The Blue Mountain(103)
‘There is no such earth,’ concluded Pinness, who had clearly been saving up his punchline. ‘And there is no such lover, either.’
Old and frail, Grandfather stood facing me and Shulamit.
‘I’m going to live with her from now on,’ he told me. ‘Please understand me, my child. At my age it’s the only thing I can do. But I can’t do it here. Not in this house.’
I heard familiar steps approaching the cabin. Pinness knocked and entered, followed by Liberson and Tsirkin.
Breathing heavily and embracing, they all burst into horrible sobs. I was so dumbfounded by the emotion gushing from their old Russian hides that I turned around and left. That night I slept among the bales in the hayloft with no Grandfather to cover me. Even when his friends left after midnight, the lights stayed on in the cabin. When I returned in the morning he was slowly making himself breakfast and the Crimean whore was fast asleep in his bed.
‘I never showed you this picture,’ said Grandfather. He ran his fingers over the paper lining of the trunk, fumbling gently until he found what he was looking for. Taking out his grafting knife, he slit and peeled back the paper, reached inside with two fingers, and drew out an old photograph.
‘This is her,’ he whispered, nodding toward the bed. ‘Back there, when we were young.’
The photograph had been slashed nearly in two from top to bottom, as though with a sickle stroke. It was held together by some old brown masking tape stuck to its back.
In a dark blouse with a round collar and a narrow tie of black velvet, Shulamit was seated on a carved chair. Her eyebrows arched like proud crescents in her vertically severed young face. Her hands, snipped by the hateful scissors, were crossed with an infinite calm, with all the radiant confidence of a beautiful woman.
‘When we went swimming in the river at night, in our little nook of reeds and rushes, Shulamit glimmered like a heron.’
She slept with all the officers, I told myself, and with all the old Red Army generals. Everyone knows she did. She was the reason you couldn’t sleep at night. She was the reason Grandmother died.
Grandfather rose, stretched himself painfully on tiptoe, and hit me in the face with his fist. He was so old and weak that it didn’t even hurt, but I broke into a sweat like a mule ploughing in autumn, and my eyes filled with tears.
Then Shulamit awoke and I ran out. Half an hour later they emerged for a walk around the yard. I followed behind them at a distance. Grandfather showed her Avraham’s milking shed, the hayloft, and old Zeitser, who was munching his pensioner’s breakfast. The mule regarded her with equanimity. At his advanced age he knew well that the beast hath no advantage over the man and that the life of both is nothing but one long tug at a stuck cart that never breaks free of pitfalls, sand traps, and bogs. They passed the remains of Grandmother Feyge’s old earthen stove, whose ruined walls still smelled of bread, pain, and baked pumpkin, and headed for the orchard. From afar I saw Grandfather’s long sleeves flap as he showed Shulamit the different trees. I knew that he was waving goodbye – to the peaches, to the pears, to the almonds, to me.
‘Just look at them,’ said Uri, coming up and standing by my side. ‘Straight out of the pages of a Russian novel.’
A month later the two of them moved to the old folk’s home. Until his dying day Grandfather retaliated with a deliberate, calculated, and relentless love whose heartless skill and soft old movements of pleasure made Shulamit shed her grey leafage, scratch at the walls, and stamp her feet as hard as her rheumatic old joints would permit.
* * *
And then, as Uri later wrote me, Grandfather died and everything began to fall apart. Rivka’s screams grew ten times louder, Avraham’s silences and crease lines deepened, and I myself all but stopped eating, because a great tuber of yearning was swelling and sprouting in my stomach. The news that Mirkin had left home got around quickly, racing through the pens and sheds and flying over the fields. It took no more than a few days for weeds to overrun the vegetable and flower gardens by the cabin. Black ants, their high abdomens arched almost to their backs, scooted madly across the floor. Three despairing almond trees, their hollow interiors claimed by the bright sawdust of Doubt, collapsed in the orchard. Ruthless cattle flies descended on the yard, and their strong, stout beaks drilled through the skin of man and beast, leaving bloody puncture marks and testy animals who couldn’t keep their minds on their work.
When thorny prosopis plants burst through the floor of the cabin, their ugly fruits distended like cancerous glands before my eyes, I rose from bed and called for Yosi. Armed with hoes, we went to the garden and began rooting out the long, tough nodules that had spread beneath the earth as the malediction of branches grew above it. Yosi had had enough after a day. His hands were blistered, and he couldn’t straighten his back that night.