The Blue Mountain(92)

Meanwhile, Riva was at home, scrubbing the last sticky stains left behind on the floor by her husband and dreaming of lace tablecloths, lacquered Chinese furniture, angora cats, and vacuum cleaners.

‘If Riva knew that Chinese lacquer is nothing but the secretion of certain aphids,’ Pinness said, ‘she wouldn’t make such a fuss over it.’

His blood carved out new channels, shooting the gaps between nerve endings and the chasms of memory. ‘It’s as though I was born an eighteen-year-old on the day I arrived in this country,’ he said. ‘My father could have been the hotel owner in Jaffa. He’s the first person I remember after birth.’

He had forgotten the names of his parents and sisters, his native landscape, the yeshiva, religious school, in Nemirov where he had studied before running off to the Land of Israel.

‘Every bit of it has been wiped out.’

For the first time, he revealed his old hatred of Rilov in public. No one understood why, because Rilov himself was already dead. ‘A he-man, a coachman, a flea-man,’ he called the dead Watchman. ‘A gentile’s brain in a Jew’s body.’

He piled his plate with more than it could hold and stuffed himself with huge mouthfuls, wolfing his food as if hungry jackals were waiting behind him to pirate it. Half-chewed, slobbery shreds tumbled out of his mouth and ran down his glistening chin. Little mounds piled up on the table around the rim of his plate.

‘I put it away like Jean Valjean, eh? As the ox licketh up the grass of the field.’

He felt so fatigued upon finishing a meal that he fell into bed at once.

‘Rest is vital for the digestion,’ he announced. ‘The body must not be asked to do more than one thing at a time. A time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing.’

I wasn’t the only one in the village concerned for the childless old teacher. His food was delivered from the co-op to keep him from having to carry baskets. Rachel Levin brought him cooked meals, slipping into his house on her silken old soles and startling him with the sudden clink of cutlery as she set the table.

‘I want fresh food, not meat from the fleshpots,’ he told her biblically. ‘Bring me of the fruit of your garden, a banquet of greens and quietness therewith.’

Once a week I brought him vegetables from the patch I kept near the cabin. It was alarming to watch him gulp them down. Busquilla came with pots of home cooking from the nearby town where he lived. In his old age Pinness had fallen in love with Mrs Busquilla’s couscous. Though he didn’t touch the meat, he ate the steamed vegetables and semolina ravenously, yellow morsels clinging to his bottom lip.

‘Thou hast tempted me and I have succumbed,’ he quoted to Busquilla. ‘Your wife should have run the workers’ kitchen in Petach Tikvah. No one would have dumped her food on the floor.’

‘Enjoy it, Mr Pinness,’ said Busquilla. He liked Pinness, was afraid of him, and sometimes furtively kissed his hand, dodging back to avoid a swat from the other hand, which could still be as quick as a jumping spider. Despite Busquilla’s explanation that ‘it’s just a Moroccan custom’, Pinness disapproved of such manners.

I offered to pay Busquilla for his wife’s food.

‘Shame on you, Baruch,’ he said. ‘Pinness is a saint, a holy man. We’re nothing but his servants. You don’t understand it because you can’t read the signs. Do you think those white pigeons that are always on his roof are just a lot of birds? And what about that snake that guards the gate of his garden?

‘God forgive me for even mentioning his death,’ said Busquilla with a heavenward glance, ‘but on that day light will flash from his grave, or perhaps water will flow from his gravestone. It’s an honour to bring him food, because it’s serving God.’

Uri scoffed at Busquilla’s beliefs and called the old teacher ‘Saint Pinness’ behind his back.

‘Let’s go and visit the saint,’ he would say to me. But our conversations with Pinness were monotonous. Once again we were his pupils, to be lectured on Shamgar the son of Anath who routed six hundred Philistines with an oxgoad or on the life cycle of the great titmouse. He even tried to give us homework.

Every few months he still heard the cry of the brazen fornicator from on high.

‘I’m sure he does it on the water tower,’ he told Uri and me through a mouthful of sweet peas. ‘One difference between Homo sapiens and birds is that men don’t copulate in the treetops.

‘He’s already, you should excuse the expression, screwed half the village,’ he winked slyly. ‘Married women too. Last night it was the wife of Yisra’eli’s oldest grandson. I don’t get it. Why, they were just married two months ago, and she seemed such a lovely young lady!’