The Blue Mountain(106)

‘I kept a small campfire going all night,’ Grandfather told me. ‘It drove off the jackals and made the blackberries and papyrus reeds glow yellow. Avraham slept, and I sat there and thought.’





Three times a week a woman comes to clean my house. At night I sit drinking tea and thinking in my spotless kitchen, picturing the village in the dark.

Our village is shaped like an H. The farmers’ houses run along the two vertical arms, their farmyards backing off to either side. The Mirkin farm is in the north-eastern corner, and the school, the meeting house, the breeder, the dairy, the clinic, the store, the feed shack, and the post office are in the village centre. The non-farmers live here too, their homes surrounded by small gardens and auxiliary barnyards.

It’s hard to imagine that it was all a wilderness once. The old photographs in Meshulam’s boxes – tents in a treeless landscape, poorly dressed men and women, skinny chickens, cows as meagre as those in Pharaoh’s dream – look like they were taken elsewhere. Lofty avenues of cypresses and casuarinas now line the entrance to every farmhouse. Slender-trunked Washingtonia palms, planted in those first years, shake their wild heads of hair in the sky.

I planted a dozen such palms myself in a handsome boulevard by the entrance to Pioneer Home. By then the only Mirkins left in the village were Avraham, Rivka, and Yosi. Every Saturday they went to visit Uri. Sometimes they invited me along.

Yosi drove the old Studebaker. Although he didn’t have a licence, he was an excellent, careful driver. You could see the road running into his eyes as if his brain were endlessly digesting it. Avraham kept silent, and Rivka, after trying to make small talk about this or that, gave up and sat there like the scolded calf she was so good at imitating.

Her brother, with whom Uri was now living, had left the village after his discharge from the army and become a successful earthmover. He had tractors working for him all over the country and businesses in Africa and Latin America. A small, rich, jovial man, he was immensely fond of me and liked to challenge me to wrestling matches. Slapping me on the back as hard as he could, he asked if I wanted ‘a job as a bulldozer’ with him.

‘I hear you’re making money, young fellow,’ he said shrewdly, planting his little fist in the great wall of my stomach. ‘If you’d like a little power shovel for those graves of yours, just let me know.’

‘All I need is a pickaxe and a hoe,’ I said.

‘Before you know it he’ll be buying you and all your power shovels out,’ said Rivka.

Although the story of his relocation, which arrived together with him, had made Uri the local girls’ dream boy, he led a life of monkish abstinence.

‘Do you know what I’ve been thinking about?’ he asked when we were left alone at last for a few minutes. ‘I’ve been thinking about your parents – about your father, who looked up and knew that a woman would fall on him from above, and about your mother, who died hugging him in her sleep, dreaming of meat.’





36



After departing with Shulamit, Grandfather returned to visit only once. I remember how my heart skipped a beat when I came home from the fields and saw the ambulance from the old folk’s home parked in the yard. Entering the cabin, I found Grandfather lying in bed, with Avraham and the village doctor seated by his side. I was good and frightened, but Grandfather explained that he missed the cabin so much he had to see it again. By the door, the doctor asked to have a word with me.

Doctor Munk was new in the village. Grandfather was already in the old folk’s home when he came. He had an amiable blonde wife who made friends with everyone and sometimes substitute-taught in the school, a woman who smelled as clean as a cat and wore summery dresses perfumed with crushed lemon leaves. A month after her arrival, Pinness and all the women heard the cry, ‘I’m screwing the doctor’s wife.’

The doctor played the cello and even gave a few amateur recitals. One of them was attended by Tsirkin, who announced afterward that if he held his mandolin upside down between his legs, ‘it would howl like that too’.

‘Grandpa thinks he’s dying,’ said Doctor Munk with the fake intimacy he cultivated, as his revolting little dog tried to nip my heels. ‘I’ve examined him and there’s nothing wrong with him. It’s something that happens to people his age, and so we have to try to calm Grandpa down.’

Grandfather’s wanting to visit the village had aroused no suspicions in the old folk’s home. No sooner did he arrive, however, than he sent Avraham for the doctor.

‘I’m dying,’ he told Doctor Munk, ‘and I’d like to know what it will feel like.’