The Blue Mountain(21)
Just then, however, when Fortune, or so it seemed from his account, had begun to smile on him, a war broke out. Along with everyone else in Tel Aviv, Grandmother’s brother was banished from the city.
‘During the war,’ said Grandfather, ‘we were given a forged vasika.’
I wrote down the word vasika. I never asked what anything meant, because explanations would only have snarled the threads of the story. Vasika, kulaks, sukra, Ottomanisation – the only reason I remember such words to this day is that I still don’t know what they mean. Just like Levin and mesamsam.
‘We lived on olives and onions and almost starved to death,’ said Grandfather.
Every autumn he picked and cured a barrel of olives. I sat next to him on the concrete path, watching him peel garlic, slice lemon, and rinse stems of dill, his hands giving off a good green-and-white-striped smell. Each time he tapped his knife handle against a clove of garlic, the pure white tooth slid out of its skin with one quick tug. He showed me how much water and salt to fill the barrel with.
‘Go and bring a fresh egg from the chicken coop, my child, and I’ll show you a nice trick.’
He put the egg in the salt water, and when it was suspended halfway to the top, neither floating upward to the surface nor sinking down to the bottom but hanging by an invisible thread of confidence and faith, we knew that the salt was just right. The levitating egg seemed no less magical to me than the grafted fruit trees in our garden or Eliezer Liberson’s walking on water.
Levin found a haven during the war in a refugee camp in Petach Tikvah. Either he had erased all memory of those hard times or else he didn’t want to talk about them. He only remembered a single night, on which great swarms of locusts landed in the fields and devoured everything in sight with a ceaseless, menacing, yet barely audible crunch.
‘When we rose in the morning, the trees were all white and dead, stripped clean of their bark.’ The locusts’ beating wings and masticating mandibles filled his brain like a hail of tormenting grit.
When the boom of the British field guns approached from the south, Levin returned to Tel Aviv, walking slowly down sandy red streets that turned to yellow as they ran into the evening. Merchants were busy removing the boards they had nailed to their shop fronts. The smiles of the Australian soldiers strolling through town inspired them with new hope.
Levin did not return to the bank. He found a job in a stationery shop, where he learned the art of fixing fountain pens. Reverently he took apart the writing instruments of famous men like Brenner, Ziskind, and Ettinger, rinsing their parts in a solution made from sycamore galls that he himself had picked, honing their nibs, and overhauling their wells. ‘Our political future lies in your hands,’ said the shop owner with a smile as he watched Levin inspect Arthur Ruppin’s black Waterman, and Levin felt a wave of contentment. The owner liked him and even introduced him to young ladies, the daughters of his friends. If only Levin hadn’t missed the smells of straw, smoke, and dusty feet. He wanted to wrap himself in a blanket of stars and grass, to sleep on threshing floors and sand dunes. In the end he persuaded his boss to let him double as a travelling salesman, and once a week he set forth on a donkey to peddle his wares to the nearby Jewish colonies.
‘I loved those trips.’ His lungs grew used to the dust, and the patient plod of the donkey gave him a sense of well-being. His route wound between fragrant walls of orange and lemon groves and hedgerows of thorny acacia bushes that glowed with little yellow fireballs, passed the barred iron gate of the Mikveh Israel Agricultural School, and turned into the vineyards of Rishon le-Tsiyyon. The sea of flowers through which he rode seemed continually to part before him. The songs of pioneers travelled through the air. Spying a group of them sitting down to eat, he would bashfully rein in his mount and stand watching from a distance until he was invited to join in. He ate heartily of the Grade D oranges and the bread dipped in cooking oil that still gave him heartburn, and chipped in with a contribution of his own, the sweet rolls and Arab cakes that he bought in Jaffa expressly for this purpose.
‘And kamardin too?’ I asked.
He gave me a mournful smile of surprise. ‘No,’ he said. ‘By then I was a little better off.’
‘Sweet Levin,’ a pretty blonde pioneer with a peeling nose once called him, laughing as she kissed his cheek after he had summoned up the courage to place a sticky crumb of cake in her beaked mouth.
‘My heart skipped a beat.’ At night he dreamed of her and of the farmhouse he would build for her and their children. There would be rows of sprouting vegetables, diligent hens, a cow, and no end of work. ‘Even now I read farm journals the way women read cookery books,’ he told me with a bitter laugh. ‘Every time I travelled that way I looked for her blue kerchief among the trees and grapevines.’ By the time he felt bold enough to ask about her a month later, he was told that she had died of typhoid fever. Once again he was plunged into deep gloom.