The Blue Mountain(89)
‘It’s important to exhibit them in their natural habitat,’ he declared with a sigh of contentment.
30
Towards the end of his life Levin grew cross and insufferable. Grandfather, the only man he had ever deferred to, was already dead, and in a moment of weakness I gave him the old work boots Grandfather had worn in the orchard. Levin sat on my bed, thrust his thin legs into them, stood up, and walked around as happily as a child with his first pair of grown-up shoes, shaking his head like a giddy colt each time he looked down at the battered toes.
‘What did you give him Grandfather’s boots for?’ grumbled Yosi. ‘Now he thinks he’s somebody.’
Inspired by the boots, Levin began poking his nose into the running of the farm and grew careless with the co-op books. He also yelled at Rachel, went for long, booted walks in the fields, stopping to look at his reflection in every puddle, took to calling himself ‘Sweet Levin’, made his wife go around in a blue kerchief, and developed a grasshopper phobia.
Unable to control myself one night, I went to peek through the window of his house and saw him take out a black notebook and wave it angrily beneath Rachel’s nose.
‘All the sins of the Workingman’s Circle,’ he hissed. ‘They’re all written down here!’
‘I wish you’d calm down,’ said Rachel wearily. ‘Tsirkin and Mirkin are dead. Poor Liberson is blind in an old folk’s home. Who are you still out to get?’
‘It was the way she laughed,’ replied Levin. ‘She went out with them every night, laughing. They purposely put funny words to Hasidic songs to make her laugh and insult me.’
Feyge’s laughter, the stains of stolen chocolate, Zeitser’s mocking glances – all left their mark on Levin’s thin skin like the voracious teeth of locusts. He recalled how Liberson had pestered him a whole night over whether the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle should play a more active role in the Chinese workers’ movement. ‘The FLWC is coming, O ye yellow masses,’ the young pioneer called out into the darkness. Feyge burst into giggles and embraced him, pressing her body against his. Levin didn’t sleep a wink that night, convinced that his sister could no longer tell reality from revolutionary fantasy.
In Petach Tikvah Mirkin smoked publicly on the Sabbath and started a row with the local religious farmers. In Jaffa Tsirkin told stupid anti-Hasidic jokes to two Hasidim they happened to meet. In Rishon-le-Tsiyyon Liberson was apprehended in the vineyards with his hands inside the blouse of the school principal’s daughter. All three of them regularly dressed and undressed in Feyge’s presence.
In a little black notebook Levin began to record secretly all the misdeeds of his sister’s corrupters. One evening he produced it and read the list out loud to them.
‘You forgot about the time Mirkin stole oranges in Jaffa,’ said Liberson.
‘I didn’t forget a thing,’ Levin told Rachel. ‘They humiliated me and killed my sister, and they got off scot-free except for Mirkin. He’s the only one who was punished.’
He began asking Meshulam about suicides in the early days of the Second Aliyah. Every graveyard in the old villages and kibbutzim had its pioneers who had taken their own lives, leaving behind gravestones carved with guilt and remorse. Most of these had been transferred to my keeping, and Levin walked up and down among them, reading the inscriptions. ‘Died at His Own Hands’, ‘Overcome by His Suffering’, ‘Drank the Hemlock’, ‘Put an End to His Own Life’. Dreamly, he murmured the awful words.
Now and then he ran screaming out of his house with a can of green insect spray in his hand, Rachel hurrying after him. Though she was younger than he was, his madness made his grey limbs strong and spry. Once she found him lying in a field, waiting to die from the spray can he had drained. But long years spent in the store amid fumes of ammonia, DDT, parathion, and benzoic acid had immunised him against all chemicals. Two hours of lying in the sun was enough for him, and rising despairingly, he went home with Rachel walking wordlessly by his side.
Even after Grandfather’s death, Levin kept coming to look for odd jobs in our farmyard. My uncle Avraham, who remembered how his kind hands had fed, bathed, and clothed him as a little orphan, put up with him and had him collect the old wires scattered among the bales of hay. Not that they were worth anything, but it was just as well not to have them getting into a feed stall and killing a cow. Levin even made himself a little work corner in the cowshed, where he sat for hours drawing coloured charts of milk production and straightening old nails for re-use. Now and then the blows of the hammer were accompanied by a groan of pain that was taken up by a merry chorus of turkeys. ‘I think your uncle must have straightened more fingers than nails,’ I once heard Uri say to his father over lunch. Yosi complained that the clouds of thick dust billowing up from the old fodder sacks Levin kept shaking out and folding were giving the poultry laryngitis. Stepping into the yard, he bawled him out rudely, assisted by juicy imprecations from his mother Rivka standing on her porch.