Reading Online Novel

The Blue Mountain(115)



‘The earth cheated on us,’ Pinness informed me with a salacious smile. ‘She wasn’t the virgin we thought she was.’





            39



Now, old, heavy, and myopic, Pinness could penetrate at a glance so far into space and so deep into earth that he suffered from attacks of vertigo and fainted on the floor of his room amid bits of leftover meatloaf, preserved caterpillars, and dry crusts of bread. This was the state Meshulam found him in when he arrived one day, devastated by a new piece of research that dealt with our very own village.

He shook Pinness awake and helped him into bed before furiously waving under the old teacher’s nose one of the many journals he subscribed to. It was a publication called The Land of Israel Historian, and on its cover was a large, oddly reddish fish curled around the Cave of the Patriarchs with its nose in the scales of its tail.

‘The latest is that they say there were no swamps here,’ shouted Meshulam irately. ‘What doesn’t pass for research these days!’

With his grey hair and clawing fingers Meshulam resembled an irritable Egyptian vulture. Turning the pages until he came to an article entitled ‘The Swamps of the Valley of Jezreel: Myth and Reality’, he began reading out loud, his shaky forefinger jumping from line to line.

‘Listen to this! “For propagandistic and political purposes, the Zionist movement created around the Valley of Jezreel a symbolic mythology of swamps, malaria, and death. In fact, ninety-nine per cent of the Valley was not swampland at all.”’

Pinness, who was by then being touted by febrile journalists as ‘one of the last pioneers of the Valley of Jezreel’, clutched at Meshulam’s words as if they were straw that might rescue him from his swoons of heresy, or an anchor whose stability amid the labyrinthine caves of time and the treacherous chutes of space could restore him to the safety of his old beliefs.

‘Go on,’ he said.

‘“The evidence indicates that at the beginning of the period of modern Jewish settlement, swampland in the Valley of Jezreel was not widespread,”’ Meshulam recited. ‘“This, of course, is at variance with the picture given by Zionist sources, which created the Myth of the Swamp. Although the actual extent of the swamps was small, their imaginative appeal was enormous.”’

Meshulam repeated the words ‘imaginative appeal’ several times with barely suppressed fury, sipped some tea, and declared that ‘they’, those ‘muzhiks who call themselves historians’, had even cited his father’s and Liberson’s memoirs ‘to advance their tissue of lies’, making a mockery of the truth by ‘quoting selectively at their convenience’.

‘But they don’t know who they’re up against!’ he roared at the ceiling. ‘I’ve got all the documents and proofs. Now you see why I saved all those papers even when everyone laughed at me.

‘Look at this,’ he said, pointing at the journal. ‘The frauds actually mention my father!’

He began to read again. ‘“Before the village was established, its founders surveyed the site. One of them, a certain Tsirkin who was nicknamed ‘Guitar’, wrote in his memoirs: ‘We went to have a look at our first swamp and saw a clump of bright green willow trees. Swamps like this, we were told by those who knew, were nothing to be afraid of, because ordinary drainage ditches could lower the water level until they disappeared.’”’

‘Guitar,’ gagged Meshulam, glancing at Pinness to see if he was similarly aghast.

‘Read on, Meshulam,’ said Pinness.

‘Now I’ll read you what my father actually wrote, the part these so-called scholars never quoted,’ Meshulam said, opening the familiar green volume of his father’s memoirs, On Native Paths, which he himself had edited, published, and given a copy of to every family in the village a few years previously.

‘“A green carpet of brackish water that collected in sinkholes and hollows lay everywhere, infested with all kinds of pests.”’ He leafed through the pages until he found the famous passage that had once appeared in The Young Worker and could still be found in school readers. ‘“We looked all around us at the green pools with their stagnant water and were far from overjoyed. The rank green rushes were taller than a man. The swamp was green too. But it was deep with promise, though its big and little marshes were crawling with mosquitoes.”’





That evening, when I had returned from my graves and was helping Avraham with the milking, Meshulam appeared at our place too. Over the whirr of the electric motors and the blasts of compressed air he vociferously told me, Avraham, and the sceptical cows how the founding fathers had ‘drained the evil waters’ until ‘they shook all over from malaria’, wallowing ‘waist-deep in muck’ while laying clay pipes in accordance with the Breuer system and singing the pioneer ditty ‘Friend of the Frog’.