The Blue Mountain (42 page)

When Levin felt that his time was up, he sent for me and offered me a large sum of money, which I refused to accept, to bury him with the pioneers. ‘With the productive sector of the village,’ he said bitterly.

I granted him his request. He was, after all, genuine Second Aliyah. On his gravestone I got the masons to carve the inscription he composed for himself: ‘Here lies the Pioneer Shlomo Levin Who Took His Own Life by Mule Bite.’

Busquilla and our lawyer, Shapiro, argued with me every week about the need to invest my earnings wisely. I never listened to a word they said.

Busquilla now had an agent working for him in Florida.

‘They’re all down there,’ he said. ‘All the old Jews. They even have swamps, and a sun as killing as ours.’

He bought a black van with ‘Pioneer Home’ painted on the doors in gold letters and managed me and the business expertly.

‘It isn’t right for me to sit in an office while you dig graves and lug a garden hose,’ he said to me. ‘You’re the owner, Baruch. Why don’t you let me employ someone to do the dirty work?’

I did my best to explain the importance of agricultural work and the village’s opposition to hired help, but Busquilla forbearingly dismissed the ideals of co-operative farming.

‘That doesn’t convince me,’ he said. ‘I’m an observant Jew myself. Everyone has his own rituals and commandments, and yours are sometimes worse than ours.’

Another time he asked me, ‘Why don’t you ever take a trip abroad? Go on a holiday, have a good time, meet some girls.’ When I failed to answer, he persisted.

‘What’s the matter, can’t afford it?’

Busquilla had a plump, pretty, likable daughter who was younger than me. Often he spoke of introducing us.

‘What for?’ I said, blushing each time. ‘I’m happy as I am.’

‘I’ll send her to Pinness with some food,’ he ventured at last, ceasing to beat around the bush. ‘All you have to do is be there. She’ll make you a good wife, not like the women you have around here.’

‘Stop it,’ I said, feeling my forehead crawl with centipedes.

‘It’s no good, your living like this. You’re a healthy young man. You ought to be married.’

‘Not me!’ I said firmly.

‘When a Moroccan wants you to marry his daughter, don’t think he’ll take no for an answer,’ Busquilla warned me.

‘I don’t like girls,’ I told him.

‘Well, you can’t have my son,’ he joked. But there was a frown on his face.

Sometimes he watched me while I worked, marvelling at my size and strength. ‘You’re not at all like the rest of your family,’ he said. ‘You’re a big, dark, hairy hulk of meat who’s never been bitten by the love bug. Now, that cousin of yours, he’s something else! He’s slept with every girl in the village, but you just go your quiet way.’

‘Stop it, Busquilla,’ I said. ‘What goes on in the family and the village is none of your business.’

‘You’ve all got a screw loose somewhere,’ he needled me, testing the limits of my patience.

Sometimes he told me about his first days in the village. ‘Everyone looked down their nose at me. It was like being on permanent probation. I was put to work digging onions to see if I would make a decent postman. Even Zis thought he was better than me because his father once hauled water from the spring, until I gave him a right to the jaw and he began to act like a human being.’

He observed people with unconcealed curiosity, quickly grasped the fine points of village life, and annoyed me with his maxims.

‘A man who spends all his time in a septic tank must be afraid of something.’

‘No woman ever forgets the first finger that touched her.’

‘A good grandfather is better than a father. A bad one is worse than anything.’

‘What’s all this earth, earth, earth stuff all the time? It’s enough that we come from it and return to it. In between a man needs to rest.’

‘You people, if you hear someone say something stupid when he’s nine, you think he’s stupid till his dying day. You’re sure you’ve got him worked out.’

As a letter carrier he had knocked on every door in the village and remembered exactly which had opened to offer him fruit or cold water and which had stayed shut while suspicious eyes studied him through the window. Busquilla was the first to know that Margulis and Tonya were back together, that Grandfather received foreign mail via channels other than the post office, and that if Grandfather never gave him the time of day, it was because of a deep anguish and hate that had nothing to do with him personally. Busquilla also knew that apart from the historical journals he received, Meshulam subscribed to other magazines whose chrome-and-flesh-coloured contents winked and tittered through their supposedly opaque brown wrappers. He chuckled too whenever he brought the Libersons their post, because he
knew that a good part of it, including letters that appeared to come from abroad, was from Liberson to Fanya.

‘He sends them without a return address to surprise her when she opens them.’

42

W
hen his compulsory army service was over Yosi signed up as a career officer, while Uri became a heavy equipment operator for his uncle in the Galilee. Thus, there was never any problem about who would inherit the Mirkin farm.

It was Meshulam who explained to me that when the founding fathers came to Palestine and saw how the fields of the Arab peasants had been whittled to thin shavings by the jack-knife of inheritance, they decided to bequeath their farms to one son alone. From the day a boy was born, he was under constant scrutiny to see if he fitted the bill. The experienced eyes of his parents, teachers, and neighbours measured his first steps, the development of his back muscles, his success at predicting rain, and the presence or absence of the green fingers that every good farmer had to have. By the time he was ten the boy knew if he was destined to remain in the village or to seek his fortune outside it.

The failures first cloaked themselves in injured silence, then burst into stormy protest in the hope of reversing the decree, which was, however, irrevocable. Their fate sealed, they were sent out into the world with the ways of the village stamped in their flesh like a cattle brand. Some became farmers elsewhere; others went into business or to the university; all did splendidly in their new lives. Years of growing up in the village, of hard work, responsibility, and an intimate knowledge of nature and animals, made successes of them all.

Gradually, each father transferred part of his farm to the chosen son, consulting him about the harvest of various fertilisers
and carefully weighing his answers and opinions. As a hive raises new queen bees, so the village raised its next generation of farmers.

Sometimes mistakes were made. Daniel Liberson, whose infant passion for my mother was taken as a sign of a nonagricultural personality, turned out to be a first-rate farmer. Having no one left to love or hate once my parents died, he devoted all his talents and energies to tilling the soil. Eventually, after working as a dedicated and much-praised adviser in an immigrants’ settlement, from which he brought back his Romanian wife, he became a thriving grower of chickens, cotton, and mushrooms. The latter were cultivated in a secret formula of straw, soil, and horse manure that Daniel found in an old Russian farmer’s almanac he got from Meshulam in a swap for Hagit’s original milking stool. According to the almanac, the best time for picking the mushrooms was when they gave off ‘a strong foresty smell’, and every few weeks when a new spore cycle ripened, since Daniel had no idea what a Russian forest smelled like, he tore his old parents away from their amours to have them sniff the dark fungal beds. Never once did they disappoint him.

Meshulam, on the other hand, made it clear from an early age that as Uri put it, ‘the only thing that ever drew him to the earth was the force of gravity’.

Uri himself never thought of remaining in the village, and his determination to leave came as no surprise. His love of books, ardour for his nursery teacher’s behind, tendency to tire easily from hard work, and quips about the frustrated lives of the hens or the over-intimacy of the inseminator with the heifers, along with other signs that could not be dismissed lightly, cast doubt on his character long before his escapades on the water tower, which were the last straw.

Though everyone liked Uri, it was obvious that Yosi would be the one to step into his father’s milking boots. He was a thorough, conscientious boy with a fund of technical knowledge and a born knack for planning and organisation. The one thing that worried Avraham was the violence pent up in him beneath the surface. Yet while my uncle was afraid that Yosi might harm an unruly
or stubborn animal, he entrusted him with the morning milking at the age of fourteen, and even Grandfather, who saw in Uri a distant reflection of his lost son Efrayim, turned to Yosi when he needed someone to harrow the orchard without damaging the tree trunks.

And so, when Yosi announced that he too was not coming back to the village, Avraham looked up from the earth, which was something he had rarely done before, and shuddered at the sight of his life stretching desolately out before him as far as the horizon of his death. He was seized by despair. Though I tried to help him with the farm work as much as I could, I was far more interested in cultivating my field of dead bodies in Grandfather’s ruined orchard.

‘Not one of Mirkin’s grandsons will be a farmer,’ said Rilov. ‘The Committee should make them sell the farm.’

‘Don’t let him worry you,’ said Busquilla. ‘Who would be crazy enough to buy it? Who’s going to dig up all those bones or grow crops between gravestones?’

Grandfather’s revenge was taking shape. The graves burned like a chastisement in the earth of the village, like a terrible mockery of its way of life, a rank challenge to its very existence. People stared and whispered as I walked down its streets, appraised my stiff neck that would not be yoked to the founders’ vision, and imagined the money in my sacks. I paid no attention to them. The eyes fixed on me were a protective bluff that did not scare me. Busquilla, who kept a record of our running battle with the village authorities in his well-organised filing cabinet, thought it was all very funny. Again and again he told me not to take the threats against me seriously.

‘You may know more about farming than I do,’ he said, ‘but I happen to know something about graves. There are six hundred and sixty saints buried in Morocco, and still more of our rabbis crossed the sea to the Holy Land in order to be buried here.’

‘It’s not the same thing,’ I said.

‘Of course not,’ chuckled Busquilla. ‘We Moroccans charge money to visit a saint’s grave, while you Jews from Europe bill the saints themselves.’

Avraham alone did not mind my field of graves. Morose and past hope, he immersed himself in his dairy operation, at which he worked harder than ever. He invented new feeding techniques, disinfected the pens with special sprays that killed all internal and external parasites, enlisted the help of two engineers to develop a flow-sensor system that monitored air pressure in each teat, and experimented with different kinds of music during milking. Ever since my father had hooked his phonograph up to Rilov’s cowshed, the farmers had known that music meant more and better milk, but only Avraham matched his records to each cow’s personal taste. Large earphones on their broad heads, the solemn-looking animals stood dreamily swaying to the strains of flutes and string sections that coaxed the milk from their udders.

He also did away almost entirely with the weekly supplement of roughage in the cows’ feed, preferring ‘more for psychological than nutritional reasons’ to take them out to pasture once a week. The milking machines that whirred nonstop made him smile at the old argument over whether a cow should be milked two times a day or three. ‘It’s not a scientific issue,’ he explained. ‘It’s simply a matter of weighing the farmer’s convenience against the cow’s.’ His own cows were milked four times a day and kept the vacuum pumps working around the clock. And though the puniest of his animals gave three times as much milk as the renowned Hagit, Meshulam, whose depressive wanderings through the village brought him to us too, declared that none of them would be exhibited in a museum or listed in a record book. ‘History is not what is done,’ he said, ‘it’s what gets into writing. That’s what makes that damn swamp study so dangerous. And it’s Hagit who will go down in history, not any of your uncle’s milk wells.’

Having ceased to bring his milk to the village dairy like the other farmers, Avraham was excluded from their daily social chat and withdrew into himself like a mole cricket into its underground chambers. Every morning as Motik skilfully backed all twenty-two wheels of his huge tanker into our yard, I heard the sound of the big diesel engine and the gasps of the power steering, followed by the inevitable conversation.

‘Good morning.’

‘Good morning.’

‘Can I start pumping?’

‘Yes.’

‘He jumped right in front of me. There was nothing I could do about it.’

‘I know. It wasn’t your fault.’

Off in a side room two big separators whirled ceaselessly. From one end flowed cream that tickled the taste buds of visitors to Pioneer Home and drew them to the cowshed, where Rivka sold them clandestine jars of it in violation of the co-operative’s by-laws. From the other end came skimmed milk, which was piped back into the cows’ drink, enriched by minerals. Avraham was the first dairy farmer in the village to understand that far more than solid food, liquid intake was the most important factor in a cow’s metabolism. That was why he had never had a cow go dry on him while still in its productive years. ‘A cow should drink five quarts of liquid for every quart of milk it gives,’ I once heard him tell Yosi as they were cleaning the white terrazzo floor of the milkshed with clear plastic high-pressure hoses. All his piping – for water, for disinfectants, for air, and for milk – was transparent, as were the constantly filling and emptying glass tanks. ‘It’s so the cows can see what they’re doing,’ said Uri, who had a revolutionary proposal of his own for increasing production. ‘Why not,’ he asked, ‘add the water directly to the milk instead of to the cows?’