The Blue Mountain (18 page)
They stood looking into the distance until Zeitser coughed, catching a whiff of far-off smoke and explosives, and Grandfather, glimpsing the carmine flush of battlefields and hearing the screams that skipped like pebbles across the waves, buried his head in his knees.
They had already returned home when an English automobile drove into the village in the morning. The children ran
to tell Rilov that Major Stoves had arrived and that the septic tank entrance should be camouflaged. Major Stoves was a tall, limping Englishman who had been wounded in North Africa and transferred to Palestine with his uniform and black walking stick. He descended from the automobile, hobbled to the far door, opened it, and saluted. Efrayim was home.
Wearing the soft yellow desert boots and winged-dagger insignia of a commando, and his ribbons, decorations, and sergeant’s stripes, in his pocket a lifelong pension certificate from His Majesty’s government, Efrayim stepped out of the car and smiled at the villagers gathered there.
The cry that went up at the sight of him was not soon forgotten. Mouths opened wide, retching with horror and consternation. Men came running from the green fields, from the leafing orchards, from the cowsheds and the chicken coops to stand before Efrayim and howl. The veterinarian’s wife, whom he had slept with on and off, screamed for a full minute and a half ‘without stopping to catch her breath’. Children he had taught to throw a knife and built kites for whimpered in high, terrified voices. Ya’akov Pinness emerged from the school and loped heavily toward his former pupil, then stopped in his tracks as suddenly as if he had run into a wall. Shutting his eyes, he bellowed like a slaughtered ox. The cows, the calves, the horses, and the chickens made a hideous racket in their pens and runs.
A phosphorous mine planted by the Italian army, ‘the Chicken Corps’, as Uri called it, had turned my uncle’s handsome face into a burned pudding of skin and flesh that glittered, ‘How can I describe the horror of it, my child, like a squashed pomegranate, in every shade of red, purple, and yellow. You’re lucky you don’t remember him.’
One of my uncle’s eyes had been torn out, his nose was in the wrong place, his lips were gone, and a crooked, wine-red gash ran diagonally across his face from the forehead to the hollow of the throat, disappearing in the collar of his shirt. His charred, mangled skin hung loosely from his cheekbones. A single green eye, sole testimony to the doctors’ attempt to restore his human visage, peered out from all that devastated tissue.
Efrayim, whose beauty had drawn curiosity-seekers from all over the Valley and made the startled birds swoop low overhead, had become a monster whom no one dared look at. The crowd pressed together in fear, ‘a whole village standing and shrieking’.
My uncle’s ghastly smile faded. He spun around as if wishing to vanish again. Major Stoves had already opened the door of the car with a muttered oath when the crowd suddenly parted to make way for Binyamin, who had elbowed his way through it like the solid blade of a ploughshare. Fighting to get to his brother-in-law’s side, he looked at him without flinching, hugged him in his thick arms, and kissed the shiny, minced flesh that had once been a cheek.
My father’s Hebrew had improved greatly. ‘Welcome home, Efrayim,’ he said, leading him away amid the silence that had collected like a puddle in the street.
For supper Efrayim asked for ‘the house vegetable salad’ and even told Esther how to make it. His voice was weak and throaty because his vocal cords were injured too.
‘First cut the onion and salt it a bit, then the tomatoes, and salt them too. The green pepper and cucumber come last. Mix well, season with black pepper, lemon juice, and oil, mix again, and let it breathe for a while.’
For the past two years, he said, he had dreamed of our salad, which ‘no one else in the world knows how to make’.
He shoved a heaped spoonful of it into his gullet and sighed with pleasure. As his horrid face made chewing motions and his flesh moved like a thousand crushed pellets, Avraham burst out crying and fled the table. But Binyamin remarked, ‘He must have forgotten to shut the water tap in the alfalfa,’ and went on talking with Efrayim about such subjects as the war, German submachine guns, a general named Rommel, commando training, and British military decorations.
‘I couldn’t speak,’ said Grandfather. ‘They had destroyed my beautiful boy. Before going to bed he said, “Goodnight, Father,” and turned away at once to spare me from hugging or kissing him.’
‘Every kiss not given him is a piece cut out of my heart,’ I found written in one of Grandfather’s notes.
All night Efrayim paced up and down in the yard, the silence of his feet keeping everyone awake. In the morning Binyamin arrived and sat down with him at the table, and the two sketched some plans on several large sheets of paper. Then Binyamin asked Zeitser to lend a hand. They took a cart through the fields to the English air base, where they were met by the lame Major Stoves, two lean, quiet Scottish commando officers who gave Efrayim an embrace, and an Indian quartermaster whose heart thumped loudly at the sight of the medals on my uncle’s chest. When they returned to the village, followed by an army truck loaded with construction rods, sand, cement sacks, and gravel, the two Scotsmen, Binyamin, and Efrayim took off their shirts and began digging a foundation hole by the cowshed. Over it they built a brick room with windows and a door that faced away from the house, out toward the cowshed and the fields.
Binyamin hooked the hut up to water and electricity, built a wonderful wood-burning stove that heated the room and the boiler, and made brown wooden shutters with copper clasps in the shape of dwarves that turned green with the years and wept ugly stripes on the plaster.
‘That’s the shed I keep my tools and plant medicines in now.’
Efrayim moved into his new home and never left it.
‘I circled the walls, which smelled of fresh, moist lime and plaster, waiting for my son to step out. Your mother put food in front of the door and pleaded with her brother to show himself. But he wouldn’t.’
Pinness came, knocked on the door, and asked to see his old pupil.
‘You screamed when you saw me,’ rasped Efrayim from within, refusing to open the door.
‘“I’m only human,” I told him. “No one knew you were wounded so badly. Open up, Efrayim. Open up for an old teacher who would like to apologise.”’
But Efrayim did not.
Grandfather and Pinness told me about it dozens of times, as if asking me to forgive them for Efrayim.
Binyamin came to visit him each evening. After a few weeks he advised him to start working in the cowshed at night.
‘The cows are afraid of me too,’ Efrayim said.
If he didn’t put himself to work, said Binyamin, he would grab him by the belt again and throw him in the cow trough.
‘But only at night,’ said Efrayim, stepping out of his room.
‘At half past nine I would see a strip of light as the door opened and the shadow of my son’s legs slipped off to the cowshed. He shovelled the manure, rinsed the milk cans, and put feed in the stalls for the morning milking.’
His heart ‘breaking into little pieces’, Grandfather lay paralysed in the cabin, listening to the rumble of the manure cart on the metal ramp, the scraping of the shovel in the sewage ditch, and the lowing of the cows crowding together in the pen and glancing surreptitiously at his son with sad whispers.
After four nights of this, Ya’akov Mirkin rose from his bed and went to the cowshed. He stood outside in the darkness and called to his son.
‘Don’t come in, Father,’ whispered Efrayim in a choked voice. ‘Don’t come into the cowshed.’
‘I have to,’ said Mirkin, stepping inside.
Efrayim managed to pull an empty feed sack over his head a second before he felt his father’s hands on his shoulders. Mirkin kissed the coarse jute, grinding the last of the fodder between his teeth until it melted thickly in tears and saliva. Gently, he removed the sack from his son’s head. Old Zeitser saw the two of them from his corner, where he pretended to be asleep.
‘The next morning I went to Margulis, asked him for an old beekeeper’s mask, and brought it to my son so that he could come and go among men.’
Efrayim’s handsome looks became a forgotten shadow, a configuration that came to life only before the shut eyes of those who cared to remember. But the life of the villagers was harder without such beauty to contemplate.
‘In a place so dependent on the laws of the earth and the weather, on the genetic quirks of animals and the acquired vagaries of men,’ Pinness explained to me, ‘Efrayim’s radiance was like the cold of snow in the time of harvest, like rest for the weary, like a lake of water in the wilderness.’ Only now did the villagers grasp what they had lost, which made their estrangement from him grow even greater.
Once a week my uncle ironed his khaki trousers and went to the military air base to chat with Major Stoves and the two laconic Scotsmen and drink beer with the British and Indian gunners stationed there. Sometimes he walked through the fields, waiting until he had left the orange grove to strip off his mask before the eyes of the startled bees who had followed him out of curiosity. Sometimes the base commander sent a car for him.
‘Your son is spending too much time with the British,’ said Rilov.
‘The village threw Efrayim to the dogs. The British know how to honour their heroes,’ snapped Grandfather.
‘Those Indians are used to seeing monsters in India,’ said Rivka.
Efrayim drank beer, ate sausages, and bought candy bars for the cows in the same canteen he had once stolen tins of bully beef from. My uncle Avraham complained mildly that the candy bars were giving the cows worms, but they loved Efrayim because of them. His friendship with the British, on the other hand, became a public bone of contention, especially since he angrily refused to help the village defence force. Though all of the old Gang was active in the Palmach, the underground Jewish army, Efrayim would not agree to give them lessons in demolition, sniping, topography, or any of the other things he had learned in the British army.
‘Who does he think he is?’ grumbled Rilov, who knew how well versed Efrayim was in all the techniques of guerrilla warfare.
‘I would only frighten the poor boys,’ said Efrayim.
One day when the war had ended and Uri, Yosi, and I were already in our mothers’ wombs, a British army car drew up at
our house. In it was Major Stoves, the two lean Scotsmen, and a red-haired sergeant with curly blond arms and the command insignia. Moving with the quiet efficiency of night fighters, they took a clinking case of beer and some tins of Players from their Land Rover, carried them to Efrayim’s room, and spent the night with him there. In his report to the Committee Rilov mentioned that the commandoes hardly spoke, communicated by prearranged winks and grunts, and departed totally drunk, the sergeant shouting, ‘You’ll have the cow in two months.’
L
ike Grandfather, I too drink my tea while drawing sustenance from the bitter olive in my mouth and imbibing strength from the sugar cube between my fingers. Like him, I stand staring into the distance to see Efrayim and Jean Valjean return and Shifris finally arrive. From the rooftop of my large house I look out at the sea. White boats bob on the waves, combs bulge in the bathing suits of trim men, and burly women crouch on windsurfers, guiding their sails with distant hips while their short, stippled hair bristles in the breeze.
Once a great wave drove one of the surfers onto the rocks. I put down my binoculars, hurried to her, slung her over one shoulder and her surfboard with its sail over the other, and carried them to the safety of the sand, leaving her there in a prone position. Back on my roof again, I watched her get to her feet and look dazedly around, studying her bloodstains and my footprints on the sand.
So Grandfather stood atop the hayloft and on the terrace of the old folk’s home, looking out over the Valley for his returning son.
The old folk’s home is eleven miles from the village, a tall building that rises high above its surroundings. I went there every other day, taking a shortcut through the fields and furiously
covering the distance in three hours with a pitcher of milk from the cowshed.
‘Wait a minute, Baruch,’ my uncle Avraham would say to me, ‘I’ll give you milk from a better cow.’ While waiting, I carried heavy sacks of fodder, helped load the full milk cans, and slung timid calves into shipment pens.
My two cousins were busy with the cows: Yosi, as morose as his father, quick and efficient at work, his pet red falcon perched on his shoulder or hopping after him like a dog, and Uri, who had taken to disappearing at night and sleeping late in the morning.
‘Some female of his must be in heat,’ grumbled Avraham, slapping him fondly on the back.
Uri, said Grandfather, was like Efrayim, only dreamier and more delicate. The resemblance was strongest in their wiry bodies, gaunt cheeks, and breathtakingly good looks. You could see Grandfather turn his grandson this way and that with his eyes as though he were his lost son frozen in a drop of amber. ‘Children. Strung pearls. Long necklaces of sperm,’ he wrote in a note I found after he had moved to the old folk’s home.
Before starting out, I wrapped the aluminium pitcher in jute and dipped it in water to keep the milk fresh. On my way I wet it again from the sprinklers I passed.
The air was cool and crisp when I set out, and dewdrops still hung from the leaves. The Valley was mantled by a sea of low-lying clouds, the mountain jutting above them like a blue isle. The rising sun, the same sun of the Land of Israel that had tried to murder Grandfather and his brother at 5.15 in the morning, was already stripping the fields of their white coverlet of mist, which dissolved like a seething blanket in the heat. Slowly the Valley threw off its soft bedclothes. The earth grew warm, drying out the damp soles of my feet. I always went barefoot, my sandals slung around my neck so that my heels could crush the earth beneath them. I can still feel the pleasure of that thin, hot soil between my toes, a grey flour ground by cart wheels and tough cattle hooves. Sometimes I walk along the sandy beach by my house, but its sharp, coarse
granules are unlike the soft powder of the paths that took me to Grandfather.
