The Blue Mountain(72)
Like the obscene shouts from the top of the water tower, the recurrent visits of the hyena, the annual arrival of the Russian pelicans, and Shulamit’s reunion with Grandfather – so the tawdry acrobat had come back to the fields of the village. Two tall, emaciated horses pulled a sorry-looking canvas-covered waggon trailing an old bear in a rusty cage. Juniper coals, pancake make-up, trompe l’oeil, and legerdemain emanated from the little caravan.
Zeitouni was a former Hasid from Tiberias who had lost his home and family in a flood. According to Rachel Levin, who knew him from then, he had shaved off his beard after the disaster, thrown his skullcap and prayer shawl into the torrents of brown water that had carried off everything dear to him, sold the Torah scrolls that were an ancient family heirloom, and begun to wander with his troupe between Damascus, Jerusalem, Hebron, and Beirut.
It was thus that he arrived in the Valley, so that his appearance among us and Efrayim’s vanishing were all the fault of the flood. Grandfather, however, who believed neither in chance, omens, nor blind destiny, but only in flight and escape, was sure that Efrayim would have disappeared in any case and that the villagers and not Zeitouni were to blame.
‘Bury me in my earth,’ he wrote on a piece of paper. He knew that I collected all his notes. He had planned his revenge with a clear and calculating precision, marking weak points and baring soft underbellies.
At first Zeitouni made a living from petty theft and ordinary miracles of the kind known to him from his Hasidic life. He sold brass amulets to childless women, cured the pox by numerology, set piles of wet wood on fire with cunning incantations, and made rain by invoking the Tetragrammaton. But though such deeds aroused fervent hopes in various places up and down the Land of Israel, Zeitouni’s pitiful wonders inspired only scorn and compassion in the Valley. ‘We saw enough of that nonsense in the Hasidic courts of the Ukraine,’ declared Eliezer Liberson to the nods of the other founding fathers.
At the end of his first appearance, which took place the year the village was founded, Zeitouni was received with less than overwhelming applause. When the troupe’s performance was over he was approached by Mandolin Tsirkin, a merry young descendant of Hasidic rabbis himself on his mother’s side and of leading Bolsheviks on his father’s. Brandishing his hoe, Tsirkin proceeded to dig a deep ditch. The deeper he dug, the louder the earth growled, until finally, when the hoe struck the crust of the pent-up swamp, sharp blades of rushes popped up in a loathsome cloud of mosquitoes and lanced Zeitouni’s delicate skin. Muscular leeches shinnied up his skinny calves and hung on there, while pale worms sought to drag him down into the depths. He stood screaming every prayer he knew until Rilov forced him to sing the old Valley favourite ‘Friend of the Frog’ and whisked him to safety with the tip of his whip.
‘Sleight-of-hand and silly tricks, how low can you get,’ commented Pinness. ‘Here today and gone tomorrow. He’s one big non-productive vagabondish bluff.’
Efrayim had spent such a quiet week by my parents’ fresh graves on the hilltop that neither Feyge, Esther, Binyamin, nor any of the other dead noticed he was there. He did not even speak when Jean Valjean placidly cropped the juicy grass growing between the graves and lapped up the flowers on the gravestones with his long tongue. He drank from the cemetery sprinkler, ate the fruit of the big jujube tree on the next hill, and roasted partridges who never knew if what hit them was a wildcat, hawk, or polecat. At night he watched the Little Owl bow and scrape on the cemetery fence, regarding him with phosphorescent golden eyes.
On the seventh day, as my uncle rose to go home, Zeitouni’s entourage slipped out of the shadows of the eucalyptus woods, crossed the track formerly used by the British ack-ack guns, and pitched camp by the spring. It wasn’t long before small fires crackled beneath iron tureens and good smells of roast meat and potage rose in wisps of smoke that drifted up Efrayim’s mangled nostrils.
The wandering players ate their meal while chatting in loud tones that carried through the clear, translucent air. Among them was a thin, top-hatted Assyrian magician who was also the bear trainer, an Arab fortune-teller whose enormous buttocks thumped together as she walked to the tinkle of the coins in her brassiere, and a strong man who had split the logs for the fire between his forefinger and thumb. Drawing the curtain on the caravan, Zeitouni took from the rear a small wooden box the size of a fruit crate, out of which wiggled a double-jointed rubber woman who snaked softly like an adder on the ground. Through the shimmering heat waves Efrayim’s sharp eye saw her brown-grey skin glitter as her boneless body, freed from its bonds, coiled and slithered with soft susurrations.