The Blue Mountain (30 page)
He had his hands crossed behind him like a landowner inspecting his estate. On my back I carried a square army pack with his pincers, nets, empty matchboxes, and sealed bottles of chloroform. ‘Your grandfather gave me this knapsack,’ he said. ‘It’s an English wireless operator’s pack that belonged to your uncle Efrayim.’
I asked if we could catch a praying mantis, an insect whose mincing gait and pious mien intrigued me. Just then, though, our path was busily crossed by an orange beetle with a black-spotted carapace, and I pointed it out to Pinness, who kept looking around while talking continually. He was thrilled to see it.
‘Maybe we’ll be in luck this time,’ he said, ordering me not to lose sight of it.
The beetle proceeded in a straight line, its two clublike antennae moving ceaselessly. Clearly it had something on its mind.
‘It has a wonderful sense of smell,’ whispered Pinness, crawling after it on all fours.
A quarter of an hour later the beetle quickened its pace. Shortly we too smelled the faint scent of carrion.
The beetle disappeared beneath a bed of straw.
‘Well now,’ said Pinness, ‘let’s have a look.’ Lifting the straw, he bared the dead body of a goldfinch. We sat down upwind to avoid the smell, and Pinness told me to watch carefully.
A second beetle appeared, making its way among the clods of earth. Without further ado, the two began mating by the corpse.
‘Look how nature has a place for everyone, Baruch,’ Pinness said. ‘Some couples meet in fields full of flowers, others at the theatre – these two prefer the stench of death.’
Now the two beetles began to burrow beneath the goldfinch, excavating little pebbles and bits of earth as the dead bird sank into the hole. We sat watching for several hours until it was completely underground and covered with soil.
‘Now,’ Pinness said, ‘Mother Beetle will lay her eggs in the carcass, chewing and softening its meat for her maggots. Some children grow up in palaces and others in corpses. May my lot always be with the salt of the earth!’
He took my hand and we went home.
When the doctors announced that Pinness could return to the village, Busquilla hired a taxi to bring him. I suggested to the old teacher that he spend a few weeks with me, but his only answer was, ‘Home.’
His eyes welled with sorrow and exertion when we got there. He had aged greatly. The little blood clots had attacked him with surgical precision, severing the bonds of memory, destroying the walls he had built during his long years in the country, and causing his brain to send out unremitting signals of hunger.
‘All the old boys are dead now,’ said Pinness. ‘From hard work and battling temptation. Levin alone is still alive. Levin alone, and I who live on with him. Two old dotards.’
He taught no more classes and rarely had pupils over to his house. He did not go out to the fields any more either. Sometimes he sat in his garden watching the ants and grasshoppers scurry across the lawn. A sand boa he released from its cage in the nature room lay limply coiled among the wild flowers. He had divided his zoological collection between me and the school, the arthropods, the bleached reptiles in their jars of formaldehyde, and the hollow birds’ eggs remaining in the nature room. Alongside the more conventional systems of taxonomy, however, Pinness also classified all life into Helpful and Harmful, and his own private collection had two categories alone, Our Friends and Our Enemies.
‘There are some borderline cases,’ he admitted. ‘Take the bee-eater. On the one hand, it kills wasps, but on the other, it eats Margulis’s bees. The mongoose preys on both voles and baby chicks.’
‘Whenever you see an insect, bird, mammal, or reptile, ask if it is friend or foe,’ said Pinness to me on one of our first outings, when I was five years old.
‘Someday I’ll leave you this collection,’ he informed me. ‘You deserve it.’
He often consulted with Grandfather, who was an expert on tree pests, and together the two taught me to identify and eradicate them. Taking me to the orchard, they put their hands on my shoulders and pointed me at a pear tree.
‘Watch carefully,’ said Grandfather.
The two men, both in grey work shirts, one wearing a worker’s cap and one a floppy-brimmed straw hat, looked down at me ceremoniously. I could feel their emotion, although I did not understand the cause of it.
‘I don’t see anything,’ I said.
Grandfather knelt and showed me a round hole, about a quarter of an inch in diameter, in the trunk of the tree. Directly beneath it on the ground was a little pile of sawdust.
‘Such a predator can eat a whole tree,’ Pinness said.
Grandfather took out a long, thin piece of wire that was coiled like a spring at one end.
‘The planter’s fishing rod,’ he said. Slowly but surely, he inserted it into the caterpillar’s tunnel. A yard and a half of wire disappeared gradually up the tree as Grandfather sighed quietly, realising the extent of the damage.
‘Damn you!’ he swore when he felt the tip of the wire pierce the caterpillar. He gave it a twist, corkscrewing it into the grub’s flesh, and gently began to retract it. The caterpillar let out an eerie squeal and a soft, repulsive whistle as its jaws and nails tore loose from the pith of the pear tree, scraping the sides of its wormhole on its reluctant journey to the sunlight.
‘Aha!’ exclaimed Grandfather, pulling out the last of the wire. Impaled on its tip was a soft, black-spotted, yellow-orange blob that squirmed and wriggled as Grandfather held it up to me. I felt a wave of nausea and hatred.
‘Take a good look, my child,’ said Grandfather. ‘This is the enemy. The tiger moth.’
That was my first lesson in agriculture. Thenceforth I was sent to the orchard twice a week to look for the telltale sawdust at the base of the fruit trees.
I can still remember fishing my first caterpillar out of a Rennet apple tree. The feel of the monster writhing and gnashing its teeth inside the tree trunk ran along the steel wire into my fingers and up through my wrist to my spine.
‘Don’t be afraid, Baruch,’ said Grandfather. ‘You’ve got him where you want him.’
I dashed the grub to the ground and stamped on it with my foot.
When a tiger moth murdered one of Liberson’s apricots, Pinness chopped down the dead tree and tunnelled in its trunk with a little axe until he found one of the caterpillars.
He cut off a section of tree trunk with the caterpillar in it. ‘We’ll add you to our collection,’ he smiled, ‘and burn the rest of your comrades at the stake.’ We dragged the tree’s carcass out of the orchard and set it on fire.
‘So long, you scoundrels,’ said Pinness as the screeches and death coughs rose from the burning branches.
He took me home with him. Removing the caterpillar with a pair of padded pincers, he wrapped it in blotting paper. ‘Some larvae secrete a staining substance when they die,’ he explained.
He put the still wriggling caterpillar in a test tube, added some petrol-soaked absorbent cotton, told me to have a seat, and gave me a biscuit and a lecture.
‘This is the true test of every collector,’ he said. ‘Nothing is harder than preserving a caterpillar. It’s so juicy that it decomposes easily, and there’s no exoskeleton to keep its shape.’
When the caterpillar had been gassed to death, Pinness took it from the test tube, laid it on a glass slide, and made an incision near its anus with a sharp little surgical knife. ‘I stole this knife from Sonya in the clinic,’ he confided, his body shaking with suppressed mirth. Rolling a pencil down the grub’s body until the intestines were squeezed out through the opening, he severed them and tossed them out the window.
‘For the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the earth,’ he intoned.
He took a small straw, inserted it into the caterpillar’s hollow corpse, and blew gently, his eyes blinking behind his
concentration-fogged glasses. As the caterpillar slowly expanded, Pinness rose carefully and bent over the table lamp, rotating the larva above the hot bulb while continuing to blow softly.
‘A hot iron will do the job too, but not an open fire.’
Within a few minutes the caterpillar’s skin was dry and hard.
‘The purists coat it with clear varnish,’ Pinness said, pouring a drop of diluted glue into the cut in the caterpillar’s rear.
He took the section of the apricot tree, sawed it lengthwise to expose the tiger moth’s tunnel, blew away the sawdust, and restored the now immortalised pest to its former residence. After writing down the date and site of its capture on a slip of paper, he opened a little box, took out a large, hairy adult moth with spotted wings, and placed it on the tree trunk still pierced by its pin.
‘It’s important to exhibit them in their natural habitat,’ he declared with a sigh of contentment.
T
owards the end of his life Levin grew cross and insufferable. Grandfather, the only man he had ever deferred to, was already dead, and in a moment of weakness I gave him the old work boots Grandfather had worn in the orchard. Levin sat on my bed, thrust his thin legs into them, stood up, and walked around as happily as a child with his first pair of grown-up shoes, shaking his head like a giddy colt each time he looked down at the battered toes.
‘What did you give him Grandfather’s boots for?’ grumbled Yosi. ‘Now he thinks he’s somebody.’
Inspired by the boots, Levin began poking his nose into the running of the farm and grew careless with the co-op books. He also yelled at Rachel, went for long, booted walks in the fields, stopping to look at his reflection in every puddle, took to calling himself ‘Sweet Levin’, made his wife go around in a blue kerchief, and developed a grasshopper phobia.
Unable to control myself one night, I went to peek through the window of his house and saw him take out a black notebook and wave it angrily beneath Rachel’s nose.
‘All the sins of the Workingman’s Circle,’ he hissed. ‘They’re all written down here!’
‘I wish you’d calm down,’ said Rachel wearily. ‘Tsirkin and Mirkin are dead. Poor Liberson is blind in an old folk’s home. Who are you still out to get?’
‘It was the way she laughed,’ replied Levin. ‘She went out with them every night, laughing. They purposely put funny words to Hasidic songs to make her laugh and insult me.’
Feyge’s laughter, the stains of stolen chocolate, Zeitser’s mocking glances – all left their mark on Levin’s thin skin like the voracious teeth of locusts. He recalled how Liberson had pestered him a whole night over whether the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle should play a more active role in the Chinese workers’ movement. ‘The FLWC is coming, O ye yellow masses,’ the young pioneer called out into the darkness. Feyge burst into giggles and embraced him, pressing her body against his. Levin didn’t sleep a wink that night, convinced that his sister could no longer tell reality from revolutionary fantasy.
In Petach Tikvah Mirkin smoked publicly on the Sabbath and started a row with the local religious farmers. In Jaffa Tsirkin told stupid anti-Hasidic jokes to two Hasidim they happened to meet. In Rishon-le-Tsiyyon Liberson was apprehended in the vineyards with his hands inside the blouse of the school principal’s daughter. All three of them regularly dressed and undressed in Feyge’s presence.
In a little black notebook Levin began to record secretly all the misdeeds of his sister’s corrupters. One evening he produced it and read the list out loud to them.
‘You forgot about the time Mirkin stole oranges in Jaffa,’ said Liberson.
‘I didn’t forget a thing,’ Levin told Rachel. ‘They humiliated me and killed my sister, and they got off scot-free except for Mirkin. He’s the only one who was punished.’
He began asking Meshulam about suicides in the early days
of the Second Aliyah. Every graveyard in the old villages and kibbutzim had its pioneers who had taken their own lives, leaving behind gravestones carved with guilt and remorse. Most of these had been transferred to my keeping, and Levin walked up and down among them, reading the inscriptions. ‘Died at His Own Hands’, ‘Overcome by His Suffering’, ‘Drank the Hemlock’, ‘Put an End to His Own Life’. Dreamly, he murmured the awful words.
Now and then he ran screaming out of his house with a can of green insect spray in his hand, Rachel hurrying after him. Though she was younger than he was, his madness made his grey limbs strong and spry. Once she found him lying in a field, waiting to die from the spray can he had drained. But long years spent in the store amid fumes of ammonia, DDT, parathion, and benzoic acid had immunised him against all chemicals. Two hours of lying in the sun was enough for him, and rising despairingly, he went home with Rachel walking wordlessly by his side.
Even after Grandfather’s death, Levin kept coming to look for odd jobs in our farmyard. My uncle Avraham, who remembered how his kind hands had fed, bathed, and clothed him as a little orphan, put up with him and had him collect the old wires scattered among the bales of hay. Not that they were worth anything, but it was just as well not to have them getting into a feed stall and killing a cow. Levin even made himself a little work corner in the cowshed, where he sat for hours drawing coloured charts of milk production and straightening old nails for re-use. Now and then the blows of the hammer were accompanied by a groan of pain that was taken up by a merry chorus of turkeys. ‘I think your uncle must have straightened more fingers than nails,’ I once heard Uri say to his father over lunch. Yosi complained that the clouds of thick dust billowing up from the old fodder sacks Levin kept shaking out and folding were giving the poultry laryngitis. Stepping into the yard, he bawled him out rudely, assisted by juicy imprecations from his mother Rivka standing on her porch.
Enraged and humiliated, Levin went home to plot his revenge. The mockery of the Workingman’s Circle resounded again in his
mind. One day he surprised Avraham during his afternoon nap.
‘Me you treat like an animal, but Zeitser you keep on!’
‘Zeitser worked with my father back in the old days,’ said Avraham. ‘We won’t throw him to the dogs just because he’s become old and weak.’
‘Zeitser is an extra mouth to feed,’ snapped Levin. ‘He’s a sponger.’
