The Blue Mountain(77)

‘You had a good teacher,’ said David.

‘It even eats small birds, mice, and lizards,’ I said, proud of my erudition.

David was incredulous. ‘A grasshopper that eats mice?’ he marvelled. ‘The little devil!’

‘Small snakes too.’

David proposed a toast to grasshoppers. Then, tactfully, he began to ask me about myself and my family.

‘You’re an odd one,’ he said. ‘If you live here, you must have money, but you’re not like the others who have it.’

‘I’m an off-duty farmer,’ I answered. Off from the village. From my family. From the earth.

Later, when I return to the banker’s house, I like to look at Grandfather’s letters and notes and at the volume of Luther Burbank he left me.

‘No man, in death, ever presented a countenance more beautiful, peaceful, or serene. He was like a child asleep …

‘We laid Luther Burbank to rest under a cedar in the garden of the old farmhouse in which he lived for forty years and in the grounds of which he did most of his revolutionary and incalculably valuable work for his fellow man.

‘He used to go there, often, where the drooping limbs of the great tree sweep down to touch the earth and to form about the stalwart, friendly trunk a little quiet house of coolness with the sweet balsam of the needles …

‘That is why he was laid there for his long rest, … blanketed with flowers.’

In an old issue of Field, where I found some dried cyclamens and crocuses left for my prying fingers by my mother, Grandfather had underlined in blue a eulogy for his hero written by a certain A. Feldman. ‘He was seventy-seven when he died in his humble home in Santa Rosa among his plums, roses, grapevines, and prickly pears.’

‘Grapevines, prickly pears, thorns, and the narcotic henbane,’ wrote Grandfather in the brittle margin. These were the plants that had welcomed him to Palestine.

‘Blanketed with flowers’, I repeated out loud to myself. ‘Blanketed with flowers.’ But though he too fled from the woman he loved and planted good fruit-bearing trees, Burbank, that happy, prolific, and contented man, never cultivated his garden in the mud of Sisera, or was buried in the land promised to his forefathers, or had a constitution or someone to avenge.





             Zeitouni watched Efrayim grow smaller in the distance. Then, having scented an easy windfall and a quick come-uppance, he rubbed his hands and turned away.

‘Move yourself,’ he shouted at the strong man. ‘Go and clean out the big pot. Move, you bloody woman, you!’

The villagers rose uneasily and began to disperse. On Rilov’s insistence, Zeitouni and his troupe left the spring and spent the night outside the borders of the village.

‘Next morning we had a visit from Hussein, the old Bedouin from the Mazarib tribe, who had gone out at the crack of dawn to calm his dogs.’

Through the tatters of mist that still lay upon the fields, Hussein had seen the caravan and its bear cage heading east, followed by Efrayim with his soft, indefatigable, steady stride. Jean Valjean squatted on his shoulders, still asleep. Though the old Arab’s first thought was that Efrayim was taking the bull somewhere to mate, he felt uneasy all day. Deciding to inform someone, he went to see his old friend Rilov that evening.

‘Your bull man is gone,’ he called, knocking on the door of the secret arms cache. ‘Your bull man is gone.’

But Rilov was not in, because he was out driving a small truck over a secret back road to the village, taking the downhills with the engine cut and the headlights off, towing a new Czech combine full of dynamite. Hussein knew, of course, that Tonya could be found draining the last lees of sweet passion with Margulis among the hives in the orchard, but loath to upset the bees, he went to the Committee office. A search party was sent out at once, but Efrayim, Jean Valjean, Zeitouni, and his troupe were nowhere in sight.

‘I never saw my old pupil again,’ said Pinness. ‘And that was the last Mirkin saw of his son too.’

He wiped his glasses again. ‘How could a bull that weighed a ton and a half, the only one of its kind in the country, and someone who looked, so help me, like Efrayim, have disappeared? How could it have happened?’

‘Efrayim could have walked through a cave full of bats without being noticed,’ I said to him. ‘You yourself told me the story of Margulis’s cat.’

Pinness began to walk up and down among the graves.

‘When you first started this horrible business, I was dead set against it,’ he said, his false teeth slobbering in his mouth. ‘You may recall that I was even present at the Committee meeting you sent that crook of a lawyer to.’