The Blue Mountain(128)

Liberson rose painfully to his feet, wrenched an old trellis out of the ground, and began groping his way between the rows of grapes with groans and shouts. I knew where he would go and followed him, making sure that no harm befell him. For six hours he stumbled over the black earth of his blindness, colliding with trees and rocks and tripping on bumps and irrigation pipes until he reached his destination. It was night-time now, and I hid again behind a slight rise in the ground.

‘She was my light,’ he kept saying as he tried to explain the situation to the night guards of the kibbutz. Hearing the alarm go off in the plastics factory, they had hurried over to find an old man whose filmy eyes shed chalky tears as he strove to pierce the concrete floor with a rotten piece of wood. Liberson was unable to convey to them how he had managed to pass through the security fence, the iron gate, and the beams of the searchlight in order to kneel by the plastic rolling mills on the spot where the muscat grapes had once grown and a young man and woman had eaten fruit and cheese while flirting to a mandolin’s fading notes.

‘This is where I met Fanya,’ he told them, six miles from her corpse.

The two handsome youngsters had no idea who Fanya or Liberson were, and did not know that the long, stubborn feud between their kibbutz and our village had started right there under a layer of concrete.

I watched them trying to decide what to do while holding Liberson up and patting him on the head. Assured they would not harm him, I slipped away and returned to the village in the dark. From afar I saw the sobbing red light of an ambulance pulling out of the kibbutz. I knew that Liberson was inside it, limp but irate, muttering incomprehensible phrases about cucumbers left uneaten in the fields. Fanya’s body had already been retrieved, and now two green flares shot up from the Rilov farm to recall the search parties.

Daniel Liberson and Ya’akovi were waiting for me by the cabin. ‘Where were you?’ they asked angrily. ‘We’ve been looking all over the place for you.’

A determined Liberson wanted to see me. He came straight to the point. In no mood to be brooked or reminded of his former opposition to Pioneer Home, he informed us that he wanted Fanya to be buried ‘in Baruch’s new cemetery’. As great as his grief and sense of loss were, he was not angry because of them but because of the fact that the death of his beloved had taught him nothing new. ‘The anticipated sorrow of parting never lets us down,’ Grandfather had written years before in one of his notes, and nowhere in the Valley was there a greater expert at reckoning separations and longing.

‘Unlike most lovers,’ Liberson wept, ‘I was struck blind when my love was taken from me, not when I first met her or lived with her.’

He refused to let the doctors treat his cataracts.

‘She was my sun, my moon, my stars, the light that ruled my day and night,’ he groaned as I dug her grave the next day. ‘A horror of great darkness has fallen on me.’ Although I remembered his angry diatribe at the Committee meeting devoted to my cemetery, when he had called me ‘a rotten apple’, ‘a death merchant’, and other such names, I was not surprised. By now I was used to Grandfather’s guiding hand hoeing the earth ahead of me to direct the flow of the future. Every night I lay down to sleep in a ditch he dug and woke shivering, smelly, and wet when the stream of his prophecies reached me.

Liberson instructed Daniel and me to save a place for him next to Fanya, and that was the end of the great cemetery debate. No one bothered me after that. The old man cloaked himself in his blindness and was sent to the old folk’s home, where he shared Grandfather and Shulamit’s former room with a hundred-and-four-year-old Bulgarian Jew.

The Bulgarian’s age impressed him greatly.

‘Yoghurt?’ asked Liberson appreciatively.

‘Brandy and chocolate,’ replied the Bulgarian, introducing himself as Albert.

And so Liberson surrendered one more article of faith while deepening his knowledge of human nature. Having lost his wife and left his land in a single week, he befriended the old Bulgarian quickly and unreservedly. They both knew that the home was their last stop and were determined to make the best of it. Liberson never argued with Albert or sought to convert him to his idea of the correct life, and Albert repaid him with a smile that could be felt if not seen. Their brief, friendly conversations led to a mutual understanding that few friends ever achieve. Liberson did not try to be funny or impressive. He told Albert neither about the Workingman’s Circle nor about the swamps and the pelicans, but only about the death of his wife and his childhood in the Ukraine. Between these two things a dark curtain hung before his eyes.