The Blue Mountain(3)

The cabin had two rooms and a kitchen. In one room Grandfather and I slept on our iron beds, whose prickly mattresses were stuffed with seaweed. There was a large, simple clothes closet, and next to it, the ‘commode’, and a chest of drawers with a cracked marble top; in its uppermost drawer Grandfather kept his raffia twine and rolls of Graftex. In the pouches of a leather belt hanging from a nail on the wall were his red-handled shears, his grafting knives, and a tube of homemade black tar for pruning cuts. His other things – his pruning saw, his alembics of salves and poisons, his pots for mixing his ‘Bordeaux Soup’, his solutions of arsenic, nicotine, and pyrethrum – were kept in the locked storeroom by the cowshed where my uncle Efrayim had shut himself up prior to his final disappearance.

In the second room were the kind of books that could be found in every house in the village: Bodenheimer and Klein’s The Farmer’s Insect Book, blue-bound issues of Field and The Planter, a copy of Yevgeni Onegin in a light cloth binding, a black Bible, the Mitzpeh and Stiebel series of Hebrew literature, and the books that Grandfather loved most of all, the two greenish volumes of Luther Burbank’s Harvest of the Years. ‘“Small, lithe, slightly stooped,” he had “knees and elbows bent a little from long years of the hardest physical labour,”’ Grandfather read to me from the introduction to the American plant wizard’s autobiography. Burbank, though, had eyes of ‘a deep and placid blue’, while Grandfather’s had turned grey.

Next to the Burbank was a row of memoirs written by people who were Grandfather’s friends. I still remember the titles of some of them: Native Paths, From the Don to the Jordan, My Earth, The Road Home. These friends were the heroes of my childhood stories. All of them, Grandfather told me in his Russian accent, had been born in a faraway land that they left ‘clandestinely’ long ago, some in railroad cars full of muzhiks – poor Russian farmers – on trains that ‘travelled slowly amid snow and wild apple trees’ via rocky coasts, great salt lakes, bald hills, and sandstorms. Others, mounted on wild geese whose wings stretched as far as ‘from the hayloft to the brooding house’, soared with joyous quacks over vast fields and high above the Black Sea. Still others knew secret passwords that ‘carried them off in a gale’ to the Land of Israel, where they landed all in a sweat, afraid to open their eyes. And then there was Shifris.

‘When we were already at the railway station at Makarov and the conductor blew the all-aboard, Shifris suddenly announced that he wasn’t coming with us. Finish your tomato, Baruch.’

I opened my mouth, and Grandfather slipped a slice of tomato sprinkled with rock salt into it.

‘Shifris said to us, “Comrades! To the Land of Israel we should go on foot, like pilgrims.” And with that he parted from us, shouldered his pack, waved, and disappeared in a puff of steam. He’s still trudging along on his way, the last pioneer to arrive.’

Grandfather told me about Shifris so that someone would know who he was when he came. Long after all the others had given up or died without waiting, I went on expecting him. I would be the boy who ran to greet him when he neared the village. Each dot on the distant flank of the mountain was his approaching form. A circle of ashes by the side of a field was the campfire he had made to boil tea. Tufts of wool in a hawthorn tree were the remains of his torn puttees. Every unfamiliar footprint in the dirt was a sign he had left as he passed by.

I asked Grandfather to show me Shifris’s route on the map, the borders he had crossed clandestinely, the rivers he had forded. I was fourteen years old when Grandfather said to me, ‘That’s enough of Shifris.’

‘He really did say he would walk,’ he told me. ‘But after a few days he must have run out of steam. Or else something happened to him on the way – maybe he got sick or hurt himself or joined the Party or fell in love … who knows, my child? There’s more than one thing can nail a man down to a place.’

On one of his slips of paper, in tiny letters, I found this note: ‘The flowering, not the fruit. The way, not the distance covered.’

The books were propped against a large Philco radio that subscribers to Field could buy in easy instalments. Facing them were a couch and two armchairs that my uncle Avraham and his wife Rivka had moved to Grandfather’s cabin after refurnishing their house. Grandfather called this room the living room, although his guests always sat at the large table in the kitchen.





Pinness stepped inside. I recognised at once the loud voice that had taught me Bible and nature.