The Blue Mountain(4)

‘Mirkin,’ he said, ‘he’s been shouting again.’

‘Who was it this time?’ asked Grandfather.

‘I’m screwing Liberson’s granddaughter,’ said Pinness loudly and emphatically. Shutting the window apprehensively, he added, ‘Not me, whoever shouted.’

‘That’s wonderful,’ said Grandfather. ‘A most accomplished fellow. Would you care for some tea?’

I strained to hear their conversation. More than once I had been caught eavesdropping behind open windows, a secret listener among fruit trees and bales of hay. With a practised movement I would wrest myself free of the hands gripping me and walk away with head high and shoulders squared, silent and untouchable. Later, when the injured party came to complain, Grandfather wouldn’t believe a word of it.

I heard his old feet scrape across the wooden floor, followed by the pouring of water, the tinkle of teaspoons against thin glass, and loud slurps. I had stopped being surprised long ago by the way the old people of the village could hold burning glasses in their hands and calmly swallow boiling water.

‘The nerve of him!’ said Pinness. ‘How could he shout like that? Shooting his foul mouth off in the trees!’

‘It’s just someone’s idea of a joke,’ said Grandfather.

‘But what should I do?’ groaned the old schoolteacher, who took it as his personal failure. ‘How can I show my face to the village?’

He rose and began pacing relentlessly. I could hear him cracking his knuckles in chagrin.

‘Boys will be boys,’ said Grandfather. ‘Why get so worked up about it?’

The chuckle creeping into his voice enraged Pinness even more. ‘Screaming at the top of his lungs so that the whole world can hear him!’

‘Look, Ya’akov,’ said Grandfather soothingly, ‘we live in a small place. If someone goes too far, he’ll be caught by the night watchmen and the Committee will take it up at a meeting. Why get all worked up?’

‘But I’m the teacher,’ stormed Pinness. ‘The teacher, Mirkin, the educator! It’s me they’ll blame.’

Filed away in Meshulam Tsirkin’s documentary archives was Pinness’s famous declaration at the 1923 Conference of the Movement: ‘The biological ability to bear children is no guarantee of the ability to educate them.’

‘No one’s going to blame you for some horny young ass,’ said Grandfather sharply. ‘You’ve given the village and the Movement a splendid generation of youngsters.’

‘I can picture every one of them,’ said Pinness softly. ‘They come to the first form as tender as baby rushes, like flowers that I weave into the brocade of our life.’

Pinness never spoke of ‘years’, only of ‘forms’. I smiled to myself in the darkness, knowing what would come next. Pinness liked to compare education to agriculture. When talking about his work, he was prone to expressions like ‘virgin earth’, ‘an unpruned vine’, ‘irrigation holes’. His pupils were saplings. Each form was a furrow.

‘Mirkin,’ he continued emotionally, ‘I may not be a farmer like the rest of you, but I too sow and reap. They’re my vineyard, my orchard. It only takes one rotten apple …’ He almost choked on his own despair. ‘Yea, and it brought forth wild grapes.… Screwing! The issue of horses and the flesh of asses!’

Like all his pupils, I was used to his quoting from the Bible, but I had never heard verses like these from him before. Unwittingly I moved in my bed and froze at once. The floorboards creaked beneath the weight of my body, and the two of them fell silent for a minute. At the age of fifteen I weighed close to sixteen and a half stone and could grab a large calf by the horns and wrestle it to the ground. My size and strength were marvelled at in the village, the farmers joking that Grandfather must be feeding me colostrum, the vim-giving first milk of nursing cows.

‘Not so loud,’ said Grandfather. ‘You’ll wake the child.’

The child; that’s what he called me until the day he died. ‘My child.’ Even when dark hair had sprouted all over my body. Even when my voice had changed and my shoulders had grown broad and beefy. My cousin Uri couldn’t stop laughing when our voices began to crack. I was the only boy in the village, he said, whose voice went from baritone to bass.

Pinness uttered a few sentences in Russian, the language the founding fathers switched to for angry whispers, after which I heard a metallic pop that was the sound of Grandfather opening a can of homemade olives with a screwdriver. Now he would place a full saucer of them on the table. As soon as Pinness, who had a great liking for anything hot, sour, or salty, began to devour them, his mood would lighten at once.