The Blue Mountain(87)
That evening Rilov came to the cabin to talk to Grandfather. With a contemptuous rattle of ice cubes between his teeth, Grandfather advised him to tell his grandson to pick on children his own age and keep away from little boys with a big punch.
That was the last time anyone tried that with me. But comic songs were sung about me during break, and Pinness, who had a knack of looking out the window of the teachers’ room in the nick of time, would come and lead me away just as I was about to charge, his hand drawing out the stiff tension in my neck.
Two afternoons a week I went out to the fields with him, to ‘the School of Nature’.
‘Nature lets nothing go to waste,’ he declared as we trod the rough path leading to the wadi. ‘Everything is grist to its mill. Seize the one and withhold not thy hand from the other. There are worms that live in garlic peels. There are spiders that eat their mates. Cattle dung, rotten fruit, fabric, paper – it’s all grist to the mill.’
He had his hands crossed behind him like a landowner inspecting his estate. On my back I carried a square army pack with his pincers, nets, empty matchboxes, and sealed bottles of chloroform. ‘Your grandfather gave me this knapsack,’ he said. ‘It’s an English wireless operator’s pack that belonged to your uncle Efrayim.’
I asked if we could catch a praying mantis, an insect whose mincing gait and pious mien intrigued me. Just then, though, our path was busily crossed by an orange beetle with a black-spotted carapace, and I pointed it out to Pinness, who kept looking around while talking continually. He was thrilled to see it.
‘Maybe we’ll be in luck this time,’ he said, ordering me not to lose sight of it.
The beetle proceeded in a straight line, its two clublike antennae moving ceaselessly. Clearly it had something on its mind.
‘It has a wonderful sense of smell,’ whispered Pinness, crawling after it on all fours.
A quarter of an hour later the beetle quickened its pace. Shortly we too smelled the faint scent of carrion.
The beetle disappeared beneath a bed of straw.
‘Well now,’ said Pinness, ‘let’s have a look.’ Lifting the straw, he bared the dead body of a goldfinch. We sat down upwind to avoid the smell, and Pinness told me to watch carefully.
A second beetle appeared, making its way among the clods of earth. Without further ado, the two began mating by the corpse.
‘Look how nature has a place for everyone, Baruch,’ Pinness said. ‘Some couples meet in fields full of flowers, others at the theatre – these two prefer the stench of death.’
Now the two beetles began to burrow beneath the goldfinch, excavating little pebbles and bits of earth as the dead bird sank into the hole. We sat watching for several hours until it was completely underground and covered with soil.
‘Now,’ Pinness said, ‘Mother Beetle will lay her eggs in the carcass, chewing and softening its meat for her maggots. Some children grow up in palaces and others in corpses. May my lot always be with the salt of the earth!’
He took my hand and we went home.
When the doctors announced that Pinness could return to the village, Busquilla hired a taxi to bring him. I suggested to the old teacher that he spend a few weeks with me, but his only answer was, ‘Home.’
His eyes welled with sorrow and exertion when we got there. He had aged greatly. The little blood clots had attacked him with surgical precision, severing the bonds of memory, destroying the walls he had built during his long years in the country, and causing his brain to send out unremitting signals of hunger.
‘All the old boys are dead now,’ said Pinness. ‘From hard work and battling temptation. Levin alone is still alive. Levin alone, and I who live on with him. Two old dotards.’
He taught no more classes and rarely had pupils over to his house. He did not go out to the fields any more either. Sometimes he sat in his garden watching the ants and grasshoppers scurry across the lawn. A sand boa he released from its cage in the nature room lay limply coiled among the wild flowers. He had divided his zoological collection between me and the school, the arthropods, the bleached reptiles in their jars of formaldehyde, and the hollow birds’ eggs remaining in the nature room. Alongside the more conventional systems of taxonomy, however, Pinness also classified all life into Helpful and Harmful, and his own private collection had two categories alone, Our Friends and Our Enemies.
‘There are some borderline cases,’ he admitted. ‘Take the bee-eater. On the one hand, it kills wasps, but on the other, it eats Margulis’s bees. The mongoose preys on both voles and baby chicks.’
‘Whenever you see an insect, bird, mammal, or reptile, ask if it is friend or foe,’ said Pinness to me on one of our first outings, when I was five years old.