The Blue Mountain(93)

It baffled him that no one else heard the cries. ‘How can it be?’ he asked. ‘It’s been going on for several years. There are night watchmen in the village who are supposed to keep their ears open. There are farmers who get up in the middle of the night to help a cow calve or prepare a shipment of turkeys. There are early-morning sprayers and the drivers of the milk lorry, which never leaves before midnight – why does no one hear it but me?’

He paused to consider. ‘I’ll bet it’s poor Daniel Liberson. He never did get over it. Or maybe it’s Efrayim, coming back at night to take revenge.’

Uri and I glanced at each other uncomfortably, wondering in what damaged lobe of his brain the old man was weaving such fantasies.

‘I’ll get to the bottom of it if it’s the last thing I do,’ declared Pinness. ‘I’ll climb the water tower and wait there for him.’

I smiled and did not try to talk him out of it. The old teacher, I felt sure, was too fat, sick, and weak ever to climb the ladder of the tower. With his usual scientific pedantry, however, Pinness was determined to solve the mystery. He sprawled for hours in his armchair, going through old notebooks in the hope of finding some childhood deviancy or telltale clue. He had kept a special journal of the best poems and cleverest remarks of his pupils, selections from which he sometimes sent to the village newspaper. These items invariably aroused the wrath of his ex-students, some of whom were already in their fifties or sixties. Once the publication of a poem of Dani Rilov’s had the whole village in stitches.

                     Chick-chick-chickina

Eats semolina.

Poor little hen,

She’ll get old and then

Off with her head

And she’s dead!



    Forty years after the composition of this lyric the compassionate poet was a calf breeder whose best friends were brutal meat merchants and coarse butchers. But Pinness merely smiled when told that Dani Rilov was furious, and went on tending his many nests and keeping a kind eye on his fledglings. Meshulam, too, was enraged by this poem, which he considered a gross fabrication.

‘Who had money in those days to feed his hens semolina?’ he fumed. ‘It’s disgraceful how some people will rewrite history just for the sake of a rhyme!’

Pinness noticed that I was prowling around his house at night to protect him from the vengeance of the Rilov clan.

‘Go to sleep, Baruch,’ he said, stepping outside. ‘I’ve already scattered my spore to the winds. Childless old teachers are indestructible. The seeds I planted won’t sprout till after I die.’

In a second, more secret notebook he had jotted down over the years various comments on his pupils’ families. Although he had always exhorted the schoolchildren to help their parents with chores, he knew that some of the farmers overworked them.

He told me about his first years as a teacher. The school had only a few students and was poorly and cheaply equipped. In summer the children sat on reed mats, and each morning he examined them ‘as the shepherd surveyeth his flock’, running his eyes over the classroom to see which of his pupils had been petted, fed, and kissed, and which had been dragged out of bed before dawn to do chores. More than once Riva Margulis’s daughter, who was awakened at 5 a.m. every day to scrub the paving-stones outside the house, came late to school, since her mother kept turning back the hands of the clock until the strip of pavement gleamed. There were no milking machines then in the village, and some children came with fingers so stiff from milking that they couldn’t write a word. Pinness made no comment when sleepy children shut their eyes and let their heads sink onto their chests, but everyone knew that he would have a private talk with the parents that evening.

‘Every child was a world in itself. I never tired of observing them.’

He made a point of arriving in the classroom before his pupils to hang pictures and posters on the walls, and then he sat down to wait for them. Avraham once told me that the year of Scott and Amundsen’s race to the South Pole, Pinness kept the children posted on their daily progress. When terrible mud covered the village in winter, he carried his little charges on his back or hitched himself to one of the legendary mud sleds and pulled them home, barking like an Antarctica-bound husky.

Avraham and Meshulam were in his first class, which had only seven pupils. While Avraham was quiet, neat, hardworking, and uncommunicative, Meshulam was lively, resentful, and argumentative. He was fascinated by Pinness’s stories about the old pioneer days, but the nature lessons left him cold.