The Blue Mountain (45 page)
‘What did you do with my father’s mandolin?’ asked Meshulam as the crowd dispersed.
I pointed at the grave.
‘What?’ he yelled. ‘You put it in the coffin?’
‘As per the request of the deceased,’ said Busquilla.
‘It was your father’s idea,’ I explained.
Meshulam gave us a look that could kill, reached for the spade, and began to exhume the fresh grave. At first I made no attempts to interfere. As he dug deeper, however, the sounds grew louder, and I stopped him.
‘Listen, Meshulam. Listen.’
He kept on digging. I grabbed the spade from him and threw it away.
‘Listen carefully, Meshulam.’
The people of our village are always hearing things in the earth: snails waking from their summer sleep, the malarial chirps of the German children, the suffocating gasps of Sisera’s army. Meshulam heard every tendon, sinew, and eyelash of his father’s body shouting at him to desist.
A flabby old orphan who had never planted a tree or known a woman in his life, Meshulam began to sob. ‘Forgive me, Father, forgive me,’ he cried, flinging himself face down on the ground.
I
n summer the cicadas thundered in the cemetery, clinging to the jasmine bushes and the branches of the olive trees. They
drove their short beaks into the bark, sipped the fresh sap from the veins of the plant, and sounded a long and monotonous cheer of pleasure. It was the same deafening roar that had accompanied the earth and its denizens immemorially, from Pinness’s primitive cavemen to the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle, greeting conquering armies, caravans of pilgrims and immigrants, and travelling merchants and circuses.
The ear-blinding sound of the cicadas can drive anyone not used to it out of his mind in a few minutes. For us people of the Valley, however, they were the beloved poets of summer and field.
‘What makes them sing?’ Pinness asked himself and me. ‘It’s not a mating song, because the females don’t seek out the singing males. It’s not territorial, because male cicadas don’t defend territory. Besides which, they’re practically deaf. What makes them sing, then?’
He looked at me, waiting for an answer. But I was a ten-year-old boy, a big, bearlike sack of stories that had no answers in it.
‘They are the true song of this country,’ Pinness explained, ‘an obstinate trill that has no melody or notes, no beginning or end, nothing but the jubilant and admonishing proclamation of Existence that says, “Here I am!”
‘I want you to know, Baruch,’ said Pinness, ‘that this humble insect is the true hero of the famous fable of the cicada and the ant. Incompetent translators called it a grasshopper, and the whole ridiculous parable is one big testimony to ignorance.’
He took me to the orchard. The sun beat down on the broad fields, and there was not a bird in the sky. The calves stood with their tongues out in the shaded squares of the cattle pens, and the spiders had retreated to the bushes from webs rigid with heat. Blue butterflies fell to the ground like burning feathers, their wings in my hand as hot and stiff as copperplate. Only the sturdy, boxlike cicada kept up its lusty dry heat-chant, its orange voice sawing through the branches, challenging the fury of the sun, mocking the furnace of the earth.
Pinness was an artist at catching cicadas. Every child in the village knew that cicadas fell silent and flew off when approached,
but it was Pinness who revealed to me that their sharp vision was offset by their near total deafness.
‘Fabre set off explosive charges by the chestnut tree in his garden, and the cicadas didn’t even budge,’ he told me. Jean-Henri Fabre, the French entomologist, was a favourite of Pinness’s. ‘He may not have kept the most exact records, and he opposed the theory of evolution,’ he admitted, ‘but I must say that he had all the innocence and curiosity of a child.’
We approached the bushes together. Pinness whipped out a hand, there was a screech of terror in the branches, and the cicada was gripped between his fingers. He pointed out to me its big checkered eyes, its transparent, veined wings, and the sound plate on the side of its abdomen. Drawing a thin straw across it, he managed to produce a brief chirrup.
He then described for me the extent of human ignorance. Aristotle, he said, believed that flies were generated from rotten meat. The Bible held that the rabbit and the hyrax chewed their cud. ‘The poor fools,’ he whispered, lowering his voice as he always did when holding an insect. ‘The ignoramuses! And for sheer misinformed stupidity, nothing beats that fable of the cicada and the ant. Why, the cicada winters underground in larval form and doesn’t need any favours from the ant! And in summer it’s the ant, more rapacious than industrious, that robs the cicada of its labours.’
I was ten years old. I still remember the feel of the cicada’s hard body between my fingers as it struggled to kick free with sturdy legs. Pinness showed me how it sucked juice from the bark of an apple tree while a long row of dark little ants, attracted by the sweet smell, ascended the tree in a black stream. The lead column attached itself to the cicada’s beak and clambered over its back, sipping the drops of juice that trickled from the apple bark and giving off a bad, aggressive smell of formic acid.
‘Take a good look,’ said Pinness. ‘“Go to the ant, thou sluggard” – to that beggarly swindler of a parasite that practises its piracy in broad daylight under the aegis of King Solomon and his proverbs and of that bourgeois Aesop, La Fontaine.’
Grandfather was not interested in creatures like the cicada.
Insects that neither helped nor harmed his fruit trees did not concern him. Sometimes, to be sure, the cicadas left a red ring on the peel of the fruit, but Grandfather did not consider this a defect. Once, hoeing next to him in the orchard, I found a cicada larva in its deep tunnel, living in utter night and clinging to a root from which it sucked its sustenance. Pale, clumsy, and bleary-eyed from the darkness, it wriggled slimily in my hand.
With Pinness’s help I also saw the final stage of the cicada’s metamorphosis. ‘It’s a matter of luck,’ he had warned me – and just then a pupa emerged from the ground and looked for a bush to ascend. It was slow and awkward, but its eyes glittered blackly.
‘The matrix is now ready to receive light and form,’ Pinness whispered. ‘For the light is sweet and a pleasant thing for the eyes to behold,’ he said. We sat down on the ground, and my teacher put his hand on mine. The pupa gripped the bush, began to climb, and stopped. As though slit by an invisible knife blade, the chrysalis split lengthwise down the back.
Little by little the adult cicada emerged from its baby suit. Still moist and weak, it wriggled its legs slowly while the damp robe of its wings began to harden. We sat watching for three hours as the sunlight and air filled its veins and its yellowish hue turned green and then grey-brown. Suddenly it let go of the shrub and flew off, and all at once – drunk with the pride of accomplishment, the passion for life, and its own existence – it joined its loud, exhorting voice to the chirps of its comrades.
Pinness grew pensive. ‘You’ve seen something today that few people ever see,’ he said to me as we walked home. He took my hand.
‘All his days he eateth in darkness,’ he quoted. ‘For four years he burrowed in the ground, and now he has four weeks to sing in the sweet light of the sun. Is it any wonder that he’s so lusty and loud?’
Those words impressed me greatly. When I related them to Grandfather, however, he dismissed them with a wave of his hand. ‘Pinness knows a great deal,’ he said, ‘but he spins a
lot of tall tales around his insects. How does anyone know that the larva in the ground is sad? Or that the cicada in the tree is happy? Pinness takes human feelings and gives them to insects.’
But back then, in the fields of my childhood, my teacher looked at me and smiled, happy to give, to educate, to influence. Young though I was, I understood that he was doing his best to make something of me. I knew that he and Grandfather sometimes argued about me, and I stretched out my neck like a big calf to be lavishly petted by both of them.
‘Isn’t being an orphan enough without your burdening him with all your tragedies?’ Pinness asked over a nocturnal bowl of olives.
I lay in bed with Fabre’s insect book on my chest, a loan from Pinness, feeling blissful when I heard Grandfather reply:
‘He’s my child.’
It was only years later that Pinness admitted his entomological rhapsodies were baseless and had been uttered simply for their effect on me, to win me over to the study of nature. ‘The magic spell animals cast on human beings is nothing more than a form of egotism that confirms our own prejudices. We domesticate cattle, train birds, and dress monkeys in top hats to reassure ourselves that we are the crowning act of Creation.
‘Curiously,’ continued Pinness, ‘the biblical creation myth and Darwin’s theory of evolution have a similar attraction. Both portray Man as the ultimate achievement. And yet, my child, what right have we to assume that Nature is purposeful and has goals? Is it not just as likely to be an accidental chain of developments that automatically eliminates its own mistakes?’
He opened his big Bible and showed me ‘an important verse’ from the Book of Ecclesiastes. ‘“For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them; as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast.”’
‘None of the commentators ever understood this verse,’ he said, slamming his Bible shut. ‘The key word in it is not “dieth”
but “befalleth”. It’s not death that best expresses the equality between man and beast, it’s the randomness of life.’
He watched me carefully, as pleased as punch to see that I was looking back at him attentively.
‘“For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts”,’ he declaimed. ‘Both are the products of accident, and both are subject to the quirks of Chance.’ He burst out laughing. ‘To say nothing of the work animals in our village, who are our social equals as well.’
‘Does the cicada remember its four years underground?’ wondered Pinness out loud beneath the apple tree. ‘Or the pretty swallowtail – does it recall having been a clumsy caterpillar on leaves of rue?
‘The pupal period,’ he explained to me, ‘is not just a stage of maturation and quiet readying for a new life. It is also one of forgetting and oblivion, an impenetrable screen between the larva and the imago, those two so contradictory life phases of a single creature.
‘Whereas we,’ he lamented, ‘have been given this most terrible of gifts. Not only must we bear on our backs the camel’s hump of memory, we are not even recompensed with a brief life of flight, song, and love unburdened by the constant urge to eat, accumulate, and grow fat.’
I watched entranced as the stream of marauding ants attacked the cicada, drove it off, and plundered the juicy well it had dug. Pinness studied me to see if I was ripe for his final peroration. ‘Why, then, did Solomon praise the ant?’ he asked. ‘Because he was a king, and kings have always preferred ants to cicadas and bees to dung beetles. Just like that stinker Michurin. They have always thought of us as a huge, blind mob of slaves whose acquired submission to servitude is genetically transmitted.’
Bringing me back to the cabin, he took the volume of Burbank from Grandfather’s bed and read aloud to me from it.
‘“Nature takes just as much cognisance of the deadly snake as of the greatest statesman.”’
‘Why? Why?’ Grandfather roused himself from the kitchen table. ‘Why must you put such things into the boy’s head?’
And so I never heard the end of Pinness’s lesson until I was grown up and the ailing old teacher had lost all inhibition. ‘It’s better to roll your own ball of shit than to eat the higher-ups’ honey,’ he informed me, chuckling as he champed on Mrs Busquilla’s Moroccan treats.
N
ow only Rilov, Pinness, Tonya, Levin, and Riva were left in the village. I asked Busquilla to drive them to the old folk’s home now and then to visit blind Eliezer Liberson, and he was ‘honoured to do it’. Liberson, however, did not show much interest in them. It took Levin’s attack on Zeitser to get him to react in his famous article, while when Rilov’s septic tank blew up, he heard the explosion, knew at once what it was, and came for the funeral.
Rilov was very old. Sometimes he emerged from his arms cache to get a breath of air, go for a ride in the fields, take in the sun, and see what was new in the village. Visitors came from all over the country to see the Watchman, who was as tough as an old boot and could still sit in the saddle for hours. ‘They don’t understand that the poor old codger climbs up there and rides around for two days at a clip because he’s embarrassed to ask for help to climb back down again,’ wrote Uri in reply to a letter from me about Yehoshua Ber and Rilov’s suspicions.
Most likely, I imagine, the uric acid fumes that penetrated the cache’s sealed ammunition crates also ate their way into the chemical time fuses. The blast shook the whole village. Thousands of old Mauser cartridges and percussion grenades and tons of TNT and dynamite sticks blew sky-high in a great tidal wave of sewage, milk, mangled earth, and twisted Sten guns.
When the yellow vapours had settled, it emerged that half of old Rilov’s farmyard was now a canyon. His son Dani’s calf pen had become a ruin of blackened posts and veal cutlets. Nothing
was left of the hayloft but a few foul-smelling brands of charcoal hissing and sputtering beneath the endless drops of rain that started to fall. ‘Fourteen milk cows went to their deaths without disclosing the whereabouts of the hidden arms,’ was Uri’s journalistic summation. Rilov himself was scattered over a radius of hundreds of yards. Trained in the conspiratorial tradition of their family, his son Dani and his grandson Uzi managed to convince the police investigators that they were confronted with a work accident caused by mixing large amounts of red phosophorus with potash and sulphur salts used for fertiliser.
The search for Rilov’s remains went on all over the village for several days, but the old man was never found. It was months before the horrid smell of ammonia, roast meat, and smoke dissipated and the old Watchman’s spiked army boots turned up, each with a rotting lump of flesh inside it. The right boot was discovered in the bushes by the spring, while the left was found in the bougainvillaea vine twining up the columns of the water tower. Both were put in a plastic bag and buried in my cemetery in the presence of a large crowd.