The Blue Mountain (38 page)
‘“Comrade Liberson: Comrade Shenhar is violating the village by-laws. We returned to the earth to farm it and to live by our own labours.
‘“Advocate Shapiro: My client is acting in perfect conformity with the ideals of co-operative farming that you speak of. He employs no hired labour and pays all his taxes and dues to the co-operative as required. If I may be allowed to say so, my client is definitely engaged in returning Jews to the earth, and the homage paid by him to the pioneers of your Movement should be a source of pride and honour to it.
‘“Comrade Rilov: That’s enough of your stupid jokes.
‘“Advocate Shapiro: My client quite literally earns his livelihood from the earth. He supports himself by his own labour, considers himself a tiller of the soil, regards the mortuary profession as a branch of agriculture, and uses agricultural tools to excavate, plant, fertilise, and irrigate his prospering business. His graves are drought-resistant, pest-resistant, frost-resistant, and disease-free. I hereby submit a detailed cost accounting demonstrating that an acre of graves is more profitable than any other agricultural crop, both in absolute terms and relative to the investment demanded.”
‘And that,’ trilled Busquilla, ‘is what killed them the most. Your profits, Comrade Shenhar. The cash. The fact that we make more money farming than they do.’
P
inness’s scientific reputation dated back to his discovery of the prehistoric cave. ‘The village and I were both young then,’ he told me. Like all his pupils, I knew the cave well. It was on a rocky slope overlooking the Valley, at the far end of the village cemetery, its entrance hidden by a clump of prickly pears and the stone ruins of the German settlers. At my grandmother Feyge’s funeral Pinness had noticed two Little Owls, a male and a female, bowing and curtseying to the mourners while curiously regarding them through slit golden eyes. ‘My heart is smitten and withered like grass, so that I forget to eat my bread,’ he eulogised his friend’s wife. ‘I am like a griffon of the wilderness; I am like an owl of the ruins.’ Several days later he returned to find that the two small birds of prey were nesting among the stone ruins. Scattered on the ground were the silvery skulls of field mice, dry, hardened bird spew, and the wings of devoured grasshoppers. A stench of carrion arose from two little fledglings in a nest, whose white plumage and angry hisses made him think of a pair of Hasidic dwarfs.
‘When I knelt to have a closer look at them, I spotted the entrance to the cave.’
At first he took it to be an ancient monk’s cell. Making his way around a large rock, he hacked a path through the prickly pears and entered. The walls exuded a strange, dim odour, a whisper of quenched campfires, dry rot, and the gummiferous smell of frozen time. The flint tools that Pinness found were buried beneath a surface layer of ash and animal dung that was easily scooped away. As he dug farther, he came across the famous cranium that brought a team of scientists all the
way from England. In this very cave, so their dig determined, had dwelt
Homo sapiens palestinaeus
.
‘
Homo palestinaeus
was never
sapiens
,’ I was told years later by Pinness, whose stroke had improved his sense of humour and made him more tolerant of shenanigans like Uri’s and backbiting like Levin’s.
The archaeologists from London found five human skeletons in the cave, three of adults and two of children. The thought of it gave Pinness the shivers. ‘Just imagine them digging up our own graves someday! I can picture the pickaxes poking at Leah, baring the blue little bones of her poor innocent twins trapped between her rib cage and her pelvis.’
Stone weapons, a large buffalo femur split along its length, and the splintered vertebrae of rhinoceros calves told Pinness that the cave dwellers had been hunters and not farmers. An old sense of resentment came over him. The flint knives, the buried arrowheads, the thick, squat, beetle-browed skulls – all reminded him of Rilov.
Stepping back out of the cave, he sat in the entrance looking down on the broad, obeisant, fertile Valley at his feet. The humble cabins of the village, its infant streets and young shade trees, suddenly seemed to float on the fallow, long-historied earth, bobbing on its countless strata. The first geometric fields of the pioneers looked like so much patchwork, mere cobwebbery. He was still a young man, and the thought of vast epochs swinging over the Valley like pendulums induced in him a feeling of vertigo.
The Englishmen included an old professor who, Pinness said, ‘took a grand liking to me’, and a merry troupe of tall students in pith helmets and wide-bottomed knickerbockers who pitched a large tent on the hill and came down to the village each day to buy eggs, milk, and cheese. They took their midday meals at Riva Margulis’s, paying for them in full, and nodding and stamping their stockinged feet beneath the table in surprised approval of the crystal service, the Siberian lace tablecloth, and the gold-rimmed drinking glasses.
‘The Committee permitted Riva to use them, although they
were really hers anyway,’ explained Pinness, his voice dropping to a whisper. ‘They came in the steamer trunk her parents sent from Russia.’
By the time Pinness told me about the cave and its archaeological deposits, Riva’s famed luxury trunk had long been buried beneath thick layers of earth and forgetfulness.
‘That was one of the first trials we were put to.’ Along with my uncle Avraham’s poem, the plague of locusts during the Great War, and the death of Leah Pinness, Riva’s trunk lay interred at such depths that only a hydraulic plough could have unearthed it.
‘After marrying Margulis, Riva wrote her parents a letter about him and his bees telling them how she loved the hard field work and enclosing some photographs of herself – a little maid from the Land of Israel in a dress of coarse grey Arab cloth, scattering chicken feed in the yard and gathering honey from the hives.
‘At the time of their wedding,’ said Pinness, ‘no one, not even Margulis himself, knew that the bride was the daughter of Beilin of Kiev, the richest Jew in the Ukraine.’
Six months later a cart arrived drawn by three span of oxen. Six Cossacks and four Cherkessians, Winchester rifles slipped through their saddles and gleaming daggers thrust in their belts, escorted it on small, nervous horses. It bore a large trunk out of which came ebony furniture, sets of dishes thinner than air, silk pillows, quilts puffed with goose down, blue lace curtains, and Bukharan rugs. Somehow Riva’s parents had managed to smuggle out a trousseau under the eyes of the Bolsheviks. That evening Tonya Rilov, beside herself with envy and principles, insisted on convening the Committee, whose members had already noticed a wild gleam in the eyes of the female comrades. The urgently called session made it clear to Riva that the co-operative would not abide such luxuries in the home of a Hebrew farmer. Either she could send the trunk packing, or else she could pack and leave with it.
‘I have a better suggestion,’ proposed Margulis mildly. ‘Riva and I have already talked it over and would like to donate the entire trousseau to the village.’
Choking on the lump in her throat, Riva nodded her agreement, and Rilov and Liberson were sent to take possession of her treasure. For years afterwards she had to watch ragged farmers eating from her family crystal, their grimy fingers clutching her gold forks while they jokingly addressed each other with courtly phrases, bowing, scraping, and dancing minuets in newly reaped fields. I can remember Pinness repeating the word ‘
narodniks
’– Russian nobles – as he told me about it. Liberson, who never missed a chance to make his wife laugh and stay in her good graces, fashioned himself a beard out of corncobs, dressed up as Count Tolstoy, and sallied forth in a long white shirt to his comrades in the fields, greeting them as his serfs and serving them chilled lemonade in fancy glasses poured from a cut-glass jug.
Riva’s lacquered Chinese sideboard stood in the Committee tent until it was eaten by oak borers. The silver was traded for six cows and a spoiled, evil-tempered Frisian bull. With one of the Bukharan rugs Rilov bought a disassembled howitzer, while the goose down was divided up among the villagers, each family getting an equal quiltful. Tonya and the village by-laws were satisfied; Riva sulked bitterly, even when Margulis reassured her that his honey tasted better licked from fingers than from golden spoons. He salved her rough hands with beeswax and dripped stalactites of honey on her navel, but she refused to be consoled. Although she seemed to have resigned herself to the village’s verdict, ‘she sobbed so gustily at night that you could hear Margulis’s tent flaps whipping in the wind’.
‘What even the Bolsheviks couldn’t take from my father our own Reds stole from me,’ she said to her husband.
Within two years all the crystal was broken. It was so transparent that it was invisible when empty, and glass after glass was swept off kitchen tables by the rude hands of the farmers.
Margulis spent the days herding his bees among the flowers. When the last cups and dishes were shattered, Riva was left to her own devices with nothing but dust, sweat, utopian visions, and the thick smell of cow manure.
‘It was then that she went mad,’ said Pinness. ‘The normal feminine passion for cleanliness, which is simply a higher form
of the nesting instinct, turned into an insane obsession.’ Armed with a tightly bound kerchief, an apron, strips of old clothes, and a pair of rubber boots, she went forth to do battle each day.
First she banished the rubbish bin, since the presence of filth, even with a lid on, upset her delicate nerves. Dozens of times a day her children had to walk the hundred and fifty yards to the cowshed, where they dumped cucumber peels, breakfast leftovers, and swept-up table crumbs onto a big compost pile.
‘She kept watching the skies,’ put in Grandfather.
‘Like Grandmother?’ I asked.
Grandfather did not answer.
‘Everyone in this village watched the skies,’ said Liberson. ‘For rain clouds. Or homing pigeons. Or locusts.’
‘Or migrating birds,’ added Fanya scornfully.
But Riva watched the skies because she expected the imminent arrival of dust clouds from the desert and flocks of defecating starlings from the north. ‘Filthbirds,’ she called them. Around her cabin she set out a dozen large flytraps, wooden crates with nets, a bait of meat or rotten fruit, and an opening below where the flies could swarm in but could not get out again. Such traps are used successfully in the village to this day, but Riva’s were perpetually empty, since the flies soon learned that she and her house were poor pickings.
Every day the English scientists regarded her blithely when she made them remove their shoes before entering her house to eat their borscht, chicken, and potatoes; thanked her politely, and returned to their cave accompanied by Pinness.
‘I used to join them because I liked their company, until Liberson informed me that no self-respecting socialist would be caught wolfing fried chicken paid for by the English bourgeoisie when his comrades were eating baked pumpkin and wild mallow.’
The English did not understand why Pinness stopped taking his meals with them. He, for his part, could not fathom why they never sang when they wielded their hoes.
After excavating and sifting thirty cubic yards of earth, the archaeologists ran into a huge slab of slate that blocked off the
space behind it. There was an ominous rumble when they tried to move it. Pinness recommended consulting an expert mason who could find the fault lines in its veins and even brought such a man from Nazareth, an old Arab who descended into the cave, put an ear to the stone slab, scratched at it lightly with his chisel, tapped it with his fingers, and announced that it was as fragile as glass and would bury them all in a cave-in if they tried to break through. And so the back of the cave remained unexplored.
Eventually the Englishmen packed their finds and belongings and went home. The district governor had an iron door made for the cave entrance, locked it, and gave Pinness the key. None too gently, Rilov demanded that the cave be used for hiding dynamite and corpses and conducting secret initiation rites, but Pinness adamantly refused. With a surprisingly mulish show of courage he told Rilov that any sign of the door’s having been tampered with would be reported to the governor at once.
The cave became his retreat. ‘Everyone needs to bury himself somewhere,’ he chuckled. Best of all he liked to sit in the entrance looking down on the Valley from an unconventional perspective of time and space. Though he never slept in it, fearing not only cave fever but all kinds of prehistoric diseases that the ticks which lived there might infect him with, odd strains of Neanderthalian typhus and even more primitive and incurably pre-anthropoid illnesses, he visited it often for research and meditation.
There in the bowels of the earth Pinness discovered blind snakes that lived off thallophytes, pallid salamanders that metamorphosed more slowly than their surface-dwelling cousins, and African wood lice that were unknown in Palestine. ‘Living fossils,’ he called them, struck by a mind-boggling thought. Not far from the cave grew a small stand of
Acacia albida
, ‘the only surviving remnant of the African flora that invaded this country millions of years ago’, and Pinness conjectured that the wood lice were relics of the same period. As he crouched watching these crablike immortals scuttle over the ground, the cave startled him by becoming the aperture of a time tunnel. The perseverance of such ‘exceedingly wise lilliputians’, who had managed to create an enduring society despite their lack of Movements, utopian
visions, and historical traditions, filled him with a warm glow. With its exotic acacias, the cave seemed to him part of a primeval bubble unburst by time. Often he had to take a deep breath before entering its subterranean labyrinth, where he felt that he was sinking into the strange, viscous depths of a pocket of still hardening amber.
For years he brought his pupils to the cave. We would tramp for close to two hours through fields and up the steep hillside to plunge all at once into the cleft of a rock. Taking the key from his pocket, Pinness would open the grating iron door, releasing a chill, thick eddy of air that crawled inquisitively over our faces and bare legs. First he made us sit in the front of the cave by a small pool of water so old it had no taste at all, its sediments having long since settled to the bottom. Eyeless little creatures jetted back and forth on it. Though the aeons of darkness stored in their bodies blinded anyone who looked at them, their soft forms could be felt as they brushed the backs of our hands.