The Blue Mountain(39)

‘“Comrade Rilov: Mules eat barley, and beer is liquid barley.

‘“Comrade Liberson: Rilov is being sophistical.

‘“Comrade Rilov: What about the turkeys who drank wine?

‘“Comrade Tsirkin: No one wasted good wine on turkeys. It’s just one of Mirkin’s stories.

‘“Comrade Rilov: After a little tipple, the mules work like the very devil.

‘“Comrade Liberson: The request is rejected. We will not introduce alcohol into our work life.

‘“Comrade Rilov: The Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle put away gallons of vodka.



‘“Comrade Liberson: We thank Comrade Rilov for the comparison, but there were no mules in the Workingman’s Circle, only jackasses.

‘“Comrade Rilov: I’ll brew my own beer, then.

‘“Comrade Tsirkin: We did not come to the Land of Israel to treat our animals to champagne breakfasts.”’

The audience would laugh and applaud, but everyone knew that Rilov had planted two rows of hops and that his mules could plough twice as much in a day as any other team. To this day the villagers remember the great steaming puddles they left behind. And yet even Zeitser, who was an expert on both mules and barley, declared that he was ‘dead set against such decadence’.

Long years in armies, communes, and all kinds of rural settlements had made the two mules callous. Seeing a shy, innocent youth, they decided to have a bit of fun with him. They baulked when he tried to harness them, tangled the reins, pooped on the traces, and made each other laugh with hideous belches. My father, however, was an industrious young man, and while his hopeless awkwardness amused the villagers, his persistence and punctuality won their admiration. The story is still told about how he left Rilov unconscious in the slops ditch after Deborah, the vicious milk cow, had sent the Watchman sprawling with a kick to the head.

‘But I cover him with a sack so he not catch cold,’ apologised my father, who ‘hated being late to the dairy’, to Tonya.

In Germany he had studied at a technical school, and within a month of his arrival he had designed and built for Rilov’s calves an automated watering system that was the talk of the Valley. He also scrubbed the cowshed with stiff brushes and Lysol and hooked it up to the phonograph in his cabin.

‘Even Rilov’s wife Tonya admitted that Mahler increased the cows’ milk production,’ Avraham once told me during one of our rare conversations.

‘I was walking in the village one day when the strains of Beethoven drew me irresistibly to your father’s cabin. I went over and peeked in the window. Your father was lying in bed listening to music, his hair a golden haystack on his forehead. He had a phonograph that his parents had sent him from Germany. They managed to get it to him before Hitler burned them.’

Pinness knocked and entered. Benjamin rose, clicked his heels, and bowed. Three things happened that day. My father’s name was Hebraised from Benjamin Schnitzer to Binyamin Shenhar; he received his first private Hebrew lesson; and he lent Pinness two records.

‘Your father was a hardworking, serious student. He never learned to speak Hebrew fluently, but his spelling was letter-perfect.’





There was in the village a merry band of youngsters known as ‘the Gang’. These were the founders’ children who had already reached adolescence.

‘The whole village forgave their mischief because they were new Jews, children of the earth, suntanned and straight-backed,’ said Pinness. ‘At night they stole candy and coffee from the co-op and guns from the nearby British airfield. Sometimes Rilov sent them out to the fields with whips to chase off the Arab flocks that ate the young grain. Every year, at the ceremony of first fruits and newborn children, they put on a Wild East show, galloping past the audience while standing on their horses like Ukrainian bandits.’

After they had cleaned out all the chocolate in the co-op, Shlomo Levin came to Pinness to demand a tête-à-tête.

‘The hooligans did it to get me,’ he said. ‘They look down on me because I’m not a farmer like their parents.’

‘They did it because they felt like eating chocolate. The predilection for sweets is a biological universal,’ Pinness said.

‘They’d never dare steal from a farmer,’ said Levin. ‘If they can’t afford chocolate, let them eat kamardin.’

‘Just last week they pinched two jars of honey from Margulis’s shed,’ Pinness replied.

‘That’s exactly how I was treated when I came to this country,’ continued Levin, deafened by anger. ‘You people never had any appreciation of plain ordinary work. You were too busy acting in your great Theatre of Redemption and Rebirth. Every ploughing was a return to the earth, every chicken laid the first Jewish egg after two thousand years of exile. Ordinary potatoes, the same kartoffelakh you ate in Russia, became tapuchei adamah, “earth apples”, to show how you were at one with Nature. You had your pictures taken with rifles and hoes, you talked to the toads and the mules, you dressed up as Arabs, you thought you could fly through the air.’