The Blue Mountain(18)

‘Have some more,’ he said, preparing another morsel.

‘I don’t need to be hand-fed,’ protested Rachel, though she could not keep from laughing. ‘I’m an old woman, not a baby.’

‘My baby,’ I heard Shlomo Levin sigh. ‘My baby sister.’

Sometimes when the old-timers reminisced about Grandmother, they would let drop a few words about her brother, so that little by little I put together a picture of him, as I did of others whom I buried. Rilov the Watchman, for instance, was the object of my investigations for years – and a dangerous one too, since his grandson and I, and my father and his son, had a running feud between us. Worse yet, he spent most of his time in the septic tank of his cowshed, where he kept the village arms cache and any intruder was liable to be shot. ‘If you value dying in your own bed, stay out of here,’ he would say, giving you his famous four-cornered stare, which was composed of two shotgun barrels and two slanty eyes.

I never talked to Rilov in my life, but Levin was more approachable. He liked me and regarded me with melancholy amusement, baffled that a Goliath like myself had been born into a family like his. ‘I only wish I was as strong and innocent as you,’ he would say to me with a smile.





Levin stayed with the Workingman’s Circle for several weeks and then decided to go off on his own. Not that Grandfather, Mandolin Tsirkin, and Liberson were unkind to him, but one look from them when he massaged his aching hands or wielded his hoe at a bad angle was enough to bring tears to his eyes and fill him with despair. He didn’t understand their jokes and never managed to learn their songs, since each evening they invented new ones.

Their bestial habits, such as scratching their toes while they ate, picking their teeth with blades of straw, and conversing with mules and donkeys, depressed and frightened him. Even Feyge, so it seemed to him, no longer held him in esteem.

‘Our father sent me to look after her, and there I was, a pathetic farmhand and a fifth wheel of an elder brother.’

And yet the three of them shared their food with him, found him and Feyge work with the farmers of the Jewish colonies, and even rescued them once from some Arab camel drivers who attacked them near Petach Tikvah and tried to steal their packs.

‘You run ahead with Feyge,’ shouted Tsirkin, ‘and keep an eye on my mandolin!’

Shlomo and Grandmother hid behind a rise and watched in astonishment as the ‘three hooligans’ wrestled with their attackers and drove them off. Liberson rejoined them with a split lip, triumphantly waving his Webley revolver, and Feyge cleaned the wound and kissed it tenderly to the gleeful cries of his companions.

Afterwards Levin chided her for her free ways.

‘I love them,’ she answered in the darkness.

He lay awake all night and announced with gloomy formality in the morning that he intended to leave them.

‘We felt pretty awful when we first came to this country too,’ said Tsirkin. ‘In another month you’ll feel better.’

But Levin decided that it was time to go his separate way, wherever that might lead him.

Liberson and Grandfather bought him a train ticket to Jerusalem and gave him a few Turkish coins. Feyge cried when her brother boarded the train.

He sat in the rickety carriage feeling low, his hands in his pockets for warmth, his knees no doubt pressed together at the same touchingly timid Levinesque angle they would later form when he sat behind his store counter. On the opposite bench a group of religious Jews and their wives regarded him with distaste while telling stories about their rabbi, who had flown on a Hasidic fur hat from the port in Jaffa straight to the Wailing Wall. Next to him sat a hunched merchant who whispered numbers to himself all the way to Jerusalem as if hoping they might safely conduct him to the terra firma of sanity.

Levin, who had barely freed himself from the oppressive presence of pelican postmen and froggy guides, suddenly realised that the country must be exuding maddening vapours that infected whoever lived in it regardless of age, tribe, or sect.

Looking out at the arid landscape, he nibbled at a slice of bread Feyge had put in his pack. Flakes of soot and bits of ash from the locomotive flew through the open window into his mouth, tasting like bitter groats. The desolation of the countryside depressed him. The grey valleys, spiny thickets, and ruined terraces of the hillsides seemed dead and pitiful compared with the vast green expanses that he remembered from the riverbanks of his childhood.

When the train swung around the last mountain curve and entered Jerusalem, Grandmother’s brother took his pack, left the station, walked past the silenced windmill of Moses Montefiore, descended to the pool in front of the old walled city where cattle were drinking from the faecal waters, and passed through a gate in the wall. The filth and shabbiness of the city inspired fear and revulsion. An insipid date drink that he bought from an Arab boy only made everything grimmer. Toward evening he spied two pioneers like himself, followed in the wake of their Russian speech, and found shelter for the night. His mood, though, did not improve.