The Blue Mountain (36 page)

I had no one except Pinness, who liked to chat with me, trying out new ideas and answering my questions. Sometimes Zeitser looked in my window and nodded, but he too was very old and hardly spoke any more.

In the mornings I rose feeling weak from the smell of Grandfather, which lingered in the cabin. The olives I cured didn’t taste like his. They grew mushy and rotten in no time because I never managed to get the salt right. The fresh egg either sank to the bottom like a rock or jumped out of the barrel as if shot from a catapult.

I was, as Uri put it, ‘a lone bird on a roof’. Until he was made to
leave the village he came to see me every morning, bringing two pieces of cake stolen from his mother’s pantry, one for me and one for Zeitser.

‘How can you live like this?’ he asked.

Swallows nested in the corners of the ceiling, and grey lichen pocked the walls.

‘You can’t let the cabin go to pieces like this,’ said Meshulam. ‘It’s one of the last artifacts left from the village’s first years.’ He had come to borrow Grandfather’s old hat for one of his exhibits. It was a grey floppy-brimmed thing that I sometimes liked to wear to the fields.

Alone in the cabin, pacing the floorboards between the rotting walls, I groaned for the grandfather who had abandoned me, for the father and mother who had died, for the uncle who had disappeared, for the stars above to save me from my loneliness and sorrow. My only friends were the spiders jiggling in the corners and the translucent geckos who scaled the walls with their hands and looked at me with black innocent eyes. By day I tended Grandfather’s orchard. From the heights of his love nest he had instructed Avraham to put me in charge of it.

‘The child needs something to do,’ he said. ‘And he has a good pair of hands.’

I pruned, notched buds, tied branches, smeared tree tar on wounds, and let the fruit ripen and fall like Grandfather had. Now and then Avraham asked for a hand in the cowshed, which I was always glad to lend. I liked unloading heavy bales from the cart and stacking them in the hayloft, cleaning the sewage ditch, and dragging the giddy, excited young heifers to their first tryst with the inseminator.

Whenever things seemed so hopeless that I felt my bones begin to rot, I would go and wrestle the calves in the feed pen. As I playfully grabbed a half-ton yearling by the horns, Zeitser would raise his wrinkled head from his pile of old newspapers and give me a quizzical look. The calves, gargantuan crossbreeds of Brahma, Angus, and Charolais, let out glad, chesty bellows when they saw me coming, pulling off my shirt as I drew near. They loved me for being the one bright spot in their brief, nasty lives.

Raising beef cattle was a highly profitable business in those days, but the sight of the meat dealers pulling up in their lorries always made my uncle Avraham glower. Wrapping a calf’s tail around a fist, they would twist it painfully back and forth while leading the big animals to the lorry ramp. Avraham couldn’t bear it. For two or three days after the teary-eyed calves were taken to the slaughterhouse, his muscles were so tense that he staggered stiffly around the yard like a mechanical doll.

Although he never said anything about my horseplay with the calves, a small, slow smile of approval spread over his face when he watched it, smoothing the furrows in his brow. Sometimes, stepping sweaty and bare-chested out of the pen, the veins bulging under my skin, I spied Aunt Rivka hiding behind the thick trunk of a eucalyptus tree.

‘Why don’t you find yourself a girl instead of laying bulls in their own shit?’ she shouted angrily before hurrying off.

In Grandfather’s drawers I found old papers and documents, flowers dried by my mother, and letters from all over the country requesting agricultural advice. ‘I have such heavy soil that the water stands after a rain,’ wrote Aryeh Ben-David of Kfar Yitzchak. ‘Do you think I should plant peach trees?’

Grandfather attached a copy of his answer to each letter. He advised ‘Dear Aryeh’ to plant a hundred and forty-four trees to an acre and to graft them on myrobalan plum stock.

I found bits of gnawed, infected leaves that were sent to him for diagnosis and a note in his own hand that said, ‘Shimon, my friend, what I said about pruning back branches does not apply to a new vineyard. At this stage, no shoots from the graft should be touched. Just make sure to remove any suckers coming up from the stock.’

There were other finds too. ‘I’m living in a rented room with several other workers,’ wrote Shlomo Levin from Jerusalem to his sister in the Galilee. ‘Every day I come home with my hands so raw and swollen from cutting stones that I can’t touch a thing. Not far from here are a few old olive trees that I go and lean my head against and cry like a small child. Will I ever make a working man? Or am I just a mummy’s boy?’

Rain drummed on the roof of the cabin, the slow, full rain of the Valley which turns the earth into a quagmire and a man’s flesh into a sponge. I enjoyed walking in it like the old-timers, with an empty sack rolled up over my head and shoulders like a huge monk’s hood. Once a week I went to see the film showing at the meeting house, more for the sake of seeing Rilov bounce some trespasser from his regular seat than anything else. Sometimes I walked to the spring, where I lay on my back looking up at the sky through the bushes. It was here that Grandfather had come with his firstborn son, baby Avraham, the night the whole village climbed the water tower to see his magic halo.

‘I kept a small campfire going all night,’ Grandfather told me. ‘It drove off the jackals and made the blackberries and papyrus reeds glow yellow. Avraham slept, and I sat there and thought.’

Three times a week a woman comes to clean my house. At night I sit drinking tea and thinking in my spotless kitchen, picturing the village in the dark.

Our village is shaped like an H. The farmers’ houses run along the two vertical arms, their farmyards backing off to either side. The Mirkin farm is in the north-eastern corner, and the school, the meeting house, the breeder, the dairy, the clinic, the store, the feed shack, and the post office are in the village centre. The non-farmers live here too, their homes surrounded by small gardens and auxiliary barnyards.

It’s hard to imagine that it was all a wilderness once. The old photographs in Meshulam’s boxes – tents in a treeless landscape, poorly dressed men and women, skinny chickens, cows as meagre as those in Pharaoh’s dream – look like they were taken elsewhere. Lofty avenues of cypresses and casuarinas now line the entrance to every farmhouse. Slender-trunked Washingtonia palms, planted in those first years, shake their wild heads of hair in the sky.

I planted a dozen such palms myself in a handsome boulevard by the entrance to Pioneer Home. By then the only Mirkins left in the village were Avraham, Rivka, and Yosi. Every Saturday they went to visit Uri. Sometimes they invited me along.

Yosi drove the old Studebaker. Although he didn’t have a licence, he was an excellent, careful driver. You could see the road running into his eyes as if his brain were endlessly digesting it. Avraham kept silent, and Rivka, after trying to make small talk about this or that, gave up and sat there like the scolded calf she was so good at imitating.

Her brother, with whom Uri was now living, had left the village after his discharge from the army and become a successful earthmover. He had tractors working for him all over the country and businesses in Africa and Latin America. A small, rich, jovial man, he was immensely fond of me and liked to challenge me to wrestling matches. Slapping me on the back as hard as he could, he asked if I wanted ‘a job as a bulldozer’ with him.

‘I hear you’re making money, young fellow,’ he said shrewdly, planting his little fist in the great wall of my stomach. ‘If you’d like a little power shovel for those graves of yours, just let me know.’

‘All I need is a pickaxe and a hoe,’ I said.

‘Before you know it he’ll be buying you and all your power shovels out,’ said Rivka.

Although the story of his relocation, which arrived together with him, had made Uri the local girls’ dream boy, he led a life of monkish abstinence.

‘Do you know what I’ve been thinking about?’ he asked when we were left alone at last for a few minutes. ‘I’ve been thinking about your parents – about your father, who looked up and knew that a woman would fall on him from above, and about your mother, who died hugging him in her sleep, dreaming of meat.’

36

A
fter departing with Shulamit, Grandfather returned to visit only once. I remember how my heart skipped a beat when I came home from the fields and saw the ambulance from the old folk’s
home parked in the yard. Entering the cabin, I found Grandfather lying in bed, with Avraham and the village doctor seated by his side. I was good and frightened, but Grandfather explained that he missed the cabin so much he had to see it again. By the door, the doctor asked to have a word with me.

Doctor Munk was new in the village. Grandfather was already in the old folk’s home when he came. He had an amiable blonde wife who made friends with everyone and sometimes substitute-taught in the school, a woman who smelled as clean as a cat and wore summery dresses perfumed with crushed lemon leaves. A month after her arrival, Pinness and all the women heard the cry, ‘I’m screwing the doctor’s wife.’

The doctor played the cello and even gave a few amateur recitals. One of them was attended by Tsirkin, who announced afterward that if he held his mandolin upside down between his legs, ‘it would howl like that too’.

‘Grandpa thinks he’s dying,’ said Doctor Munk with the fake intimacy he cultivated, as his revolting little dog tried to nip my heels. ‘I’ve examined him and there’s nothing wrong with him. It’s something that happens to people his age, and so we have to try to calm Grandpa down.’

Grandfather’s wanting to visit the village had aroused no suspicions in the old folk’s home. No sooner did he arrive, however, than he sent Avraham for the doctor.

‘I’m dying,’ he told Doctor Munk, ‘and I’d like to know what it will feel like.’

The odd thing was that Grandfather had never had the slightest use for doctors. He trusted only nurses and medics and couldn’t stand our former physician, a strange supervegetarian who had come to us from Scotland long before Efrayim’s letters and had been dead for several years. Far in advance of the discovery of penicillin he smeared infected cuts and drippy penises with bread mould, and included in his diet baked bulb of autumn crocus, mesocarp of mandrake, and ground walnut bark. He also made sure to sunbathe every morning, and his guests were offered such refreshments as mallow leaves picked by the roadside and purslane filched from the chickens’ feedboxes. His language
was a source of general amusement. One of his more famous diagnoses was, ‘The cow kicked Rilov in the head, and for half an hour he lay in manure with no sense.’

So healthy and balanced were the foods the Scottish doctor ate that he never aged at all. When as a man of eighty he crumbled to a yellow powder, the last of his cellulose consumed by bostrychids and weevils, there was not a wrinkle in his skin.

Doctor Munk was acquainted with the stories told about Ya’akov Mirkin in the village.

‘I’ve heard a lot about you, Grandpa,’ he said, leafing through the clinic’s medical file. ‘I’m glad to get to know you.’

He phoned the doctor at the old folk’s home, took Grandfather’s pulse and blood pressure, and performed a cardiogram to be on the safe side.

‘Grandpa,’ he said, ‘you’re as healthy as a horse. I wouldn’t send you to the Olympics, but you’re in fine form.’

‘Let’s get this right,’ said Grandfather, the chill in his voice cheering me. ‘In the first place, I’m not your grandfather. And in the second place, I didn’t ask for your medical opinion. Don’t call me Grandpa, and don’t send me to the Olympics. Just tell me what it feels like to die.’

‘To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t know,’ said the offended physician. ‘I suppose it depends what you die of.’

‘Old age,’ said Grandfather. ‘I intend to die of something as banal as old age.’

I was up all that night. I was so glad to have him back in the cabin and so scared by the way he talked that I was too tense to fall asleep. He himself, after laboriously rising to cover me and returning to bed, fell asleep like a baby.

As soon as the sun was up I made him breakfast. After we had eaten, Grandfather asked me to take him to the fields. I pushed him along the ruts of the tractor path in his wheelchair. The old milk cows sighed happily to see him as we passed the cowshed, but some of the young calves and heifers didn’t know who he was.

‘You need to put a salt lick in the feed stalls,’ Grandfather said to Avraham, who had just arrived.

‘Nowadays there’s already salt in the concentrate, Father,’ said Avraham.

‘Any cow would rather lick her own salt,’ insisted Grandfather stubbornly.

We passed the fig tree and the olive. Grandfather gave Zeitser a hug and patted him on his nose, which was as smooth and soft as a colt’s despite his great age.

We reached the orchard, which looked wild and healthy.

‘Very nice,’ said Grandfather, fingering the leaves and branches. ‘Go and bring me some fruit.’

He sniffed the Methley and Vixen plums, varieties no one grew any more, and declared that the soil needed nitrogen. Next autumn, he suggested, I should enrich it by sowing sweet peas among the trees.

‘Listen to me, Baruch,’ he said all of a sudden. ‘That doctor knows nothing. I’m dying and I want to be buried here, in my orchard.’

I could feel my face twitch. A frightened smile struggled for a foothold at one corner of my mouth.

‘But Avraham wants to keep up the orchard. You yourself asked me to look after it,’ I said.

‘And so you will,’ said Grandfather. ‘Don’t you worry. I won’t take up much room.’

‘Listen to me carefully, my child,’ he added after a while. ‘I didn’t come here to visit. I came here to die. I want to do it at home, because it will be easier to bury me here if you don’t have to ask anyone’s permission or snatch my body from the freezer at the old folk’s home.’