The Blue Mountain(123)

I granted him his request. He was, after all, genuine Second Aliyah. On his gravestone I got the masons to carve the inscription he composed for himself: ‘Here lies the Pioneer Shlomo Levin Who Took His Own Life by Mule Bite.’





Busquilla and our lawyer, Shapiro, argued with me every week about the need to invest my earnings wisely. I never listened to a word they said.

Busquilla now had an agent working for him in Florida.

‘They’re all down there,’ he said. ‘All the old Jews. They even have swamps, and a sun as killing as ours.’



He bought a black van with ‘Pioneer Home’ painted on the doors in gold letters and managed me and the business expertly.

‘It isn’t right for me to sit in an office while you dig graves and lug a garden hose,’ he said to me. ‘You’re the owner, Baruch. Why don’t you let me employ someone to do the dirty work?’

I did my best to explain the importance of agricultural work and the village’s opposition to hired help, but Busquilla forbearingly dismissed the ideals of co-operative farming.

‘That doesn’t convince me,’ he said. ‘I’m an observant Jew myself. Everyone has his own rituals and commandments, and yours are sometimes worse than ours.’

Another time he asked me, ‘Why don’t you ever take a trip abroad? Go on a holiday, have a good time, meet some girls.’ When I failed to answer, he persisted.

‘What’s the matter, can’t afford it?’

Busquilla had a plump, pretty, likable daughter who was younger than me. Often he spoke of introducing us.

‘What for?’ I said, blushing each time. ‘I’m happy as I am.’

‘I’ll send her to Pinness with some food,’ he ventured at last, ceasing to beat around the bush. ‘All you have to do is be there. She’ll make you a good wife, not like the women you have around here.’

‘Stop it,’ I said, feeling my forehead crawl with centipedes.

‘It’s no good, your living like this. You’re a healthy young man. You ought to be married.’

‘Not me!’ I said firmly.

‘When a Moroccan wants you to marry his daughter, don’t think he’ll take no for an answer,’ Busquilla warned me.

‘I don’t like girls,’ I told him.

‘Well, you can’t have my son,’ he joked. But there was a frown on his face.

Sometimes he watched me while I worked, marvelling at my size and strength. ‘You’re not at all like the rest of your family,’ he said. ‘You’re a big, dark, hairy hulk of meat who’s never been bitten by the love bug. Now, that cousin of yours, he’s something else! He’s slept with every girl in the village, but you just go your quiet way.’



‘Stop it, Busquilla,’ I said. ‘What goes on in the family and the village is none of your business.’

‘You’ve all got a screw loose somewhere,’ he needled me, testing the limits of my patience.

Sometimes he told me about his first days in the village. ‘Everyone looked down their nose at me. It was like being on permanent probation. I was put to work digging onions to see if I would make a decent postman. Even Zis thought he was better than me because his father once hauled water from the spring, until I gave him a right to the jaw and he began to act like a human being.’

He observed people with unconcealed curiosity, quickly grasped the fine points of village life, and annoyed me with his maxims.

‘A man who spends all his time in a septic tank must be afraid of something.’

‘No woman ever forgets the first finger that touched her.’

‘A good grandfather is better than a father. A bad one is worse than anything.’

‘What’s all this earth, earth, earth stuff all the time? It’s enough that we come from it and return to it. In between a man needs to rest.’

‘You people, if you hear someone say something stupid when he’s nine, you think he’s stupid till his dying day. You’re sure you’ve got him worked out.’

As a letter carrier he had knocked on every door in the village and remembered exactly which had opened to offer him fruit or cold water and which had stayed shut while suspicious eyes studied him through the window. Busquilla was the first to know that Margulis and Tonya were back together, that Grandfather received foreign mail via channels other than the post office, and that if Grandfather never gave him the time of day, it was because of a deep anguish and hate that had nothing to do with him personally. Busquilla also knew that apart from the historical journals he received, Meshulam subscribed to other magazines whose chrome-and-flesh-coloured contents winked and tittered through their supposedly opaque brown wrappers. He chuckled too whenever he brought the Libersons their post, because he knew that a good part of it, including letters that appeared to come from abroad, was from Liberson to Fanya.