The Blue Mountain(140)
‘You sound just like your mother,’ I scowled.
Uri laughed. ‘You and my mother didn’t get on very well, but I want you to know that she’s not a stupid woman. Far from it. She got my father out of here in the nick of time, just before he blew his fuse.’
He switched on Grandfather’s reading lamp and sat up in bed, baring his thin, splendid torso. A single broad scar was all that was left of the boot mark above his left nipple. ‘I got a letter from them,’ he smiled, producing some photographs of a large white house surrounded by palm trees. Rivka, in a yellow dress, was sitting on a wooden veranda sipping a reddish iced drink from a huge glass, her round eyes shining happily over the rim. Avraham, in shorts and a grey undershirt, the creases in his forehead soft and damp in the tropical sunlight, was instructing a group of blacks in a barn that looked like a cross between a laboratory and a palace.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘So she did. I don’t blame her. You’re lucky you didn’t have to see your father coming back from Yehoshua Ber’s interrogation.’
I can picture her perfectly, looking as grimly determined as any dim, obstinate hen on its eggs. She had her whole birdlike brain set on it. Convinced by her husband’s collapse in the cowshed that he had to leave the village at once, she hurried off to see her brother, who was on good terms with earth-moving contractors, arms dealers, invisible middlemen who were perfectly transparent, and secret entrepreneurs whose tentacles spread all over the world. ‘My brother will think of something,’ she kept telling me, unexpectedly arousing my sympathy. ‘I’m going to talk to him. Is there anything you’d like me to tell Uri?’
She went, came back, and kept mum. A few days later three strangers came to visit the farm. Cool and reserved, they walked around the yard at a fixed distance from each other, like the little flies in the hayloft. They made measurements, took an inventory, and talked at length with Avraham, observing him for hours as he worked in the cowshed, their Dacron suits as shiny as the breasts of preening pigeons. Not a speck of dust or a wisp of straw stuck to their well-groomed hair or the mirror-bright tips of their shoes. If you could have bred Rosa Munkin’s lawyer with a Scottish commando, that’s what their children would have been like.
One of them photographed the milkshed while jotting down numbers and charts, and a month later the lorries and dealers arrived. Avraham sold all his cows and his electrical and pneumatic equipment, left me his blue Fordson-Dexta, and took off for the Caribbean with his wife, four pregnant heifers who kept mooing apprehensively and stretching their necks to look back, and a few dozen test tubes of frozen sperm. Awaiting him there were a government contract, ‘milk-starved natives’, unlimited budgets, and simple, high-spirited soil that had never been cursed by the bones of saints or the poisonous salts of long-awaited redemption.
I stayed in the cabin even though they left me the key to their house. Now and then I went to have a look at it, opening taps to keep the pipes from clogging and windows to air the place. Thick cobwebs covered the milking stalls in the cowshed, jumping spiders and geckos hunted midges in the wall cracks, and at night I could hear the faint tinkle of floor tiles shattering all by themselves.
It was a few weeks before the last music of milking and the last chomping of hay stopped echoing in the feed stalls and the whistle of compressed air and the soft plop of dung faded away. The cascades of milk dried into a thick layer of yellowish powder that covered the floor and felt good beneath my bare feet.
The village smithy, I thought, must have looked the same way when the Goldman brothers walked out of Grandfather’s stories and off to war.
‘He only waited for Shulamit to get back at her,’ I told Uri.
‘My child,’ Uri said, ‘you don’t understand a thing. Do you remember when Pinness wanted to teach us about oxygen and the lungs and stood you in front of the class with a bag over your face?’
‘You bet I do,’ I said. ‘I passed out.’
‘That’s because you were such a good boy and Pinness forgot to tell you when to stop,’ Uri grinned.
‘So?’ I felt hurt.
‘Grandfather lived all his life with a stupid bag named Shulamit over his face, breathing the poisoned air of hopeless love. That’s what made him ill, that’s what drove him mad, and that’s what killed him when she came. Why do you think he died so soon after and even knew that it was going to happen?’
‘He was old,’ I said. ‘That’s what he told Doctor Munk.’
‘I never believed Grandfather like you did, and I screwed Doctor Munk’s wife the month he came to the village,’ said Uri disdainfully. ‘Take my word for it, he doesn’t know anything either. Not about love and not about how ill you can become from it.’