The Blue Mountain (7 page)

Afterwards Levin chided her for her free ways.

‘I love them,’ she answered in the darkness.

He lay awake all night and announced with gloomy formality in the morning that he intended to leave them.

‘We felt pretty awful when we first came to this country too,’ said Tsirkin. ‘In another month you’ll feel better.’

But Levin decided that it was time to go his separate way, wherever that might lead him.

Liberson and Grandfather bought him a train ticket to Jerusalem and gave him a few Turkish coins. Feyge cried when her brother boarded the train.

He sat in the rickety carriage feeling low, his hands in his pockets for warmth, his knees no doubt pressed together at the same touchingly timid Levinesque angle they would later form when he sat behind his store counter. On the opposite bench a group of religious Jews and their wives regarded him with distaste while telling stories about their rabbi, who had flown on a Hasidic fur hat from the port in Jaffa straight to the Wailing Wall. Next to him sat a hunched merchant who whispered numbers to himself all the way to Jerusalem as if hoping they might safely conduct him to the terra firma of sanity.

Levin, who had barely freed himself from the oppressive presence of pelican postmen and froggy guides, suddenly realised that the country must be exuding maddening vapours that infected whoever lived in it regardless of age, tribe, or sect.

Looking out at the arid landscape, he nibbled at a slice of bread Feyge had put in his pack. Flakes of soot and bits of ash from the locomotive flew through the open window into his mouth, tasting like bitter groats. The desolation of the countryside depressed him. The grey valleys, spiny thickets, and ruined terraces of the hillsides seemed dead and pitiful compared with
the vast green expanses that he remembered from the riverbanks of his childhood.

When the train swung around the last mountain curve and entered Jerusalem, Grandmother’s brother took his pack, left the station, walked past the silenced windmill of Moses Montefiore, descended to the pool in front of the old walled city where cattle were drinking from the faecal waters, and passed through a gate in the wall. The filth and shabbiness of the city inspired fear and revulsion. An insipid date drink that he bought from an Arab boy only made everything grimmer. Toward evening he spied two pioneers like himself, followed in the wake of their Russian speech, and found shelter for the night. His mood, though, did not improve.

‘The Jews here turn up their noses at us, and the Arabs have already twice assaulted me,’ he wrote to his sister. ‘This city, with its stones and poverty, will be the ruin of me. All one sees is vanished glory and dead ashes. The stones alone are at home here. This is no place for living men.’

For a while he tried to learn stonemasonry. The Arab masons amazed him with their sharp eye, which could peel the surface away from each stone and reveal its inner nature. ‘They even had a word for it,
mesamsam
. You might have thought they were cutting dough instead of rock.’ But Levin’s fingers ached and swelled long hours after laying down his chisel, and he decided to go to Jaffa. ‘It was a softer city,’ he told me, ‘not as stony.’

Lacking the money for a train ticket, he joined two youths and a young girl from Minsk who were going to Jaffa on foot. Oddly, this tiring journey, which took two whole days, was a pleasant experience despite the mountainous route that led them through thornbushes, over boulders, and past barking dogs ‘to avoid the highwaymen of Abu Ghosh’.

Unfamiliar black birds chirruped all around, pointing their orange beaks in the air. Grey lizards, ‘the lords of the wilderness’, amused him with their prayers. The young men he was with were friendly, helped him carry his things, and even gave him good advice. The taller of the two, whose name was Hayyim Margulis, told him to wear a woollen belt around his waist even in the
hottest weather and informed him that he intended to become a beekeeper in order ‘to bring forth honey from the rock’.

‘But bees are more than just honey,’ said Margulis gaily. ‘Without them we can never make the wilderness blossom. Without bees there is no fruit, no clover, no vegetables, nothing. The flies and wasps of this country aren’t to be trusted.’ During one of their rest stops Margulis showed him how to find wild bee hives. ‘It’s an old Cossack trick,’ he explained, taking out a little box and striding over to a flowering thyme plant whose bright blossoms buzzed with ‘savage bees’.

‘That one is good and sozzled,’ he whispered, pointing at a bee couched luxuriously in a flower. Stealthily stalking it with the box, he shut the lid on it, then did the same with several other bees.

‘They always fly straight back to the hive,’ he explained, freeing one of the bees and running after it with upturned face, tripping over stones and clods of earth. Levin followed closely behind him. When they lost sight of the little creature after a few dozen yards, Margulis freed a second bee and kept on running.

The sixth bee brought them to its home, which was hidden in the notched trunk of a carob tree. Levin stood a safe distance away, marvelling when Margulis rubbed his hands and face with wildflower petals and walked straight up to the hive, letting the bees land on his bare skin and crawl all over it. He scooped some honey into his hands and returned to the girl from Minsk, who licked it off his outstretched, dripping fingers as if she had been doing it all her life.

‘Sweet Margulis,’ she laughed. Her name was Tonya, and she didn’t take her eyes off him for a second.

They saw caravans of camels, ‘Turkish trains’, as Margulis called them. Levin tingled with pleasure. Hayyim Margulis was the first person in Palestine not to humiliate him, and Levin felt the beginnings of a great liking for this fragrant young man, whom he already dared affectionately call ‘Hayyim’ke’ in the privacy of his thoughts. Perhaps, he imagined happily, he would be asked to join Margulis for good. Together, he daydreamed, the two of them would possess land and Tonya, together plough
the earth and build a home. For a fleeting moment the future seemed to beckon from beneath a warm canopy of hope. It was all so sudden that he could feel the back of his neck go limp from sheer bliss. But no sooner had they reached Jaffa than Margulis took Tonya by the arm and disappeared with her and their friend behind the Park Hotel, waving goodbye. Sadly, Levin watched them depart. For several hours, until he was chased off by a waiter, he sat on a bench in the garden of the hotel, looking at the spire of the Lutheran church and the flame trees glowing red all around him. When night came, he bedded down on the dunes north of Jaffa. Cold lizards crawled over his belly, and the snouts of jackals sniffed his legs. He didn’t sleep a wink, and when morning came he went to look for construction work in Tel Aviv.

‘The girls here,’ he wrote to his sister, who was then digging irrigation holes in orange groves near Hadera, ‘are callous and crass and pay no mind to a young man like me who cannot serenade them or sweeten their lives with honey. They want strong fellows who sing while they work, and I, weak and afflicted as I am, am not well liked by them. How I long for a soft, pure hand, for the fragrance of a muslin dress, for a cup of coffee with little cakes on a white table by a green riverbank.’

Levin dug foundations and pushed wooden wheelbarrows through the sand until he felt his back would break.

‘My poor hands are all blistered, and every blister has burst. My skin is peeling and full of bloody cuts. And each day’s work is followed by a sleepless night. My back and sides ache, and each thought is more worrisome than the last. Will my powers hold out? Have I the mental and physical fortitude to pass the test? I would be happiest going back to Russia or away to America,’ he wrote to Feyge, who was then singing away as she crushed stones into gravel near Tiberias.

Levin showed me Grandmother’s answer. ‘There are other women working here, and they indeed launder and cook for the men as you feared would be my lot. But how happy your little sister is!
She
is a real worker. Tsirkin, Mirkin, and Liberson – I call them by their last names, and they in turn call me Levin and
salute me like an officer – all lend a hand in keeping up our tent. Tsirkin, when the spirit moves him, is a most wonderful cook. Give him a cabbage, a lemon, some garlic, and some sugar, and he will make an unparalleled borscht. From a pumpkin, some flour, and two eggs he whipped up enough food for a week. Yesterday was Mirkin’s turn to do the laundry. Would you believe that a grown man washed your sister’s underthings?’

Levin was so overcome with envy and abhorrence that he made a note of his feelings in his diary, thus condemning them to immortality.

‘Do you remember that song I used to sing back home? Yesterday I taught it to the boys. Tsirkin played it for us, and we sang all night long until the sun rose and a new day of work began.’

Levin stuck his pencil behind one ear, rose, stepped out from behind the desk in his office, and began to dance slowly, describing a pained, graceful circle around his torment while singing in a high voice:

I shall plough, and I shall sow, and I shall rejoice––

Only when I am in Israel’s land.

You may dress me in plain cloth and call me ‘Jew’––

Only when I am in Israel’s land.

I shall eat dry bread and bow to no man––

Only when I am in Israel’s land.

He sank back into his chair. ‘Israel’s land,’ he said. ‘You can’t throw a stone in this country without hitting some holy place or madman.’

All around him were the first houses of Tel Aviv, with their Jewish workers, Arab coachmen, and new inhabitants.

‘Suddenly I realised that no one was ever born in this country. Those who didn’t fall from the sky popped up from under the earth.’

He began carefully peeling more letters from the rustling bundle in his drawer. Elegantly anxious, Grandmother’s large, round handwriting angled charmingly forward.

‘I rose from my sickbed,’ she wrote her brother, ‘and toward
evening we went for a swim in the Sea of Galilee. The boys carried on like naked babies in the water, and I waded in wrapped in a sheet I threw back on shore once I was neck-deep. Then the three of them had a contest. Liberson said he would walk on water like Jesus and nearly drowned, Mirkin proved quite an artist at skimming stones over the waves, and Tsirkin played to the fish for our supper. In fact, though, I have eaten nothing but figs for the past three days.’

Levin, who had never seen his sister in the nude, was stricken with anger and shame. His short lunch break was already over. Up and down the dusty street walked young men like himself in tattered work clothes, sweaty, faded young women with hunger and disease glittering in their eyes, and fine gentlemen in white jackets and fancy shoes that never sank into the sand. One of them gave Levin a rude look, and he rose from the limestone ledge he was seated on and went back to work.

‘All afternoon I dreamed of returning at night to the sycamore tree on the dune, where I could sit in the dark with my thoughts.’

That evening, however, when he climbed the sand dune and came to the tree, beneath which he sought only to collapse until he regained his strength, he found a young couple ‘rutting like pigs’. One look from them was enough to send the despairing Levin running to the shore.

The next day he went to a bank in Jaffa and asked for a job. He was in luck. Because he boasted a good hand, knew some book-keeping, and had a nice, trustworthy smile, he was given a trial as an assistant clerk, and a year later he was already a cashier with a white jacket and a straw hat on his head. The sores on his hands healed, his skin grew soft and smooth again, and at night he strolled along the beach in a pair of moccasins, listening to the whispers and songs of the pioneers on the dunes and smelling the spicy tea they brewed in tin cans. His heart leaped inside him.

Just then, however, when Fortune, or so it seemed from his account, had begun to smile on him, a war broke out. Along with
everyone else in Tel Aviv, Grandmother’s brother was banished from the city.

‘During the war,’ said Grandfather, ‘we were given a forged
vasika
.’

I wrote down the word
vasika
. I never asked what anything meant, because explanations would only have snarled the threads of the story.
Vasika, kulaks, sukra, Ottomanisation
– the only reason I remember such words to this day is that I still don’t know what they mean. Just like Levin and
mesamsam
.

‘We lived on olives and onions and almost starved to death,’ said Grandfather.

Every autumn he picked and cured a barrel of olives. I sat next to him on the concrete path, watching him peel garlic, slice lemon, and rinse stems of dill, his hands giving off a good green-and-white-striped smell. Each time he tapped his knife handle against a clove of garlic, the pure white tooth slid out of its skin with one quick tug. He showed me how much water and salt to fill the barrel with.

‘Go and bring a fresh egg from the chicken coop, my child, and I’ll show you a nice trick.’

He put the egg in the salt water, and when it was suspended halfway to the top, neither floating upward to the surface nor sinking down to the bottom but hanging by an invisible thread of confidence and faith, we knew that the salt was just right. The levitating egg seemed no less magical to me than the grafted fruit trees in our garden or Eliezer Liberson’s walking on water.

Levin found a haven during the war in a refugee camp in Petach Tikvah. Either he had erased all memory of those hard times or else he didn’t want to talk about them. He only remembered a single night, on which great swarms of locusts landed in the fields and devoured everything in sight with a ceaseless, menacing, yet barely audible crunch.

‘When we rose in the morning, the trees were all white and dead, stripped clean of their bark.’ The locusts’ beating wings and masticating mandibles filled his brain like a hail of tormenting grit.