The Blue Mountain

by Shalev, Meir

  Benjamin grunted from the impact. My mother was tall and not at all light, and he had to go down on his knees to absorb the shock. Her terrified body struck his chest, her bare belly panting with fright against his cheeks, so close that I can still feel the warmth of it across all the yarns and years.

  ‘You can let go of me now,’ she smiled. She had got her breath back, but her nails still dug frantically into his shoulders and arms. ‘You were great.’

  My father was nonplussed. He had never before been so close to a female body.

  ‘Thank you kindly, Benjamin,’ she laughed, jumping from his arms and smoothing out her dress just as Efrayim and Daniel appeared carrying a tall fruit-picker’s ladder.

  ‘Hey, you German schmuck, what are you doing?’ shouted Efrayim irately. Light and skinny fifteen-year-old though he was, he was on the verge of laying into Rilov’s worker. Daniel stood there dumbstruck, pallid with envy, helplessness, and loss. His lips twitched.

  ‘He saved my life,’ said Esther. ‘Rilov’s stupid German saved my life.’

  Once more my father heard her laugh and was brushed by a sweet breeze as my mother, Efrayim, and Daniel Liberson took off on the run around the corner.

  My father was sixteen when he came to the village and went to live and work on Rilov’s farm.

  ‘He arrived from Germany right before the war,’ it says in the village album. ‘His entire family died in the gas chambers, and he met his death among us here. We will always remember the hardworking, thoughtful, cultured young man that he was. Who can forget him on his way to the dairy each evening, whistling symphonies and giving everyone a big hello while carrying four large milk cans on his shoulders?’

  Rilov’s stupid German carried the milk cans himself because he had trouble communicating with Rilov’s mules. The four cans, weighing five and a half stone apiece, were chained to an iron yoke on his shoulders.

  Rilov’s mules arrived with the British army during World War I and decided to stay on.

  ‘Apart from their annoying habit of cadging beer from every passer-by, they were excellent draught animals,’ said Meshulam. In a box labelled ‘Miscellanies’ he kept the protocol of the Committee meeting at which Rilov requested a beer budget for them. It was his custom to read it aloud at village celebrations.

  ‘“Comrade Rilov: Mules eat barley, and beer is liquid barley.

  ‘“Comrade Liberson: Rilov is being sophistical.

  ‘“Comrade Rilov: What about the turkeys who drank wine?

  ‘“Comrade Tsirkin: No one wasted good wine on turkeys. It’s just one of Mirkin’s stories.

  ‘“Comrade Rilov: After a little tipple, the mules work like the very devil.

  ‘“Comrade Liberson: The request is rejected. We will not introduce alcohol into our work life.

  ‘“Comrade Rilov: The Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle put away gallons of vodka.

  ‘“Comrade Liberson: We thank Comrade Rilov for the comparison, but there were no mules in the Workingman’s Circle, only jackasses.

  ‘“Comrade Rilov: I’ll brew my own beer, then.

  ‘“Comrade Tsirkin: We did not come to the Land of Israel to treat our animals to champagne breakfasts.”’

  The audience would laugh and applaud, but everyone knew that Rilov had planted two rows of hops and that his mules could plough twice as much in a day as any other team. To this day the villagers remember the great steaming puddles they left behind. And yet even Zeitser, who was an expert on both mules and barley, declared that he was ‘dead set against such decadence’.

  Long years in armies, communes, and all kinds of rural settlements had made the two mules callous. Seeing a shy, innocent youth, they decided to have a bit of fun with him. They baulked when he tried to harness them, tangled the reins, pooped on the traces, and made each other laugh with hideous belches. My father, however, was an industrious young man, and while his hopeless awkwardness amused the villagers, his persistence and punctuality won their admiration. The story is still told about how he left Rilov unconscious in the slops ditch after Deborah, the vicious milk cow, had sent the Watchman sprawling with a kick to the head.

  ‘But I cover him with a sack so he not catch cold,’ apologised my father, who ‘hated being late to the dairy’, to Tonya.

  In Germany he had studied at a technical school, and within a month of his arrival he had designed and built for Rilov’s calves an automated watering system that was the talk of the Valley. He also scrubbed the cowshed with stiff brushes and Lysol and hooked it up to the phonograph in his cabin.

  ‘Even Rilov’s wife Tonya admitted that Mahler increased the cows’ milk production,’ Avraham once told me during one of our rare conversations.

  ‘I was walking in the village one day when the strains of Beethoven drew me irresistibly to your father’s cabin. I went over and peeked in the window. Your father was lying in bed listening to music, his hair a golden haystack on his forehead. He had a phonograph that his parents had sent him from Germany. They managed to get it to him before Hitler burned them.’

  Pinness knocked and entered. Benjamin rose, clicked his heels, and bowed. Three things happened that day. My father’s name was Hebraised from Benjamin Schnitzer to Binyamin Shenhar; he received his first private Hebrew lesson; and he lent Pinness two records.

  ‘Your father was a hardworking, serious student. He never learned to speak Hebrew fluently, but his spelling was letter-perfect.’

  There was in the village a merry band of youngsters known as ‘the Gang’. These were the founders’ children who had already reached adolescence.

  ‘The whole village forgave their mischief because they were new Jews, children of the earth, suntanned and straight-backed,’ said Pinness. ‘At night they stole candy and coffee from the co-op and guns from the nearby British airfield. Sometimes Rilov sent them out to the fields with whips to chase off the Arab flocks that ate the young grain. Every year, at the ceremony of first fruits and newborn children, they put on a Wild East show, galloping past the audience while standing on their horses like Ukrainian bandits.’

  After they had cleaned out all the chocolate in the co-op, Shlomo Levin came to Pinness to demand a tête-à-tête.

  ‘The hooligans did it to get me,’ he said. ‘They look down on me because I’m not a farmer like their parents.’

  ‘They did it because they felt like eating chocolate. The predilection for sweets is a biological universal,’ Pinness said.

  ‘They’d never dare steal from a farmer,’ said Levin. ‘If they can’t afford chocolate, let them eat kamardin.’

  ‘Just last week they pinched two jars of honey from Margulis’s shed,’ Pinness replied.

  ‘That’s exactly how I was treated when I came to this country,’ continued Levin, deafened by anger. ‘You people never had any appreciation of plain ordinary work. You were too busy acting in your great Theatre of Redemption and Rebirth. Every ploughing was a return to the earth, every chicken laid the first Jewish egg after two thousand years of exile. Ordinary potatoes, the same kartoffelakh you ate in Russia, became tapuchei adamah, “earth apples”, to show how you were at one with Nature. You had your pictures taken with rifles and hoes, you talked to the toads and the mules, you dressed up as Arabs, you thought you could fly through the air.’

  ‘That’s what kept us going,’ said Pinness.

  Levin got to his feet, pale with hatred. ‘I kept myself going too,’ he said. ‘I could have left and I didn’t. I could have been a rich businessman in the city and I came here instead. You taught them to look down on me. And don’t start in on that song and dance of yours – they’re my saplings, they’re my plant bed – because you’re no more of a farmer than I am. We’re both public servants. Both of us thought we were serving an idea, and now it turns out to have been just a bunch of kulaks. You can have them and their earth and their first fruits and their cows! Gordon and Brenner wrote with the fountain pens that I fixed.’

  Pinness lost his temper. �
�No one came here to do anyone a favour,’ he said. He raised his voice. ‘And no one deserves a medal for giving up a shop in the city. You came because you needed this earth as we all did. The feel of it, the smell of it, the promise of it. Needed it more than it needed you.’

  Once Levin had left with an injured slam of the door, however, Pinness gathered the Gang and gave them a loud dressing-down.

  ‘Our life in this village is more than just sweets. If all you want is bonbons and petit fours, you can pack your bags and go to the city.’

  The Gang walked out shamefacedly and submitted to the pedagogical penance of building a big sandbox for the kindergarten that the children still play in to this day.

  My uncle Efrayim was one of them. He was a handsome, slender boy, as quick and unerring as a ferret, the biggest prankster and mocker of them all. One day the Gang decided to play a joke on Binyamin, whose slow, clumsy gait had caught their notice. Efrayim had hated and feared him ever since his rescue of my mother.

  One Saturday while Binyamin was resting, the boys threw a young viper into his cabin and waited to see what would happen. When my father heard its slithering scales, he gave a cry and ran outside to gales of laughter. For a moment he stood facing them, his bright eyes slit against the afternoon sun with the fury of knowing he had been duped. Stepping up to Efrayim, who was then seventeen, he grabbed him by his broad leather belt and jerked him off the ground with one motion.

  ‘Your uncle Efrayim squirmed and yelled and laughed, but your father, using only his left hand, carried him to the farmyard and threw him into the cow trough, Sabbath clothes and all.’

  ‘Bravo!’ shouted the Gang. In no time they had all trooped into Binyamin’s cabin. Efrayim raised a heel tough as a horn and bashed in the snake’s neck as it lay coiled beneath a chair. Then they made Binyamin sit down at the table and arm-wrestle with them one by one. Emerging unvanquished, he was declared a Gang member himself.

  Slow, smiling, shy, and inarticulate, he met them every Friday. Before long they learned to use his technical talents and broke into Pesya Tsirkin’s car, which had been given to her by the Movement. Told by them that it was needed to convey arms and important intelligence, Binyamin started it up without a key. Somehow, however, the group always managed to stop on its way at a cinema in the city.

  Efrayim grew attached to Binyamin and forgot his old grudge at seeing his sister giggling breathlessly in his arms. Several times a week he went to listen to music in his cabin. In Binyamin’s trunk was clothing from Germany that Efrayim found funny. Putting on a pair of leather Tyrolean shorts and a dark flannel suit jacket, he ran outside to make his friends laugh. At the bottom of the trunk he discovered a long muslin dress.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked, running his hand over the soft fabric. Nothing in the village could match it for sheer silkiness, not even the velvet noses of the colts or the petals of the apple blossoms. Suddenly, thinking of his mother, Efrayim felt tears in his eyes.

  ‘For my wedding,’ replied Binyamin. ‘My mother for my wedding gave me it.’

  He took a photograph from his wallet. ‘Father, Mother, Hannah, Sarah,’ he said, pointing. ‘My mother gave me the dress.’

  Binyamin’s mother, a tall blonde woman, was seated on a chair, her two daughters, in identical dresses, beside her. Behind them stood his short, slender father with a clipped haircut and a military moustache.

  Efrayim, who had no mother, and Binyamin, who soon would have no family at all, became fast friends.

  ‘I can still hear their voices in my ears. My two pupils’ voices, Efrayim’s quick chatter and Binyamin’s nasal bass. Your lost uncle. Your dead father.’

  14

  One day in late winter Tonya Rilov stole into Hayyim Margulis’s bee patch. After the death of her daughter under the hooves of a cow, Tonya had given birth to a son named Dani. Rilov was a man of so few words that the boy did not begin to talk until he was five, and Tonya’s hatred for her husband kept growing like a wall. Most of his time Rilov spent in the huge arms cache in his septic tank, where he had accumulated quantities of weapons that no one dared even guess at. No matter how hard he scrubbed himself with steel wool, his body still smelled of urea and dynamite. Tonya longed for the honeyed fingers of Margulis.

  She hid among Ya’akovi’s Japanese satsuma plum trees, observing her old love from a distance. In his cumbersome beekeeper’s suit he looked like a jolly bear. He was moving his hives around among the trees while planning blossoming dates, new aromatic combinations, and the pasturing of his winged cows in the spring. Crouching low, Tonya followed him to his work shed and entered behind him. His heavy cloth-and-mesh mask kept him from noticing her.

  Margulis took a hive down from a shelf, opened it and studied its honeycombs. Tonya could see how intense and happy he looked. Removing a honeycomb on which an excited throng of worker bees had clustered, he drove them off with his bare hand and beamingly laid on the table two bees that were embroiled in a battle. He separated them with two matchsticks, and when they flew at one another again, he parted them once more. Finally, when their strength began to flag, he put them in a special container with a glass divider to keep them apart. Stripping off his mask, he went to put it in its place and ran into a stiff embrace from Tonya, who was standing right behind him.

  ‘Tonya!’ breathed the startled Margulis. ‘Are you crazy? In broad daylight? Your husband will murder me.’ He pushed her firmly away, sat her down in a chair and served her honey.

  ‘Why the spoon, Hayyim?’ purred Tonya. ‘Why not do it the old way?’

  ‘You’ve just been a witness to my greatest secret,’ said Margulis, ignoring her with a grin. ‘The reconciliation of the queens.’

  Tonya tried to switch the subject back to their own reconciliation, but Margulis just looked at her with his innocent blue eyes and went on talking.

  ‘In every hive there’s just one queen,’ he lectured her. ‘That’s an inviolable law. It limits the number of new bees. And now, with spring blossoms on the way, I need as many workers as I can get.’

  ‘You talk just like a capitalist,’ smiled Tonya through her tears. But Margulis overlooked her humour and anguish alike.

  ‘I wait for the new queens to hatch,’ he continued, ‘and when they attack each other, I keep patiently separating them with a stick, over and over, until they’re tired of fighting and are willing to live and lay eggs together in one hive. That way I have twice as many workers and twice as much honey. You left me for him, Tonya, now sleep in the bed you’ve made.’

  ‘But what’s that got to do with it, Hayyim?’ she murmured, her lips softly closing over his name as she thought about his honeyed fingers. ‘Why are you telling me all this about bees?’

  Margulis, however, had returned to his fighting queens and was once more separating the murderous mothers with infinite patience, coaxing them with gentle words. Tonya left the shack and slipped back through Ya’akovi’s orchard. Under a sky like flattened grey tin there was no sound but her own smothered sobs and the loathsome squish of her boots as they sucked in and out of the mud.

  She was crossing the next plot of land, half hidden amid the first flowering fruit trees and some crowded rows of cabbage, when she spied Efrayim and Binyamin dancing a waltz among the Valencia oranges. At once she went home and told her husband.

  Rilov hurried to Grandfather, less worried by the relations between the two boys then by the insidious appearance of bourgeois dances in the village. But the rumour began to circulate and people started to talk.

  ‘He was only teaching me to dance,’ explained Efrayim at the family table. ‘I recited Pushkin for him and showed him how to harness Rilov’s crazy mules, and he taught me to listen to music.’

  ‘Isn’t that the fellow who caught Esther when she fell off the roof?’ asked Grandfather.

  ‘I did not fall,’ protested my mother. ‘I jumped into his arms.’

  ‘Why don’t you bring that Romeo of yours home so we can meet him?’ Gr
andfather said to Efrayim.

  Rivka Peker, the saddler’s daughter who was going out with Avraham, sounded a raspberry with her fat lips, and Avraham called Efrayim ‘Strauss’ and ‘Matilda’, for which he was rewarded by the discovery of a whole herring in his shirt pocket.

  ‘I invited him for Friday night dinner,’ announced Efrayim the following day. ‘He eats whatever he’s given.’

  * * *

  Avraham began to sneeze a few minutes before Binyamin arrived, and everyone smiled with the realisation that the German must be bringing a bouquet of jonquils.

  My mother was eighteen then. From childhood on she had been the motherless family’s cook. She looked curiously at Rilov’s dumb worker, who wielded his knife and fork skilfully but had dropped the flowers he picked for her in the wadi on the white socks she had worn in his honour. Her body still recalled his powerful hands and the hot breath of his mouth against her bare belly. Though they had passed each other often since the day she fell from the roof, he had stared down at the ground each time he saw her. The jingle of her legs in her dress made his mouth go so dry that he was afraid of not being able even to get out a hello.

  Of course, Binyamin knew that Esther was the girlfriend of Daniel Liberson, the Valley volleyball star, her steady folkdance partner, and the son of Eliezer Liberson, who once a month assembled the young trainees in the village for a lecture on the principles and beliefs of the Movement.

  He kept his eyes on his plate, swallowing his soup with a sound. Throughout the meal he seemed to be debating something, and right after dessert, as if having come to a decision that must not be frittered away, he asked Grandfather’s permission ‘to go for a walk with Esther’.

  ‘The person to ask is the young lady,’ said Grandfather, regarding Binyamin and his daughter. Whenever he saw a new couple he wondered when and how their love would go amiss.

  They went out to the fields, Efrayim gliding after them like a polecat. For a long while he watched them walk in silence. At last Binyamin looked up at the sky and said in a strange, muffled voice, ‘So many stars.’