The Blue Mountain(19)

‘The Jews here turn up their noses at us, and the Arabs have already twice assaulted me,’ he wrote to his sister. ‘This city, with its stones and poverty, will be the ruin of me. All one sees is vanished glory and dead ashes. The stones alone are at home here. This is no place for living men.’

For a while he tried to learn stonemasonry. The Arab masons amazed him with their sharp eye, which could peel the surface away from each stone and reveal its inner nature. ‘They even had a word for it, mesamsam. You might have thought they were cutting dough instead of rock.’ But Levin’s fingers ached and swelled long hours after laying down his chisel, and he decided to go to Jaffa. ‘It was a softer city,’ he told me, ‘not as stony.’

Lacking the money for a train ticket, he joined two youths and a young girl from Minsk who were going to Jaffa on foot. Oddly, this tiring journey, which took two whole days, was a pleasant experience despite the mountainous route that led them through thornbushes, over boulders, and past barking dogs ‘to avoid the highwaymen of Abu Ghosh’.

Unfamiliar black birds chirruped all around, pointing their orange beaks in the air. Grey lizards, ‘the lords of the wilderness’, amused him with their prayers. The young men he was with were friendly, helped him carry his things, and even gave him good advice. The taller of the two, whose name was Hayyim Margulis, told him to wear a woollen belt around his waist even in the hottest weather and informed him that he intended to become a beekeeper in order ‘to bring forth honey from the rock’.

‘But bees are more than just honey,’ said Margulis gaily. ‘Without them we can never make the wilderness blossom. Without bees there is no fruit, no clover, no vegetables, nothing. The flies and wasps of this country aren’t to be trusted.’ During one of their rest stops Margulis showed him how to find wild bee hives. ‘It’s an old Cossack trick,’ he explained, taking out a little box and striding over to a flowering thyme plant whose bright blossoms buzzed with ‘savage bees’.

‘That one is good and sozzled,’ he whispered, pointing at a bee couched luxuriously in a flower. Stealthily stalking it with the box, he shut the lid on it, then did the same with several other bees.

‘They always fly straight back to the hive,’ he explained, freeing one of the bees and running after it with upturned face, tripping over stones and clods of earth. Levin followed closely behind him. When they lost sight of the little creature after a few dozen yards, Margulis freed a second bee and kept on running.

The sixth bee brought them to its home, which was hidden in the notched trunk of a carob tree. Levin stood a safe distance away, marvelling when Margulis rubbed his hands and face with wildflower petals and walked straight up to the hive, letting the bees land on his bare skin and crawl all over it. He scooped some honey into his hands and returned to the girl from Minsk, who licked it off his outstretched, dripping fingers as if she had been doing it all her life.

‘Sweet Margulis,’ she laughed. Her name was Tonya, and she didn’t take her eyes off him for a second.

They saw caravans of camels, ‘Turkish trains’, as Margulis called them. Levin tingled with pleasure. Hayyim Margulis was the first person in Palestine not to humiliate him, and Levin felt the beginnings of a great liking for this fragrant young man, whom he already dared affectionately call ‘Hayyim’ke’ in the privacy of his thoughts. Perhaps, he imagined happily, he would be asked to join Margulis for good. Together, he daydreamed, the two of them would possess land and Tonya, together plough the earth and build a home. For a fleeting moment the future seemed to beckon from beneath a warm canopy of hope. It was all so sudden that he could feel the back of his neck go limp from sheer bliss. But no sooner had they reached Jaffa than Margulis took Tonya by the arm and disappeared with her and their friend behind the Park Hotel, waving goodbye. Sadly, Levin watched them depart. For several hours, until he was chased off by a waiter, he sat on a bench in the garden of the hotel, looking at the spire of the Lutheran church and the flame trees glowing red all around him. When night came, he bedded down on the dunes north of Jaffa. Cold lizards crawled over his belly, and the snouts of jackals sniffed his legs. He didn’t sleep a wink, and when morning came he went to look for construction work in Tel Aviv.

‘The girls here,’ he wrote to his sister, who was then digging irrigation holes in orange groves near Hadera, ‘are callous and crass and pay no mind to a young man like me who cannot serenade them or sweeten their lives with honey. They want strong fellows who sing while they work, and I, weak and afflicted as I am, am not well liked by them. How I long for a soft, pure hand, for the fragrance of a muslin dress, for a cup of coffee with little cakes on a white table by a green riverbank.’