The Blue Mountain (8 page)
When the boom of the British field guns approached from the
south, Levin returned to Tel Aviv, walking slowly down sandy red streets that turned to yellow as they ran into the evening. Merchants were busy removing the boards they had nailed to their shop fronts. The smiles of the Australian soldiers strolling through town inspired them with new hope.
Levin did not return to the bank. He found a job in a stationery shop, where he learned the art of fixing fountain pens. Reverently he took apart the writing instruments of famous men like Brenner, Ziskind, and Ettinger, rinsing their parts in a solution made from sycamore galls that he himself had picked, honing their nibs, and overhauling their wells. ‘Our political future lies in your hands,’ said the shop owner with a smile as he watched Levin inspect Arthur Ruppin’s black Waterman, and Levin felt a wave of contentment. The owner liked him and even introduced him to young ladies, the daughters of his friends. If only Levin hadn’t missed the smells of straw, smoke, and dusty feet. He wanted to wrap himself in a blanket of stars and grass, to sleep on threshing floors and sand dunes. In the end he persuaded his boss to let him double as a travelling salesman, and once a week he set forth on a donkey to peddle his wares to the nearby Jewish colonies.
‘I loved those trips.’ His lungs grew used to the dust, and the patient plod of the donkey gave him a sense of well-being. His route wound between fragrant walls of orange and lemon groves and hedgerows of thorny acacia bushes that glowed with little yellow fireballs, passed the barred iron gate of the Mikveh Israel Agricultural School, and turned into the vineyards of Rishon le-Tsiyyon. The sea of flowers through which he rode seemed continually to part before him. The songs of pioneers travelled through the air. Spying a group of them sitting down to eat, he would bashfully rein in his mount and stand watching from a distance until he was invited to join in. He ate heartily of the Grade D oranges and the bread dipped in cooking oil that still gave him heartburn, and chipped in with a contribution of his own, the sweet rolls and Arab cakes that he bought in Jaffa expressly for this purpose.
‘And
kamardin
too?’ I asked.
He gave me a mournful smile of surprise. ‘No,’ he said. ‘By then I was a little better off.’
‘Sweet Levin,’ a pretty blonde pioneer with a peeling nose once called him, laughing as she kissed his cheek after he had summoned up the courage to place a sticky crumb of cake in her beaked mouth.
‘My heart skipped a beat.’ At night he dreamed of her and of the farmhouse he would build for her and their children. There would be rows of sprouting vegetables, diligent hens, a cow, and no end of work. ‘Even now I read farm journals the way women read cookery books,’ he told me with a bitter laugh. ‘Every time I travelled that way I looked for her blue kerchief among the trees and grapevines.’ By the time he felt bold enough to ask about her a month later, he was told that she had died of typhoid fever. Once again he was plunged into deep gloom.
‘I never even knew her name until she was dead,’ he wrote to his sister, who had learned by then to plough with a team of oxen.
‘It was my first furrow in the Land of Israel,’ she wrote. ‘At first I couldn’t manage to steer and press down on the plough at the same time. Liberson had to take the reins from me. Now, though, I can plough straight as an arrow.’
She came down with malaria too. ‘But their sweet blood is curing me,’ she wrote to her brother.
Shlomo Levin made his rounds with pens, inkwells, stationery, nibs, commercial forms, and pencils in the saddlebags of his donkey. Though twice he was robbed and asaulted, he proved to be a first-rate salesman and was taken in as a partner in the firm.
That year the first Jewish settlers pitched their tents in the Valley of Jezreel. The Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle decided that ‘Comrade Mirkin and Comrade Levin should enter the state of matrimony’. Together with the beekeeper Hayyim Margulis and his sweetheart Tonya from Minsk, who was later to fall in love with Rilov, the future pedagogue Ya’akov Pinness, and his pregnant wife Leah, who would die that same year, they formed the first group to scour the Valley for purchasable farmland, ‘to search out the country’, as Pinness put it biblically. Thus they became the founding fathers of the village.
‘We had a donkey called Katchke. By day he hauled water from the spring, and by night, while we slept, he put on a frock coat, polished his hooves and glasses, spread his ears wide, and flew off to London.
‘Just as the King of England was sitting down to breakfast, Katchke knocked with one hoof on the door of the palace. The King invited him in and offered him a soft-boiled egg in a cup and the softest white bread you could imagine. As soon as Katchke began to tell him about our village, the King ordered his servants to cancel his other appointments for the day.
‘“But Boris the King of Bulgaria is waiting in the royal office, Your Majesty.”
‘“Let him wait,” replied the King of England.
‘“The Queen of Belgium is in the garden.”
‘“She can stay there,” said the King. “Today I plan to talk with Katchke, a Hebrew donkey from the Land of Israel.”’
‘G
randmother Feyge,’ said Uri, dreamy-eyed, ‘walked through a field of jonquils in a dress without panties, just like a Ukrainian peasant. She got pregnant from the pollen. That’s why to this day my father cries and sneezes when the jonquils flower down by the spring.’
The Committee counted the months and concluded that Grandmother would give birth around Shavuot, the holiday of first fruits. ‘And what better first fruit could there be than the first child of the village?’
‘Tsirkin and Liberson were thrilled by Grandmother’s pregnancy,’ said Grandfather in a tone that made it seem perfectly normal. The two of them went on dangerous expeditions to bring her lemons from across the Jordan, caper buds from the mountains of Samaria, and partridge chicks from the Carmel. Two devoted women comrades were sent from a settlement in
the Jordan Valley to wait on her during her difficult last months. They read to her aloud from selected works of fiction ‘and the writings of Movement theoreticians’.
‘As ridiculous as it may seem, the myth of the firstborn child retains its power,’ said Meshulam Tsirkin, who never forgave his father Mandolin and his mother Pesya for finishing second. ‘Your grandmother Feyge carried the child of the whole village in her womb.’
Feyge strolled radiantly among the tents along the muddy paths of the village, her voice grown so opulent that it charmed man and beast alike.
‘Mirkin too, who only loved her in partnership with Eliezer Liberson and Mandolin Tsirkin and never forgot his Crimean love even on the day he brought Feyge to his tent, looked at her moonily then,’ said Pinness.
‘He rubbed her belly with green olive oil,’ declared Uri, adding an embellishment of his own.
When it was time for Feyge’s accouchement, she was rushed by cart to the railway station, which was several miles away. The entourage had hardly left the village, however, when it saw the train come around the blue bend of the mountain and roll into the station.
The story of my uncle Avraham’s birth was one of the most famous in the Valley. On the village’s fiftieth anniversary it was even dramatised by a director from Tel Aviv, who astounded the locals with his purple pants and his loud efforts to bed every young girl in sight.
Mandolin Tsirkin and Rilov the Watchman ‘jumped on their horses, galloped off like two Cossack lightning bolts’, and caught up with the train. Over the protests of the engineer, who brandished a coal shovel, Rilov leapt from his horse into the locomotive, subdued the man with an angry glare and a stiff prod to the chest, and yanked the brake handle.
‘We’re not just anyone, we’re Committee!’ he told the engineer and his sooty assistant, who lay shivering on a pile of coal, stunned by this pronouncement and the sudden stop of the train.
‘On your feet and shake a leg if you want to die in your own bed, you dead jackal, you!’ shouted Rilov. ‘Full steam ahead!’
The train started out with a groan, leaving behind a great wake of sparks, columns of smoke, two saddled horses, and Grandmother Feyge and her forgotten entourage, which ran shouting toward the tracks. There was no choice but to give birth in the fields.
My uncle Avraham was delivered an hour later, Grandmother and Grandfather’s firstborn son and the first child of the village. ‘He was born in our field, on our earth, beneath our sun, in the exact place where Margulis’s main irrigation tap now stands.’
That day the cicadas kept up a steady roar in the fields. The pioneers sat up singing all night, and in the morning Rilov and Tsirkin reappeared, having run all the way back. Rilov did not even apologise. After sipping some water, he demanded a general meeting to decide what the child should be called. ‘He’s already been given a name by his mother,’ he was told. ‘It’s Avraham, after her father.’ Eliezer Liberson muttered something about ‘comrades taking impermissible liberties’ and even wrote in the village newsletter that ‘the child is as much ours as hers’, but there was nothing he could do about it.
Knowing that the birth of a first child afflicts all men with a sense of their own mortality, Fanya Liberson, who had been shanghaied from her kibbutz several weeks previously, made Grandfather leave Grandmother’s tent.
‘Fanya and my poor wife Leah moved in with her. The two of them embroidered nappies for little Avraham and wove him a cradle of reeds they had cut by the spring.’
A week later the circumciser arrived from the city beyond the blue mountain. The villagers dressed in white, cut their hair and nails, and sat in a semicircle in front of Mirkin’s tent. A great cheer went up as Grandfather stepped outside holding his son high in the air. ‘Your uncle Avraham was truly our first fruit, because he was born before the fruits of the trees had set.’ To this day, on the holiday of Shavuot, the feast of first fruits, all that year’s children are held high in front of everyone to commemorate the occasion.
The whole village was dazzled by the beauty and fairness of the new baby, who ‘smiled with a mouth so bright that you could have sworn he had already cut his teeth. He was like a big jonquil swaddled in its calyx.’ Avraham was born without the two deep creases that now furrow his brow, and with a friendly expression on his face, which was as fresh and smooth as the peel of a large apple.
‘We formed a circle immediately,’ said Pinness. ‘Each arm found a shoulder or waist and the dance began.’ Everyone felt that it was a moment of grace for the village, which now had ‘someone to carry the torch forward in the great relay race of the generations’ and need not fear extinction with the death of its founders.
Pinness smiled softly, the pleasure of the memory etched in every line of his face. ‘The child bound us forever,’ he said, the words dropping from his mouth like the fruit of the wild plum tree on Margulis’s land – sweet, small, and precise.
‘We passed him around from hand to hand and let everyone hold him in their arms. For a sweet, awesome moment each of us felt the promise of his delicious flesh and inhaled his good smell. One by one, as if he were a ritual object, we took him and gave him our blessing, some out loud and some deep in their hearts. Each of us had a part in him.’
‘Someday I’ll show you the protocol of the circumcision,’ promised Meshulam. ‘Liberson’s wish for the baby was that he should grow up to plough the first furrow in the Negev desert. Rilov’s was that he redeem the mountains of Gilead and the Bashan. My father promised to teach him the mandolin. They imagined him sowing and ploughing, bringing faraway Jews from the Urals and the deserts of Arabia to this country, and developing new, sturdier strains of wheat. And what did he turn out to be? Your uncle Avraham.’
Still, it was a fine hour, one whose bounty helped see the villagers through many long weeks of hardship and privation. They all felt quiet and content – all except Shlomo Levin, my grandmother’s brother, who came by train from Tel Aviv. Afraid to appear in his citified white jacket, he wore a grey cap with a
protective visor and a rough work shirt that made him break out in a rash.
Levin walked from the railway station through the fields, overwhelmed by the deep smell of the heavy earth that purred beneath his feet. And though Feyge threw her thin, tired arms around him, and Tonya and Margulis, who remembered him from their hike to Jaffa, smiled at him like old friends, he felt like an outsider among the excited pioneers who hugged him and plied him with drink. He even managed ‘to hold the baby wrong’, so that it bit his wrist with its sharp little teeth.
Then everyone went in search of the circumciser, who had gone out for a stroll to smell the good earth and murmur ecstatic prayers to himself. He took Avraham in his arms, clicked an appreciative tongue at the sight of his well-formed member, and relieved it of its foreskin. There was a profound hush. Even Liberson, who claimed that circumcision was a pagan custom, felt that it was no time for argument. And when the loud yelp of their firstborn son sounded over the fields, the pioneers burst into unashamed tears.
E
frayim, my lost uncle, was Grandfather’s favourite child. He was a handsome boy, quick on his feet, and Grandfather never tired of telling me how he went off to war, how he carried his calf around on his shoulders, and how he vanished from the village. Efrayim was born a year after Avraham and a year before my mother Esther. ‘The sight of all those children running about the village and helping out with the chores was a tonic for us all.’
Margulis’s Tonya had a daughter too, but the child’s father was Rilov. From the day of her arrival in the village Tonya had been swept off her feet by Rilov’s fierce masculine charms. The only bed she wished to die in was his, and she was maddened with passion when he asked her to smuggle rifle bullets in her
brassiere. He took her down with him to the arms cache in the septic tank, their shadows jiggling to the light of an oil lamp as his fingers drew the ammunition from her breasts. Once having counted out the cartridges, however, he helped her put her clothes back on. She could feel her heart in her throat as he tightened and tied the pink laces on her back. Smiling with visionary eyes, Rilov told her how he dreamed at night of Pesya Tsirkin. ‘She has everything I need,’ he explained. ‘An automobile, the right connections, and a big bra.’ Tonya was hurt but undeterred.