The Blue Mountain(17)
‘Not one of them dared lay a hand on your grandmother,’ Pinness told me. ‘They just romanced her with their pranks and silly jokes, making her laugh until their sweet blood built up her resistance against malaria and depression.’
They slung stones like shepherd boys, sang in Russian to the waterfowl that arrived each autumn from the delta of the Don, and bathed but twice a month. All night they danced barefoot, and with the break of dawn they walked across the country. ‘They could work a whole week on no more food than five oranges,’ I told my cousin Uri.
But my uncle Avraham’s twins Yosi and Uri were not impressed by these tales.
‘That’s nothing,’ said Uri. ‘They forgot to tell you how Liberson streaked naked across the Sea of Galilee in Feyge’s honour, how Tsirkin played the mandolin for her all night on the shore, and how three giant Saint Peter’s fish jumped out of the water in the morning and landed bewitched at her feet, hopping on their spiny fins while Grandfather skimmed pebbles across the water to the other side of the lake.’
To be on the safe side, I asked Meshulam for his opinion. He knew of no source, he replied, ‘that could authenticate the more fantastic stories about the Workingman’s Circle.’
Meshulam had no sense of perspective. Pinness explained to me that this happened to people who remembered other people’s memories. In his unhierarchical, pigeonholing brain Eliezer Liberson’s walking on water had the same status as land acquisitions in the Jordan Valley. And yet with my own eyes I had seen old man Liberson floating at night in the village swimming pool, gasping and gurgling to show his wife Fanya that he was still as young as ever, while if Tsirkin grew the tallest, juiciest penicillaria in the village, it was only because he strolled through his green fields at night, his white head gleaming in the darkness, serenading the tender sprouts with his mandolin. I was sceptical only about Grandfather, because he had never stopped loving Shulamit, the Crimean whore who betrayed him, cheated on him, ‘went to bed with every officer in the Czar’s army’, and stayed behind in Russia all those years.
‘But he married Grandmother Feyge,’ said Uri, whose long, heifer-like eyelashes danced up and down whenever the subject was women or love.
I already loved Uri then, when we were children. We were sitting in a big field of clover waiting for Avraham and Yosi, who were out cutting alfalfa for the cows on a creaky horse-drawn reaper. In the nearby orchard Grandfather and Zeitser were burning weeds.
‘That has nothing to do with it,’ I said. I knew he had only married her because a plenary session of the Workingman’s Circle had decided he should. ‘Grandfather has a girlfriend in Russia, and someday she’s going to come.’
‘No, she won’t,’ said Uri. ‘She’s too old and too busy sleeping with retired Red Army generals.’
Grandmother Feyge had been dead a long time then, and I, who had lived with Grandfather since I was two, saw at night how he opened the box with the blue envelopes that came from afar, from the country of the wicked Michurin, the filthy muzhiks, and the infamous Shulamit, and sat slowly writing answers that were not always mailed, though he never crossed out a word of them. One morning when he went to the orchard, I found an unfinished letter on the floor among the night’s harvest of notes.
I couldn’t understand a thing. Not only wasn’t it in Hebrew, it wasn’t even in the foreign letters that appeared on the green glass of our big radio. I carefully copied a few words out on a piece of paper and took it with me to school.
During recess I went to see Pinness, who was having tea with the teachers.
‘Ya’akov,’ I asked him, ‘did you ever see writing like this?’
Pinness looked at the paper, blanched, reddened, led me out of the teachers’ room by the hand and tore what I had given him into shreds. ‘You shouldn’t have done that, Baruch. Don’t ever go poking through your grandfather’s papers again.’
I never cheated on Grandfather again. I never looked at his papers again either, until he was dead.
6
I remember Grandmother Feyge’s brother walking down the streets of the village, his head and glasses glinting in the sun, his shoulders stooped, old crumbs of apricot leather yellowing between his teeth. Though public servants like Levin were not highly regarded by the farmers, he was the person they turned to whenever anyone was needed to do an audit or arbitrate a dispute, because he was as honest as the day was long and a great stickler for the facts.
One afternoon as he sat with his Yemenite wife Rachel under the white mulberry tree in their yard, tearing off little pieces of pitta bread and cheese with his thin blue fingers and placing them in her mouth, I eavesdropped on their conversation, scrunching myself up in a bush as best I could.