The Blue Mountain(85)

For three days he talked only to himself. Then, on the fourth, he turned to me and said perfectly clearly, ‘My distant ancestors were the cavemen.’

I stared at him in amazement. Irritated by my slowness, he continued as if giving dictation: ‘To seek to bind men to the earth is to turn them into blind moles and dumb cattle.’

It was then I first understood that although the old teacher might speak, walk, go home, and run around again with his butterfly nets, he would never really get well. The world of values he had constructed, the walls of faith and the reservoirs of hope, had crumbled into a feeble fretwork of foam when the dark blood haemorrhaged in his brain.

‘Now everyone will think I’m crazy,’ he began to wail a few days later as it dawned on him what had happened. I tried to calm him by pointing out that there wasn’t a person in the village who was considered sane by anyone else. Sanity, in fact, meant no more to us than a majority vote on who was or was not in his right mind. To this day Efrayim is thought to have been a madman because of Jean Valjean, to say nothing of being an informer and a traitor. Plenty of Committee members thought Pinness was crazy even before his stroke because of the shouts he heard at night. Others believed Grandfather to be an old loony because he stopped picking the fruit in his orchard from the day of Efrayim’s disappearance, letting it fall to the ground with the disdainful remark that he was growing the trees for their flowers. When Rilov discovered that Margulis was carrying on with Tonya, he decided that the beekeeper must be crazy, not to mention stupid. Margulis, for his part, thought Riva was insane and flung himself on Tonya Rilov’s bony, forgotten body with all the fluttering passion of a moth, ‘busily buzzing her’ with his sweet virility as Uri put it. Tonya knew that she was not all there herself but preferred her madness to her husband’s smell of rifle grease, gunpowder, and urea.

I too, in the days when I still lived in the village, was thought to be demented. My cemetery was the final proof, but even in kindergarten the other children kept away from me, and I never had a friend my age except Uri.

Grandfather and Pinness crammed me with stories and taught me about insects and trees, and Tsirkin played his mandolin for me and made me gape by pounding nails into boards with his bare hand, so tough was the skin of his palms. Whenever I shook his hand, there was a sound like the creaking of dry wood. ‘Ever since one of them broke its sting on his hand, the scorpions in my father’s cowshed have been scared stiff of him,’ said Meshulam with a smile. And yet when Mandolin did the milking, his hands grew so soft that not a cow complained of their roughness.

And Liberson read me stories from books and once even played hide-and-seek with me.

‘They did it for your grandmother,’ said Pinness.





            29



Eliezer Liberson didn’t always have time for me. After turning his farm over to Daniel, he devoted himself to finding new and better ways of courting Fanya.

He never ceased amusing and surprising her with a savoir faire that, latent in him from the start, had developed remarkably from the moment it was pressed into use. Well aware that no loam was more mysterious and demanding than love’s, he declared that it did not tolerate such commonplace methods as crop rotation and fallowing, which were intended for poor soils and unimaginative farmers. Periodically, the whole village heard the ripples of Fanya’s laughter through the Libersons’ windows. ‘Liberson’s done it again,’ was always Uri’s admiring comment.

None of us could resolve the contradiction between Liberson the stuffy ideologue, who bombarded meetings and the village newsletter with utopian avalanches of words, and the concealed Don Juan who would do anything for Fanya. He taught the jackdaws in his orchard to wolf-whistle at her and took her out to the fields on summer nights for erotic walks that sometimes had me as their secret companion. Years ago, Pinness once told me, when Fanya was working in the village packing house, Liberson prepared a cup of rich cocoa with sweet cream and sugar, filled his mouth with it, and went off to give his wife a custardy kiss. ‘No one who stopped to talk to him on his way could understand why, for the first time in memory, he kept his mouth shut.’

On the occasion of their tenth wedding anniversary he overcame his proletarian principles, went off to town in his cart, and returned with some expensive scented soap that smelled of frivolity and rank heresy. Hitherto the women of the village had bathed and washed their hair with huge bars of smelly grey laundry soap. Though Fanya used the gift only on Fridays, the seductive fragrance of her skin made her self-conscious, led to disapproving whispers in the village, reminded several old-timers of Riva Margulis’s infamous luxury trunk and Pesya Tsirkin’s perfume, and tripled Liberson’s passion for her.