The Blue Mountain

by Shalev, Meir

  Ten years later in my own cemetery, which was populated largely by Diaspora Jews, Pinness reminded me of our hike to Beth-She’arim.

  ‘What a pedagogical failure,’ he said. ‘I never would have dreamed that one of my own pupils would decide to ape what he saw there. I thought I was sounding a warning, but now I wonder whether I didn’t plant the idea for this monstrosity in your mind then.

  ‘Ninety per cent of the pioneers of the Second Aliyah left this land,’ said Pinness. ‘Now you’re returning them to it.’

  We were standing by Mandolin Tsirkin’s grave. ‘He’s still playing away down there,’ Pinness said. ‘Still playing away.’

  It was there, by the grave of Mandolin Tsirkin, that Pinness had his stroke. He had bent close to the earth in his fashion, keeping his ear to the ground, when suddenly he smiled weakly, his expression slowly changing to that of a man who has heard a secret burble in his head. At first I didn’t realise what had happened, but as soon as I saw his body start to slump I threw down my hoe and hurried over. Too timid to grab him with both arms, I held out a hand for him to lean on, but he was unable to find it with his own. The same hand that had dissected tadpoles beneath the microscope and strummed the drumheads of crickets now groped feebly in the air like a blind proboscis.

  He raised his head heavily, his lips grimacing as he tried to speak. All that came from his throat were some thick rasping sounds. As if sinking into quicksand, he fell slowly to the ground. His face went white, his breathing grew quick and shallow, and sweat trickled down his cheeks. I put him on my shoulder and ran to the clinic.

  Doctor Munk, our repulsive village physician, called an ambulance, and I went along to the hospital.

  ‘It’s difficult to predict the outcome,’ the doctor in the emergency room told me. ‘We’ll have to keep him here. You never know with these things.’

  Pinness lay writhing in his bed like a huge maggot exposed to light. White, bulky, and damp, he squirmed on the sheets, ate incessantly, and kept trying to make himself talk. When I gave him a pen and paper, he made some squiggles in the far margin of the page and went on writing in the air. One leg could barely move, anhis eyes bulged and rolled in their sockets like overripe fruit.

  His skin mildewed, thin grey webs of it clinging to the sponge when the nurse washed him in the morning. They grew back again at night, as if he wished to spin a cocoon around himself and awake, winged and well, in a familiar world of flowers and sunlight.

  He had me very worried. He cackled like an animal, wet his bed, and now and then tried to get his hands to meet in midair. I sat up by his bedside for two nights and three days, all but going mad from the grinding of his jaws, which never stopped working away. Luckily, the village sent someone to relieve me and look after him until he recovered.

  It took three weeks for his skin to return to normal and his speech to be restored. At first he found certain consonants difficult, but from the moment he started to talk again, the power of words lifted him out of the depths. It was a while before I realised that he was not using the past or future tense. That was a good sign, I tried telling the doctor, because it meant that the old man was fighting to regain a sense of the time he was living in. Gradually, more and more words reappeared with their grammar, gathered like ants on a fallen fruit, and bore him back into consciousness in a great, excited procession.

  ‘Excellent,’ said the doctor. ‘He’s much improved.’

  Once he could speak again, Pinness recovered quickly. The doctor was surprised by his powers of recuperation. He never understood that a man like Pinness, a man of language and vision, could bypass his blocked synapses by speaking directly to the limbs of his body and making them obey his words. This was how he regained control of his leg, and eventually, of his fine motor co-ordination.

  For three days he talked only to himself. Then, on the fourth, he turned to me and said perfectly clearly, ‘My distant ancestors were the cavemen.’

  I stared at him in amazement. Irritated by my slowness, he continued as if giving dictation: ‘To seek to bind men to the earth is to turn them into blind moles and dumb cattle.’

  It was then I first understood that although the old teacher might speak, walk, go home, and run around again with his butterfly nets, he would never really get well. The world of values he had constructed, the walls of faith and the reservoirs of hope, had crumbled into a feeble fretwork of foam when the dark blood haemorrhaged in his brain.

  ‘Now everyone will think I’m crazy,’ he began to wail a few days later as it dawned on him what had happened. I tried to calm him by pointing out that there wasn’t a person in the village who was considered sane by anyone else. Sanity, in fact, meant no more to us than a majority vote on who was or was not in his right mind. To this day Efrayim is thought to have been a madman because of Jean Valjean, to say nothing of being an informer and a traitor. Plenty of Committee members thought Pinness was crazy even before his stroke because of the shouts he heard at night. Others believed Grandfather to be an old loony because he stopped picking the fruit in his orchard from the day of Efrayim’s disappearance, letting it fall to the ground with the disdainful remark that he was growing the trees for their flowers. When Rilov discovered that Margulis was carrying on with Tonya, he decided that the beekeeper must be crazy, not to mention stupid. Margulis, for his part, thought Riva was insane and flung himself on Tonya Rilov’s bony, forgotten body with all the fluttering passion of a moth, ‘busily buzzing her’ with his sweet virility as Uri put it. Tonya knew that she was not all there herself but preferred her madness to her husband’s smell of rifle grease, gunpowder, and urea.

  I too, in the days when I still lived in the village, was thought to be demented. My cemetery was the final proof, but even in kindergarten the other children kept away from me, and I never had a friend my age except Uri.

  Grandfather and Pinness crammed me with stories and taught me about insects and trees, and Tsirkin played his mandolin for me and made me gape by pounding nails into boards with his bare hand, so tough was the skin of his palms. Whenever I shook his hand, there was a sound like the creaking of dry wood. ‘Ever since one of them broke its sting on his hand, the scorpions in my father’s cowshed have been scared stiff of him,’ said Meshulam with a smile. And yet when Mandolin did the milking, his hands grew so soft that not a cow complained of their roughness.

  And Liberson read me stories from books and once even played hide-and-seek with me.

  ‘They did it for your grandmother,’ said Pinness.

  29

  Eliezer Liberson didn’t always have time for me. After turning his farm over to Daniel, he devoted himself to finding new and better ways of courting Fanya.

  He never ceased amusing and surprising her with a savoir faire that, latent in him from the start, had developed remarkably from the moment it was pressed into use. Well aware that no loam was more mysterious and demanding than love’s, he declared that it did not tolerate such commonplace methods as crop rotation and fallowing, which were intended for poor soils and unimaginative farmers. Periodically, the whole village heard the ripples of Fanya’s laughter through the Libersons’ windows. ‘Liberson’s done it again,’ was always Uri’s admiring comment.

  None of us could resolve the contradiction between Liberson the stuffy ideologue, who bombarded meetings and the village newsletter with utopian avalanches of words, and the concealed Don Juan who would do anything for Fanya. He taught the jackdaws in his orchard to wolf-whistle at her and took her out to the fields on summer nights for erotic walks that sometimes had me as their secret companion. Years ago, Pinness once told me, when Fanya was working in the village packing house, Liberson prepared a cup of rich cocoa with sweet cream and sugar, filled his mouth with it, and went off to give his wife a custardy kiss. ‘No one who stopped to talk to him on his way could understand why, for the first time in memory, he kept his mouth shut.’

  On the occasion of their tenth wedding anniversary he overcame his prole
tarian principles, went off to town in his cart, and returned with some expensive scented soap that smelled of frivolity and rank heresy. Hitherto the women of the village had bathed and washed their hair with huge bars of smelly grey laundry soap. Though Fanya used the gift only on Fridays, the seductive fragrance of her skin made her self-conscious, led to disapproving whispers in the village, reminded several old-timers of Riva Margulis’s infamous luxury trunk and Pesya Tsirkin’s perfume, and tripled Liberson’s passion for her.

  Two months went by, and when the soap was almost gone Fanya discovered in it her husband’s real present – ‘a silly note’ in a tiny tube he had had the tinsmith make specially. Liberson came running as soon as he heard her merry squeal in the laundry shack, which was where the showers were located in those days.

  Subsequently, so it was said, he began leaving her notes wherever possible. Fanya found his little tubes in wheels of farmer cheese and in the feed stalls of the milk cows, heard them rattle in the oil cans of the brooder, and – for by now Liberson was a past master – even discovered one of them in the craw of a chicken she had slaughtered and was cleaning for dinner.

  ‘As usual, Eliezer is overdoing it,’ commented Pinness approvingly. ‘If he keeps it up he’ll make Fanya paranoid, though I must say his hiding places are far better chosen than that stinking arms cache of Rilov’s.’

  Tsirkin, on the other hand, still devoted himself to his farm, though he was thoroughly sick of his life, his worthless son, and ‘that double-breasted politician’ his wife.

  Meshulam, having salvaged dozens of boxes of old papers from a kibbutz in the Valley, was busy cataloguing them in those years, while Pesya occasionally sallied forth from the Movement’s headquarters in Tel Aviv to turn up in the village with foreign socialist leaders, agricultural experts from Burma, or some African minister in a gaudy skirt and baker’s hat. She was also active in the immigrant camps, where she organised social and educational activities, and even had her picture in the paper bathing a baby from Morocco in a tin tub while smiling at its mother. ‘Comrade Pesya Tsirkin Teaches New Immigrant Mother-Love’ was the caption beneath her maternal breasts.

  Behind his impeccable manners Grandfather went on nursing a keen, secretive grudge against his two old friends. Meanwhile, he raised me, pruned and cultivated his trees, wrote notes, and made plans. The same passage of time that filled me with stories and layered my bones with thick flesh put an end to the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle, of which nothing was left but a monumental legend, a few torn snapshots, and some disembodied shadows.

  I still thought of Tsirkin and Liberson as family, however. One day, finding no one in at the Libersons, I picked up the storybook he always read to me from. Although I was still a little boy and couldn’t read, I knew enough to realise that the glossy white pages of the book were blank in their cloth binding. Liberson had made up every story I had heard from him: ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’, ‘The Stork and the Fox’, even ‘The Flower of the Golden Heart’!

  Pinness burst out laughing when I told him.

  ‘In general,’ he said, ‘we all either invent stories or retell those we’ve heard. And in particular, the tale of the Ant and the Grasshopper happens to be a lot of twaddle.’

  One night I heard him talking with Grandfather in the kitchen.

  ‘He should spend more time with boys his own age,’ he said. ‘It’s no good for a small boy like him to be always with grown-ups.’

  ‘He’s my child,’ answered Grandfather, sucking extra hard on the bitter olive in his mouth.

  ‘Mirkin,’ insisted Pinness, ‘whether or not it’s what you want, you’re bringing Baruch up in an old ruined cloister. I see how he is in school. He doesn’t play with marbles or a ball during break. He doesn’t talk to anyone. All he does is crawl on the lawn. By himself.’

  ‘He’s looking for beetles, just like you,’ said Grandfather.

  Sometimes I glanced up to see myself encircled by a shouting, jeering crowd.

  ‘The children surround him like a flock of songbirds that has cornered an owl. They screech and make fun of him.’

  ‘It doesn’t worry me,’ Grandfather said. ‘And I don’t envy the child who provokes him.’

  When I was six I broke two of Uzi Rilov’s fingers. I was crouched by the white oleanders near the fence, looking for green hawkmoth caterpillars. Thick and shiny, they wriggled cumbersomely over the poisonous bushes, turning their necks to give me a frightening look when I touched them. I knew that their big blue mascara-ringed eyes were a bluff, because Pinness had told me that they weren’t real and were only there to scare away predators.

  Uzi Rilov landed on my back with a thump, grabbed me by the ears, and began to shake me back and forth. I got hold of his wrist and spun around to face him. At thirteen he was older and quicker than me. For his bar mitzvah his grandfather had given him a stallion and a revolver and sent him off without food to survive as best he could in the hills near the Cherkessian villages. But though I was only six, at six stone I was just as tall as he was and had been raised by Grandfather on colostrum and hate. Slowly I bent back two of his fingers until I heard them snap. Turning pale, he toppled to the ground and passed out. Two teachers carried him off while I bent back down for a look at the make-believe eyes of my caterpillars.

  That evening Rilov came to the cabin to talk to Grandfather. With a contemptuous rattle of ice cubes between his teeth, Grandfather advised him to tell his grandson to pick on children his own age and keep away from little boys with a big punch.

  That was the last time anyone tried that with me. But comic songs were sung about me during break, and Pinness, who had a knack of looking out the window of the teachers’ room in the nick of time, would come and lead me away just as I was about to charge, his hand drawing out the stiff tension in my neck.

  Two afternoons a week I went out to the fields with him, to ‘the School of Nature’.

  ‘Nature lets nothing go to waste,’ he declared as we trod the rough path leading to the wadi. ‘Everything is grist to its mill. Seize the one and withhold not thy hand from the other. There are worms that live in garlic peels. There are spiders that eat their mates. Cattle dung, rotten fruit, fabric, paper – it’s all grist to the mill.’

  He had his hands crossed behind him like a landowner inspecting his estate. On my back I carried a square army pack with his pincers, nets, empty matchboxes, and sealed bottles of chloroform. ‘Your grandfather gave me this knapsack,’ he said. ‘It’s an English wireless operator’s pack that belonged to your uncle Efrayim.’

  I asked if we could catch a praying mantis, an insect whose mincing gait and pious mien intrigued me. Just then, though, our path was busily crossed by an orange beetle with a black-spotted carapace, and I pointed it out to Pinness, who kept looking around while talking continually. He was thrilled to see it.

  ‘Maybe we’ll be in luck this time,’ he said, ordering me not to lose sight of it.

  The beetle proceeded in a straight line, its two clublike antennae moving ceaselessly. Clearly it had something on its mind.

  ‘It has a wonderful sense of smell,’ whispered Pinness, crawling after it on all fours.

  A quarter of an hour later the beetle quickened its pace. Shortly we too smelled the faint scent of carrion.

  The beetle disappeared beneath a bed of straw.

  ‘Well now,’ said Pinness, ‘let’s have a look.’ Lifting the straw, he bared the dead body of a goldfinch. We sat down upwind to avoid the smell, and Pinness told me to watch carefully.

  A second beetle appeared, making its way among the clods of earth. Without further ado, the two began mating by the corpse.

  ‘Look how nature has a place for everyone, Baruch,’ Pinness said. ‘Some couples meet in fields full of flowers, others at the theatre – these two prefer the stench of death.’

  Now the two beetles began to burrow beneath the goldfinch, excavating little pebbles and bits of earth as the dead bird sank into the hole. We sa
t watching for several hours until it was completely underground and covered with soil.

  ‘Now,’ Pinness said, ‘Mother Beetle will lay her eggs in the carcass, chewing and softening its meat for her maggots. Some children grow up in palaces and others in corpses. May my lot always be with the salt of the earth!’

  He took my hand and we went home.

  When the doctors announced that Pinness could return to the village, Busquilla hired a taxi to bring him. I suggested to the old teacher that he spend a few weeks with me, but his only answer was, ‘Home.’

  His eyes welled with sorrow and exertion when we got there. He had aged greatly. The little blood clots had attacked him with surgical precision, severing the bonds of memory, destroying the walls he had built during his long years in the country, and causing his brain to send out unremitting signals of hunger.

  ‘All the old boys are dead now,’ said Pinness. ‘From hard work and battling temptation. Levin alone is still alive. Levin alone, and I who live on with him. Two old dotards.’

  He taught no more classes and rarely had pupils over to his house. He did not go out to the fields any more either. Sometimes he sat in his garden watching the ants and grasshoppers scurry across the lawn. A sand boa he released from its cage in the nature room lay limply coiled among the wild flowers. He had divided his zoological collection between me and the school, the arthropods, the bleached reptiles in their jars of formaldehyde, and the hollow birds’ eggs remaining in the nature room. Alongside the more conventional systems of taxonomy, however, Pinness also classified all life into Helpful and Harmful, and his own private collection had two categories alone, Our Friends and Our Enemies.