The Blue Mountain

by Shalev, Meir

  ‘I’m a woolly mammoth, frozen in ice,’ he told me, spewing bits of food as he laughed. ‘Whoever digs me out will find I’m still edible.’ In the course of his own lifetime, ‘which is but a blink in the evolutionary process’, he had seen the griffon vulture disappear from the skies of the Valley, had witnessed the introduction of animals that understood human speech, and had heard the warble of the blackbird, which had left its old habitat in the hills of the Lower Galilee to settle in our village.

  His mind was still whole in those days, well rounded and defended, before his illness had made heretical inroads. And yet even when younger, he had felt the futility of all things. The famous Via Maris, ‘the Way of the Seal’, along which countless conquerors and traders had crossed the Valley, was nothing but a wretched scratch on the surface of the earth. The ancient walled city of Megiddo to the west, with its mighty fortresses and bottomless storehouses, was a crumbling pile of ruins at the foot of the blue mountain range. The once living stream, ‘that ancient river, the river Kishon’, in which the nine hundred chariots of Sisera had sunk, was now a mendacious sewer. Field marshals and altars had been swallowed up by the depths, palaces had crumbled like bones, like old aqueducts, like ancient terracing, like the vineyard of the nearby kibbutz. Barely two generations had passed since Liberson’s elopement through the grapevines with Fanya, and already it was uprooted, covered with concrete and a plastics factory, the entire story forgotten.

  Pinness envied the caveman, who had wandered to this guileless land without biblical get-thee-outs to find it unpossessed and unscarred by the petty footprints of human loyalty and love, ‘driven only by his own hunger and thirst and an innocent appetite, retained by every living cell to this day, for that warm, moist thing we call life’.

  He also envied Meshulam, who, caring nothing for the long pinions of Time, chose to follow its winged flight only from the day the founding fathers first alighted in the Valley. Oblivious to the forces of disintegration and rot, Meshulam shut his eyes to the chalk-white bones, the fossilised ostrich eggs, and the broken slivers of giant shells that Pinness lovingly collected. Everything that had happened before the founding of the village seemed to him one long, superfluous column of negative numbers.

  ‘Meshulam is convinced that it was the founders of the village who drove away the cavemen and the swamp flora and poisoned the mastodons and the cave bears before weeding the crabgrass and planting vegetables. He thinks the earth just sat here waiting for them, trembling like a bashful bride.

  ‘And for whom? For whom? Waiting for whom?’ chanted the old teacher in a thin, mocking voice. Towards the end of his life he had mastered all the subtleties of sarcasm. He understood now how easily the earth shook off whatever trivial images men cloaked it in. ‘Why, it’s nothing but a tissue of poor fictions anyway, the earth!’ he exclaimed. ‘A thin crust beneath which is nothing but pure selfishness, a speck of dust at the far end of a minor galaxy.

  ‘The earth cheated on us,’ Pinness informed me with a salacious smile. ‘She wasn’t the virgin we thought she was.’

  39

  Now, old, heavy, and myopic, Pinness could penetrate at a glance so far into space and so deep into earth that he suffered from attacks of vertigo and fainted on the floor of his room amid bits of leftover meatloaf, preserved caterpillars, and dry crusts of bread. This was the state Meshulam found him in when he arrived one day, devastated by a new piece of research that dealt with our very own village.

  He shook Pinness awake and helped him into bed before furiously waving under the old teacher’s nose one of the many journals he subscribed to. It was a publication called The Land of Israel Historian, and on its cover was a large, oddly reddish fish curled around the Cave of the Patriarchs with its nose in the scales of its tail.

  ‘The latest is that they say there were no swamps here,’ shouted Meshulam irately. ‘What doesn’t pass for research these days!’

  With his grey hair and clawing fingers Meshulam resembled an irritable Egyptian vulture. Turning the pages until he came to an article entitled ‘The Swamps of the Valley of Jezreel: Myth and Reality’, he began reading out loud, his shaky forefinger jumping from line to line.

  ‘Listen to this! “For propagandistic and political purposes, the Zionist movement created around the Valley of Jezreel a symbolic mythology of swamps, malaria, and death. In fact, ninety-nine per cent of the Valley was not swampland at all.”’

  Pinness, who was by then being touted by febrile journalists as ‘one of the last pioneers of the Valley of Jezreel’, clutched at Meshulam’s words as if they were straw that might rescue him from his swoons of heresy, or an anchor whose stability amid the labyrinthine caves of time and the treacherous chutes of space could restore him to the safety of his old beliefs.

  ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘“The evidence indicates that at the beginning of the period of modern Jewish settlement, swampland in the Valley of Jezreel was not widespread,”’ Meshulam recited. ‘“This, of course, is at variance with the picture given by Zionist sources, which created the Myth of the Swamp. Although the actual extent of the swamps was small, their imaginative appeal was enormous.”’

  Meshulam repeated the words ‘imaginative appeal’ several times with barely suppressed fury, sipped some tea, and declared that ‘they’, those ‘muzhiks who call themselves historians’, had even cited his father’s and Liberson’s memoirs ‘to advance their tissue of lies’, making a mockery of the truth by ‘quoting selectively at their convenience’.

  ‘But they don’t know who they’re up against!’ he roared at the ceiling. ‘I’ve got all the documents and proofs. Now you see why I saved all those papers even when everyone laughed at me.

  ‘Look at this,’ he said, pointing at the journal. ‘The frauds actually mention my father!’

  He began to read again. ‘“Before the village was established, its founders surveyed the site. One of them, a certain Tsirkin who was nicknamed ‘Guitar’, wrote in his memoirs: ‘We went to have a look at our first swamp and saw a clump of bright green willow trees. Swamps like this, we were told by those who knew, were nothing to be afraid of, because ordinary drainage ditches could lower the water level until they disappeared.’”’

  ‘Guitar,’ gagged Meshulam, glancing at Pinness to see if he was similarly aghast.

  ‘Read on, Meshulam,’ said Pinness.

  ‘Now I’ll read you what my father actually wrote, the part these so-called scholars never quoted,’ Meshulam said, opening the familiar green volume of his father’s memoirs, On Native Paths, which he himself had edited, published, and given a copy of to every family in the village a few years previously.

  ‘“A green carpet of brackish water that collected in sinkholes and hollows lay everywhere, infested with all kinds of pests.”’ He leafed through the pages until he found the famous passage that had once appeared in The Young Worker and could still be found in school readers. ‘“We looked all around us at the green pools with their stagnant water and were far from overjoyed. The rank green rushes were taller than a man. The swamp was green too. But it was deep with promise, though its big and little marshes were crawling with mosquitoes.”’

  That evening, when I had returned from my graves and was helping Avraham with the milking, Meshulam appeared at our place too. Over the whirr of the electric motors and the blasts of compressed air he vociferously told me, Avraham, and the sceptical cows how the founding fathers had ‘drained the evil waters’ until ‘they shook all over from malaria’, wallowing ‘waist-deep in muck’ while laying clay pipes in accordance with the Breuer system and singing the pioneer ditty ‘Friend of the Frog’.

  ‘“Despite the warnings of Doctor Yoffe and the fever we all came down with, we cut papyrus with our sickles until our arms ached and our shoulders felt like stone,”’ he held forth from his father’s memoirs. ‘“Under absolutely no circumstance must you try settling in such a place,”’ he quoted Doctor Yoffe, the country’s leading e
xpert on malaria. Meshulam knew a large portion of the documents in his possession by heart.

  We were busy opening and shutting air valves. By the time Avraham switched off the Alfa-Laval vacuum pump, Meshulam had moved on to the high ground of principle, castigating ‘the epidemic of cynicism that has infected the public’ and ‘the pathetic hunger for publicity and sensationalism that you find among academics, which will soon spread throughout our society, this village not excepted.’

  In those days Avraham no longer brought his milk churns to the dairy. His cows yielded such prodigious quantities of milk that he had installed his own refrigerator in the yard, and the village tanker emptied it every day. Now, checking its temperature, he remarked that perhaps Meshulam should write an article for the papers. But Meshulam merely spat angrily and said that the press was ‘part of the conspiracy’ and that ‘something drastic must be done to set this country on its ear’.

  ‘It’s scandalous,’ admitted Pinness, grateful to be released for a while from the clutches of the cavemen and the slow crumbling of the Via Maris into a world that had reassuringly contracted to the dimensions of a local outrage. ‘Today it’s Guitar Tsirkin and tomorrow they’ll say there were never any pioneers to begin with. Why, Doctor Yoffe was here in person and declared that this place was every bit as bad as the swamps of Hadera.’

  He wrote a long article and sent it to the Movement newspaper, which not only failed to print it but did not even bother to return it. Pinness was cut to the quick. Resentfully he recalled all the pieces that he and his fellow pedagogues had regularly published in Movement dailies and periodicals in the past. ‘A little poem’ of his had even been printed in The Young Worker in a special box bordered by flowers, and had been set to music by Mandolin Tsirkin. Every child in the Valley could sing its refrain in a piping, confident voice:

  Say ye not the flesh is weary,

  Say ye not the dream is fled.

  Be in this land a pioneer, ye!

  Never shall ye bow your head.

  In the end Pinness turned to the village treasurer and asked for a grant to publish the article at his own expense. He was given the money and the piece appeared, but the words ‘Paid Advertisement’ at the bottom seared his soul like a humiliating tattoo.

  Under the title ‘A Land That Devoureth Its Inhabitants’, Pinness referred to the Swamp Revisionists as ‘promiscuousmouthed hypocrites’ and related his own memories.

  ‘On our visit to the site we saw the graves of the Germans who had tried to settle there before us and died of malaria. Later we met an old Arab who was ploughing with a team of oxen.

  ‘“Don’t you suffer from swamp fever?” I asked him.

  ‘“No,” he said. “If you come to live here, you will have four years of war, because that’s how long you will fight your own blood, but if you are alive at the end of them, you will go on living.”

  ‘“What about your children?” I asked. “Do many of them die?”

  ‘“Yes,” he said. “The old people live, but the children, Allah takes them.”

  ‘A year later my wife Leah died of malaria with two infants in her womb, sinless twins who never saw the light of day. As the chief butler says to Pharaoh, “I do remember my faults today.” I sought to take my own life, but my comrades snatched my gun from me. My wife and twins were the victims of the imaginary swamps of the Valley of Jezreel.’

  In the village, the old argument over Pinness’s rifle was revived.

  ‘What is he yacking about that gun again for? He forgot to take it with him,’ said Meshulam, who considered Pinness’s article a red herring.

  ‘Rilov removed the firing pin,’ said Levin.

  ‘You weren’t even here then,’ Levin was told.

  ‘Rilov was carrying on with Leah Pinness,’ declared Riva Margulis.

  ‘That whore never died of malaria. She died of cave fever,’ said Tonya Rilov.

  ‘Whoever should know knows, and whoever shouldn’t doesn’t,’ said Rilov, sticking his head out of his septic tank for a breath of fresh air before resubmerging and vanishing from sight.

  40

  I was thrilled by the publication of Pinness’s advertisement. For the first time, I saw the words of the stories I knew spread out on the printed page for all to see. I looked back at the mountain, searching once more for the figure of Shifris, the green of Efrayim’s eye, the glimmer of Jean Valjean’s horns. Uri scoffed at any mention of this trio and asked me in his sardonic letters whether Efrayim would also carry Shifris on his back or Shifris would carry Efrayim and Jean Valjean on his.

  Nevertheless, although Pinness’s article aroused a degree of interest in the village and the area, the great public debate he had hoped for failed to materialise.

  Meshulam, as bitter as the leaves of a cornflower, exclaimed, ‘I told you so. This country needs a shaking up!’

  Returning to Founder’s Cabin, he settled down among his old rolling pins, washboards, sooty lanterns, clay pots, sieves, winnowers, butter churns, millstones, and oil incubators to launch a new project, namely, a diorama of the swamp and its draining. Visitors, so he hoped, would come from all over the country to see it.

  With no little effort he dug a large, shallow pit in his yard and filled it with water. ‘I’m founding a swamp,’ he answered all inquiries, and since the heavy black Valley soil is not very porous, the water remained there for several days. I went to have a look at it. It was already a little swamp of sorts: mosquitoes and dragonflies had come to lay their eggs in it, protozoal algae had tinged it a mythical green, and a loudly singing Meshulam had hastened to dig drainage ditches and plant a few eucalyptus branches in the mud. At that point, however, his neighbours, unable to stand the mosquitoes and the oestrous croaking of the frogs, broke into his yard at night, gave him a good beating, and drained the little bog with a sewage pump hooked up to a tractor engine. The issue came up at a general meeting of the village, at which Meshulam announced that he had just begun to fight. And indeed, in the days that followed, his annoying puddles turned up in the most unexpected places, such as the entrance to the village, the lawn in front of the meeting house, the public war memorial, and the nursery.

  Following Meshulam one night, I saw him drag a fireman’s hose from the school hydrant to the nursery playground, where toddlers arriving at seven-thirty in the morning discovered that the sandpit built years ago by the Gang was completely flooded, its contents blasted all over the yard by the pressurised water. In it stood a shirtless Meshulam, his trousers rolled up to his knees, waiting to be carried off by malaria. The hair on his chest was a furious grey, his head was streaked red by his father’s gypsy bandanna, and plastic toys in all colours floated around his legs. The sight of the blond, innocently chirping youngsters coming upon such a scene alarmed me. I knew it was silly, but it did.

  Not that anything happened. The children were of course frightened, and two became totally hysterical; one, Ya’akovi’s son, stuttered for months afterward; but that was all. Meshulam, standing in the middle of his swamp, was not bitten by a single anopheles mosquito, although a sudden, mocking breeze blew the hair of some processionary moth caterpillars out of the nearby pine trees, which did make his shoulders itch for a long time to come.

  That same week we went to visit Uri. He asked about Zeitser, whom he called ‘Productivus Bound’, and inquired after Pinness, whose ‘adverticle’ he had seen in the newspaper. I told him about Meshulam’s latest madness. ‘King Jonquil of the Swamps,’ pronounced Uri, and we both burst out laughing. When Rivka said that she saw no difference between Meshulam’s swamps and my cemetery, however, Uri grew suddenly serious and told his mother that the village had more surprises in store for it, and that now, from a distance, he could more clearly see the processes of disintegration that he himself had played a part in.

  We drove home in time for a nap. An onerous heat lay over the yard. The cows were asleep in their pen. The refrigerator motors hummed quietly in the milk shed. Farther off we
saw Zeitser lying under his fig tree with his head covered. No one gave it a second thought, because Zeitser liked to shade himself in hot weather with an old green cloth, but when we rose from our nap the waning sun’s rays glinted off an army of green flies. Avraham let out a great bitter cry and ran to the old mule, whose head was wrapped in the necrophagous blanket of the outdoors.

  Zeitser was still breathing. His ribs rose and sank slowly. An odd, sticky, round object lay on the ground by his neck. It took a few seconds to absorb the full horror of what we were looking at and to realise that it was the mule’s left eyeball, which a flying stone had dislodged from its socket.

  A puddle of blood, scattered stones, the tracks of familiar work boots, and the imprint of frantic hooves made what had happened all too clear. Taking advantage of our absence, Shlomo Levin had stolen into the yard during the hot noon hours when everyone was closeted indoors and stoned Zeitser from a safe range until he succeeded in knocking the mule’s eye out.

  Avraham called for the vet, a kindhearted man who had never given much thought to the true relations between farmers and their animals. They crouched together by Zeitser’s side to examine the terrible wound.

  ‘It’s a bad one,’ said the vet. ‘He’s very old. We’ll have to give him a shot.’

  ‘A shot?’ said Avraham.

  ‘Between the eyes,’ replied the vet, getting to his feet.

  Avraham threw him out of the yard. He brought a cattle hypodermic and some sulpha from the medicine cabinet in the cowshed, cleaned, disinfected, and bandaged the mule’s eye socket, and pumped a quart and a half of Biocomb into his veins. Tears kept running down his cheeks, but his hands were sure and steady. He sat by Zeitser’s side for three whole nights, and then, despairing of conventional remedies, filled some baby bottles with sweetened skimmed milk, barley gruel, and brown rice in poppy aspic and fed him as though he were a newborn calf critically ill with dysentery.