The Blue Mountain (31 page)

‘Zeitser,’ replied Avraham, ‘is the best mule in this village. He was always more than just a draught animal to my father and me. He’s worked and sweated for us his whole life. A lot of two-legged pioneers never did half as much.’

‘He may
have been
the best mule in this village,’ said Levin, personally affronted by the reference to sweat, ‘but I never heard of a mule getting a pension. Why don’t you sell him to the Arab sausage factory or the glue works in Haifa bay? No one keeps an old mule in stock who can’t pull a cart any more.’

‘Don’t force me to choose between the two of you,’ said Avraham. ‘Zeitser isn’t stock and never was.’

Most of the mules in our village were English or Yugoslavian. Two were German, left behind at the end of World War One. Zeitser, I was told, was the only mule from Russia, whence he immigrated with a group of pioneers whose home was a place called Mogilev. They bought him the day they set out for Odessa. Seeing him on sale at a market, one of them joked loudly to his friends, ‘I know that mule. He’s a direct descendant of the mule of the Baal Shem Tov.’

‘Unbelievers!’ scolded the Hasid who was holding Zeitser’s tether. ‘Since when do mules have descendants?’

‘Are you questioning the Baal Shem Tov’s powers?’ answered the pioneer to the laughter of his comrades. ‘If the holy rabbi wished, even a mule could have sons.’

The Hasidim of Mogilev nearly came to blows with them, but the clink of roubles had a calming effect. The pioneers bought the mule, and Zeitser gratefully carried their belongings to the wharf. When they boarded the steamship
Kernilov
and saw how sad he looked, they chipped in for an extra ticket, ‘hoisted him
on deck in a huge net that hung from a crane’, and brought him to the Land of Israel.

‘They never regretted it for a minute. No job was too hard for Zeitser.’

It was Meshulam Tsirkin who discovered that Zeitser had worked in Sejera with Ben-Gurion. He read one of Ben-Gurion’s letters to me, a document he had got from the Movement archives in a swap.

Sejera

April 2, 1908

Before the sun is up, at half past four, I rise and go to the cowshed to feed my animals. I sift hay into the feedbox for the oxen, sprinkle some vetches over it and mix them, and then make myself tea for my breakfast. With the first rays of the sun I take my herd, two teams of oxen, two cows, two calves, and a donkey, to drink from the trough.

It was one of the few times I saw Meshulam laugh.

‘A donkey!’ he roared, slapping his knees and his stomach. ‘A donkey! That donkey was Zeitser. But fat chance that some socialist fresh off the boat from Russia would know the difference between a donkey and a mule!’

Zeitser belonged to the Mogilev commune for several years. Now and then he ran into Grandfather and his friends, and for a while they even worked side by side. When his commune found a piece of land to settle down on, however, he began to have second thoughts. The main problem, as Grandfather put it, was that ‘Zeitser’s penchant for solitude and private initiative clashed with the rigidly communal framework’. Zeitser hated meetings and debates, and such questions as ‘the status of pregnant comrades’, ‘the latest news from the workers’ movement in Latvia’, and ‘improving the nutrition of field hands’ did not concern him in the least. Most of all he loathed the public confessionals in which the commune members bared their hearts to each other.

One day, according to Uri, when a female communard who was cleaning out the cowshed laid a soiled baby in his stall, Zeitser decided that his notion of family life was incompatible
with that of the kibbutz. That same day he picked himself up and went to inspect a co-operative village.

‘Zeitser was an unusually good worker,’ Grandfather told me when I was a small boy. ‘He always knew what field to go to and never had to be steered.’

Zeitser ploughed and cultivated our fields, uprooted dead trees, pulled loaded carts, and was as thrilled as the rest of us by each new sprout and can of milk. When his shoes needed adjustment or replacement, he went on his own to the Goldman brothers’ smithy. He was the only draught animal in the village not to wear the leather blinkers Peker made against worldly temptations, because ‘nothing ever tempted him but work’. Only once did he succumb, when he mistakenly ate some Jimsonweed flowers growing by the manure pile. He got high, walked around in circles for two days, made eyes at the young female calves, and behaved like any hot-blooded numbskull.

With the passage of time, his strength faltered. Grandfather, who was personally acquainted with the ravages of old age and could easily discern them in the mule’s wasted body, tried easing up on his work, but Zeitser refused to acknowledge his decrepitude until one day he collapsed in the traces.

Generally, I remember what I am told better than what I have seen, but that day, like the day of my rescue from the hyena, sticks in my memory. Grandfather, Zeitser, and I had gone to fetch fodder and had loaded some twenty sacks of it on the cart. On the short uphill before the last bend Zeitser suddenly stopped with a queer, high-pitched snort, and the heavy cart began to roll backwards. Grandfather had never whipped Zeitser in his life, and now too he merely urged him on with shouts and slaps of the reins. Quivering all over, Zeitser managed to brake the slipping cart and braced himself to pull it up the hill, his haunches sinking nearly to the ground and his iron horseshoes striking sparks on the paved road. When his laboured panting turned to deep wheezes, Grandfather threw down the reins and climbed out of the cart. Anxious veins made an alarming wreath on his bald scalp as he tried to calm the mule and free him from his harness. Gathering his strength for one last mighty
effort, however, Zeitser let out a huge fart, lost his balance, and collapsed. There was a loud crack from up front as the longpole snapped, leaving the traces hanging from the mule’s neck. Grandfather quickly slipped off the hames and grabbed Zeitser’s head in his hands. For a while they remained there, weeping soundlessly together.

Zeitser returned home without the cart, his head bowed with shame. I walked alongside him, not knowing what to say.

‘He’s a work animal,’ Grandfather said. ‘At least sit on his back so he’ll feel he’s doing something.’

I rode him home, feeling the twitching and damp breathing of his mortified hide in my thighs. Tsirkin’s horses Michurin and Stalin brought the cart to our yard, and that evening Grandfather and Avraham decided to start putting Zeitser out to pasture. It was then that we bought our first oil-fuelled Ferguson, which Grandfather never learned to drive, leaving Zeitser only the milk cans to haul. A few years later, when the phlebitis in his forelegs and the strongyles parasites in his intestines had depleted his remaining strength and even the simplest words, like ‘giddyup’, escaped him, Grandfather tethered him to a long rope in the shade of the big fig tree. Beneath the tree Avraham set out both halves of a sawed barrel, one for water and one for barley, and now and then Grandfather took Zeitser for a leisurely walk, just the two of them, to meditate and smell the flowers.

Unlike most old men, who forget the present and remember the distant past, Pinness had forgotten his childhood and youth entirely.

‘I know who I am and where I’m going, I just have no idea where I’ve come from,’ he explained to me, to himself, and to everyone.

He looked at me sadly when I came to visit him in his garden. The day before he had attended Bodenkin’s funeral in Pioneer Home, and now he was upset and mournful. All his life he had been a great believer in education, and he held himself partly to blame for my lapse. ‘Did I go wrong on that hike to Beth-She’arim, or was it those carrion beetles?’ But I knew
that his anger was halfhearted, like his response to the nocturnal cries he still heard. He had stopped turning livid when telling me about them, cursing in Russian and waving his arms. Indeed, the look on his fat face was more one of baffled curiosity. The swamp of blood awash beneath his cranium could no longer be kept down.

‘Well now, Baruch,’ he smiled. ‘It seems I’ve gone through some kind of mutation. I just don’t have anyone to pass it on to.’

He was very old. Every week I brought him his clean laundry and changed his sheets and tablecloth.

‘Why are you doing this for me?’ he once asked me shrewdly. ‘What are you plotting?’

‘Neither of us has anyone else,’ I answered. ‘I have no grandfather, and you have no grandson.’ Despite his sorrowful smile, I could see he was pleased by what I said.

He had few friends left in the village. Grandfather, Liberson, Fanya, and Tsirkin were all dead. Even Rilov. Every morning Tonya paid a brief visit to her husband’s grave to make sure he hadn’t found a secret escape hatch, and then, supported by an aluminium frame, pulled herself along the gravel paths to Margulis’s tombstone, on which she sat senilely licking her fingers. I buried Margulis as per his request, perfectly embalmed like a Hittite monarch. His sons coated him with a black layer of bee glue and put him in a coffin filled to the top with honey and sealed with beeswax. In midsummer, when the white-hot earth turned so dry that it cracked, orange-coloured fumes rose from the grave, and Margulis’s bees, maddened by so much sweetness and longing, buzzed around it with loud melancholy. Tonya never budged from there. ‘Like Rizpah the daughter of Aiah by the corpses of her sons,’ whispered Pinness admiringly. ‘That’s the difference between us and you,’ he added. ‘We did it with sacred devotion. You do it with obscenities from water towers.’

Meanwhile, Riva was at home, scrubbing the last sticky stains left behind on the floor by her husband and dreaming of lace tablecloths, lacquered Chinese furniture, angora cats, and vacuum cleaners.

‘If Riva knew that Chinese lacquer is nothing but the secretion of certain aphids,’ Pinness said, ‘she wouldn’t make such a fuss over it.’

His blood carved out new channels, shooting the gaps between nerve endings and the chasms of memory. ‘It’s as though I was born an eighteen-year-old on the day I arrived in this country,’ he said. ‘My father could have been the hotel owner in Jaffa. He’s the first person I remember after birth.’

He had forgotten the names of his parents and sisters, his native landscape, the
yeshiva
, religious school, in Nemirov where he had studied before running off to the Land of Israel.

‘Every bit of it has been wiped out.’

For the first time, he revealed his old hatred of Rilov in public. No one understood why, because Rilov himself was already dead. ‘A he-man, a coachman, a flea-man,’ he called the dead Watchman. ‘A gentile’s brain in a Jew’s body.’

He piled his plate with more than it could hold and stuffed himself with huge mouthfuls, wolfing his food as if hungry jackals were waiting behind him to pirate it. Half-chewed, slobbery shreds tumbled out of his mouth and ran down his glistening chin. Little mounds piled up on the table around the rim of his plate.

‘I put it away like Jean Valjean, eh? As the ox licketh up the grass of the field.’

He felt so fatigued upon finishing a meal that he fell into bed at once.

‘Rest is vital for the digestion,’ he announced. ‘The body must not be asked to do more than one thing at a time. A time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing.’

I wasn’t the only one in the village concerned for the childless old teacher. His food was delivered from the co-op to keep him from having to carry baskets. Rachel Levin brought him cooked meals, slipping into his house on her silken old soles and startling him with the sudden clink of cutlery as she set the table.

‘I want fresh food, not meat from the fleshpots,’ he told her
biblically. ‘Bring me of the fruit of your garden, a banquet of greens and quietness therewith.’

Once a week I brought him vegetables from the patch I kept near the cabin. It was alarming to watch him gulp them down. Busquilla came with pots of home cooking from the nearby town where he lived. In his old age Pinness had fallen in love with Mrs Busquilla’s couscous. Though he didn’t touch the meat, he ate the steamed vegetables and semolina ravenously, yellow morsels clinging to his bottom lip.

‘Thou hast tempted me and I have succumbed,’ he quoted to Busquilla. ‘Your wife should have run the workers’ kitchen in Petach Tikvah. No one would have dumped
her
food on the floor.’

‘Enjoy it, Mr Pinness,’ said Busquilla. He liked Pinness, was afraid of him, and sometimes furtively kissed his hand, dodging back to avoid a swat from the other hand, which could still be as quick as a jumping spider. Despite Busquilla’s explanation that ‘it’s just a Moroccan custom’, Pinness disapproved of such manners.

I offered to pay Busquilla for his wife’s food.

‘Shame on you, Baruch,’ he said. ‘Pinness is a saint, a holy man. We’re nothing but his servants. You don’t understand it because you can’t read the signs. Do you think those white pigeons that are always on his roof are just a lot of birds? And what about that snake that guards the gate of his garden?

‘God forgive me for even mentioning his death,’ said Busquilla with a heavenward glance, ‘but on that day light will flash from his grave, or perhaps water will flow from his gravestone. It’s an honour to bring him food, because it’s serving God.’

Uri scoffed at Busquilla’s beliefs and called the old teacher ‘Saint Pinness’ behind his back.

‘Let’s go and visit the saint,’ he would say to me. But our conversations with Pinness were monotonous. Once again we were his pupils, to be lectured on Shamgar the son of Anath who routed six hundred Philistines with an oxgoad or on the life cycle of the great titmouse. He even tried to give us homework.

Every few months he still heard the cry of the brazen fornicator from on high.

‘I’m sure he does it on the water tower,’ he told Uri and me through a mouthful of sweet peas. ‘One difference between
Homo sapiens
and birds is that men don’t copulate in the treetops.

‘He’s already, you should excuse the expression, screwed half the village,’ he winked slyly. ‘Married women too. Last night it was the wife of Yisra’eli’s oldest grandson. I don’t get it. Why, they were just married two months ago, and she seemed such a lovely young lady!’