The Blue Mountain (49 page)

I could feel summer ending in the burning leaves that whirled in the orchard, in the subtle way the wind grazed my bare shoulder, in the sudden silence of the rock doves, in the ragged nests of the paper wasps. No longer the same old busybodies, Margulis’s orphaned bees hovered lethargically, hoping to find a last grape or fig that had eluded the harvesters. Returning from my late-night walks, I saw the stiff forms of baby crows lying on thin layers of frost beneath the cypress trees. There was more dew at night, cold little pools of it collecting on the tractor seats in the dents made by the farmers’ behinds. Fleecy clouds gathered in the afternoon skies of the Valley. Pinness, Rachel, Riva, and Tonya planted their radishes and cauliflower, dug up
their potatoes, and pruned the dead branches on their tomato vines. Only the pampered and well-fed flowers of Pioneer Home refused to acknowledge the turning of the year, tinting the air with their brilliance like the cantor’s beautiful daughter.

A year later I left the village. I may not have read all the signs at the time, but I did feel the autumn more sharply than ever that year. The air was thick with finality and parting.

‘Summer’s end is more terrible than summer,’ the cantor quoted the rabbis to me, watching the expression on my face.

People who don’t know me try all kinds of ways to get on my good side and work me out. They’ll send up a trial sentence to test the thickness of my cranium or extend their hand to my nose for me to sniff. I don’t hold it against them. I know that Grandfather saw to it that I am part animal, part tree. Now, though, I was overcome with revulsion. The hissing way the cantor said ‘summer’, the wet, disgusting pop of the ‘t’ in ‘terrible’, as if produced by a straight, thick finger in his mouth: I felt a sudden dislike for this man, whose long black coat made him look like a rootless scarecrow in somebody’s vegetable patch.

48

O
n Rosh Hashana eve I went with Uri to visit Eliezer Liberson in the old folk’s home. Busquilla sometimes drove there on business, and I had planned to hitch a ride with him in the farm truck until Uri said, ‘Let’s walk.’ Once again I set out on the familiar path that seemed to flow from the soles of my feet and crawl in front of me like a warm, submissive snake of earth.

Most of the old folk were in the home’s synagogue, singing in childishly insistent voices as if to pave their way to the next world, but Liberson had never had the slightest use for anyone else’s prayers, and Albert was in bed as usual, quiet and majestic. His white silk shirt rippled in and out with each breath while his black bow tie fluttered its wings at his throat.

‘We Bulgarian Jews don’t go in much for religion,’ he said with a bright smile. ‘
Por lo ke stamos, bendigamos
.’

‘“It’s enough for us to count our blessings”,’ translated Liberson from the Ladino. He already knew most of Albert’s sayings. Usually they spoke in Hebrew, but sometimes they whispered together in Russian.

‘Bulgarian is very close to it,’ Liberson said. ‘And in my old age I’ve picked up a bit of Ladino.’

He sat facing his friend with his sour orange cane between his knees. He knew who I was as soon as he touched my face and turned his blind, dirty-white eyes on me. ‘How big you are,’ he said. ‘You have your father’s strength and your mother’s height.’

Only now did he sense Uri’s presence. Gripping his elbow, he pulled him nearer and ran his antenna-like fingers over him. He caught his breath as they descended from the forehead, gently plucking and pinching the cheeks and skimming longingly over the bridge of the nose that was broken on the night of Uri’s beating.

‘You’ve come back,’ he said. ‘I always knew you would.’

‘I’ve come back,’ said Uri.

‘And you’re all healed,’ added Liberson. ‘Everything is all right now.’

‘Yes,’ said Uri. ‘I’m all right now.’

‘And your French calf?’

The touch of horror made my heart a tight fist. The blind man had peeled Uri like a fruit and put his finger on the poisonous, sore kernel.

‘I’m Uri Mirkin,’ my disconcerted cousin whispered.

The old man’s hand jumped back as if burned by a live coal.

‘Uri Mirkin,’ he said. ‘Of the water tower?’

I glanced back and forth from the ugly old man who had held one woman in thrall to my handsome cousin who had slept with every woman in the village.

‘I came to say I’m sorry,’ said Uri hoarsely.

‘Who isn’t?’ Liberson asked.

‘Did he do you wrong?’ asked Albert.

‘Oh, no,’ said Liberson. ‘He’s just a wild shoot that sprang up in the village fields.’

‘He is a fine-looking boy,’ Albert said.

‘If I had his looks,’ said Liberson, ‘my life would have been unbearable. The girls would have thrown themselves at me like ripe fruit falling off a tree.’

‘
Non tiene busha
,’ said Albert. ‘He has no shame.’

‘That’s not how it was,’ Uri said.

Liberson rose and asked us out to the terrace. He walked up and down the balcony, the light breeze picking up from his skin its mossy old farmer’s smell of steamer trunks, dried dung, clover, and milk. His sturdy cane and grey work trousers lent him a presence that had not been passed on in his genes, Michurin notwithstanding.

Lifting the cane, he pointed towards the horizon.

‘Do you see that wadi way out there? That’s where we came from, Tsirkin and I, with your grandmother and grandfather, to have a look at the Valley. That good-for-nothing brother of hers was a bank clerk in Jaffa at the time.’

Though he paused to make sure we hadn’t missed the dig at Levin, we said nothing. Eliezer Liberson viewed the Valley as a relief map of his memories, its co-ordinates given by the smells and shadows that reached him. And yet, despite their confident precision, the movements of his cane in the darkness that shrouded him filled me with sorrow.

‘The roads were full of bandits,’ he continued. ‘The Valley was one big vale of tears. Here and there pus-eyed sharecroppers worked tiny patches of land. Jackals and hyenas walked around in broad daylight.’

He ran his cane over the landscape like a master of generations. ‘And over there by those two oak trees, do you see? That’s where Jael had her tent, the wife of Heber the Kenite. But we only got as far as the Germans’ abandoned site and then left by train.’

‘King Boris stood outside the railway station and said, “You’re not taking my Jews.” That’s what he told the Germans. They didn’t scare him.’ Albert’s voice sounded huskily from inside the room, strained with gratitude.

‘That’s the same Boris who cooled his heels while Katchke was talking to the King of England,’ said Uri.

The blind man gave us a loving and compassionate smile. ‘Albert tends to daydream,’ he said. ‘The Balkan Jews aren’t like us.’ He resumed the thread of his discourse. ‘We worked by the Sea of Galilee and on the road to Tiberias, and at night we swam in the sea. We were already bare-bottomed in the water, splashing your grandmother, when she took off her dress and stood on the shore tall and naked, like a beautiful heron on the rocks. We swam back to her and climbed out.’

‘Seven pounds each,’ said the soft voice within the room.

‘What is he talking about?’ whispered Uri.

Liberson went to the door. ‘Shhh, Albertiko. Shhh,’ he said.

We continued to sit on the terrace. The earth underneath the garden of the old folk’s home was alive. Seeds waited. Cicada larvae nursed. Earthworms and carrion beetles laboured over putrefaction.

‘We were no better than you are,’ said Liberson. ‘The time and place made us what we were. Many of us couldn’t take it and left. That’s something you know about, Baruch, because now they’re coming back to you.’

‘Tell us a story, Eliezer,’ I said all of a sudden. ‘Tell us a story.’

‘A story,’ said the old man. ‘All right, I will.’

‘A few days after we arrived in this country,’ he began in the old familiar tone, ‘before we met your grandfather, Tsirkin and I found work digging holes for new saplings in an almond grove near Gedera. It’s awful work. You feel your spine is splitting, your hands are full of blisters, and the Arab coolies beyond the acacia hedge are waiting for you to break so they can get their old jobs back again. Just then one man threw down his hoe and said he was going for water, and another went along to help him. They came back with a jug and poured everyone a drink, and when they had finished that they said they would count the holes.’

He sniggered. ‘Did you hear that, Albert? We dug and they counted.’ Since Albert said nothing, he continued. ‘Every group of workers had its hole counters. First they went for water, then
they poured it, then they counted the holes. Soon they were counting people, and before long, party members. Within a year they were travelling to Zionist congresses in Europe, and from there to raise money in America, which gave them even more to count.’

Liberson laughed. ‘Tsirkin hated them. The hole counters became big-time politicians and never gave us enough money. We were always on the verge of making it, on the verge of getting in the harvest, on the verge of starving to death.’

‘
Non tiene busha
,’ repeated Albert from his bed.

‘Once,’ continued Liberson, ‘Pesya brought home some member of the Central Committee. Meshulam was a little boy. He sat there hypnotised all evening, asking all sorts of questions. The man, whose name I won’t mention, was thrilled by how much the boy knew. After he had gladly answered all his questions, Pesya took him to the cowshed to see Tsirkin milk the cows. Tsirkin took one look at him and recognised him at once.

‘“Well, look who’s here,” said Mandolin. “It’s just like the good old days. I’ll milk and you can count the cows.”’

Liberson turned back towards the Valley. He moved his hands and cane slowly, feeling his way across the map of his longings. ‘We came to build a village. A place of our own. There, that big green blotch way out there – that’s the eucalyptus woods we planted. The trees sucked up the swamp. Cut them down and it will be back, as far as the eye can see.’

He did not know they were gone already. The big, sappy trunks had been felled the year before, and nothing had happened. The stumps were rooted out, and cotton was planted in their place.

‘Beyond the woods is the wadi where Pinness ran to kill himself when he found Leah with Rilov. Who would have believed it? A pregnant woman! We ran after him and brought him back, and only found his gun a year later during ploughing. It was rusted and useless, and Leah was dead by then too. She came down with some rare cave fever that even Doctor Yoffe had never seen.’

He drew a quick stroke in the air with his cane, from west to south. ‘There, on that far mountain, Elijah saw the little rain cloud and ran before the chariots of Ahab. He raced the
king’s horses all the way to Jezreel, over there, and reached it before them.’

We went back inside. The room smelled of the sweet crimson perfume of overripe Astrakhan apples, Liberson’s approaching death, and Albert’s sheets.

‘You’ve caused quite a rumpus, you two boys, eh? You with your graves, and you with your girls.’

‘I drive a tractor now,’ said Uri. ‘I’m a working man.’

Stripped of his sense of humour, Uri was alone and defenceless against Liberson. The old man sat wearily on his bed. I felt bad about taking up so much of the small room and making him huddle against the wall.

‘The Movement likes to think of us as one big happy family,’ he said. ‘The tribe of pioneers. Together we came, together we redeemed the land, together we farmed it, together we’ll die, and together we’ll be buried in a nice photogenic row. In every old photograph there’s a row sitting and a row standing, and two more of them on a crate in the back, looking over the others’ shoulders, and two more lying down in front, propped on their elbows with their heads touching. Three rows out of four eventually left the country. In every photograph you have the three rows, the heroes, and the zeroes.’

‘Grandfather once said something like that too,’ said Uri. But enveloped in darkness, Liberson was not listening. Only the memory of love could still catch his light-deprived eyes. He faced the window. I knew what he would say. ‘Over there, where the kibbutz has its factory, there was once a lovely vineyard. That’s where I met Fanya.’ He turned toward, me with tears in his white eyeballs. ‘You did right, Baruch, to let me go there by myself. Anyone else would have tried to help me.’

I told him about Meshulam’s swamp. ‘How silly can you get,’ he sighed. ‘Who cares about all that any more? It’s just a big waste of water.’ The details didn’t interest him.

‘I hate this place,’ he said to us. ‘They make me weave lampshades out of raffia and eat supper at four o’clock.’

Uri wanted to hear more about Liberson’s adventures with Fanya, but Liberson’s mood had taken a turn for the worse. He
was already somewhere else. He had left us and dived back into a world in which we did not exist.

‘The old geezer,’ raged Uri on our way home. ‘He doesn’t give a damn. I planned this meeting for so long, and the two of you had to go and ruin it – you with your nonsense stories and him with his textbook memories. Lecturing us with that cane. Even when they’re blind, those founding fathers of yours, they have to see more and know better than anyone.’

‘What do you want from him?’ I asked. ‘His wife is dead, his friends are dead, and Meshulam’s swamp, if you ask me, scared him more than he let on.’

‘I’d rather he did chuck me out than treat me so condescendingly. They were always blind. They stood up to their knees in mud with earth in their ears and never saw more than one thing.’

‘But why should he give a damn about your problems? What did you ever do for him?’

‘I suppose it’s just as well,’ Uri said. ‘Maybe all my feelings of guilt just came from missing this place.’

‘He only thinks about Fanya,’ I said. ‘That whole performance on the terrace was just to show us that he remembers where the vineyard was.’

‘He’s a sick man,’ Uri said. ‘He’s demented. He could easily have an operation to remove those stupid cataracts. He wants to be blind. I swear he does.’