The Blue Mountain (16 page)
That year Grandfather’s orchard blossomed as never before. He asked Hayyim Margulis to place a few beehives among the trees, and the honey that resulted was nearly red and so sweet that it burned the tongue. All day long Grandfather circulated among his rows of fruit trees, whose dates of blossoming and parade of scents had been calculated from midwinter through spring, tottering drunkenly home from their lush fragrance. By now Avraham was in full charge of the cows, leaving Grandfather free to enjoy his private Eden, around which he planted thick hedges of cypress trees to shield it from the
winter winds that came roaring down from the blue mountain.
The white blossoms of the almonds were the first to appear, the sweetness of their petals wafting through the air as if challenging the rain and the mud. Next the peach bloomed in a fierce pink, the tall, slender stamens of its flowers lighter than its rich, dark buds. Beside it glowed the delicate apricot, whose scent was like a woman’s perfume. Soon the plums joined in, their little blossoms covering the branches with a velvety white. The apples flowered after Purim in reds and whites, their smell as full and juicy as their fruit. At Passover time came the quinces, from which Rachel and Shlomo Levin made jams and jellies, and the pears with their white flowers, winey-fumed and purple-funnelled. Finally, when the earth was hot from the ascendant sun that ruled the orchard, swelling its pregnant pistils, the orange trees brought Grandfather’s scent fest to a close with a cloak of fragrance so heavy that it enveloped the whole village.
It was in this orchard, where the meadow browns flitted freely, the bees buzzed with loud gaiety, and the birds and buprestid beetles fell fainting from the treetops, that I buried Grandfather and his friends. But in those days Esther planted gillyflowers that opened overnight and led Binyamin to wet wallows of fallen petals. Before dawn she stole back to the cabin with her sandals in her hands, though the strong, familiar scent of wet earth, pears, and gillyflowers given off by her warm skin awakened Grandfather anyway.
‘He was too happy for words. The smell of his daughter was as the smell of a field which the Lord hath blessed.’
‘What a lovely story,’ said Fanya Liberson. Her hair, I assume, was draped over her husband’s chest, and her thigh lay across his stomach then too. ‘As sorry as I feel for our poor Daniel, I’m glad for a change to see a man at Mirkin’s who is crazy in love.’
For the first time, love reigned supreme at the Mirkin farm. With wild shrieks the two of them re-enacted their first encounter, Esther clambering up the bales in the hayloft and grabbing
hold of the ridgepole while Binyamin stood below her, watching her kick her legs.
‘I’m not letting go till you say
schnell, schnell
,’ she would shout.
Avraham cleaned out the cowshed, his eyes darkly on the floor, the creases pulsing in his forehead.
One night, coming back from a stroll in the fields, I took off my shoes and tiptoed quietly up to Rivka and Avraham’s window, where I heard my aunt discussing my mother.
‘I remember her as though it were yesterday,’ she rasped in her lizardy voice. ‘Hanging from the roof of the hayloft. You never looked, but believe you me, she wasn’t wearing any underpants.’
‘I think my mother was jealous. My father never looked up her dress like that, and he never whistled any off-key operas for her either.’
I
n a nearby village there was an awful incident at the time. A farmer took his own life without anyone knowing why. ‘He was buried with the secret of his death,’ said our village newsletter. His body, covered with dead buds and the broken wings of satyr butterflies, was found in Grandfather’s orchard with its skull blown off and its big toe on the trigger of an old five-round semi-automatic. It had been lying there for several days, the strong smell of the flowering fruit trees hiding the stench of the putrefying corpse until Grandfather’s suspicions were aroused by the sight of swarms of green flies, which generally found blossoms repulsive.
The suicide left behind a widow, an only son aged eight, and the rifle, which was so rusted that Rilov had to cross it off his list of useable firearms in the Valley. The child was told that his father had gone on a long trip and would bring him presents
when he returned, but the children in school told him what they heard at night when their parents were gathered at the kitchen table with their friends, whispering over tea after a day’s work. The boy took to walking in his sleep, and came home every night before dawn with his feet scratched by thorns and stones.
‘I hear my father calling,’ he told everyone.
Pinness was furious. The children of the dead man’s village attended our school. Every day they arrived in a cart pulled by a team of horses, their shoes wet from the dewy weeds by the roadside. ‘How can a child be lied to like that?’ he screamed in the teachers’ room. ‘How can anyone contaminate such a tender sprout?’
Though he realised at once that it was the work of the hyena, it was high spring and no one paid heed to his warnings. Man and beast wanted only to stretch out in the grass and take in the sun and warm earth. The cowsheds and rabbit hutches were full of the squeals of calves and babes. The young primiparous heifers came down with spring fever and ran wildly about with their tails sticking up, kicking the air. The deep winter mud was drying out, and the ground was no longer sticky and treacherous but soft and springy underfoot. The snorts of the wildcat cubs, scrapping playfully as they practised their murderous arts on carpets of grass and daisies, could be heard down by the spring. Hayyim Margulis’s bees growled softly among the flowers as they transported their sweet cargo, while flocks of bee-eaters freshly returned from the tropics wreaked havoc among them. Male doves strutted atop the cowsheds, their bright, swollen crops and their sheeny breasts slicing the sunshine like prisms. Great flocks of pelicans passed overhead, bound northward for
there
, the land of wheat, wolves, and birches. On their way they flew low over Liberson’s house and screamed mockingly at Fanya. The spring doubled its flow, and the last winter jonquils gave off such a powerful scent that Avraham broke out in long riffs of tears and sneezes.
Anxious and tense, Pinness took the children out to the fields for a look at the flowers.
‘The month of Nisan is the month of our Movement,’ he told
his pupils, his eyes combing his surroundings for the enemy. ‘It’s then that Nature lifts high her red flags in memory of our liberation from bondage in Egypt: the poppy, the anemone, the red buttercup, the pheasant’s-eye, the mountain tulip, and the everlasting.’
‘And then, as I was standing there listening to their laughter in the field, the green wall of young corn suddenly parted like a curtain, thrust aside by the shoulders of the hyena.’
Every spring the hornet queens emerged from their winter hideaways. Weak and frozen, they searched for a place to build their nests. Within a few weeks each had hatched a regiment of brigands. When summer came their black-and-yellow forms flashed through the air with a fierce, menacing rasp, raiding the grape clusters, descending on fruits and milk cans, biting men and animals, decimating beehives, and terrorising the whole village. The Committee paid the children a small bounty for every dead hornet, and every spring Pinness took them out to the field to trap the queens before they could establish a new generation of ‘rapacious Midianites’.
‘It isn’t easy for me to ask you to kill a hornet queen,’ he told them. ‘It’s not our way to kill living things. But the field mouse, the hornet, the viper, and all tree pests are our mortal enemies.’
The vipers emerged early that year, unwinding their thick bodies in the sun and waiting for a careless mouse, hoof, or bare foot. In the mornings we found their limp bodies hanging from the chicken wire that had trapped their broad heads at night while they were trying to steal eggs and baby chicks. Binyamin, who was scared to death of snakes, never went out to the fields without boots and a long hoe on his shoulder.
‘My daughter just laughed at him, skipping barefoot through the clover no matter how he screamed at her to stop.’
‘A big strong boy like you,’ said Esther, ‘and such a coward!’
They sat in a field overlooking the British air base.
‘I steal a plane and fly to my old home,’ said Binyamin.
‘When my mother was still alive,’ Esther revealed to him, ‘we
had a little donkey. Every night she spread her ears and flew off to Constantinople to meet the Turkish sultan.’
Esther lay on her back while Binyamin regarded her sceptically. He checked the lush grass, took off his shirt and boots, and lay down pleasurably beside her. Two minutes later Esther nudged him in the stomach and pointed to a large viper, as thick as a man’s forearm, that was crawling slowly toward them. She could feel Binyamin stiffen and start to shake, every pore of his skin gushing sweat.
‘Don’t move,’ she said. ‘If I haven’t eaten you, it won’t either.’
But the viper kept coming toward them, sniffing the ground with its tongue. Esther pinned Binyamin down with her hand to keep him from moving. When the snake neared her foot, she picked up one of his heavy work boots and clubbed it on the neck. It lunged and writhed while she struck it again and again till its head was as flat as a wafer.
‘What a stupid idiot you are!’ she said to Binyamin. ‘What a stupid fatso! Killing a snake is nothing. Efrayim once killed a viper with a shoe brush.’
Across the fields they saw Pinness and his children by the corn patch, far from the houses of the village. But they could not see the hyena, which was hidden up to its shoulders in the thick corn.
Pinness knew it would not attack. Hyenas rarely did, and even then only when they found a single weak, tender victim.
‘But I recognised it,’ he gasped. ‘It made me feel murderous. I wanted to run at it, kill it, choke it. It recognised me too, though, and disappeared back into the thick foliage. The children never even saw it.’
He gathered the children around him, flapping his arms like a mother hen, and returned with them to the village, where he worriedly related his fears to the Committee head.
‘The hyena must have been attracted by a carcass that somebody threw in the corn,’ said the Committee head, who was reminded by Pinness’s fears of ‘some idiotic Arab superstition’. It couldn’t possibly be the same beast that had bitten settlers
and struck them down during their first years in the Valley, he argued. Pinness left more upset and worried than before.
He hurried to the teacher from the neighbouring village and urged him to set traps and post guards, but no one there had seen the hyena or even come across its tracks.
‘Just as years later no one heard those obscenities in the middle of the night,’ he said to me angrily.
The sleepwalker disappeared every night in search of his father. Without waking he loosed the ropes tying him to his bed and set out, vanishing under the noses of his pursuers as if he had dissolved into little flakes of darkness. Once the night watchmen saw his sleeping figure emerge from the shadows and cross right in front of the breeding horse, a splendid but violent stallion that had already trampled a calf and a hired hand to death. Not only did it do him no harm, it rubbed against the fence of its corral and whined as fearfully as an abandoned puppy.
‘On the seventh night the hyena called again, and the blond little boy, thinking it was his father, was tricked into rising from his mother’s bed and going out to the fields with his eyes shut, in nothing but a white nightshirt.’
Three days later the little body was found with a splintered neck bone, next to the jujube tree in the dry bed of the wadi. It was old Zeitser on one of his pensive walks who discovered it lying beneath the familiar, accursed green blanket of necrophiliac flies. He ran all over the Valley to tell the founders.
Pinness, who was not exactly ‘a fire-breathing warrior’, stood by the little coffin before the open grave, weeping and swearing revenge.
‘It’s no accident that it strikes at the smallest and weakest of us,’ he said. ‘The hyena is Doubt and Despair, the loss of faith and the sowing of confusion. But we shall be of good cheer and continue to build and plant, to sow and water, until the ploughman shall overtake the reaper and the treader of grapes him that soweth seed.’
The villages were in a state of panic. The broken neck and savaged chest of the little boy struck terror in all hearts. Children
were no longer allowed out at night to turn off sprinklers or check that the barnyard gate was shut. And yet the springtime went its merry way.
‘Before long the dead boy sank into the sediments of the Valley’s painful memory. Along with the victims of malaria and of Arab bandits, the suicides and the fallers by the wayside, he too became a fable in our textbooks and a black-framed picture in the teachers’ room. Each time I looked at his little face, I cursed the fates in my heart.’
The spring earth had dried out and cracked, the stalks of grain turned yellow, and our new Marshall thresher was brought to the fields. The harvest was a particularly good one that year, ‘as if the earth had accepted our sacrifice’. Binyamin came to help out after finishing work at Rilov’s, and my mother brought his meals to the field, poking fun at his sensitive skin that blistered in the sun, hissing like a snake behind his back, tripping him among the sheaves, and wrestling with him in the smothering dust of chaff that covered their faces and clothes.
The Mirkins were preparing for a double wedding – Binyamin and Esther’s, Avraham and Rivka’s. No one had the slightest inkling of the cunning ambushes of Time or the tubers of evil swelling in its furrows. My parents’ death, Efrayim and Jean Valjean’s disappearance, Zeitser’s gruesome end, Pioneer Home – all these were not even the tiniest cloud on the horizon. In honour of the occasion Pinness and Tsirkin composed a short musical comedy on the history of threshing floors from the days of Ruth to the present. Some of the village women volunteered to make the food, and the Committee saw to the tables and tablecloths.
