The Blue Mountain(70)
No matter how many new teachers came to the village, Pinness never condemned them for their ignorance or wrong educational views.
‘It’s like tilting at windmills,’ he would say, ‘as when one doth hunt a partridge in the mountains.’
Students who got into trouble were sent to see him at home. Slowly the culprit would approach the hedge of arborvitae, open the green gate, walk up the flagstone path while being sprayed by the little sprinkler, and hesitantly open the never-locked door. Putting a friendly hand on the boy’s damp neck, Pinness would lead him to the little kitchen, make him a cup of tea from an essence that was always in readiness, and talk to him. Sometimes it was about field drainage; sometimes about the parable of the vineyard in the Book of Isaiah, or bisexual flowers and their amazing strategies for avoiding self-pollination. Long after returning to the classroom with a cracker or a piece of candy in hand, the child would still feel the old teacher’s warmth and the sweetness of the tea he had drunk.
In Pinness’s younger days he would yoke a waggon to a team of mules and take twenty pupils at a time – ‘Up you go, children, shake a leg there, my little flowers’ – for a spring hike that lasted two weeks.
Old Zeitser, who was very critical, once expressed the desire to come along on one of Pinness’s last spring hikes. Tired but excited, he returned smelling of campfire smoke and crushed wild garlic leaves to announce that ‘you don’t find teachers like that anymore’.
Pinness took us to Mount Gilboa to teach us David’s lament for Saul and Jonathan, to En-Dor when we read Tchernichovski’s poem about the witch from there whom King Saul consulted, and to the Jordan Valley when we studied the history of the Movement. He showed us the scent stations of the deer, the pollen trap of the bee orchid, and the sticky nets of the orb weaver in the rockrose. We, his little emissaries, gathered for him bits of ancient pottery from the old archaeological site, skink eggs from the fields, fossils from the limestone rocks of the hills. He sorted them, catalogued them, put them in boxes, and sent them to professors in Jerusalem and London. Beneath starry skies he took us out to the fields at night to see ‘the heavenly bodies’ and hear ‘the plainsong of the toads’.
‘Feyge died slowly,’ he told me while serving tea and biscuits. He threw me a suspicious look, as if uncertain whether I understood. ‘She was sick. She was overworked. Not everyone had the strength for those days. And she had given birth to several children in a row. Efrayim came right after Avraham, and your mother Esther a year after Efrayim. It was more than her body could take.’
I described the way I had seen Mandolin Tsirkin looking at Grandmother’s photograph.
‘All three of them loved your grandmother,’ he sighed. ‘They adored her and put her on a pedestal. They just didn’t love her as a man loves a woman.’
‘Fanya says they were like three brothers and a little sister.’
‘They were like three brothers and a little brother,’ said Pinness. ‘A little brother they were crazy about. Do you understand what I’m telling you?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
There’s something about my big, dense body that makes people think I’m slow-witted.
‘I know how attached you are to your grandfather. He’s really an outstanding personality. And I know how hard it is for you without him. But he loved another woman, and he waited for her and fought against her all his life. That’s something you must realise by now.’
‘Then why did he marry Grandmother?’
‘My child,’ Pinness laughed, ‘it was the Workingman’s Circle’s decision. Today that sounds like one of their practical jokes, but back then such things were really voted on. When I was in the commune in the Jordan Valley, there was once a meeting to determine which women should get pregnant and when. That’s when I left with Leah and the twins in her womb. The kibbutz next door had a huge debate about whether saying “good morning” and “good evening” was a bourgeois custom or not.
‘Maybe they were afraid she would end up with someone else. Maybe they simply didn’t think it through. She never understood the relations that had formed among them either. Why, all four of them used to swim naked together in the Sea of Galilee. Today no one can understand that, not even they themselves, not even that great scholar Meshulam Tsirkin. Knowest thou the time when the wild goats of the rock bring forth? Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? Out of whose womb came the ice? And the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it?’