The Blue Mountain(73)
According to Uri, Efrayim had seen such a woman once before, during the war, in a port city of Algeria. Lowering themselves by ropes from the roof and scaling the walls like spiders, his commando unit had just captured the Foreign Legion fortress commanding the harbour. After tossing grenades through all the windows, they set out to clear the city of snipers.
Someone opened fire on them from one of the houses. The men stormed inside, shot the sniper, and found themselves surrounded by frightened girls dressed in see-through fabric and coughing from the dust of bullet holes and smashed powder jars. When the smoke of battle had cleared, the whores, convinced the soldiers were American, asked for chewing gum. Captain Stoves, Efrayim’s platoon commander, borrowed a lipstick from one of them and stepped outside. As he was scrawling ‘Off Limits For All Ranks’ on the front door, he was shot in the left knee and forced to drag himself back inside.
Though the girls wore heavy silk veils over their faces, Uri related excitedly, their nipples could gauge the width of each commando’s shoulders through their lace clothes. Pouring spicy perfumes on Captain Stoves’s wound, they dressed it and laid him down on a soft divan to watch their act. Its principals were two tall Senegalese whose tribal morés allowed them to copulate only standing up, in such a manner that the male partner bumped his head against the arched alabaster ceiling upon climax; a young Hungarian with a velvet-lined oral cavity and fleshy flower petals fluttering in the depths of her throat; and an Anatolian shepherdess whose armpits, perfumed with tincture of nasturtium buds, sprouted long braids festooned with coloured ribbons, while her pubic hair – as could be seen by anyone giving it a gentle tug to make sure it wasn’t a wig – fell in a dense, curly curtain from her navel to her knees. There was also a Communist from Cracow, a Jewess with thin eyebrows who demanded absolute silence in her boudoir so that she could concentrate on speaking from between her legs. ‘Not that Efrayim understood a word, because he knew no Yiddish,’ Uri rhapsodised. Each time he told the story, the marvels of the prostitutes grew greater.
They did their best to entertain the platoon, and ‘Efrayim learned in a night whatever our veterinarian’s wife still hadn’t taught him.’ Coloured fountains shot up merrily from the establishment’s bidets, and trained pornithological jackdaws cawed in all the languages they knew to arouse the young lads and ladies. One bright talent performed the dance of the rubber woman, which ended with her applauding herself by clapping the soles of her feet behind her back. Zeitouni’s rubber woman, Uri explained, reminded Efrayim of the little silver bells on the toes of this Algerian harlot, which had gone on tinkling in his ears when her dance was done, in a purple-canopied bed on the building’s second storey.
Pinness saw them setting up camp by the spring and didn’t know what to do. Normally one spoke to Rilov in such cases, but Pinness and Rilov weren’t on speaking terms. In the end he ran to tell Margulis. Margulis told Tonya, who hurried outside and knocked on the iron door of the arms cache.
She was greeted by a flashlight and the twin barrels of a shotgun.
‘What do you want?’ demanded Rilov, grabbing his bullwhip, jumping on his horse, and galloping off to the fields as soon as he was told that Zeitouni had arrived.
Like all the founding fathers, Rilov knew Zeitouni and didn’t like him.
‘Care for a bite?’ asked Zeitouni, reaching for a ladle and removing the cover from a pot as Rilov rode up.
‘What do you want here, Zeitouni?’ snapped Rilov, rearing his horse.
‘We’ll have something to eat, put on a show, and be on our way.’
‘You’ll have nothing to eat, put on no show, and be on your way!’ Rilov corrected him, adding his usual threat about out-of-bed deaths.
Zeitouni smiled. ‘This is our livelihood,’ he said in a syrupy voice. ‘And it’s all the same to me where I die.’
‘You’re not dealing with just anyone!’ Rilov threatened him. ‘I’m Committee!’
Zeitouni, however, was made of sterner stuff than train engineers and argued unperturbedly back. Rilov’s first thought was to call Mandolin Tsirkin to swamp the circus owner again. Despite appearances to the contrary, he was by no means an extremist and ‘made do with reaching for his whip, which lay folded in his saddlebag’.
Just as the strong man, reading Rilov’s mind, was about to desert the rock he had been sitting on and join the fray, men and women began arriving from the village in animated conversation, eager to have their minds taken off the oppressive atmosphere of mourning that had lain over them for a week. While Pinness ran after them, stumbling over the uneven ground as he shouted at them to come back, Zeitouni signalled his troupe to begin and shinnied up a large palm tree to direct it.