The Blue Mountain(99)

Pinness asked Uri if he was all right, and failing to get an answer, he hurried to the rose garden by the synagogue, soaked a handkerchief under a tap, and rushed back to wet my cousin’s split lips. His slender, savaged body, ‘like a fallen, lynched angel’s’, made a slow, excruciating effort to move its cracked ribs and battered organs.

Pinness took Uri by the arms and barely managed to drag him to his nearby house. ‘His collarbone was fractured and one shoulder was dislocated.’

‘Why didn’t you call me?’ I wailed. ‘I would have carried him.’



Pinness laid Uri in his bed and sat by his side. Completely undressing the handsome, finely formed, mauled figure, he swabbed the wounds with a soft cloth and disinfected them.

Uri kept tossing and turning in pain. Bright welts covered him like flowers, and the pudendal smell rising from his loins flew up Pinness’s inflamed nostrils ‘and clogged my sinuses’, accumulating behind his forehead like a sweet layer of dew.

Pinness sat watching Uri all night.

‘He asked me why I shouted each time and what made the women of the village line up to go to bed with me.’

‘His shock and pain were too great for him to answer any of my questions.’

Pinness could not get the sounds – the thumping blows, the splintering bones, the cracking joints, the shriek of flayed skin – out of his mind. He had failed to make out the attackers in the dark, and now he suspected every man in the village between the ages of sixteen and sixty. ‘We have become like the beasts of the forest,’ he declared, ‘each man devouring his brother alive.’ His skull bones had thinned to a perforated membrane that could not hold back his sorrow and his wrath. ‘All my life I stood in the breach, and now that the dyke had collapsed, I faced the tide of danger by myself.’

In the morning he left tea and biscuits by the bed and went to our cowshed. Avraham and Yosi were busy with the milking, grumbling over Uri’s absence. I was unloading a cart of beet fodder in the farmyard.

‘Uri’s at my place,’ announced the teacher.

Before he could say another word, the Committee members appeared on the scene. Avraham left Yosi and me with the milking and went off with them to his house. Before two minutes had gone by Rivka’s frightful screams sounded up and down the street. As if being a saddler’s rather than a farmer’s daughter and the wife of the village’s firstborn disappointment were not bad enough, she now had to bear the disgrace of her son’s profligacy. For the first time in my life I could hear as much as I wanted without having to crawl, duck, climb trees or creep through the darkness like a thief.

‘It’s all the fault of that hard-up nursery teacher who let him go around with his head up her arse,’ screamed my aunt.



‘You don’t have to tell the whole world about it,’ said Avraham.

‘It’s all your fault. You were hard up yourself at the age of nine. Your brother fucked cows and your sister went down on every rooftop.’

A huge flock of startled pigeons took off from the roof of the cowshed, the last echo of their wingbeats ringing in Rivka’s cheeks. The Committee waited patiently for the rumpus to die down and informed Uri’s parents of its decision to ‘ask Uri to take a leave of absence from the village’. Ya’akovi’s wife, it was announced, had already been driven to her sister in the city that night. Meshulam Tsirkin, who was then a fifty-year-old virgin, admitted afterward that ‘if every woman Uri screwed had to leave the village, there would be no one here but Tonya and Riva’.

Uri was taken to the district hospital. I visited him there only once, because he asked that no one come again. ‘At least Grandfather’s dead and doesn’t know,’ he said. The nurses who ogled the good looks that showed through his bandages and bruises suspected that women were not to his taste. After his release it was decided to send him to his mother’s brother, a wealthy road contractor in the Galilee. Avraham and Rivka accompanied him to the railway station. From the roof of the hayloft I watched them depart via the paths of Pioneer Home.

They paused by Grandfather’s grave, passed through the orchard, and diminished like ants in the straw-yellow expanse. That was how I had seen Zeitser disappearing on his Sabbath walks, and Efrayim vanishing, and Grandmother Feyge rushing toward the railway tracks with her comrades, and Levin returning to Tel Aviv after his sister’s funeral.

Uri was wearing a light shirt and a pair of pressed blue cotton trousers, and carrying a small wooden suitcase. Rivka walked by his side, and Avraham a few steps ahead of them, his head lowered as if to clear the way. They crossed the fields of stubble, made a detour around the abandoned British ack-ack guns, and reached the station hidden among giant eucalyptus trees. When the train had pulled out, leaving only its whistle behind, I saw Avraham and Rivka coming back. Now it was she who strode ahead, excitedly waving her hands, while every now and then he bent down to the ground and placed some poisoned seeds in a mousehole he had spied along the way.