The Blue Mountain(26)

Grandfather had a sixth sense for growing trees. Planters from all over the country consulted him and sent him infected leaves and pest eggs. The trees in his backyard made even the experts marvel. Every year pilgrimages of songbirds and agronomists arrived in our village to see and taste Mirkin’s fruit. I myself remember visitors coming especially to watch Grandfather harvest olives in autumn.

‘Come here, my child,’ he said, teaching me to wrap my arms around the olive tree as he did. He didn’t beat the branches with a stick as was the custom, but hugged the trunk with his face pressed against it while swaying with it gently. At first nothing happened. After a few minutes, however, I could feel the robust tree sigh and shudder, and soon, to the excited gasps of the crowd, a quiet downpour of fruit rained on my head and shoulders. I can still recall the faint drumming of those olives on my skin.

Grandfather planted the avenue of casuarinas when Avraham was born. ‘That firstborn disappointment and vain hope,’ as he was called by Meshulam Tsirkin, who was a year younger and had his own theory about why Grandfather had planted non-fruiting trees upon the birth of his first son.

When Grandmother Feyge gave birth to her second child, my uncle Efrayim, Grandfather was so happy that he grafted onto a single sour orange stock branches of orange, grapefruit, lemon, and tangerine. ‘My quadratic equation’, he called it, and once the wondrous citrus began yielding its various fruits, he went on filling the village with his mad experiments, which soon began to cross-pollinate each other. Muscat grapes rotted high on the unpickable branches of cypresses, and Iraqi dates turned yellow on plum trees. Eventually Grandfather grew alarmed by this unrestrained outburst of Michurinism, but the trees kept going strong.

The following year Grandmother had Esther, my mother and her last child, after whom her body ceased from fruitfulness and began preparing itself for death. Although these events took place but a few dozen years ago, they are already wrapped in the fibrous shrouds of time, embalmed in the black wax of mystery, as if they came straight out of Pinness’s Bible lessons, in which Deborah’s palm and Abraham’s tamarisk still burgeoned prolifically, planted by the rivers of stories – nomadic tales of earth and tents, of legendary wells, trees, and wombs.

Grandmother lived long enough to move from her tent to the cabin I later shared with Grandfather. She scrubbed the wooden floor, in which faint depressions recall her knees to this day, until it gleamed. When a glass window was installed, she sewed bright curtains for it out of pieces of old cloth. Outside, by the fig tree, she built an earthen oven that stored the good smells of baked pumpkin and bread. Two half-breed Damascene cows stood tied in the shed, and little Avraham took them out at dusk to graze on the front of our land: Rachel Yana’it was joined by more colourful Cherkessian hens who pecked alongside her in the yard. When chicks hatched they were put in a wooden box warmed by an oil lamp, and soon they tempted the old wildcat to leave his home in the blue mountain and take up residence by the spring in our fields.

‘They cooked in outdoor ovens, picked purslane for the chickens, went barefoot, and fetched water in tin cans,’ said Yosi, Uri’s twin brother. ‘In short, they were your typical Arab village.’

On the land where Pioneer Home now stands, Grandfather planted his big orchard. He dug irrigation ditches between the rows of trees, which he watered at night so as not to pester them in the heat of day. When he grew sleepy, he placed his hose at the top end of a ditch and lay down to nap at the bottom. Awakened by the slow-flowing water when it reached him, he rose, moved the hose to the next ditch, and went back to sleep. This system of his was the butt of many jokes in the village. ‘He only does it to avoid sleeping at home,’ Fanya protested to Liberson. There were farmers who voiced the fear that if Mirkin ever forgot to wake up, the orchard would be flooded and the swamp would return to the Valley.

Grandfather paid them no mind. Shaking from happiness and cold, he came home each morning vaporous with wet earth. At his hands the orchard was already bearing large fruit in its second year.

That same year Zeitser came for a visit from his commune in the Jordan Valley. He was an old friend of Grandfather’s. Though he never complained about it, ‘you could see that life in the commune didn’t suit him’. Grandfather asked him to stay on in the village, and Zeitser agreed on the condition that their friendship did not result in special treatment. He considered himself a simple farmhand and wanted to be nothing else. So modest were his needs that he did not even care to sleep indoors.

‘Why does he live in the cowshed?’ I asked Grandfather. ‘Why does old Zeitser live with the cows?’