The Blue Mountain(144)

‘Bread?’ The cantor did not know my cousin yet.

‘Isn’t Yom Kippur the day on which you eat only matzo?’

‘That’s enough, Uri. You should be ashamed of yourself,’ scolded Busquilla. ‘Please forgive him, Cantor.’

‘We brought our own food from home,’ laughed the little twins. A frown on his face, their father hushed them sternly.





An end-of-summer melancholy hung in the air, causing us all to fall silent. From the orange groves came the pungent smell of autumn manuring, and you could hear the mournful death of summer in the clucks of Ya’akovi’s geese as they flung themselves against the wire of their pens, quacking painfully at the sight of the Africa-bound birds overhead.

‘Summer and winter, swallow and heron,’ said Pinness in the solemn tone he generally saved for his classes in biblical poetry. I could tell from the enigmatic smile on his lips that the old man was once again listening to the seasons changing inside him.

‘As the last fruits of summer, as the gleanings of the vintage,’ answered the cantor, matching scripture for scripture. Relaxing, he permitted himself to smile.

I could feel summer ending in the burning leaves that whirled in the orchard, in the subtle way the wind grazed my bare shoulder, in the sudden silence of the rock doves, in the ragged nests of the paper wasps. No longer the same old busybodies, Margulis’s orphaned bees hovered lethargically, hoping to find a last grape or fig that had eluded the harvesters. Returning from my late-night walks, I saw the stiff forms of baby crows lying on thin layers of frost beneath the cypress trees. There was more dew at night, cold little pools of it collecting on the tractor seats in the dents made by the farmers’ behinds. Fleecy clouds gathered in the afternoon skies of the Valley. Pinness, Rachel, Riva, and Tonya planted their radishes and cauliflower, dug up their potatoes, and pruned the dead branches on their tomato vines. Only the pampered and well-fed flowers of Pioneer Home refused to acknowledge the turning of the year, tinting the air with their brilliance like the cantor’s beautiful daughter.

A year later I left the village. I may not have read all the signs at the time, but I did feel the autumn more sharply than ever that year. The air was thick with finality and parting.

‘Summer’s end is more terrible than summer,’ the cantor quoted the rabbis to me, watching the expression on my face.

People who don’t know me try all kinds of ways to get on my good side and work me out. They’ll send up a trial sentence to test the thickness of my cranium or extend their hand to my nose for me to sniff. I don’t hold it against them. I know that Grandfather saw to it that I am part animal, part tree. Now, though, I was overcome with revulsion. The hissing way the cantor said ‘summer’, the wet, disgusting pop of the ‘t’ in ‘terrible’, as if produced by a straight, thick finger in his mouth: I felt a sudden dislike for this man, whose long black coat made him look like a rootless scarecrow in somebody’s vegetable patch.





            48



On Rosh Hashana eve I went with Uri to visit Eliezer Liberson in the old folk’s home. Busquilla sometimes drove there on business, and I had planned to hitch a ride with him in the farm truck until Uri said, ‘Let’s walk.’ Once again I set out on the familiar path that seemed to flow from the soles of my feet and crawl in front of me like a warm, submissive snake of earth.

Most of the old folk were in the home’s synagogue, singing in childishly insistent voices as if to pave their way to the next world, but Liberson had never had the slightest use for anyone else’s prayers, and Albert was in bed as usual, quiet and majestic. His white silk shirt rippled in and out with each breath while his black bow tie fluttered its wings at his throat.



‘We Bulgarian Jews don’t go in much for religion,’ he said with a bright smile. ‘Por lo ke stamos, bendigamos.’

‘“It’s enough for us to count our blessings”,’ translated Liberson from the Ladino. He already knew most of Albert’s sayings. Usually they spoke in Hebrew, but sometimes they whispered together in Russian.

‘Bulgarian is very close to it,’ Liberson said. ‘And in my old age I’ve picked up a bit of Ladino.’

He sat facing his friend with his sour orange cane between his knees. He knew who I was as soon as he touched my face and turned his blind, dirty-white eyes on me. ‘How big you are,’ he said. ‘You have your father’s strength and your mother’s height.’

Only now did he sense Uri’s presence. Gripping his elbow, he pulled him nearer and ran his antenna-like fingers over him. He caught his breath as they descended from the forehead, gently plucking and pinching the cheeks and skimming longingly over the bridge of the nose that was broken on the night of Uri’s beating.