The Blue Mountain(81)
There was a sharp rap on the window. It was Yosi’s falcon, beating its wings against the glass pane. Hurriedly I ducked and crawled away. Yosi had taken the red falcon from its nest when it was a fledgling covered with white fuzz, hissing and bristling angrily at the world. For three months, while it grew and got its wing feathers, he fed it mice and lizards that he caught. Hopping and stumbling about on its sharp talons, the bird followed its master around the yard as faithfully as a dog. When the time was ripe, Yosi took it up to the roof of the cowshed and tossed it in the air to teach it to fly. The falcon learned but did not fly away. It remained in our yard, trilling and calling for Yosi all the time. You couldn’t leave a window open for a moment, because it would fly inside, tearing curtains and smashing vases in its delight. When all its fellow birds had already left for points south, it alone remained behind.
‘Highly unusual,’ said Pinness. ‘It’s highly unusual for a red falcon to winter in this country. Such loyalty!’
‘Get that damn bird out of here!’ screamed Rivka.
Uri began to giggle.
‘You should be glad it comes to us and not to your father,’ said Avraham.
Rivka’s father, Tanchum Peker the saddler, had waxed enthusiastic when his grandson decided to raise a falcon. ‘We’ll make a hunting bird of him,’ he said, his bald head glistening with anticipated excitement. Peker had once been one of the busiest men in the village, a stitcher and mender of harnesses, bridles, reins, and traces whose hames were famous in the Valley for never chafing an animal’s neck. Grandfather once described to me how Peker had cut strips of leather into whips, running his knife along the large hides while grunting, tongue out with the effort. ‘He had such a sure hand that the tip of the whip began to quiver as soon as it was free.’ Peker’s business declined when draught animals were replaced by tractors, but the odour of leather and saddle soap clung to his fingers and boots, and the wooden walls of his workshop continued to smell of it.
‘A trained falcon like officers and noblemen used to have,’ Peker dreamed.
As a young man he had served as a cavalry adjutant in Czar Nikolai’s army.
‘Those were the days,’ he liked to say with a nostalgia that annoyed the founding fathers. ‘Officers with swords and gold epaulettes, daughters of landed aristocrats, balls, hooped dresses, waltzes, sweet whisperings in the garden …’
Peker was fond of describing the annual ball of the provincial police inspector. ‘They served enormous river fish, huge pike and perches. I was given my fill too, and then the dancing began.’
‘And a yid like you, Peker, did you also dance and whisper in the garden?’ Liberson asked scornfully. ‘Or did you just lick the boots of those who did?’
‘I danced,’ answered Tanchum Peker proudly.
‘With the major’s livery boy or with the governor’s mare?’
Peker did not reply. It was he who had stitched the saddles and girths for the horses of the Watchmen’s Society, thus earning him the place in the pages of history that all the elders of the village hungered for. The index of The Watchmen’s Book seemed to him a sufficiently honorable memorial to make any further acknowledgment from posterity quite unnecessary.
Grandfather couldn’t stand him, because when the Workingman’s Circle had worked as shepherds during World War One, the Watchmen had harassed them, stealing their flocks and spreading rumours that kept their employers from paying them. Hunger and hard work took their toll on the four and reduced them to a single pair of shoes, which they gave to Feyge. For hours on end Tsirkin sat playing his mandolin, gulping the strummed notes to appease his growling stomach. Feyge’s skin was covered with boils. Haggard and sun-scorched, she forced herself to keep going, reaching out a weary hand to stroke the heads of her comrades.
‘My boys,’ she called them. ‘My loves.’
Her boys wrapped their feet in rags. No longer did they float on air. Their skin grew tough and heavy, and hunger pinned them to the ground. Had they stood motionless, I could not have seen them, because they would have been as invisible as clods of earth. Every other day Tsirkin cooked a gluey porridge of corn and chickpeas in a tin stove he had built in a pit with a broken clay jug for a chimney.
Years later, when they no longer smelled of the smoke, Grandfather and his friends still bore the Watchmen a grudge. ‘Those satraps who wanted to found a commune of Arab horses in the Galilee,’ he called them.
* * *
‘A hunting falcon,’ said Peker, taking the old awls and crooked needles from his toolbox and sitting himself down at his saddler’s bench with its bulky wooden vices in the middle. Yosi, Uri, and I sat beside him, entranced by the wisdom of his fingers and the good smell of his work. The old man smeared some threads with wax, spat on the fingernail of a brown thumb, traced a line with it for his knife and stitched together several strips of thin, soft leather to make a blindfold for the bird. ‘As long as you cover the falcon’s eyes,’ he explained, ‘he just sits there as quiet as a baby.’