The Blue Mountain (35 page)
‘Border crossings never posed a problem for Efrayim,’ remarked his old commander Lord Lovat, who arrived for a visit from London. ‘Your son was a first-rate soldier and a true friend,’ he told Grandfather. ‘We kept in touch even after his discharge. He helped us immensely.’
Grandfather bit his lips and said nothing.
Lord Lovat was a slim old gentleman who leaned on a carved walking stick and kept his throat covered with a blue silk scarf. The scarf also concealed a stainless steel pipe that stuck out of his shredded Adam’s apple and whistled softly when he laughed. Accompanying him was a tall, attractive middle-aged woman who began to shiver when she entered the village.
Lord Lovat signed the village visitors’ book and then, curious to see where Efrayim had learned the art of silent walking, was
taken to Rachel Levin’s home. He watched in amazement as the bronzed old woman glided over to a rabbit filching greens from her garden and scared it to death by shouting ‘Boo!’ into its long ear.
Soon after he and Grandfather had closeted themselves for a long talk in the cabin, I was discovered eavesdropping near the timber wall and sent to join the pretty woman in the orchard. She walked among the blossoming trees, pressing their petals to her throat while singing and laughing in low tones.
I was asked to guard her, and I did, walking as quietly behind her as I could at a safe distance so that she could waltz unhindered among the pear trees. Not even Avraham or Grandfather recognised her. I alone caught a whiff of her scent and heard the bulls bellow as they lunged at the fences of their pens.
‘Ya’akov,’ said Grandfather to Pinness when Lord Lovat and his attractive companion were gone, ‘do you remember how Jacob says in the Bible, “My son is yet alive, I will go see him before I die”?’
‘And he did see him, Ya’akov,’ Pinness said. ‘In the end he saw him.’
‘This Jacob will never see his son again,’ said Grandfather. ‘The only thing still keeping me alive is getting even with you all. You drove him from the village, and I’ll get you where it hurts the most, in the earth. I’ll get Shulamit in the heart, and you in the earth.’
S
he had a hard Russian
r
and deep, spongy
l
’s. Once all the founders of the village talked like that, but the local air stretched their palates, widened their larynxes, and diluted the thick saliva in their mouths.
‘For sixty-five years your grandfather wrestled with Shulamit
in his heart. He wallowed in sands and swamps like an animal to get rid of the smell and touch of her; he tried to purge her from every orifice of his body, rooting her out with the long steel wires of memory. But her skin shimmered at him in the pear petals and from the flank of the blue mountain. No stone skimmed across the ponds of his soul ever sank to the bottom. Each pelican swooping low over Liberson’s house showed him her white breast.’
Pinness, now a fat, hungry, curious, sick old man, easily waxed poetic. Camouflaged as an old nature teacher, he clasped me to his breast, jabbing me with reflections and spines of love. When I started to cry in a thick, sticky voice he patted the back of my neck.
‘Revenge is patient,’ he said, ‘as patient as the bulb of the squill awaiting summer’s end. Its greatest pleasure lies in ripening and refinement. It takes shape in the deepest recesses of the soul, beneath the thin surfaces of wheat fields and smooth complexions, in hidden clefts and cleavages.’
Towards the end of his life no revenge escaped his notice. He explained to me how Grandfather had wreaked vengeance on the village and on Shulamit, and how the earth had wreaked vengeance on us all. The things he said in those years shocked the village more than anything except Pioneer Home.
‘Long accustomed to the stench of saints’ bones and the gross feet of pilgrims and legions, this vulgar earth must have split its sides laughing at the sight of us pioneers kissing it and watering it with our tears of thanksgiving, possessing it in a frenzy, thrusting our little hoes into its great body, calling it mother, sister, lover. Even as we ploughed our first furrows and planted our first crops, as we weeded, drained swamps, and cleared thickets, we sowed the seed of our own failure.’
His voice became almost festive as he continued.
‘We may have drained the swamps, but the mud we discovered beneath them was far worse. Man’s bond with the earth, man’s union with Nature – is there anything more regressive and bestial? We raised a new generation of Jews who were no longer alienated and downtrodden, a generation of farmers linked to
the land, a society of the grossest, most quarrelsome, most narrow-minded, most thick-skinned and thick-headed peasants! Your uncle Avraham understood that when he was nine, your grandfather understood it when Efrayim disappeared, and I understood it when I saw him let the fruit rot in his orchard while caring only for the flowers. Uri had to have his spleen kicked in before he understood it too.
‘There is no such earth,’ concluded Pinness, who had clearly been saving up his punchline. ‘And there is no such lover, either.’
Old and frail, Grandfather stood facing me and Shulamit.
‘I’m going to live with her from now on,’ he told me. ‘Please understand me, my child. At my age it’s the only thing I can do. But I can’t do it here. Not in this house.’
I heard familiar steps approaching the cabin. Pinness knocked and entered, followed by Liberson and Tsirkin.
Breathing heavily and embracing, they all burst into horrible sobs. I was so dumbfounded by the emotion gushing from their old Russian hides that I turned around and left. That night I slept among the bales in the hayloft with no Grandfather to cover me. Even when his friends left after midnight, the lights stayed on in the cabin. When I returned in the morning he was slowly making himself breakfast and the Crimean whore was fast asleep in his bed.
‘I never showed you this picture,’ said Grandfather. He ran his fingers over the paper lining of the trunk, fumbling gently until he found what he was looking for. Taking out his grafting knife, he slit and peeled back the paper, reached inside with two fingers, and drew out an old photograph.
‘This is her,’ he whispered, nodding toward the bed. ‘Back there, when we were young.’
The photograph had been slashed nearly in two from top to bottom, as though with a sickle stroke. It was held together by some old brown masking tape stuck to its back.
In a dark blouse with a round collar and a narrow tie of black velvet, Shulamit was seated on a carved chair. Her eyebrows
arched like proud crescents in her vertically severed young face. Her hands, snipped by the hateful scissors, were crossed with an infinite calm, with all the radiant confidence of a beautiful woman.
‘When we went swimming in the river at night, in our little nook of reeds and rushes, Shulamit glimmered like a heron.’
She slept with all the officers, I told myself, and with all the old Red Army generals. Everyone knows she did. She was the reason you couldn’t sleep at night. She was the reason Grandmother died.
Grandfather rose, stretched himself painfully on tiptoe, and hit me in the face with his fist. He was so old and weak that it didn’t even hurt, but I broke into a sweat like a mule ploughing in autumn, and my eyes filled with tears.
Then Shulamit awoke and I ran out. Half an hour later they emerged for a walk around the yard. I followed behind them at a distance. Grandfather showed her Avraham’s milking shed, the hayloft, and old Zeitser, who was munching his pensioner’s breakfast. The mule regarded her with equanimity. At his advanced age he knew well that the beast hath no advantage over the man and that the life of both is nothing but one long tug at a stuck cart that never breaks free of pitfalls, sand traps, and bogs. They passed the remains of Grandmother Feyge’s old earthen stove, whose ruined walls still smelled of bread, pain, and baked pumpkin, and headed for the orchard. From afar I saw Grandfather’s long sleeves flap as he showed Shulamit the different trees. I knew that he was waving goodbye – to the peaches, to the pears, to the almonds, to me.
‘Just look at them,’ said Uri, coming up and standing by my side. ‘Straight out of the pages of a Russian novel.’
A month later the two of them moved to the old folk’s home. Until his dying day Grandfather retaliated with a deliberate, calculated, and relentless love whose heartless skill and soft old movements of pleasure made Shulamit shed her grey leafage, scratch at the walls, and stamp her feet as hard as her rheumatic old joints would permit.
* * *
And then, as Uri later wrote me, Grandfather died and everything began to fall apart. Rivka’s screams grew ten times louder, Avraham’s silences and crease lines deepened, and I myself all but stopped eating, because a great tuber of yearning was swelling and sprouting in my stomach. The news that Mirkin had left home got around quickly, racing through the pens and sheds and flying over the fields. It took no more than a few days for weeds to overrun the vegetable and flower gardens by the cabin. Black ants, their high abdomens arched almost to their backs, scooted madly across the floor. Three despairing almond trees, their hollow interiors claimed by the bright sawdust of Doubt, collapsed in the orchard. Ruthless cattle flies descended on the yard, and their strong, stout beaks drilled through the skin of man and beast, leaving bloody puncture marks and testy animals who couldn’t keep their minds on their work.
When thorny prosopis plants burst through the floor of the cabin, their ugly fruits distended like cancerous glands before my eyes, I rose from bed and called for Yosi. Armed with hoes, we went to the garden and began rooting out the long, tough nodules that had spread beneath the earth as the malediction of branches grew above it. Yosi had had enough after a day. His hands were blistered, and he couldn’t straighten his back that night.
‘It’s hopeless,’ he said to me. ‘Cut them back above ground once a week, keep dousing them with petrol, and maybe you’ll get rid of them.’
But I wanted to go for the jugular, for the hidden body that had waited for Grandfather to depart before reaching out its tentacles and creeping up at me from the earth.
The deep trench I had dug crossed the yard and ran out to the fields. I extended it now towards the orchard, sending clods of earth flying with great whacks of the hoe as I cut through acres of corn and clover and worked my way through the ruins of the British ack-ack positions, to the consternation of moles and centipedes and the dismay of unearthed pot-shards and mole crickets. I rooted out every side shoot I could find, and four days later I straightened up to find myself down by the spring.
Here, by the blackberries where the infant Avraham lay glowing in the dark and Pinness met the old Arab walking behind his plough, there was still a strong sulphurous stench of Bulgakov. His silken hairs floated in the air, and the venomous, spittley breath of the hyena condensed on the elecampane leaves. It was here that I traced the mother plant to its lair.
Suddenly the stubborn root thickened and dived down into the bowels of the earth. I wrapped it around my waist, dug in my heels and began to pull. I was in great shape, nineteen stone of meat and gristle, as tall as my mother and as strong as my father. Slowly the earth lifted as the yellowish root came to light, raising great clumps of soil, rat corpses, buried owl turds, large pewter beer mugs, and crushed tin toys still warm from the hands of the German children who had gone clutching them to their malarial deaths.
I toppled backwards when the rootstalk came out, its white rootlets wriggling like parasitic worms as they looked for something to grip. A great hole remained in the ground, and from it rose a milky, pestilent vapour thick with swarms of mosquitoes. Peering down into it, I saw the dense, murky water of the past swirling slowly, little grubs clinging to its surface and breathing patiently through their short air tubes. Like any old pupil of Pinness’s, I could have identified the larvae of the anopheles mosquito with my eyes closed.
A deep gurgle sounded from the hole. Shut up by the founders in the bowels of the earth, imprisoned in the trunks of the eucalyptus trees they planted, the soughing swamp began to surge toward me as it was touched by the sun’s rays.
I was seized by fear. All the horror stories I had heard from the old pioneers until they were flesh of my flesh now came to life. As fast as I could I hoed the earth back into the hole, stamping on it insanely with all my weight and strength.
I came home to find the feathery prosopis leaves wilted and moribund, tore what was left of them out of the ground with my hands, and went to sleep. I stayed in bed for days, breathing the smell of the spring, the sappy odour of the cabin’s wooden walls, and the fragrance of Grandfather. It was then I first realised that
my own life, overpowered in his body’s huge shade, had grown like a low fern, mere mould of the forest floor.
Long night after night I lay without a blanket, listening to tiny footsteps on the roof and tremulous chirps of yellow-plumed chicks, until Avraham came to me with a full pitcher and told me that Grandfather had asked for milk.
At about that time I was informed that as an orphan I was exempt from the army. In the village it was rumoured that I had been found psychologically unfit.
‘What else could you expect from a child who adopted a mad grandfather as his mother?’ asked my aunt Rivka.
Never an easy woman, Aunt Rivka had loathed me openly since Grandfather’s departure for the old folk’s home. She was so worried he might will the farm to me that she kept begging her sons to visit him. Yosi, though, said he was too busy with the cows, while Uri didn’t give a damn.
‘I couldn’t care less about trees, and I don’t intend to be a farmer,’ he announced. ‘Who wants to live in a place like this? There’s nothing to do here but blabber about cows all day long.’
Still, everyone watched his step with me. I was the strongest teenager in the village. At the age of fourteen I was already anchor man on our tug-of-war team. Before each match Grandfather would say to me, ‘Just dig your heels in and stay put, Baruch. We’ll show ’em!’