The Blue Mountain (46 page)

The funeral of Rilov’s boots was attended by the last surviving Watchmen, veterans of the Haganah, and hundreds of pallid, unknown old men who emerged from airtight compartments and underground cellars and chambers. Once the grave was filled in, they gathered beneath the shade trees to update passwords, synchronise watches, and trade secrets.

We had always known that Rilov continued to stow arms away for the defence of the village and the Movement even after the establishment of a Jewish state, but no one had had any notion of the quantities he had managed to secrete. ‘Rilov could have armed two whole divisions,’ proclaimed one of his eulogists, fixing his yellow eyes on the assembly. ‘We weep for you, Comrade. We weep for your arms cache. We weep for Tonya, your partner in subterfuge. We weep, ah, bitterly, for so many good weapons gone forever.’

Having learned from her life with her husband that death is no excuse, Tonya walked away from his fresh grave, went straight to Margulis’s tombstone, and sat down in her usual place in sight
of the mourners. The shape of her body was waiting for her there in the swarm of hovering bees, and she quickly slipped into it, licking and sucking her decomposing fingers.

Liberson too remained in the cemetery after the funeral, groping up and down among the graves with his cane of sour orange wood. He ran a hand over my face and shoulders when I approached and recognised me at once. ‘How big you are,’ he said. ‘You have your father’s strength and your mother’s height.’ Asking me to lead him to Fanya’s grave, he sat down on the white stone and took a deep breath of air. ‘So Rilov’s gone too,’ he said. ‘That madman. It’s a great loss. Pinness and Mirkin couldn’t stand him, but if not for him and his friends, we wouldn’t be here today. His type is needed also, indeed it is.’

He was glad to smell the flowers and ornamentals. ‘You should plant vegetables too,’ he said to me. ‘Vegetables would do well here.’ In Russia, he told me, there was a Crimean farmer who planted squash, onions, watermelons, and potatoes between the rows in the village graveyard with fabulous results. His potatoes were as big as melons, his watermelons were unusually red and sweet, and ‘he once grew a pumpkin weighing six poods – nearly as much as you, Baruch – that was taken by
troika
to the summer home of Czar Nikolai.

‘The blood of the dead ran in its veins,’ he explained. ‘I want you to plant roses and aubergines on my grave, and I’ll nourish them with my old body. Verily, I shall blossom in the Land of Israel.’

Liberson took his wooden-handled grafting knife from his pocket. It was just like the one Grandfather had and sometimes used for whittling. Cautiously I sat down beside him, afraid of his wrath if he sensed me on his wife’s grave. He began to peel an apple that he also produced from his pocket. The skin came off in a red ribbonlike strip that kept getting longer until it was all peeled and he commenced to chew with his corniculate gums.

‘Over there in the kibbutz,’ he said, ‘where the factory is now, there used to be a lovely vineyard. That’s where I met Fanya.’

Toward evening Busquilla drove us to the old folk’s home. Frail
and faded, Liberson sat between us in the black farm truck. ‘Next time,’ he said, ‘I’ll be in a box in the back.’

When we arrived I took him gently by the elbow and led him to his room. The old Bulgarian lay in bed in his silk shirt and black bow tie and smiled up at his friend.

‘Good evening, Albert,’ said Liberson.

‘Back so soon?’ Albert asked.

‘It’s all over.’

‘After a Bulgarian funeral, everyone goes to the dead man’s house for a huge meal,’ said Albert longingly. ‘
Pastelikos, apyu
, cold beans. And of course a drink or two.’

‘After a funeral in the village, we just go on eating hay,’ said Liberson.

The two old men laughed. ‘I once had a girlfriend in Varna,’ Albert declared. ‘You should have seen her breasts. They weighed seven pounds each. They’re pushing up the daisies now.’

Liberson signalled me to go home, and I did.

46

A
s if they had planned it together, the old folk were dying off one by one. A great deal was said at their graves about ‘the vacuum left behind’, but although Pinness had taught us in school that Nature abhors a vacuum, nothing rushed in to fill this one.

One night I went to spy on Meshulam. Through his window I saw him bent over his documents, his face lined with contrition and framed with the new white fuzz of a mourner’s beard. His visitors heard him regret having shortened his father’s life with his shirking, denounce his own petty-mindedness, and list the principal differences between the anopheles and the house mosquito as smoothly as if humming a melody. Whereas the larva of the latter has a long breathing tube and lies in the water diagonally, the larva of the former has a short breathing
tube and lies in the water horizontally. The house mosquito has short antennae and a drooping stomach, the anopheles has long antennae and an arched stomach. Asked why he should bother to recite basic facts that every schoolboy in the village knew by heart, Meshulam answered modestly that the memory of the Jews of Israel was going soft and some things needed to be saved from oblivion.

When the month of mourning was over, Meshulam looked in the mirror and decided to keep his beard. ‘It’s the first crop he ever managed to grow, so of course he can’t stand ploughing it under,’ wrote Uri, who kept asking me to send him news of the village.

As sometimes happens with beards, Meshulam’s flourished splendidly and gave him a sense of his own rectitude. Every day he came with new queries to his father’s grave, where his appearance caused a stir among the visitors. With Mandolin Tsirkin’s old work clothes and rope belt and his own great shock of salt-and-pepper hair, Meshulam was the spitting image of Hankin, Gordon, or the prophet Isaiah. American tourists and visiting schoolchildren looked at him admiringly and asked to have their pictures taken with him. Busquilla suggested paying him ‘a modest salary’ to hang around Pioneer Home all day ‘with a worker’s cap and a hoe’, and even wanted to sell picture postcards of him. As far as I was concerned, though, Meshulam was nothing but a pest. Since Avraham and Rivka had gone abroad, he had become more obnoxious than ever. He even insisted that ‘we must’ –
we
, no less! – put Hagit’s stuffed body by his father’s grave. Now that Grandfather and Avraham were gone and the farm was mine, I had no more patience for him.

‘I don’t need that mangy cow of yours in my cemetery,’ I told him. ‘If your father had wanted her next to him, he would have told Liberson.’

Busquilla was poised to recite our usual disclaimer about the candidate not meeting admission requirements, but Meshulam, his face limned by the golden aura of swamp drainers and desert blossomers that he had managed to acquire from a prolonged study of old photographs, chose not to argue.

For several weeks he tried to make a farmer of himself, getting some Rhode Island broilers for his yard and even attempting to plant vegetables. Bashfully approaching Rachel Levin, whose greens were famous throughout the village, he tendered her one of his prize exhibits, a book by a farmer named Lifshitz entitled
Vegetable Growing in the Land of Israel
. Rachel, however, looked doubtfully at the old paperbound volume, on the cover of which two fat children and a huge lettuce graphically symbolised the bounty of the land, and pointed out to Meshulam that the book was older than the village and badly out of date in its advice.

Nevertheless, Meshulam was smitten by Lifshitz’s prose style. ‘“Your aubergine delights in light and well-mannered soil”,’ he read aloud to me, his lips curling as though tasting the aubergine’s delightful nourishment. The two sentences he found most spellbinding were: ‘“The most suitable of radishes for the Land of Israel gardener is the Giant White of Stuttgart”,’ and ‘“The smaller the animal, the finer its manure: sheep droppings are finer than cattle droppings; songbird droppings are finer than pigeon droppings; but finest of all are the droppings of the silkworm”.’

‘He must dream of giant Nazi radishes getting fat on protozoa shit,’ wrote Uri, adding that Meshulam would go down in history as ‘the first farmer in the Valley to manure his crops with a tweezers and a magnifying glass’.

Meshulam got hold of some silkworms, and Rachel, patient and good-natured as ever, showed him how to feed the little creatures fresh leaves from the mulberry tree in his yard. But not even their magic guano could do any good. The timidity of Meshulam’s touch made the earth go into spasms and vomit up his seed, while his starving chickens called him names behind his back.

Meshulam did not give up. Filled with the great deed for which he was preparing himself, he went around with a pregnant expression. The villagers knew that look well from their cows and their wives but failed to recognise it on a face with a beard, misinterpreting it as grief.

The product of his father’s obstinacy and his mother’s shamelessness, Meshulam was now abetted by these two qualities. He hired Uzi Rilov to give his land a good ploughing, borrowed the village’s chain mower and heavy harrow, and uprooted the rank carpet of wild carrot, mignonette, and yellowweed from his property.

The last carnivorous mice, snakes, centipedes, and ichneumons fled in panic from the land that had been their home ever since Mandolin Tsirkin’s last illness. The green John Deere tractor crushed the burrows of the voles, splattered the eggs of the lizards, and bared the angry mole crickets to the depredations of the sun. Uzi piled all the weeds in a big heap at the field’s far end, and Meshulam set them on fire and stared at them, mesmerised by the tidings of the great, all-purifying flames.

‘So Meshulam’s decided to be a farmer at last,’ said the farmers to each other at their evening meetings by the dairy. They would have been happy to give him advice, because he knew absolutely nothing about agricultural equipment except for the ancient Kirchner and Zirle mouldboards pictured in 1920s farming journals, but Meshulam was not looking for help. On his own initiative he had the district digger build a five-foot wall of earth around his land, the purpose of which, he explained to his startled neighbours, was to plant an experimental rice paddy.

‘Rice,’ he announced, ‘is an important and nourishing food whose cultivation had been neglected in this country.’

By now, however, no one believed a word he said. It was obvious to everyone that behind his white beard and show of ploughmanship and filial bereavement, Meshulam had swamps on the brain. It was decided to discuss the matter at the next general meeting, where it would share the agenda with new contracts for the fodder dealers, the acquisition of some old railway track for the construction of additional cowsheds, and also, I was extremely happy to hear, the request of my cousin Uri to visit the village.

He had now been in exile for several years, and tempers had cooled. Bearing a quiet halo of proud reconciliation and new
ideas from the city, Ya’akovi’s wife had returned long ago, and when Uri wrote to ask the Committee’s permission to come home for the autumn holidays, I was sure his petition would be granted.

The general meeting was never held, however, because Meshulam struck sooner than expected. The night before it was to take place he set out for the fields, wearing his father’s work boots and carrying a new ten-pound pick he had bought in the village store. Never in his life, not even when he discovered letters to Liberson from Slutzkin and Berl Katznelson in a cardboard box in the Committee office, had his heart pounded so loudly as it was pounding now, as he walked along the main irrigation pipe smashing the large water taps one after another without stopping once to look back.

Fountains shot up and kept jetting. At first the water sank into the soil, but then, gluing the thin particles together, it turned the field into a huge basin of mud in which it slowly began to rise.

Meshulam did not go home. All night he sloshed around the field, climbing up to perch on the earthen wall when the water reached his boot tops. By the time worried cries rose from the cowsheds and poultry runs, waking those responsible for noticing a drop in water pressure, the Tsirkin farm was flooded and the village had lost three weeks of its national irrigation quota.

In the morning we all turned out to have a look, unable to believe our eyes. The silt had sunk to the bottom, and the new lagoon lay sparkling in the sunlight, the shimmering reflection of the blue mountain visible in its calm water from the angle at which I stood. Apart from an inexpressible fear, we all felt the hidden passion of the farmer for whatever is cool and clear, flows and bubbles, and mirrors the images of clouds. Pinness was the first to realise what had happened. After years of sowing and reaping, of tears, joy, and mockery, the floodgates of the earth had been sprung.

‘I stood there thinking of the day Avraham Mirkin recited his poem,’ he testified much later before the Movement commission
of inquiry that investigated the events. ‘Then too not everyone sensed the approaching disaster.’ The commission members looked at him, looked at each other, thanked him politely, and told him he could go.

Even after the crowd had dispersed, I couldn’t bring myself to leave the Tsirkin farm. The longer I stood watching, the more stagnant the clear water grew, forming a green nightmare of slime before my eyes. Lured from their lairs by the odour of legend and doubt, sedge and loosestrife sprouted alongside great snails that had waited all their lives for such wet tidings.

From his place atop the earthworks, armed with his father’s gypsy bandanna and a curved papyrus sickle that he had removed from the walls of Founder’s Cabin, Meshulam proclaimed: ‘A swamp is born!’

‘There’ll be mosquitoes!’ shouted Ya’akovi the Committee head, who was close to collapse from the late summer busy season and the cost of the lost water.

Meshulam raised a hand. ‘So there will,’ he called out. ‘The Jews of this country have forgotten what a swamp is. The time has come to remind them.’

Ya’akovi did not wait to hear the rest. Shouting, ‘You’re out of your mind!’ he ran for the digger and started up the engine. With a thud the steel scoop rammed the earthen breastwork and battered a two-yard breach through which Meshulam’s lake began to flow, flooding the neighbouring fields.