The Blue Mountain(127)
They walked slowly along the border of the planted crops, tottering happily. The first autumn rains had fallen the day before. Tender sprouts grunted their way up through the earth, which emitted the usual vapours of pure promise that made the farmers drunker every year. It was the season when I used to go with Pinness to watch the burrowing insects, who waited for the first showers to soften the ground before digging themselves and their offspring a new domicile.
Fanya and Eliezer headed for Margulis’s old vineyard. Liberson, with his thick-lensed glasses, carried the picnic basket, and Fanya, weak and light, rested her head on his shoulder, joking with her husband about the impudent spermlike aroma of the stamens of the carob trees. ‘Fanya, at your age!’ said Liberson, turning pink with love.
Both leading and clinging to each other, they walked along the cart tracks, thoroughly enjoying the smell of the rain and the clouds from the cave in the blue mountain. They spread a cloth beneath the ancient grapevines, held out their hands to help one another settle slowly down into the high grass, and ate without taking their eyes off each other.
There was not a soul in sight. Margulis had planted the little vineyard years ago for the exclusive use of his bees. He had never picked the fruit, believing that would make his honey winier, and the vines, untended since his death, grew over their rotting trellises in a jungle of sturdy, wildly intertwining shoots. Large silvery argiopidae wove sparkling curtains between them. Skinks warmed themselves in summer’s last rays on fresh molehills, looking fondly at the loving couple.
Liberson sliced the pickled fish with slow precision and spread sour cream on the rolls. ‘How about a cucumber, Fanya?’ he suggested slyly.
‘Later,’ Fanya answered. Not wanting to make her suspicious and spoil his surprise, Liberson did not press her. He settled back against a rock while Fanya lay on her back in the grass with the bright halo of her head on his thigh. It was mid-afternoon, and the soft autumnal sun, as pale as the yolk of a refrigerated egg, bathed their bodies, working its way into their old joints and filling them with amatory pleasure.
‘Look,’ said Liberson. His dim eyes had discerned some blurry dots flying towards him in the still air, bright with a black, translucent glow.
Fanya opened her eyes. ‘Queen ants,’ she said. ‘The queen ants have come out for their wedding flight.’
The winged queens of the harvest ants had emerged by the hundreds into the autumn light, flying or crawling over the ground. Many were hunted by the open beaks of swallows or trapped in spider webs. Others glided on air, each with a tiny male attached to it.
‘How beautiful they are,’ said Fanya. ‘How beautiful on the one day of light and love they’ll ever have.’
Liberson stared straight ahead, struggling to make out the glossy queens. Fanya shut her eyes again and stretched delicately out on the ground, her head turned to one side with her cheek on her husband’s leg. Feeling her light, winged touch, Liberson raised his hand to clasp her fingers and found himself gently clutching a queen ant.
‘Look,’ he said to Fanya. ‘Here she is, the queen. And I, my precious, I thought it was you.’
‘It is me,’ said Fanya. ‘Come fly with me.’
The swallows clove the air with their sharp cries and black sicklelike wings. Her eyes shut, Fanya let the sunlight pinken the darkness beneath her lids. She smiled as she heard the shrill calls, and Liberson felt love’s sweet pleasure steal from her body into his. He held the queen up to his frail eyes to examine her shapely figure.
‘When Pinness was in his prime,’ he said, ‘he would have given a speech about the power of love that makes the queen ant grow her wings.’
‘You could still give one,’ said Fanya. As though she were already asleep, a swift dreamlike breath escaped her slightly parted lips. Her hand dropped to the ground, and her white hair moved in the wind. Liberson looked at her, feeling her body relax. Careful not to wake her, he stretched out on his back, laid his head on the rock, and gazed up at the vast sky while his hand played slowly with a tuft of hair on her neck. Their long years together had taught him to cultivate the passion for life, which burned in him ever more strongly as he grew old. ‘The eternal flame’ was his private phrase for it. He was grateful to God for liking him despite his unbelief and giving him the strength to nourish this flame daily, and to the kibbutz and Mandolin Tsirkin for providing him with such a gift, the bright butterfly who was his very own.
A few queen ants landed on Fanya’s dress, and Liberson, before dozing off too, blew on them gently to keep them from disturbing her sleep. An hour later he awoke shivering from the chill that had crept into the air. By the time he realised that it was not the frost of autumn but of his wife’s dead body, the cataracts on his eyes had curtained off his last sight, leaving him totally blind. In the darkness that descended on him, his fingers probed Fanya’s icy skin while he listened to the buzz of the green flies that could scent death moments before it arrived. From the tall grass among the grapevines where I lay in hiding, I saw him shaking her corpse.