The Blue Mountain(78)

I said nothing.

‘Don’t think I changed my mind because of the poppycock he talked there. A cemetery is a legitimate business … a branch of agriculture … a way of making a living from the earth … You should have been ashamed of yourselves! I was when I heard him. I was mortified. Who could have imagined that a grandson of Mirkin’s would ever say such things!’

‘And now?’

Pinness laughed. ‘I’m a different man now. The dykes are down. As a matter of fact, I’m saving up my pennies for you to bury me.’

‘What are you talking about, Ya’akov,’ I exclaimed heatedly. ‘How can you believe I’d take money from you?’

‘You’ll bury me for nothing, eh?’ said Pinness.

Though I could tell from his face that I had said something wrong, I couldn’t work out what it was.

‘My child,’ Pinness said, patting me on the cheek. ‘My child.’ Its skin smoothed by chalks and ethers, its grip shaped by flutes and pens, his soft hand brushed my face and curled around my neck. I shut my eyes.

‘You can be proud of what you’ve done here, Baruch. Sometimes we do the right things for the wrong reasons. But I’ll find myself a grave somewhere else.’

He walked slowly, his hand outstretched as though still on my head like Grandfather’s. Like the music of Mandolin Tsirkin. The icy touch of Grandmother’s forehead. The downy fuzz of the baby doves on the roof of the village feed shed.

Thirty-eight years old and weighing twenty stone, the owner of a seaside villa, I am still Pinness’s pupil and Grandfather’s child. I still wait for the feel of Grandfather’s moustache on my neck, for his stories, for the sliced tomato with rock salt that he put on the table for my breakfast.

The thin, ticklish warmth of soil against my toes. The sweet blood that saves from malaria and depression. The poison that never loses its potency. Shifris will appear, ragged and mouldy, to the pied piping of the symphonies of Mahler. Storks on the chimney of the old house in Makarov, dreaming of the frogs of Zion.

The boom of the surf through the window of my big house. The rustle of money sacks. Two hundred and seventy-four old men and women, one mandolin, and one old mule are buried in my graveyard. Pioneers, practising idealists, and capitalist traitors.





            27



Uri and I could read at the age of five. Yosi refused to learn and sat silently beside us while Grandfather drew words for us on paper. Grandfather did not teach us each letter separately like Pinness but started with whole words. ‘They’ll learn to recognise the letters on their own,’ he said. ‘Single letters don’t mean a thing. They only come alive when joined to others.’

In nursery we played in the sandpit Efrayim and his Gang built after the great chocolate robbery and rode on the old iron-wheeled Case tractor that was donated to us rather than to Founder’s Cabin over Meshulam Tsirkin’s objections.

Sometimes Levin came from his nearby shop with cold juice or fresh rolls for us. We took the rolls to the woods behind the meeting house where the wild garlic grew – a last remnant of the days when anopheles mosquitoes warred on us and the water buffalo stuck out its tongue at us – and ate them with the long, odorous leaves sandwiched in.

‘Nature’s bread spread,’ our nursery teacher Ruth called the wild garlic. ‘Now let’s go and have Nature’s bread spread.’

Wearing shorts, white cotton hats, and identical crude sandals that Bernstein the shoemaker stitched for us, we all trooped off singing to the woods. Every year before Passover Bernstein received us in his cabin. Placing weights in our hands to keep our excitable feet glued to the strips of leather he stood us on, he sketched our soles with a rough pencil that tickled our big toes.

‘No talking, children,’ he warned us through clenched teeth, because his mouth was full of nails. At least once a week we heard him screaming from pain in the bathroom behind the shoe shop.

‘In the days before you were born, we didn’t have such footwear. Avraham went around in sandals cut from old tyres, while your mother and Efrayim went barefoot.’

We walked to the woods in single file. Because I was the biggest, I was always at the end. Yosi kept straying out of line moodily, looking for round pebbles for his catapult, and Uri skipped along beneath Ruth’s dress with nothing showing but his calves and feet, which resembled the hind legs of a bee inside a big, sweet flower. Ruth, a placid look on her broad face, called to mind a quadruped with two large, unshod forepaws and two little rear ones in sandals.

‘There’s more to that boy than meets the eye,’ jested Pinness affectionately at the sight.