The Blue Mountain(75)

Just as he let out a mighty roar, however, all flushed and quivering with the pleasurable exertion of lifting his ‘Apollo Weights’, a pair of train wheels joined by their heavy axle, Efrayim came tripping down from my parents’ graves to see the show with Jean Valjean on his back, a ton and a half of horns, hooves, crème, and meat.

The villagers grinned. The strong man stared at Efrayim and the bull as if delirious, began to sway dangerously, dropped his dumb-bells, and tumbled to the ground. Efrayim’s green eye peered at him through the screen of his beekeeper’s mask.

‘That’s fabulous,’ shouted Zeitouni, hurrying over to Efrayim. ‘Fantastic! And I love your hat too.’ According to Pinness, he was quite out of breath ‘from avarice and the prospect of settling old scores’.

Efrayim stepped aside with a yawning Jean Valjean on his shoulders to watch the mangy bear jump through a flaming hoop, whimpering with pain.

‘How much do you want to appear?’ asked Zeitouni.

A mutter of protest ran through the crowd. Efrayim turned himself and the bull around to face it.

‘For them it’s on the house,’ he said, stripping off his mask.

There was not a peep from the audience.

‘Good afternoon, folks,’ Efrayim said.

‘We all stared at the ground in shame and horror.’



My uncle turned back to Zeitouni and his troupe. Taking one look at him, the strong man began to vomit metal screws and slabs of concrete. The magician’s doves shut their eyes. ‘I see much fire and great pain!’ screamed the fortune-teller.

‘Shut up, you moron,’ Zeitouni brayed at her.

‘So, Zeitouni, how do you like my appearance?’ asked Efrayim.

‘I couldn’t care less,’ said Zeitouni. ‘Man looketh on the outward show, but Zeitouni looketh on the heart. You’ll make a fortune with me.’

‘I don’t need it,’ Efrayim replied.

Zeitouni gave a barely perceptible eye signal to the rubber woman, who squirmed over to Efrayim like a serpent, wound her ankles around her neck, and rocked back and forth on her back like an upended turtle. Freeing one leg, she ran it all over herself. Her flat belly rippled. She laid one cheek on her mons, which bulged conspicuously.

Pinness coughed delicately. ‘That’s the word for the fatty tissue beneath the pubic hair,’ he explained with the utmost patience. ‘She was like the promise of every forbidden pleasure that the body secretly dreams of,’ he said. ‘A horrible, disgusting sight. An alley cat. A hyena.’





Since his return to the village, Efrayim had been without a woman. The wickeder gossips claimed that he got his thrills from Jean Valjean’s copulations. As a young man, they recalled, he had sometimes slept with the veterinarian’s wife, a coarse, oversexed woman who liked to watch her husband castrate colts and calves. Now he felt his stomach kink with a hot, phantasmal hate. Moist memories of purple canopies crawled up his loins. He swivelled his one eye from the rubber woman to Zeitouni.

‘I’ll be back to talk to you this evening,’ he said. ‘Wait for me here.’

And bounding Jean Valjean on his shoulders to get a better grip, he glided home as if floating on air in his soft desert boots.

‘Seen from behind at a distance, the two of them looked like a giant boletus on a tiny stem,’ Pinness said.



He rose from the bench with effort, took off his glasses, which were foggy despite the heat, and began wiping them with a corner of his blue shirt, making the same circular movement over and over.

‘Who is that over there, Baruch? Isn’t that Bodenkin?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

Yitzchak Bodenkin, one of the first settlers in the Jordan Valley, now a half-deaf old man with a mouth as limp and twisted as last year’s blade of grass, was slowly weeding the row of zinnias by the gate.

‘What is he doing here?’

‘He came a week ago,’ Busquilla explained. ‘He ran away from the kibbutz isolation ward. He walked all the way, arrived half dead, and asked permission to stay until his other half dies too.’

‘And that’s where he sleeps at night? Out in the open like a dog?’

‘Of course not,’ I said indignantly. ‘Weeding the flowers was his idea. He sleeps in the old cowshed.’

‘In the cowshed?’

‘I offered to put him up in the cabin, but he would rather be with Zeitser.’

‘Like the elephant who comes home to die,’ said Pinness.

He went over to say hello to Bodenkin. The old man didn’t recognise him.

‘Don’t keep me from my work, boy,’ he grumbled. ‘After lunch I’ll take you to the fair and buy you a lollipop.’