The Blue Mountain (27 page)
The thin, ticklish warmth of soil against my toes. The sweet blood that saves from malaria and depression. The poison that never loses its potency. Shifris will appear, ragged and mouldy, to the pied piping of the symphonies of Mahler. Storks on the chimney of the old house in Makarov, dreaming of the frogs of Zion.
The boom of the surf through the window of my big house. The rustle of money sacks. Two hundred and seventy-four old men and women, one mandolin, and one old mule are buried in my graveyard. Pioneers, practising idealists, and capitalist traitors.
U
ri and I could read at the age of five. Yosi refused to learn and sat silently beside us while Grandfather drew words for us on paper. Grandfather did not teach us each letter separately like Pinness but started with whole words. ‘They’ll learn to recognise
the letters on their own,’ he said. ‘Single letters don’t mean a thing. They only come alive when joined to others.’
In nursery we played in the sandpit Efrayim and his Gang built after the great chocolate robbery and rode on the old iron-wheeled Case tractor that was donated to us rather than to Founder’s Cabin over Meshulam Tsirkin’s objections.
Sometimes Levin came from his nearby shop with cold juice or fresh rolls for us. We took the rolls to the woods behind the meeting house where the wild garlic grew – a last remnant of the days when anopheles mosquitoes warred on us and the water buffalo stuck out its tongue at us – and ate them with the long, odorous leaves sandwiched in.
‘Nature’s bread spread,’ our nursery teacher Ruth called the wild garlic. ‘Now let’s go and have Nature’s bread spread.’
Wearing shorts, white cotton hats, and identical crude sandals that Bernstein the shoemaker stitched for us, we all trooped off singing to the woods. Every year before Passover Bernstein received us in his cabin. Placing weights in our hands to keep our excitable feet glued to the strips of leather he stood us on, he sketched our soles with a rough pencil that tickled our big toes.
‘No talking, children,’ he warned us through clenched teeth, because his mouth was full of nails. At least once a week we heard him screaming from pain in the bathroom behind the shoe shop.
‘In the days before you were born, we didn’t have such footwear. Avraham went around in sandals cut from old tyres, while your mother and Efrayim went barefoot.’
We walked to the woods in single file. Because I was the biggest, I was always at the end. Yosi kept straying out of line moodily, looking for round pebbles for his catapult, and Uri skipped along beneath Ruth’s dress with nothing showing but his calves and feet, which resembled the hind legs of a bee inside a big, sweet flower. Ruth, a placid look on her broad face, called to mind a quadruped with two large, unshod forepaws and two little rear ones in sandals.
‘There’s more to that boy than meets the eye,’ jested Pinness affectionately at the sight.
‘I want you to stop it!’ shouted Rivka at her son. ‘You’re the talk of the whole village. What kind of business is this?’
Not even a five-year-old, though, likes to be deprived of his pleasures.
‘I like it,’ said Uri.
‘But no one walks that way,’ Avraham butted in.
‘You mind your own business,’ said Rivka. ‘We know all about the poems you recited when you were nine. The child is a chip off the old block.’
‘Ruth lets me,’ said Uri.
‘I’d like to know what she’ll be letting you do two years from now,’ snapped Rivka.
‘Ruth smells nice,’ said Uri.
It was because of Uri that the Committee ordered Ruth to come to work in trousers. My cousin was reduced to coming to her after the ten o’clock break, taking off his shirt, slouching against her solid thighs, and asking her to ‘make my back feel good’.
On the first day of school Grandfather took a half-day off from his trees to escort me, Yosi, and Uri to our classroom. Yosi stepped up to the front wall, regarded the big poster that Pinness had hung above the blackboard, and slowly read from it out loud.
‘Not the soldier’s sword, but the farmer’s plough, conquers the land.’
Grandfather burst out laughing. ‘You completely fooled us,’ he said to Yosi, who was blushing with pleasure. ‘All the time you sat there quietly understanding everything!’
Being a head taller than anyone else, I was placed in the last row. I put down my schoolbag, a leather briefcase from Germany that had belonged to my father Binyamin, and watched Pinness enter the classroom. This was not my first lesson with him. When I was five he once took me out to the orange grove to show me a roofed oval nest with a round entrance on one side.
‘This is the nest of the graceful warbler,’ he said. ‘Its fledglings are gone already. You can stick your hand inside it.’
The inside of the nest was lined with soft, warm down and groundsel seeds.
‘The warbler is our friend because it eats harmful insects,’ said Pinness. ‘It has a little body and a long tail.’
He took me home with him. From the hundreds of hollowed- out birds’ eggs he kept in boxes, he produced a warbler’s egg to show me. It was pale and tiny with red speckles at the ends. A few days later we dodged through thick undergrowth, listening to the male warbler’s mating chirp and watching him balance with his tail. His long, sharp bill was indeed perfectly adapted to catching insects.
‘Good morning, boys and girls. My name is Ya’akov.’ Pinness’s spectacles swept over the room and paused to smile at me and my briefcase, which had once been filled with classical records. It had been in his house the night of my parents’ death and so had survived the fire. Before the start of the school year he brought it to me. ‘Tomorrow you’re starting school, Baruch. This is your father’s briefcase. I kept it for you.’
Every year he came to the first-year classroom to greet the new pupils. Generally, he took advantage of the opportunity to tell a story. This time it was about the mighty Samson. The school walls shook when he roared like the mangled lion.
‘Now tell me, children,’ he asked when he had finished, ‘what made Samson a hero?’
‘’Cause he killed the lion,’ said Rilov’s granddaughter Ya’el.
‘’Cause he knocked down the Philistines’ house,’ said Yosi.
‘He wasn’t afraid of bees. He took the honey with his hands,’ said Margulis’s grandson Micha.
‘I never thought of that before,’ Pinness commented excitedly.
After school he held a teachers’ meeting.
‘I have been young and now I am old,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen generations of children come and go, and still I am filled with wonder by their wisdom. This morning a boy in the first year told me that the heroism of Samson was more a matter of mental courage than of physical strength, as evidenced by the fact that he was not afraid to reach bare-handed into a wild beehive for its honey.’
He eyed the teachers one by one.
‘You are the custodians of a rare treasure, of the tenderest, most beautiful saplings that this village has planted in its earth. You must water and fertilise and enrich them, but be careful how you prune them.’
That night, while I lay eavesdropping on them from my bed, Pinness told Grandfather about Margulis’s grandson and his talk with the teachers.
‘You see, Ya’akov,’ said the teacher, ‘Hayyim Margulis’s little grandson sees his father and grandfather put on masks, gloves, and protective suits and smoke the bees from their hives. But Samson stepped up with no protection at all and took the honey as easily as bread from a baby. In that boy’s eyes no deed could be more heroic.’
‘That’s marvellous,’ said Grandfather. ‘But ripping apart a lion bare-handed is a tall order for anyone, beekeeper’s mask or not.’
I could hear his voice choke. He grimaced as though from pain.
‘What’s that got to do with it, Mirkin?’ asked Pinness. ‘What does it matter if the boy was right or not? What matters is the sweet freshness of these children’s pure, innocent minds. You, as a planter, should be the first to realise how difficult it is to cultivate such a thing.’
‘It’s time you stopped making all those comparisons, Ya’akov,’ said Grandfather. ‘There’s no connection whatsoever between planting and education. Or between human beings and animals. Or between a Capnodis caterpillar and the way a man thinks.’
After school I had lunch with Grandfather. Sometimes, though, if he had work to do or was feeling below par, I ate in Rachel Levin’s house. Her thick, tight curls were already streaked with grey. All day long she went about in a green work smock.
I was fascinated by the bottoms of her feet gliding soundlessly across the floor.
‘Would you like to learn to walk quietly?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I said enthusiastically. I had heard stories about my uncle Efrayim and had already begun my own prowling.
‘Come, I’ll show you how it’s done.’
She took me out to her garden. The Levins kept a few chickens and a rabbit hutch near their house, beside rows of vegetables and spices. Levin had tried growing vegetables on his own when he first came to the village, but he possessed a grey thumb that made plants wilt on the spot. He ate his sallow tomatoes and pallid peppers with relish and even tried convincing the experts that they were new varieties he had developed, yet it was only after his marriage, when Rachel took over the garden, that Levin, who had always dreamed of being a farmer, enjoyed the fruits of his land at last. Rachel Levin planted vegetables and flowers and brought boxes and cans of basil plants from her parents, and at night man and beast came to stand outside her fence and imbibe the good smell.
Rachel broke a few dry twigs from the hedge and scattered them over the path.
‘Watch carefully, Baruch,’ she said, stepping soundlessly over them. ‘Now you do it.’
The twigs popped beneath my feet. Rachel laughed.
‘At your age Efrayim was as quiet as a flannel cloth on a table. When you put down your foot, make sure it’s soft and flat. And breathe from the stomach, not from the chest.’
She laid down some more twigs, but with the same results.
‘You walk like an old cow,’ she sighed. ‘We’ll have to wait for Efrayim to return.’
Levin came home for lunch. He didn’t look like Grandmother’s photograph at all. He was always pale and weak, and dragged his legs instead of walking quietly.
And yet, I thought, perhaps all the Levins were like that, which was why Grandmother had died young.
Sometimes Avraham invited me to eat with him. Because of Rivka, however, that was something I preferred not to do. Best of all I liked eating with Grandfather, even if all he could cook was baked potatoes. After lunch I stole over to the paved path
beneath Avraham and Rivka’s window to listen in on their table talk.
Uri, a curious and cynical thrill-seeker even then, had no trouble spoiling his parents’ appetite.
‘What did Grandmother die of?’ he asked all of a sudden.
I could hear Avraham frown. ‘She was ill.’
‘What with?’
‘Stop being a pest, Uri.’
‘Nira Liberson says she wasn’t ill.’
‘Why don’t you tell Liberson’s granddaughters to mind their own business.’
It was quiet for a while. Then I heard Rivka say: ‘She was killed by the grandfather you all adore. Didn’t you know?’
I stood up and peeked over the windowsill. Rivka was angrily scrubbing the oilcloth on the table, her chest, stomach, and thighs wobbling beneath her dress like a herd of double chins. Flies kept landing on the jam stains left from breakfast. Avraham ate in silence. So did Yosi. Both used their bread to shovel food onto their forks.
‘The salad needs more dressing,’ said Yosi. He and his father liked to dip their bread in the salad dressing.
‘Do you want a salad or a swamp?’ Rivka asked.
‘He’s right,’ said Avraham. ‘We like dressing.’
‘Yes, and you’ve both got fat sopping it up with bread.’
‘But how could he have killed her?’ asked Uri, who saw no future in discussing the salad.
‘With blocks of ice and letters from Russia,’ said Rivka.
‘I don’t think these are stories for nine-year-old boys,’ said Avraham, the lines beginning to crawl in his forehead.
There was a sharp rap on the window. It was Yosi’s falcon, beating its wings against the glass pane. Hurriedly I ducked and crawled away. Yosi had taken the red falcon from its nest when it was a fledgling covered with white fuzz, hissing and bristling angrily at the world. For three months, while it grew and got its wing feathers, he fed it mice and lizards that he caught. Hopping and stumbling about on its sharp talons, the bird followed its master around the yard as faithfully as a dog. When the time
was ripe, Yosi took it up to the roof of the cowshed and tossed it in the air to teach it to fly. The falcon learned but did not fly away. It remained in our yard, trilling and calling for Yosi all the time. You couldn’t leave a window open for a moment, because it would fly inside, tearing curtains and smashing vases in its delight. When all its fellow birds had already left for points south, it alone remained behind.
‘Highly unusual,’ said Pinness. ‘It’s highly unusual for a red falcon to winter in this country. Such loyalty!’
‘Get that damn bird out of here!’ screamed Rivka.
Uri began to giggle.
‘You should be glad it comes to us and not to your father,’ said Avraham.
Rivka’s father, Tanchum Peker the saddler, had waxed enthusiastic when his grandson decided to raise a falcon. ‘We’ll make a hunting bird of him,’ he said, his bald head glistening with anticipated excitement. Peker had once been one of the busiest men in the village, a stitcher and mender of harnesses, bridles, reins, and traces whose hames were famous in the Valley for never chafing an animal’s neck. Grandfather once described to me how Peker had cut strips of leather into whips, running his knife along the large hides while grunting, tongue out with the effort. ‘He had such a sure hand that the tip of the whip began to quiver as soon as it was free.’ Peker’s business declined when draught animals were replaced by tractors, but the odour of leather and saddle soap clung to his fingers and boots, and the wooden walls of his workshop continued to smell of it.