The Blue Mountain(94)

‘Your uncle had no mother at home, and neither for that matter had Meshulam.’ Pinness noticed that Meshulam did not bring a sandwich to school like the other children but only a plain slice of bread. He knew too that Tsirkin raised the boy on baked pumpkin and hard-boiled eggs, the only dishes he could prepare, which were sometimes supplemented by good-hearted neighbours who brought Meshulam hot meals or invited him to eat with them.

‘Meshulam could have been our pride and joy,’ he said. ‘He had a good head and a steadfast character, but his childhood diverted him into a world in which torn clothes and baked pumpkin were lofty ideals instead of signs of neglect.’

He knew that Meshulam’s laziness had turned the whole village against him. ‘Still,’ he said to me, ‘I would have expected you to be more understanding of him.’

‘Grandfather couldn’t stand him either,’ I said.

‘Your grandfather couldn’t stand anyone,’ said Pinness. ‘Except, sometimes, me, and that too for debatable reasons. You see the village and the whole world through your grandfather’s eyes. You’re still tied to him by the apery strings.’

He chuckled at his own pun and told me in a near whisper how Meshulam had celebrated his bar mitzvah. Since Pesya was never at home and Mandolin Tsirkin was always tired from the farm work, Meshulam had to prepare the party for his schoolmates on his own. Finding a few dried tortes left over from a visit by the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, he cut them into thin slices and brought them to the classroom early that morning. Pinness arrived at 6 a.m. to find the frantic boy wetting the desiccated cakes with tears and drops of sweet wine in the hope of bringing them back to life. Retreating silently, he went home and came back with a tray of crackers spread with jam.

‘Your mother left these with me for your birthday,’ he told Meshulam, who said nothing though he knew it was a lie.

All these things were recorded by Pinness in his notebook, which he referred to as his ‘barn log’. There, in the old teacher’s handsome hand, you could find whatever failed to appear on his pupils’ report cards. His handwriting was so elegant, and his concern for penmanship so great, that all the children of the village learned to write exactly like him. In fact, they still do, which has led to the misattribution of anonymous love letters and the crediting of cheques to the wrong accounts. Once, when the poet Bialik came to visit, Pinness presented him with an album of poetry composed in his honour by the schoolchildren. The great writer was so struck by the sameness of the script that he joked that the teacher must have written everything himself. Pinness was too insulted to respond, but that very week he took his students to the foot of Mount Gilboa to study the verse of Bialik’s rival Tchernichovski.

I watched him open his green gate and hobble up the street to Levin’s house. Tonya and Riva were the last of the village’s female founders, while he, Zeitser, and Shlomo Levin were the three surviving males.

‘Zeitser was never much of a conversationalist, Rachel stuffs me with food, and Levin, who couldn’t learn to farm a plot of land, now does nothing but cultivate plots all the time,’ he said after returning one night to find me sitting by Grandfather’s grave.





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Every year Zeitser participated in two festive events. On the anniversary of the founding of the village he was invited by the culture committee to join the founding fathers on the stage, an honour reserved for him and Hagit alone among the animals, and on the holiday of Shavuot three neatly combed boys in white shirts came to take him to Meshulam’s yard, where he was hitched with a great to-do to ‘the first cart’, which was then piled high with fruits, milk cans, garlanded sheaves of wheat, screaming infants, baby chicks, and calves. It was the only day of the year on which Zeitser agreed to doff his old Russian worker’s cap with its specially made earholes and don a wreath of flowers that gave him a slightly Dionysiac appearance.

When an irate Shlomo Levin was reminded of all this, however, he raved and ranted even more, labelled Zeitser ‘an old parasite’, and related with loud shouts how he had left his newspaper in our cowshed the night before and had returned there to find Zeitser squatting hoofishly on his haunches against the fig tree, perusing by moonlight the paper spread out in his lap. His, Levin’s, newspaper!

This argument raged not far from the mule himself, who was tethered to the fig tree beside his food and water, delicately being deloused by two devoted cattle egrets who had come especially from the Jordan Valley. The earth packed hard by his hooves described an exact circle around him. Dipping his big jaws into his barrel, Zeitser stood smacking his lips over a mouthful of the best barley. A thin smile flitted over his face, and he pricked up his ears through his battered cap as though listening. Levin, angrier than ever, stepped up to the mule’s water barrel and kicked it over. Avraham lost his temper and chased his uncle from the yard.