The Blue Mountain (51 page)
‘It was a hyena,’ I said. ‘It even said so in the newspaper. Its skull is in the nature room at school.’
‘If you feel that strongly about it, fine,’ said Yosi. ‘The point is that Grandfather saved your life.’
‘I was in the yard by pure chance,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think he would have saved yours?’
‘If it had been me, there would have been no hyena. Don’t you see that? Do you think it just happened to come along?’
I was flabbergasted. It never occurred to me that he might look at it that way.
‘Sometimes, when we’ve been lying in ambush along the border night after night until I get so sleepy I hallucinate, I’m afraid that Shifris will turn up. I worry that he’s going to set off a mine, or that some soldier will yell “Halt!” and that idiot who never halted in his life will keep on going and get himself shot.’
‘He won’t,’ I said. ‘He’s just somebody Grandfather made up.’
‘Grandfather was quite something,’ said Yosi. ‘He must have been a real heavyweight. Why else would they come from all over the world to be buried next to him?’
‘That day with the hyena was a clear, bright summer day,’ I said. ‘Pinness made me remember everything by seasons.’
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ he said. ‘I’m getting cold.’
‘Your father was born in early summer,’ I told him. ‘The double wedding was in the autumn. Grandmother died in the spring, and Rilov blew himself up in winter. That’s when Tsirkin died too, but Fanya died in summer and Grandfather in autumn.
‘I sat up with him for three days and three nights,’ I said. For
the first time in my life I was telling a story too. ‘Your father kept coming and going. So did the doctor. Grandfather’s friends were there too – Tsirkin, Liberson, Shifris, and Pinness. I was so tired I didn’t know what I was doing.’
He lay in his bed, on his prickly mattress of seaweed, his pale skin clothed in new pyjamas. I rose heavily and stepped outside, onto the earthen paths that never failed me.
Autumn had descended on the village with the usual downpour of fallen leaves and the anxious, mournful cries of baby swifts baulking at their first migration. I followed the cart track to the fields, trampling the last yellow grass sticking up in the centre ridge. The titmouse and warbler nests were unravelling in the orchards and in the drainpipes of the cowsheds. Behind the stud pen I spied the cattle dealers’ loathsome six-wheel lorry loaded with three dejected, stricken-tailed calves as it made its way among horse-drawn carriages and American limousines never seen in our village. Elegantly dressed men and women in high, round collars and children in shiny black shoes were walking up and down. I wondered who had told all these strangers about Grandfather’s death, but I continued along the avenue of carob trees, whose heavy white smell embarrassed the visitors. ‘The date and the carob are unisexual fruit trees. One male can pollinate dozens of females,’ said Pinness in my ear.
I heard the whirr of the spring as it laboured to cool its late-summer trickle, and the fragrant fizz of delicate, ripely fallen fruit that lay rotting on the ground with soft drunken eructations. Every summer we stored yellow pears in bales of hay, where they gave off sweet fermenting fumes as they stewed. The fruits’ flesh dissolved inside the peel, and by autumn they had turned into soft egglike lozenges swollen with intoxicating cream. Removing them gently from their hiding place, we pierced their skin with our teeth and sucked out the alcoholic nectar.
‘I remember that,’ said Yosi. ‘It tasted like a liqueur.’
Dryness and finality were everywhere. The cicadas were long gone. The fierce, confident buzzing of heat-propelled wasps and beetles had subsided, and little piles of pebbles and chaff were the only signs of the dwellings of the harvest ants. And yet in the
green groves the pistils of the oranges were swelling with a slow murmur and the grapefruits were fattening on their stems. Cells divided in the turkey eggs. Frozen sperm thawed in the wombs of cows. Milk and honey, sap and semen, were gathered up by the autumn.
There was a smell of watered earth in the air. The soil had been turned for autumn ploughing. It always smelled of rain before the first rains came. ‘That’s how the earth gets the clouds to water it,’ said Pinness, who was walking by my side.
I felt a terrible sadness. For Grandfather, dying of his own incurable volition. For my own life. For the House of Mirkin, on whose windows love had stealthily tapped but once to die with my mother and father.
The blackberries were blooming by the spring. A baby bleated poems in their brambles. Strong as an ox, a barefoot boy with coarse features came towards me swinging cans of milk. ‘Straight from the cow,’ he bellowed, shutting his eyes for me to pat his neck.
‘Let’s get out of here, my child,’ said Pinness, pushing me aside with uncharacteristic strength. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
It was autumn, and flocks of storks and pelicans were already wandering southward overhead, darkening the skies of the Valley with their giant wings. I knew that soon the robin would return to nest in the pomegranate tree, defending its home with loud, rosy- hearted clicks. Next would come the starlings, their thousands of spotted breasts spinning and whirling in great flocks, descending to blanket the earth of the Valley with their excrement.
My bare soles felt the huge snails stirring in the ground, waiting to be awakened by the first rains and tilt at each other with their siliceous blades. The bulbs of the autumn crocuses made bubbles in the surface of the earth. ‘Soon the plover will arrive in our fields, wagging its pretty plumes and following the furrows,’ called out Pinness behind me. I headed on into the hills, along the orphaned paths leading to the mountain. The farther I walked from the village, the stronger became the unruly smell of elecampane and the woodier the pads of thorny burnet. On the blue mountain where I had never been, the rubbery sceptres of the
squill were already in bloom, and the speckled white blossoms of the caper plants hid sharp hooks that would tear at my flesh.
Green plains stretched beyond the mountain. (Not the sea, said the wind, not the sea, said the rustle of grain.) A wide river flowed there. White-breasted women bathed in its waters, and on its banks nestled little villages. Farther off the earth tilted and vanished with a motile, nebulous glow. It might have been white tundra wolves that howled there, or the wind tousling the birch trees. The land was broad, so vast it never met the horizon, which quivered high above it.
I turned and ran like a child who has opened a forbidden trunk.
And then the visions stopped rising from Grandfather’s body and I knew that he was dead.
‘That’s an interesting way to determine clinical death,’ said Yosi. ‘Did you ever tell Doctor Munk about it?’
‘Grandfather died when he had no more dreams,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t everyone?’
A
fter a few days Yosi went back to the army. When I shook his hand as he climbed into the jeep, it still prickled with wary suspicion. Uri stayed on and helped me out with some jobs. Tonya Rilov died that week, and when Uri and I lifted her up from Margulis’s gravestone, there were not enough bees to fill the space she had left. Dani Rilov stood to one side, whimpering in a strange, high voice. ‘Listen to him,’ Uri said. ‘He doesn’t know how to cry. His father never taught him.’
The days that followed kept us digging all the time. Dani Rilov’s little insect brain had hatched an unexpected problem – should his mother be buried next to her husband’s boots or next to Margulis? He was so dense that he even went to ask Riva, who wrung out the cloth she was holding, pushed him off her freshly
mopped stairs, and said that for all she cared we could open her husband’s coffin and ‘throw your mother and your father’s filthy boots into it together’.
Each morning, confused and tearful, he came to tell me he had changed his mind. Surprised by such inner turmoil in a crude fattener of calves like Dani, I dug Tonya up and moved her back and forth five times despite the stench and the stings of angry bees. Even Uri, who normally could not have passed up a quip about this underground shuttle, remarked that Tonya deserved the utmost consideration ‘for her devoted finger-sucking among the bees, rain or shine for so many years’.
Fortunately, Busquilla lost his temper in the end and said to Dani, ‘That’s enough! It’s time to put an end to this farce. Who do you think you’re dealing with here, a dead cat? Where’s your respect for your parents?’
To me he said, ‘What does he think he’s doing? It’s almost Yom Kippur!’
He invited Uri and me to spend the day with his family in the nearby town where he lived.
‘You can come with us to the Moroccan synagogue,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t hurt you to see that there are real Jews in this country.’
‘Let’s do it,’ said Uri. ‘It might be fun.’
‘You go,’ I said to him. ‘That stuff isn’t for me. When did we ever make a thing about Yom Kippur?’
‘I’m not going without you,’ said Uri.
We stayed at home. That afternoon we were visited by Weissberg’s little twins. Like two black-capped nightingales, they stood bashfully but proudly in the doorway of the cabin. ‘You’re invited to the meal before the fast,’ they said, flying off with matched movements as if each were the other’s shadow.
‘I think we should take them up on it,’ said Uri. ‘Weissberg must have forgiven us.’
‘Not me,’ I said. ‘That’s not my cup of tea. And I don’t like having supper at 4 p.m.’
‘I’m going.’
‘You can do what you want.’
At four o’clock, with the Day of Atonement soon to begin, I took off my shirt, stood in the middle of the yard, and split a few logs as loudly as I could. I stuffed the pieces into the wood-burning stove that stood against the cabin, making sure the iron door clanked, and took a steaming hot shower on Grandfather’s little milking stool while Uri sat in his parents’ house feasting his stomach on the cantor’s food and his eyes on his beautiful daughter.
I scrubbed myself till I was red, hidden in steam as I listened to the deep purr of the chimney on the other side of the wall. I knew that the Weissbergs could hear the stove too and were doing their best to ignore the religious outrage.
Towards evening, when the cantor and his family went off to synagogue, Uri returned to the cabin.
‘Aren’t you going to pray?’ I asked as caustically as I could.
‘Not tonight. But I will go tomorrow,’ he answered solemnly.
Although the second and third generation of villagers kept away from the synagogue, which was empty and abandoned most of the year, the old folk, after lapsing from the fiery free thought of their youth into subsequent indifference, had begun to take a renewed interest in religion. Some became greater heretics than ever, while others, falling prey to fears and penitence, took to praying regularly every Sabbath with great devoutness and even with tears. Eliezer Liberson referred to them as ‘our bugbear comrades’, a term whose exact significance escaped me, though its tone and intention were perfectly clear.
‘What’s she like?’ I asked.
‘Who?’
‘The young cantoress.’
Uri laughed. ‘She sat there like a heifer with its head in its feedbox. She just stared at her plate and didn’t say a word. All I saw of her was a bit of forehead, a couple of fingers, and six yards of blue fabric.’
‘She’s beautiful,’ I said.
‘Since when do you notice women?’ asked Uri. ‘Has something happened? Do you want to tell me about it?’
I kept silent.
‘I’m not really into all that any more, but there’s still a thing or two I remember,’ he said.
I woke him up in the middle of the night, and we went to the cemetery. In spite of myself I dug Tonya up one more time and moved her back to Margulis, although I left her headstone by the grave of Rilov’s boots.
‘Something tells me you’re going out of your mind,’ said Uri, who was sitting on Shlomo Levin’s grave.
‘A scarecrow like you would look better with a beard and sidelocks,’ I said to him.
‘You’re beginning to annoy me,’ said Uri. ‘You’re jealous, that’s all. If you’d like to start up with her, go on. You can ask Pinness for a few good icebreakers from the Bible, go to the synagogue, and make eyes at her. I’ll even teach you a few tricks myself.’
‘I am not jealous,’ I said, evening out the sides of the grave. ‘And I doubt that your country-boy tricks would get me very far with her.’
When I awoke in the morning he was leaning out of the cabin window in his underwear.
‘Quick,’ he said, ‘get up and take a look. What a sight!’
I got out of bed and looked out at the street. The Weissbergs were on their way from our yard to the synagogue, mother and daughter with coifs on their heads, the cantor in a shiny bright gown and huge skullcap. All had new white canvas shoes on their feet instead of the leather ones that were forbidden on the fast day.
‘Don’t they look athletic,’ grinned Uri. ‘Come on, team!’ he called out to them.
They turned to look at him. His head and shoulders were out of the window, dappled sunlight falling through the casuarina tree onto his bare skin. Weissberg uttered a single syllable. The two gorgeous eyes stared back down at the ground, and the stockinged legs beneath the dress resumed their motion.
‘Come on, let’s eat something,’ said Uri. ‘Make me the Grandfather Special. Just – no colostrum, please.’
After breakfast he announced that he was going to the synagogue.
‘They invited me yesterday,’ he explained.
‘I doubt they’ll be thrilled to see you there after that crack of yours this morning.’
‘It’s not their private synagogue.’ He left the cabin.
A long, boring day stretched out ahead of me. There was no special work to be done in the cemetery. I had no one to ask for forgiveness, and Uri’s behaviour had annoyed me. After doing the dishes I walked around the yard for a while and then climbed the steps to Avraham and Rivka’s house, crouching low as I tiptoed barefoot in the hope that some of the Weissbergs had returned to rest from the long service.
It was quiet. I opened the door and stepped inside, plunging into the unfamiliar smell that had already sunk into the walls. In Uri and Yosi’s room the twins’ clothes were neatly arranged on the backs of chairs. A white sheet had been hung over the bookcase to hide its forbidden books from sight. Two stern-looking suitcases stood in Avraham and Rivka’s room, where the two beds had been moved apart. All the pictures in the living room had been turned around to face the wall. The impenetrable dark blue dress lay quietly folded on the cantor’s daughter’s bed. I knelt and buried my face in the thick weave, six yards of heavy blue fabric, until the horrid screech of a bluejay startled me and I ran back down the stairs and to the village centre.