The Blue Mountain(111)
‘“Comrade Liberson: Comrade Shenhar is violating the village by-laws. We returned to the earth to farm it and to live by our own labours.
‘“Advocate Shapiro: My client is acting in perfect conformity with the ideals of co-operative farming that you speak of. He employs no hired labour and pays all his taxes and dues to the co-operative as required. If I may be allowed to say so, my client is definitely engaged in returning Jews to the earth, and the homage paid by him to the pioneers of your Movement should be a source of pride and honour to it.
‘“Comrade Rilov: That’s enough of your stupid jokes.
‘“Advocate Shapiro: My client quite literally earns his livelihood from the earth. He supports himself by his own labour, considers himself a tiller of the soil, regards the mortuary profession as a branch of agriculture, and uses agricultural tools to excavate, plant, fertilise, and irrigate his prospering business. His graves are drought-resistant, pest-resistant, frost-resistant, and disease-free. I hereby submit a detailed cost accounting demonstrating that an acre of graves is more profitable than any other agricultural crop, both in absolute terms and relative to the investment demanded.”
‘And that,’ trilled Busquilla, ‘is what killed them the most. Your profits, Comrade Shenhar. The cash. The fact that we make more money farming than they do.’
38
Pinness’s scientific reputation dated back to his discovery of the prehistoric cave. ‘The village and I were both young then,’ he told me. Like all his pupils, I knew the cave well. It was on a rocky slope overlooking the Valley, at the far end of the village cemetery, its entrance hidden by a clump of prickly pears and the stone ruins of the German settlers. At my grandmother Feyge’s funeral Pinness had noticed two Little Owls, a male and a female, bowing and curtseying to the mourners while curiously regarding them through slit golden eyes. ‘My heart is smitten and withered like grass, so that I forget to eat my bread,’ he eulogised his friend’s wife. ‘I am like a griffon of the wilderness; I am like an owl of the ruins.’ Several days later he returned to find that the two small birds of prey were nesting among the stone ruins. Scattered on the ground were the silvery skulls of field mice, dry, hardened bird spew, and the wings of devoured grasshoppers. A stench of carrion arose from two little fledglings in a nest, whose white plumage and angry hisses made him think of a pair of Hasidic dwarfs.
‘When I knelt to have a closer look at them, I spotted the entrance to the cave.’
At first he took it to be an ancient monk’s cell. Making his way around a large rock, he hacked a path through the prickly pears and entered. The walls exuded a strange, dim odour, a whisper of quenched campfires, dry rot, and the gummiferous smell of frozen time. The flint tools that Pinness found were buried beneath a surface layer of ash and animal dung that was easily scooped away. As he dug farther, he came across the famous cranium that brought a team of scientists all the way from England. In this very cave, so their dig determined, had dwelt Homo sapiens palestinaeus.
‘Homo palestinaeus was never sapiens,’ I was told years later by Pinness, whose stroke had improved his sense of humour and made him more tolerant of shenanigans like Uri’s and backbiting like Levin’s.
The archaeologists from London found five human skeletons in the cave, three of adults and two of children. The thought of it gave Pinness the shivers. ‘Just imagine them digging up our own graves someday! I can picture the pickaxes poking at Leah, baring the blue little bones of her poor innocent twins trapped between her rib cage and her pelvis.’
Stone weapons, a large buffalo femur split along its length, and the splintered vertebrae of rhinoceros calves told Pinness that the cave dwellers had been hunters and not farmers. An old sense of resentment came over him. The flint knives, the buried arrowheads, the thick, squat, beetle-browed skulls – all reminded him of Rilov.
Stepping back out of the cave, he sat in the entrance looking down on the broad, obeisant, fertile Valley at his feet. The humble cabins of the village, its infant streets and young shade trees, suddenly seemed to float on the fallow, long-historied earth, bobbing on its countless strata. The first geometric fields of the pioneers looked like so much patchwork, mere cobwebbery. He was still a young man, and the thought of vast epochs swinging over the Valley like pendulums induced in him a feeling of vertigo.
The Englishmen included an old professor who, Pinness said, ‘took a grand liking to me’, and a merry troupe of tall students in pith helmets and wide-bottomed knickerbockers who pitched a large tent on the hill and came down to the village each day to buy eggs, milk, and cheese. They took their midday meals at Riva Margulis’s, paying for them in full, and nodding and stamping their stockinged feet beneath the table in surprised approval of the crystal service, the Siberian lace tablecloth, and the gold-rimmed drinking glasses.