The Blue Mountain (26 page)

My uncle turned back to Zeitouni and his troupe. Taking one look at him, the strong man began to vomit metal screws and slabs of concrete. The magician’s doves shut their eyes. ‘I see much fire and great pain!’ screamed the fortune-teller.

‘Shut up, you moron,’ Zeitouni brayed at her.

‘So, Zeitouni, how do you like my appearance?’ asked Efrayim.

‘I couldn’t care less,’ said Zeitouni. ‘Man looketh on the outward show, but Zeitouni looketh on the heart. You’ll make a fortune with me.’

‘I don’t need it,’ Efrayim replied.

Zeitouni gave a barely perceptible eye signal to the rubber woman, who squirmed over to Efrayim like a serpent, wound her ankles around her neck, and rocked back and forth on her back like an upended turtle. Freeing one leg, she ran it all over herself. Her flat belly rippled. She laid one cheek on her mons, which bulged conspicuously.

Pinness coughed delicately. ‘That’s the word for the fatty tissue beneath the pubic hair,’ he explained with the utmost patience. ‘She was like the promise of every forbidden pleasure that the body secretly dreams of,’ he said. ‘A horrible, disgusting sight. An alley cat. A hyena.’

Since his return to the village, Efrayim had been without a woman. The wickeder gossips claimed that he got his thrills from Jean Valjean’s copulations. As a young man, they recalled, he had sometimes slept with the veterinarian’s wife, a coarse, oversexed woman who liked to watch her husband castrate colts and calves. Now he felt his stomach kink with a hot, phantasmal hate. Moist memories of purple canopies crawled up his loins. He swivelled his one eye from the rubber woman to Zeitouni.

‘I’ll be back to talk to you this evening,’ he said. ‘Wait for me here.’

And bounding Jean Valjean on his shoulders to get a better grip, he glided home as if floating on air in his soft desert boots.

‘Seen from behind at a distance, the two of them looked like a giant boletus on a tiny stem,’ Pinness said.

He rose from the bench with effort, took off his glasses, which were foggy despite the heat, and began wiping them with a corner of his blue shirt, making the same circular movement over and over.

‘Who is that over there, Baruch? Isn’t that Bodenkin?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

Yitzchak Bodenkin, one of the first settlers in the Jordan Valley, now a half-deaf old man with a mouth as limp and twisted as last year’s blade of grass, was slowly weeding the row of zinnias by the gate.

‘What is he doing here?’

‘He came a week ago,’ Busquilla explained. ‘He ran away from the kibbutz isolation ward. He walked all the way, arrived half dead, and asked permission to stay until his other half dies too.’

‘And that’s where he sleeps at night? Out in the open like a dog?’

‘Of course not,’ I said indignantly. ‘Weeding the flowers was his idea. He sleeps in the old cowshed.’

‘In the cowshed?’

‘I offered to put him up in the cabin, but he would rather be with Zeitser.’

‘Like the elephant who comes home to die,’ said Pinness.

He went over to say hello to Bodenkin. The old man didn’t recognise him.

‘Don’t keep me from my work, boy,’ he grumbled. ‘After lunch I’ll take you to the fair and buy you a lollipop.’

‘He doesn’t remember me,’ Pinness said. ‘We once worked together for a few days in a grapefruit grove near the pumphouse by the Jordan, painting tree trunks with your grandfather’s black salve. There were rats there as big as cats who had gone mad from the heat and the loneliness. They climbed the citrus trees and ate their bark. The trees had terrible wounds in them.’

He sat down again, sad and tired.

‘We never guessed what would happen,’ he said. ‘Rilov should have sent that troublemaker Zeitouni packing. He should have
whipped the living daylights out of him, a whip for the horse and a rod for the fool’s back.’

26

I
never go down to the public beach below my house before evening. The swimmers and surfers are gone, and there is not a soul in sight. Half-eaten sandwiches, lost sandals, and the twiggy skeletons of grape clusters litter the sand. The slowly dissolving cries of children still hang in the air like dirty rags. Out at sea a sturdy grey coastguard vessel rocks rapaciously on the foam.

David, the old beach chair man, sees me coming and puts the kettle on the little gas burner in his cane hut. I always bring him something to eat, or else a bottle of spirits from the banker’s cellars or a book from his library. David devours books in both French and Spanish.

‘Just call me Da-
vid
and rhyme it with “read”,’ he introduces himself with a rusty laugh. His teeth are big and white. His body is burnt and shrivelled from the sun.

We drink spicy tea and chat lazily while the sand around us squirms with fine-pincered little yellow crabs.

‘They’re my beach cleaners,’ says David.

The sand crabs scuttle out of their holes and run about, their arms raised in that most moving and primeval of human gestures that is both threat and plea. So Efrayim raised his hands to his face when he stepped out of the British automobile in the village. So Grandmother Feyge raised hers, searching the skies for pelicans and rain.

Other crabs, busy refurbishing their burrows, give themselves away by little flurries of wet sand. Their tawny colour makes them hard to see when they stand still, but I, who was taught to pick out a praying mantis on a dry branch, to open the camouflaged trapdoors of spiders, and to tell the caterpillar of the geometer moth from a bare twig, am able to spot them easily.

‘You like those little things?’ David asked, following my gaze. ‘They’re not kosher.’

‘I do,’ I said. ‘I don’t eat them. But I have an old aunt who eats grasshoppers.’

‘There are grasshoppers in the desert that look just like pebbles until they move,’ chuckled David.

‘It takes patience,’ I said.

Little insects hid in the silver whitlowwort, disguised as shiny dry leaves.

‘It takes patience, Baruch,’ said Pinness. We were crouched in ambush by a shrub. ‘Some of those little white leaves swaying back and forth are insects that can mimic the motion of a leaf in a breeze. As soon as the breeze dies down, you’ll see. The real leaves will stop moving while the silly insects go on.’

Human beings and insects, he explained to me, were polar opposites in their methods of adaptation. The former, poorly equipped and vulnerable, depended on their inventiveness and ability to learn, while the latter, rugged and prolific, were incapable of learning a thing. They were born with whatever they had. Even behaviour as complex as that of Margulis’s bees, said Pinness, had nothing to do with learning or experience.

Grandfather watched us stand on two milk cans by a wall of the cowshed, examining the mud daubers’ houses in a corner of the ceiling. Pinness took a blade of straw and poked a hole in the bottom of one of the little juglike structures, showing me how the wasp continued to work on her roof without bothering to repair her ruined floor.

‘She’s obeying inherited patterns of behaviour,’ he said, immediately adding the question: ‘Which is better, the small but precisely programmed intellect of the insect or the capacious and unconcentrated mind of man?’

‘Take Rilov and his son,’ he said to me another time. ‘They were born total morons and that’s all they’ll ever be. No more than five per cent of the volume of their brains is even useable. But unlike all the scatterbrained geniuses, they utilise that five per cent with single-minded efficiency.’

I told David about the giant long-horned grasshopper that
Pinness brought from the Galilee. Pinness’s eyes sparkled when he added it to his collection, fearsomely impaled on a pin.

‘Just see how perfectly camouflaged it is, Baruch,’ he said. ‘It’s green and looks like a long leaf when it stands perfectly still. When its prey approaches, it leaps on it and embraces it in a death hug, crushing it against the spines on its chest. So Joab took Amasa by the beard to kiss him while shedding his bowels on the ground with the sword in his other hand.’

‘You had a good teacher,’ said David.

‘It even eats small birds, mice, and lizards,’ I said, proud of my erudition.

David was incredulous. ‘A grasshopper that eats mice?’ he marvelled. ‘The little devil!’

‘Small snakes too.’

David proposed a toast to grasshoppers. Then, tactfully, he began to ask me about myself and my family.

‘You’re an odd one,’ he said. ‘If you live here, you must have money, but you’re not like the others who have it.’

‘I’m an off-duty farmer,’ I answered. Off from the village. From my family. From the earth.

Later, when I return to the banker’s house, I like to look at Grandfather’s letters and notes and at the volume of Luther Burbank he left me.

‘No man, in death, ever presented a countenance more beautiful, peaceful, or serene. He was like a child asleep …

‘We laid Luther Burbank to rest under a cedar in the garden of the old farmhouse in which he lived for forty years and in the grounds of which he did most of his revolutionary and incalculably valuable work for his fellow man.

‘He used to go there, often, where the drooping limbs of the great tree sweep down to touch the earth and to form about the stalwart, friendly trunk a little quiet house of coolness with the sweet balsam of the needles …

‘That is why he was laid there for his long rest, … blanketed with flowers.’

In an old issue of
Field
, where I found some dried cyclamens
and crocuses left for my prying fingers by my mother, Grandfather had underlined in blue a eulogy for his hero written by a certain A. Feldman. ‘He was seventy-seven when he died in his humble home in Santa Rosa among his plums, roses, grapevines, and prickly pears.’

‘Grapevines, prickly pears, thorns, and the narcotic henbane,’ wrote Grandfather in the brittle margin. These were the plants that had welcomed him to Palestine.

‘Blanketed with flowers’, I repeated out loud to myself. ‘Blanketed with flowers.’ But though he too fled from the woman he loved and planted good fruit-bearing trees, Burbank, that happy, prolific, and contented man, never cultivated his garden in the mud of Sisera, or was buried in the land promised to his forefathers, or had a constitution or someone to avenge.

Zeitouni watched Efrayim grow smaller in the distance. Then, having scented an easy windfall and a quick come-uppance, he rubbed his hands and turned away.

‘Move yourself,’ he shouted at the strong man. ‘Go and clean out the big pot. Move, you bloody woman, you!’

The villagers rose uneasily and began to disperse. On Rilov’s insistence, Zeitouni and his troupe left the spring and spent the night outside the borders of the village.

‘Next morning we had a visit from Hussein, the old Bedouin from the Mazarib tribe, who had gone out at the crack of dawn to calm his dogs.’

Through the tatters of mist that still lay upon the fields, Hussein had seen the caravan and its bear cage heading east, followed by Efrayim with his soft, indefatigable, steady stride. Jean Valjean squatted on his shoulders, still asleep. Though the old Arab’s first thought was that Efrayim was taking the bull somewhere to mate, he felt uneasy all day. Deciding to inform someone, he went to see his old friend Rilov that evening.

‘Your bull man is gone,’ he called, knocking on the door of the secret arms cache. ‘Your bull man is gone.’

But Rilov was not in, because he was out driving a small truck over a secret back road to the village, taking the downhills
with the engine cut and the headlights off, towing a new Czech combine full of dynamite. Hussein knew, of course, that Tonya could be found draining the last lees of sweet passion with Margulis among the hives in the orchard, but loath to upset the bees, he went to the Committee office. A search party was sent out at once, but Efrayim, Jean Valjean, Zeitouni, and his troupe were nowhere in sight.

‘I never saw my old pupil again,’ said Pinness. ‘And that was the last Mirkin saw of his son too.’

He wiped his glasses again. ‘How could a bull that weighed a ton and a half, the only one of its kind in the country, and someone who looked, so help me, like Efrayim, have disappeared? How could it have happened?’

‘Efrayim could have walked through a cave full of bats without being noticed,’ I said to him. ‘You yourself told me the story of Margulis’s cat.’

Pinness began to walk up and down among the graves.

‘When you first started this horrible business, I was dead set against it,’ he said, his false teeth slobbering in his mouth. ‘You may recall that I was even present at the Committee meeting you sent that crook of a lawyer to.’

I said nothing.

‘Don’t think I changed my mind because of the poppycock he talked there. A cemetery is a legitimate business … a branch of agriculture … a way of making a living from the earth … You should have been ashamed of yourselves! I was when I heard him. I was mortified. Who could have imagined that a grandson of Mirkin’s would ever say such things!’

‘And now?’

Pinness laughed. ‘I’m a different man now. The dykes are down. As a matter of fact, I’m saving up my pennies for you to bury me.’

‘What are you talking about, Ya’akov,’ I exclaimed heatedly. ‘How can you believe I’d take money from you?’

‘You’ll bury me for nothing, eh?’ said Pinness.

Though I could tell from his face that I had said something wrong, I couldn’t work out what it was.

‘My child,’ Pinness said, patting me on the cheek. ‘My child.’ Its skin smoothed by chalks and ethers, its grip shaped by flutes and pens, his soft hand brushed my face and curled around my neck. I shut my eyes.

‘You can be proud of what you’ve done here, Baruch. Sometimes we do the right things for the wrong reasons. But I’ll find myself a grave somewhere else.’

He walked slowly, his hand outstretched as though still on my head like Grandfather’s. Like the music of Mandolin Tsirkin. The icy touch of Grandmother’s forehead. The downy fuzz of the baby doves on the roof of the village feed shed.

Thirty-eight years old and weighing twenty stone, the owner of a seaside villa, I am still Pinness’s pupil and Grandfather’s child. I still wait for the feel of Grandfather’s moustache on my neck, for his stories, for the sliced tomato with rock salt that he put on the table for my breakfast.