The Blue Mountain(131)

Ya’akovi and Dani shoved him back into his chair.

‘What made you come back here, Yehoshua?’ asked Ya’akovi.

‘I left Zeitouni. I didn’t want to work for him any more. That was a long time ago. After that I had all kinds of jobs. I was in the building trade, carrying cement sacks, and I worked tying ships in the port, for example. I was already living in this village before I even remembered that that bloke with the cow came from here.’

I heard old Rilov rise from his chair and knew he was about to grill the suspect until the hackles stood up on his neck. ‘That was a lovely bull story,’ he said. ‘We’ve already heard it all before. Now listen carefully and watch your step. Did you run into any English on your way?’

‘No.’

‘I’m going to ask you again. Did you see any English talking with Efrayim, taking anything from him, giving him anything?’



‘What kind of English, for example?’ Yehoshua was getting annoyed. ‘The English are gone. This is our country now.’

‘I’ve dealt with men twice your size,’ said Rilov with genuine nostalgia. ‘Think it over. Maybe an English officer with a limp and a cane? Or two Scotsmen?’

‘What’s a Scotsmen?’

‘Don’t leave the village,’ said Rilov. ‘I’ll check your story with some friends in the Galilee, and I’ll get back to you. Don’t think you’re dealing with just anyone. I’m Committee!’ His voice had acquired a hollow resonance with age, and his words kept on ringing in the air after he had left the room.

Avraham came back from Yehoshua Ber’s interrogation a devastated man. He went straight to the cowshed, where he started to bellow and spin around with his arms out, staggering this way and that like Shoshanna when Grandfather slaughtered her, the deep creases in his forehead white from pressure. Yosi was in the army, and Uri was with his uncle in the Galilee, so Rivka grabbed me and dragged me to her husband to keep him from smashing his head against a wall. I waited until he collapsed on the floor and carried him to his house.

It was easy for me. Effortless. I’m a strong man. As big as an ox. An obedient brawler of a grandson, broad of back and stiff of neck. Why else did Grandfather cram me with so much strength? To carry him when he died, to carry Pinness when he was sick, to carry that half-drowned surfer by the sea. And the exhausted Shifris. And my sacks of money. And my barrels of stories. And my beautiful, tall, burned mother.





Mandolin Tsirkin died in his bed in the yard. Pesya, who passed away a year later, did not even know about it. Alone in a little room in a Movement geriatric institution near Tel Aviv, paralysed on her right side, she lay holding subtle but demented conversations in a loud voice with the minister of the treasury, Fanya Liberson, and someone named Ettinger. She had no idea whom Meshulam meant when he came to tell her about his father’s death. Repeating the words ‘gizzard flowers’ over and over, she begged him to rescue her slip from the flames.



Tsirkin died noisily, unco-operatively, shouting his objections at the top of his lungs. The whole village heard him wrestling with Death.

‘Why didn’t anyone tell me that it hurt?’ he cried out in bitter astonishment.

Meshulam and Doctor Munk stook by his bed. Assisted by Eliezer Liberson, who had been brought from the old folk’s home, they tried to get him to the hospital. He argued with them, squirmed, refused.

‘It’ll be over in a few minutes anyway,’ he said.

‘The interns will stick tubes up me,’ he moaned.

‘Call for Doctor Yoffe,’ he commanded in a fog. And briefly pausing, he went on: ‘Come, join us, Feyge. I’ve made some baked pumpkin with flour and eggs. Come, they’re both gone now. Jump into the water with me, it’s not cold at all.’ Suddenly he shouted, ‘Comrades Tsirkin, Mirkin, and Liberson will make no dishonorable advances.’ I alone knew what he meant.

He calmed down a bit, his chest rising and falling heavily.

‘I have to keep breathing,’ he told himself. ‘I mustn’t stop even for a minute.’

A fresh attack of pain racked his body, making him shout out loudly and curse the ‘hole counters’ – a familiar term so old that no one knew what it meant any more. ‘It all started with those damn idiots the hole counters,’ he swore.

‘Who were the hole counters?’ I asked Meshulam several weeks later.

‘It’s just something my father made up,’ he replied.

I never gave him the letter that Mandolin wrote to Grandmother Feyge. The other documents in Tsirkin’s box he read aloud at his father’s funeral. He was thrilled to come across an original letter from Hankin having to do with the removal of Arab sharecroppers from land purchased in Ein Tab’un, and to discover a shopping list of the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle from June 1919. ‘Two rotls of flour, a bottle of sesame oil, four shirts of Arab cloth, a straw hat for Mirkin,’ it said.