The Blue Mountain(146)
He sniggered. ‘Did you hear that, Albert? We dug and they counted.’ Since Albert said nothing, he continued. ‘Every group of workers had its hole counters. First they went for water, then they poured it, then they counted the holes. Soon they were counting people, and before long, party members. Within a year they were travelling to Zionist congresses in Europe, and from there to raise money in America, which gave them even more to count.’
Liberson laughed. ‘Tsirkin hated them. The hole counters became big-time politicians and never gave us enough money. We were always on the verge of making it, on the verge of getting in the harvest, on the verge of starving to death.’
‘Non tiene busha,’ repeated Albert from his bed.
‘Once,’ continued Liberson, ‘Pesya brought home some member of the Central Committee. Meshulam was a little boy. He sat there hypnotised all evening, asking all sorts of questions. The man, whose name I won’t mention, was thrilled by how much the boy knew. After he had gladly answered all his questions, Pesya took him to the cowshed to see Tsirkin milk the cows. Tsirkin took one look at him and recognised him at once.
‘“Well, look who’s here,” said Mandolin. “It’s just like the good old days. I’ll milk and you can count the cows.”’
Liberson turned back towards the Valley. He moved his hands and cane slowly, feeling his way across the map of his longings. ‘We came to build a village. A place of our own. There, that big green blotch way out there – that’s the eucalyptus woods we planted. The trees sucked up the swamp. Cut them down and it will be back, as far as the eye can see.’
He did not know they were gone already. The big, sappy trunks had been felled the year before, and nothing had happened. The stumps were rooted out, and cotton was planted in their place.
‘Beyond the woods is the wadi where Pinness ran to kill himself when he found Leah with Rilov. Who would have believed it? A pregnant woman! We ran after him and brought him back, and only found his gun a year later during ploughing. It was rusted and useless, and Leah was dead by then too. She came down with some rare cave fever that even Doctor Yoffe had never seen.’
He drew a quick stroke in the air with his cane, from west to south. ‘There, on that far mountain, Elijah saw the little rain cloud and ran before the chariots of Ahab. He raced the king’s horses all the way to Jezreel, over there, and reached it before them.’
We went back inside. The room smelled of the sweet crimson perfume of overripe Astrakhan apples, Liberson’s approaching death, and Albert’s sheets.
‘You’ve caused quite a rumpus, you two boys, eh? You with your graves, and you with your girls.’
‘I drive a tractor now,’ said Uri. ‘I’m a working man.’
Stripped of his sense of humour, Uri was alone and defenceless against Liberson. The old man sat wearily on his bed. I felt bad about taking up so much of the small room and making him huddle against the wall.
‘The Movement likes to think of us as one big happy family,’ he said. ‘The tribe of pioneers. Together we came, together we redeemed the land, together we farmed it, together we’ll die, and together we’ll be buried in a nice photogenic row. In every old photograph there’s a row sitting and a row standing, and two more of them on a crate in the back, looking over the others’ shoulders, and two more lying down in front, propped on their elbows with their heads touching. Three rows out of four eventually left the country. In every photograph you have the three rows, the heroes, and the zeroes.’
‘Grandfather once said something like that too,’ said Uri. But enveloped in darkness, Liberson was not listening. Only the memory of love could still catch his light-deprived eyes. He faced the window. I knew what he would say. ‘Over there, where the kibbutz has its factory, there was once a lovely vineyard. That’s where I met Fanya.’ He turned toward, me with tears in his white eyeballs. ‘You did right, Baruch, to let me go there by myself. Anyone else would have tried to help me.’
I told him about Meshulam’s swamp. ‘How silly can you get,’ he sighed. ‘Who cares about all that any more? It’s just a big waste of water.’ The details didn’t interest him.
‘I hate this place,’ he said to us. ‘They make me weave lampshades out of raffia and eat supper at four o’clock.’
Uri wanted to hear more about Liberson’s adventures with Fanya, but Liberson’s mood had taken a turn for the worse. He was already somewhere else. He had left us and dived back into a world in which we did not exist.