The Blue Mountain(71)

He patted the back of my neck. ‘You’re a strange lad,’ he said. ‘Yosi’s a little muzhik, Uri reminds everyone of Efrayim, and you’re the old folk’s boy, Mirkin’s orphan. Come, my child, let me put you to work. You can help me out in the garden.’





Efrayim disappeared with Zeitouni’s troupe, carrying Jean Valjean on his shoulders, as soon as the week of mourning for my parents was over. The bomb thrown into their house had rolled beneath my bed, where it lay hissing and smoking. The crack of the window as it shattered woke my father, but precious seconds went by before he smelled the burning fuse, realised what had happened, and switched on the light. Raking me up in his arms blanket and all, he threw me through the window like a bundle. Then he threw himself on my mother, who twined her arms and legs around him and smiled in her sleep.

The villagers heard the explosion in the meeting house, where they were holding a general assembly. On the agenda was the replacement of several main irrigation pipes, an issue they were stormily debating. Together they burst from the building and ran toward the receding echoes of the blast, the crackle of burning walls, and the smell of roasted flesh.

By the time they passed Rilov’s yard, all was quiet again. The cows had stopped screaming and gone back to chewing their cud. The smoke had dispersed. In distant Berlin I picture Daniel Liberson waking from a nightmare and wailing, ‘I want to go home!’ like a baby in a voice that could be heard far and near. He shat in his trousers, sucked his thumb, and crawled like a lizard over his bed until his buddies wrapped him in a sheet and rocked him back to sleep. In the morning two Scotsmen who knew many languages and roads arrived to escort him on the long way back to Palestine.

The leather pants from the Tyrol, the wedding dress, Efrayim’s letters to Binyamin – all went up in flames. ‘The only thing we could hear in the darkness was an infant’s hurt sobs. We searched with our torches and found you crawling half naked in the grass, covered with large moths.’

I was two years old.

‘We’ll raise him with Yosi and Uri,’ said Avraham.

But Grandfather wrapped me in a blanket and took me home with him. All night long he cleaned the soot and the charred powder of moth wings off me and tweezed little pieces of glass from my body. In the morning he dressed me and took me to stand with him by the coffins, which were already on display in the meeting house, draped in the flag and black bunting.

Rilov was there, dazed and overwhelmed by failure. ‘At least they died in their bed,’ was the best comfort he could offer Grandfather, who smiled wanly.

‘Yes, Rilov, you’re right. They did die in their bed,’ he said, patting the Watchman on the shoulder where his skin was grooved by his rifle strap.

‘That idiot,’ Uri said to me. ‘It runs in that whole family. What else can you expect from a man whose grandfather was the only Jew in Russia to rape Cossacks?’

‘Mirkin is raising another orphan,’ the villagers said. Shlomo and Rachel Levin came to make lunch and returned to offer their help. But Grandfather told them, ‘Avraham will run the farm and I’ll raise the child by myself.’

Jean Valjean rubbed up against the cypress trees that bordered the cemetery. Efrayim and Avraham shovelled earth onto my parents’ graves. National eminences and leaders of the Movement came to give speeches. Grandfather held me in his arms while Tsirkin and Liberson stood like two snapshots on either side of him.

Afterwards the crowd broke into little groups that laid the usual flowers and pebbles on the graves.

‘Come, Baruch,’ said Grandfather to me. ‘Schnell, schnell.’

‘You laughed because you knew those words from home.’ He lifted me up and put me on his shoulders.

The village got over the tragedy. ‘We were made of the toughest of cloths.’ There wasn’t a house without its dead, whether from malaria or from a bullet, from the kick of a wild mule or at the hands of the deceased himself. ‘Or of the nation we served, or of the Movement and its dreams.’

‘In the Diaspora too the Jewish people spills its blood,’ wrote Liberson of my parents in the village newsletter. ‘Yet there Jewish blood is as pointless in death as in life. Here there is meaning to both our lives and our deaths, because our Homeland and our Freedom call to us. May our determination be redoubled by our grief. We have chosen life, and we shall surely live.’





            25



It was blind chance, said Pinness, concluding a conversation about the theory of evolution, that Zeitouni had returned to perform in the village right after my parents’ death.