The Blue Mountain

by Shalev, Meir

  ‘It’s really quite simple,’ I told myself, wandering through the large rooms of my house. ‘Why keep picking at it, prying and looking for answers?’

  Wasn’t that why Grandfather had raised me to be what I was? He had made me as big and strong as an ox and as faithful and savage as a sheepdog, thick-skinned and thick-headed. And now he lies in his grave, surrounded by dead friends and tickled pink by the village’s conniptions.

  ‘Leave him alone. The child is nothing but a bag of yarns and tall tales,’ said Pinness when I announced that I had no intention of appearing before the Committee for a hearing.

  I was no longer a child. I was a rich young giant, burdened with my money and my bulk. Pinness, however, had a way of extending his pupils’ childhoods to all ages, continuing to pat them on heads that had long since grown bald or grey. ‘Who knows how many memories were crammed into the boy’s big body until it just burst and spilled its bile?’ he asked rhetorically. If Grandfather had been alive, he would have dismissed such a remark by saying that although Pinness knew many fine parables, ‘he sometimes forgets what they’re about’.

  When asked to abandon the mortuary business, I myself always replied, ‘I’m only doing what Grandfather wanted.’ I sent Busquilla and his hired lawyer to the Committee hearing because they were outsiders, as smooth as they were crude. The fallen leaves of stories had not covered them, and the soles of their shoes kept the Valley’s fine dirt off their feet. I pictured the scrape of spartan chairs in the Committee room, the broken-nailed hands drumming like hooves on the table. Let the two of them face those stalwart eyes for me, those rough fingers jabbing the air.

  I was only Grandfather’s little child, doing what he wanted. I had nothing more to say.

  In Odessa Grandfather and his brother Yosef boarded the Ephratos, a small, filthy ship ‘full of bad people’ that plied the Mediterranean and Black seas. Like two sides of the same coin, Ya’akov and Yosef Mirkin saw different halves of the world. ‘My brother was excited, tempestuous. He paced back and forth in the prow of the ship, looking straight ahead.’

  Yosef nurtured dreams of white donkeys, Hebrew power, and Jewish homesteads in the mountains of Gilead. Grandfather thought of Shulamit, who had stayed behind after threshing his flesh with the flails of deceit and jealousy, and of Palestine, which was for him but a refuge from crimes of passion, a land beyond the borders of memory where he and his wounds might grow scar tissue.

  He sat in the stern of the ship and gazed at the water, his bare heart unravelling behind him in the foam. ‘Can’t you see? Our warm hearts come apart like balls of twine,’ he wrote in a note long years later.

  During their days at sea, when all they ate was bread and dried figs, Ya’akov and Yosef Mirkin vomited incessantly.

  ‘We arrived in this country and headed north. By summer Yosef and I were on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.’ Grandfather’s hand travelled back and forth, shovelling mashed potatoes mixed with homemade yoghurt and salty fried onions into my mouth. ‘The first night we found work guarding the fields, and at dawn we sat down to see how the sun rose in the Promised Land. It came up at half past four. By quarter past five it was trying to kill us. Yosef hung his head and started to cry. That wasn’t how he had imagined the day of redemption.’

  Now his hands were busy with the salad. ‘We were three friends. Mandolin Tsirkin, Eliezer Liberson, and me. My brother Yosef fell ill, couldn’t take any more, and ran away to America.’

  Hot, weak, and irritable, Grandfather oscillated between attacks of malaria and spasms of anger and longing.

  Yosef made it big in California. ‘When we were still walking around wrapped in burlap in winter, our socks stuffed with newspapers to keep out the cold, he was selling suits to bourgeois Americans.’ When the village was hooked up to electricity a few months before Grandmother Feyge died and Yosef sent a money order so they could buy a refrigerator, Grandfather threw the letter into the slops ditch by the cowshed and told Grandmother that he would never touch ‘the dollars of a capitalist traitor’. Yosef then went to Santa Rosa, Luther Burbank’s small and beloved farm that attracted sentimental hordes of visitors, insects, and fan mail, and sent Grandfather a signed photograph of the great planter. I saw him in the trunk beneath Grandfather’s bed with his straw hat, polka dot tie, and fleshy earlobes. ‘But even a gesture like that couldn’t reconcile Mirkin.’

  Fanya Liberson was Grandmother’s best friend.

  ‘Feyge, who was already sick and weak, short of breath and love, came to me in tears,’ she said after I had pestered her for hours, following her expectantly about. ‘But not even we could convince your grandfather. He made her go on carrying those big blocks of ice for the icebox.’

  ‘And your friend Mirkin was her biggest ice block of all,’ Fanya said another time to her husband. Grandmother Feyge’s sufferings and death still haunted her and made her furious anew each time she thought of them.

  I couldn’t hear Eliezer Liberson’s murmured answer. Crouched by their house, my face pressed to the wet slats of the blinds, I saw only his lips as they moved, and her beautiful, bright old head laid across his chest.

  Grandfather never forgave his brother and never saw him again. It was only after his death that I had Yosef exhumed and his bones brought from California to our Valley. His two sons, joint owners of the Mirkin & Mirkin Textile Company of Los Angeles, sent me a cheque for ninety thousand dollars.

  ‘Your father was a capitalist traitor,’ Busquilla wrote to them on the official stationery of Pioneer Home, ‘but we are still giving you a ten per cent discount because he was a member of the family.’

  The dead arrived in hosed-down farm trucks, in carts hitched to tractors, in the bellies of airplanes, in wooden coffins and lead caskets.

  Sometimes there were big funerals with huge crowds and reporters and sweating troops of VIPs and politicians. Busquilla greeted them with scraping, sinuous gestures that disgusted me. They watched me dig the grave, shrinking back from the shower of earth I sent flying, while urging Busquilla to make his worker hurry up.

  Other bodies came unattended, accompanied only by a bill of lading and a note with the inscription requested for the gravestone. Some were interred by a single angry son or weeping daughter. Some arrived alive, crawling through the fields with their last breath to be buried in Pioneer Home.

  ‘With my old comrades,’ they said. ‘Next to Mirkin,’ they pleaded. ‘In the earth of the Valley.’

  Before burying them, I opened their coffins in the shed by Busquilla’s office to have a look at them. I had to make sure that no one ineligible was smuggled in.

  The ‘capitalist traitors’ who arrived from America were already slightly decomposed. Their carnal frivolity moulted, they stared at me with fishy, apologetic eyes rheumy with supplication. The old comrades from the Valley were very quiet, as if napping under a tree in the fields. Many of them I knew from their visits to Grandfather or Zeitser when I was a boy, in their hands a gnawed branch, an old letter, or a leaf attacked by aphids that they had come to consult about. Others I knew only from stories, from answers to questions I had asked, and from what I had had to imagine myself.

  Grandfather brought me to his cabin wrapped in a blanket when I was two years old. He washed the soot off me and picked the slivers of glass and wood from my skin. He raised me, fed me, and taught me the secrets of trees and fruit.

  And told me stories. As I ate. As I weeded. As I pruned the wild suckers of the pomegranate trees. As I slept.

  ‘My son Efrayim had a little calf called Jean Valjean. Efrayim got up every morning, took Jean Valjean out for a walk on his back, and returned home at noon. He did that each day. “Efrayim,” I said to him, “that’s no way to raise a calf. It will get so used to it that it will never want to use its own legs.” But Efrayim didn’t listen. Jean Valjean grew bigger and bigger until he became a huge bull. And even then Efrayim insisted on carrying him everywhere … That was my son Efrayim for you.’

>   ‘Where is Efrayim?’

  ‘No one knows, my child.’

  Though there were never tears in his eyes, the corners of his mouth sometimes trembled imperceptibly. Often, when the fruit trees were in blossom, or on an exceptionally fine day in the Valley, he told me about my uncle Efrayim’s handsome looks.

  ‘When he was still a little boy, the birds used to flock to his window to watch him wake up.

  ‘Now I’ll tell you about your mother. Ah-h-h … open your mouth, Baruch. She was an extraordinary young woman. Once, when she was a little girl, she was sitting on the pavement outside our cabin polishing the family’s shoes: mine, and Grandmother Feyge’s, and Uncle Avraham’s, and Uncle Efrayim’s, who still lived at home. Just then … open your mouth, my child … just then she saw a snake, a big viper, crawling slowly up the pavement, coming closer and closer.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then … one more bite. What happened then?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did your mother run away?’

  I knew the story by heart.

  ‘No!’

  ‘Did she cry?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Did she faint?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Well now, Baruch, my child, finish what’s in your mouth. Swallow. Your mother didn’t faint. What did she do? What did your mother do?’

  ‘She sat there without moving.’

  ‘And the viper came slowly, slowly crawling up the pavement, puffing and hissing, psss, psss, psss, until it was right next to your mother’s bare foot. And then … she took the big shoe brush and …’

  ‘Wham!’

  ‘Right on the head of the snake.’

  ‘Where is my mother?’

  ‘You’re with Grandfather now.’

  ‘And the snake?’

  ‘The snake is dead.’

  ‘And my father?’

  Grandfather rose and patted me on the head.

  ‘You’ll be as tall as your mother and as strong as your father.’

  He showed me the crumbling flowers that my mother had dried as Pinness’s pupil. He told me about a great river, ‘a hundred times wider than our little wadi’, about ‘Gypsy thieves’, about the poor German Templars who had tried settling the Valley before us until every one of their children, ‘all yellow and shaking like baby chicks’, died of malaria.

  His fingers, used to binding grafts with raffia, hoeing weeds, and feeling fruit, undid my stained bib gently. He bent down to pick me up, his moustache springing against my neck as he tickled me with his breath.

  ‘My child.’

  ‘Where did Grandmother Feyge come from?’

  Grandmother Feyge came from the same faraway land. She was much younger than Grandfather, who was already an old farmhand when she arrived, inured to illness and able to digest whatever local slop was put before him. All the time, though, he thought of Shulamit, who had made his life wretched and now sent him letters from Russia. Twice a year a blue envelope arrived from her – via the Turkish mail, on winds that blew from the north, in the bills of the pelicans who came down to rest ‘on their way to hottest Africa’.

  5

  Grandfather met Grandmother in Palestine when he, Eliezer Liberson, and Mandolin Tsirkin were working in Zichron Ya’akov, a town of private farmers supported by the philanthropical Baron Edmond de Rothschild.

  While the unruly trio sang Ukrainian songs ‘to get the goat of the Baron’s parasites’, Feyge and her brother Shlomo Levin sat off to one side, their empty stomachs faint with hunger. Together they had come to Palestine and been cast by Arab stevedores onto a filthy wharf, from which they picked themselves up and wandered off in search of work, stricken by hunger, the sun, and dysentery. Their delicate mien discouraged employers, and when Shlomo Levin found work in a vineyard by removing the glasses that made him look too intellectual, his weak eyes could not tell the difference between a three-and four-bud cut, which made him ruin a whole row of grapevines and got him sacked on the spot.

  They ate the potluck of charity: lentils in heartburn oil, Egyptian onions, Grade D oranges, brown strips of kamardin.

  Kamardin was the poor man’s candy, apricots boiled to a pulp and dried into leather. Each time I mouthed the word I could feel the sticky sweetness of its syllables. Shlomo Levin once told me how he loathed it.

  ‘But it was cheap,’ he said. ‘And I and your grandmother, my poor sister, had no money.

  ‘The poor need sweets because they’re the taste of consolation,’ he explained, still angered by the memory of how the boys of the village had stolen chocolate from his store. ‘It’s not as if they couldn’t have afforded to pay for it, those big heroes!’

  In Rehovot Feyge found temporary work as a seamstress. One day, as she was sitting on an empty orange crate patching clothes, several figures on horseback stopped in front of her. A thin, erect woman looked down from the saddle with lordly severity.

  ‘Why are you doing ghetto work?’ she scolded.

  Feyge threw down her needle and thread, burst into tears, and ran off. Shlomo hurried after her.

  ‘Do you know who that was?’ he asked. ‘That was Rachel Yana’it, the workers’ leader.’

  Ten years later, when Grandmother bought her first hen in the nearby Cherkessian village, she called her Rachel Yana’it and liked nothing better than to scold her for the tiny eggs she laid.

  Feyge’s hunger pangs flowed in her veins. She could feel them circulate through her heart, pumped all over her body. That day in Zichron Ya’akov, she and her brother were cleaning vats in the winery, and the fermentation vapours so tortured her empty belly that she felt she was going to faint. When the three young men working next to them stopped their singing and produced from their knapsacks pitta bread, olives, some slices of cheese, and a bottle of brandy stolen from the storeroom, her eyes clouded mistily over. They rubbed their hands and dug in. After a while Mandolin Tsirkin felt Feyge staring at the crumbs on his lips.

  Tsirkin could read the hunger in anyone’s eyes. With a tip of the neck of his mandolin, he invited her to partake.

  ‘She looked like a hunted bird. I smiled at her with my eyes the way you smile at a child.’

  Feyge let go of her brother’s sleeve and joined them.

  ‘She did eat of their own meat, and drank of their own cup,’ quoted Pinness over Grandmother’s grave.

  Shlomo Levin didn’t like the noisy threesome and was afraid of them. ‘They ate and drank like Arab coolies and sang like Russian hooligans,’ he told me in the office of the co-op. ‘At a time when all of us were torn by a thousand loyalties and conflicts, nothing fazed them at all.’

  He didn’t look up at me. We sat by ourselves in his office, the sun glinting off the myriad particles of dust that danced outside the window. Levin was cutting carbon paper for the co-op’s receipt books with his thumbnail. Though I was too young to understand everything he said, I didn’t interrupt him with questions. Like the desert flowers in Pinness’s collection, Levin opened up once every few years, and it would have been a great mistake to stop him.

  ‘She fell for them at once,’ he whispered, his blue fingers trembling. ‘Like a dumb moth for the flame that kills it.’

  Levin was shocked to see them tear off pieces of bread and cheese with their dirty fingers and put them in his sister’s dry mouth. Though he tried to keep her away from them, that same night, when Liberson, Mirkin, and Mandolin Tsirkin were high from finishing their bottle of brandy, they founded the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle ‘in order to cheer your grandmother up’. They even voted a budget, wrote a constitution, and composed a preamble to it.

  ‘The historians never took the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle seriously,’ said Meshulam Tsirkin to me. ‘Perhaps it suffered from its name. What serious scholar would write a dissertation on an organisation with a name like that?’ he grinned. ‘Still, it was a living legend among the pioneers. It was the first true commune in this country, because it was the first to
grant full equality to women. And though its by-laws were highly idiosyncratic, you’ll find several important breakthroughs in them.’

  Underneath Grandfather’s bed in the cabin was a large wooden trunk. I shut the curtains and opened it. The documents lay beneath a white embroidered blouse, a Russian worker’s cap, and a yellowing mosquito net. Her picture, too.

  Grandmother smiled at me. She had two black braids and little hands, and looked as though she were about to come skipping right out of the photograph. Wheeling around, I saw Grandfather behind me, his pale face looking stern. He knelt by my side, prised my fingers from the picture one by one, returned it to the trunk, and took out an envelope with different photographs.

  ‘This is Rilov, the famous Watchman,’ he said in a mocking tone I knew well. Grandfather had never liked the members of the Watchmen’s Society. ‘Underneath that Arab cloak he’s got two Mauser pistols and a French field cannon. Behind him is that good-for-nothing Rosa Munkin, and the two men lying down in front of him are Pinness and Bodenkin.’

  He began to pace the room.

  ‘In all our old photographs,’ he said, ‘you’ll always find one row of us standing, another sitting, and two of us lying in front of them, propped on their elbows with their heads touching. One of those standing and one of those lying down always left the country in the end. One of those sitting always died young.’

  He bent down, pulled an old sheet of paper from the trunk, and burst into laughter.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘This is the constitution of the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle.’

  He stood up and began reading with a flourish.

  ‘“Article One. The Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle will avoid the seductive and vain glamour of all cities.

  ‘“Article Two. Comrade Levin will cook. Comrade Tsirkin will wash the dishes. Comrade Mirkin will look for work. Comrade Liberson will do the laundry and the talking.