The Blue Mountain(122)

I cleaned the pigeon droppings and spider webs off the box and brought it to him.

‘It’s got all kinds of old papers and crap in it,’ grinned Tsirkin. ‘A shopping list of the Workingman’s Circle from June 1919, a letter to me from Hankin, and a letter from Shifris that the pelicans brought from Anatolia ten years ago. No one knows it except me and Liberson, but that mad old man is getting closer all the time.’

‘Should I give it to Meshulam?’

Tsirkin looked at me as though I were a moron.

‘Of course not!’ he screeched. ‘Just tell him that you’ll trade it for the mandolin. If he’s the idiot I think he is, he’ll agree. There’s nothing he loves more than papers. I want you to bury the mandolin in the coffin with me so that the worms can play me music on it.’





            41



Two weeks later, in the middle of the night, Zeitser broke free without warning from the rope that tethered him to the fig tree, went to Shlomo Levin’s house, raised one hoof, knocked politely on the door, and stepped aside to wait. Levin came out to see who it was, but by the time he recognised the mule’s huge silhouette lunging at him in the darkness, he knew it was too late. Cocking his head to see his foe with his good eye, Zeitser bared his yellow teeth, sank them in Levin’s upper arm, and bore down as hard as he could with all the powerful hatred left in his old jaws. He tore the flabby biceps to tatters, splintering the crunchy humerus as a froth of thin blood bubbled up amid the shreds and slivers. There was no time for Levin to scream. He passed out on the spot while Zeitser padded quietly back to his barrel of feed and his fig tree.

In the small hours of the morning Rachel Levin noticed that her husband was not in bed and hurried outside to find him green and moaning among the garden plants. Her screams woke the whole village, and Yosi drove Levin to the hospital. At first there was talk of a new hyena, but that afternoon Avraham came to the Committee office to confess that the culprit was Zeitser. The district veterinarian was called for, and following an investigation he ordered that Zeitser be shot as required by law.

There was an uproar. Avraham ran berserkly home, sobbing and slinging earth. When the vet appeared with a policeman, Zeitser was gone from the yard, because my uncle had already hidden him in the thicket by the spring. I had been busy pouring concrete that morning for the erection of two new gravestones and only heard the news when I returned home in the afternoon. Avraham refused to tell me the mule’s whereabouts, but when I went down to the spring to be alone the next day I discovered him there, his empty eye socket shedding slow tears of pus.

‘I’ll bring you some barley,’ I said. But Zeitser was beyond all that: ambling in his dreams along familiar paths, he was smelling blossoms whose names had been forgotten, the likes of which could only be found in my mother’s old album of dried flowers. In the evening Avraham came to stand guard against wild beasts and bureaucrats. Close to midnight, however, he dozed off, and Zeitser, taking advantage of the opportunity, slipped away to the fields.

It was dawn when we towed his big truncated body back from the highway. Zeitser knew that at 3 a.m. every day the milk lorry started out for the city, and he had waited for it by the roadside.

‘He jumped out and lay in front of the Mack’s wheels,’ related Motik the driver, still in a state of shock. ‘With twenty-eight tons of milk in the tank, there was nothing I could do.’

Chipped and falling apart from years of hard labour, Zeitser smashed against the tanker’s big bumper like a clay doll. Tyre marks, tufts of hair, dusty bloodballs, rashers of mule meat, and cracklings of old skin were strewn along three hundred yards of road, up and down which Avraham ran shouting to drive off the gathering jackals.

When Shlomo Levin returned from the hospital a month later with his stump of an arm swinging in an empty sleeve, no one even said hello to him. The late Zeitser, as Eliezer Liberson phrased it in a speech given at a memorial in the meeting house, to which he had come especially from the old folk’s home, had been ‘one of the monumental figures of the Movement’.

The wretched Levin was never his old self again. Day after day he sat wasting away in Rachel’s garden, nibbling whole sheets of kamardin. He was particularly angry at Zeitser because, having stolen the limelight in his lifetime, he had now conspired in his death to pre-empt the glorious suicide that Levin had long dreamed of. His only visitors were Avraham, who still remembered from childhood his uncle’s gifts and kind hands, and Uri when he returned to the village.

When Levin felt that his time was up, he sent for me and offered me a large sum of money, which I refused to accept, to bury him with the pioneers. ‘With the productive sector of the village,’ he said bitterly.