The Blue Mountain(12)

            4



The Mirkin farm was one of the most successful in the village.

So everyone said enthusiastically whenever Grandfather’s fruit trees broke into stormy bloom; so they said when my uncle Avraham’s cows gushed floods of milk; so they said, upset and envious, when the cowshed filled with dusty insect moults and bulging sacks of money while the orchard went to ruin and was sown with bones and graves.

The graves ran in rows on either side of red and white gravel paths. Scattered among them were green benches, flowering shrubs, trees, and shady corners for meditation, and in the middle was Grandfather’s white gravestone. The whole village shook its head at the sad fate of earth that was meant to bring forth fruit and fodder but had become a great field of revenge.

‘It’s really quite simple,’ I told myself, wandering through the large rooms of my house. ‘Why keep picking at it, prying and looking for answers?’

Wasn’t that why Grandfather had raised me to be what I was? He had made me as big and strong as an ox and as faithful and savage as a sheepdog, thick-skinned and thick-headed. And now he lies in his grave, surrounded by dead friends and tickled pink by the village’s conniptions.

‘Leave him alone. The child is nothing but a bag of yarns and tall tales,’ said Pinness when I announced that I had no intention of appearing before the Committee for a hearing.

I was no longer a child. I was a rich young giant, burdened with my money and my bulk. Pinness, however, had a way of extending his pupils’ childhoods to all ages, continuing to pat them on heads that had long since grown bald or grey. ‘Who knows how many memories were crammed into the boy’s big body until it just burst and spilled its bile?’ he asked rhetorically. If Grandfather had been alive, he would have dismissed such a remark by saying that although Pinness knew many fine parables, ‘he sometimes forgets what they’re about’.

When asked to abandon the mortuary business, I myself always replied, ‘I’m only doing what Grandfather wanted.’ I sent Busquilla and his hired lawyer to the Committee hearing because they were outsiders, as smooth as they were crude. The fallen leaves of stories had not covered them, and the soles of their shoes kept the Valley’s fine dirt off their feet. I pictured the scrape of spartan chairs in the Committee room, the broken-nailed hands drumming like hooves on the table. Let the two of them face those stalwart eyes for me, those rough fingers jabbing the air.

I was only Grandfather’s little child, doing what he wanted. I had nothing more to say.





             In Odessa Grandfather and his brother Yosef boarded the Ephratos, a small, filthy ship ‘full of bad people’ that plied the Mediterranean and Black seas. Like two sides of the same coin, Ya’akov and Yosef Mirkin saw different halves of the world. ‘My brother was excited, tempestuous. He paced back and forth in the prow of the ship, looking straight ahead.’

Yosef nurtured dreams of white donkeys, Hebrew power, and Jewish homesteads in the mountains of Gilead. Grandfather thought of Shulamit, who had stayed behind after threshing his flesh with the flails of deceit and jealousy, and of Palestine, which was for him but a refuge from crimes of passion, a land beyond the borders of memory where he and his wounds might grow scar tissue.

He sat in the stern of the ship and gazed at the water, his bare heart unravelling behind him in the foam. ‘Can’t you see? Our warm hearts come apart like balls of twine,’ he wrote in a note long years later.

During their days at sea, when all they ate was bread and dried figs, Ya’akov and Yosef Mirkin vomited incessantly.

‘We arrived in this country and headed north. By summer Yosef and I were on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.’ Grandfather’s hand travelled back and forth, shovelling mashed potatoes mixed with homemade yoghurt and salty fried onions into my mouth. ‘The first night we found work guarding the fields, and at dawn we sat down to see how the sun rose in the Promised Land. It came up at half past four. By quarter past five it was trying to kill us. Yosef hung his head and started to cry. That wasn’t how he had imagined the day of redemption.’

Now his hands were busy with the salad. ‘We were three friends. Mandolin Tsirkin, Eliezer Liberson, and me. My brother Yosef fell ill, couldn’t take any more, and ran away to America.’

Hot, weak, and irritable, Grandfather oscillated between attacks of malaria and spasms of anger and longing.

Yosef made it big in California. ‘When we were still walking around wrapped in burlap in winter, our socks stuffed with newspapers to keep out the cold, he was selling suits to bourgeois Americans.’ When the village was hooked up to electricity a few months before Grandmother Feyge died and Yosef sent a money order so they could buy a refrigerator, Grandfather threw the letter into the slops ditch by the cowshed and told Grandmother that he would never touch ‘the dollars of a capitalist traitor’. Yosef then went to Santa Rosa, Luther Burbank’s small and beloved farm that attracted sentimental hordes of visitors, insects, and fan mail, and sent Grandfather a signed photograph of the great planter. I saw him in the trunk beneath Grandfather’s bed with his straw hat, polka dot tie, and fleshy earlobes. ‘But even a gesture like that couldn’t reconcile Mirkin.’