The Blue Mountain(114)
Pinness showed us how to make blades out of flint, made us try lighting a fire by rubbing stones, and shepherded us back to the ledge outside the cave for a view of the Valley and the village.
‘The cavemen,’ he told us, ‘sat looking down on our Valley from here too.’ There were large sumac and oak trees then, ash and juniper, and wild animals – ‘the spotted leopard, the roaring lion, and the charging bear’.
He rose to his feet. ‘And the land was watered like a garden of the Lord,’ he declaimed. ‘A stream of pure water ran through the Valley, whose white mists hid the earth. Large herbivores pastured in the reeds – wild boar, hartebeests, hippopotami, and bison. The cavemen descended to the Valley to hunt them and split their bones on this ledge with stone hammers and knives.’
Pinness could all but hear the bellows of the slaughtered wild oxen and the rip of hunters’ bellies slashed by the tusks of the boar. His eyes unpeeled the earth, plunging into the quicksand of the past as he told us about the primeval rain forests that had once covered the globe and about the cichlids and wild ostriches that had migrated to the Valley from Africa long before the first human beings. That tiny killer, the shrew, must have migrated from the glacial north; the rabbit and the agamid lizard from somewhere across the Mediterranean; and the sparrow and the genet from the distant steppes of Asia.
Avian wings, anthropoid legs, bovine hooves, and carnivorous claws lay all around him in the earth. Canaanites, Turkomans, white wagtails, Jews, Romans, wild goats, Arabs, swamp cats, German children, Damascene cows, and English soldiers had vied to leave their prints in the crumbling and amnesiac soil.
He was not a historian, just a modest and inquisitive pedagogue, ‘a folk teacher’, as he liked to call himself, whose subjects were Nature, the Bible, the cycles of the year, the extinction of species, and the resurrected bodies of ancient gods and visions.
‘I’m a woolly mammoth, frozen in ice,’ he told me, spewing bits of food as he laughed. ‘Whoever digs me out will find I’m still edible.’ In the course of his own lifetime, ‘which is but a blink in the evolutionary process’, he had seen the griffon vulture disappear from the skies of the Valley, had witnessed the introduction of animals that understood human speech, and had heard the warble of the blackbird, which had left its old habitat in the hills of the Lower Galilee to settle in our village.
His mind was still whole in those days, well rounded and defended, before his illness had made heretical inroads. And yet even when younger, he had felt the futility of all things. The famous Via Maris, ‘the Way of the Seal’, along which countless conquerors and traders had crossed the Valley, was nothing but a wretched scratch on the surface of the earth. The ancient walled city of Megiddo to the west, with its mighty fortresses and bottomless storehouses, was a crumbling pile of ruins at the foot of the blue mountain range. The once living stream, ‘that ancient river, the river Kishon’, in which the nine hundred chariots of Sisera had sunk, was now a mendacious sewer. Field marshals and altars had been swallowed up by the depths, palaces had crumbled like bones, like old aqueducts, like ancient terracing, like the vineyard of the nearby kibbutz. Barely two generations had passed since Liberson’s elopement through the grapevines with Fanya, and already it was uprooted, covered with concrete and a plastics factory, the entire story forgotten.
Pinness envied the caveman, who had wandered to this guileless land without biblical get-thee-outs to find it unpossessed and unscarred by the petty footprints of human loyalty and love, ‘driven only by his own hunger and thirst and an innocent appetite, retained by every living cell to this day, for that warm, moist thing we call life’.
He also envied Meshulam, who, caring nothing for the long pinions of Time, chose to follow its winged flight only from the day the founding fathers first alighted in the Valley. Oblivious to the forces of disintegration and rot, Meshulam shut his eyes to the chalk-white bones, the fossilised ostrich eggs, and the broken slivers of giant shells that Pinness lovingly collected. Everything that had happened before the founding of the village seemed to him one long, superfluous column of negative numbers.
‘Meshulam is convinced that it was the founders of the village who drove away the cavemen and the swamp flora and poisoned the mastodons and the cave bears before weeding the crabgrass and planting vegetables. He thinks the earth just sat here waiting for them, trembling like a bashful bride.
‘And for whom? For whom? Waiting for whom?’ chanted the old teacher in a thin, mocking voice. Towards the end of his life he had mastered all the subtleties of sarcasm. He understood now how easily the earth shook off whatever trivial images men cloaked it in. ‘Why, it’s nothing but a tissue of poor fictions anyway, the earth!’ he exclaimed. ‘A thin crust beneath which is nothing but pure selfishness, a speck of dust at the far end of a minor galaxy.