The Blue Mountain (53 page)
‘He’s out in the fields,’ said Albert with a mysterious smile, adding a proverb in Ladino, though Liberson was not there to translate the soft, sure words.
Everyone knew that Liberson was wandering through the Valley, because the vagrant little dust devils his feet kicked up kept appearing in the most unexpected places, but the old
man eluded his pursuers. Dying of hunger and thirst, he walked the land, too weak to open a water tap or pick the wondrous fruit on the trees. Although Daniel looked everywhere for his father, Liberson, like Grandfather before his death, was too small and light to leave tracks. He was only found months later, when the kibbutz corn harvester came across his birdlike bones.
Now I was waiting for Pinness. ‘When he goes, I’ll leave,’ I announced, though Uri and Nehama assured me that I would make them happy by staying.
‘Don’t even think of it, Baruch. We want to be the last farm to use an ox along with the tractors,’ Uri said.
I smiled, Nehama laughed, little Efrayim, who was feeding, gave a start, and Pinness, the oldest, illest man in the Valley, of which he was the last surviving pioneer, went on slowly chewing the stuffed spleen that Busquilla had officiously brought him. Pinness knew I was waiting for him and had kept his distance from me for several months.
‘You can leave now,’ he said to me with an effort. ‘I wouldn’t let you bury me in your cemetery even if you did it for nothing.’
Walking him home, I could feel the fear in his movements. He no longer talked about insects and fruits or put his hand on the back of my neck. He was saving up what little strength he had left for his last conscientious stand.
‘You won’t get me,’ he said to me. ‘You won’t get me.’ I did not answer. I knew that the School of Nature, which matriculated man and beast with equal randomness, was stronger than both Pinness and me.
‘To Nature the flea, the cockroach, the hyena, the buzzard, the leopard, the cobra are as important as the dog who loves and guards you, the horse who understands and works for you, the young girl in her lover’s embrace, the child at its mother’s knee in prayer, or the mature man on whom depend the happiness and well-being of a gracious wife and a family of lovely children,’ wrote Luther Burbank.
‘Our self-love makes us try to ignore this obvious truth,’ Pinness once said to me when I was a boy. ‘We seek to palliate
it with all kinds of religious fairy tales about Messiahs, other worlds, and superstitious Paradises.’
Now I trailed him like a pack of hyenas following a wounded ram, waiting for him to fall. I stalked him in silence. ‘What a pitiful collector you are,’ he said, turning to face me. ‘You’d mount us all on pins if you could. But this is one series you’ll never finish.’
In the middle of the night I saw him fumble in the drawer of his bedside table, take out the old key, and set forth. He covered the three miles in two days with me a few paces behind him, as once I had followed Liberson to the kibbutz factory. Every now and then he turned to look at me anxiously.
‘You can wait for me there,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to tag on behind me. You know very well where I’m going.’ But I went on, carrying on my shoulders the memory of his old knapsack with its tweezers and jars of chloroform, the English wireless operator’s pack he had been given by my uncle Efrayim.
The old iron latch, which had not moved in its groove for years, slid open as if newly oiled. Pinness stood in the entrance for a moment before turning around to smile at me. ‘Being of clear mind,’ he declared. ‘Of clear mind.’ He stooped and vanished. I waited for him to pay his last respects and step back out to fall into my clutches.
He stood for a minute inside the cave, breathing deeply. As the blind snakes of the past snuggled up to his legs and the ancient African wood lice cralwed possessively over him, I suddenly realised from my vantage point outside what was about to happen. I rushed forward with a shout and a howl, but the old teacher stumbled on ahead with surprising agility, groping, tripping, and skidding along the damp ground until he reached the great slab of slate that screened off the unexcavated depths. Taking a little hammer from his pocket, he searched for the fault line that the old stonemason from Nazareth had shown him.
Pinness raised a feeble hand. He was too weak to bring the hammer down with any force and let it drop on the rock’s weakest point.
The loud chime could be clearly heard outside the cave. For a second nothing happened. Then came a gritty sound of crumbling from the heart of the rock, cracks appeared all over it with frightening speed, and it shattered like a glass plate. Pinness fell headlong, tumbling among the slivers as dozens of tons of earth from distant glacial epochs buried him with the antediluvian bones of his ancestors and his one-celled friends, the industrious bacteria, who pre-dated the swamps and the Creation of Light. More with the soles of my bare feet than with my ears, I heard the muffled echo rumble back to me.
A full moon punctured the sky, revealing the whole Valley at my feet, as clear and luminous as white silk. So, I thought, must Liberson have seen it before going wholly blind, when Fanya was alive and his cataracts still let the daylight through.
I looked around me. The sheets of plastic in the farmers’ fields shone like great lakes of milk, the trees and haylofts loomed hugely in the dark, and here and there a big new puddle glistened among them. The fruit trees Uri had planted in my cemetery were still small, and among them the gravestones shone whitely like great birds of passage that had come down to rest on the surface of the earth.
Slowly I swivelled my head. The Little Owl, rejoining its rank fledglings, bowed to me with ancient mockery. I headed back to the village.
All night I tossed and turned without falling asleep. Towards morning, like a big bear, I climbed slowly and noisily up the casuarina tree outside their bedroom to say goodbye to Uri and Nehama. Huddled in the branches with a headful of jointed needles, I heard the sound of their breathing, followed by Nehama’s voice, which still had its strange, rapid accent.
‘And now,’ she said to Uri, ‘shout it again.’
The three of us laughed, Uri and Nehama in their room and I in the boughs of the great tree that still bore the shiny scars of the hammock my father and mother had hung in it.
Several weeks later Busquilla informed me that he had bought me a house and drove me and my moneybags to the banker’s.
I am thirty-eight today, and my body is once more at peace. I will never be any bigger than I am, and my permanent weight, as I wrote in Grandfather’s crumpled old notebook, is twenty stone or seven poods. Sometimes Busquilla comes in the black farm truck to drive me back to the village, where I visit Uri and Nehama and play with their four little children.
I was there last spring. I brought Uri some more money, and he gave me a weary hug. Nehama shook my hand and smiled, and the four children rushed at me with loud squeals, trying to knock me to the ground. After lunch I took them for a walk in the fields. I do that every visit. I put Efrayim and Esther, the two oldest children, on my shoulders, and carry Binyamin and little Feyge, who is always complaining about the old-fashioned name her parents gave her, under my arms.
We went to see the red flags of Nature, the little wildcats, and the hornet queens, and then we went to visit the graves of Grandfather and his friends. Uri has put poles as tall as ships’ masts in the ground by every headstone, a strip of purple cloth hanging from each, because otherwise you could never find them among the thick cover of cotton and wheat, the crowded corn stalks, and the fruit trees.
Afterwards we walked barefoot along the paths that run through the fields and climbed the hill. The children ran around while I sat beside the rotting, bent old iron door, gazing at flocks of northbound pelicans, the chequered carpet of the Valley, and the wall of the blue mountain.
‘Look,’ said Feyge, pulling me by the shirt. ‘Look, Uncle Baruch.’
Her brown eyes flecked with yellow and green squinted into the sun like an owl’s mocked by the birds of day. Her great-grandmother’s anxious smile, which never quite settles down, played over the corners of her mouth. With a tiny hand she pointed to the distant name of my mother. Daniel Liberson had ploughed it in the earth, and every year it is coloured by the spring in huge blue letters of cornflowers.
THE BLUE MOUNTAIN
MEIR SHALEV, one of Israel’s most celebrated novelists, is the author of three other works of fiction –
Four Meals
,
Esau
and
The Big Woman
– all of which have been notable literary and commercial successes in Europe and beyond. His novels have been published in over ten countries. Shalev is also a columnist for
Yediot Achronot,
a leading Israeli newspaper, and is the author of five children’s books, also published widely on the international front. He lives in Jerusalem.
HILLEL HALKIN has translated over fifty books from Hebrew and Yiddish by well-known contemporary Israeli and classical Jewish authors.
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2001 by
Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
First published in Israel in 1988
by Am Oved Publishers
First published in English
in the United States in 1991 by
HarperCollins Publishers
This digital edition first published in 2009
by Canongate Books
Copyright © Meir Shalev, 1988
English translation copyright © Hillel Halkin, 1991
The moral right of Meir Shalev and Hillel Halkin
to be identified as respectively the author and translator
of the work has been asserted in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 725 9
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