The Blue Mountain

by Shalev, Meir

  ‘“Article Three. Comrades Tsirkin, Liberson, and Mirkin will make no dishonourable advances toward Comrade Levin.

  ‘“Article Four. Comrade Levin will make no attempt …”’

  The door of the cabin swung open and Meshulam Tsirkin barged inside, wagging his head energetically.

  ‘Give that to me!’ he shouted. ‘Give it to me, Mirkin, I beg of you! I must have that document for the archives.’

  ‘Why don’t you go help your old man, he’s bringing in the hay today,’ said Grandfather. ‘Make it quick, before I set Baruch on you.’

  ‘Whatever you say about him,’ said Meshulam Tsirkin after Grandfather’s death, ‘Mirkin was one of the revered figures of the Movement. It’s no wonder that so many wasters are willing to pay a fortune to be buried next to him. That’s a fine last will and testament he’s left you!’

  As soon as they signed the protocol, the three men turned to Feyge with deep ceremonial bows and asked her to join too. ‘What about your brother?’ asked Liberson once she had added her signature. Levin, however, pointed out gloomily that he hadn’t yet made up his mind ‘where my political sympathies lie’.

  ‘In that case,’ said Grandfather, ‘since you have so much trouble making up your mind, you’re the man we’ll send to the next Zionist congress to deliver a speech on the subject.’

  ‘You can always join the Hole Counters’ Local,’ said Mandolin Tsirkin. Until his dying day, ‘hole counter’ was the most savage term of abuse in his vocabulary.

  Shlomo Levin rose disgustedly and went off to sleep in the workers’ hostel, but realising the next morning that he was liable to be left all alone, he followed the Workingman’s Circle southward to the vineyards of Judea.

  ‘There were no roads or cars, and we didn’t even own a horse,’ said Grandfather. ‘We walked the whole way and let the frogs guide us through the swamps.’

  Although they seemed to him like a three-headed monster, Levin tagged after them for several days. Tsirkin played the mandolin until its notes ‘nearly bore a hole in my skull’. Mirkin held them up for hours at a time to observe the slow dance of the stamen of the jujube tree. Liberson was the worst of them all. At night he lay croaking in low, lazy tones, keeping it up until he was covered with toads that converged on him from all directions. ‘They’re excellent sources of information,’ he confided.

  ‘They’re nothing but a bunch of clowns,’ said Levin to Feyge. ‘They don’t take a single thing seriously.’

  Whenever he told me about his dead sister, he had to keep removing his glasses to defog their thick lenses.

  ‘Our father made me promise to look after you.’ Many times in his life he must have thought and uttered the words he declaimed for me now. ‘I want you to leave them and come with me.’

  ‘I’m seventeen years old, Shlomo,’ answered Feyge, ‘and I’ve found the man I’m going to live my life with.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Levin with a suspicious look at the three ragged young men weeding grapevines with dizzying speed.

  ‘I haven’t decided yet,’ she said. ‘But we can’t put it off much longer. It will be one of those three.’

  ‘They’re hooligans. They’ll make you cook for them, darn their socks, do their washing.’

  ‘We have a constitution,’ said Feyge.

  ‘They’ll turn you into their charwoman. You won’t be the first girl who came here as a pioneer and ended up buried in the communal kitchen.’

  ‘But they’ll keep me laughing,’ said Grandmother Feyge. ‘And I’ll get to know the land through them.’

  ‘And no one can say,’ said Shlomo Levin with a catch in his throat, ‘no one can say that Ya’akov Mirkin did not help her get to know the land.’

  By now, long years after her death, he had forgiven Grandfather, even helping him with the farm work and playing draughts with him. Twice a year, though, on the anniversary of his arrival from Russia and on that of his sister’s death, he visited her grave ‘so that I can have a quiet place for an hour or two to hate all the big shots and smart alecks’.

  He followed them to the colonies of Judea, to the experimental farms, to the Jordan and the Yavne’el valleys. Grandfather told me how they had danced, hungered, drained swamps, quarried rock, ploughed fields, and hiked together through the Galilee and the Golan.

  ‘We had no Busquilla or Zis to bring us mail in those days. Do you know how we got letters from Russia?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Liberson had some friends who were pelicans. They brought them.’

  I opened an incredulous mouth, into which Grandfather stuck a hard toothbrush smeared with acrid paste and began to scrub my gums.

  ‘Have you ever seen the bill of a pelican?’

  ‘Ah?’ I gargled.

  ‘It comes with a sack. Now rinse your mouth. The pelicans put the mail there, and on their way to Africa they stopped to bring us letters and regards.’

  Pinness had no use for such stories. ‘This Valley and the coastal plain aren’t even on the pelicans’ migration route,’ he said to Grandfather. ‘Why fill the boy’s head with such nonsense?’

  But Grandfather, Liberson, and Tsirkin didn’t obey Pinness’s laws of nature. Mounted on hoes, they flew over poisonous swamps and blazed trails through a rank cover of rushes and crabgrass while the light, fragrant cloud of Feyge’s dress draped their faces with thin veils of devotion. I saw them airborne like groundsel seeds, white splotches against the drab landscape. Below them ran Levin, shouting at Feyge to come down.

  ‘Not one of them dared lay a hand on your grandmother,’ Pinness told me. ‘They just romanced her with their pranks and silly jokes, making her laugh until their sweet blood built up her resistance against malaria and depression.’

  They slung stones like shepherd boys, sang in Russian to the waterfowl that arrived each autumn from the delta of the Don, and bathed but twice a month. All night they danced barefoot, and with the break of dawn they walked across the country. ‘They could work a whole week on no more food than five oranges,’ I told my cousin Uri.

  But my uncle Avraham’s twins Yosi and Uri were not impressed by these tales.

  ‘That’s nothing,’ said Uri. ‘They forgot to tell you how Liberson streaked naked across the Sea of Galilee in Feyge’s honour, how Tsirkin played the mandolin for her all night on the shore, and how three giant Saint Peter’s fish jumped out of the water in the morning and landed bewitched at her feet, hopping on their spiny fins while Grandfather skimmed pebbles across the water to the other side of the lake.’

  To be on the safe side, I asked Meshulam for his opinion. He knew of no source, he replied, ‘that could authenticate the more fantastic stories about the Workingman’s Circle.’

  Meshulam had no sense of perspective. Pinness explained to me that this happened to people who remembered other people’s memories. In his unhierarchical, pigeonholing brain Eliezer Liberson’s walking on water had the same status as land acquisitions in the Jordan Valley. And yet with my own eyes I had seen old man Liberson floating at night in the village swimming pool, gasping and gurgling to show his wife Fanya that he was still as young as ever, while if Tsirkin grew the tallest, juiciest penicillaria in the village, it was only because he strolled through his green fields at night, his white head gleaming in the darkness, serenading the tender sprouts with his mandolin. I was sceptical only about Grandfather, because he had never stopped loving Shulamit, the Crimean whore who betrayed him, cheated on him, ‘went to bed with every officer in the Czar’s army’, and stayed behind in Russia all those years.

  ‘But he married Grandmother Feyge,’ said Uri, whose long, heifer-like eyelashes danced up and down whenever the subject was women or love.

  I already loved Uri then, when we were children. We were sitting in a big field of clover waiting for Avraham and Yosi, who were out cutting alfalfa for the cows on a creaky horse-drawn reaper. In the nearby orchard Grandfather and Zeitser were burning weeds.

  ‘That has nothing to do
with it,’ I said. I knew he had only married her because a plenary session of the Workingman’s Circle had decided he should. ‘Grandfather has a girlfriend in Russia, and someday she’s going to come.’

  ‘No, she won’t,’ said Uri. ‘She’s too old and too busy sleeping with retired Red Army generals.’

  Grandmother Feyge had been dead a long time then, and I, who had lived with Grandfather since I was two, saw at night how he opened the box with the blue envelopes that came from afar, from the country of the wicked Michurin, the filthy muzhiks, and the infamous Shulamit, and sat slowly writing answers that were not always mailed, though he never crossed out a word of them. One morning when he went to the orchard, I found an unfinished letter on the floor among the night’s harvest of notes.

  I couldn’t understand a thing. Not only wasn’t it in Hebrew, it wasn’t even in the foreign letters that appeared on the green glass of our big radio. I carefully copied a few words out on a piece of paper and took it with me to school.

  During recess I went to see Pinness, who was having tea with the teachers.

  ‘Ya’akov,’ I asked him, ‘did you ever see writing like this?’

  Pinness looked at the paper, blanched, reddened, led me out of the teachers’ room by the hand and tore what I had given him into shreds. ‘You shouldn’t have done that, Baruch. Don’t ever go poking through your grandfather’s papers again.’

  I never cheated on Grandfather again. I never looked at his papers again either, until he was dead.

  6

  I remember Grandmother Feyge’s brother walking down the streets of the village, his head and glasses glinting in the sun, his shoulders stooped, old crumbs of apricot leather yellowing between his teeth. Though public servants like Levin were not highly regarded by the farmers, he was the person they turned to whenever anyone was needed to do an audit or arbitrate a dispute, because he was as honest as the day was long and a great stickler for the facts.

  One afternoon as he sat with his Yemenite wife Rachel under the white mulberry tree in their yard, tearing off little pieces of pitta bread and cheese with his thin blue fingers and placing them in her mouth, I eavesdropped on their conversation, scrunching myself up in a bush as best I could.

  ‘Have some more,’ he said, preparing another morsel.

  ‘I don’t need to be hand-fed,’ protested Rachel, though she could not keep from laughing. ‘I’m an old woman, not a baby.’

  ‘My baby,’ I heard Shlomo Levin sigh. ‘My baby sister.’

  Sometimes when the old-timers reminisced about Grandmother, they would let drop a few words about her brother, so that little by little I put together a picture of him, as I did of others whom I buried. Rilov the Watchman, for instance, was the object of my investigations for years – and a dangerous one too, since his grandson and I, and my father and his son, had a running feud between us. Worse yet, he spent most of his time in the septic tank of his cowshed, where he kept the village arms cache and any intruder was liable to be shot. ‘If you value dying in your own bed, stay out of here,’ he would say, giving you his famous four-cornered stare, which was composed of two shotgun barrels and two slanty eyes.

  I never talked to Rilov in my life, but Levin was more approachable. He liked me and regarded me with melancholy amusement, baffled that a Goliath like myself had been born into a family like his. ‘I only wish I was as strong and innocent as you,’ he would say to me with a smile.

  Levin stayed with the Workingman’s Circle for several weeks and then decided to go off on his own. Not that Grandfather, Mandolin Tsirkin, and Liberson were unkind to him, but one look from them when he massaged his aching hands or wielded his hoe at a bad angle was enough to bring tears to his eyes and fill him with despair. He didn’t understand their jokes and never managed to learn their songs, since each evening they invented new ones.

  Their bestial habits, such as scratching their toes while they ate, picking their teeth with blades of straw, and conversing with mules and donkeys, depressed and frightened him. Even Feyge, so it seemed to him, no longer held him in esteem.

  ‘Our father sent me to look after her, and there I was, a pathetic farmhand and a fifth wheel of an elder brother.’

  And yet the three of them shared their food with him, found him and Feyge work with the farmers of the Jewish colonies, and even rescued them once from some Arab camel drivers who attacked them near Petach Tikvah and tried to steal their packs.

  ‘You run ahead with Feyge,’ shouted Tsirkin, ‘and keep an eye on my mandolin!’

  Shlomo and Grandmother hid behind a rise and watched in astonishment as the ‘three hooligans’ wrestled with their attackers and drove them off. Liberson rejoined them with a split lip, triumphantly waving his Webley revolver, and Feyge cleaned the wound and kissed it tenderly to the gleeful cries of his companions.

  Afterwards Levin chided her for her free ways.

  ‘I love them,’ she answered in the darkness.

  He lay awake all night and announced with gloomy formality in the morning that he intended to leave them.

  ‘We felt pretty awful when we first came to this country too,’ said Tsirkin. ‘In another month you’ll feel better.’

  But Levin decided that it was time to go his separate way, wherever that might lead him.

  Liberson and Grandfather bought him a train ticket to Jerusalem and gave him a few Turkish coins. Feyge cried when her brother boarded the train.

  He sat in the rickety carriage feeling low, his hands in his pockets for warmth, his knees no doubt pressed together at the same touchingly timid Levinesque angle they would later form when he sat behind his store counter. On the opposite bench a group of religious Jews and their wives regarded him with distaste while telling stories about their rabbi, who had flown on a Hasidic fur hat from the port in Jaffa straight to the Wailing Wall. Next to him sat a hunched merchant who whispered numbers to himself all the way to Jerusalem as if hoping they might safely conduct him to the terra firma of sanity.

  Levin, who had barely freed himself from the oppressive presence of pelican postmen and froggy guides, suddenly realised that the country must be exuding maddening vapours that infected whoever lived in it regardless of age, tribe, or sect.

  Looking out at the arid landscape, he nibbled at a slice of bread Feyge had put in his pack. Flakes of soot and bits of ash from the locomotive flew through the open window into his mouth, tasting like bitter groats. The desolation of the countryside depressed him. The grey valleys, spiny thickets, and ruined terraces of the hillsides seemed dead and pitiful compared with the vast green expanses that he remembered from the riverbanks of his childhood.

  When the train swung around the last mountain curve and entered Jerusalem, Grandmother’s brother took his pack, left the station, walked past the silenced windmill of Moses Montefiore, descended to the pool in front of the old walled city where cattle were drinking from the faecal waters, and passed through a gate in the wall. The filth and shabbiness of the city inspired fear and revulsion. An insipid date drink that he bought from an Arab boy only made everything grimmer. Toward evening he spied two pioneers like himself, followed in the wake of their Russian speech, and found shelter for the night. His mood, though, did not improve.

  ‘The Jews here turn up their noses at us, and the Arabs have already twice assaulted me,’ he wrote to his sister. ‘This city, with its stones and poverty, will be the ruin of me. All one sees is vanished glory and dead ashes. The stones alone are at home here. This is no place for living men.’

  For a while he tried to learn stonemasonry. The Arab masons amazed him with their sharp eye, which could peel the surface away from each stone and reveal its inner nature. ‘They even had a word for it, mesamsam. You might have thought they were cutting dough instead of rock.’ But Levin’s fingers ached and swelled long hours after laying down his chisel, and he decided to go to Jaffa. ‘It was a softer city,’ he told me, ‘not as stony.’

  Lacking the money for a train ticket,
he joined two youths and a young girl from Minsk who were going to Jaffa on foot. Oddly, this tiring journey, which took two whole days, was a pleasant experience despite the mountainous route that led them through thornbushes, over boulders, and past barking dogs ‘to avoid the highwaymen of Abu Ghosh’.

  Unfamiliar black birds chirruped all around, pointing their orange beaks in the air. Grey lizards, ‘the lords of the wilderness’, amused him with their prayers. The young men he was with were friendly, helped him carry his things, and even gave him good advice. The taller of the two, whose name was Hayyim Margulis, told him to wear a woollen belt around his waist even in the hottest weather and informed him that he intended to become a beekeeper in order ‘to bring forth honey from the rock’.

  ‘But bees are more than just honey,’ said Margulis gaily. ‘Without them we can never make the wilderness blossom. Without bees there is no fruit, no clover, no vegetables, nothing. The flies and wasps of this country aren’t to be trusted.’ During one of their rest stops Margulis showed him how to find wild bee hives. ‘It’s an old Cossack trick,’ he explained, taking out a little box and striding over to a flowering thyme plant whose bright blossoms buzzed with ‘savage bees’.

  ‘That one is good and sozzled,’ he whispered, pointing at a bee couched luxuriously in a flower. Stealthily stalking it with the box, he shut the lid on it, then did the same with several other bees.

  ‘They always fly straight back to the hive,’ he explained, freeing one of the bees and running after it with upturned face, tripping over stones and clods of earth. Levin followed closely behind him. When they lost sight of the little creature after a few dozen yards, Margulis freed a second bee and kept on running.

  The sixth bee brought them to its home, which was hidden in the notched trunk of a carob tree. Levin stood a safe distance away, marvelling when Margulis rubbed his hands and face with wildflower petals and walked straight up to the hive, letting the bees land on his bare skin and crawl all over it. He scooped some honey into his hands and returned to the girl from Minsk, who licked it off his outstretched, dripping fingers as if she had been doing it all her life.