The Blue Mountain(101)

Now, at the age of ninety-five, Pinness looked up to discover that the menacing tides had dried behind the dykes and fresh breezes blew over the earth.

‘If only I could tell you,’ he said to me, ‘what marvellous thoughts I have inside my head! I can feel them flutter there like moths.’

‘Only now do I understand,’ he wrote in an article that touched off a storm when it appeared, ‘that Uri Mirkin was the most original thinker our village ever produced. Like Jeremiah in the Valley of Ben Hinnom, like Elijah on Mount Carmel, like Jotham atop Mount Gerizim – so Uri Mirkin spake in parables from the heights of the water tower.’





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‘Everything happened after Grandfather left the village and after he died,’ my banished cousin wrote to me. He had finished his army service and was operating a scraper for his uncle in the Galilee, declining to return to the Valley. ‘Zeitser and Liberson went blind and died, Pinness lost his mind, Meshulam started reswamping the village, my father and mother left the country, Yosi became a career officer who speaks without using his jaws and thinks without using his head, I was sent into exile, and you of all people have become the richest farmer in the Valley.



‘I received a letter from Pinness. He thinks about us. Mirkin’s two grandsons, he writes, both dealt him a low blow. One in Death and one in Love. The necrophile and the nymphophile. Quote, unquote. It’s a shame that Grandfather isn’t around to hear Pinness’s language these days.

‘What was it about the old man that held everything together?’ wrote Uri. ‘Who knows who he really was: an angel of green growth or the Satan of poor Grandmother Feyge’s Workingman’s Circle? Like you, I think a lot about Efrayim. Did Grandfather bring him the mask for Efrayim’s sake or for his own? Sometimes I think Efrayim left because of Grandfather alone.’

My big footprints run along the retreating margin of the sandy beach. I look in amazement at this light, poor soil whose grains are so pretty and so worthless. And yet what is it but the soil of the Valley speeded up? Quicker to absorb moisture and quicker to lose it, quicker to blow away and quicker to pile up, quicker to fall apart and quicker to clump together, quicker to imprint and quicker to obliterate.

Damp nubs left by the playful toes of little children, the prints of beach sandals, the balled heels of women leading to the water’s edge and disappearing there, and jagged holes torn in the sand by the joggers with their dumb, tormented looks. Were Efrayim to walk here, Jean Valjean’s weight would make deep depressions in the sand, deeper even than mine.

I can’t imagine anyone leaving because of Grandfather. Deep down I want to grab his shirt and huddle under his wings to this day. ‘You’re wrong,’ I wanted to say to Uri. ‘Completely wrong. No one could want to leave Grandfather, not even our uncle Efrayim.’





The search for Efrayim continued until Grandfather’s death. A dragnet was spread all over the Levant for a masked man with a big blond bull on his shoulders. Colonel Stoves, who was now serving with the Arab Legion in Transjordan, looked for him everywhere, hobbling on his shattered knee. Old Arab friends of Rilov’s brought reports from Syria and Lebanon. The Movement had its own intelligence network in the country. Agricultural advisers, party activists, veterinarians, ritual circumcisers, itinerants of all kinds who ran into varieties of man and beast, were asked to keep their eyes open.

Occasionally Charolais calves were rumoured to have been sired in odd places. Pilgrims returning from Mecca told the headman of the Mazarib tribe that they had seen a huge white bull on the Saudi Arabian coast near al-Magnah. Through their binoculars two Scottish naturalists studying the reproductive habits of coots in the Seyhan marshes of Turkey saw a short- legged blond calf mating with a female water buffalo. A migrant starling that landed in Pinness’s garden to beg him to remove an irksome aluminium band from its leg had seen Efrayim swimming across the Black Sea in a northerly direction while Jean Valjean galloped thunderously along the shore.

For a while these reports aroused hopes. But the noiseless and invisible Efrayim, who was a past master at infiltration, camouflage, navigation, and survival, was never found. His route took him over greater distances than anyone had at first imagined. After a few years a French racing motorcyclist found Charolais-like calves in Armenia and Algeria. Jean Valjean’s crème, so it seemed, could be carried by the wind like pollen.

‘He must have taken Jean Valjean to that brothel in Algiers,’ Uri said.

‘Border crossings never posed a problem for Efrayim,’ remarked his old commander Lord Lovat, who arrived for a visit from London. ‘Your son was a first-rate soldier and a true friend,’ he told Grandfather. ‘We kept in touch even after his discharge. He helped us immensely.’