The Blue Mountain(65)
‘I know Efrayim. He did it for revenge,’ said Major Stoves, who spent a whole day ransacking the Rilov place with his men without ever suspecting that the arms were cached in the septic tank.
Rilov kept mum.
‘He murdered my cat Bulgakov,’ said Riva Margulis.
Since her cat’s death she had made a bastion of her storage shed, stocking it with cleaning supplies, Lysol, detergents, and thousands of rags while talking constantly about the price she had paid for the Jewish people’s return to its land.
Armed with brooms and rags, all the women of the village fought a daily battle against the dust from the cart wheels. Riva, however, was an exceptional advocate of cleanliness, and after Bulgakov’s death when the dirt drifting in through the windows stained even her purest memories, her obsession grew worse. To the three rooms in her house that were off limits she now added the bathroom, having discovered that drops of water from the shower left tiny white spots on the floor when they evaporated. ‘Tile leprosy’, she called it, sending her family to the laundry room or the cattle trough when anyone needed to wash.
The whole village saw that she was losing her sanity, but Margulis and his sons, nourished by the purest and most fragrant of all natural substances, were by nature equable and forgiving. Their lives with the bees had taught them to respect all hard workers, and they not only failed to reprimand the mad Riva but gave in to her every demand. Indeed, on the anniversary of Bulgakov’s death Margulis bought his wife an American vacuum cleaner to assuage her grief and give her something new to live for.
When Riva opened the big cardboard carton with its strong smell of still remembered luxury, her heart skipped a beat from pure ecstasy. For the rest of the evening she almost forgave her husband for putting Efrayim up to killing Bulgakov. Her whole body throbbed to the powerful motor that sucked up the dirt and left clean pathways behind it, but when she opened the machine a blissful week later, she saw that the filth was now inside. Hurt and indignant, she realised that Margulis had tricked her. Far from getting rid of dirt, the vacuum cleaner simply transferred it to another, better-concealed place. ‘Riva discovered the Law of the Conservation of Crap,’ said Uri when he heard the story.
After scrubbing the vacuum cleaner inside and out, Riva wrapped its disassembled parts in clean, soft linen, locked them in the bathroom, and went to scream at her husband in his bee shed.
‘Your machine just sweeps everything under the rug,’ she yelled. ‘I know that’s your system. It’s the way you do everything!’
One look at his wife was enough to convince Margulis that not even pure pollen could calm her.
‘Don’t come any closer,’ he said. ‘The bees might attack you.’
He himself could move among the hives without rippling the air. Through a curtain of angry worker bees prepared to defend him against all comers, he scrutinised his wife. Never before had he noticed the thick, flabby wattles that had developed on her knees from years of vigorous floor scrubbing, or the stubbiness of her fingers, which had shrunk to half their length from wielding too many rags dipped in ammonia.
‘Leave me alone, Riva,’ he said. ‘You’re not in your right mind.’
That night he went to Tonya’s, waiting outside in the dark until he saw Rilov head for his septic tank with a flashlight and a machine gun. As soon as the little trapdoor with its disguise of earth and straw shut behind him, Margulis entered the house, his dripping hands staining the doorknobs with myrrh. Extending two sweet forthright fingers to Tonya, he told her that he was agreeable.
I don’t remember Efrayim at all. Sometimes I try dredging my memory for a masked head leaning over my bed, its green eye protruding at me through the holes of a net. The mind-boggling picture of a man with a bull on his back is nowhere to be found in me either.
Nor do I remember my mother and father. I was two years old when the Mirkins were struck their double blow, the death of my parents and the disappearance of Efrayim with Jean Valjean. That’s when Grandfather took me to live with him.
Voices, mostly women’s, were heard to say in the village that an old widower was incapable of giving an infant ‘the proper home environment’, but Grandfather paid them no heed. He had raised children before, and now he simply added me to his mixture of olives, bereavement, and sugar cubes.
My loneliness and longing blur his image in my mind. Although sometimes I can conjure up a full portrait of him, pale and precise, mostly all I glimpse are scattered details that suddenly shine in a strong light, like a winter field when a sunburst pours through the clouds. A white arm resting by a glass of tea; the movement of a shoulder; a cheek and moustache leaning over me; the thin trunks of his legs, gnarled by work and years.