The Blue Mountain(34)
Pesya Tsirkin quickly scaled the heights of public office and soon was in charge of budgets and bureaus herself. It did not take Mandolin many months to realise that the queasy feeling produced in him by his wife’s visits was hatred pure and simple. After Pesya went to London on Movement business, she returned to the village cloaked in exotic perfumes that made the barnyard animals sneeze and stagger. Arriving home, she kissed little Meshulam, who was playing with some baby chicks on the floor, seized her husband by the hand with a strange expression, and tried to drag him off to the bedroom. Tsirkin, whose most ingrained beliefs were offended by the scent of her, slipped from her prurient grasp and found in her suitcase still more perfume, a pair of high-heeled shoes, and a black dress. A body search also uncovered a silk slip.
‘You bought all this crap with Movement money,’ he accused her, shaking with anger.
‘Like hell I did,’ laughed Pesya, opening her arms wide. ‘I won the money in a casino I went to with Ettinger between sessions.’
The sight of her newly shaven armpits filled him with fear and indignation. Throwing the clothing and shoes into the barrel he used for burning dead chickens and poisoned mice, he doused them with the perfume to send the flames higher. That same Saturday he moved his bed out to the large mulberry tree in the yard and broke off relations with the woman who had brought such disgrace on the Movement, the village, and the Tsirkin family. Everyone knew that he slept in the yard whenever his wife came to visit, because he sat up half the night strumming away on his mandolin. His Sabbath clothes were stained with the black and purple blotches of ripe mulberries that fell on him in his sleep. Now and then he let out a shout that could be heard all over the village, for he was one of the first victims of the stealth of Efrayim, who took to sneaking up to his bed and poking prickly ears of wheat into his nostrils.
Forty years later Pesya was awarded the Labour Prize. The real reason that Comrade Tsirkin’s whole life was ‘devoted to her society and people’, as it says on the parchment certificate hanging on the wall of Founder’s Cabin, was her husband’s unyielding abstinence. It was also the reason Meshulam remained an only child.
The guests Pesya brought were the Americans who had donated the money for buying the village lands, and who now wanted to see how they had helped make the wilderness blossom. The three Ford limousines they came in were the first American automobiles we had seen.
The wealthy Jews spent hours walking through the farmyards, smiling and taking pictures. ‘Their clothes stank of sybaritism, and their smooth skins masked the hideous secrets of wealth. But what could we do? The money was theirs.’
One of them was accompanied by an attractive young woman. ‘No one as beautiful as she had been seen in our village before. She was like the very heavens for purity, tall and striking, with grey eyes that crinkled like olives when she laughed. The spirit of gaiety lurked in the corners of her mouth.’
The visitors were shown the new refrigerator in the dairy, saw Avigdor Ya’akovi single-handedly yoke the breeding bull to a cart, and were taxied on it to the garden to pick fresh vegetables. They watched Ya’akov Mirkin graft vines onto the new grape stock they had brought him, and Rilov demonstrate the correct breathing for target shooting in the three standard positions, standing, kneeling, and lying.
It was then that Pesya announced her intention of showing them the village’s firstborn son.
Grandfather objected. ‘The child is not a display item,’ he said.
Pesya stepped up to him with a smile, bobbing her breasts to heighten her persuasiveness.
‘This isn’t a London casino,’ said Grandfather, who knew the truth behind Mandolin’s stained Sabbath clothes. ‘Keep your hands off the boy.’
Just then, though, Avraham came back from the fields on Zeitser’s back. Grandfather turned to take him home, but something in the eyes of the village’s firstborn son as they glanced at the assemblage made him freeze.
The philanthropists from America were agog at the sight of the earnest, motherless boy, whose radiant complexion brought home the full significance of the enterprise they were supporting. He smiled at them, and then, without being asked, knelt on the ground, dug a small hollow, placed a seed of corn in it, and covered it with earth. ‘This symbolic act, which expressed the meaning of our lives so well, moved everyone greatly.’ Two of the philanthropists immediately proposed bringing the boy back with them to America, where he would be sent to the best schools before returning to his homeland as an all-round Renaissance man. At this point, however, Pinness intervened to explain tactfully that a firstborn son’s virility came from contact with his native soil, taken from which ‘he will lose his strength like Samson and be like any other man’. And so the guests had to content themselves with asking the child to speak a few words to them about the Jewish people’s return to their ancestral land, the village’s ties to the earth, and so on and so forth.