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The Blue Mountain(132)



Meshulam claimed that Shifris’s letter was a forgery. ‘It’s a bad practical joke,’ he said, though he kept it in his archives. ‘If you ever want to swap it for the constitution of the Workingman’s Circle, I’m ready to talk,’ he told me.

We lowered the coffin into the ground, and Meshulam hoed some earth onto it. After a while his place was taken by blind old Eliezer Liberson, the last survivor of the Workingman’s Circle, who finished the job with a few practised scoops of the spade.

‘What did you do with my father’s mandolin?’ asked Meshulam as the crowd dispersed.

I pointed at the grave.

‘What?’ he yelled. ‘You put it in the coffin?’

‘As per the request of the deceased,’ said Busquilla.

‘It was your father’s idea,’ I explained.

Meshulam gave us a look that could kill, reached for the spade, and began to exhume the fresh grave. At first I made no attempts to interfere. As he dug deeper, however, the sounds grew louder, and I stopped him.

‘Listen, Meshulam. Listen.’

He kept on digging. I grabbed the spade from him and threw it away.

‘Listen carefully, Meshulam.’

The people of our village are always hearing things in the earth: snails waking from their summer sleep, the malarial chirps of the German children, the suffocating gasps of Sisera’s army. Meshulam heard every tendon, sinew, and eyelash of his father’s body shouting at him to desist.

A flabby old orphan who had never planted a tree or known a woman in his life, Meshulam began to sob. ‘Forgive me, Father, forgive me,’ he cried, flinging himself face down on the ground.





            44



In summer the cicadas thundered in the cemetery, clinging to the jasmine bushes and the branches of the olive trees. They drove their short beaks into the bark, sipped the fresh sap from the veins of the plant, and sounded a long and monotonous cheer of pleasure. It was the same deafening roar that had accompanied the earth and its denizens immemorially, from Pinness’s primitive cavemen to the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle, greeting conquering armies, caravans of pilgrims and immigrants, and travelling merchants and circuses.

The ear-blinding sound of the cicadas can drive anyone not used to it out of his mind in a few minutes. For us people of the Valley, however, they were the beloved poets of summer and field.

‘What makes them sing?’ Pinness asked himself and me. ‘It’s not a mating song, because the females don’t seek out the singing males. It’s not territorial, because male cicadas don’t defend territory. Besides which, they’re practically deaf. What makes them sing, then?’

He looked at me, waiting for an answer. But I was a ten-year-old boy, a big, bearlike sack of stories that had no answers in it.

‘They are the true song of this country,’ Pinness explained, ‘an obstinate trill that has no melody or notes, no beginning or end, nothing but the jubilant and admonishing proclamation of Existence that says, “Here I am!”

‘I want you to know, Baruch,’ said Pinness, ‘that this humble insect is the true hero of the famous fable of the cicada and the ant. Incompetent translators called it a grasshopper, and the whole ridiculous parable is one big testimony to ignorance.’

He took me to the orchard. The sun beat down on the broad fields, and there was not a bird in the sky. The calves stood with their tongues out in the shaded squares of the cattle pens, and the spiders had retreated to the bushes from webs rigid with heat. Blue butterflies fell to the ground like burning feathers, their wings in my hand as hot and stiff as copperplate. Only the sturdy, boxlike cicada kept up its lusty dry heat-chant, its orange voice sawing through the branches, challenging the fury of the sun, mocking the furnace of the earth.

Pinness was an artist at catching cicadas. Every child in the village knew that cicadas fell silent and flew off when approached, but it was Pinness who revealed to me that their sharp vision was offset by their near total deafness.

‘Fabre set off explosive charges by the chestnut tree in his garden, and the cicadas didn’t even budge,’ he told me. Jean-Henri Fabre, the French entomologist, was a favourite of Pinness’s. ‘He may not have kept the most exact records, and he opposed the theory of evolution,’ he admitted, ‘but I must say that he had all the innocence and curiosity of a child.’

We approached the bushes together. Pinness whipped out a hand, there was a screech of terror in the branches, and the cicada was gripped between his fingers. He pointed out to me its big checkered eyes, its transparent, veined wings, and the sound plate on the side of its abdomen. Drawing a thin straw across it, he managed to produce a brief chirrup.