The Blue Mountain(121)

‘You’re not going to catch me riding around in one of those Odessa droshkies,’ announced Mandolin when Meshulam suggested buying an electric car like those used by old people on the kibbutzim.

He felt bone-weary. He couldn’t work any more. His rich fields with their fine fruit trees and the best hay, wheat, and cotton in the village fell fallow. Bindweed, creeping grass, and prosopis spread their wild, ominous drapery over the Tsirkin farm. Whole families of mice escaping from poison in the neighbouring fields found shelter in the abandoned soil and used it as a staging post for raids on their former territories. Although the Committee kept demanding that Meshulam stamp them out and farm his fields, this was simply beyond his capacities. The farmers consulted Liberson, who racked his brains and remembered that the village had been visited in its first years by an eccentric Egyptian agronomist who claimed that mice had a horror of broad beans. And indeed, when the fields surrounding Meshulam’s were planted with these beans on Liberson’s orders, the inexplicable magic worked its spell. The mice kept to Meshulam’s property, where they multiplied steadily until hunger, overcrowding, and internal dissension caused them to grow long fangs and turn into predators. Every night we could hear their hoarse death groans and roars of vengeance as they devoured one another. The broad- bean barrier, explained Pinness, had turned Tsirkin’s fields into an evolutionary cul-de-sac whose inhabitants could never mutate back again.

Meanwhile, their udders bursting, Mandolin Tsirkin’s cows screamed and cursed in pain while the old man sat in his wheelbarrow trying to teach his son how to milk. Never before in his life had Meshulam held a female nipple.

‘For years we milked by hand,’ thundered the old man. ‘By hand! And you mean to tell me you can’t even open the stopcock of a milking machine?’

‘She’s got an infected udder, you imbecile, can’t you see? Why are you torturing the poor thing?’

His arthritis drove Tsirkin mad. Warped like a kite’s talons, his fingers froze. The calloused skin of his palms dried and split into a network of deep fissures that caused him terrible pain. He could no longer milk, prune trees, or play the mandolin. One day he was told by Tanchum Peker the saddler that the old peasants of the Crimea cured rheumatism with bee toxin. The next morning I took him to Margulis’s grave, where he pulled off his shirt, rose with difficulty from his wheelbarrow, let down his trousers, and stood leaning against the gravestone, his body gleaming in the sun while he waited to be stung by Margulis’s inconsolable bees. Tonya gave him an angry look but said nothing. Removing what was left of her fingers from her mouth, she vanished into the trees – among which, clustered like fruit in the dense foliage, two generations of village children were hiding in the hope of getting a glimpse of a founding father’s behind.

In pain and impatient, Tsirkin shouted and waved his hands at the bees to no avail. Long years of work and music had made him smell so good that they took him for a giant flower rather than a honey thief and landed in swarms on his shoulders, crawling docilely over his back and bare bottom.

After an hour of this, he asked to be taken home. The bees had left orange pollen in the wrinkles of his neck and the cleft between his buttocks. Busquilla cleaned him off carefully with a large, soft brush, helped him to put on his shirt and knot the rope belt on his trousers, and followed us back to the village.

The three of us sat on Tsirkin’s bed beneath the mulberry tree. He had taken to sleeping outside again on summer nights, because the heat brought Pesya’s damnable perfume steaming out of the walls of the house, torturing the old man’s nose and principles.

‘Listen here, Baruch,’ he said to me. ‘I’m not long for this world. I want you to set aside a good place for me next to your grandfather.’

‘It’s yours for the asking,’ said Busquilla.

‘If you don’t mind, I was talking to Mirkin’s child,’ said Tsirkin in an icy tone. He paused for a moment. Tsirkin never uttered a sentence without making sure that the sentence before it had been understood.

‘I want you to bury my mandolin with me, like you did with Margulis and his honey. Like all those little Pharaohs in Egypt with their ivory toys and dung beetles.’

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘It’s not so simple, because Meshulam took it to his museum when I stopped playing.’

Getting Meshulam to surrender a historical artifact was an impossible mission, but Tsirkin had thought of everything. ‘On top of the beam in my hayloft, in the far corner, you’ll find a little box. Bring it to me. Don’t worry, Meshulam won’t catch you. He never goes to the hayloft unless he’s forced to.’