The Blue Mountain

by Shalev, Meir

  In Poland he had been a famous wrestler. ‘I’d get dressed up in a leopard skin, for example, put on a Roman belt, and beat the hell out of the Christians.’ He even excitedly showed us an old photograph of himself wearing a gold cardboard helmet with a horsehair plume, his huge calf muscles laced in the leather straps of a gladiator.

  Yehoshua Ber rented a room from Rachel Levin and pleased the feed manager with his untiring hard work. Every morning he jogged and exercised out in the fields, his great buffalo gasps audible all over the village. Twice a week he coached the teenagers in those two forgotten arts of British Mandate days, jujitsu and hand-to-hand combat. ‘You don’t even have to pay me, for example,’ he told them bashfully. And then one day, when he was demonstrating how he could lift a feed sack with one hand, his face flushed with pleasurable exertion, Rilov came charging out from behind a heap of sorghum seeds, drew his Russian revolver from his belt, and declared:

  ‘I’ve got it! I know who you are. You’re Zeitouni’s strong man.’

  Now everyone remembered. Although the years had stripped him of his great mane of hair, he was the same performer who had smashed bricks and twisted nails for Zeitouni.

  Dani Rilov and Ya’akovi took Yehoshua Ber to the Committee office and sent for Avraham.

  Avraham was excited and edgy. ‘Where’s my brother?’ he demanded at once.

  The strong man, however, was unable to be of any help.

  ‘Your brother was only with us for one day, for example,’ he said. ‘Zeitouni billed him as Alfonso Corrida, the Strong Man of Toledo.’

  The repulsive stage name made everyone groan and shudder with disgust.

  ‘He followed us all day with that cow on his back,’ said the strong man.

  ‘Bull. It was a Charolais bull,’ said Dani Rilov.

  ‘He just walked along with it. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I sat in the cart, for example, and all the time I kept looking back at him. He had this mask on his face and kept walking with the cow. He wasn’t even breathing hard, for example. That evening we camped in an Arab village. From the moment your brother joined us, Zeitouni never stopped insulting me. He even made me cook supper for everyone.’

  Before the dumbfounded eyes of the Arabs, who were sure he had a djinn in him, Efrayim lifted Jean Valjean to his shoulders ten times. The beekeeper’s mask with its gleaming green eye frightened them too.

  ‘That cow was the only thing he had strength for,’ said Yehoshua. ‘I could have pinned him to the ground with one hand. He couldn’t pick up two hundred pounds. Not even one hundred, for example. Just that cow, for example.’

  ‘If there’s one more “for example” out of you,’ said Rilov, ‘I’ll make you eat this whip.’

  Pinness opened the door, came in, and sat down.

  There had been a good gate that evening, and Zeitouni was in a fine mood.

  ‘After supper he let your brother have the rubber girl.’

  Avraham had tears in his eyes. ‘What did we do to deserve all this? What?’

  ‘How wretched a man must be to stoop to such things!’ mused Pinness.

  ‘No one had ever messed around with her before,’ said the strong man. ‘Only Zeitouni. She didn’t even need men. Whenever she had the hots, she went down on herself, for example. The way she tied herself into knots could drive a man out of his mind.’

  Pinness fidgeted and said, ‘You can skip the lurid details. Stick to Efrayim, please.’

  ‘Zeitouni put her in a tent with your brother,’ continued the strong man, ‘and they had a go at it until pretty soon we heard her howling like an animal. Just then along comes that cow of his, opens the tent flap with its horns, and stands there watching them. They were glued together, for example, she had herself plastered all over him. Your brother was naked except for that net on his face. He gave the cow a kick in the schnoz, his nose, but the cow, it didn’t want to leave.’

  ‘He was watching Efrayim just like Efrayim watched him,’ said Avraham in a shattered voice that could have been Grandfather’s speaking from the earth.

  ‘Well, he stood up with the girl still wrapped around him and began to walk off. The cow, it picked up his clothes in its mouth and started to follow them. After a couple of yards there was this big pop, for example, and the girl, she came loose like a wet rag.’ The strong man stuck a straight, thick finger in his mouth, pressed it against the inside of his cheek, and plucked it out like a disgusting cork.

  ‘That’s what it sounded like,’ he said.

  Zeitouni ran after them, pleading and shouting. ‘But that cow just turned around with its head down, for example, gave him a look and a snort, and put its foot in the ground, here, just like this. He didn’t dare come closer.’

  ‘Where did Efrayim go?’ asked Rilov.

  ‘At what o’clock?’ asked Dani. His son Uzi was doing his army service, and he had picked up some military expressions from him.

  Yehoshua stopped bellowing ominously and pawing the ground with his foot. ‘It was like a dream, for example,’ he said, his coarse face growing bright and soft. ‘It was like having a dream in a dream. He just put that cow on his back, and off they went into the trees and clouds.’

  ‘But where?’ shouted Avraham. ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the strong man. ‘Zeitouni looked for them a bit. He thought your brother might change his mind. But he just walked away. I’ve never seen anyone like him in my life. That morning I was jealous of him, that afternoon I was afraid of him, and that evening I loved him.’

  The next day Zeitouni bought a small calf from the villagers and made the strong man begin practising bull lifting.

  ‘I said to him, “How much can I lift? A thirty-stone cow? A forty-stone cow? That still doesn’t put me in his class. I know something about strength. That’s my line. But what he’s got, for example, that isn’t strength, that’s something you’ve got to be pretty desperate to have. Or maybe two men who were friends could do it together, for example.”’

  I heard a deep sigh on the other side of the wall and the scrape of a chair leg. Avraham rose wearily and walked out. Yehoshua Ber sat there for a moment and then ran to the window and shouted after him, the words sailing over my head, ‘I think that cow didn’t want your brother to do it with the rubber girl.’

  Ya’akovi and Dani shoved him back into his chair.

  ‘What made you come back here, Yehoshua?’ asked Ya’akovi.

  ‘I left Zeitouni. I didn’t want to work for him any more. That was a long time ago. After that I had all kinds of jobs. I was in the building trade, carrying cement sacks, and I worked tying ships in the port, for example. I was already living in this village before I even remembered that that bloke with the cow came from here.’

  I heard old Rilov rise from his chair and knew he was about to grill the suspect until the hackles stood up on his neck. ‘That was a lovely bull story,’ he said. ‘We’ve already heard it all before. Now listen carefully and watch your step. Did you run into any English on your way?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m going to ask you again. Did you see any English talking with Efrayim, taking anything from him, giving him anything?’

  ‘What kind of English, for example?’ Yehoshua was getting annoyed. ‘The English are gone. This is our country now.’

  ‘I’ve dealt with men twice your size,’ said Rilov with genuine nostalgia. ‘Think it over. Maybe an English officer with a limp and a cane? Or two Scotsmen?’

  ‘What’s a Scotsmen?’

  ‘Don’t leave the village,’ said Rilov. ‘I’ll check your story with some friends in the Galilee, and I’ll get back to you. Don’t think you’re dealing with just anyone. I’m Committee!’ His voice had acquired a hollow resonance with age, and his words kept on ringing in the air after he had left the room.

  Avraham came back from Yehoshua Ber’s interrogation a devastated man. He went straight to the cowshed, where he started to bellow and spin around with his arms out, staggering thi
s way and that like Shoshanna when Grandfather slaughtered her, the deep creases in his forehead white from pressure. Yosi was in the army, and Uri was with his uncle in the Galilee, so Rivka grabbed me and dragged me to her husband to keep him from smashing his head against a wall. I waited until he collapsed on the floor and carried him to his house.

  It was easy for me. Effortless. I’m a strong man. As big as an ox. An obedient brawler of a grandson, broad of back and stiff of neck. Why else did Grandfather cram me with so much strength? To carry him when he died, to carry Pinness when he was sick, to carry that half-drowned surfer by the sea. And the exhausted Shifris. And my sacks of money. And my barrels of stories. And my beautiful, tall, burned mother.

  Mandolin Tsirkin died in his bed in the yard. Pesya, who passed away a year later, did not even know about it. Alone in a little room in a Movement geriatric institution near Tel Aviv, paralysed on her right side, she lay holding subtle but demented conversations in a loud voice with the minister of the treasury, Fanya Liberson, and someone named Ettinger. She had no idea whom Meshulam meant when he came to tell her about his father’s death. Repeating the words ‘gizzard flowers’ over and over, she begged him to rescue her slip from the flames.

  Tsirkin died noisily, unco-operatively, shouting his objections at the top of his lungs. The whole village heard him wrestling with Death.

  ‘Why didn’t anyone tell me that it hurt?’ he cried out in bitter astonishment.

  Meshulam and Doctor Munk stook by his bed. Assisted by Eliezer Liberson, who had been brought from the old folk’s home, they tried to get him to the hospital. He argued with them, squirmed, refused.

  ‘It’ll be over in a few minutes anyway,’ he said.

  ‘The interns will stick tubes up me,’ he moaned.

  ‘Call for Doctor Yoffe,’ he commanded in a fog. And briefly pausing, he went on: ‘Come, join us, Feyge. I’ve made some baked pumpkin with flour and eggs. Come, they’re both gone now. Jump into the water with me, it’s not cold at all.’ Suddenly he shouted, ‘Comrades Tsirkin, Mirkin, and Liberson will make no dishonorable advances.’ I alone knew what he meant.

  He calmed down a bit, his chest rising and falling heavily.

  ‘I have to keep breathing,’ he told himself. ‘I mustn’t stop even for a minute.’

  A fresh attack of pain racked his body, making him shout out loudly and curse the ‘hole counters’ – a familiar term so old that no one knew what it meant any more. ‘It all started with those damn idiots the hole counters,’ he swore.

  ‘Who were the hole counters?’ I asked Meshulam several weeks later.

  ‘It’s just something my father made up,’ he replied.

  I never gave him the letter that Mandolin wrote to Grandmother Feyge. The other documents in Tsirkin’s box he read aloud at his father’s funeral. He was thrilled to come across an original letter from Hankin having to do with the removal of Arab sharecroppers from land purchased in Ein Tab’un, and to discover a shopping list of the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle from June 1919. ‘Two rotls of flour, a bottle of sesame oil, four shirts of Arab cloth, a straw hat for Mirkin,’ it said.

  Meshulam claimed that Shifris’s letter was a forgery. ‘It’s a bad practical joke,’ he said, though he kept it in his archives. ‘If you ever want to swap it for the constitution of the Workingman’s Circle, I’m ready to talk,’ he told me.

  We lowered the coffin into the ground, and Meshulam hoed some earth onto it. After a while his place was taken by blind old Eliezer Liberson, the last survivor of the Workingman’s Circle, who finished the job with a few practised scoops of the spade.

  ‘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.

  44

  In 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.