The Blue Mountain(11)

‘It’s private,’ I told him.

He backed off a few steps and leaned against Shulamit’s gravestone, waiting to be asked to translate the letter.

‘It’s from some old lady in America,’ he informed me after a glance at it. ‘Her name is Rosa Munkin. She’s from your grandfather’s hometown. She was here many years ago, worked with him in Rishon-le-Tsiyyon and Rehovot, and thought the world of him. Someone wrote to her that you buried him at home, and she wants to be buried here too when she dies, right next to him.’

He handed me back the envelope. ‘There’s more in it,’ he said.

Inside was a cheque made out to me for ten thousand dollars.

‘This is just the down payment,’ Busquilla said. ‘She’s a very sick woman and won’t live much longer. Her lawyer will bring the rest of the money with her.’

‘What am I supposed to do with this?’ I asked, confused. ‘It isn’t even real money.’



‘You’ll need help, Baruch,’ said Busquilla softly. ‘We’re talking big money. We’re talking foreigners. We’re talking English. We’re talking lawyers and the Committee and income tax. You’ll never manage it by yourself.’

With ten thousand dollars, I thought, I could plant the most fabulous trees around Grandfather’s grave, Judas trees, flame trees, white oleanders. I could lay a path of red gravel from Grandfather to Shulamit. I could go looking for my lost uncle Efrayim or pay to have old Zeitser’s stomach complaints taken care of.

‘Don’t breathe a word of this to anyone, Baruch,’ said Busquilla. ‘Not a soul. Not even your cousin Uri.’

That evening Busquilla came to the cabin with a black typewriter and wrote a letter for me in English. Rosa Munkin answered it, and three months later, in the middle of the night, she arrived personally in a shiny coffin, chaperoned by a lawyer with a headful of hair, a slick suit, and a smell of aftershave lotion such as had never perfumed the air of our village before. Vile and elegant, he stood watching me dig the grave.

‘Just look at him,’ Busquilla whispered. ‘I know the type. This isn’t the first corpse he’s buried in the middle of the night.’

The lawyer sat in the dark on Grandfather’s grave, dangled his polished shoes, and chewed on a blade of straw while disgustedly sniffing the odours of the village that came wafting on the warm night air from the cowsheds and chicken coops.

We lowered Rosa Munkin into the soil of the Valley. The American took a slip of paper and a skullcap from his pocket, recited a brief prayer in an incomprehensible Hebrew, instructed me to make a square concrete base for the headstone, and reached for a black attaché case in the back of his huge estate car. Busquilla counted the banknotes with a quick, moistened finger and made out a receipt.

A few days later the lawyer returned with a fancy stone of polished pink marble. To this day, among the grey and white stones chiselled out of local rock, Rosa Munkin’s grave resembles a big box of candy.

I stashed the money away in the cowshed. Zeister was asleep there, covered by the old army blanket that had been in his possession since the Great War, dead to the world. Then I returned with Busquilla to the cabin, where we sat at Grandfather’s table drinking tea and eating bread with olives.

‘I’m sure you’ll want to tell your uncle Avraham and Pinness,’ he advised me. ‘Don’t do it just yet, though. Wait a little while.’

The next day Busquilla quit his job at the post office and put himself at my disposal.

‘I’ll manage the business, and you can pay me what you think I’m worth,’ he said.

That was the beginning of Grandfather’s vengeance, which was carried out with the prophetic exactitude of a good planter, filled my sacks with money, and wreaked havoc on the most sensitive nerve centres of the village.

‘They drove my son Efrayim from here,’ he repeated to me and Pinness one last time before his death. ‘But I’ll get them where it hurts the most: in the earth.’

We didn’t know then what he was talking about.

The Committee considered several candidates to fill Busquilla’s position at the post office and finally settled on Zis. The donkey already knew every house in the village, and now that it was riderless, could carry packages too. Zis was the grandson of Katchke, a charter member of the village who had hauled water from the spring every day until he was murdered by a snake.

Zis, however, did not even last two years. ‘The old-timers discovered that he was licking the stamps off the envelopes,’ said my sardonic cousin Uri.

The Committee appealed to Busquilla to return to his old job, but by then he had a business card that said ‘Manager, Pioneer Home’ in Hebrew and in English, plus ‘a herd of one hundred corpses’, as old Liberson sarcastically put it until the death of his wife Fanya, his first and only love, who became the hundred and first.