The Blue Mountain(156)

After the wedding ceremony a few self-conscious musicians played tunes that we all knew from the village, because they were the same as the ones the founding fathers used to sing on winter nights – ‘Rabbi Elimelech’, ‘My Soul That Yearns for Thee’, and ‘On the Sabbath Day’. None of the band, however, could play like Mandolin Tsirkin, who had the knack of ‘plucking the heartstrings along with the bowstrings’. Yosi, Avraham, and I stood in a corner with awkward smiles, watching the Hasidim dutifully go through the motions of dancing. A fatuously gay Pinness joined in loudly, while Busquilla was already deep in whispered negotiations with a pale bearded man. No one laughed when the wedding jester jumped on the table, or when Weissberg’s fat brother balanced a chair with seven bottles of brandy on his forehead, all of which fell to the floor and smashed to pieces.

Later it clouded over and we rode home in a thin, pleasant autumn rain. Yosi drove, Avraham talked gaily all the way about marvellous tropical fruits and hot equatorial storms, Busquilla tried to tell jokes, and Pinness went on singing. Knowing I would soon be leaving the village, I kept silent. Uri sat in the back holding Nehama’s hand, in which a small, protective kerchief was tightly clutched.





That winter I helped Uri cut down the ornamental trees in Pioneer Home, dig up the flower beds, and rip out the gravel paths.

Uri was full of enthusiasm. He wanted to bring two power saws to speed up the work, but I preferred to chop down the trees with an axe and drag their heavy corpses off myself, for once more I felt the old restlessness coursing through my body and the need for hard, violent work.

The bauhinias, the poincianas, the Judas trees, and the big hibiscus bushes fell under my blows, sappy puddles seeping into the ground. I cut the trunks and branches into fragrant cords of firewood and stacked them in the cowshed.

Avraham and Rivka gave the young couple their house. When spring came and Nehama went out to the fields in short hair and a maternity dress down to her knees, the sun shining through the thin fabric outlined the lovely roundness of her belly and the soft arched space between her legs. Yosi came home for a week’s leave, and the four of us planted fruit trees and sowed fodder in between the gravestones. I liked the feel of the smooth little seeds of clover as they went slipping through my fingers.

Uri had all kinds of plans. Though he had no savings, his parents, his uncle, and I were glad to lend him all the money he needed. Nehama cleaned out Avraham’s cowshed, and the cows filed back in their iron yokes to moo and listen to music while the milking machines whirred once again.

Late that summer we buried Eliezer Liberson. Some time before he had vanished from his room.

‘He’s out in the fields,’ said Albert with a mysterious smile, adding a proverb in Ladino, though Liberson was not there to translate the soft, sure words.

Everyone knew that Liberson was wandering through the Valley, because the vagrant little dust devils his feet kicked up kept appearing in the most unexpected places, but the old man eluded his pursuers. Dying of hunger and thirst, he walked the land, too weak to open a water tap or pick the wondrous fruit on the trees. Although Daniel looked everywhere for his father, Liberson, like Grandfather before his death, was too small and light to leave tracks. He was only found months later, when the kibbutz corn harvester came across his birdlike bones.

Now I was waiting for Pinness. ‘When he goes, I’ll leave,’ I announced, though Uri and Nehama assured me that I would make them happy by staying.

‘Don’t even think of it, Baruch. We want to be the last farm to use an ox along with the tractors,’ Uri said.

I smiled, Nehama laughed, little Efrayim, who was feeding, gave a start, and Pinness, the oldest, illest man in the Valley, of which he was the last surviving pioneer, went on slowly chewing the stuffed spleen that Busquilla had officiously brought him. Pinness knew I was waiting for him and had kept his distance from me for several months.

‘You can leave now,’ he said to me with an effort. ‘I wouldn’t let you bury me in your cemetery even if you did it for nothing.’

Walking him home, I could feel the fear in his movements. He no longer talked about insects and fruits or put his hand on the back of my neck. He was saving up what little strength he had left for his last conscientious stand.

‘You won’t get me,’ he said to me. ‘You won’t get me.’ I did not answer. I knew that the School of Nature, which matriculated man and beast with equal randomness, was stronger than both Pinness and me.

‘To Nature the flea, the cockroach, the hyena, the buzzard, the leopard, the cobra are as important as the dog who loves and guards you, the horse who understands and works for you, the young girl in her lover’s embrace, the child at its mother’s knee in prayer, or the mature man on whom depend the happiness and well-being of a gracious wife and a family of lovely children,’ wrote Luther Burbank.