The Blue Mountain (28 page)

‘A trained falcon like officers and noblemen used to have,’ Peker dreamed.

As a young man he had served as a cavalry adjutant in Czar Nikolai’s army.

‘Those were the days,’ he liked to say with a nostalgia that annoyed the founding fathers. ‘Officers with swords and gold epaulettes, daughters of landed aristocrats, balls, hooped dresses, waltzes, sweet whisperings in the garden …’

Peker was fond of describing the annual ball of the provincial police inspector. ‘They served enormous river fish, huge pike
and perches. I was given my fill too, and then the dancing began.’

‘And a yid like you, Peker, did you also dance and whisper in the garden?’ Liberson asked scornfully. ‘Or did you just lick the boots of those who did?’

‘I danced,’ answered Tanchum Peker proudly.

‘With the major’s livery boy or with the governor’s mare?’

Peker did not reply. It was he who had stitched the saddles and girths for the horses of the Watchmen’s Society, thus earning him the place in the pages of history that all the elders of the village hungered for. The index of
The Watchmen’s Book
seemed to him a sufficiently honorable memorial to make any further acknowledgment from posterity quite unnecessary.

Grandfather couldn’t stand him, because when the Workingman’s Circle had worked as shepherds during World War One, the Watchmen had harassed them, stealing their flocks and spreading rumours that kept their employers from paying them. Hunger and hard work took their toll on the four and reduced them to a single pair of shoes, which they gave to Feyge. For hours on end Tsirkin sat playing his mandolin, gulping the strummed notes to appease his growling stomach. Feyge’s skin was covered with boils. Haggard and sun-scorched, she forced herself to keep going, reaching out a weary hand to stroke the heads of her comrades.

‘My boys,’ she called them. ‘My loves.’

Her boys wrapped their feet in rags. No longer did they float on air. Their skin grew tough and heavy, and hunger pinned them to the ground. Had they stood motionless, I could not have seen them, because they would have been as invisible as clods of earth. Every other day Tsirkin cooked a gluey porridge of corn and chickpeas in a tin stove he had built in a pit with a broken clay jug for a chimney.

Years later, when they no longer smelled of the smoke, Grandfather and his friends still bore the Watchmen a grudge. ‘Those satraps who wanted to found a commune of Arab horses in the Galilee,’ he called them.

* * *

‘A hunting falcon,’ said Peker, taking the old awls and crooked needles from his toolbox and sitting himself down at his saddler’s bench with its bulky wooden vices in the middle. Yosi, Uri, and I sat beside him, entranced by the wisdom of his fingers and the good smell of his work. The old man smeared some threads with wax, spat on the fingernail of a brown thumb, traced a line with it for his knife and stitched together several strips of thin, soft leather to make a blindfold for the bird. ‘As long as you cover the falcon’s eyes,’ he explained, ‘he just sits there as quiet as a baby.’

He cut an opening for the falcon’s curved beak and then, from some thicker leather, stitched himself a large elbow-length glove. ‘That’s to guard my arm from being shredded by the falcon. Just look at those talons of his.’

By then the falcon had started hunting on his own. Yet whenever he heard Yosi’s whistle he hurried back to land at his feet.

‘The fact that he’s already trained to return is excellent. Now we’ll teach him to stand on my arm. Just wait and see, Yosi, in two weeks he will be bringing us rabbits for lunch.’

‘The red falcon is too small a bird,’ scoffed Pinness, dismissing the whole idea. ‘The most he will bring you is a mouse. For hunting you need a peregrine falcon. Besides which, Yosi, falconry is a revolting sport practised by an exploitative and decadent social class that leads a life of parasitic luxury.’

‘Why don’t you tell your teacher to go back to hunting frogs at night,’ snorted Peker the saddler when Yosi anxiously reported this conversation.

Yosi and his grandfather took the falcon out to the fields. Uri and I were told to walk a distance behind them so as not to get in the way. The falcon sat obediently on the old saddler’s arm, his white talons gripping his glove and his chiselled head motionless inside the leather mask. Peker chose a suitable site, wet his finger to test the wind, removed the blindfold, and let the falcon take off. The splendid bird soared aloft, his brown-striped red belly gleaming in the clear air.

‘A-a-a-ll right! Whistle for him now!’

Yosi stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled. The falcon froze in midair, fanned his tail feathers, fluttered in place for a moment, and dived diagonally towards them with half-folded wings. The old saddler held his gloved arm out to the bird. With a flap the falcon spread its braking pinions, but the outstretched arm scared him off. Beating the air, he made for Peker’s bald head.

‘It was horrible,’ Peker told the doctor who stitched up his skull. ‘I thought I was done for.’

Unable to gain a foothold on the smooth surface, Yosi’s falcon kept jabbing it with razor-sharp talons. His face streaming with blood, Peker passed out. The damn bird flew away in a fright, and we ran home to get help. No one was there except old Zeitser, who was working in the yard and came back to the field with us. Green flies covered Peker’s head, from which the scalped skin was hanging free. We helped Zeitser hoist him onto his shoulders and carry him to the village clinic.

Within a few days, once it was clear that Tanchum Peker would recover, since he was already up and about with a huge turban of white gauze on his head, nicknames like ‘Hawkeye’, ‘Nimrod the Hunter’, and ‘Sultan Abdulhamid’ were being tried out on him. In the village newsletter Liberson wrote that while we were indeed building a new society that sought to return to nature, this did not mean ‘exploiting the instincts of predatory birds for our own primitive needs’.

‘The beast hunts for sustenance, man for perverted pleasure,’ declared Pinness in school before reading us a few relevant passages from
The Jungle Book
of Rudyard Kipling, who was ‘a wise man for a colonialist’.

I stood up and sent the rock I was holding crashing through the window. Slivers of glass fell on Avraham and Rivka’s table.

‘Grandfather did not kill her,’ I said heavily.

‘Like grandfather, like grandson,’ mocked Rivka. ‘Get him out of here before I murder him.’

‘That’s enough!’ said Avraham.

‘I suppose you’ll ask your father to pay for the window!’

‘I want you to calm down this minute.’

‘Just wait till the old man dies,’ Rivka snarled, ‘and he starts brawling over the inheritance.’

‘I said, enough!’ shouted Avraham.

He rose, went outside, and came over to me.

‘Don’t worry about her, Baruch,’ said my uncle Avraham. ‘She’s just worked up. You can stay here as long as you like. No one’s kicking my own nephew out of my house.’

I looked at him. His short stride, his sloping shoulders, and his ploughed forehead formed an impenetrable grid that moved with him like the shell of a turtle. Sometimes he took the twins and me to the hayloft and encouraged us to wrestle on the bales of hay. I never knew whether or not he liked seeing me floor his two sons. Uri would leap on me from behind and break into helpless giggles as I lifted him in the air, while Yosi, humiliated, would run to his mother with hurt sobs.

Avraham took my hand in his. I liked the feel of it. Even then I understood dimly that certain members of our family shared the same portion of pain. As a boy, it was said in the village, Avraham had attacked a foreign woman who came to visit, screaming, kicking her legs, and biting her in the stomach until a slap from Rilov sent him sprawling. But my uncle was an excellent farmer who read volumes of professional literature and was often called to a neighbour’s farmyard to help make a diagnosis. He kept careful tabs on all his cows, writing down the family tree of each beside a record of milk production, fat content, number of inseminations, calves, stillbirths, and cessations of lactation. This made for an unusually detailed farm log even without the section in which he entered the exact dates when his bereaved cows’ sons were sent to the slaughterhouse.

My mother was dead, Efrayim was gone, and Avraham was the only one of Grandmother Feyge’s children still at home. All those years he continued to visit his mother’s grave regularly. Uri and I used to watch him riding Efrayim’s heavy Hercules bicycle up to the cemetery on the hill.

‘He’s going to talk to Grandmother,’ Uri said. ‘He tells her what’s new on the farm.

‘Your mother’s there too,’ he added. I didn’t answer him.

Never without trepidation, I myself went once a year with Grandfather to visit my parents’ graves. Time in the village moved in loops of rain clouds and was measured by gestations, the length of furrows, and the mysterious, irreversible processes of decay, and I did not want to add memorial days to the list. Years later, when I had become an expert undertaker, I learned to hear the violent popping of death-bloated bellies in the earth. Then, though, I simply sat with Grandfather by my parents’ headstones and walked with him to his wife’s grave, which was always spotless and well kept. The concrete gutter at its foot was bright with yellow-white jonquils and purplish-green stalks of basil.

‘My father planted the jonquils,’ Uri said, ‘to make it easier for him to cry.’

28

W
e were eleven when Pinness organised one of his last hikes.

‘We’ll do it like the good old days, in a horse-drawn cart,’ he announced.

When he was younger he used to take his pupils as far as the Golan and the Horan on expeditions that lasted up to three weeks. They dried flowers, trapped insects, and slept at night in Jewish settlements, as well as in Arab villages that Rilov gave a clean bill of health. Angry parents complained that Pinness took their boys and girls away during the busiest times on the farm, but Pinness, at a special meeting convened to discuss the matter, retorted that ‘education knows no slack seasons’.

‘Have patience, friends,’ he said. ‘What the school sows now, you will reap in ten years’ time.’

This time he had planned a mere three-day hike.

‘I’m sorry, my children. Your parents will tell you about the great hikes of long ago, but my strength now is not what it was then. We’ll go only so far as the Kishon River and ancient Beth-She’arim.’

Before it was light Grandfather brought me to Pinness’s house.

‘Take good care of my child, Ya’akov,’ he said.

At the age of eleven I was as tall as Grandfather. Pinness laughed and said that no doubt I would take better care of him.

Daniel Liberson came along as our escort. He rode on horseback, armed with a rifle and a whip. His glance seemed to flay me alive, searching my forehead for lost signs. When we reached the channel of the Kishon, we took our little pocket Bibles from our knapsacks and read in high, excited voices:

‘The kings came and fought;

Then fought the kings of Canaan in Taanach by the waters
        of Megiddo;

They fought from heaven;

The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.

The river of Kishon swept them away,

That ancient river, the river Kishon.’

Pinness rocked back and forth to the ancient cadence and spoke scathingly of the elders of the city of Meroz, ‘who avoided conscription by hiding at the town dump’. And he added, ‘The Canaanites had nine hundred chariots. They thundered through the Valley while we hid among the oaks on Mount Tabor.’ He traced great movements in the air, his voice growing passionate. ‘And then it rained. And what do we get in our Valley when it rains?’

‘Mud,’ we shouted.

‘How much mud?’

‘Lots,’ we shouted. ‘Mud up to your boots.’

‘Mud up to the cows’ stomachs,’ said my cousin Yosi in all seriousness.

‘Then it came up to the horses’ stomachs,’ said Pinness, leading us step by step. ‘The chariot wheels stuck in the mud, and down we came from the woods and smote them so hard that the land was quiet for forty years.

‘Such quiet,’ he repeated as though to himself, ‘such quiet that it could only be measured in years.’ But we were children and did not understand his mutterings.

The next day we travelled to ancient Beth-She’arim. On our way Pinness warned us that we were about to visit ‘a terrible place’.

‘Here the dead were brought from the Diaspora to be buried in the soil of our land,’ he said to us as we stood in the large burial cave. His voice echoed in the chill gloom, his shadow flickering over the walls and running down the ancient sluices left by the quarriers’ chisels. ‘Rabbi Judah the Prince lived and died in this place, and after his burial here, it became an important necropolis.

‘But we, children,’ Pinness went on, ‘returned to this land not to die but to live. In those days it was believed that being buried in the Land of Israel would purge you of sin and make you worthy of eternal life. We, however, do not believe in the resurrection of the dead and ritual atonement. Our atonement is the tilling of the soil rather than the quarrying of graves. Our resurrection is the ploughed furrow. Our sins will be purged by hard work. The accounting that we give will be in this world, not in the next.’

‘Why fill their heads with all that nonsense?’ Grandfather asked him during one of their night-time tea talks. Liberson, however, interrupted to say that Pinness was right, because the next world was the cunning invention of unscrupulous rabbis and priests who had failed to keep their promises in this one.

Ten years later in my own cemetery, which was populated largely by Diaspora Jews, Pinness reminded me of our hike to Beth-She’arim.

‘What a pedagogical failure,’ he said. ‘I never would have dreamed that one of my own pupils would decide to ape what he saw there. I thought I was sounding a warning, but now I
wonder whether I didn’t plant the idea for this monstrosity in your mind then.