They will not!’

I was so upset by Ackerman that I told Pinness about him.

‘We never thought we would grow old,’ said Pinness, who had grown weak from despair and very old himself ever since Uri’s beating at the foot of the water tower. ‘Having come to this country together, and worked together, and settled the Valley together, we were certain we would die together too.’

‘It’s a fact,’ confirmed Meshulam. ‘You won’t find a single document of theirs referring to old age. They discussed everything under the sun – the proper diet for a pregnant comrade, the fairest way to divide up work clothes, whether to invest in a pair of city shoes for the village treasurer. The only subject that never came up was what to do about themselves when they grew old.’

‘The battle with old age is a very private one,’ sighed Pinness. ‘It was never a matter for the Movement. When it’s time for
me to depart this world, all I ask is a clear mind to face my death with.’

Today Ackerman is buried in row six, plot seventeen of my cemetery. His food machine lies behind the kibbutz cowshed, shiny, abandoned, and silent. Some experts from the Institute of Technology who had heard of it tried to operate it and gave up. No one besides Ackerman could get it to work, just as the sour orange tree by our cabin, which had borne, so it was said, lemons, pears, apricots, and quinces, stopped yielding when Grandfather died. Green, unfriendly, and infertile, it stands in the yard with the rude nests of sparrows, impudent patchworks of straw and stolen feathers, hanging from its branches.

Only Zeitser, in whose honour the old people had come to our village, bore his suffering in silence, as if determined to live out his life with as much circumspection as possible. Now and then I untied him and took him to the cemetery, where he stood in the cool shade of the trees, unrebuked by me if he cropped the grass or trampled a flower on his blind side.

Meshulam’s swamp fever seemed to have passed too. ‘Tsirkin is down with his final illness,’ said Pinness of Meshulam’s father. Meshulam so wished to give the old man some pleasure in his last days that he even began working on the farm. And yet, said Pinness, like all revenges, Tsirkin’s too was ripening poignantly, deep beneath the fragile membranes of broad wheat fields and smooth skin.

A few weeks before his death Mandolin Tsirkin asked to see me. He still lived at home and was dead set against going to the old folk’s home. ‘I don’t need to have my fingers broken by some physiotherapist while a young intern sticks tubes up my backside.’

Irritable and grumpy, Tsirkin could barely walk. Meshulam pushed him around the village in a wheelbarrow padded with sacks.

‘Who but a good-for-nothing like him would have time to take care of his old father,’ grumbled Tsirkin. ‘At least he’s finally found something to do with himself.’

‘You’re not going to catch me riding around in one of those Odessa
droshkies
,’ announced Mandolin when Meshulam suggested buying an electric car like those used by old people on the kibbutzim.

He felt bone-weary. He couldn’t work any more. His rich fields with their fine fruit trees and the best hay, wheat, and cotton in the village fell fallow. Bindweed, creeping grass, and prosopis spread their wild, ominous drapery over the Tsirkin farm. Whole families of mice escaping from poison in the neighbouring fields found shelter in the abandoned soil and used it as a staging post for raids on their former territories. Although the Committee kept demanding that Meshulam stamp them out and farm his fields, this was simply beyond his capacities. The farmers consulted Liberson, who racked his brains and remembered that the village had been visited in its first years by an eccentric Egyptian agronomist who claimed that mice had a horror of broad beans. And indeed, when the fields surrounding Meshulam’s were planted with these beans on Liberson’s orders, the inexplicable magic worked its spell. The mice kept to Meshulam’s property, where they multiplied steadily until hunger, overcrowding, and internal dissension caused them to grow long fangs and turn into predators. Every night we could hear their hoarse death groans and roars of vengeance as they devoured one another. The broad- bean barrier, explained Pinness, had turned Tsirkin’s fields into an evolutionary cul-de-sac whose inhabitants could never mutate back again.

Meanwhile, their udders bursting, Mandolin Tsirkin’s cows screamed and cursed in pain while the old man sat in his wheelbarrow trying to teach his son how to milk. Never before in his life had Meshulam held a female nipple.

‘For years we milked by hand,’ thundered the old man. ‘By hand! And you mean to tell me you can’t even open the stopcock of a milking machine?’

‘She’s got an infected udder, you imbecile, can’t you see? Why are you torturing the poor thing?’

His arthritis drove Tsirkin mad. Warped like a kite’s talons, his fingers froze. The calloused skin of his palms dried and split
into a network of deep fissures that caused him terrible pain. He could no longer milk, prune trees, or play the mandolin. One day he was told by Tanchum Peker the saddler that the old peasants of the Crimea cured rheumatism with bee toxin. The next morning I took him to Margulis’s grave, where he pulled off his shirt, rose with difficulty from his wheelbarrow, let down his trousers, and stood leaning against the gravestone, his body gleaming in the sun while he waited to be stung by Margulis’s inconsolable bees. Tonya gave him an angry look but said nothing. Removing what was left of her fingers from her mouth, she vanished into the trees – among which, clustered like fruit in the dense foliage, two generations of village children were hiding in the hope of getting a glimpse of a founding father’s behind.

In pain and impatient, Tsirkin shouted and waved his hands at the bees to no avail. Long years of work and music had made him smell so good that they took him for a giant flower rather than a honey thief and landed in swarms on his shoulders, crawling docilely over his back and bare bottom.

After an hour of this, he asked to be taken home. The bees had left orange pollen in the wrinkles of his neck and the cleft between his buttocks. Busquilla cleaned him off carefully with a large, soft brush, helped him to put on his shirt and knot the rope belt on his trousers, and followed us back to the village.

The three of us sat on Tsirkin’s bed beneath the mulberry tree. He had taken to sleeping outside again on summer nights, because the heat brought Pesya’s damnable perfume steaming out of the walls of the house, torturing the old man’s nose and principles.

‘Listen here, Baruch,’ he said to me. ‘I’m not long for this world. I want you to set aside a good place for me next to your grandfather.’

‘It’s yours for the asking,’ said Busquilla.

‘If you don’t mind, I was talking to Mirkin’s child,’ said Tsirkin in an icy tone. He paused for a moment. Tsirkin never uttered a sentence without making sure that the sentence before it had been understood.

‘I want you to bury my mandolin with me, like you did with
Margulis and his honey. Like all those little Pharaohs in Egypt with their ivory toys and dung beetles.’

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘It’s not so simple, because Meshulam took it to his museum when I stopped playing.’

Getting Meshulam to surrender a historical artifact was an impossible mission, but Tsirkin had thought of everything. ‘On top of the beam in my hayloft, in the far corner, you’ll find a little box. Bring it to me. Don’t worry, Meshulam won’t catch you. He never goes to the hayloft unless he’s forced to.’

I cleaned the pigeon droppings and spider webs off the box and brought it to him.

‘It’s got all kinds of old papers and crap in it,’ grinned Tsirkin. ‘A shopping list of the Workingman’s Circle from June 1919, a letter to me from Hankin, and a letter from Shifris that the pelicans brought from Anatolia ten years ago. No one knows it except me and Liberson, but that mad old man is getting closer all the time.’

‘Should I give it to Meshulam?’

Tsirkin looked at me as though I were a moron.

‘Of course not!’ he screeched. ‘Just tell him that you’ll trade it for the mandolin. If he’s the idiot I think he is, he’ll agree. There’s nothing he loves more than papers. I want you to bury the mandolin in the coffin with me so that the worms can play me music on it.’

41

T
wo weeks later, in the middle of the night, Zeitser broke free without warning from the rope that tethered him to the fig tree, went to Shlomo Levin’s house, raised one hoof, knocked politely on the door, and stepped aside to wait. Levin came out to see who it was, but by the time he recognised the mule’s huge silhouette lunging at him in the darkness, he knew it was too late. Cocking
his head to see his foe with his good eye, Zeitser bared his yellow teeth, sank them in Levin’s upper arm, and bore down as hard as he could with all the powerful hatred left in his old jaws. He tore the flabby biceps to tatters, splintering the crunchy humerus as a froth of thin blood bubbled up amid the shreds and slivers. There was no time for Levin to scream. He passed out on the spot while Zeitser padded quietly back to his barrel of feed and his fig tree.

In the small hours of the morning Rachel Levin noticed that her husband was not in bed and hurried outside to find him green and moaning among the garden plants. Her screams woke the whole village, and Yosi drove Levin to the hospital. At first there was talk of a new hyena, but that afternoon Avraham came to the Committee office to confess that the culprit was Zeitser. The district veterinarian was called for, and following an investigation he ordered that Zeitser be shot as required by law.

There was an uproar. Avraham ran berserkly home, sobbing and slinging earth. When the vet appeared with a policeman, Zeitser was gone from the yard, because my uncle had already hidden him in the thicket by the spring. I had been busy pouring concrete that morning for the erection of two new gravestones and only heard the news when I returned home in the afternoon. Avraham refused to tell me the mule’s whereabouts, but when I went down to the spring to be alone the next day I discovered him there, his empty eye socket shedding slow tears of pus.

‘I’ll bring you some barley,’ I said. But Zeitser was beyond all that: ambling in his dreams along familiar paths, he was smelling blossoms whose names had been forgotten, the likes of which could only be found in my mother’s old album of dried flowers. In the evening Avraham came to stand guard against wild beasts and bureaucrats. Close to midnight, however, he dozed off, and Zeitser, taking advantage of the opportunity, slipped away to the fields.

It was dawn when we towed his big truncated body back from the highway. Zeitser knew that at 3 a.m. every day the milk lorry started out for the city, and he had waited for it by the roadside.

‘He jumped out and lay in front of the Mack’s wheels,’ related
Motik the driver, still in a state of shock. ‘With twenty-eight tons of milk in the tank, there was nothing I could do.’

Chipped and falling apart from years of hard labour, Zeitser smashed against the tanker’s big bumper like a clay doll. Tyre marks, tufts of hair, dusty bloodballs, rashers of mule meat, and cracklings of old skin were strewn along three hundred yards of road, up and down which Avraham ran shouting to drive off the gathering jackals.

When Shlomo Levin returned from the hospital a month later with his stump of an arm swinging in an empty sleeve, no one even said hello to him. The late Zeitser, as Eliezer Liberson phrased it in a speech given at a memorial in the meeting house, to which he had come especially from the old folk’s home, had been ‘one of the monumental figures of the Movement’.

The wretched Levin was never his old self again. Day after day he sat wasting away in Rachel’s garden, nibbling whole sheets of
kamardin
. He was particularly angry at Zeitser because, having stolen the limelight in his lifetime, he had now conspired in his death to pre-empt the glorious suicide that Levin had long dreamed of. His only visitors were Avraham, who still remembered from childhood his uncle’s gifts and kind hands, and Uri when he returned to the village.