The Blue Mountain(143)

Every year the Committee hired the Rabbi to lead High Holy Day services for the handful of villagers who attended our little synagogue. When the holidays were over he returned home with a wad of notes, several trussed hens, a crate of pomegranates, figs, raisiny late grapes, and – if the year had been a good one – a large jar of cream.

Now that he was old, so that ‘his hands shook from long years of prayer and motorcycling’, he was no longer entrusted with such delicate tasks as haircutting and circumcision. Eventually, having grown too weak to sing or blow the ram’s horn, he found us a new cantor, an extremely Orthodox cousin of his from the city beyond the blue mountain.

The Committee sent Uzi Rilov in an open jeep to pick them up at the railway station. The Weissbergs – the new cantor and his wife, their adolescent daughter, and their little twin boys – were equally shocked by the jouncing, dusty ride through the fields and Uzi’s immodestly bared shoulders. Mrs Weissberg and her daughter chastely declined the offer of his hand to help them down from the jeep. Soon after their arrival a good smell of sweet and unfamiliar cookery came wafting from Avraham and Rivka’s house.

The new cantor was unlike his predecessor. He did not know anyone in the village, and the earth of the Valley held no appeal for him. On the morning after they came his wife hung clothes on Rivka’s washing-line the likes of which we had never seen before, and a little later Weissberg stepped out onto the porch and began to practise his ram’s horn, slicing the air into shivering strips that sent hundreds of roof-roosting pigeons high into the sky.

The cantor’s twin boys startled the village youth with their long sidelocks and socks and the huge velvet skullcaps that covered their shaven heads. Overwhelmed by sun, fresh fruit, and the smells of cowshed and field, they tiptoed through the farmyards gaping at the poultry and livestock while lisping to each other in a rapid speech whose strange diction could not be understood. They were especially frightened by the cows in heat, mounting each other brazenly, and by the mules, those half-asses and half-horses that seemed to have stepped out of the pages of a devilish bestiary. The village children pointed and jeered at them from a safe distance, afraid to approach such exotic creatures too closely. Even Pinness, who stared at them as if straining to remember, was unable to connect them with the childhood that had been erased from the lobes of his brain.

‘I know them from somewhere,’ the old man kept saying, ‘but I can’t seem to place them.’

Dark and sombre-looking like her father, the Weissbergs’ daughter spent most of her time in the house, although I sometimes saw her towards evening, garbed in long dresses, strolling arm in arm with her mother along the village’s palm-shaded main street. They were not at all like our own freckled women and girls, whose fruity, gullible charms were blown afar by the breezes. As they walked with lowered eyes and small steps, talking in low tones, mother and daughter appeared to be fleeing the burly farmers and their bare-chested sons, defending their virtue with the little handkerchiefs they clasped in their hands, their ceaseless murmuring, and the armour of their clothing, which precluded all conjecture concerning what lay beneath it.

Late one afternoon Busquilla invited the Weissbergs to visit the cemetery. Uri and I were weeding the flower beds while Pinness sat nearby. When Busquilla finished explaining the nature of our enterprise to his guests, the cantor nodded and said, ‘It is a great commandment to bury the dead properly, a great commandment.’ He did not know, of course, that we broke all the rules by burying them in coffins, without prayers or pious beggars to give alms to.

I straightened up as they approached and greeted us, struck dumb by the beauty of the cantor’s daughter. Her complexion was a heart-rending mixture of peach and olive, and her dark eyes were lowered beneath prominent brows curved as finely and sharply as a sickle. Until then the only women I had ever known were the women of the Valley. Half were too old, and I had seen so much of the other half since infancy that they held no interest for me.

‘Allow me, Cantor, to introduce our teacher, Ya’akov Pinness,’ said Busquilla. ‘This is Baruch, my boss, and this is Uri, in whose parents’ home we have been privileged to house you.’

‘Welcome to our village,’ said Pinness dryly.

The cantor smiled.



‘Weissberg is the name,’ he said. ‘I’m pleased to meet you. You’ve been very hospitable.’

‘Be careful in the kitchen, Cantor,’ said Uri. ‘There may be some old bread lying around.’

‘That will do, Uri!’ said Pinness, instantly on guard.