‘Excuse me for shouting at you, Baruch,’ said the blind man as I departed. ‘One day you’ll see what I see. Forgive me, and come again soon.’
Neither Pinness nor Levin could sleep at night. Each lay planning and plotting in his bed.
Levin sought vengeance on the mule, because of whom Eliezer Liberson had humiliated him in public as he had never been humiliated before. Through his window I could see his stinging old wounds reopen and suppurate with shame. Once again the uncouth hooligans of the Workingman’s Circle shot their mocking darts at him, mountains of sand and chocolate threatened to bury him, and hordes of locusts crawled over his bed, skinning him alive.
At that very moment, having gone to the refrigerator for some leftover couscous that he dribbled all over his pillow, Pinness was reflecting on the lascivious cries that pierced his tender eardrums and defiled all that was dear to him. Now that the blood soaking his brain had diluted his anger and swamped his thirst for vengeance, he merely desired to uncover the culprit.
He rose with difficulty, went out to the garden, crossed the street, and walked up and down beneath the large concrete columns of the water tower. It took him a while to get over the annoying hot and cold flashes in his body. Then, grabbing hold of the iron ladder, he began to climb to the top.
‘It was only the second time in my life that I had done that,’ he told me. ‘Thirty years ago, when some high school students wanted to practise rope gliding, I climbed up there with Efrayim, Meshulam, Daniel Liberson, and Avraham. They all came down by rope except for me and Meshulam. We took the ladder again.’
He was afraid of being seen, and worse yet, of his own sick body failing him. ‘Every ounce of logic I had left argued against it.’ His fear of heights made every cell go numb. And yet, frail and brittle, he kept climbing. He didn’t dare look down. The higher he went, the colder it became.
He gripped the peeling rungs with damp hands, pulling his scared body after them with a mysterious strength until he reached the top of the tower. Hiking a leg over the edge, he collapsed on the concrete roof, shaking from fright and exertion. For a few minutes he lay there ‘like a stricken corpse’, gladly letting the chill roughness of the concrete bring him back to life. Then, still breathing hard, he sat up and looked about.
The flat, round roof was ringed by a low parapet topped by a guardrail of metal pipes. In one corner were the remains of the observation post that once had been ‘faithfully manned’ by a lookout equipped with a mounted searchlight and a bell. White with dust, a few empty sacks and tattered semaphore flags lay abandoned there.
Pinness rose, leaned against the cool metal of the railing to help fight off a wave of vertigo, and unpremeditatedly called out, ‘Yoo-hoo! Yoo-hoo!’ His cry, however, was too weak to escape the clutches of the branches and the gusting night breeze. Although classified as a Helpful, a barn owl startled him by darting close to his head, as silent as a groundsel’s floating seed. ‘The harm the barn owl does the poultry is more than balanced by the number of mice it eats,’ he had always claimed, greatly angered by farmers who killed it because they feared its noiseless flight and the human look of its white face.
Beneath him lay the village, ‘no longer white tents in the wilderness but houses and cowsheds and fields, paved and well-trodden paths, tall trees and rooted men.’
The village was asleep. The wind whistled through the treetops. Yolks formed and clustered in the vitals of the hens. Mixers hummed in the feed shed and sprinklers chattered in the darkness.
Pinness lay in ambush for an hour and a half, during which nothing happened. In the end he climbed down again, terrified, and slowly made his way home.
‘I did it,’ he thought, hardly able to move. ‘Tomorrow night I’ll do it again.’
32
Towards the end of his life in the old folk’s home Grandfather was so feeble that he spent most of his time in bed or in a wheelchair. Shulamit took care of him as best she could, but she too was far from healthy or strong. The smoke of old steamships and railway stations hung in the air between them. They never stopped touching each other, looking at each other, supporting each other, meeting and parting from each other.
The Crimean whore sat watching Grandfather for hours, touching his fingertips and crying as she read the cuneiform writing on his wrinkled neck. Within a few weeks he had grown shorter; his chest was narrower, and his whole body had dwindled. No longer nourished by his sensual attentions, she now scavenged the cells of his body.
His carefully measured love was as dangerously calibrated as the act of a tightrope walker. A single heedless movement could have sent him plummeting into her eyes, choking on the dust of his own bones.