The Blue Mountain(126)

Only now did the village understand Liberson’s prophecy. The hard olive stone had split and germinated. The promise of the firstborn son had been fulfilled. In his white smock and yellow rubber boots, Avraham had professionally outclassed every other first son in the country. And yet there was something frightening in the mechanical way he moved his hands when he worked. His fingers no longer massaged the cows’ udders but rubbed them as though they were strangers, and he never smiled with pleasure any more when their teats grew erect, or slapped the rump of a heifer in heat, or handfed clover to a favourite milker. Like giant stuffed animals, his cows strode to their places while he fitted them to the rubber cups of the machine as though he were a new piece of automated equipment himself. Still, so much milk gushed from them that more than once he had to dump surpluses, forming bogs covered by a sour scum.

One evening when he was throwing out several hundred quarts of milk, Rivka came to the cowshed to inquire coquettishly why he did not offer to give her a milk bath like those the Roman empresses took. Avraham flashed her a smile whose tail end smouldered with an anger she had never seen in her life. The furrows deepened in his forehead, branching up into his thick hair, and for a moment his face was so contorted that he reminded her of his missing brother. Suddenly she grasped the full danger he was in. Remembering how quick the Mirkins were to hide behind tree bark and beekeepers’ nets, she realised what I had known all along, that her husband was drowning his anguish and wrath in his cows’ white lakes.

Meanwhile I ploughed and cultivated my earth, sowing it with lupin, while Busquilla brought in several lorryloads of red gravel and got masons to lay borders and polish square blocks of white marble into gravestones. I extended the paths to the ends of the property, ploughed the lupin under when it flowered to green-manure the soil, planted handsome ornamentals, and installed stone and wooden benches. Magnificent birds never seen even by Pinness descended to rest from their migrations, hopping on the tree boughs, and quiet little animals appeared among the flowers as though created there. At dusk I would stroll through the garden, polishing the copper letters, breathing the cool air that had formed in the shade of the trees, and naming the birds and animals.

It was utterly peaceful. The old pioneer songs had died down into a quiet murmur, the great manifestos were silent in the sweet clods of earth, and the flaming swords of debate no longer turned every way. Couples came from all over the Valley on summer nights to make love on the cool headstones. I could hear the wind carry off the soft moans and gasps of the women, and sometimes there was a dull explosion in the earth as a newly buried stomach swelled to the point that the flaccid abdomen popped loudly from the pressure. I knew that as the guts came spilling out, the hordes of white maggots knocking madly on the coffin burst inside. Except for Grandfather, who was laid to rest in nothing but shrouds as is the Orthodox custom, everyone in Pioneer Home was buried in a coffin. This has been the practice in Movement villages and kibbutzim ever since Liberson denounced the Orthodox for returning to the earth the easy way.





Eliezer and Fanya Liberson came to all my funerals. The old man always stood in the front row with one arm draped around his wife, his fingers grazing her breast, but he was still firmly opposed to my booming business. Like all his friends, he was carefully calculating the days he had left and his prospects of living them out.

Apart from sniffing the mushrooms, his entire farm was now in Daniel’s hands. Utopian formulations, polemical swordplay, and the trench warfare of ideology no longer interested him. Such phrases as ‘our inner world has ceased to be inviolable’, ‘in times of drift and doubt’, and ‘the question of economic self-sufficiency must be examined in historical perspective as well as in light of this generation’s inward experience’ now rolled off his pencil and out of his mouth with a painful, frustrating ease. Fanya alone, with her merry laugh, white hair, and keen eyes, was not to be taken for granted. She was still his holy grail of love, an airy butterfly of the vineyards whose polka dot dresses and bright head were the last lights his ailing eyes could make out.

Every year Eliezer celebrated their first bucolic meeting with a picnic in the lap of nature. In the old days Tsirkin had joined them with his mandolin, but now that he was confined to a wheelbarrow, this custom had ceased.

For the fiftieth anniversary of their falling in love, Liberson prepared a basket of bread, a wheel of farmer cheese that still showed the marks of the cheesecloth, some pickled herring in sour cream and green apples, and a few late-ripening cucumbers, in one of which was a note. He had implanted the little tin tube in the pistil of the flower several weeks ahead of time, as it was beginning to swell among the wilted petals, and the cucumber’s green flesh had formed around it. Fanya packed dishes and silverware, Liberson filled a thermos with clear pomegranate juice, and the two started out for the fields.