The Blue Mountain(119)

Once they had gone home, it became clear that Grandfather’s rotting body, Rosa Munkin’s moneybags, and the other capitalist traitors I had buried had not merely poisoned the orchard and sowed confusion. Within a few weeks, as though by mutual consent, the voice of the old pioneers was raised in lament across the Valley. Pinness, who was accustomed to painstaking observation and precise notation, was the first to understand what was happening. Once recovered from the initial fright of his own uncontrollable crying, he began to make out the sobs and snuffles of the others and to realise that he was hearing something more than the smothered threnody of cornered moles or the wailing of fruit sprayed with pesticide.

‘A voice is heard on high, lamentation and bitter weeping,’ he pronounced.

The barely audible yet all-penetrating sound of deeply cleared throats, loudly blown noses, and painfully swallowed lumps made the night air shudder. No jaw was clenched tightly enough to stop the sobs that escaped it. Softly these flowed from the wrinkled vulture throats of the founding fathers, easily overcoming the resistance of bald gums and rumpled lips. ‘They’re softening up the earth,’ declared Pinness, who told me about the amazing digging capacities of certain insects.

Soon word began to reach us from other villages, travelling as fast as a dust devil. The old itinerant barber, who came once a month on his ancient motorcycle, told us that Yehoshua Krieger, the chicken breeder from the kibbutz of Nir Ya’akov who had invented the fuelless incubator and drafted the first workers’ manifesto in Gedera, claimed to be growing roots. Krieger’s announcement was made at his ninetieth birthday party, which was celebrated by a large crowd, and would not have bothered anyone had he not planted himself by the water pipe leading to the grain fields, thus interfering with the laying of irrigation lines and the tractors finishing the autumn ploughing. Each time they tried to remove him he began to scream horribly, insisting that he was in devilish pain because his little rootlets were being torn.

In the end, said the barber, Krieger had to be dug up with a great clump of earth clinging to his feet and replanted among the cypresses by the approach to the kibbutz, where he stood waving at whoever came and went, harassing embarrassed young female volunteers from abroad, and pestering everyone with incorrect weather forecasts.

Yitzchak Tsfoni, who had ploughed the first furrow at the Valley’s eastern end, pressing down on the ploughshare with one hand while firing his gun wildly with the other, took to wandering around the centre of his village with baskets of reddish soft-shelled eggs that he said he had laid himself. Believing they would bring him eternal youth, he ate them avidly and tried to get his children and grandchildren to do so too.

‘It’s not illogical,’ said Pinness, straining to catch a glimpse of the back of his new haircut in the mirror. ‘Eating your own eggs could turn the linear flow of time into a circle.’

Ze’ev Ackerman, who had lived on the kibbutz next door, completed construction of a revolutionary new food machine with which he appeared one day in Pioneer Home, accompanied by his sheepish-looking son.

I remembered them well from my visits to Grandfather in the old folk’s home. Ackerman had been the kibbutz plumber for years and had always complained bitterly about the snobbery of the field hands. When these ‘princes of the wheat fields’, as he called them, came to the communal dining hall smelling of earth and hay, he, reeking of linseed oil, soap fumes, and sewage, would sit there watching them jealously.

Now, in the old folk’s home, he toyed with the kibbutz members who came once a month to beg him to reveal the location of the underground water and sewage pipes he had installed years before. He alone had a map of the system, and the kibbutz gardeners were forced to look on distraughtly while three whole lawns were dug up to find leaks, blockages, and the whereabouts of pipes that the angry old man kept a zealously guarded secret.

He himself devoted his spare time and vast technical knowledge to a single all-consuming project, his ‘constructivist revenge’, as he called it, a machine made of pipes, tanks, and shiny little solar receptors whose valves he had turned on the lathe belonging to the old folk’s home’s handyman.

Old Ackerman was overcome with emotion when Grandfather came to the home. ‘There was so much we could have done together if it hadn’t been for that oversexed friend of yours, Eliezer Liberson,’ he said, reminding Grandfather of the incident of the cow.

He asked about Mandolin Tsirkin and the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle, wiped a tear as he thought of Grandmother, whom he called ‘a pioneer’s pioneer’, inquired after Zeitser, who had worked with him in Yavne’el, and then, grabbing Grandfather by the sleeve and sitting him down on his bed, began haranguing him about his machine, which would revolutionise agricultural life.