The Blue Mountain(74)

‘But why did it matter to you?’ I asked Pinness.



He still remembered all the pros and cons from the day of Efrayim’s disappearance. ‘Look here, Baruch,’ he said, calm and affable, ‘apart from the fact that we had just buried your parents, there were a few matters of principle involved. Men and woman seeking to strike roots in the earth after two thousand years of alienation from it didn’t need to see a Jewish tightrope act; that fortune-teller might have foretold a future that didn’t square with our own vision; and the fraudulence of the magician could have misled our youth into looking for easy solutions to our problems – solutions whose whiff of opportunism would only have heightened the doubts that were already undermining our resolve.’

His voice dropped to the Russian whisper. ‘Besides which, we could never have allowed that queen of the cesspool – that rubber woman, that human chamber pot – to display her lewd obscenities. Who could have doubted for a moment that her unmentionable bumps and grinds would have a bad effect on our young farmers? Yea, for a whore is a deep ditch, and a strange woman is a narrow pit.’

We were sitting on the wooden bench by Grandfather’s grave. Pioneer Home had already overrun all of Grandfather’s land. Avraham and Rivka were abroad, Yosi was a career officer rising rapidly in the army, and Uri was driving tractors for his uncle in the Galilee.

The money piled up in the cowshed, and a good smell of flowers and well-nourished earth hung in the air. A few visitors circulated among the large gravestones, pleasantly crunching the gravel under their shoes: relatives of the deceased, high- school students writing sentimental essays, and hefty female youth group leaders waddling around inhaling the fragrance of the dappled shadows. A silvery shadow herself through the glimmering wings of the bees that swarmed about her, Tonya Rilov sat in her usual place on Margulis’s grave. ‘She’s his true gravestone,’ responded Uri with surprising pathos when I wrote and told him how old Tonya sat sucking and licking her fingers without cease on the grave of her beloved.

Busquilla strolled up and down the paths with two young Americans, the sons of a cosmetics manufacturer from New York by the name of Abe Cederkin, a one-time member of the Jordan commune who had sent them to pick out his grave site. They were in a state of high emotion.

‘Wonderful,’ they kept saying. ‘Marvellous.’

Busquilla thanked them for their compliments.

‘Our father worked in Baron de Rothschild’s winery for three weeks before his mother took sick and he had to leave Palestine,’ they told Busquilla.

‘A good pioneer had to think of his mama too,’ Busquilla beamed. He showed them a few available sites on a map of the cemetery. ‘The price varies according to the distance from Ya’akov Mirkin, may his memory sustain us,’ he explained.

‘Our father worked with Mirkin for four days in Petach Tikvah,’ said the two.

‘All Jews are brothers,’ replied Busquilla. ‘Who didn’t work with Mirkin at one time or another?’

‘Our father wants to know how Balalaika Tsirkin is doing,’ said the older son.

‘Mandolin,’ Busquilla corrected him. ‘Mandolin Tsirkin. Row five, plot seven, beneath that big olive over there. He was Mirkin’s best friend.’

‘So was our father,’ said the American.

‘We don’t give discounts,’ Busquilla declared. ‘All that matters is that your father, may he live to a ripe old age, belonged to the Second Aliyah.’

‘Naturally.’

‘You’ll give us a deposit now to reserve the place for you. The balance will be paid upon delivery. Of course, there’s no rush. This way to the office, please.’

Pinness watched Busquilla’s sales pitch with interest, then grunted and turned his back. He was a very old man. His eyesight was poor, and his cheeks and tongue moved incessantly, as if chewing an endless bowl of pabulum. He had put on a lot of weight too.

‘Yea, I’m an old man and heavy,’ he said of himself.

‘In the end Zeitouni backed down,’ he told me. ‘He agreed that only the bear and the strong man would perform.’





The show was subdued, professional, and rather disappointing.

‘It’s true that the bear could do arithmetic,’ said Uri, who liked to embellish the story of Zeitouni, ‘but any seven-year-old could have done as well.’

The strong man, on the other hand, aroused initial interest by braiding some thick nails together and smashing several bricks against his forehead. The farmers regarded him with curiosity, as if appraising a valuable work animal. Their excitement grew as he began to flex and ripple his muscles, which looked like large rats scrambling beneath his skin from his sloping shoulders to the two babyish hollows in the small of his back.